Adnkronos (Adnkronos) – There's an intellectual genre that never goes out of fashion in the West: announcing the end of the West. The causes change, the rivals change, even the centuries change, but the obituary, yellowed and somewhat torn, remains stuck to the country's rusty noticeboard. At the beginning of the twentieth century, it was Oswald Spengler who diagnosed the Decline of the West; in the 1970s, it was the oil shock and stagflation; in the 1980s, Japan; after 2008, the financial crisis; today, China, polarization, debt, demographic aging, war, international disorder.
At each stage, the patient seems definitively done for. And at each stage, more or less battered, he continues to show up for the next appointment.
It is from this paradox that Paolo Messa begins in The West is Alive. Long Live the West. To Debunk the Rhetoric of Declinism, recently published by Rubbettino. He doesn't deny its crises, but he opposes the transformation of crisis into destiny, of problem into decadence, of vulnerability into proof of an irreversible historical exhaustion.
On the other hand, declinism is no longer just a diagnosis, but a language through which we almost automatically interpret the world.
Messa wants to overturn the optical illusion: democracies appear more fragile than authoritarianisms precisely because they continually stage their own fragility.
Democracy debates, protests, investigates, and denounces. It exposes corruption, recounts failures, publishes unpleasant statistics, puts government officials on trial, and lets newspapers and opposition groups turn every crack into news.
Authoritarianism does exactly the opposite: it hides the crack and photographs the wall. "The West is not in crisis because it discusses its problems: it discusses its problems because it is alive."
An autocracy may appear extraordinarily efficient at a given moment. It can rapidly build infrastructure, impose an industrial choice, curb conflict, and direct capital and society. The problem is what happens when it makes mistakes. In a democracy, mistakes generate opposition, information, elections, legislative changes, and sometimes new governments. In a closed regime, they may be protected by the very power structure that created them. Democratic noise isn't necessarily the noise of a machine breaking down; it can be that of a machine repairing itself while still functioning.
Timothy Snyder's On Freedom, published in 2024, comes to mind: "Freedom involves recognizing that you're wrong": freedom involves the ability to recognize one's own error. The superiority claimed by the open model lies not in being immune to error, but in having built institutions that allow it to be identified, challenged, and corrected.
Messa wants you to shift your focus from the obsession with a single quantity: the share of global GDP.
Naturally, that share has decreased. It would be strange if it hadn't, given the entry of billions of people into the global economy and the rise of China, India, and other major countries. But Messa argues that mistaking the reduction in relative weight for absolute decline is looking at the 21st century with 19th-century tools.
We must also observe where universities, research, patents, capital, technological innovation, and global businesses are concentrated; where students choose to study; where researchers and entrepreneurs move; which cultural systems continue to generate languages, fashions, music, television series, and consumer models. The West, and we will excuse the defeatists, remains the "most desirable civilization": people even vote with their feet. Migration flows and flows of talent continue, overall, to move toward open societies, not toward large-scale authoritarian systems.
Silicon Valley, Berlin, Milan, Netflix, the dollar, Italian design, American biomedical research, British universities: they are all part of an ecosystem where the free flow of people, ideas, and capital reigns supreme. And freedom is not just a moral principle. It is also a social technology.
The most geopolitical part of the book begins when the author asks why, if this material and cultural force still exists, the perception is so different. The answer is that Western declinism doesn't entirely originate in Moscow or Beijing (too convenient), but offers Moscow and Beijing extraordinarily easy-to-use material.
Explicitly based on the 2024 National Endowment for Democracy report on authoritarian narratives, Joseph Siegle showed how Russia and China don't necessarily have to convince the international public that authoritarianism is magnificent. It's enough to convince them that democracy is hypocritical, inefficient, chaotic, and incapable of delivering on its promises. The strategy is asymmetric: the autocrat doesn't have to win the reputational race, he simply has to reduce his opponent's reputational advantage.
Yet, despite the BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and the various multilateral and minilateral forums that spring up every month, there is no real new International of autocracies founded on a coherent common ideology. What they have in common are interests, techniques of political survival, opaque financial systems, propaganda, and the mutual benefit that comes from the weakening of democratic societies.
Messa takes this reasoning a step further. Western pessimism becomes geopolitical raw material. The contradictions of democracies are taken, decontextualized, and reassembled until they prove an already established thesis: the West no longer works. Corruption uncovered by a journalistic investigation becomes proof that "everything is corrupt"; a protest becomes chaos; a contested election becomes institutional collapse; the immigration debate becomes a latent civil war.
But you can't respond to propaganda by censoring criticism. That would be a fatal contradiction that would confirm the narrative of its opponents. We must learn to distinguish self-criticism from self-flagellation, information from manipulation, rational pessimism from fatalism.
India, Brazil, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and, more generally, that vast array of countries unwilling to permanently choose between the "West" and a supposed alternative bloc: Messa observes that one of the West's mistakes was to imagine that modernization, trade, and growth would automatically produce political convergence. This hasn't happened. But the alternative isn't to demand a new Cold War with two rigidly separate camps. Instead, the West must compete through infrastructure, investment, technology, security, and partnerships among equals. Hence the focus on Imec, the Gulf agreements, the Mattei Plan, and the possibility of building networks that don't necessarily require partners to first agree to ideological commitment.
The true measure of Western vitality will not be convincing London, Paris, or Washington that the West is alive. It will be convincing Jakarta, Riyadh, Delhi, Brasilia, and Pretoria that maintaining a deep relationship with open economies and societies continues to be beneficial.
There is no "end of history" in these pages. The democratic model does not triumph because history has a predetermined direction. It must compete in the geopolitical marketplace of institutions, technologies, infrastructure, and ideas.
The West is alive, of course, but being alive doesn't mean being immortal. If anything, it means still having something to lose. And, above all, something to invent.
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