In the public discourse of global power politics, the language of Western doom has become a familiar currency. From Vladimir Putin’s claims of Western moral decay to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s insistence that Europe has lost its civilizational core, and from Donald Trump’s recent portrayal of the European Union as a declining and dependent actor, this rhetoric is often presented as realism: a clear-eyed acknowledgment that liberal societies have exhausted themselves.
After World War I, the German philosopher Oswald Spengler gave this narrative its most influential form in The Decline of the West. He argued that civilizations follow fixed life cycles, like organisms: birth, flowering, exhaustion, and collapse. The West, he claimed, had entered its final phase-technologically powerful but spiritually hollow, culturally repetitive, politically destined for authoritarian rule and rigid power blocs. Spengler’s diagnosis still resonates: technology and money dominate public life; democratic politics often feels managerial rather than visionary; cultural production can seem recursive; moral values have lost much of their inner meaning; and power increasingly organizes itself into blocs.This deterministic view has found new life in contemporary debates over immigration. Across the European New Right, openness to migration is framed as civilizational self-cancellation: Europe, it is argued, is erasing itself by admitting people from non-European cultures who will eventually dissolve its Judeo-Christian foundations from within. The force of this argument, however, lies in its simplicity, not its accuracy.
Europe does not operate in a realm of unfettered choice. It functions within binding legal obligations: international refugee law, the European Convention on Human Rights, EU asylum directives, and constitutional guarantees that prohibit collective expulsion and require individual assessment of asylum claims. These are not optional expressions of moral generosity; they are commitments embedded in the postwar legal order. The challenge has been the complexity of governing within these constraints - particularly when it comes to the tension between democratic responsiveness and effective governance in open societies. What is often criticized as a lack of expediency is in fact a consequence of democratic process itself: legal obligations that require due process, judicial review, and political deliberation. These constraints slow decision-making and the implementation of policy by design. That complexity has been poorly communicated to the public, creating space for those who recast legal obligation as ideological surrender and procedural governance as civilizational collapse. But complexity within binding legal norms is not the same as choosing to erase one’s own civilization.
European civilization was shaped by centuries of migration, conflict, inclusion, and synthesis. Continuity has depended not on purity, but on the capacity to reinterpret foundational principles under changing conditions. The present moment is no exception. The West is not facing inevitable decline, but a demanding phase of rearticulation: aligning unprecedented technological and economic power with renewed democratic purpose under conditions of mobility, diversity, and normative and legal constraint. That process is difficult and often messy-but it is precisely what free societies are designed to manage.
Spengler’s conclusion-that the decline of civilizations is inevitable was – and is - wrong. Civilizations are not biological organisms; they are political and moral systems, capable of adaptation, reform, and self-correction. Language plays a decisive role here. As Michel Foucault observed, power operates through discourse by defining the terms in which reality is understood. In contemporary decline narratives, words become performative. “Openness” is recoded as weakness, “pluralism” as surrender, “demography” as destiny. Once inevitability is built into language, democratic choice appears naïve, and authoritarian control appears pragmatic.
This is why decline rhetoric is so useful to leaders like Putin, Erdoğan, and Trump. None truly believes the West is collapsing. The language of doom narrows political imagination, delegitimizes legal and institutional constraint, and justifies the concentration of power.
This is also why Spengler’s ideal remain relevant, despite the potnetial traps of anachrinism. His lasting insight was not that decline is unavoidable, but that societies convinced of their own decline become tempted by authoritarian solutions. In his account, late civilizations respond to complexity not with renewal, but with consolidation-strong leaders, centralized power, and the promise of order in place of deliberation. That warning, rather than his fatalism, deserves renewed attention.
The real danger is not that Western civilization is doomed. It is that belief in inevitable decline becomes the justification for abandoning the democratic restraints that make renewal possible. That belief legitimizes the concentration of power and the turn toward authoritarianism-and this is where genuine decline begins. Europeans, of all people, know this from experience: from family histories, collective memory, and history books alike. Fascism, Nazism, and communism were not foreign impositions; they were European inventions. History suggests that openness is not what leads civilizations to fall; abandoning democratic restraints in response to fear is.
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Zašto su narativi o propasti zapadne civilizacije opasni
U javnom diskursu globalne politike moći, jezik zapadne propasti postao je često u upotrebi. Od tvrdnji Vladimira Putina o moralnom raspadu Zapada, preko insistiranja Recepa Tayyipa Erdoğana da je Evropa izgubila svoju civilizacijsku srž, pa do nedavne predstave Donalda Trumpa o Evropskoj uniji kao opadajućem i zavisnom akteru – ova retorika se često predstavlja kao realizam: trezveno priznanje da su liberalna društva iscrpila samu sebe.
Nakon Prvog svjetskog rata, njemački filozof Oswald Spengler dao je ovom narativu najuticajniji oblik u djelu Propast Zapada. Tvrdio je da civilizacije slijede fiksne životne cikluse, poput organizama: rođenje, cvjetanje, iscrpljivanje i kolaps. Zapad, tvrdio je, ušao je u svoju završnu fazu – tehnološki moćan, ali duhovno prazan, kulturno repetitivan, politički osuđen na autoritarnu vladavinu i krute blokove moći. Spenglerova dijagnoza i dalje odjekuje: tehnologija i novac dominiraju javnim životom; demokratska politika često djeluje menadžerski, a ne vizionarski; kulturna produkcija može izgledati ponavljajuće; moralne vrijednosti izgubile su mnogo od unutrašnjeg značenja; a moć se sve više organizuje u blokove.
Ovaj deterministički pogled našao je novi život u savremenim debatama o migraciji. Širom evropske Nove desnice, otvorenost prema migraciji se predstavlja kao civilizacijsko samoponištenje: Evropa, tvrdi se, briše samu sebe primanjem ljudi iz neevropskih kultura koji će na kraju rastvoriti njene judeo-kršćanske temelje iznutra. Snaga ovog argumenta, međutim, leži u njegovoj jednostavnosti, a ne tačnosti.
Evropa ne djeluje u prostoru neograničenog izbora. Ona funkcioniše unutar obavezujućih pravnih okvira: međunarodnog prava o izbjeglicama, Evropske konvencije o ljudskim pravima, direktiva EU o azilu i ustavnih garancija koje zabranjuju kolektivno protjerivanje i zahtijevaju individualnu procjenu zahtjeva za azil. To nisu opcionalni izrazi moralne velikodušnosti; to su obaveze ugrađene u poslijeratni pravni poredak. Izazov je bila složenost upravljanja unutar tih ograničenja – posebno kada je riječ o napetosti između demokratske odgovornosti i efikasnog upravljanja u otvorenim društvima.
Ono što se često kritikuje kao nedostatak efikasnosti zapravo je posljedica samog demokratskog procesa: pravne obaveze koje zahtijevaju pravičan postupak, sudsku reviziju i političku deliberaciju. Ta složenost usporava donošenje odluka i implementaciju politika – i to namjerno. Međutim, ta složenost je loše komunicirana javnosti, stvarajući prostor za one koji pravnu obavezu prikazuju kao ideološku predaju, a proceduralno upravljanje kao civilizacijski kolaps. Ali složenost unutar obavezujućih pravnih normi nije isto što i izbor da se izbriše vlastita civilizacija.
Evropska civilizacija oblikovana je stoljećima migracija, sukoba, uključivanja i sinteze. Kontinuitet je zavisio ne od čistoće, nego od sposobnosti reinterpretacije temeljnih principa pod promjenjivim uslovima. Sadašnji trenutak nije izuzetak. Zapad se ne suočava s neizbježnim padom, već s zahtjevnom fazom reartikulacije: usklađivanja neviđene tehnološke i ekonomske moći s obnovljenom demokratskom svrhom u uslovima mobilnosti, raznolikosti i normativnih i pravnih ograničenja. Taj proces je težak i često neuredan – ali upravo je to ono što slobodna društva treba da upravljaju.
Spenglerov zaključak – da je pad civilizacija neizbježan – bio je i ostao pogrešan. Civilizacije nisu biološki organizmi; one su politički i moralni sistemi, sposobni za prilagodbu, reformu i samokorekciju. Jezik ovdje igra odlučujuću ulogu. Kako je Michel Foucault primijetio, moć djeluje kroz diskurs definišući pojmove u kojima se stvarnost razumijeva. U savremenim narativima o padu, riječi postaju performativne. „Otvorenost“ se rekodira kao slabost, „pluralizam“ kao predaja, „demografija“ kao sudbina. Kada se neizbježnost ugradi u jezik, demokratski izbor izgleda naivan, a autoritarna kontrola pragmatična.
Zato je retorika propasti toliko korisna liderima poput Putina, Erdoğana i Trumpa. Nijedan od njih zaista ne vjeruje da se Zapad urušava. Jezik propasti sužava političku imaginaciju, delegitimizira pravna i institucionalna ograničenja i opravdava koncentraciju moći.
Prava opasnost nije u tome da je zapadna civilizacija osuđena na propast. Opasnost je u vjerovanju da je pad neizbježan, jer to postaje opravdanje za napuštanje demokratskih ograničenja koja čine obnovu mogućom. To vjerovanje legitimizira koncentraciju moći i skretanje ka autoritarizmu – i tu počinje istinski pad. Evropljani, od svih ljudi, to znaju iz iskustva: iz porodičnih historija, kolektivnog pamćenja i historijskih knjiga. Fašizam, nacizam i komunizam nisu bili strani nametnuti sistemi; oni su bili evropske izmišljotine. Historija sugerira da otvorenost nije ono što vodi civilizacije ka padu; napuštanje demokratskih ograničenja iz straha jeste.