Chapter 63: The Twilight of Western Supremacy
Core idea
Five centuries of Western dominance are ending
For roughly five hundred years — from the Iberian voyages of the late fifteenth century through the late twentieth — Europe and its offshoots dominated the world economically, militarily, scientifically, and culturally. That dominance is now visibly fading. By 2050, demographers project that China and India will have the world’s two largest economies; Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa will be major players; Islam will likely have surpassed Christianity as the largest religion; and the very concept of a single “superpower” — a nation that can shape global outcomes alone — will look quaint. The relative decline is not a forecast; it is an arithmetic consequence of population, growth rates, and the diffusion of industrial capacity to formerly colonized regions.
The reaction was predictable
When a dominant group sees its dominance slipping, it tends to respond in one of three ways: gracefully adapt, double down, or scapegoat. In the West of the 2010s, all three responses have been visible, but the most politically consequential has been the third. White nationalist and ethno-nationalist movements have grown rapidly across the United States and Europe, attached themselves to mainstream political parties, won real elections, and reshaped the political center of gravity. Brexit (2016) and Donald Trump’s first US presidency (2017-2021) are the two highest-profile victories of this current, but they sit alongside Le Pen’s National Rally in France, the AfD in Germany, Wilders in the Netherlands, Meloni in Italy, Orbán in Hungary, and similar movements across the developed world.
Why it matters
The European Union as the visible target
The European Union, formalized by the 1991 Maastricht Treaty and built on common law, common currency, and freedom of movement, became the most ambitious peaceful political project of the twentieth century. It also became the natural target of nationalist movements that defined themselves against multinational governance. The 2016 Brexit referendum, in which the United Kingdom voted by a narrow margin to leave the EU, was driven heavily by anxieties about immigration — particularly Eastern European workers and the possibility of Turkish accession. The pattern repeated elsewhere: in every EU member state, nationalist parties have made anti-EU positioning central to their identity. The EU has so far survived these pressures, but it has been visibly weakened, and the question of how much further it can be hollowed out before it fails is genuinely open.
Why racism keeps coming back
A standard twentieth-century assumption was that racism would gradually fade as a generation raised on civil-rights victories replaced an older one. The data of the 2010s and 2020s suggest something stranger. Many of the most active participants in contemporary white nationalist movements — the Charlottesville marchers, the online neo-Nazi forums, the young French and German voters drawn to ethno-nationalist parties — are younger than their less-radicalized parents and grandparents. So racism is not simply being inherited from older generations.
One piece of the puzzle comes from a 2009 Stanford study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. The researchers found that white Americans were more likely to express racist beliefs after being given an opportunity to mention that they had voted for Barack Obama. The mechanism — a documented psychological pattern called moral self-licensing — is that people who have just established their moral credentials feel freer to behave badly. Apply this at scale: a society that congratulates itself on no longer being racist may, paradoxically, create conditions in which racism becomes more comfortable to express. This does not explain everything, but it suggests why civil-rights advances are often followed by backlash periods.
Demography meets identity
For most of the twentieth century, “American” and “European” were words that implicitly meant “white.” Demographic projections that those societies will be majority-nonwhite by roughly 2050 are therefore experienced by many white Americans and Europeans not just as a population shift but as a change in national identity. Combined with the simultaneous external decline of Western economic power, the result is a two-front identity crisis: my country is becoming less powerful in the world and I am becoming less central within it. White nationalist movements offer a coherent (if dangerous) story that addresses both anxieties at once — make the country “great” again externally, and preserve its traditional demographic character internally. The story is appealing for the same reason all populist stories are: it identifies a clear enemy and promises a clear restoration.
Key takeaways
Key takeaways
- By 2050, China and India are projected to have the two largest economies in the world, and Islam will likely have surpassed Christianity as the largest religion.
- The relative decline of Western economic and military dominance is an arithmetic consequence of population and industrial diffusion, not a forecast.
- The European Union, formed by the 1991 Maastricht Treaty, is the most ambitious peaceful political confederation since the USSR.
- Brexit (2016) was driven heavily by anxieties about Eastern European immigration and potential Turkish accession to the EU.
- White nationalist movements have grown across the United States and Europe in parallel with Western decline and demographic change.
- Moral self-licensing research suggests that establishing anti-racist credentials can paradoxically make subsequent racist behavior more comfortable.
- The 2008 global financial crisis fundamentally damaged public trust in the neoliberal order and helped open political space for populist movements.
- Enoch Powell's 1968 'rivers of blood' speech is often cited as an early mainstreaming of European white nationalist arguments.
Mental model
Read it as: Three independent twenty-first-century pressures — geopolitical decline, demographic change, and the 2008 economic crisis — converged into a single compound anxiety in many Western populations. That anxiety could be channeled adaptively or defensively. The political success of nationalist movements since 2016 shows that the defensive branch has, for now, dominated.
Key figures
Enoch Powell (1912-1998)
A Conservative British MP with a scholarly background — he had been a professor of Greek at age 25 — whose April 1968 “rivers of blood” speech denounced nonwhite immigration as an existential threat to British identity. The speech cost him his shadow cabinet position and was widely condemned at the time, but it laid the rhetorical template for European nationalist politics for the next half-century. Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage cited Powell approvingly as recently as 2014.
Marine Le Pen (1968-)
Leader of the French National Rally (formerly National Front), the party founded by her father Jean-Marie Le Pen. Marine has rebranded the party’s image, distanced it from her father’s explicit antisemitism, and made it competitive in French presidential elections. She has reached the second round of presidential voting in 2017 and 2022, losing both times but consolidating the National Rally as one of the two largest political forces in French parliamentary politics.
Donald Trump (1946-)
A New York real-estate developer and television personality who won the 2016 US presidential election on a platform of anti-immigration restrictionism, trade protectionism, and explicit American nationalism (“America First”). His presidency reshaped both major US parties and inspired similar movements internationally. He returned to the presidency in 2025 after losing the 2020 election, attempting to overturn the result, and being indicted in multiple jurisdictions for the attempt.
Example
The frog and the pot
Imagine a hegemonic power whose dominance has been so total, for so long, that its institutions, language, and self-image all rest on the assumption that the dominance is permanent. Then, gradually, other powers rise. Each individual change is small enough to ignore. The hegemon’s relative share of global GDP slips from 50 percent to 40 percent to 30 percent, but it still has the largest military, the reserve currency, and the most prestigious universities. It continues to behave as if it still ran the world, because in many visible ways it still does.
Eventually the slip becomes impossible to ignore. The hegemon now has three options. It can negotiate a graceful transition to a multipolar order, accepting that it will be one major power among several. It can fight to preserve its position, often through wars it cannot afford to win. Or it can turn inward, blame the change on internal enemies (immigrants, minorities, foreign agents within), and try to restore the past by force.
Most declining hegemons have tried some combination of options two and three, and most have ended their decline considerably worse off than they would have if they had picked option one earlier. The historical record — late Habsburg Spain, late Ottoman Turkey, late Romanov Russia, late British Empire — is sobering. The question facing the United States and the EU in the present decade is whether, this time, the choice can go differently. As of this writing, the answer is genuinely unclear.
Related lessons
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