Since entering the White House, Donald Trump has continued to repeat that the United States will finally regain its size after an era of decline in no other. Economically, it is difficult to see what decrepitude the President Trump alludes. Economic growth has been around 2.5 % per year since the leaving COVIR. The biggest people think that Chinese GDP will soon catch up with American GDP, while this theory flourished five years ago.
The companies that dominate 21st century technologies, in digital, artificial intelligence, hardware, humanoid robots, streaming, are all American. Despite certain wokist ends and exorbitant registration fees, the country’s universities remain attractive. And American military power is not disputed anywhere in the world. Thanks to inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration even started a movement of reindustrialisation and spectacular decarbonation. As a decline, we saw worse.
Entangled in its standards, the EU can correct the shot
Admittedly, income inequalities have exploded across the Atlantic for twenty years, but this is not a subject that the Trump candidate was particularly denounced. As for the real problem of irregular immigration, it demonstrates in hollow that many people prefer to live in the United States rather than in Latin America. This feeling of downgrading is even stronger in Europe, and especially in France. The European Union, entangled in standards and taxes, has not given itself the means of innovation and power. The error can be corrected. Nothing prevents member states from setting up an ambitious simplification plan, freezing normative projects, quickly raising their decarbonized energy production capacities and investing 3 to 4 % of their GDP in defense. Europe reacts only when it is cornered: we are there. The probable arrival at the German Chancellery of the President of the CDU Friedrich Merz could be the political impetus that will place the continent in the right direction.
That said, Western countries, despite their supposed (in the United States) or real (in Europe) difficulties, remain those in the world where we live best, whether it is income, security of people or the freedom that reigns there. This is the reason why it is they who attract the most migratory flows, Russia or China being eldorados only for extremely poor populations. In one of the most lucid and exciting books of this start of the year, The winner’s cursewhich has just been released at the editions of the observatory, the economist Pierre Bentata gives the reasons for this Western paradox between pessimism and objective reality. Over the course of an explicit title chapter (“the impoundment decline”), it ridiculously turns the proliferation of works which, for more than a century, announce the end of the West.
Dissatisfaction, engine of progress
Pierre Bentata’s thesis is twofold. The West is in the grip of doubt because free countries have a tendency to introspection which makes them analyze their functioning in the most tiny details. However, our societies are far from perfect and they are unable to keep their promises of shared prosperity and total justice as Raymond Aron had already noticed. Social paradise on earth does not exist. But at the same time, this permanent self-criticism is the best life insurance for Western liberal democracies.
We always have a reason to be dissatisfied, which maintains the dynamics of progress. Provided not to consider our successes as immutable achievements. Our democratic lifestyles are to be defended and protecting in the face of those who want to destroy them. This is the case of enemies from the outside, such as Putin’s Russia. Or enemies from the inside, such as Islamists encouraged by revolutionary factions or parties like LFI. Faced with these apostles of intolerance, the tolerance of the West is suicidal.
Nicolas Bouzou, economist and essayist, is director of the Astères consulting firm
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