The title of Jean-François Colosimo’s latest work is double-edged. West, global enemy no 1 (Albin Michel, 256 pages, 21.90 euros) is both an expected charge against the coalition of “neo-empires” – Russia, China, Iran, Turkey, India – and an erudite attempt to define what the “West” was and what it represents today, hated by these new powers. Beyond a thesis widely shared by intellectuals and geopoliticians of the “West” – opposed to the rest of the world – the author seizes the opportunity to point out the excesses of a “westernization” forced march of the world started from the 18th centurye century. “The entity [l’Occident] or what takes its place, that they [ses ennemis actuels] overwhelming, is not without stains and blemishes”affirms the essayist, who also directs Editions du Cerf.
The enterprise is ambitious, useful without a doubt, but too broad in scope, at times served by emphatic prose where there is no anger. To support his demonstration, Mr. Colosimo takes a detour through the long history of the imperial idea, taking the reader into a whirlwind of times and places, of characters in turn triumphant or decadent, enlightened or obscurantist. , Russian, Ottoman, Persian, Qing or Mughal. Without forgetting the European, colonial and/or slave empires, hit by the “failure of the civilizing mission by which they will have legitimized themselves”and whose policies are intimately linked to the evolution of the new antagonistic powers. “Failing to have been able to make them impartial and effective, do we not bear a responsibility in the rejection of the ideals of universality, freedom, equality, fraternity combined? »
In response, Mr. Colosimo cites European authors from the beginning of the 20th centurye century, describing, after the“abysmal decivilization of the Great War”THE “decline of the West”blaming his frenzied relationship with technology, depicting a world doomed, for lack of“universally impose the Anglo-Saxon democratic and liberal model”.
From historical failures to attempts at authoritarian Westernization, the author traces the troubled periods during which the resurgent empires drew inspiration from Western technological or military power without renouncing a form of despotism. The discussion then focuses on the conditions for the emergence of these “neo-empires”which the author considers based on “conflict and conquest”. At their head, he notes with bitterness, Putin, Xi, Erdogan, Modi and Khamenei now reign, whose predecessors experimented with revolutions, Europeanization, despotism, modernism, communism, nationalism or internationalism with varying degrees of success. with or without God. It dates this ” descent into hell “ from the end of the 19th centurye century, period in which “Eastern autocrats or activists who advocate imitation of the West are gradually sinking into unreality”.
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