What makes a civilization decline? Is a decline caused by economic or moral faults or do they simply grow old and cannot face the challenges of younger, stronger forces which challenge them? For Britain after World War I, this topic was discussed at various levels of society. Having entered the first world war as a great Empire, within four years the average Brit could see the Anglo colonies of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa clamor for more independence while the crown of the jewel, India, began to make small steps towards independence. What were the causes and could such a decline in power be stopped?
Richard Overy, whose outstanding analysis of World War II, Why the Allied Won has once again created a history that is overwhelming in detail and argument. Beginning shortly after the end of World War I, numerous books, pamphlets and debates centered on the decline of Western civilization. These debates were not shallow exercises, but serious discussions as to causes and possible remedies. Going back to Nietzsche who felt that history was cyclical, was civilization, “merely the current expression of man’s futile efforts to fight the reality of decay with the weapons of illusory order.”? If progress was illusional, then the certainties of the 19th century were null and void. Civilizations, according to Nietzsche come and go, rise and fall, are born and die so there was not a great moral lesson to be learned from the decline of the West. Nietzsche’s thesis became the starting point for Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West which was hugely popular especially in Germany after the war. Unlike Hegel who saw a progression of history, Spengler’s saw civilizations almost like plants, which rise and fall as part of a great cycle. Spengler listed eight ‘ripe’ cultures, “…from the Chinese through the Indian, antique, Arabian and Western” and that each had a cycle of about 1000 years from birth to death.
