Can We Stop the West's Decline? - What I Told the Holberg Debate

I recently took part in a debate in Bergen, Norway alongside Yanis Yaroufakis and Cynthia Miller-Idrisson whether the West is in decline and what we can do about it. You can watch this speech here, watch highlights of the debate here or watch the entire thing from start to finish here.

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It’s wonderful to be here in Bergen, the only city in the world with worse weather than London.

I am afraid that being British I must begin with an apology. Unlike our distinguished speakers I am not an expert. I am not a professor like Cynthia and unlike Yannis, I have never attempted to save Greece from economic collapse, a task whose achievability I regard with some skepticism.

But the one thing I can offer, perhaps, is that I have a different perspective to most Westerners despite being one. I am both an insider and an outsider. I was born and raised in the Soviet Union and 1990s Russia before moving to England as a teenager.

And being Russian I must begin with a warning.

Many of you will be familiar with the story of the boiling frog who sits in water that gets warmer and warmer until, without noticing, the frog is cooked. Those of us who come from Eastern Europe have been cooked before and my warning to you is this: it’s getting hot in here.

The subject of tonight’s debate is whether the West is in decline but to answer it, I must address an obvious question which sits underneath this entire discussion: the fact that many people in our societies, especially academics, journalists and intellectuals would like us to decline because it would validate their worldview in which the rich, white, Western colonial imperialists are finally stripped of their many ill-gotten privileges. I say that this sits underneath our discussion because once a society has been sufficiently infected with this mind virus, its survival is inevitably in question. If enough people believe their country is bad, how could they not bring about its decline?

Let me be clear: decline is NOT inevitable. On the contrary, I believe decline is extremely avoidable, provided we actually choose to avoid it. My warning is intended to provoke action, not paralysis.

Incidentally, the question about whether the West is good and worth preserving has an easy, obvious and incontestable answer. That answer is Australia. Australia is a Western country surrounded by non-Western countries. And precisely 0 Australians risk their lives every year by getting on rickety boats to brave shark-infested waters in search of a better life. That sort of traffic is all one way. The same is true on the southern border of the United States. The same is true in the Mediterranean. The same is true for the English channel with tens of thousands of people crossing into Britain illegally from Calais every year. I don’t blame the people coming, I wouldn’t want to stay in France either.

My point is, if you look at how people vote with their feet, Western civilisation blows the competition out of the water. I know this is politically incorrect to say but our civilisation is better. That’s not just my opinion, it’s the opinion of millions of people who choose to come here and the hundreds of millions of others who would if they could.

And that’s despite the fact that we are going through a period of decline. What do I mean by decline?

In 1978, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who left the Soviet Union for America after enduring years in the hard labour camps of the Soviet GULAG, gave an address to Harvard students. Let me quote him briefly.

“A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party and of course in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course there are many courageous individuals but they have no determining influence on public life. Political and intellectual bureaucrats show depression, passivity and perplexity in their actions and in their statements and even more so in theoretical reflections to explain how realistic, reasonable and intellectually and even morally warranted it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice. And decline in courage is ironically emphasized by occasional explosions of anger and inflexibility on the part of the same bureaucrats when dealing with weak governments and weak countries, not supported by anyone, or with currents which cannot offer any resistance. But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists. Should one point out that from ancient times decline in courage has been considered the beginning of the end?”

I’m sad to say his message has aged excruciatingly well. Not only is it still true, it is more true today than it was 50 years ago!

But forget Solzhenitsyn, how about we listen to our fellow citizens? An Ipsos poll conducted earlier this year found that 68% of people in Britain say the country is in decline.

Why do British people feel this way? Because we are inherently miserable, obviously. But, just in case that’s not the only reason, let’s look at the facts.

In Britain, GDP per capita fell sharply during the Great Financial Crisis of 2007-2008 and has still not recovered. Put simply, on average, British people are poorer today than they were in 2007.

This is true here in Norway too. And also in Sweden, Iceland, Finland, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland.

I’m afraid to say that despite the efforts of one Yannis Varoufakis, it is true even in Greece, whose GDP per capita was $32,000 in 2008 and is just $23,000 on the latest figures available.

And this is no accident. Because politicians are judged on whether they grow the GDP, not GDP per capita, they don’t actually care about whether you and I are richer or poorer. The easiest way to deliver GDP growth is to increase the number of people in the country. The way they have done this (importing low skilled, low wage workers) makes us poorer but in a way that politicians can’t get the blame for it.

Economic growth in Britain is not just anaemic, it’s fake. It’s an accounting trick. As for Europe, it’s been in economic decline for at least a decade. That’s not my opinion. That’s a direct quote from Jose Manuel Barrosso, the former President of the European Commission writing earlier this week.

Now look, money isn’t everything. And it can’t buy you happiness. Even though it can buy you a car with heated seats which is the closest thing to happiness I’ve experienced since landing in Norway. But the absence of money does make misery a lot more probable.

I’m going to talk about Britain for a moment and wherever you’re watching this from, see if this rings a bell.

We release dangerous criminals from prison because of overcrowding, the police do not investigate crimes like car break-ins and burglaries, we have growing NHS waiting lists and even the anger we saw spill out during the summer riots is a product, in large part, of a stagnating economy.

The average age for someone buying their first apartment or house in Britain is now almost 34. In London, where all the good jobs are, it’s 37. In other words, even for people who can afford their own home, the point at which they are likely to buy one is now so late in life that they would struggle to have children for purely biological reasons.

While expensive housing and economic stagnation are not the only cause, it is clearly a contributing factor to the halving of Britain’s Total Fertility Rate in just 60 years. In 1964, British women had around 3 children on average. Today we are well below replacement.

As with other troubles, Britain is not alone. From the US, to the entire European Union, all of Scandinavia, Australia, New Zealand and Canada we are not even close to having enough kids to replace us. This is not a uniquely Western phenomenon but it is especially bad in our societies.

Now look I don’t claim to know the right number of human beings on earth. And after an hour of doom scrolling social media I frequently feel the right number is 0.

But what I do know is that if you were a zoologist studying an animal species which was unwilling to reproduce you would hardly conclude that everything was going swimmingly.

Have you ever heard the expression “it’s like getting pandas to mate”? It’s used to say that something is very difficult because zoos and conservationists are really struggling to maintain the panda population. A typical female panda will have 5 to 6 cubs over her lifetime, an average Western female human will have 1.5.

This phenomenon has cultural, economic and spiritual dimensions. But the fact is that a society which is not having enough children to replace its population is doomed to face both decline and the uncontrolled mass immigration of the kind we’re seeing across the Western world.

And the reason I bring up mass immigration, is that a nation can endure and bounce back from periods of stagnation and even decline provided there is a sense of common purpose and a willingness to be honest about the problems it faces. In Britain, we have neither.

The nation - and the common purpose that came with it - is rapidly becoming a thing of the past, to be replaced with the much-celebrated “communities” we keep hearing so much about. Instead of seeing ourselves as British first and everything else second, we are now Asian, Black, White, Jewish, Muslim, Christian and LGBTQI+ first and little else second.

As for honesty, we shun, ostracise and increasingly set the police on people who express widely-held views about illegal immigration, the threat of Islamist terrorism and a failure of multiculturalism, especially if they come from the working class whose crass ways and ugly sentiments offend the sensibilities of the chattering classes.

I see no urgency. When I listen to people of all political persuasions who run my country, they’re all doing their best to pretend that what is happening is normal. A problem to be managed. I assumed that this was the face they were putting on for public consumption but, alas, behind closed doors it’s exactly the same.

People say that if we were attacked, we’d struggle to get people to enlist to defend it. I think that’s nonsense. If our country went through what the people of Ukraine experienced in February 2022 or what Israel suffered on Oct 7, I have no doubt there would be millions of young men around the country who would volunteer to serve and millions of others who would support the war effort.

But we’re not in a war. There is no enemy to fight. There is just a creeping, unstoppable malaise. And so we don’t know what to do. Even now, with the wave enthusiasm that swept through the United States and Argentina.

Because the problem is not our politicians, it’s us. Millei won in Argentina because he promised to cut red tape, taxes and bureaucrats with his chainsaw of freedom. Trump won in America because he promised to cut regulation, taxes and waste.

Europeans, on the other hand, are very clear: we want higher taxes and more government spending. This is why no one in Britain or Europe talks about unleashing the talents of our people. We don’t want to be unleashed, we want to be looked after.

We need to recognise that the answer to our problems is to create a vibrant and growing economy, not jack up tax rates and energy prices to chase industrious, creative and wealthy people out of our countries. In Britain, we have lost more millionaires than any country except China in recent years.

We need to spend more time focussing on building wealth than on arguing about how to divide it. We need to aspire to do things, make things, create things.

I know many of you don’t like him but if you’re even remotely curious you have to ask yourself why Elon Musk has become an icon to millions of people around the world? It’s not his charismatic speeches and stunning good looks! He builds big things and in doing so reminds us who we are supposed to be! He reminds us that we are meant to reach for the stars, not into our neighbours’ pockets.

To the British ear, everything I’ve just said is monstrously cringe. Aspiring for things? How ghastly. Judging by some of your faces this is just as true here in Norway. The mindset shift we need is not going to be easy to achieve. You might even say it’s like getting Westerners to mate. But I’m here to tell you something you already know: until we become a civilisation that wants to succeed, we won’t.

Thank you very much!