The Continent has already seen empires fade, but the U.S. remains dynamic.
Opinion: WSJ
There are few places more soothing or beautiful in midsummer than the Baltic coast of the German state of Schleswig-Holstein. The sun sets around 10 p.m. and sea breezes keep temperatures cool while most of the Northern Hemisphere sweats. In Kiel, the region’s largest city and most important harbor, happy crowds stroll the waterfront celebrating the start of Kiel Week, one of the largest sailing events in the world now in its 143rd year.
Yet even there, the shadows of the growing world crisis were evident. Sailboats in the regatta shared the harbor with a large military presence. The 53rd annual North Atlantic Treaty Organization joint fleet exercise in the Baltic was winding down as I arrived. For 21 days, an all-NATO force of more than 50 ships, 85 aircraft and about 9,000 personnel conducted naval operations and landing drills as Russian aircraft buzzed over them.
The American sailors I encountered among the carnival rides, snack bars and restaurants at water’s edge were enthusiastic about their mission. They were unfazed by the possibility that their next assignment might take them from NATO’s northern edge in the Baltic to the confrontation building in the Mediterranean between Israel and Hezbollah.
Even with NATO forces in the harbor, Kiel didn’t have a very martial air. The sailors wandered through the waterfront arcades amid throngs of civilian merry makers. Nobody seemed particularly worried about Russia’s brooding presence at the far end of the Baltic Sea. And Germany, like Europe generally, remains locked in denial about how grim the global situation has become—and how rapidly German and European influence is evaporating around the world.
Decadence and decline aren’t newcomers to the north German coast. The Hanseatic League of commercial city-states was once a major power stretching from the modern Netherlands to Russia. Lübeck, the city on my itinerary after Kiel, rose to its peak in the 14th century, when it was commonly recognized as the league’s “queen.” In 1375 Charles IV named Lübeck one of the “five glories” of his Holy Roman Empire, along with Pisa, Florence, Venice and Rome. After a long decline, the German Empire absorbed Lübeck in 1871, and the last vestiges of its independence ended when the Nazis incorporated the “free city” into the state of Schleswig-Holstein. It remains, however, an important tourist destination, and is renowned for its marzipan.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, decadence and decline were central preoccupations of Lübeck’s most famous modern son, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Thomas Mann. “Buddenbrooks,” the work that made his name, was set in a thinly fictionalized Lübeck and describes the social, cultural and economic decline of a typical German bourgeois family during the 19th century. As the primitive strength of the early Buddenbrook generations yielded to the more tortured and conflicted psychologies of a later era, the family became less effective in the real world. Family ties frayed, the business shrank, and the novel closes as a handful of impoverished surviving family members cling to the memories of past greatness.
History doesn’t, I think, teach us that decline has a single cause. The ancient Greeks and Romans believed that decline and decay were part of a natural and inevitable process. As a society becomes affluent and powerful, it loses the primitive virtues that made it great. As virtue vanishes from a people, its institutions decay, and ultimately its defenses collapse.
Success hastened the decline of the Roman Republic into an absolute monarchy. Institutions developed for a struggling city-state on the banks of the Tiber didn’t work for a state that stretched from modern Belgium to Egypt. Excessive success was also a factor in the decline of Qing-dynasty China. Stronger than all its neighbors, China grew complacent. But while China stood pat, European states were driven by endless wars and rivalries to focus on institutional and technological innovations. By the 19th century, China was shocked to discover it was helpless before the power of the once-despised Westerners.
Success isn’t the only cause of decline. Arnold Toynbee argued that civilizations fall when their leaders can no longer command the respect of the masses. The “internal proletariat” of the poor and dispossessed aligns with the “external proletariat” of poor, chaotic outsiders beyond the frontiers, and a once-great civilization comes crashing down. The Hanseatic League and the Ottoman Empire declined in part because voyages of discovery opened new trade routes that sidelined the old Eurasian ones.
Given America’s external and domestic challenges these days, talk of U.S. decline has become fashionable again. After a long look at Europe, I’m not convinced. Lubbock isn’t Lübeck. Our pains are growing pains rather than the aches of old age.
As long as we keep developing new technologies, integrating immigrants and generating wealth on a staggering scale, American society will be too dynamic for decadence and too busy for decline.
