The Decline of the West

The Decline of the West: Reflections on the Contemporary European Identity Crisis

By Paolo Falconio

Member of the Honorary Governing Council and lecturer at the Society of International Studies (SEI)

N.A.

A reflection that revisits Spengler’s vision of the “decline” of the West to interpret the identity crisis of contemporary Europe.

This is not a historical analysis in the strict sense, but rather an attempt at a philosophy of history exercise, using Spengler’s cultural morphology as a lens to read the present. It is an effort to interpret the present through symbolic and morphological categories.

There is no claim to provide answers—rather, it aims to shake Man from his technological slumber and prompt society to acknowledge the decline to which we have become accustomed.

Abstract

This contribution offers a critical reinterpretation of Spenglerian thought applied to the contemporary European geopolitical and cultural context. Through the analysis of the dichotomy between “Kultur” and “Zivilisation,” it seeks to explore the identity crisis characterizing 21st-century Europe, questioning the continent’s ability to recover the dimension of universality that historically defined it. The reflection revolves around two fundamental issues: the possibility of reintegrating European identity within a universalistic horizon and the persistence of an inner cultural force (“Kultur”) beyond the outward manifestations of civilization (“Zivilisation”).

Oswald Spengler’s monumental work, Der Untergang des Abendlandes (1918–1922), represented one of the most ambitious and controversial attempts to interpret universal history through the morphological paradigm of civilizations. Although his methodology and conclusions have been widely criticized by academic historiography, Spengler’s conceptual framework continues to offer relevant heuristic tools for understanding contemporary cultural dynamics.

The operation, therefore, is to isolate the still fertile conceptual cores—Kultur/Zivilisation and Seelenkategorie—stripping them of the historical determinism characteristic of Spengler’s work.

In today’s context, marked by profound geopolitical changes and increasing identity fragmentation, it becomes necessary to question the very nature of the West as a historical-cultural category. The fundamental question is whether this category still holds semantic and operational validity for contemporary Europe, or whether it has been completely absorbed and redefined by the postwar North American cultural hegemony.

The first methodological consideration concerns the nature of the West itself. It is not merely a geographical category, but a “category of the soul” (Seelenkategorie), according to Spengler’s expression, identifying a complex of values, practices, institutions, and symbolic representations. In the contemporary landscape, this category is predominantly identified with the United States of America, which since World War II has assumed the role of political, economic, and cultural leader of the Western world.

This observation, however controversial it may seem, reflects an undeniable geopolitical reality. Europe, while geographically Western, has progressively lost the cultural centrality and proactive capacity that characterized it in previous centuries. This loss of centrality is not simply the result of economic or military dynamics, but reveals a deeper crisis of identity and vision.

The West “west of the Elbe” has its roots in Roman civilization, understood not merely as an urban or state entity, but as the embodiment of a principle of universality. Rome represented the orbis terrarum, the cosmic order translated into political and legal order—a model of social organization capable of transcending ethnic and geographic particularities. This universalistic dimension constituted the core identity of European Western civilization, its civilizing mission, and its horizon of meaning.

Spengler’s distinction between Kultur and Zivilisation is one of the most fertile and least understood aspects of his thought. Originally developed within the early 20th-century German cultural debate, this dichotomy served to forge and legitimize a German national identity in opposition to the French and Anglo-Saxon models. Kultur, of Latin origin but reappropriated by the Germanic tradition, designated spiritual depth, inner strength, a people’s creative capacity, its existential authenticity. Zivilisation, by contrast, represented exteriority, good manners, technical progress, urbanization—in short, everything pertaining to the surface of social life which, lacking spiritual grounding, constitutes an “empty shell.”

Decontextualized from German nationalism and applied to the contemporary European condition, this distinction takes on unexpected relevance. The crucial question becomes: does Europe still possess a Kultur, an inner force capable of producing culture in the substantial sense—capable of generating meaning, projects, worldviews? Or has it been reduced to pure Zivilisation, a collection of technical and productive excellences—German engineering, Italian fashion, French refinement—that float atop a spiritual void, lacking a deep identity to guide and justify them? There is competence without vision, technical perfection without moral direction, cultural memory without generative capacity. It is as if Europe has become a virtuoso who flawlessly performs scores written centuries ago, yet is incapable of composing new music. A Heideggerian echo lingers: perfected technique as oblivion of being, competence without direction as a subtle form of nihilism.

In any case, the proposed reflection revolves around two fundamental questions that deserve analytical development: universality and inner force.

The first question concerns the ability of European peoples to “bring their identity back into universality.” This formulation requires conceptual clarification. Universality here should not be understood in an abstract or cosmopolitan sense, but in the specific sense of the Greco-Roman-Christian tradition: the ability to articulate principles, values, and institutions that transcend local particularities without erasing them, that offer a common horizon without imposing cultural homogenization. “Can Europe bring its identity back into universality?”—this is, therefore, a question of spiritual survival. Without a new universality, Europe loses its historical function, its unifying “logos,” and becomes a sum of fragments without direction.

Historically, Europe has embodied this universalistic tension through Roman law, Greek philosophy, Christianity, humanism, and the Enlightenment. Each era proposed its own version of the universal, always maintaining this transcendent vocation. This is a crucial point often misunderstood in contemporary debate. European universality has never meant uniformity, but rather a striving toward common principles that left room for local differences. Roman law coexisted with local customs, Christianity took shape in diverse national forms, the Enlightenment produced French, German, Italian, and Spanish variants. It was a plural universalism—oxymoronic, perhaps—but precisely for that reason, vital. The contemporary question is whether this vocation is still alive or has been exhausted, giving way to fragmented particularism or to a universality “imported” from the North American model, in a process of assimilation marked by consumerist homogenization disguised as individual freedom. In this reading, Europe oscillates between reactive identity closure and dissolution into global indistinction, unable to propose a third path: a new European universalism capable of reconciling difference and commonality, plurality and meaning.

The second question is even more radical and pertains to the existential dimension: “Do we still have the inner strength to be and to exist?” This inquiry does not concern technical or economic capacities, but the very will to exist as an autonomous historical subject. The inner strength referred to is what Spengler would call “vitale Kraft,” the vital impulse that animates a civilization in its ascending phase—the ability to envision the future, to take risks, to generate new cultural forms. It is not a matter of economic or military capacity, but of will. It is a Nietzschean question even before a Spenglerian one: does Europe still possess that “will to power” (understood not aggressively, but as vital impulse, as self-affirmation) that makes a people a historical subject rather than a passive object of others’ history? The idea evokes Greek paideia and German Bildung: culture as formation of the soul before external structure.

The underlying hypothesis is that contemporary Europe has entered a phase of vital exhaustion, where the preservation of existing heritage prevails over the creation of new forms, where material well-being is accompanied by spiritual impoverishment, where the memory of the past no longer translates into future planning. If this diagnosis is correct, then Europe finds itself precisely in the phase Spengler defined as “Zivilisation,” the twilight phase of a civilization that has exhausted its creative possibilities.

This diagnosis is severe but aligns with other twentieth-century readings (Eliot, Jünger, Heidegger, Ortega y Gasset, Patočka), updated for the twenty-first century: it finds worrying empirical evidence. European demographic decline, for example, is not just a statistical fact but can be read as a symptom of a civilization that has lost faith in the future, that prefers present comfort to the challenge of generational continuity. European public debate often seems dominated by the management of the present rather than the imagination of alternative futures. The great collective narratives—whether religious, ideological, or political—seem exhausted, replaced by administrative pragmatism that generates neither enthusiasm nor mobilization. We are witnessing an exhaustion of the libido existendi, the very desire to continue.

A particularly significant aspect of this reflection, I believe, concerns the level at which the response to these questions must be situated. It is not a matter of expecting institutional or political solutions from above, but of a process that must occur “within each individual.” A transversal question, from the people to the industrial and financial aristocracies. This identification of personal responsibility as a prerequisite for collective regeneration represents, in my view, not only an important insight but the conditio sine qua non for reversing current processes. The genesis is not found in “Zivilisation,” but in “Kultur”—that is, in personal existential commitment to a new shared historical project. Only then do institutional mediations, intellectual networks, political patronage, and all those structures typical of “Zivilisation” intervene. The Renaissance was not a political project, and although the modern world is very different, it is not more complex in an absolute sense. It is we who have lost the ability to analyze complexity.

This translates into a daily “call” to “gather our heritage.” This metaphor of heritage is powerful and multilayered. Europe’s heritage is immense: philosophy, art, science, law, political institutions. But for a heritage to be such, it must be actively received, understood, made one’s own. It is not enough to possess it passively like a museum; it must be metabolized, made alive, capable of inspiring new creations. Otherwise, culture becomes inert memory, no longer a generative force. Hence the urgency of a “daily call” to make the past present, to bring the past to life in the now.

From this perspective, European regeneration is not only a possible shared component of politics but an ethical-existential task, concerning the formation of the European individual as a subject aware of their history and responsible for their future.

The call in question is therefore a call to historical responsibility. Each individual is faced with a choice: to contribute to the regeneration of European “Kultur” or to passively witness its dissolution into mere “Zivilisation” and, ultimately, its disappearance from history.

The concluding warning is thus easily formulated: “we will disappear from the history books” – and this is not apocalyptic rhetoric, but reflects a concrete historical possibility. The history of civilizations is dotted with entities that ceased to exist as active subjects, becoming mere objects of archaeological and historiographical study. The Western Roman Empire, Byzantium, the pre-Columbian civilizations, to name a few examples, have all experienced this fate.

Spengler predicted that the West, like every organic civilization, would go through the phases of birth, growth, maturity, and decline. The open question is whether such a fate is inevitable or whether historical awareness can generate forms of resistance or renewal that alter the expected trajectory.

In the European case, the threat of historical disappearance does not necessarily take the form of catastrophic collapse, but rather of progressive geopolitical marginalization accompanied by an identity dissolution. Europe risks becoming a theme park of its own past, incapable of generating a future, oscillating between nostalgia for its glorious past and imitation of external cultural models.

Spenglerian reflection, updated in the contemporary context, places Europe before a fundamental choice. The identity crisis the continent is experiencing is not merely a political or economic issue, but pertains to the deeper sphere of “Kultur,” the capacity to be and to exist as an autonomous historical subject.

The questions raised do not admit easy or immediate answers. They require a process of critical self-awareness, both individual and collective, capable of distinguishing between the appearance of “Zivilisation” and the substance of “Kultur.” They require the ability to honestly question the persistence of a vital inner force and the possibility of reconnecting with that dimension of universality that has historically characterized European identity.

The recovery of the West as a “physical and cultural entity” to which one belongs cannot be the result of nostalgic yearnings or abstract ideological projects, but must emerge from a renewed existential and cultural commitment by individuals and communities capable of embracing the legacy of the past to generate new forms of life and thought.

If this regeneration does not occur, Europe truly risks becoming a closed chapter in history textbooks, an example – for future civilizations – of how even the most brilliant cultural creations can dissolve when they lose their inner strength, when “Kultur” is reduced to “Zivilisation” and this, ultimately, fades into historical irrelevance.

In this sense, this brief essay does not aim to be merely a cultural diagnosis, but is a personal appeal to responsibility and the creation of meaning.

Essential Bibliography

- Spengler, O. (1918–1922). The Decline of the West. Munich: C.H. Beck.

- Heidegger, M. (1942–43). Parmenides. Milan: Adelphi (Italian ed. 1999)

- Elias, N. (1939). The Civilizing Process. Basel: Haus zum Falken.

- Huntington, S. (1996). The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster.

- Brague, R. (1992). Europe, the Roman Way. Paris: Criterion.

- Patočka, J. (1975). Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History. Chicago: Open Court.

- Nietzsche, F. (1886). Beyond Good and Evil. Milan: Adelphi (Italian ed. 1977)

- Nietzsche, F. (1887). On the Genealogy of Morality. Milan: Adelphi (Italian ed. 1984)

- Jünger, E. (1950). Across the Line. Milan: Adelphi (Italian ed. 1989) – with an essay by Heidegger.

Paolo Falconio

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