JB: Is that because there are different "Wests"? That it's entirely possible to have a position in which a large percentage of the world's population wish to migrate to Western states and yet there are individual states within the West which may have a rapid decline. You might think of Argentina over the last 100 years, whose economy really went down, whose culture suffered badly. I don't think for a second that we are in that league but it's no accident that you can have a situation in which we could simultaneously be saying that there are serious problems in Britain and yet also that Western culture — and Western society exemplified in the US — is still very vibrant. The US has got a lot of reasons for that: its demography — there are a lot of young people there, which is tremendously important for a dynamic society. It has a lot of space — the American cities may be big but if you fly over the US you are repeatedly struck by how a lot of the country is not particularly heavily populated. And there is a sense of "can-do" enthusiasm and openness, which is really quite a dynamic feature. Obviously there are a lot of problems with America, I'm not ignoring that — adversarial politics is becoming more and more strident, it's getting harder to move through policy formation — but as a dynamic society, the US is there. One of the difficulties is that when we talk about the West and ask whether there is, or whether there is not, a crisis in the West we have to think about what we mean by "the West". Do we mean the US and the rest as an add-on or do we imagine there is some kind of average, as it were, which encompasses people from, shall we say, Helsinki to Honolulu?

Jeremy Black 

NS: Don't forget Glasgow.

DJ: Just think again about the Cold War. Norman, your book is entitled The Atlantic and Its Enemies. We can argue, as Jeremy rightly says, about what we mean by the Atlantic community and the West, but what about its enemies? In the Cold War we could to some extent define ourselves by our enemies. We knew who they were and that helped us to decide who we were. That's not so clear now. Who do you think are the enemies of the West now? Are they mostly within — the sort of problems you talked about — or are they external? Or maybe we don't have enemies any more?

NS: Good question that. We've got an awful lot of enemies. I think this problem has grown since the 1960s. Call it self-hatred if you like. Or is it just a part of a certain strand in the West which keeps producing things which in the end might kill it? I am very impressed by those books by Melanie Phillips, for instance on education. How on earth anybody in a country like this would have thought up the educational reforms that we got in the mid-Sixties and later; and why they weren't scrapped? I don't want to harp on about this one but it's all too visible what has happened with governments now, like the one we have just elected. It's going to have to face cuts and we all know that universities are the first on the line. There are about 110 universities which will all be up for cuts of five per cent, which means that some institution which frankly wanted just to have been left doing a good job as a polytechnic will lose five per cent. And King's College London will lose an important professorship in the understanding of how to read old manuscripts. This kind of thing is bound to happen. You get awfully sick of that kind of thing. These are the internal enemies and they are the real problem. I cannot really believe that a few crazy Taliban or Taliban-sympathising people are doing nearly as much damage over the medium term as internal factors.

DJ: Jeremy, how do you see this?

JB: The transition from democracy to democratisation, in a sense that society has to be accountable in all its actions, is a clear challenge. Different parts of the West and the non-West are responding to it with greater success. Norman is right — there are clearly serious problems, for example in educational standards and other such issues — but we are responding to the way in which society across the world is very volatile at the moment. Increasingly people are living in very large cities. If you go to the third world, places like Kinshasa or Lagos or Mexico City have more than 10 million inhabitants in these kind of environments. They are not really under control of any particular agency and people there have to create their own new senses of social identity. It's not surprising that when they do that those senses often aim against other aspects of the society that are present at that moment. 

I suppose that when I am feeling a pessimist I would feel this is a terrible thing. But on the other hand I'm not quite sure how one could imagine a steady-state answer to a world which is growing so rapidly in population. I don't think you are going to be able to say that continuity is going to happen in such an environment. As far as the West is concerned, we actually are not the area of the world whose population is growing most rapidly. That problem, that challenge, is not the one that is actually the issue in Europe. If anything, in Europe the challenge is the mismatch between the so-called indigenous populations which are not growing particularly rapidly — in countries such as Hungary or Italy, or to a certain extent parts of Western Europe which are actually shrinking — and the incoming groups, which may not always wish to accept the fact that they are a part of a pluralistic community. That challenge is very different to the challenge in much of the New World — the different West. When we look at the New World, we tend to think only of the United States but of course we have to bear in mind that Mexico to Chile is also part of the West.