Murphy, Goldsworthy, O'Donnell and I are very obviously and openly worried that things could go terribly wrong for the modern West, and explicitly explore comparisons with the history of Rome.  In the case of Goffart, Heather and Halsall this is not so, though Goffart does reveal some modern anxieties of his own (over German nationalism). But it is hard not to conclude that a widespread anxiety over a modern "decline of the West" underlies the presence of all these books on the disintegration of the Roman empire, and of a reading public prepared to buy them. It is certainly very striking that so many books have recently appeared on the dissolution of Rome's power, and so very few chart its rise and apogee. Europeans, and their descendents the North Americans, have had it very good for four or five centuries, thanks to their dominance (military, political, economic, cultural, even religious) over the globe. Romans had it very good for about the same number of centuries. Then things got a lot more "complicated" for the Romans. Are we in the modern West headed in the same direction? 

It is interesting to explore a notable absence from these books.  They are primarily, for the most part exclusively, about the fall of Roman power in the Western half of the empire — they do not explore in any detail the survival of the empire based in Constantinople, which considered itself "Roman" throughout its existence and which only disappeared in 1453. In the English-speaking world (in Greece and the Balkans, obviously, things are different) this empire is essentially viewed as part of the oriental "other", and given a suitably exotic name, "Byzantine" — full of Ys and Zs, difficult to pronounce with confidence, and redolent of incense and mosaics. We do not identify with the Romans of Constantinople in the same way as we identify with the Romans of Rome. This also means that we, and all these books, can largely ignore the great crisis that faced the East Roman empire two centuries after the fall of the West — the rise of the Arabs and of Islam. This was something that happened not to "our" Roman empire, but to an alien "Byzantine" empire. This is very convenient, because it means we Europeans, and peoples of European descent, while getting deeply preoccupied by our own barbarians and their role in history (as all these books testify), can ignore the much more important, but also much more sensitive, issue of the role of Arab and Muslim invasions in overturning the world order during the seventh century.