The West’s confusion: origins and implications

Despite the brief euphoria caused by the demise of the Communist Bloc in the Cold War, the West was finally able to comprehend new threats and challenges to the world order after the end of the Cold War. However, the West was not able to offer effective responses to the specific manifestations of these threats. The main reason for this is the situation, which can be defined ‘the West’s confusion’. First of all, that is misunderstanding of the importance of West’s leadership as a prerequisite for a stable post-cold war world order. The West’s leadership has historically been the result of a long process and the interaction of many factors, it is based on a successful model of social development, the core of which is a triad of individualism, the market economy and liberal democracy. Two visions of the West – both as the cultural community and the community of highly developed countries – are interconnected, but in the context of the problems of the contemporary world politics the West is foremost a community of developed democratic countries that has acquired a multifaceted institutionalisation, including in the form of security complexes. Overcoming of the West’s confusion implies the harmonisation of values and interests as factors of West’s behaviour on the international arena. Regular confusion demonstrated by the West and its unwillingness to take over the leadership and responsibility encourages two major destructive players: China and Russia. The world without the West (as the organising system power) is a world of chaos and disarray, even more dangerous than the world of balance of powers, which led to the two world wars.