On the cover of historian Niall Ferguson's new book, Civilization: The West and the Rest, is a photograph of a gold-filigreed, antique French mantel clock lying on its side. Mr. Ferguson's implication is clear: Like France's 18th-century monarchy, societies don't fall decorously. They topple – not without warning, perhaps, but nevertheless with astonishing speed and often messy consequences. And that, as he told The Globe and Mail's Michael Posner, constitutes his book's Code Red alert: Unless Western civilization contends with the myriad risks it now faces, it, too, may collapse – and sooner than one might think.
How does the current euro-zone crisis apply to your schema?
This is something I predicted in an earlier book, The Cash Nexus – the degeneration of a monetary union with no fiscal component. But Europe is not necessarily at its best when it's integrated. Remember, the fragmented state structure was a big advantage 500 years ago, vis-à-vis unitary, imperial China. But it also speaks to my general point that things collapse, rather than decline gradually. Everybody thought the euro zone was fine until it wasn't fine.
Do you see Greece leaving the euro zone?
I think it's still a low-probability scenario, for Greece or anyone else, even in the event of default. The costs would be very high to all concerned. We ought to have known what monetary union would mean. We saw what happened with the integration of East Germany after 1989 – a few years of boom and then high unemployment. That's what Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland have been dealing with – the hangover that comes from stimulus. The euro was supposed to increase integration in Europe. It's actually done the opposite.
In your book, you take the West to task for a word I can barely pronounce, pusillanimity. What do you mean by it?
It's from the Latin, for weakness or vacillation of spirit. It's a nice word for cowardice or, in the vernacular, lack of balls. Pusillanimity of leadership is one of the big problems of our time. The institutional problems on both sides of the Atlantic can only be addressed with strong leadership, because they involve riding over the vested interests and privileges of powerful groups. We need to update the software, delete the viruses and reboot the machine, and that calls for massive political courage of the sort we don't see much of right now.
Confidence Men, Ron Suskind's recent book on the Obama administration, suggests that the President was sandbagged by his own advisers and prevented from implementing more dramatic financial reform.
Suskind is an outstanding journalist and it's clear he's been briefed by [former director of the National Economic Council] Larry Summers's enemies. But the room for manoeuvre was pretty darn limited. It's easy to engage in wishful thinking. Should the stimulus package have been bigger? A better question might be: Could things have been worse? It was only in the summer of '09 that we began to pull out of a tailspin that, until that moment, tracked very closely the declines of the Great Depression. So we do need to give credit where due. It turns out to be harder to create a sustained recovery when consumers are deleveraging, the housing market is in the tank and confidence is at a low ebb.
Indian novelist Pankaj Mishra, reviewing Civilization in the London Review of Books …
That wasn't a review. It's extremely selective, quite deliberately misrepresents my work, and strongly implies that I'm a racist, which I resent. I'm extremely angry about that piece. It was malicious and defamatory and I don't intend to take it sitting idly. I will respond with great force to that attempt at character assassination.
But how do you feel about being called a neo-imperialist?
