A skipped century – notes on premature predictions

A carousel in Surabaya, Indonesia. Photo: Shutterstock

Does the future belong to China?

Since Donald Trump’s return to the White House, the thesis of the imminent “decline of the West” has been very en vogue in the media. Shortly after the scandal-ridden meeting between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the White House, the former foreign minister of Germany, Joschka Fischer, said in an interview with Die Zeit on March 6th 2025 that “The West is finished, and from within, not by an external power.”

According to some authors, this dismantling or self-dismantling of the West could offer the East a unique opportunity to fundamentally change existing power relations. When these figures speak of the East, they do not mean Russia, which has turned into a junior partner of Beijing since its war of aggression against Ukraine, but rather the two most populous countries in the world: China and India. In an interview with the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on April 17th 2025, the renowned Singaporean political scientist and diplomat Kishore Mahbubani said the following:

“By 2050, China and India could be the world’s number one and two economies… These tectonic shifts are like an approaching wave: unstoppable.”

This prediction is reminiscent of the forecasts made at the beginning of the 20th century, following Japan’s victory over the Russian Empire in the 1904-05 war, which came as a complete surprise to the world. Even then, the thesis of the imminent decline of the European great powers and the inexorable rise of Asia, not least China, was repeatedly expressed. Representative of many such predictions, I would like to quote a prediction made in 1911 by the Russian-German social democrat Alexander Helphand (Parvus):

“Just as the 19th century was marked by the settlement of the great lands of America, so the 20th century is marked by the industrialization of populous Asia. … China is building railways, China is drilling armies according to the European model, and from the coastal cities that European capital has industrialized, capitalist industry is penetrating into the interior of the empire … We are on the eve of a revolution in world trade, from which a new world system of trading states will emerge.”

However, Parvus’s prediction regarding China was a century too early. It was not at the beginning, but at the end of the 20th century that China was to experience rapid economic growth. For example, the gross domestic product of the EU in 1980 was ten times that of China, as Kishore Mahbubani points out. Forty years later, however, China’s GDP was already equal to that of the entire EU. In 2050, Mahbubani adds, China’s GDP will already be twice as large as that of the European Union.

This thesis of the inevitable decline of the West and the unstoppable rise of the East seems very convincing at first glance. Nevertheless, it ignores many uncertainties. For example, there is the question of the stability of the hybrid Chinese system, which attempts to reconcile an ideologically shaped surveillance state with capitalist modernity. Whether this synthesis can succeed in the long term is questionable. It is by no means impossible that China will also experience its own perestroika, with the turbulence characteristic of its Soviet counterpart. What consequences this will have for the competition between the systems and for the balance of power between East and West remains to be seen.

The “academic Pugachev”

Just as Parvus skipped a century with his prediction about China’s future, one of the sharpest critics of the French Revolution, Joseph Marie de Maistre, did the same with regard to the victory of the future Russian Revolution. In 1811, de Maistre wrote:

“Freedom will have the same effect on the Russian temperament as fiery wine on someone who is not accustomed to it. The mere spectacle of this freedom will intoxicate even those who do not yet share in it. If, in this spiritual and emotional state, some academic Pugachev appears (Yemelyan Pugachev was the leader of what was probably the largest Russian peasant uprising of 1733–1775) … then the state will in all probability immediately fall apart.”

And indeed, the academic Pugachev (Lenin) did appear in Russia and the state did temporarily collapse, albeit 106 years after de Maistre’s prediction.

In the meantime, at least until the revolutions of 1848, the tsarist empire was considered the most dangerous enemy of the European revolution and the most important pillar of the old European order, whose defence was the primary goal of the Holy Alliance founded in September 1815. After the outbreak of the February Revolution in Paris in 1848, the conservative Russian poet Fyodor Tyutchev wrote:

“In Europe (there have long been) basically only two powers: revolution and Russia… Between them there is neither treaty nor mediation. The life of one is the death of the other. The outcome of the struggle that has begun between them, which is the greatest the world has ever seen, will determine the political and religious future of humanity for centuries to come.”

Unlike de Maistre, Tyutchev proved to be a false prophet. After the failure of the 1848 revolutions, the revolutionary centre of the continent shifted eastward to the tsarist empire. Just at the time when Tyutchev spoke of an unbridgeable gulf between Russia and the revolution, a new intellectual and political formation began to emerge in Russia: the revolutionary intelligentsia. The fact that the term “intelligentsia” is essentially untranslatable into western languages and is used there merely as a technical term shows that it is a typically Russian phenomenon that rarely had an equivalent in other countries. According to the Cologne historian Theodor Schieder, the unconditional and absolute nature of the intelligentsia’s revolutionary beliefs was virtually unknown in the West. What is surprising in this context is the fact that the intelligentsia became radicalized during the reign of the liberal Tsar Alexander II (1855–1881). Alexander II, who went down in Russian history as the “Tsar Liberator”, had initiated a massive programme of reforms shortly after his accession to the throne in 1855. In 1861, serfdom was abolished, censorship was considerably relaxed, and the judicial reform of 1864 created independent courts, thereby establishing the first beginnings of a separation of powers in the country. However, all these developments were of little relevance to the revolutionary intelligentsia. On the contrary, the more liberal the monarchy became, the more radically it was opposed by the intelligentsia. They were not interested in reforming the existing system, but in its complete destruction in order to build a social paradise on earth on its ruins. Instead of overcoming its internal divisions, Russia headed toward total confrontation during the era of reforms, culminating in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II by the terrorist organization Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will or People’s Freedom) on March 1st 1881.

Although the intelligentsia fought passionately against the tsarist regime, it seemed so all-powerful to them that they hardly expected its imminent destruction and eventual takeover. They largely neglected the problem of the techniques of rule and identified primarily with their role as victims. Only with the “party of a new type” founded by Lenin in 1903 – the Bolsheviks – was the situation different. The Bolsheviks succeeded in combining radical utopianism with a pronounced sense of power politics. This synthesis enabled Lenin and his like-minded comrades to defeat all their domestic opponents after the fall of the tsar in February 1917 and establish the first totalitarian regime of the modern era in Russia in October 1917. The prediction made by de Maistre in 1811 has essentially been confirmed.

Fears of decadence

Finally, I would like to turn to another premature prediction that practically skipped a century. This is namely the thesis of Russia’s inexorable rise and the decline of the decadent West, which lacked the strength to renew itself. Such visions of doom were very widespread in the West in the mid-19th century. Many authors at the time were convinced that the future belonged to Russia, which was untouched by decadence. Visions of the decline of the West were omnipresent. In order to show many such predictions, I would like to quote the German-Austrian Orientalist Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer, who wrote the following in 1850 (following the lead of the Russian publicist and writer Alexander Herzen, who was critical of the regime):

“The Occident cannot solve the social problem; it has reached the end of its spiritual and worldly resources … The only thing that is certain is that, in contrast to Western Europe, which has been worn down by a long life and is now withering away, a people is emerging … which has grown up under the hard outer shell of tsarism … a people … that blindly believed in passively submitting to the will of others.”

The Crimean War, which broke out in 1853, showed how unfounded these visions of doom were. Between the Napoleonic Wars and the Second World War, no war to restore the European balance of power was as short. The opponents of the hegemonic power succeeded in defeating this power without the total mobilization of their power potential, using only a fraction of their forces.

Immediately after the fall of the port city of Sevastopol in September 1855, which sealed Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War, Alexis de Tocqueville said that this setback was of no significance for Russia. Its rise would continue unabated. As proof, Tocqueville cited Russia’s massive expansion in the Far East, which continued despite the defeat in the Crimean War. Many later historians agree with Tocqueville. Dieter Groh, Geoffrey Barraclough, and Norman Rich, for example, believe that Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War merely concealed its strength. Russia’s power did not suffer any significant losses.

Nevertheless, contrary to the opinions expressed here, Russia experienced not only an apparent but a real decline in power after the Crimean War. The expansion into Central Asia and the Far East did little to strengthen the tsarist empire vis-à-vis the West. This is because at the same time the West was also experiencing a period of tremendous colonial expansion. The decline of the tsarist empire in terms of power politics was primarily due to the country’s internal political divisions and the increasing isolation of the tsarist regime within society. Russia’s defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 was a particularly clear reflection of this ongoing decline in the power of the tsarist monarchy.

Even after the Bolshevik revolution, Russia was initially unable to regain its former position as a great power. It had to come to terms with the loss of numerous territories of the former tsarist empire and was dealt a severe blow in 1920 by the newly re-established Polish state. Added to this were the unprecedented losses caused by the so-called “Red” and Stalinist terror. It was only after the Second World War, when the Soviet Union extended its sphere of influence to the Elbe, that people remembered the predictions made a hundred years earlier by Tocqueville and other European pessimists. The internally divided West now seemed once again inferior to the dictatorially ruled, monolithic Russian colossus. That this view underestimated the West’s potential for development and overestimated the power potential of Russia and the USSR is another matter. What is important for this article is above all the fact that the thesis expressed by Tocqueville and a few other authors in the mid-19th century about Russia’s inexorable rise to power was premature. It skipped practically a century.

This is an extended version of a column published on May 22nd 2025 in German in the online debate magazine DieKolumnisten.

Leonid Luks is professor of history at the Catholic University Eichstaett-Ingolstadt, Bavaria, Germany

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empire, geopolitics, history