Anti-Western contempt historically recurs as Western power relatively declines

Evidence

At various times before the nineteenth century, Byzantines, Arabs, Chinese, Ottomans, Moguls, and Russians were highly confident of their strength and achievements compared to those of the West. At these times they also were contemptuous of the cultural inferiority, institutional backwardness, corruption, and decadence of the West. As the success of the West fades relatively, such attitudes reappear. People feel “they don’t have to take it anymore.” Iran is an extreme case, but, as one observer noted, “Western values are rejected in different ways, but no less firmly, in Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, China, and Japan.” We are witnessing “the end of the progressive era” dominated by Western ideologies and are moving into an era in which multiple and diverse civilizations will interact, compete, coexist, and accommodate each other. This global process of indigenization is manifest broadly in the revivals of religion occurring in so many parts of the world and most notably in the cultural resurgence in Asian and Islamic countries generated in large part by their economic and demographic dynamism. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 259