'The death of the west': Samuel Huntington, Oriana Fallaci and a new 'moral' geopolitics of births and bodies

The 'War on Terror' has justified a whole new set of re-territorialisations of security and identity, also in the 'West'. In this paper, I highlight one particularly powerful aspect of the idea of the 'West under threat': one wedded to the idea of a demographic-reproductive menace. Such ideas are not only the prerogative of extremist fringes, for the two authors whose work is discussed in this piece are very much part of the mainstream: Samuel Huntington, whose latest book Who Are We? America's Great Debate focuses on the 'deconstruction' of American identity and the threat represented by hyper-fertile immigrant populations and Italian writer-journalist Oriana Fallaci, whose two most recent books have launched an offensive against the 'Islamic Reverse Crusade' that threatens to 'submerge and subjugate' Europe. Certainly, the intimations of a 'threat' to the West are in no way new, nor are they a unique product of the 'War on Terror'. What is new, however, is the force with which they are being articulated today and the ways in which they are entering into popular circulation, in both Europe and America. What is more, on both sides of the Atlantic, those raising the sound of alarm for 'The Death of the West' prescribe not only a re-affirmation of (Western) ideals, but also -and increasingly -a set of policies for the biological survival of the West. 'The Death of the West' is thus not only a parable of political and geopolitical decline, but also a morality play regarding real deaths and, especially, real births.