The Role of Atrocities in the Turn from Western to Post-Western Order: Reflections on Pankaj Mishra’s ‘The Shoah after Gaza’

Both the ‘West’ as floating signifier and the self-understanding of ‘Western’ national communities arguably face deeper deficits of legitimacy today than after 1914, Hiroshima, Auschwitz, post-war decolonisation, or the ‘War on Terror’. At the same time, the American—and probably final—embodiment of Western claims to the right of enforcement of global moral standards and geopolitical order is in visibly accelerating decay. By engaging with Pankaj Mishra’s February 2024 essay ‘The Shoah after Gaza’, this paper argues that these two sets of crises are mutually reinforcing, and probably irrevocable. It then contemplates the prospects for the future preservation in the world at large of a conflated set of universal and Western values, without the legitimising presence of a hegemonic Western enforcer.