The idea of a West was initially also a geographic idea, when first used by the ancient Greeks to indicate the societal structure and culture of those societies that stood West of Persia. Later adopted also to describe the societies falling under the Roman influence, it has since been utilized by early and late medieval Christians, Europeans, Americans, and those societies that saw themselves in association with the latter two. The Western world nowadays can be identified in terms of some key values, structures, and principles, including capitalism, liberalism, democracy, human rights, NATO, and the Group of Eight.
What Is the West?
According to some recounting, Mahatma Gandhi was once asked what he thought of contemporary civilization, to which question he replied: "I think it would be a good idea." Is there really such a thing as the West? If there is, is it a civilization or a hodgepodge of societies loosely sharing some values? In case, which values are truly specific of the West?
Sure enough, the idea of the West has been shifting over the course of the centuries. The shift was clearly geographical, moving from the contemporary south-eastern borders of Europe up north, to the contemporary map, which extends over the five continents and, depending on the criteria employed to sort out Western from non-Western countries, includes a different array of places. Here is, for instance, a map of the countries adopting a Latin alphabet.
The aspects that are characteristic of the West will thus be relative to different historical periods and, within a certain age, they may vary from society to society. Still, to deny that a West has ever existed may seem to deny part of the history of those societies.
Key Aspects of the West
The West is certainly a vague and shifting concept. Yet, that a concept is vague is no reason to do without it; possibly, indeed, any interesting concept is vague. The question is rather how a concept is employed. How has the concept of the West been put at use?
At times, the West has been used to invoke a religious identity. Late Roman emperors and medieval Christians used the concept to sort out those societies that identified under the Christian creed as opposed to pagans or Muslims. Thus, the West was a common idea to defend against religious threats; it was a war engine.
In modern Europe, the West has been employed also to diffuse a certain economic system, capitalism, centered on private ownership and a free market. Initially, this did happen through colonial trade, whose benefits for certain Europeans and Americans came at great expenses for those that did not belong to this herd.
Western people have also identified themselves also in racial terms, in different ways at different times. While this manner to decline the concept reminds most immediately of Nazism and Fascism, already in ancient Greece the difference between Western and non-Western people was often drawn in terms of genealogy, skin color, or other somatic traits, which tendency we find repeated recurrently also during the Roman as well as the Medieval times.
Capitalism is still probably the driving force of the West, along with democracy, freedom, and equality. All of those are closely related to liberalism as opposed to societies that were based on socialist or communist philosophies. The contraposition between the two was particularly stark during the Cold War period, while nowadays it is more attenuated and countries such as Russia and China seems to have embraced capitalism in some form or other.
Still, the West is also identified in terms of military alliances such as NATO, privileged diplomatic dialogues as those established within the Group of Eight and the Group of Twenty, and economic institutions such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Further Online Readings and Sources
It is remarkable how little has been devoted to the concept of the West among contemporary philosophers. Probably the deepest discussion of the theme is to be found among fiction and non-fiction writers reflecting on the imaginary of the West and its fragile boundaries. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a classic starting point.
Turning to philosophically denser works, here is the online edition of Oswald Spengler’sThe Decline of the West, a classic book regarding the crisis of Western civilization published between 1918 and 1923.
