What is “the West”?

Contours of a civilization at a crossroads

The “West” is elusive, both as a tangible entity and as a concept. It is as comprehensive a civilization as its uniformity and unity are difficult to comprehend. On one hand, it is arguably the most influential civilizational force ever to span the globe. Its ways of thinking are as widespread as its writing system. Worldviews, societal patterns, and technologies originating in the West permeate nearly every corner of the planet. Western influence has been ubiquitous and omnipresent for generations.

On the other hand, the West is neither an easily identifiable nor an obviously unified and uniform entity. It extends across several continents and encompasses considerable cultural, social and linguistic diversity. Politically, too, it lacks an immediately recognizable single structure. Critics and political operatives who equate the West as a whole with some part of it risk engaging in superficial simplifications or, worse, in deliberate distortions.

The West has become so pervasive and overwhelming that barely someone on the planet can escape its influence, while average “Westerners” may not even be aware of how “their civilization” shapes their own identity – nor even think in terms of a “West” at all. On the opposite end, vocal proponents of the geopolitical “West” tend to adhere to specific views suggesting unity, as defended in centres of power across the Washington-London-Brussels axis.

No “Westologists” exist to help us understand the West, nor is there a single discipline dedicated to the endeavour of studying the West. Yet virtually all disciplines – and not only in the West – are concerned with aspects of the West, or think implicitly along the lines of Western civilization. Philosophy often means Western philosophy, and sociology largely focuses on Western societies. In disciplines like Chinese, Japanese, or Russian studies, “the West” is presumed as an implicit opposite, though this is neither clearly articulated nor argued for.

Those with a voice in the West have long regarded themselves as the reference civilization and the centre of the world. Inebriated with its own global dominance and concomitant hubris, the West has had the luxury of not needing to act as a unified entity nor viewing itself as one.

Global orders have consistently revolved around power(s) rooted in the West, whether in unipolar, bipolar, or West-centric multipolar global configurations. Now, with the unipolar moment of uncontested hegemony coming undone, for the first time in centuries the West faces what amounts to an actual civilizational challenge regarding both its identity and its place in the world.

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In the present launching article to this platform, I attempt to lay out the “Western question” in a most condensed form. In future writing, I will elaborate in more detail on its various aspects and beyond. Much of this article draws on my book “Wir und der Westen (und die Welt)” [“We and the West (and the World)” (in German)], which is to appear shortly.

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In long and intense researching, I have not come across anyone who has formulated a convincing account regarding what the West is. What is worse, almost nobody seems to even be asking the question. Might anything be wrong with the question, or is there any fundamental problem about it? At any rate, “the West” is constantly referred to, either as a vaguely defined and assumed civilization or, more often, as a similarly vaguely defined and assumed geopolitical or societal entity.

The combined perspective of a civilization that has emerged over history and a contemporary societal entity does seem convincing though. The West can be understood as a set of patterns of social relations, of norms and values, of institutions and infrastructure, and of systems of meaning handed down over time, all shaped and expressed within ideas, language and society. What are the core aspects of the West as a historical civilization that have led to the contemporary West and that still define it today? Put differently, what does the contemporary West consist of and how is it founded in the historically evolved civilization?

Very succinctly put, as a historically evolved civilization – one among many – the West is grounded in Romanized, Germanized and Christianized Western Europe, within self-referenced imperial continuity to the (Western) Roman Empire and under an imperial-papal dual structure, always with reference to the Ancient Greeks in the background. Constituted with these foundations towards the first millennium AD, Western civilization subsequently shaped its Renaissance and its Modernization, and carried them into the world through its own expansion. Over the centuries, it increasingly became the central civilisatory reference, even affording the leisure of pushing itself to the postmodern limits of its own recognizability, in its mission to proselytize liberalism and other values that it claimed to be universal.

Having reached the unipolar moment, the financialized and neoliberal West – led by the Anglosphere – pushed to the extreme the expansion of globalized financial capital that it harbors within its core. People all over the world have been “empowered” by its logic of short-term profitability to compete for social mobility amidst precariousness and stress. Furthermore, the West’s elites have delighted and harassed populations of all countries and civilizations with their progressive-liberal ideals. But the liberal hegemony is over. As Glenn Diesen aptly writes, though in a slightly different context: "The liberal hegemony is no longer liberal, and the hegemony is exhausted."

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The "official" view regarding the West is held by supranational bodies such as the European Union (EU), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the Group of Seven (G7), as well as by the governments of the most powerful Western countries and the leading media of the respective discursive spheres. According to the self-image presented there, the West is a community of values and interests that upholds freedom, democracy, the rule of law, and human rights, both internally and externally.

According to this same self-image, the West positions itself in global affairs as the pole of liberal democracies and is opposed to the pole of autocracies. It defends the liberal or "rules-based" global order against those said to be unjustifiably attacking it. In doing so, measures such as military interventions not authorized by the UN Security Council or economic sanctions not covered by international law are sometimes considered necessary and justified. When it comes to the West as a contemporary geopolitical entity, everything stands or falls with how one assesses the tenability of this official view in light of the real-existing West.

In its core, the official view of the geopolitical West contains two assumptions. Simply put, these are "we are the good guys" (in the sense "we are a de facto morally superior civilization built on morally superior principles"), and "we have a right, or a duty, to intervene around the globe" (even in the absence of a global consensus, and independent of international law).

According to a more critical perspective, however, the real-existing West is primarily interested in maintaining its hegemony. Mainly through Washington (the USA), London (the UK), and Brussels (the EU and NATO), the unipolar world order is enforced in a way that ensures no peer competitor can emerge, with the goal of maintaining full-spectrum dominance across military, political, economic, and technological domains. According to this perspective, this goal is pursued even through illegal means such as regime change operations, unilateral sanctions, and other forms of threats and coercion, while references to human rights and democracy are opportunistic and hypocritical rather than principled. Furthermore, critics within the West and inconvenient politicians elsewhere are, at times, unscrupulously silenced.

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The only author I found to have properly formulated the question “What is the West?” is Emmanuel Todd in a chapter of his recent “La défaite de l’Occident”. He crafts a broad definition of the West with reference to the historic dimensions of educational and economic development, and contrasts it with a more narrow definition with the criterion of participation in the liberal and democratic revolution. While he broadly takes the former to include the big nations of the G7, or NATO plus Japan, he includes only Britain, the US, and France for the latter.

Leaving aside the fate of other nations in Todd’s big-picture take, I find the inclusion of Japan into the West troubling. While Japan is geopolitically aligned with the West, and shares some formal political institutions, it is civilizationally different on virtually all deeper levels of worldviews and lifeworlds. Interestingly, while Todd looks for a historically informed sociological definition of the West, he neither goes back further than a few centuries nor considers other relevant societal categories.

As a first approach to capture the contours of the West through comparisons, the distinction of civilisational proximity and geopolitical proximity seems to me a useful starting point. While this remains a major simplification, it comes much closer to the goal of delimiting the West. Russia, for instance, is civilizationally close to the West in many dimensions, but it is geopolitically not aligned, while Japan is geopolitically aligned and civilizationally different. Along these lines, China would be a case of both civilizational and geopolitical non-proximity.

With the sequence from the above-mentioned civilizational grounds through modernisation and expansion up to the present moment there is a vast terrain to be put in perspective. The West in its depth and diversity has no lack of dimensions to explore and tap into.

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The current transition from a unipolar to a multipolar global order poses profound challenges. The West is confronted with the prospect of no longer being the center of the world. This means it not only needs to find its place in the emerging multipolar world, but it also has to redefine itself by reshaping its own identity. The West has to come up with a new, “post-unipolar” version of itself.

Neither the current version of Western integration around EU, NATO and G7 nor the alternative of falling back to co-existing sovereign nation-states – or now the potential of a renewed America First plus all-out assertive imperialism – seem convincing models in the face of an emerging multipolar order of civilisation-states including China, India, Russia and Iran. The “West” can neither remain its imperial expansionist self, nor easily morph into an up-to-date and healthy version of sovereign nation-states coexisting in its best republican and democratic tradition. At the core, geopolitically, it is about nothing less than finding its place in a post-unipolar framework, and civilizationally, or philosophically, it is about preparing itself for such a framework – learning to see oneself as one reference among many.

At the beginning of the unipolar moment, there was a chance to lead and set the stage for a world characterized by more win-win cooperation. But this opportunity has been squandered through an obsessive attitude of zero-sum game logic and bloc thinking. Unlike in earlier times, the West can no longer hide behind excuses that the world simply functions in cynical ways. Rather it has behaved cynically itself and been at the origin of perpetuating this logic, while the opportunity might have existed to go ahead with a different attitude and move the world more strongly in a direction away from hegemony, imperialism and oligarchy.

Now faced with new limits, the West will be forced to figure out who and what it actually is. Westerners will need to determine whether they are truly a cohesive entity, and if so, what that cohesion – its identity – consists of. At present, there are many traces, approaches, and visions, but in my view none that is convincing, internally consistent, nor broadly supported. The roles that nation-states and the supranational level of a – perhaps one day properly and democratically legitimate? – united West might one day play remain as uncertain as the question whether such a thing should be considered desirable.

At this critical juncture, I propose viewing the challenges ahead as an opportunity for growth and maturity, rather than as a cause for rageful behavior that overturns the chessboard. Instead, why not envision a new Western Renaissance, rooted in our finest democratic (anti-oligarchic), republican (anti-imperial), and liberal traditions, balancing the common good with individual freedom? Achieving this would require the West to renounce hegemony, imperial continuity, amoral realism, and dishonest expansion. In their place, it would need to embrace a role as a cooperative actor within a multipolar world founded on sovereign equality among states and civilizations.

Whither, post-unipolar West?