Western World

Western World, cultural-geographic descriptor generally referring to the countries of western Europe and nations originating as western European settler colonies. The Western World, or “West” colloquially, has been a powerful and discursive concept for millennia, during which the geographic and cultural entities placed under the label have fluctuated dramatically.

The concept of the Western world, set in opposition to an Eastern world, can be traced as far back as the writings of Herodotus, the 5th century bce Greek who is commonly called the first historian and is famous for his account of the wars between Greek states and Persia during that century. As the expanding Roman Republic came into more contact with the eastern Mediterranean Hellenistic societies, the former began to contrast themselves with the East. The emerging dichotomy was further reinforced when the Roman emperor Diocletian made the decision in 285–6 ce to split the empire into two parts, a western one and an eastern one—a division that was made permanent in 395.

With the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 ce, the formal establishment of the Holy Roman Empire in 962 ce, and the Great Schism of 1054 ce between Western Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, the West-East division became more defined. However, the Orthodox East was still considered a part of Christendom, a more salient geographic unit when contrasting the whole of Christian Europe with the Islamic Caliphates, which began to appear in the 7th century. In the view of many scholars, cultural descendants of Byzantine Orthodox Christianity, including Russia and parts of the Balkans, have retained a liminal status near, but still outside, the West. Although Western Christianity split further during the Protestant Reformation, the common cultural heritage and religious traditions of the varying sects maintained a sense of unity when contrasted with non-Christian groups.

Concurrent intellectual and political developments, beginning with the Renaissance (14th and15th centuries) and the European Age of Exploration starting in the 15th century, played a crucial role in defining and expanding notions of the West. The Renaissance helped Europeans rediscover the classical tradition and introduced ideas such as humanism, which would become central to descriptions of Western intellectual thought. Exploration and colonization, pioneered by the Portuguese and Spanish, would bring large swathes of the non-Western world under the control of the West, especially the New World. The confrontational and often violent conditions of European expansion, along with the growing transatlantic slave trade, endowed the emerging colonial powers with a sense of fundamental separation from, and superiority to, the non-Western groups they encountered. Simultaneously, the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), foreshadowed by the Protestant Reformation and subsequent Catholic Counter-Reformation, ended with the Treaty of Westphalia, often cited as the origin of the idea of the nation-state, which gave Westerners a clear sense of the rights and sovereignty of independent states.

The Scientific Revolution (16th and17th centuries) and the Enlightenment (17th and18th centuries) brought ideals of rationalism, secularism, and democracy to the fore in Western intellectual thought, where they have since remained. These intellectual advancements helped create the technology necessary to fuel the Industrial Revolution, which began in the 18th century and saw the West leap above the non-western world in material wealth and ability to project power on a global scale, as well as increasing Western activity, imperial expansion, and colonization in East Asia and the Near, or Middle, East. Western scholars interested in these cultures began to refer to themselves as “Orientalists,” deriving from the Latin term oriens, or east. Scholars such as Edward Said, in his influential book Orientalism, have argued that it was only through the characterization of the Orient that Westerners gained an oppositional conception of the Occident, or West.

This period of increasing material development also began to raise questions as to what constituted “the West.” The young country of the United States, for example, followed a course of development much more analogous to European states than to Latin American states, which gained independence mostly contemporaneously. Although most modern historians point to complex material and political factors for this divergence, the racial thought that dominated at the time largely blamed the Indigenous influence on Latin American society, thus beginning the region’s slow drift out of the conceptual West.

As Europe continued to colonize Africa and Asia, the concept of the West became increasingly intertwined with political constitutionalism, a scientific worldview, and white supremacy; after the Second World War discredited both social Darwinism and imperialism, the conceptual West began to focus increasingly on the former two concepts. Now in opposition to the communist East, the West began to emphasize its pluralism and individualism. Another important factor was economic. During the Cold War (1947–91), it was often assumed that market economies and capitalism were features of the West, counter to the socialism of the Soviet bloc and its allies. Even though religion became increasingly less important in western Europe, descriptions of the West continued to prize a pluralistic secularism against the dogmatic atheism of the communists. The Cold War era also saw non-western countries such as Japan and South Korea increasingly embrace Western values, institutions, and economic principles, thereby creating more ambiguity in what, precisely, the term signified.

Since the Cold War’s end, the concept of the West has remained in flux. The 1996 publication of Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, which argued that future international conflict would be civilizational rather than ideological, brought a renewed focus to the concept of the West; the al-Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001, confirmed Huntington’s thesis in the minds of many. Proponents of the West and its legacy cite a dedication to democracy, pluralism, human rights, and a belief in progress. Critics of the West and this description of its values point to the legacies of racism, colonialism and neocolonialism, and imperialism to argue that the West is hypocritical. Some proponents of the West acknowledge these failings, but they argue that the legacy of Western democracy shows an ability to correct past wrongs not found in other sociopolitical and civilizational models. Others, regardless of their moral and historical assessment of the West, argue that the concept is a useful tool in analyzing history and current events.