Abstract
The West used to be one of those stable concepts that oriented the Westerners in their various activities around the world. Today it is a concept challenged from several sides. Through an overview of the basic historical meanings of the concept, this article focuses on the points of contestation and possible changes regarding the concept of the West. The most important challenge to the concept has been made by a debate over the actual status of the transatlantic relationship. Whereas the existence of a political West is strongly questioned within the debate over a possible transatlantic divide, there seems to be a parallel move in the reverse direction when the concept is used in opposition to Islam. Although the idea of a clash of civilizations is dismissed by many, it still plays an important role in reviving the West as a cultural and civilizational entity. We are thus witnessing an internal dismantling of the West alongside an external rearming of the concept.
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Notes
A search in the International Bibliography of Social Sciences yields only four texts with Western identity in the title as opposed to 121 texts with European identity in the title within the last ten years.
For a history of this version, see Gress, 1998. Gress only focuses on how the liberal version narrates historical events and periods. He does not discuss the more basic meaning of civilization inherent in the narrative.
The question of differences in religion seems to be a separate theme within the debate on differences —see, for example, ‘The fight for God’ in the Economist (December 19, 2002). But the religious theme was forcefully added to the debate on the transatlantic divide by none other than Javier Solana, when he, in an interview in the Financial Times, claimed that the differences were to be understood in the framework of European secularism and American religion (www.euobserver.com, January 8, 2003).
Rumsfeld used the term old Europe when answering a question about the attitude of the European allies to a possible war in Iraq: ‘Now, you’re thinking of Europe as Germany and France. I don’t. I think that's old Europe. If you look at the entire NATO Europe today, the center of gravity is shifting to the east’ (Secretary Rumsfeld briefs at the Foreign Press Center, Wednesday, January 22, 2003; http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Jan2003/t01232003_t0122sdfpc.html)
Habermas surrounds ‘old Europe’ with inverted commas in the text, probably to simultaneously quote Rumsfeld and distance himself from the term.
Compared to other ‘geo-cultural’ concepts (e.g., Africa, Asia, China, America) that might be combined with ‘the West’, Islam gets by far the most hits in a Google search.
The debate came in several waves: the first one with Huntington's 1993 paper in Foreign Affairs, the second with the publication of the book in 1996, and the third with the reactions to 9/11. ‘Clash of Civilizations’ is probably one of the most-quoted book titles ever (it gets 1 660 000 hits in a Google search, compared, for instance, to approximately 1 250 000 hits for ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ (Search conducted August 15, 2006).
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Ifversen, J. Who are the Westerners?. Int Polit 45, 236–253 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.ip.8800167
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.ip.8800167