For your book The West: The History of an Idea, you spent 12 years researching what people mean when they talk about “the west”. At a time when America’s president shows more admiration for autocratic Russia than for Nato-allied countries in Europe, are we witnessing the end of the west as an idea?
I certainly wouldn’t write off the west. What we are seeing is a challenge to a version of the west that had America as its leader. But it doesn’t have to signal the end. The west is crucial to Europeans, and they have been the core of it. America joined at some point as an offshoot; it has been isolationist before, and it may become isolationist again. So we may see a different version of the west for a while, with its core in Europe, as it historically has mostly been. But America will surely return sooner or later.
A west without America is hard to get one’s head around. When we use that term, most people think of the cold war, and a western alliance led by the Anglosphere …
Of course. One common view is that the notion of the west gains traction with the foundation of Nato in 1949 and the cold war. At the other extreme there’s the “from Plato to Nato” idea, which says the west started with ancient Greeks when they fought off the Persians. Meanwhile, among historians, there has been a boringly universal consensus that the west as a self-conscious idea begins in the 1880s or 90s, and is due primarily to the needs of British imperialism: it was invented to justify imperialism, to demarcate the oriental east of Asia and Arab peoples as an “other”.
But I disagree. In my research I found it was French writers who first started using the word in the 1820s, and they did so because they realised the term “Europe” was no longer fit for purpose.
What was wrong with “Europe”?
The problem was that geographically and politically, from the time of Peter the Great in the early 18th century, it included Russia. Later, Russia’s Tsar Alexander I came to dominate the 1815 Congress of Vienna and the Holy Alliance that he established subsequently. More and more western Europeans began to worry about Russia’s inevitable domination of Europe. It was a large and expansionist monolith. The 1820s saw the Greek war of independence against the Ottoman empire, but for a lot of French commentators the real danger was that Russia could take Constantinople after an Ottoman collapse they saw as imminent. They began to see the Greeks as a kind of rampart of the west.
In the 1830s, talk of “the west” and a “western alliance” became more acute, because by then Alexander I had died and Nicholas II was very despotic. There was an anxiety that Russia was not on the margins anymore and could be about to dominate Europe. Crucially, France had become a constitutional monarchy as of 1830 with the July Revolution. Suddenly an Anglo-French “western” alliance of constitutional regimes made sense in a way it didn’t before with the absolutist Bourbons. And so more and more you had speeches by French members of parliament proposing une alliance européenne ou plutôt occidentale.
Geographically, where did this original version of the west start and end?
This is where Auguste Comte comes in, perhaps the most neglected philosopher of the modern world. These days he is mostly remembered for inspiring the motto “Ordem e Progresso” (Order and Progress) on the Brazilian flag, and for being cited in practically every novel by the controversial French novelist Michel Houellebecq. But in the 19th century, Comte’s philosophy of positivism was immensely influential, comparable in impact only to Hegel. And Comte endlessly banged on about the importance of speaking about the west and not Europe, and defined and analysed what he meant by “the west” in many voluminous writings and in great detail.
Comte insisted the west needs to include what he called the five great nations, by which he meant linguistic groups: German (which for him included the Scandinavians and the Dutch), French, Italian, Iberian and English – plus the descendants of their settler colonies in the Americas, Australia and New Zealand.
He tried to make “the west” as non-religious a unit as possible. It was not the same as “Christendom” – unlike more modern “western civilisation” advocates such as Samuel Huntington, Comte didn’t believe that your religion is your destiny. So he included Greece, in spite of its Orthodox religion and its being located on the edge of the Balkans, because of the importance of ancient Greek culture for Rome. And he didn’t want the west to be an ethnic unit either, so he also included Poland even though it was Slavic, because it had been Catholic for 1,000 years. So from the beginning the west went with an open-ended vision of a membership not based on genetic or religious origins, and thus allowing the possibility of expansion or enlargement of membership.
That does make it sound a bit like an imperial project, though…
On the contrary. Comte’s vision was that the west would one day come to include the whole world – but never through the means of conquest. He insisted empires should be abolished: Algeria should be given independence, the English should leave India, and each large country should split into smaller republics so they could be better governed.
Comte included both South and North America in the supranational unit he called the west, or République Occidentale. But America only signed up to the idea of the west belatedly, towards the end of the 19th century and more decisively during the first world war. Even then it did so reluctantly, mainly due to the influence of academics who had studied at German universities and German migrants. Americans in the early decades of their country’s existence had fair reasons to be sceptical, since the last thing they wanted, as the world’s first postcolonial nation, was to be associated in some cultural or political unit with the imperialist and semi-aristocratic Europeans.
As the idea of the west has evolved over time, various states and regions have been added on or taken away. During the cold war, Japan was seen as part of the west – albeit mostly politically, militarily and technologically, and less so culturally. Westernisation and modernisation are not the same thing. Turkey was – and in a sense remains – part of the west because it is in Nato, even though Mr Erdoğan would hate to hear Turkey described as part of the west. The vision of the founder of the Turkish Republic, Kemal Atatürk, and of a major ideologist of Turkish nationalism, Ziya Gökalp, was for Turkey to join “western civilisation”. But currently Erdoğan seems to have different plans.
Would Ukraine have fit into this original version, into the West 1.0?
Ukraine’s situation in the 2020s is comparable to that of Greece in the 1820s, in that both countries’ cultures have been shaped by Orthodox Christianity. Religion is important, but people also make their own history. I challenge anybody to explain to me how you can tell the Ukrainians they are not western if they decide to be, and if they fight as hard as they do to prevent their conversion into a satellite of Russia. The way Europeans talk about Ukraine now is very similar to how French commentators spoke of Greece exactly 200 years ago. The Franco-Swiss writer Benjamin Constant wrote that Europeans had become used to their luxuries and their peace, and in Greece he saw a people willing to fight for freedom and to be the rampart of the west, as he explicitly put it in 1825. Thus Ukraine is an additional new member, as the west is once again being redefined.
If the idea of the west is so malleable, are there any common denominators at all?
If you are asking if there is a common denominator among the widely different definitions of what distinguishes the west from other cultures, I would say there is. Thinkers ranging from the Trotskyite anticapitalist Cornelius Castoriadis to conservative liberal Raymond Aron agreed that what distinguishes the west is its capacity for self-criticism and self-correction. In the course of history you have governments that do terrible things, but then you have regenerative and corrective movements that come as a reaction to previous injustices. It seems to be ingrained in the value system of the west to be self-critical. Most criticism of the west, such as anti-colonialism, has emerged from within its own value system. Some of the most fascinating criticisms of the policies of its governments, such as by the African American novelist Richard Wright, were asking the west to do the “western” thing, to live up to its principles more consistently.
That sounds less like a value and more like a habit.
You are right. It’s a predicament, a historical accident. The French Protestant historian François Guizot argued in the 1820s that the reason western Europe’s civilisation had not stagnated since the fall of the Roman Empire was conflict and plurality. It’s not that the Catholics didn’t want to abolish the Protestants, that the Germans didn’t want to abolish the French or the French didn’t want to abolish the Germans, the aristocrats, the democrats, and so on: it’s that nobody prevailed. So people learned to live with disagreement and conflict, and learned how to put up with each other. Not because they have any genetic or inherent superiority but just because they had to.
I’m against the use of the term “western values”, because if you call something western you can’t hope for others to consider adopting it. Calling liberal democracy, constitutional guarantees, freedom of speech, freedom of sexual orientation, justice, equality of treatment, and so on, “western values” plays into the hands of Putin and every dictator. It is probably wiser to call such values by universal names if they are to have a chance to be attractive to people from other cultures. That a number of values, institutions and principles that many of us today cherish came to be combined in the west is a historical reality. But they do not need to be called “western values” because nobody has ownership of cultural productions.
But I also think if we resign to abolishing the west, or allowing it to auto-destruct, many progressives will end up badly missing it. If we throw the baby out along with the bathwater, as Richard Wright put it in 1956, “the precious heritage – the freedom of speech, the secular state, the independent personality, the autonomy of science – which is not western or eastern, but human, will be snuffed out of the minds of men.”
