In The West: The History of an Idea, Georgios Varouxakis traces the modern idea of “the West” as a socio-political—rather than geographic—concept, and as the name for a political association based on cultural commonality. From 395 AD, “the West” could refer to the Western Roman Empire and later to the Catholic Church as opposed to the Eastern Orthodox Church. But the way we use “the West” today must be traced to the first half of the nineteenth century, argues Varouxakis in his learned book.
Varouxakis is an author with skin in the game. His preface places the book in an autobiographical context. Best known as a scholar of the thought of John Stuart Mill, Varouxakis was born on the island of Crete in Greece. He was seven years old when Turkey invaded Cyprus in July 1974, and his father was mobilized. While agreeing with the Greek prime minister, Konstantinos Karamanlis, that Greece belonged to the West, Varouxakis’s grandfather had been born prior to Crete joining Greece in 1913, before which the island was an autonomous part of the Ottoman Empire. Accordingly, his grandfather referred to himself as “Roman,” which is what the Greeks within the Ottoman Empire called themselves, as they regarded themselves as the descendants of the Eastern Roman Empire with its capital in Constantinople (now Istanbul). While Varouxakis’s education was thoroughly Greek, the culture of his native Crete contained a mixture of Eastern and Western influences.
The question of whether Greece was Eastern or Western was critical to the story about the beginning of the meaning of “the West,” which Varouxakis traces to the early nineteenth century. In the process, he challenges a number of orthodoxies, and most importantly, the notion that the idea of “the West” emerged in the late nineteenth century in defense of European imperialism. On the contrary, he shows that the idea was first conceived as part of an anti-imperial program. Nor was the appearance of the concept related to the more explicit racial discourse of the period between 1890 and 1930. Instead, “the West” emerged and gained meaning in opposition to the rising threat from Russia in the east.
The Russian Threat
As Varouxakis demonstrates, “the West” was historically by no means identical to “Europe” or “Christendom,” and indeed emerged as an alternative when Russia appeared as a major European (and Christian) power under Peter the Great. Until the eighteenth century, the crucial distinction in Europe was between north and south, but the rise of Russia challenged this categorization, especially in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, with Russia being frequently described as an “Eastern” power. The need for a “Western” alliance against Russia became viewed as paramount.
Among eighteenth-century anticipations, Voltaire used the term Occident (West) rather than Europe to refer to what we would call Western civilization. But he did not conceptualize a West that excluded Russia, but rather understood Russia as a northern European power, as was common at the time. Indeed, Voltaire wrote a sympathetic history of Peter the Great and celebrated Russia’s advances.
“The West” was historically by no means identical to “Europe” or “Christendom,” and indeed emerged as an alternative when Russia appeared as a major power.
In the early nineteenth century, Germaine de Staël promoted German culture in her De l’Allemagne (On Germany) in 1810, eventually inspiring Harvard graduates and other Americans to pursue doctoral studies at Berlin, Halle, Heidelberg, and Göttingen. In this work and elsewhere, Staël began to supplant the eighteenth-century North-South division with an East-West one. She was clear that Russians were in spirit Eastern, even if their courtiers might have acquired Western habits.
The East-West division was further promoted by Staël’s collaborator and lover Benjamin Constant. During the Greek Revolution against the Ottoman Empire (1821–29), Constant argued in a pamphlet that the Greeks were Christians fighting against their Muslim conquerors. The struggle between East and West, for Constant, was one between civilization and semi-savagery. This meant that the Greek cause was the cause of the West (“La cause des Grecs est la nôtre”). But Constant and others remained convinced that the enfeebled Ottoman Empire was not the long-term Eastern challenge for the West. In this context, the abbé de Pradt suggested that Western Europe had to erect a federative system to be able to stand up to the might of Russia.
Auguste Comte
The French philosopher Auguste Comte is a crucial figure in Varouxakis’s history. Comte and his fellow Positivists wanted to form a “Western republic” that would abolish empire and conquest. Because of Russia, Comte found “Europe” to be too confusing for what he was describing (and prescribing). Varouxakis argues that Comte was the first political thinker to elaborate an explicit sociopolitical project based on the idea of “the West.” His project was based on the idea of abolishing empires and replacing them with a republic led by the five great Western nations: the French, Italian, Spanish, British, and German. His membership list was based on pre-Reformation, or Charlemagne’s Europe, and thus excluded Russia.
Comte is rarely read today, but he was a dominant intellectual figure in the nineteenth century. His motto was “order and progress,” which he viewed as two mutually supportive principles in opposition to revolutionaries and reactionaries alike. His many disciples were spread all over the world in the nineteenth century, and his motto can be found on the Brazilian flag (Ordem e Progresso), as the Brazilian republic was founded by Comtists in 1889.
The first systematic attempt to substitute “the West” for “Europe” in Britain was made by Comte’s British followers and their leader Richard Congreve, beginning with the volume on International Policy (1866). Congreve regarded Ottoman Turkey as more Western than Russia. Unlike Comte, who merely viewed the US as an offshoot of England, Congreve gave a great deal of attention to America. But he was convinced that it was the mass rather than the ideas of the US that made it weigh heavily in international affairs. In due course, however, America and Americans would play key roles in most narratives about “the West.”
America and the World Wars
For many Americans in the nineteenth century and beyond, “the West” meant the frontier, both geographically and, as Frederick Jackson Turner put it, “a phase of social organization.” The Anglo-American Encyclopædia Britannica had no entry for “the West” until 1929, and even then, it focused on the concept in its intra-American sense. But “Western civilization” had appeared nearly a century earlier, in Francis Lieber’s Encyclopædia, under an entry for “Woman.” Lieber, who was first known as Franz, as he spent the first decades of his life in Germany, also referred to “the West” in a lecture in Boston in 1829. But this was not his preferred terminology. Lieber went on to defend transatlantic Western unity and shared civilization under the heading of a term of his own coinage: Cis-Caucasian (all Caucasians did not belong to the West). Unsurprisingly, this term did not catch on.
Before, during, and after the First World War, German academics looked increasingly to the East. Meanwhile, the Great War played a key role in eventually bringing America into the Western alliance.
One of the first Americans to write widely about “the West” and “Western civilization” was the philosophically trained journalist and public intellectual Walter Lippmann, before “Western civ” courses became a staple at US elite universities. And Lippmann spoke of a “Western alliance” before the US had entered the Great War. In The Stakes of Diplomacy (1915), Lippmann contended that the appearance of a joint enemy tended to unite nations, enlarging the circle of fellow-feeling. More specifically, to meet the challenge of Japan, American isolationism was insufficient. Central to his scheme was that the “liberal powers of the West” must control sea power.
A heavily debated question in the wake of the First World War, which had wreaked havoc at the heart of Europe, was whether it had heralded the end of Western civilization. It was in this context that Oswald Sprengler published The Decline of the West (1918–22), in which he predicted that the dominance of Western culture was likely to be succeeded by Slavic. As Varouxakis shows, while Sprengler’s book met with a negative reception from academics, its wider impact was immense.
Strauss was particularly concerned that historicist relativism had come to dominate the social sciences in “the West.”
Unsurprisingly, World War II stimulated plenty of discussion about Western civilization, especially after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and shattered the straightforward East-West dichotomy supported by the Hitler-Stalin pact. Lippmann interpreted the Second World War as a civil war within the Western world. In a famous lecture delivered in December 1940, he argued that the West had lost its democratic ethos because of educational decline in the last half-century and especially the neglect of Western culture. This was the culture which the Romans had inherited from the Greeks and passed on to the Church Fathers, and which had steadily expanded from the beginning of the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century. It was the culture in which the Founding Fathers had been steeped. But modern education, Lippmann contended in 1940, was based on a denial of the religious and classical ideals of the Western world. The religious tradition of the West was particularly frowned upon, with disastrous consequences. Instead of seeing reason as the master of man’s appetite, it had been reduced to its servant. Moreover, Lippmann posited that a society could only be progressive if it conserved its tradition. “In developing knowledge men must collaborate with their ancestors,” he wrote in a Burkean fashion.
The Cold War
Though Russia was briefly incorporated into “the West” during World War II and its immediate aftermath, the Cold War changed that trajectory. W. E. B. Du Bois maintained in 1946 that it was “the Russian people and their army which saved Western civilization in the Second World War.” But many Westerners came to regard the Soviet Union as the greatest challenge to “the West.” The UK’s socialist foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, over dinner with the American secretary of state, George C. Marshall, spoke of the need for a “spiritual federation of the West.” As the Iron Curtain hardened, Bevin sought to strengthen the UK’s relationship with the “young, vigorous, democratic people” of the US.
In the early 1950s, the young Henry Kissinger, then a PhD candidate at Harvard, co-founded the “Harvard International Seminar,” whose mission he described as “create[ing] a nucle[us] of understanding of the true values of a democracy and of spiritual resistance to communism.” The people who attended the program included future presidents and world leaders.
Kissinger had written his undergraduate thesis on Arnold J. Toynbee (and Kant and Sprengler). Toynbee, professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, became highly fashionable in the US in the late 1940s, as an abridged version of the first six volumes of his A Study of History was published in 1947. After Truman asked Congress to approve funding to support Greece and Turkey against communist threats, Time magazine put a portrait of Toynbee on its cover along with a comment piece titled, “Our civilization is not doomed.” In the magazine, the former communist Whittaker Chambers implored the US to step up to the plate and fill the vacuum left by the decline of the British Empire. Ironically, however, Toynbee did not think highly of the US, and he believed that the Soviet Union had a powerful “spiritual” weapon in communism, as he argued in his 1952 Reith Lectures. This and other views made Toynbee a highly controversial figure in Britain.
A host of German-born thinkers wrote about Western civilization in Cold-War America, including Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss. Strauss was particularly concerned that historicist relativism had come to dominate the social sciences in “the West” and especially in the US. His student Allan Bloom targeted cultural relativism and nihilism in his best-selling Closing of the American Mind (1987).
Meanwhile, the Frenchman Raymond Aron offered a powerful liberal defense of “the West” in his seminal critique of the “leftist intellectual,” The Opium of the Intellectuals (1955): “The true Communist is the man who accepts the whole of the Soviet system in the terms dictated by the Party. The true ‘Westerner’ is the man who accepts nothing unreservedly in our civilization except the liberty it allows him to criticize it and the chance it offers him to improve it.” In a similar vein, though ostensibly writing from a more conservative position, Allan Bloom argued that only Western nations, influenced by Greek philosophy, had the ability to be self-critical, whereas all other dominant cultures were ethno-centric, “think[ing] their way is the best way, and all others inferior.”
The book shows “the West” to have been a flexible and changing concept, and an immensely useful one in political and cultural debate.
Bloom wrote against the backdrop of the self-criticism that had swept the young people of the Western world since the 1960s. But as liberal capitalism triumphed and communism faltered and ultimately failed, the key question thinkers increasingly asked was whether the West offered “a universalizable model for the whole world, or was it a distinct, unique, culture, that should look after itself and abandon universalist pretensions.” Samuel Huntington and his student Francis Fukuyama offered widely different answers. Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis made him famous, but it was controversial from the start and was challenged by Huntington’s “clash of civilizations.” For example, while Fukuyama had argued, in 1989, that Chinese expansionism had disappeared, Huntington retorted, also in 1989, that it had yet to appear. For Huntington, instead of exporting its values, “the West” had to learn to live alongside other, competing civilizations. Eight civilizations stood out for Huntington: Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, and African. Most of these civilizations had little time for Western values such as democracy, constitutionalism, human rights, free markets, and separation between church and state. Rather than conflict, Huntington promoted co-existence and understanding of civilizational differences.
The West and Us
In the final chapters, Varouxakis considers how definitions and memberships of “the West” have once again been reconsidered in light of NATO’s expansion and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Here he demonstrates that some of the defining political questions of the present day, of the part of the West in the world, and particularly the role of the United States abroad, have a very long history indeed. It reflects the fact that this is not an antiquarian book but a must-read for anyone with an interest in current and world affairs.
The almost inevitable conclusion of a study as vast and wide-ranging as this one is that “the West” has meant different things to different people at different times. It is, as we like to say, an essentially contested concept. The book shows “the West” to have been a flexible and changing concept, and an immensely useful one in political and cultural debate. Yet, Varouxakis remains clear as to why “the West” has been so successful and resilient. As he points out, Comte chose the term “‘Occident’ [West] because of the historical, cultural, religious, and emotional baggage and associations that it carried.” It was bound to be more effective than Lieber’s “Cis-Caucasian.” And because of the missing deep-seated history, Varouxakis doubts that a new Chinese-led politico-cultural alliance has any prospect of being as successful, even with the Belt and Road Initiative.
Notwithstanding the elasticity of “the West” as a concept, Varouxakis further disagrees with those who claim that there is no such thing as Western culture:
Studying these things historically shows that most of the models, institutions or principles in question evolved out of the history of a particular culture of society for particular combinations of reasons. The outcomes were not inevitable or ‘providentially’ determined, but they are equally far from being completely accidental … at each of the phases of their history there are factors that reliably differentiate the civilizations or cultures of transnational societies such as ‘the West’ from those outside them.
Varouxakis concludes the book by taking issue with those who, since the Cold War, have almost habitually blamed the West for all the ills of the world. Instead, he offers a thoughtful defense of liberal, commonly known as Western, values. He is particularly critical of attempts to “decolonize” the so-called Western canon, as it would be mistaken to view thinkers such as Socrates, Aristotle, and Cicero as belonging to any specific cultural, “racial,” geographical, or even linguistic group. Though from the Mediterranean, “they belong to the world,” writes Varouxakis.
The West is a monumental achievement of scholarship. Its chief contribution is its decentering of imperial and racial paradigms, which have become politicized and turned into stale orthodoxies that have led to distortions in historical understanding. Notions that “the West” was invented to justify empire, racial hierarchy, and religion have led to a great deal of confusion, especially among the bien-pensants, as when Peter Beinart in the Atlantic asserted, in response to a 2017 speech by Donald Trump in Poland, that “the West is a racial and religious term.” It is Varouxakis’s great accomplishment to have shown that its origins were much more complicated, and more interesting. And more relevant, because “the West” is not going anywhere soon.
