In 1989, the prize for Younger European Movie of the Yr, awarded yearly by the European Movie Academy, went to a function movie about two younger boys who escape from communist Poland to Denmark by hiding beneath a truck. The movie, 300 Miles to Heaven, was primarily based on a real story that had occurred a couple of years earlier. The boys didn’t inform their mother and father something. In a way, their story was typical: All through the Chilly Battle, 1000’s of individuals tried to flee East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and different locations behind the Iron Curtain by digging tunnels, flying in balloons, or hiding in automobiles crossing the closely guarded border. In Eighties Japanese Europe, even kids had little doubt that the “heaven” within the film’s title meant the capitalist West, not their very own international locations’ Marxist utopia. Within the final scene of the movie, the boys name dwelling. When requested if their mother and father have been indignant and whether or not they need to return, their father shouts, with tears in his eyes: “Don’t ever come again! Do you hear me?”
For almost half a century, unusual residents, politicians, and students all knew what the West was. The concept of a well-defined West formed the worldwide notion of actuality. From morning to nighttime, the confrontation between the West and the East—typically referred to as the First World and Second World—was coated by the mass media with political pathos, ethical depth, and emotional readability. At present, the state of affairs appears to be like completely different. The shared definition of “the West” appears to be fading. Already after the collapse of communism, students started to query what the West truly was, now that its ideological adversary had disappeared. Does it discuss with the European Union plus the USA and Canada? If that’s the case, what about Australia, Japan, and South Korea? With successive waves of democratization, the idea of the West started to unfold past its conventional geographic transatlantic boundaries, taking up a civilizational slightly than a merely geographical which means. But probably the most troublesome problem for the West was nonetheless to return.
In 1989, the prize for Younger European Movie of the Yr, awarded yearly by the European Movie Academy, went to a function movie about two younger boys who escape from communist Poland to Denmark by hiding beneath a truck. The movie, 300 Miles to Heaven, was primarily based on a real story that had occurred a couple of years earlier. The boys didn’t inform their mother and father something. In a way, their story was typical: All through the Chilly Battle, 1000’s of individuals tried to flee East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and different locations behind the Iron Curtain by digging tunnels, flying in balloons, or hiding in automobiles crossing the closely guarded border. In Eighties Japanese Europe, even kids had little doubt that the “heaven” within the film’s title meant the capitalist West, not their very own international locations’ Marxist utopia. Within the final scene of the movie, the boys name dwelling. When requested if their mother and father have been indignant and whether or not they need to return, their father shouts, with tears in his eyes: “Don’t ever come again! Do you hear me?”
The West: The Historical past of an Concept, Georgios Varouxakis, Princeton College Press, 512 pp., $39.95, July 2025
For almost half a century, unusual residents, politicians, and students all knew what the West was. The concept of a well-defined West formed the worldwide notion of actuality. From morning to nighttime, the confrontation between the West and the East—typically referred to as the First World and Second World—was coated by the mass media with political pathos, ethical depth, and emotional readability. At present, the state of affairs appears to be like completely different. The shared definition of “the West” appears to be fading. Already after the collapse of communism, students started to query what the West truly was, now that its ideological adversary had disappeared. Does it discuss with the European Union plus the USA and Canada? If that’s the case, what about Australia, Japan, and South Korea? With successive waves of democratization, the idea of the West started to unfold past its conventional geographic transatlantic boundaries, taking up a civilizational slightly than a merely geographical which means. But probably the most troublesome problem for the West was nonetheless to return.
For at the least a decade, the West has been present process an ideological bifurcation. That is arguably most evident from the angle of nations that after imported the West’s constitutional and political patterns. If Taiwan or Estonia have been to undertake this job at present, they’d face a alternative à la carte. Is it the West of the Trump-era United States? Is it the West of Europe’s main liberal democracies? Is it the West of these members of the European Union that, like the USA, have chosen or might quickly select a much less liberal path? The dilemma just isn’t an summary one. As a way to survive on the map, small international locations normally should adapt to new situations within the worldwide area. However which of the West’s a number of instructions is normative at present?
It’s on this context that Georgios Varouxakis has written a much-needed ebook: The West: The Historical past of an Concept. Varouxakis, a professor of the historical past of political thought at Queen Mary College of London, goals to pin down a protean idea that has lengthy annoyed students in his self-discipline. Born in Crete beneath the Greek army dictatorship, Varouxakis studied in Greece and the UK. On the outset of the ebook, he recollects how central the notion of “the West” was for international locations akin to his personal.
Within the Nineteen Seventies and thereafter, Greece was seeking a solution to the query of its personal identification. Athens because the cradle of democracy was historical historical past. Fashionable Greece belonged to NATO from 1952 however was not, for a substantial a part of the twentieth century, a democracy. Between 1967 and 1974, it was dominated by a right-wing army junta. Greece’s inhabitants was predominantly Japanese Orthodox, not Catholic or Protestant, and nonetheless digesting a legacy of centuries of Ottoman rule. The nation didn’t belong to the European Financial Group, the predecessor of what’s now the European Union. Nonetheless, after the autumn of the junta, Prime Minister Konstantinos Karamanlis firmly declared on behalf of all Greeks that “We belong to the West.”
Little shock, maybe, that Varouxakis—who was 7 years previous when the dictatorship collapsed—undertook to make clear an idea that’s as politically charged as it’s elusive. His childhood recollections remind us that the magnetism of political cultures—what one may name “gentle energy” at present—can depart an indelible mark on mental biography. The kaleidoscope of quotations in his ebook testifies to a Herculean scholarly effort. Varouxakis begins in antiquity, tracing how a way of cultural superiority—greater than geography—outlined the “civilized” a part of the traditional world. The middle of civilization of what was later referred to as “Europe” strikes from Greece to Rome, from Rome to Byzantium, and later to Aachen (from the place Charlemagne dominated his West European empire) and lots of different websites. The phrases “Europe” and “Christianity”—although not synonymous—represent the conceptual ancestors of the time period “West.” Varouxakis credit Auguste Comte, a nineteenth century French scholar, because the foundational determine who formed our fashionable concept of the West as a sociopolitical entity, a group sure by shared establishments and aspirations.
The fresco The College of Athens by Raphael, on show within the Vatican Museums in Rome on Aug. 4, 2012Lucas Schifres through Getty Pictures
In recent times, students have more and more argued that the time period “the West” is analytically obscure and ideologically harmful. Some authors predict the West’s geopolitical meltdown, for which Samir Puri borrowed the metaphor “Westlessness” in his 2024 ebook of the identical title. Naoise Mac Sweeney, in her bestselling The West: A New Historical past of an Outdated Concept, urged readers “to rid ourselves of the Grand Narrative of Western Civilization, placing it firmly apart as each factually incorrect and ideologically outdated.” Regardless of such iconoclasm, “the West” has not disappeared from discourse. Encyclopedia Britannica nonetheless defines “Western world” as “a cultural-geographic descriptor usually referring to the international locations of western Europe and nations originating as western European settler colonies.” Varouxakis accepts this broad body however seeks to fill it with historic and mental content material as broad as doable, from sources in classical antiquity to the speeches of Donald Trump.
Varouxakis’s ebook is each chronological and thematic, however its main limitation is the absence of a usable classification system for readers searching for to navigate the labyrinth. Thus, his declared purpose—to transcend the ivory tower and provide conceptual instruments of social relevance—stays solely partly fulfilled. Whereas Mac Sweeney and different deconstructive students need to discard the thought of a West, Varouxakis is extra inclined to reclaim its optimistic mental heritage. This stance might replicate his lived expertise of Greece’s democratic transformation after authoritarian rule. In that gentle, one might remorse that he makes such sparing use of the Greek perspective. Though it is a ebook on the historical past of an concept, a extra express engagement with the lived expertise of Westernization from what got here earlier than may have tremendously enhanced the ebook’s up to date resonance.
The record of authors analyzed is spectacular, though not all of them are given equal consideration. After stepping off this conceptual merry-go-round, one encounters an empirical wall. Finally, within the contest between democratic and non-democratic traditions inside the West, Varouxakis sides with the previous. He endorses liberal democracy, the rule of legislation, and pluralistic tolerance because the defining options of the West—whilst he presents rival interpretations, together with Trump’s and different populist redefinitions of Western politics. This alternative, although intellectually defensible, arises from a normative standpoint that appears solely exterior to the ebook itself. Within the twenty first century, readers are left confronting an ideological battlefield over the “right” which means of the West. Given what we have now simply learn, any declare to unique or conclusive possession of the time period is finally arbitrary. One can simply as simply learn your entire ebook and select a special West than Varouxakis. James Kurth, as an example, has proposed an alternate program for defending the West not on the idea of liberal norms however “within the identify of faith, nations, households, and excessive tradition.”
The up to date understanding of the West as a democratic political tradition owes extra to post-1945 sociopolitical observe than to the theories, debates, and realities that got here earlier than. Whereas it issues how somebody like Comte conceived the West, it issues equally how unusual residents and policymakers skilled it after World Battle II—which different students, akin to Paul Betts and Martin Conway, have emphasised. On this vein, Odd Arne Westad provocatively advised that till the Fifties, the idea of the West was “meaningless,” missing the political, army, financial, and cultural cohesion that postwar establishments later offered.
Berliners crowd in entrance of the Berlin Wall as they watch border guards demolish a bit close to Potsdam Sq. in Berlin on Nov. 11, 1989. Gerard Malie/AFP through Getty Pictures
Above all, the idea of the West endures within the rhetoric of its opponents. Russia’s rhetoric plainly names “the West”—typically “the collective West”—as its adversary. Denouncing “Western hegemony” has develop into a diplomatic ritual in Beijing, Moscow, and elsewhere. Satirically, since 1989, the West has by no means been so ideologically divided, however its critics need to see solely an oppressive monolith.
Opposite to these students who dismiss the idea of a West, it stays analytically helpful—if solely to make clear what the present battle inside the West is about. As Philippe Nemo argued in his quick however outstanding ebook, What Is the West?, initially revealed in French in 2004, the Western venture may be perceived as a succession of mental and ethical levels. From this attitude, at present’s contest over the which means of “West” may thus be seen as a battle over which historic layer ought to function inspiration: that which got here earlier than or after the post-1945 growth of the West as a cohesive, transnational liberal venture? Each can legitimately declare the identify, although they diverge in spirit and observe.
Many have argued that Trumpism and different populist actions signify a post-liberal phenomenon—a response to the perceived failures of the dominant ideology shaping a lot of the world because the finish of the Chilly Battle. Studying Varouxakis, nonetheless, convinces us that the concepts espoused by the brand new populists are, the truth is, retrograde. What emerges just isn’t a forward-looking redefinition of identification—whether or not Western, nationwide, or one thing else. It’s slightly an train in ideological excavation—politicians rummaging by way of the dumping floor of discarded mental traditions seeking usable fragments. On this, the ebook aligns with the broader sample recognized, as an example, by Matthew Rose in his insightful World after Liberalism: Philosophers of the Radical Proper, the place the post-liberal proper is proven to be animated much less by political innovation than by selective nostalgia. This recycling of concepts has political attraction for a lot of voters. In any case, not everybody seeks novelty within the political bazaar.
One other perception from Varouxakis’s ebook is that probably the most politically potent and traditionally sturdy ideas are exactly these which are emotionally charged and versatile in which means. As Augustine of Hippo mused concerning the which means of time, “If nobody asks me, I do know what it’s; if I want to clarify it to him who asks me, I have no idea.” So too with the West: Semantic indeterminacy is partly the supply of its political vitality. The societies on the periphery of the West are conscious about this continued vitality: They perceive the sensible stakes of belonging to a political tradition lengthy recognized with freedom and stability—particularly when each are beneath risk from authoritarian or totalitarian forces inside and with out. This was true in Greece, Portugal, and Spain throughout the Nineteen Seventies, in post-communist Europe after 1989, and in Ukraine at present. Nobody in Kyiv must be persuaded of the enduring reality behind Karamanlis’ declaration that his nation belonged to the West.
After all, as soon as a rustic joins this unique membership, it positive aspects the Western proper to query itself endlessly—to Hamletize, because it have been, over what “West” truly means. And therein lies the irony of the West’s enduring mental and political legacy.
