Where and What is the West?

Haberman, Arthur and Adrian Shubert. 2002. The West and the World: Contacts, Conflicts, Connections.
Toronto: Gage Publishing Inc.

What is the West and how is it different from the rest of the world? Though we often encounter
the term "the West," its meaning is sometimes elusive, because as an idea, or as a civilization, or
as a geographical entity, it has changed, and continues to change, over time.
The West denotes an area distinct from areas located in the north, east, and south. Even then, its
location is unclear. There is an absolute north fixed by the polestar, but there is no such fixed
point thai divides the Earth along an east-west axis. "The distinction of North and South is real
and intelligible .... But the difference of East and West is arbitrary and shifts round the
globe."(Gibbon 1986: 2)The West also conjures up a variety of ideas and images, ranging from
the cities of London, Paris, and New York, to houses of parliament, to Hollywood movies, to
factories and skyscrapers, to cowboys and jeans, to a political attitude.
There has been no agreement on the places that make up the West, as the maps shown here
illustrate. Some consider the core of the West to be the area known as Latin Christendom (map
A). Yet others define its limits even more narrowly, including only Britain, France, Belgium,

Holland, and Switzerland (map B).

During the Cold War, in the period after World War II, the West was denned as Western Europe,
the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and, sometimes, Japan (map C). Some

authors propose a broader cultural West that includes Western Europe, North America, Latin
America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and, occasionally, the Philippines, but not Japan
(map D). People who focus on "racial" origins include only those parts of Latin America where
the population is predominantly European in originArgentina, Uruguay,and southern Brazil,
but not Mexico.
Our definition of the West takes into account its changing nature over the past five hundred
years. Geographically, the West refers to Europe, including Russia and Turkey, and the
significant European settler colonies in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Culturally, the West
incorporates a dual heritage of Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures, which are generally
acknowledged as forming the basis of Western civilization, although it owes a debt to Islam for
preserving a portion of the former, as well as for providing its own contributions. The West also
includes a shared heritage of medieval Europe and ideas growing out of the Renaissance.
Over the past five hundred years, the West has developed systems of belief based on the concepts
of individual rights and constitutional government. The West has an economic core by which it
has transformed itself and others through trade, industry, and technology. Artists, writers, and
builders have helped shape Western attitudes toward human nature, social justice, truth, and
beauty, while frequently drawing on models and inspiration from elsewhere.
One important thing to keep in mind as you read this book is that the West is always in the
process of becoming; it is never fully in a state of being. The West changes along with historical
developments,and its central principles are interpreted differently at different times. It has been a
powerful force in the world during the last five hundred years. Yet, there has always been a gap
between Western ideals and the reality of its societies and its relations with others.
Thus, we see the West as real, but fluid and evolving. We do not fully
share the widely held belief in a "Western Civilization" based on a set
of timeless and unique ideas and institutions. Samuel Huntington, a
contemporary advocate of the need for the West to defend itself
against what he sees as other, hostile civilizations, lists
"individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality,
liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of
church and state" as "Western ideas [that] often have little resonance
in Islamic, Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, Buddhist or Orthodox
cultures." (Huntington 1996:40) This is a hotly contested view of the
West, and one we question.
Such a concept of the West relies on three separate but related premises. The first is a highly
selective view of Western history. To see freedom as a permanent characteristic of Western
civilization requires turning a blind eye to what actually happened during many centuries.
According to historian William McNeill:

Within the European past, attention focussed on times and places where Freedom
flourished or faced critical challenge. Classical antiquity, the barbarian invasions, the
rise of representative institutions in the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation,
the Enlightenment, all the magnificent advances of the nineteenth century were what
deserved to be studied; eras of darkness and despotism could be properly skipped
over since they made no contribution to the main stream of human achievement.
(McNeill 1995: 11)
Inevitably, the result was an incomplete, if not distorted view, of Western civilization.
In fact, most of what are deemed to be essential and permanent characteristics of Western
civilization became realities only recently. Human rights were limited to a relatively small group
of people until the twentieth century. The separation of church and state in the West did not come
into existence until the late eighteenth century , and then only in the United States. Even today,
the role of religion in matters of state and law is controversial. Equality under the law is
relatively new; social and economic equality continue to be issues of debate.
Another way to selectively define the West is to consider it as a culture of intellectuals, referring
to specific sources, above all its Great Books, such as The Bible, and works by Plato, Dante,
Shakespeare, Descartes, Dostoyevsky, and Dickens. Such an approach
assumes the works of these masters are the essence of a society. Those
who take this approach may see little need to concern themselves with
actual history, and especially with the lives of the vast majority, most of
whom were illiterate until quite recently. Thus, a small number of works
produced by an elite are seen to reflect the experiences and the lives of
millions over centuries. At one time, historians were themselves part of
this elite, interpreting the past from a Western perspective.
The West can also be defined by contrasting it with other civilizations,
but only after they have been defined in a highly selective way. The most
frequent contrast is with something called the East, or the Orient, or
simply Asia, which includes India, Japan, China, and the Islamic world.
The countries in this area are as different from each other as each is from the West. Yet, they are
sometimes presented as an undifferentiated whole that shares fundamental characteristics that are
diametrically opposed to those of the West.
The Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen

has described this approach.

The West is seen, in effect, as having exclusive access to the values that lie at the
foundation of rationality and reasoning, science and evidence, liberty and tolerance,
and of course rights and justice.
Through selective emphases that point up differences [rather than similarities]
with the West, other civilizations can ... be redefined in alien terms,

which can be exotic and charming, or else bizarre and terrifying, or simply strange
and engaging. (Sen 2000: 36)
Sen gives the example of Indian culture, which for Westerners has meant only the study of Indian
religious texts, but not works of literature, mathematics,economics, and natural science.
How does the usual Western image of India absorb a figure such as Madhava, a mathematician
from Kerala who "developed his own system of calculus based on his knowledge of
trigonometry around 1500 A.D. [CE], more than a century before either Newton or Leibniz"?5
How does such an image account for the ideas of Akbar, the Mughal emperor of India (1556
1605), who decreed in his multi-religious realm that the state
guarantee "no man should be interfered with on account of religion, and
anyone is allowed to go over to a religion that pleases him"? These ideas
were being developed at precisely the same time in the West, but with
greater continuity.
The contrast between rationality and mysticism has been a central point
of distinction between West and East. This contrast ignores much in
both Western and non-Western history. Some Western religious thought
falls within the mystical tradition, while India, China, and the Islamic
world all have histories in which there are periods of reason-based
thought and scientific discovery. The Sung period in China (960-1279
CE) was an important era of rationalist thought long before Europe's
Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. Jacques Gernet has written:
What is strikingly manifest [in the Sung period] is the advent of a practical
rationalism based on experiment, the putting of inventions, ideas and theories
to the test. We find curiosity at work in every realm of knowledgearts, technology
natural sciences, mathematics, society, institutions, politics. (Little 1997: 3)
Gernet maintains there are differences between the West and other civilizations. Each is indeed
"unique," but these differences should not prevent us from appreciating similarities and
overlaps.
If, as John Donne wrote, "No man is an island unto himself," exactly the same can be said about
cultures and civilizations. The vast geographical expanse from China to Western Europe, a
region that historians call the "Eurasian ecumene," had long been connected through trade. The
expansion of Islam after the eighth century brought in much of North Africa as well. By 1400,
the "Old World" was bound together by multiple networks of trade. This was the moment when
Europe's Renaissance or rebirth was just getting underway. One historian called Europe at
that moment in history a relatively backward and "insignificant outlier of mainland
Asia."(Tingale 1997: 14)

Europe would move quickly from being a fringe of the Asian continent to becoming the dynamic
centre of networks that spanned the globe. This process had its first, tentative steps with
European essentially Portuguese and Spanishvoyages of exploration during the fifteenth
century. We begin not with 1500, but with 1453. While the former date is more easily
remembered, it has no
special historical
significance. In contrast, the
Ottoman conquest of
Constantinople in 1453 can
be seen as initiating the
history of the modernity in
the West.
Cut off from their
established trade routes to
the East, Europeans
undertook to find a new
maritime route to the
wealthy nations of Asia.
These voyages brought them
into direct and permanent
contact with Africa, Asia,
and the Americas.
The outcome, however, was far from certain, for well into the seventeenth century Europe was
still on the defensive against the expansive power of the Ottoman Empire. During the sixteenth,
seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, the Europeans built commercial and imperial systems that
knitted their continent together with Africa, parts of Asia, and the Americas in a way that
contributed significantly to the development of European power. And it was during the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that a few regions of Europe broke into the revolutionary
world of industrial production and mass economic prosperity, which laid the basis for
more than a century of European global domination.
This [course] tells two main stories. One deals with the rise and consolidation of Europe as the
most powerful part of the world between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the gradual
emergence of some of its offshoots and other areas, including the United States and Japan. This
course of events, which very few people alive in 1500 would have thought possible, cannot be
understood by focussing solely on developments within Europe and the West itself. Europeans
and their colonial cousins did not live in an isolated world. At every point there were others,
from the societies of the Americas, Africa, Asia, and elsewhere, who played an essential role.
Some cooperated with the West for their own reasons; others were forced to comply; still others
resisted, with varying degrees of success. The perceptions and actions of people from all of these
societies are this [courses] other main story.