The notion of the ‘West’ is tricky. While it seems to imply a geographical orientation, a quick preview of the locations considered ‘West’ — Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand, and in some interpretations South America — contradicts this view. So, what does ‘the West’ mean? Originally, the West was thought to be simply the place where the sun sets. Due to this, some ancient societies, such as the Egyptians and the Greeks, located their afterlife abodes to the West, set on the margins of their known geography. This was conceived to be at the end of the terrestrial world. This spatial location at the end of the world, which was not as yet imagined as a sphere, created the concept of a spatial border that delimited the world according to the rising and the setting sun. The concept was taken up by the Roman Empire that boasted that it was the only empire to rule territories from the rising to the setting sun. This motto was adopted and magnified by the Habsburg Empire. Under Emperor Charles V, the empire claims that in its realms “the sun never sets”, as its territories stretched from Europe to the Americas. By the time the empire was at its height, the centre of gravity in Europe, the so-called Old World, had shifted from firstly, Mesopotamia and Anatolia, and then the Eastern Mediterranean, to Western Europe, which operating under the ideological blinds of hetero-specification, of defining itself in oppositions to others (i.e. against the Eastern Roman Empire, which is now termed Byzantine), determined that it itself comprised the West, defining itself in opposition to the much older and once venerable cultures of the East.
Thus, taking the cue from Antiquity and the medieval period, in modern times the ‘West’ came to denote Western Europe and all other regions in the world where due to conquest and colonization, or other forms of substantial influence and control, cultural and economic aspects, along with value systems, of Western European societies, became defining features of the official states that were established, such as across the Americas, Australia and New Zealand. Precisely because of this historical evolution of the term, countries and nations in Europe that did not spring from this same cultural nexus have always been ambivalently placed under the term ‘the West’. This is the case for all of the Balkan states that were under the Ottoman empire (the ‘East’) for centuries, for much of Eastern Europe, despite there being located both in Europe and to the West of the great civilizations of Antiquity.
Over the course of time, and with the rising power of certain states and their own value system, the West became largely synonymous with free market capitalism, democratic (or pseudo-democratic) constitutions, legislation for human and civil rights, religious freedoms, but also a mentality that privileges individualism over community relations. Presently, the concept of ‘the West’, or Occidentalism, is being repackaged as an ideological weapon far more specific than it was before: approbating the ‘Classical Antiquity’ of the Greeks and the Romans, it is being rebranded as the most progressive of the world’s cultures: a champion of reason, moderation, progress, secular ethics or at least independence of religion from political power, political and human rights, and legislative initiatives for international peace. Stretching this belief in progress to the maximum, some of the most extreme proponents of Occidentalism now consider it a zero-sum game, where the co-living with other societies is not possible or even desirable, thus ending up propagating the same sort of mentalities that led to conquests and colonization in previous centuries. And despite the acknowledged achievements of western societies (e.g. civil and political rights legislation), many of the political classes that now represent countries that think of themselves as pertaining to the Occident continue to fail in many of the ideals the concept allegedly espouses. By having spawned a system where reason and progress became identical to self-perpetuating quest for profit, the concept can be stripped bare of its alleged humanitarian and social progress values to reveal the era of free-market capitalism, with, in many cases, only vestiges of democratic credentials.
Eleftheria Pappa