What we mean by the West - Transcript

ORBIS, Fall, 1997 by William H. McNeill

The subject today is the meaning of "the West" in the sense of Western civilization. The first and most obvious point to make is that the meaning of the West is a function of who is using the word. Those who feel themselves to be part of the West - who think of the West as "we" - will surely have flattering things to say about their civilization. Those who think of the West as the "other" are likely to define it in less flattering terms. The basic meaning of the word is "where the sun sets" - one of the cardinal directions. Chinese geomancers drafted elaborate and codified rules about what that direction meant as opposed to the East, North, or South. But we in the West have nothing so precise as the Chinese: to us the West connotes all sorts of characteristics desired by some, eschewed by others.

In the United States, for instance, the West conjures up the Wild West of our historic frontier, a place of freedom, open spaces, new starts, and a certain manliness. But it was also a place where danger, loneliness (largely due to the paucity of women), and lawlessness often prevailed. At the same time, Americans have habitually embraced a contradictory meaning of the West. For inasmuch as all North America was the West vis-a-vis the Old World that colonists and later immigrants had left behind, the West was considered a "more perfect" place conducive, not to danger and lawlessness, but to liberty, equality, and prosperity. Americans were "new men under new skies," as Frederick Jackson Turner proclaimed.

And yet, at the same time, Americans undeniably brought much of the Old World with them to the New. Hence, whatever qualities were to be found in both worlds tended to unite them and bespeak a broader notion of the West. At first, it encompassed the Atlantic littoral of Europe (the British Isles, Scandinavia, the Low Countries, France, and Iberia) plus America. In time, it came to encompass Australia, New Zealand, and all other European overseas settlements. The West, therefore, could be imagined as a civilization independent of locale. Finally, one hears today of a West that includes not only nations populated by European stock, but also non-Western nations that have assimilated Western institutions, techniques, and to some extent values: Japan, for instance.

What the West means in a given context, therefore, depends entirely upon who is invoking the term and for what purpose. But it is fair to say that virtually all definitions of Western civilization drew a line somewhere across Europe placing Germany (at times), Poland and Eastern Europe (at times), and Russia and the Balkans (at all times) beyond the pale of Western civilization. A Briton might joke that "the Wogs begin at Calais," a Frenchman dub the Rhine the frontier of civilization, a German insist that "at the Ringstrasse the Balkans begin," and a Pole that Asia begins with the westernmost Orthodox church; but wherever drawn, that line is the most enduring political/cultural demarcation in the history of Europe.

The meanings we give to the West today, in the United States, are by and large translated from the usage of Western Europeans in the late nineteenth century: the era when the British and French colonial empires bestrode the world and Germany and Italy were, by comparison, marginalized. But the outskirts of this Anglo-French core - Germany to the east and America to the west - might demand to be recognized as part of the West at the same time as they rivalled Western Europe for power and influence. The story of Western civilization in the twentieth century, in fact, might be organized around the theme of the alternative visions of Western civilization that Germany and the United States each pressed, by force, on the Euro-Atlantic core.

Perhaps the most profitable way to proceed, therefore, is to trace so far as possible where this Western European self-conception came from, how it was received in the United States around the turn of this century, and how it was subsequently embodied in our own high school and college curricula.

The Classical Cradle

The birth of a concept of a West as opposed to an East can be dated exactly to events that occurred on either side of the Aegean Sea in the years 480 and 479 B.C. That may seem exceedingly strange - to wit, that the West of Anglo-French imagination sprang from a Persian imperial invasion of Greece some twenty-five hundred years ago - but it is nonetheless so. The army of the Persian Empire crossed the Hellespont to assault a ragged confederacy of some twenty-odd city-states. The imperial side deployed perhaps sixty thousand professional soldiers with an abundant supply train stretching fifteen hundred miles. The Hellenic side could field mere militia forces composed of citizen-soldiers. And yet, against all odds and apparent reason, the Empire lost and the militias won. That they did so posed a logical quandary even for the Greeks. But the classical answer offered by Herodotus was simply that free men fight better than "slaves." This classical explanation of Greece's deliverance was so powerful, persuasive, and it must be said, flattering to the Greeks that it echoed throughout the rest of Mediterranean antiquity. The only life worth living, it held, was that of a free citizen who might take part in the public deliberations that affected his fate up to and including the risk of death in battle in defense of freedom. So mighty was this ideal that it survived the conquest of the city-states themselves and entered into the public consciousness of their conquerors, Macedon first, and then Rome. And even though those empires liberated the Greeks themselves from their internecine warfare, the Greeks never ceased to mourn their lost freedom.