Paul Gillespie: False notion of the West traces a line from Plato to Nato

In times of rapid change we struggle to find a vocabulary and ideas to express it. These often take an ideological form that distorts and obscures more than it reveals.

“The West” is one of these changing ideological terms in contemporary geopolitical discourse. Firmly ensconced in the political geography of the Cold War years, its liberal democratic values and market capitalism were counterpoised to the collective and communist East. It is more pervasive again as transatlantic relations between US and European leaders converge through the Ukraine war.

Its modern origins are mainly in British imperial expansion and consolidation in the 18th and 19th centuries and in the development of its former colony the United States in the same period. Civilisational and racial hierarchies were used to justify imperial rule over more “backward” peoples and to defend slavery before, during and after the US civil war of the 1860s.

An associated historical account was constructed to bolster the case for “Western civilisation”. Originating in ancient Greece and the Roman empire, those values and cultures survived the Dark and Middle Ages, were restored in the European Renaissance, universalised in its 18th century, brought to maturity in the imperial period and continue to flourish after decolonisation and Cold War in the second half of the 20th century. Christianity is a part of the mix, depending on context.

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As Naoíse Mac Sweeney writes, this standard version of Western civilisation is ‘canonical and clichéd. But it is wrong. It is a version of Western history that is both factually incorrect and ideologically driven’

This is all fine and dandy, so taken for granted it seldom gets critical attention. The task is taken on by an archaeologist and historian of the ancient Greek world Naoíse Mac Sweeney in her provocative and appealing new book The West: A New History of an Old Idea (WH Allen, 2023). She now works in Vienna.

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As she writes, this standard version of Western civilisation is “canonical and clichéd. But it is wrong. It is a version of Western history that is both factually incorrect and ideologically driven – a grand narrative that constructs Western history as a thread running singular and unbroken from Plato to Nato”.

Her book examines the subject through sparkling biographies of 12 historical figures straddling these near three millennia. They justify her first conclusion that “the cross-fertilisation of ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ cultures happened throughout human history and that the modern West owes much of its cultural DNA to a wide range of non-European and non-white forebears”.

Her second is that “the invention, popularisation and longevity of the grand narrative stem from its ideological utility”. Her third is that all history is a product of political choices, including hers, even as the discipline insists on high standards of accuracy. And a fourth is that the imperial and racial superiority ideological underpinnings of the traditionally established narrative no longer fit the liberal, democratic and more tolerant principles of the modern West. They require renewal.

Several models

What form might that take? Several models are under way. They are pulled between more right-wing ideological and civilisational essentialism on traditional lines, and more liberal or social-democratic alternatives, based on intercultural transfers and borrowings.

A variant model centred on the Anglosphere highlights older essentialisms of empire and race resurrected in Brexit Britain and Trump’s America

The transatlantic West brings United States and Europe leaderships together in a new liberal ideological embrace and military alliance against Russia over Ukraine. The results have US strategic superiority built in, thereby exposing them to French resentments and wider European concerns about conflicting economic interests, especially over China.

A variant model centred on the Anglosphere highlights older essentialists of empire and race resurrected in Brexit Britain and Trump’s America. It draws on the ”Five Eyes” intelligence network including Canada, Australia and New Zealand, established in the Atlantic Charter of 1941.

[ Fintan O'Toole: The West is always in decline, even when it isn't ]

A liberal neoconservative version extends strategic involvement to Asian representative democracies such as India, Japan and South Korea, pushing the West beyond geography in a new Indo-Pacific strategic framework.

Counterpoised to these “Wests” is China’s new model of dialogue between relatively closed and eternally pristine civilisations, pursued now in an annual Ancient Civilisations Forum with Greece, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Italy, Peru, Bolivia, Armenia and Mexico. Mac Sweeney believes this model falsely freezes real history, which is full of borrowings, interactions and conflicts, into a frame of eternalised nation-statism reflecting China’s current sponsorship of an alternative international system.

China’s use of multipolar rhetoric about the more equal distribution of world power coming out of ‘Western’ domination is shared with Putin’s Russia. This helps explain their appeal to the Global South as those world regions demand from “the West” the right to travel on that more equal journey too.