The West: The History of an Idea, Georgios Varouxakis,  Princeton University Press, £35

Georgios Varouxakis’ immensely erudite The West: The History of an Idea is not a history of the West but a history of how and why the term came to be used. And it is a history full of surprises. To begin with, the concept of the West is relatively new. Prior to the early 19th century, reference was usually made to either ‘Christendom’ or ‘Europe’. Next, it is incorrect to assume that the term first came to prominence in the context of the Cold War after 1945. Nor, contrary to recent academic orthodoxy, is it the case that the idea of the West emerged in or around the 1890s, in Varouxakis’s phrase, ‘to cater to the needs of high imperialism’. It did not emerge in juxtaposition to either Asia or Islam.

Rather, as Varouxakis shows, it was the advent of Russia as a major international power during and after the Napoleonic wars that caused the conceptual revolution that the idea of the West denoted. Prior to this, the standard distinction had been between the North and the South, with Russia cast as a ‘Northern’ power. As Varouxakis writes: ‘most of those who would begin talking of Russia as “Eastern” after the Congress of Vienna were invoking its Easternness in order to defend themselves against Russian domination of Europe, by creating a new “Western” alliance against what they saw as a Russian menace’. Among those who fostered this linguistic innovation was Mme de Staël. ‘You feel yourself in Russia’, she wrote, ‘at the gate of another earth.’

Nonetheless, according to Varouxakis, it was the French philosopher Auguste Comte, writing in mid-century, who was the first to develop a comprehensive concept of the West, ‘both as a supranational cultural identity and as a proposed political entity’. Comte is now little, if ever, read, but his ideas attracted wide attention during his lifetime, attracting devoted followers (including in Britain). For Comte, the use of the term ‘l’Occident’ rather than Europe was a conscious decision and one integral to the introduction of the broad-ranging institutional reforms he was proposing. In geographical terms, Comte’s ‘West’ included most of the peoples of western Europe plus the peoples descended from them in the Americas and Australasia. Crucially, this new world order was intended to abolish European empires and replace them with an altruistic and peaceful ‘Western Republic’.

As was always the case, Comte’s project was set out in elaborate and minute detail, but its imagined end point was the eventual disappearance of the West and its merging into a greater republic that would embrace the whole of Humanity. As Varouxakis comments: ‘instead of being a product of imperialist plans and rhetoric around the turn of the 20th century… “the West” as a deliberate political project was, on the contrary, fiercely anti-imperialist’. Given the later equation of ‘the West’ with such notions as liberty and human rights, it might also be noted that ‘the West’ envisaged by Comte would be neither liberal, democratic nor individualistic.

This was not the end of the story. Despite their internationalism, many a French writer could not but equate the West with their homeland. This sentiment only intensified with the rise of a militaristic Prussia and the subsequent cataclysm of world war. Could Germany rightfully be considered part of the West? The French philosopher Henri Bergson, for one, had his doubts. Indeed, did Germany want to be part of it? According to Thomas Mann, German ‘Kultur’ was superior to the rival claims of Roman and successor western civilisation. As for the insular British, they at first had difficulty translating both ‘l’Occident’ and ‘occidentale’, never mind the more challenging notion of ‘occidentalité’. Little by little the United States was drawn into the orbit of what was increasingly seen as a transatlantic cultural West. Of special interest in Varouxakis’s account is his exploration of how black intellectuals came to see ‘the West’. Many were to voice their disappointment that it had failed to deliver on its principles and promise.

With great skill and astonishing range, Varouxakis traces the vicissitudes of these shifting patterns of thought in the decades following the Second World War. As he remarks, ‘who was included in, or who was to be the saviour of, “Western civilization” was not at all static’. For a brief moment, even the Soviet Union joined the club. Many tears were shed about the fate of what Czeslaw Milosz labelled ‘the kidnapped West’, the central European nations imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain and forcefully deprived of their western cultural identity. Others deceived themselves into believing that the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the triumph of the West and of the western idea. ‘Somehow’, Varouxakis writes, ‘the West and western civilization have a tendency to come back in new versions even among people who had buried them as irretrievably dead’.

What sense can be made of this long history and why does it matter? Most obviously, there has been no single concept of the West. The term has been used in varied, inconsistent and confused ways. Many of the earlier meanings of the West are still part of the potential repertoire of its uses. These ‘different layers of meaning’, Varouxakis writes, can resurface ‘depending on who uses the term, when, and why’. So, too, the West has frequently been defined in juxtaposition to its supposed opposite (Tsarist and Soviet Russia being one example). As to why it matters, Varouxakis argues that the multilayered meaning of the concept of ‘the West’ will ensure that its use ‘will not be abandoned in the foreseeable future’. We need therefore to be attentive to how we speak of ‘the West’. To quote Varouxakis again: ‘The future depends, among other things, on the quality of our thinking and conversations, and clarity as to what the words we use mean, or might come to mean, will be among the most vital building blocks for enhancing that quality.’ In this context, Varouxakis is damning in his criticism of the lazy and unoriginal thinking that sees ‘the West’ as the source of all the world’s present evils. Some of these criticisms of the West might well be justified but, in Varouxakis’ view, the call for the wholesale demolition of western civilisation risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater. A better approach, he suggests, is for us to cease referring to the institutions and ideas we hold dear as ‘western’ and to begin referring to them by universal names. ‘They deserve’, he writes, ‘to be adopted not because they are “Western” but rather because they are freedom-promoting, fair, equitable, conducive to justice, peace-promoting, happiness-enhancing, and so on.’ The classic texts of Greek and Roman literature, he holds, ‘constitute an inheritance for the whole of humanity’. Above all, by showing brilliantly that any attempt to attribute an unchanging and inherent essence to ‘the West’ is misplaced, Varouxakis justifies his claim that history matters.