Western world

The Western world as derived from Samuel P. Huntington's 1996 Clash of Civilizations:[1] in light blue are Latin America and the Orthodox World, which are either a part of the West or distinct civilizations intimately related to the West.[2][3]

The Western world, also known as the West, primarily refers to various nations and states in the regions of Australasia,[a] Western Europe,[b] and Northern America; with some debate as to whether those in Eastern Europe and Latin America[c] also constitute the West.[5][6][7] The Western world likewise is called the Occident (from Latin occidens 'setting down, sunset, west') in contrast to the Eastern world known as the Orient (from Latin oriens 'origin, sunrise, east'). The West is considered an evolving concept; made up of cultural, political, and economic synergy among diverse groups of people, and not a rigid region with fixed borders and members.[8] Definitions of "Western world" vary according to context and perspectives.[9]

Modern-day Western world essentially encompasses the nations and states where civilization or culture is considered Western[10][11][12]—the roots of which some historians have traced to the Greco-Roman world and Christianity.[13][14] In the Global North–South schism, the West is often correlated with Global North.[15][16] A historic idea of Europe as the geographic West emerged in the fifth century BCE Greece.[17][18][19] A geographical concept of the West started to take shape in the 4th century CE when Constantine, the first Christian Roman emperor, divided the Roman Empire between the Greek East and Latin West. The East Roman Empire, later called the Byzantine Empire, continued for a millennium, while the West Roman Empire lasted for only about a century and a half. This caused many people in Western Europe to envy the Byzantine Empire and consider the Christians there as heretics.[9] In 1054 CE, when the church in Rome excommunicated the patriarch of Byzantium, the politico-religious division between the Western church and Eastern church culminated in the Great Schism or the East–West Schism.[9][20] Even though friendly relations continued between the two parts of the Christendom for some time, the crusades made the schism definitive with hostility.[21] The West during these crusades tried to capture trade routes to the East and failed, it instead discovered the Americas.[22] In the aftermath of European colonization of these newly discovered lands, an idea of the Western world, as an inheritor of Latin Christendom emerged.[23]

The English word "West" initially meant an adverb for direction. By the Middle Ages, Europeans began to use it to describe Europe. Since the eighteenth century, following European exploration, the word was used to indicate the regions of the world with European settlements.[24][25][26] In contemporary times, countries that are considered to constitute the West vary according to perspective rather than their geographical location. Countries like Australia and New Zealand, located in the Eastern Hemisphere are included in modern definitions of the Western world,[27] as these regions and others like them have been significantly influenced by the British—derived from colonization, and immigration of Europeans—factors that grounded such countries to the West.[28] Despite being located in the Far East, a country like Japan, in some contexts, is considered a part of the West as it aligns with the ideals of Western-style democracy; while a country like Cuba, located in the Western Hemisphere, is argued as not being a part of the West as it aligns with the ideals of communism.[29] Depending on the context and the historical period in question, Russia was sometimes seen as a part of the West, and at other times juxtaposed with it.[30][31][32] Running parallel to the rise of the United States as a great power and the development of communication–transportation technologies "shrinking" the distance between both the Atlantic Ocean shores, the aforementioned country (United States) became more prominently featured in the conceptualizations of the West.[30]

Between the eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, prominent countries in the West such as the United States, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Australia, and New Zealand have been once envisioned as ethnocracies for whites.[33][34][35] Racism is cited as a contributing factor to Westerners' colonization of the New World, which today constitutes much of the "geographical" Western world.[36][37] Starting from the late 1960s, certain parts of the Western World have become notable for their diversity due to immigration.[38][39] The idea of "the West" over the course of time has evolved from a directional concept to a socio-political concept that had been temporalized and rendered as a concept of the future bestowed with notions of progress and modernity.[30]

  1. ^ THE WORLD OF CIVILIZATIONS: POST-1990 scanned image Archived 12 March 2007 at the Wayback Machine
  2. ^ Huntington, Samuel P. (1991). Clash of Civilizations (6th ed.). Washington, DC. pp. 38–39. ISBN 978-0-684-84441-1. The origin of western civilization is usually dated to 700 or 800 AD. In general, researchers consider that it has three main components, in Europe, North America and Latin America. [...] However, Latin America has followed a quite different development path from Europe and North America. Although it is a scion of European civilization, it also incorporates more elements of indigenous American civilizations compared to those of North America and Europe. It also currently has had a more corporatist and authoritarian culture. Both Europe and North America felt the effects of Reformation and combination of Catholic and Protestant cultures. Historically, Latin America has been only Catholic, although this may be changing. [...] Latin America could be considered, or a sub-set, within Western civilization, or can also be considered a separate civilization, intimately related to the West, but divided as to whether it belongs with it.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  3. ^ Huntington, Samuel P. (2 August 2011). The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Simon & Schuster. pp. 151–154. ISBN 978-1451628975.
  4. ^ Espinosa, Emilio Lamo de (4 December 2017). "Is Latin America part of the West?" (PDF). Elcano Royal Institute. Archived (PDF) from the original on 22 April 2019.
  5. ^ Stearns, Peter N. (2008). Western Civilization in World History. Routledge. pp. 88–95. ISBN 9781134374755.
  6. ^ "Is Eastern Europe part of the Western world?". www.studycountry.com. Retrieved 27 December 2023.
  7. ^ Espinosa, Emilio Lamo de. "Is Latin America part of the West?". Elcano Royal Institute. Retrieved 27 December 2023.
  8. ^ Hunt, Lynn; Martin, Thomas R.; Rosenwein, Barbara H.; Smith, Bonnie G. (2015). The Making of the West: People and Cultures. Bedford/St. Martin's. p. 4. ISBN 978-1457681523. The making of the West depended on cultural, political, and economic interaction among diverse groups. The West remains an evolving concept, not a fixed region with unchanging borders and members.
  9. ^ a b c Shvili, Jason (26 April 2021). "The Western World". worldatlas.com. Archived from the original on 1 October 2022.
  10. ^ Hanson, Victor Davis (18 December 2007). Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-307-42518-8. the term "Western" — refer to the culture of classical antiquity that arose in Greece and Rome; survived the collapse of the Roman Empire; spread to western and northern Europe; then during the great periods of exploration and colonization of the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries expanded to the Americas, Australia and areas of Asia and Africa; and now exercises global political, economic, cultural, and military power far greater than the size of its territory or population might otherwise suggest.
  11. ^ Spielvogel, Jackson J. (2006). Western Civilization. Wadsworth. pp. xxxiii. ISBN 9780534646028. people in these early civilizations viewed themselves as subjects of states or empires, not as members of Western civilization. With the rise of Christianity during the Late Roman Empire, however, peoples in Europe began to identify themselves as part of a civilization different from others, such as that of Islam, leading to a concept of a Western civilization different from other civilizations. In the fifteenth century, Renaissance intellectuals began to identify this civilization not only with Christianity but also with the intellectual and political achievements of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Important to the development of the idea of a distinct Western civilization were encounters with other peoples. Between 700 and 1500, encounters with the world of Islam helped define the West. But after 1500, as European ships began to move into other parts of the world, encounters with peoples in Asia, Africa, and the Americas not only had an impact on the civilizations found there but also affected how people in the West defined themselves. At the same time, as they set up colonies, Europeans began to transplant a sense of Western identity to other areas of the world, especially North America and parts of Latin America, that have come to be considered part of Western civilization.
  12. ^ Stearns, Peter N. (2008). Western Civilization in World History. Routledge. pp. 94–95. ISBN 9781134374755. During the 18th and 19th centuries, Western civilization expanded geographically, in whole or in part. [...] a host of major trends... occurred essentially in parallel, suggesting significant cohesion within an expanded Western civilization. The industrial revolution, though launched in Britain, turned out to be a transatlantic process very quickly. ... The same applies to the new movement to limit per capita birth rates – the demographic transition that ran through Western civilization during the 19th century... and the outcomes by 1900, in unprecedentedly low birth rates per family combined with rapidly falling infant death rates, was essentially the same through out this expanded Western world.
  13. ^ Sharon, Moshe (2004). Studies in Modern Religions, Religious Movements and the Babi-Baha'i Faiths. BRILL Academic Publishers. p. 12. ISBN 978-9004139046. Side by side with Christianity, the classical Greco-Roman world forms the sound foundation of Western civilization. Greek philosophy is also the origin for the methods and contents of the philosophical thought and theological investigation in Islam and Judaism.
  14. ^
  15. ^ Nayak, Meghana; Selbin, Eric (2010). Decentering International Relations. Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 2. ISBN 9781848132405. First, IR focuses primarily on and legitimizes the actions and decisions of the US and the global North/West. Second, IR privileges certain political projects, such as neoliberal economic policies, state-centrism, and Northern/Western liberal democracy. Third, IR legitimizes the most privileged socio-political players and institutions, in both the Global North/West and the Global South [...] When we say 'North/West,' we mean primarily the US, but also Great Britain, 'Western' European countries, and, depending on context, limited others.
  16. ^ Lazar, Michelle M. (2005). Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis Studies in Gender, Power and Ideology. Springer. p. 15. ISBN 9780230599901. For example, it is now fairly common place in many universities in the global north/west and in some universities in the south/east to include gender-related modules, including studies on gender and language, in their curricula.
  17. ^ Pagden, Anthony (2008). Worlds at War The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and West. Oxford University Press. pp. xi. ISBN 9780199237432. The awareness that East and West were not only different regions of the world but also regions filled with different peoples, with different cultures, worshipping different gods and, most crucially, holding different views on how best to live their lives, we owe not to an Asian but to a Western people: the Greeks. It was a Greek historian, Herodotus, writing in the fifth century B.C.E., who first stopped to ask what it was that divided Europe from Asia [...] This East as Herodotus knew it, the lands that lay between the European peninsula and the Ganges
  18. ^ Shvili, Jason (26 April 2021). "The Western World". worldatlas.com. Archived from the original on 1 October 2022. The concept of the Western world, as opposed to other parts of the world, was born in ancient Greece, specifically in the years 480-479 BCE, when the ancient Greek city states fought against the powerful Persian Empire to the east.
  19. ^ Hunt, Lynn; Martin, Thomas R.; Rosenwein, Barbara H.; Smith, Bonnie G. (2015). The Making of the West: People and Cultures. Bedford/St. Martin's. p. 4. ISBN 978-1457681523. Building on concepts from the Near East, Greeks originated the idea of the West as a separate region, identifying Europe as the West (where the sun sets) and different from the East (where the sun rises).
  20. ^ "East-West Schism". britannica.com. Archived from the original on 29 September 2023.
  21. ^ Ware, Kallistos (1993). The Orthodox Church. Penguin Books. ISBN 9780140146561. But even after 1054 friendly relations between east and west continued. The two parts of Christendom were not yet conscious of a great gulf of separation between them, and people on both sides still hoped that the misunderstandings could be cleared up without too much difficulty. The dispute remained something of which ordinary Christians in east and west were largely unaware. It was the Crusades which made the schism definitive: they introduced a new spirit of hatred and bitterness, and they brought the whole issue down to the popular level.
  22. ^ Durant, Will; Durant, Ariel (2012). The Lessons of History. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 9781439170199. The Crusades, like the wars of Rome with Persia, were attempts of the West to capture trade routes to the East; the discovery of America was a result of the failure of the Crusades.
  23. ^ Peterson, Paul Silas (2019). The Decline of Established Christianity in the Western World. Routledge. p. 26. ISBN 9780367891381. While "Western Civilization" is a common theme in the curriculum of secondary and tertiary education, there is a great deal of disagreement about what the terms "West" or "Western" world signify. I have defined it as those "religious traditions, institutions, cultures and nations, including their contemporary shared values, that together emerged as the intellectual descendants and transformers of Latin Christendom." Geographically, this entails Western Europe (including Poland and other central European countries), North America and many other parts of the world that share these traditions and histories, or have adopted them. Much of Central and South America seem to reflect these traditions and values.
  24. ^ Pagden, Anthony (2008). Worlds at War The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and West. Oxford University Press. pp. xv. ISBN 9780199237432. The English word "West" was originally an adverb of direction. It meant, in effect, "farther down, farther away". By the Middle Ages, it was already being used by Europeans to describe Europe, and by the late six-teenth century, it had become associated with forward movement, with youth and vigor, and ultimately, as Europe expanded—westward—with "civilization". Ever since the eighteenth century, the word has been applied not only to Europe but also to Europe's settlers overseas, to the wider European World.
  25. ^ Appiah, Kwame Anthony (9 November 2016). "There is no such thing as western civilisation". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 8 April 2023. Often, in recent years, "the west" means the north Atlantic: Europe and her former colonies in North America. The opposite here is a non-western world in Africa, Asia and Latin America – now dubbed "the global south" – though many people in Latin America will claim a western inheritance, too. This way of talking notices the whole world, but lumps a whole lot of extremely different societies together, while delicately carving around Australians and New Zealanders and white South Africans, so that "western" here can look simply like a euphemism for white.
  26. ^ Gregerson, Linda; Juster, Susan (2011). Empires of God: Religious Encounters in the Early Modern Atlantic. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 978-0812222609. Retrieved 28 June 2018.
  27. ^ Western Civilization Archived 11 August 2017 at the Wayback Machine, Our Tradition; James Kurth; accessed 30 August 2011
  28. ^ Peter N. Stearns, Western Civilization in World History, Themes in World History, Routledge, 2008, ISBN 1134374755, pp. 91-95.
  29. ^ Shvili, Jason (26 April 2021). "The Western World". worldatlas.com. Archived from the original on 1 October 2022. Thus, Japan could be considered part of the West because it maintains a Western-style democracy, even though it is located in the Far East. At the same time, Cuba still clings to communism, and it is argued by many that the ruling regime of Cuba does not hold so-called Western values, even though it is geographically in the Western Hemisphere.
  30. ^ a b c Bavaj, Riccardo (21 November 2011). ""The West": A Conceptual Exploration". academia.edu. Archived from the original on 2 August 2022.
  31. ^ Roberts, Henry L. (March 1964). "Russia and the West: A Comparison and Contrast". Slavic Review. 23 (1): 1–12. doi:10.2307/2492370. JSTOR 2492370. S2CID 153551831.
  32. ^ Alexander Lukin. Russia Between East and West: Perceptions and Reality Archived 13 November 2017 at the Wayback Machine. Brookings Institution. Published on 28 March 2003
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  34. ^
  35. ^
    • "The Immigration Restriction Act and the White Australia policy". National Archives of Australia. Retrieved 19 December 2022. The Immigration Restriction Act 1901 was a landmark law which provided the cornerstone of the unofficial 'White Australia' policy and aimed to maintain Australia as a nation populated mainly by white Europeans. It included a dictation test of 50 words in a European language, which became the chief way unwanted migrants could be excluded. The policy remained in place for many decades.
    • "White New Zealand policy introduced | NZHistory, New Zealand history online". nzhistory.govt.nz. Retrieved 8 March 2021. New Zealand's immigration policy in the early 20th century was strongly influenced by racial ideology. The Immigration Restriction Amendment Act 1920 required intending immigrants to apply for a permanent residence permit before they arrived in New Zealand. Permission was given at the discretion of the minister of customs. The Act enabled officials to prevent Indians and other non-white British subjects entering New Zealand.
  36. ^ Cotter, Anne-Marie Mooney (2016). Culture Clash: An International Legal Perspective on Ethnic Discrimination. Routledge. p. 12. ISBN 9781317155867. In the western world, racism evolved, twinned with the doctrine of white supremacy, and helped fuel the European exploration, conquest and colonization of much of the rest of the world.
  37. ^ Jalata, Asafa (2002). Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization. Springer. p. 40. ISBN 9780312299071. Western world racism inflated the values of "Europeanness" and "Whiteness" in areas of civilization, human worth, and culture, and deflated the values of "African-ness" and "Blackness".
  38. ^ Spielvogel, Jackson J. (2006). Western Civilization. Wadsworth. p. 918. ISBN 9780534646028. Intellectually and culturally, the Western world after 1965 was notable for its diversity and innovation.
  39. ^ Browne, Anthony (3 September 2000). "The last days of a white world". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 18 November 2022. We are near a global watershed - a time when white people will not be in the majority in the developed world — Just 500 years ago, few had ventured outside their European homeland. [...] clearing the way, they settled in North America, South America, Australia, New Zealand and, to a lesser extent, southern Africa. But now, around the world, whites are falling as a proportion of population.


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