By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

In his 2001 Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power, Victor Davis Hanson argues that the possession of Western culture uniquely enables effective warfare, so that the West has come to dominate the globe and will continue to do so. By "Western" culture, Hanson says, he means: 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 in 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. (xv)

Hanson posits a "common cultural tradition" from ancient Greece to the present. This cultural inheritance has caused Western warfare to be exceptionally successful: Western civilization has given mankind the only economic system that works, a rationalist tradition that alone allows us material and technological progress, the sole political structure that ensures the freedom of the individual, a system of ethics and religion that brings out the best in humankind - and the most lethal practice of arms conceivable. (455)

No rival to this power is anticipated - if countries other than those presently belonging to the West gain power, Hanson argues, it will be because they too have become Western culturally, for the mere adoption of technology is not enough. The hardcover edition of the book was released just before September 11, but the softcover edition includes an afterword responding to it. Here Hanson describes the terrorist attack on the US as "in some sense the culmination of a growing divide between the Islamic and Western worlds" (457). The overthrow of the Taliban by the Americans immediately afterward is evidence that the non- West is no match for the West. The American soldiers, fighting as free men, are more adept at fighting, just as the Romans, Alexander the Great, the Greeks at Salamis, and the Spanish in Mexico, were more adept than their non-Western opponents (458-9). On the other side, "the terrorists, like the

Ottomans at Lepanto, were entirely parasitic on Western technological, culture," and "like the Aztecs," the Taliban did not have their own rationalist traditions that would have enabled them to maintain their position (459). This lesson is drawn even more strongly  by Hanson in an article in American Heritage, "The Longest War" (and on the cover: "East Vs. West: Our War Didn't Begin on September 11. It Began 3,000 Years Ago"), in which he announces that "Osama bin Laden and the Taliban have very few legitimate grievances against the United. States": "Bin Laden is more correctly seen as an inherently evil man who hates and envies us for our clout and our influence" (36-37). He is but one in a long line of "marginal fanatics" who have reacted violently to the West (39), but who will fail in the end because terror is a last resort for "the opponents of Western civilization who have lacked its discipline and firepower" (40).

Hanson presents an unashamedly Westernist or positive Occidentalist view - maybe even an "extreme Occidentalist" view, in that he sees America as the "most potent incarnation" of "the European military tradition" (45), despite the fact that its educated classes promote weakness in their advocacy for "multiculturalism, conflict-resolution theory, postmodernism" (46). His theory posits a Western civilization spanning three thousand years animated by the same principles of freedom and military and technological dominance, principles which set it apart from, and above, all other peoples. 12

While Hanson represents an American conservative public intellectual's view of the West, Jean-Luc Nancy represents that of contemporary French theory. 13 Like Hanson, Nancy is concerned with the nature of the West and its future. According to a recent commentator, "his work soberly attests a fascination with the West's panoply of immanence" (2). In his "Deconstruction of Monotheism," written in early 2001, Nancy argues that "Our time is thus one where it is urgent for the West - or what remains of it  to analyze its own future, to look back at and examine its provenance and its trajectory, and to question itself about the process of the breaking.down of meaning which it allows to take place" (37). The West is coming to the point where it can no longer be "t West": Westernization has occurred everywhere, and there is nothing therefore to distinguish the West from anywhere else. While the West is often theorized through its relation to the Enlightenment, or to nineteenth-century imperialism, or to the neighboring Islamic or Slavic worlds, Nancy argues that monotheism is more fundamental to its being: the globalization of the West is, in effect, the globalization of monotheism (37-38).

And this is the condition of possibility for global "atheisation." Christianity is the basis of the West; while Western monotheism presupposes classical thought and has existed in tension with the other monotheisms of Judaism and Islam, still "the West is deeply Christian" (40). Nancy's account is meant to be a corrective to two opposing views: one, that Western modernity is the overcoming of religion; and two, that a saving return to Christianity is possible. Instead, he offers the possibility that there could be an unrecognized resource, "a buried origin" "beneath" Christianity/ monotheism/the West, one which could open up to "the imperceptible future" (41).

Nancy also adds something to his original text in light of the attacks on September 11. In a postscript, written in 2002, Nancy writes that the terrorist attack has made it clearer that "the world is tearing itself apart over an unbearable division of wealth and power" (45).

What makes our divisions unbearable is secular modernity; democracy, human rights, and tolerance cannot provide a sacred foundation for hierarchy, authority, or difference, but instead they cause all of these to be experienced as a violation of the fundamental principle of equality. September 11 is not the sign of a clash of civilizations, but the symptom of ruptures within monotheistic uniformity. The universality and uni1ateralism  of one side is balanced by the "nihilistic mobilization" of Unity on the other. The truth of the one God - that only He is One, that He cannot come into presence, and that everything present is therefore multiple - has been lost because monotheism has tried to give itself being through cultural forms (46).

In his "Consecration and Massacre," Nancy reflects further that monotheism can either assert the domination of the One or, through the withdrawal of the One, allow plurality to emerge (48). In the first instance, we are subject to the desire to eliminate all that is different. The domination of the One leads to uniformity: there is a kind of equivalence then between Christianity, communism and capitalism in that all involve equality and exchange (49). But their irresolvable splits and conflicts reveal: the incapacity of Western civilisation to do anything other than spread - with the same movement - its domination, for one thing, its ideals or its norms for another, and for a third thing an increasing incapacity to dialectise the former via the latter. In truth, this civilisation reveals its incapacity to spread and take hold as a civilisation. (52)

Western civilization is at its limit, and the only hope is for the advent of a new civilization, stemming from somewhere else, or from extreme demands of differences within, or from a new way to truth beyond the One (53).

Nancy's work is an example of negative Occidentalism: instead of characterizing the West as exceptionally favored, he describes it as particularly malign. Instead of Western culture being informed by freedom, he believes that it is informed by totalizing equalization. Instead of the West looking forward to an endless series of successes that will bring the Rest eventually into its orbit, Nancy anticipates that it will come to its end out of its own impasses, and he can only hope that something better will replace it. For Hanson, the essential feature of the West that has led to its military success is continuous from its Greek beginnings to the present; but for Nancy, the essential feature of the West is monotheism, for which Greeks and Roman culture merely laid the necessary framework. Because of this difference, Islam is Other to the West according to Hanson, and a participant in Western monotheism according to Nancy. For the former, the East, which merges into the Rest, is the necessary opposite to the West, while for the latter the West's opposite is whatever is non-monotheistic. For Hanson, wealth and power are the signals of success, and for Nancy they are signs of nihilism. Yet. for both, the West has the characteristics identified in the previous chapter as belonging to it as a concept: the West is a mode of being and a totality; it is not determin,ed by geographical location; its essence unfolds through a dynamic history; it is uniquely different from all other cultures; and its meaning is directed towards the future. For both, therefore, the West functions an ideal-type construct used to diagnose the condition of our times and explain political events. In neither is the theoretical nature of the West acknowledged.

Our  objective in this part of our investigation thus, will be to show that this kind of conceptualization around the idea of the West did not occur, and could not have had significance, in the periods of history that are variously held to constitute the Western tradition and that came before the period following that Koselleck designated as the Satte/zeit, the transition to late modernity in the latter part of the eighteenth century. To make this argument, we will draw upon a number of excellent historical studies of terms of cultural identity such as Europe and Christendom.

West is most obviously the opposite of east. In a fixed world, the difference between east and west is absolute: the east is where the sun rises and the west is where the sun sets.

The terms Orient and Occident, derived from the Latin, refer to rising and falling respectively. Various religious and poetical valuations attend this duality. The east is the dawn, the origin, the place of birth. the beginning, the source of light; it is the place from whence things rise. The west is the sunset, the end, the place of death, finality, darkness; it is where things fall. Influenced by Said's Orientalism, we are accustomed to seeing the deprecatory connotations of the first term (as in Oriental despotism). In the ancient world, however, its associations typically were positive, having to do with shining, birth, splendor, renewal. Lux orientalis means the light, of knowledge or of revelation, from the east; the Garden of Eden was in the East. The ancient associations with the west, on the other hand, were often negative. In Latin, words related to the occidental referred to falling down, being ruined or slain, and being weary. Yet the rising in the east is merely a beginning of something, and the sun moves towards its goal in the west. Thus the west was also connected to destiny, completion, the future, and the beyond. The Isles of the West and Atlantis were in the West; Aeneas came to Italy nom Troy as the fates decreed the westward "course of Empire." Loren Baritz writes concerning the religious and political themes of the west: "Sometimes eternity, happiness, and millennial themes were woven into one conception of the west; sometimes the imperial themes stood alone" (618); the west "might be either a place, a direction, an idea, or all three at once" (619).

East and West, Orient and Occident, then, had in classical culture a variety of meanings related to the movement of the sun, some with positive valuations and some with negative.

Being western rather than eastern is often equated with the distinction between being European rather than Asian. One might ask whether or not these doubles are equivalent in meaning. But fIrst one should ask what has been meant by Europe and Asia in the first place. The idea of Europe is closely tied with the idea of the West, first of all because the two terms are often used interchangeably and secondly because they each have played a role in the other's definition. In some cases, the West is just a short form for "Western Europe and those countries following the Western European model." The West would be then essentially an expanded double of Europe, the latter understood as the essential or "core" Europe in Western Europe. In this view, Eastern, and at times Southern Europe, are not fully European, although technically part of the landmass designated as the continent of Europe.14

One possible geographical significance of Europe's being characterized as Western is that it is the westernmost cape of the Eurasian landmass; but, as Churchill complained, this description is unacceptable from the point of view of European cultural centrality (Hay 5). Europe is not merely a cape but a continent, although it does not fit the definition of a continent, because early modem European thinkers mapped the world to reflect their sense of Europe's centrality, as Lewis and Wigen observe. Yet there were always those who drew attention to the reality of Europe's geographical insignificance for polemical reasons. Herder, for example, in his 122nd letter of the Letters Concerning the Advancement of Humanity (1797) asked "why should the western extremity of our Northern Hemisphere alone be the home of civilization? And is that really so?" (47).

Even this relative sense of being a western part of something larger has been to Europe's credit, however. As a headland facing westwards towards the Atlantic, Europe was figured as projecting itself forward Derrida describes this idea of Europe as ''the representation or figure of a spiritual heading, at once as project, task, or infinite - that is to say universal- idea" . . . "a heading for world civilization or human culture in general.

The idea of an advanced point of exemplarity is the idea of the European idea, its eidos, at once as arche - the idea of beginning but also of commanding" (24).

Leaving aside the question of how much Europe can be characterized as being essentially western, much discussion has debated about how much the idea of Europe can be even read backwards into the past. Anthony Pagden, in his introduction to the 2002 The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union (3,5), and Peter Bugge, in his

2001 "Asia and the Idea of Europe" (4), both think that the idea of Europe has had a long history of distinction from Asia through its possession of certain attributes, such as freedom. But Michael Heffernan, in his 1998 The Meaning of Europe, argues that Europe constitutes "a series of invented geographies" that are more prescriptive than historically descriptive (5).15 Europe is not a continuous or stable geographical referent, even in "European" history, and has not been a "self-positing spiritual entity that unfolds in history and never needs to be explained" (Delanty 1995 ix). One point made in the studies on Europe by Hay, Heffernan, and Lewis and Wigen, is that our present conception of space as geography, particularly as being mapped, and with political entities having defInite borders is recent. Historical atlases are misleading, for they graph the earth in a manner not conceived of before the early modem period. While the terms of geography have continued, their signifIcance has changed.

The name of Europe is derived evidently from Europa- a Phoenician, hence Asian, princess kidnapped by Zeus and brought to Crete. But what was it that took her name?

Even for the Greeks "Europe" did not have a stable meaning: it seems to have begun as referring to the Greek mainland in distinction from the islands (Hay 2), and eventually, as Greek traders extended their reach, it came to designate the lands on one side of the waterways that linked the Aegean to the Black Sea, with Asia was on the other side (Lewis 21). Asia was to the south as well as east, Europe to the north as well as west. To this two-continent model was then added a third, Libya.

Except for the "brief, exceptional" (Bugge 4) period of the Persian Wars, the Greeks did not seem to identify themselves particularly as Europeans opposed to Asians, for Europe  was considered to be the home of the "uncivilized, barbarous, nonpolitical" peoples while both the Hellenes and Asians were civilized (Dussel133). The Greeks sensed they were in the middle more than they were to the west of an Asiatic east. Aristotle argued in his Politics, for example, that: Those who live in a cold climate and in Europe are full of spirit, but wanting in intelligence and skill; and therefore they retain comparative freedom, but have no political organization, and are incapable of ruling over others. Whereas the natives of Asia are intelligent and inventive, but they are wanting in spirit, and therefore they are always in a state of subjection and slavery. But the Hellenic race, which is situated between them, is likewise intermediate in character, being high-spirited and also intelligent. Hence it continues free, and is the best-governed of any nation, and, if it could be formed in to one state, would be able to rule the world. (201)

Did Romans think of themselves as Europeans? Lewis and Wigen describe the historical process whereby Hellenic geographic designations, describing the world as experienced by the Greeks, were gradually extended to name areas beyond their intention or their knowledge by the Romans. But while the latter might have adopted the categories of Greek scholarship, Europe was not their source of cultural identity: Rome itself was primarY. Rome was at "the heart of civilization" (Hay 4), and civilization was located around the Mediterranean. Inland, there were barbarians in all directions, and these barbarians were found particularly, from the point of view of Rome, in the lands of  Europe. Rome, in any case, expanded to rule in all three continents, and Hay argues that the Greek three-continent scheme had no emotive significance for them.

Nor did the Romans image themselves exclusively as western. While Rome was to the west of Asia, so was Aftica - which meant that Europe would not be considered "the West": in the Aeneid, Italy and Carthage are both the new world to the Trojans. Greece, to the east of Rome, and Hellenistic culture, which spread throughout the Mediterranean, would not have been described as either Western or European particularly, especially because the Hellenistic incorporated so many elements from Asian religions. Rome itself, when it became the successor to Alexander's empire, became more eastern. Geoffrey Barraclough, in his History in a Changing World, argues that "the Roman empire, with its centre of gravity in the Mediterranean - and increasingly, as time passed, in the eastern basis of the Mediterranean - drew its sustenance from eastern and non-European lands, and was therefore scarcely more appropriate, as a model for an 'idea of European coherence,' than is the British empire to-day" (34).

It could be supposed that the idea of the West began with the division between Eastern and Western Roman Empire (Williams 333). Certainly the labels of Occident and Orient began with Rome, but they referred to two parts of the Roman Empire, not two parts of the world. While Gress argues against the Greek origins of the West, he does argues for the Roman, maintaining that Western civilization began with the fusion of the Roman empire with the Germanic tribes in the lands of the old Roman Occident. In its most convincing fonn, the notion of the historical West, called by Ifversen the Old West, can point to the continuity between the Roman Empire's Occident and Western Christendom, centered in the city of Rome. It is true that the basis of what we now call Europe began as the far western reaches of the older Roman Empire (Pocock, "Some Europes" 59), but Hay points out Europe of the early modem period was not the successor of Rome in a straightforward way. On the one hand, modem Europe included areas which had never been Roman and, on the other hand, Rome had had successors in its East (62).

Barraclough strongly objects to the claims of historical causality linking ancient Rome to the contemporary West that are involved in "the idea of European coherence" and "our western tradition" (31). Because these claims about the origin of the West are repeated so often, Barraclough's arguments against them are worth citing in detail: The Roman Empire was not centered in its western part; the "barbarians" were not what we mean by barbarians and they did not threaten Roman civilization as such; if there was any continuity of the traditions of Rome, it occurred mainly in Byzantium until 1435 rather than in the Rome's west - to think otherwise merely reflects a Eurocentric bias; the belief that there was a "classical tradition" that could be "handed down in unbroken successionmfrom Rome" is belied by the historical commonplace that classical culture was overcome by Oriental and Germanic currents by the third century, and that the Church Fathers were ''filled with antipathy to Roman traditions"; intellectual life flourished not in the west but in eastern non-European capitals; Greek, not Latin, was the primary language for scholarship for centuries even in the west; and Christian thought in the west originated in North Africa (34-37). Any continuity between the Roman west and a modern West is superficial, therefore, existing only in terminology and not in its meaning (38). Any appearance of unity in thought during the Middle.Ages is an illusion, abetted by the Church's practice of destroying both its opponents and their writings - even so, it is clear  that anti-Catholic thought was "extraordinarily vigorous and its diffusion extraordinarily widespread" (38). The empire did not provide a symbol of unity because in the medieval period there were two Roman empires, and the western empire did not include even what is now Western Europe, for it excluded Britain, Scandinavia, and Spain (39). In sum, for Barraclough, the narrative of Western succession to Rome displays ''the deprecatory, almost contemptuous attitude toward the Eastern empire, which this attitude implies, as though Roman 'traditions' of empire, instead of passing to the 'New Rome' on the Bosphorus, remained tied down for all time in the west" (35).

If Europe during the Middle Ages should not be understood by us to carry forward the cultures of the ancient world, neither did it understand itself to be primarily "European."

After the breaking up of the Roman Empire into smaller units, and with the gradual adoption of Christianity, the salient way of dividing the previously Roman world during this period was between Christians and non-believers. That is, there is no continuous tradition of people living in Europe identifying Europe as the central source of collective identity. Geographical consciousness centered on continents did not emerge until the modern conception of geography, as Lewis and Wigen argue persuasively in their The Myth of Continents. Scholars disagree about whether or not Europe had any meaning at all in the early middle ages, that is before the year 1000  According to Charles Tilly's 1990 Coercion, Capital, and European States, Europe did not exist "in the first millennium of Christian history" (38), and according to Michael Heffernan's 1998 The Meaning of Europe, Europe as an idea had "no currency in political debate" then, because the Mediterranean was dominant (9). But Judith Herrin argues, in her 1989 The Formation of Christendom, that while the collective identity of Christendom did not have geographical significance, after the rise of Islam there was a meaningful distinction between lands under the control of Charlemagne rather than under either the caliph or the Byzantine emperor. The idea of Europe originates, therefore, with Charlemagne (295). In any case, as Hay argues, both Christendom and Europe are scholars' terms, and should not be taken to represent the most significant representations of space and groupings in the medieval world. Elsewhere, the power and accomplishments of the peoples in Europe were insignificant, and the cultural dynamism now held to characterize the history of the West was not evident. David Morely and Kevin Robins note in their 1995 Spaces of Identity, for example, that for medieval Arab scholars West and East were divisions of the Arab world, with the Maghreb meaning the West, and the Europe of the northern barbarians was called the "land of the Franks.“16

This changed following the final conquest of Byzantium by the Turks, after which Christendom became confined to the European landmass, which included Russia. "Europe" began to succeed "Christendom" in the early modem period, although it by no means completely replaced it (Lewis 25). It was favored by the humanists, who preferred words with classical origins. Then, as the unity of Christendom was broken in the Reformation, what commentators discerned were competing but similar types of states, tied together through balance of power (Bugge 5).17 Europe became conceived of as an entity unified by its variety, as a commonwealth of differences. Its political arrangements, its discoveries and expansions, became signs of its uniqueness and superiority, especially compared to the New World and Afiica. Conversely, eighteenth-century thinkers often compared Europe unfavorably to civilized powers in Asia. The Turks were admired and feared, and to a certain extent included in the European state system (Bugge 5), and other nations in the East were often used as a foil to European powers, as described in Paul Hazard's classic The European Mind and in J. J. Clarke's 1997 Oriental Enlightenment:The Encounter between Asian and Western Thought.

A number of western themes can be found in European literature during the early modem period, but they co-existed with other senses of geographical relations and had diverse significations. The conflict between North and South dominated Europe. The discovery of new lands to the west countered the typing of Europe as Western. For example, when John Donne writes in "The Second Anniversarie" of "The Westeme treasure, Easterne spicerie,/ Europe, and Afrique, and the unknown rest" (228-9), the "Westeme" means the American. Donne used westering motifs in his poems as well: In his "Riding Westwards," traveling west means going the wrong way, away from Christ in the east.

Going west, or "westering," also signified in this period translatio imperii, the movement of empire westwards. Joseph Roach in his 1996 Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, details the extent to which English national identity drew upon the story of Aeneas' travels into the west, and the extent to which the English saw themselves as the rightful inheritors of imperial power and the rightful carriers of divine revelation westward to the New World. But then this New World might supplant the one left behind, namely Old Europe, something believed by American Puritans. There also emerged during the Enlightenment a motif of "being tired of Europe." Bishop Berkeley, in his 1726 poem "Verse on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America" writes, for example:

The Muse, disgusted at an age and clime
Barren of every glorious theme,
In distant lands now waits a better time
Producing subjects worthy fame;
Not such as Europe breeds in her decay;
Such as she bred when ftesh and young
When heavenly flame did animate her clay,
By future poets shall be sung.
Westward the course of empire takes its way:
The four first acts already past,
A fifth shall close the drama with the day:
Time's noblest offspring is the last. (1-4,17-24)

Herder, in his 122nd Letter previously cited, believes that the world was inhabited by different peoples who were, in effect, living in different epochs, but that this diversity would come to an end when "the seafaring grizzled old men of Europe, with their spirits, diseases, and slaving practices, transport them too into grizzled old age" (45). Humane duty should compel Europeans not to intervene in the path of development of others: "the Europeans with the imposition of their arts, customs, and doctrines usually played the role of jaded ancients who have completely forgotten what it is to be a child" (45). He continues the theme of Europe's old age in a subsequent passage: "So, let no one augur the decline and death of our entire species because of the graying of Europe! What harm  would it be to our species if a degenerate part of it were to perish? Others take the place of those that withered and flourish ever more freshly" (47).

The meaning of Europe in relation to others came to be considered in a new manner through the new concept of civilization. a term coined in 1756. Civilization was a state of that society which had acquired arts and skills, polish and virtue. Europe might have progressed the most in acquiring civilization, because it was the most favored by geography. But civilization referred to a universal state, not an attribute of a particular culture, and so it was not thought that Europe was one kind of civilization among others.

There might be civilization in Europe, but there was not yet anything called "European civilization." In the nineteenth century, however, scientific, technological, and industrial advances by Europeans, and their drawing of the globe into networks of trade and colonization. led to a strong sense of European uniqueness and superiority. Unlike in the eighteenth century, Asia then became considered as essentially backwards. There were two conceptual shifts: the singular "civilization." designating a universal process, was supplemented around 1818 by the plural "civilizations," designating separate cultures. At the same time, a singular "history," designating one of multiple histories, was supplemented by the universal "History," designating a single process. Together, they produced Eurocentrism - the claim both that Europe refers to a distinct civilization arising out of a particular historical development, and that its history is universally significant: Europe's history is History, the historical development of humanity as such.

Francois Guizot was one of the first to particularize the term civilization through the formulation "European civilization" in 1828: "I have used the term European civilization," he writes, "because it is evident that a certain unity pervades the civilization of the various European states" (3). Demonstrating a common feature of this kind of discourse, Guizot's idea of European civilization entails not only a claim about the essence of Europe, but also a claim about how one nation exemplifies that essence: "We of France occupy a favorable position for pursing the study of European civilization. . . it is without vanity, I think, that we may say that France has been the center, the focus of European civilization." Even when France has not herself invented something new,"there is scarcely any great idea, any great principle of civilization, which, prior to its diffusion, has not passed in this way through France." Guizot concludes from this that "the peculiar characteristics of France" have ''rendered her eminently fit to march at the very head of European civilization." Also anticipating a theme in the future discourse of the West, he warns of the burden of moral leadership: Much as been given to us, much will be required of us; we must render to posterity a strict account of our conduct; the public, the government, are all now subjected to discussion, examination, responsibility.....while we require that all things shall be open to our inspection and inquiry, we ourselves are under the eye of the world, and shall, in our turn, be discussed, be judged. (24)

Denis de Rougement, in his 1966 The Idea of Europe, observes that despite this nationalist dimension, the question of Europe in the nineteenth century was put forward as a counter-weight to national chauvinism. Yet, as the concept of civilization became particularized as European civilization, it came to employ new kinds of defining markers- first linguistic, through the discovery of the Indo-European or Aryan language group,  and then racial, through the eliding of this linguistic category with the racial category of white or Caucasian, as Ivan Hannaford argues in his Race: The History of an Idea in the West. For example, Edouard Drumont in his 1886 La France Juive writes: "It can be seen thus that all the nations of Europe are very closely linked to the Aryan race, from which have spring all the great civilizations. The Aryan or Indo-European race is the only one to uphold the principles of justice, to experience freedom and to value beauty" (109).

The result of the identification of Europe with ethnic or racial characteristics - such as Guizot's French and Drumont's Indo-Europeans - meant that the idea of Europe applied only to the "real Europe" of the Atlantic nations. As Pocock points out, even the inclusion of central Europe became problematic when western European thinkers traveled there and experienced it as foreign ("Some Europes" 67). Thus, as Larry Wolff argues in his 1994 Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization in the Mind of the Enlightenment, calling Europe "Western" clarifies where the true Europe really is, namely in Europe's west and not in its middle or center or east.

The nineteenth century also saw the emergence of a new idea of Europe as defined by its history, encouraged by the new scientific approach to historical research and the production of monumental works ofhistorica1 scholarship. The studies of the history of ancient Rome by Theodor Mommsen, the rise of historical linguistics, the comparative studies of law by Henry Maine and Paul Vinogradoff, etc., led to an understanding of Europe as connected through a narrative of organic development to the remote past. The historical idea of Europe as "shaped by the Greek, Roman, (Latin) Christian culminating in the Enlightenment" resulted in the identification of Europe with '"the western secular heritage" (Delanty "Models" 4). This idea of a Europe, now mediated by historical  consciousness and a global frame of reference, becomes a fundamental presupposition for the idea of Western civilization which would emerge after the turn of the twentieth century.

The First World War was widely seen as Europe's self-destruction as European states lost power to US and the USSR in the postwar period. In this context, some conservatives started to define Europe through superiority of its tradition rather than the advancement of its economic development. Even so, fascists believed that the unification of Europe as the world power would impose order on inferior, especially Asiatic, races. Hitler's Reich was, at least in much of the propaganda, the "European" rather than "German" order (Bugge, "Asia" 11). Norman Davies, in his Europe: A History, calls the Nazi programs "the most extreme versions of' Eurocentrism' and 'Western civilization' that have ever existed" (38).

Later chapters will explore how the West as a concept developed in some distinction from the idea of Europe. The West entered geopolitical discourse especially after World War Two, when it was used to describe the alliance led by a triumphant United States, while Europe alone was shattered, discredited, and shrunken or shrinking into its semi continental borders. Western Europeans needed a new identity to free them of the taint of fascism and distinguish them from the communist nations of Eastern Europe. The true Europe was now to be grounded in the tradition of the classics and high culture, in economic advancement, and in political freedom, all which distinguished it from the Eastern Bloc. But the initial work of European co-operation and identity creation was pragmatic, not ideological, and essentially regional. According to Ole Waever, ''the project of Europe is itself-not to launch itself on world history but to prevent another world war starting on European soil" (qtd. in Bugge "Asia" 1 1). Subsequent debates over European identity have involved a tension between what Peter Bugge calls the republican approach - a commitment to common institutions - and a culturalist approach seeking to define and promote distinctly European values.

There is the greatest uncertainly concerning the borders of Europe itself, its geographico-political borders (in the center, to the east and to the west, to the north and to the south), its "spiritual" borders (around the idea of philosophy, reason, monotheism, Jewish, Greek, Christian [Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox], and Islamic memories, around Jerusalem, a Jerusalem itself divided, tom apart, around Athens, Rome, Moscow, Paris, and it is necessary to add, "etc.," and it is necessary to divide yet again each of these names with the most respectful persistence). (63)

This uncertainty about Europe's borders and definitions belongs to the very idea of Europe. This is still the case on one level, but on another Europe now exists institutionally for the first time. Even here, however, the issues are complicated: at what point are the European Economic Community, the European Community, and the European Union, equivalent to Europe as such? To be actualized, does Europe need a constitution? What will be Europe's members be, and its borders? In other words, does the political and economic union called Europe correspond to the "real" Europe? Vaclav Havel, in a speech to the European Parliament in 1994, posed the problem this way: Many people might be left with understandable impression that the European Union, to put it a bit crudely - is no more than endless arguments over how many carrots can be exported from somewhere, who sets the amount, who checks it and who eventually punishes the delinquent who contravenes the regulations ... This is why it seems to me that perhaps the most important task facing the European Union today is to come up with a new and genuinely clear reflection on what might be called European identity, a new articulation of European responsibility,and intensified interest of the very meaning of European integration in all its wider implications for the contemporary world, and the recreation of its ethos, or, if you like, its charisma. (qtd. in Groothues I)

Here, Havel repeats many of the common themes of the discourse concerning "the idea of Europe": that Europe has a task, to be made clear by an authentic thinking; that the basis of a common cultural identity is problematic; that Europe has a responsibility; that European unity has global (perhaps world-historical) meaning; and that Europe's true reality is spiritual - it is an ethos, a charisma - the latter suggestive either of charm or leadership. Something new is needed: a new reflection, a new articulation - yet also a return to the old: there should be a recreation, reconstitution. These are all prescriptive.

They tell us what Europe should do or be; they tell us the truth of what Europe is. How much does this question of Europe, as it is now being posed, have to do with the question of the West? The West's borders, as I have argued, are inherently theoretical, while Europe is a place. But, but as we have seen, the space of Europe is also theoretical, and, as a conception, it is also a relatively recent one, first becoming important in the early modern period. Europe, like the West, belongs to the discourse of modernity, even if it emerged somewhat earlier. Therefore, when asking whether the dichotomy between West and East as a source of value has been fundamental to European culture – beginning with the ancient Greeks, who distinguished their homeland from Asia –questions concerning the continuity of Europe itself should be kept in mind.

It is true that a sense of difference from those in lands to the east has seemingly been part of the identity of all those groups held to have constitute the European past due to competition and conflict. There were: the wars of the Greeks against the Trojans and then the Persians; the division of the Roman Empire into its Occidental and its Oriental parts; the schism between the Western Roman Catholic Church and Eastern Orthodoxy; the conflict between the Western powers and the Ottoman Turks in the early modern period; the differentiation of Western and Eastern Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the nineteenth-century distinction between the imperialist nations in the West and the colonized or otherwise dominated lands in the East; and Britain's sense of its difference from the Continent throughout much of its history. Therefore, as a term that demarcates a fundamental division, with Europe on one side and Asia, the Orient, and the East on the other, the West would appear to have been a source of continuous identity for almost three millennia. Being relatively western seems to have produced a sense of commonality underlying a particular civilization, one distinct from its Oriental neighbors.

As both Hanson and Nancy maintain, the West's essence has revealed itself through a particular set of practices and valuations that have persisted through time.

As we have arguedabove, however, while ideas about the direction westward, or the west as a relative location, have been important in writings now considered part of the Western tradition, they have been so in ways that lack a unified significance. The directional name naturally has often functioned to indicate a division within a field of authority, such as the Roman Empire in the West and the Roman Empire in the East. Just as naturally, the mapping of space according to the division between the eastern and the western has involved qualitative and evaluative judgments. The American West, for example, continues to involve a range of associations that can be summarized as "the idea of the West" that differentiates it in character from the American East and that has a qualitative dimension. The many possible uses of the west, therefore, need to be distinguished from the West as a concept: the West does not refer to any specific locality or set of institutions, but rather proposes a theory regarding an essential continuity in both time and space. This theory has depended upon a number of assumptions concerning the organic unity of culture, and the development of History, for example, that were not available until the nineteenth century. My point can be demonstrated a priori: since the West refers to a distinct civilization, and since the idea of plural civilizations did not exist before the early nineteenth century, the West as the name of a unique civilization and a unique historical development could not have been used until relatively recently. When it did emerge, however, it was inflected by the other kinds of ideas involving the west, and in turn was infected by them. Mutual inflection, I would argue, has served to mask the conceptual nature of the West by naturalizing it.

Thus, according to the premises of conceptual history, older terminology involving the west needs to be translated rather than be assumed to be equivalent to contemporary references to the West. At the same time, the concept and the term do not need to be the same: just as the term can exist without the concept, so the concept .can exist without the term. The West might merely be equivalent to the Roman Occident, to Christendom, and to Europe, or it might be a double of Indo-European culture, white civilization, the Western Hemisphere, capitalism, or modernity itself. The true history of the West as a concept would be therefore a history of all these other concepts, not to mention the whole framework of historicism in modern thought.

 

Eurocentrism, Afrocentrism, Multiculturalism

Finding the West P.3

Finding the West P.4

Finding the West P.5

Finding the West P.6

Bibliography and Works Cited

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