https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n17/thomas-meaney/ranks-of-humanity
The West: The History of an Idea
by Georgios Varouxakis.
Princeton, 491 pp., £35, September 2025, 978 0 691 17718 2

Few terms​ in international politics appear so infirm, so doddering, yet so indomitable as ‘the West’. Attempts to replace it – ‘the developed world’, ‘the free world’, ‘the liberal international order’, ‘the global North’ – have only underscored its endurance. When Oswald Spengler leaped out of obscurity with the publication of the first volume of The Decline of the West in the last months of the First World War, he inaugurated a genre of premature autopsies: The End of the West; The Defeat of the West; The Abandonment of the West; The Death of the West; Suicide of the West. The books make up a small library, and the idea soldiers on, despite claims to the contrary. ‘The category “the West” does not seem to be in Donald Trump’s head,’ David Brooks wrote at the start of Trump’s second term. In The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief and the Future of the West, Alexander Karp, the head of Palantir, writes that ‘the West’ is ‘a concept that has been discarded by many, almost casually’. One of the persistent features of the West is that its champions worry it will wither away.

While the historical West may have been constituted by Latin Europe and Britain, along with their colonial offshoots, many promoters of the West today seem to think of it as a club that can sign up new members, including eligible liberal democracies such as Taiwan, South Korea and what Solzhenitsyn once called a ‘Far West’, namely Japan. The most zealous booster of this sort is the historian Stephen Kotkin. But there is less porousness in the history of the West than this idealised picture suggests. The concept came into its own less as a geographical expression or a collection of values than as a euphemism for a particular cultural and political project. From the start, for its advocates, the West formed the vanguard of world development, but they were conflicted about how expansive or inclusive that development could be. The West can play at being universal, seeing itself as the only ‘civilisation’ and basing itself on metrics of modernisation or democratisation or simply wealth, but if the core appears threatened – by migration or the rise of a rival power or a sense of its own decline – it snaps back to its original, exclusive formation, as the superior civilisation among several. Various nations have claimed to be its leader – France, Britain, the United States – but the central drama of the West has been its diet: which nations it has chosen to keep out, and which it has swallowed whole.

When did the West begin? The triumphs of Athenians and Spartans over the Persians are cited as early instances of the plucky West standing up against the vast, despotic East. More plausible is the assumption that the idea of ‘the West’ gathered steam in the third century, when Emperor Diocletian severed the Roman Empire into two separate administrative halves. The term ‘West’ or ‘Occident’ was mapped onto Latin Europe – the far-western provinces of the former Roman Empire that became the realm of Charlemagne – while the ‘East’ or the ‘Orient’ comprised a much more indefinite grouping, sometimes limited to Byzantium but often stretching to include China and India. More recent efforts to provide a genealogy for the West have located its origin much later, seeing it as a cunning term in the lexicon of British imperialism, which only became widely used in the run-up to the First World War. ‘The West’ and ‘Western civilisation’, in this telling, were from the beginning part of a propaganda effort to draw the US onto the Allies’ side against Germany.

One of the satisfactions of Georgios Varouxakis’s The West: The History of an Idea is that, with a precision far exceeding that of earlier accounts, it attempts to pinpoint the time and place ‘the West’ was born. Indeed he gives us the exact address: 17 rue Monsieur-le-Prince in Paris’s sixth arrondissement. In the 1840s, Auguste Comte began to concoct a plan for the ‘avant-garde of Humanity’ that would find political expression in a ‘République occidentale’. Comte was one of the first modernisation theorists. According to him, the advanced portion of humanity had moved through three historical stages: the ‘theological’, when it attributed historical causes to divine intervention; the ‘metaphysical’, when it graduated to thinking in abstract philosophical concepts; and then at last the ‘positive’ age, when industrial development and science were able to advance ‘order’ and ‘progress’, yielding a peaceful world society. Comte believed that the only part of mankind nearing this terminus was located in Western Europe, along with its transplanted societies in the Americas and Australasia. The ‘Western Republic’ comprised the French, the Spanish, the Italians and, more reluctantly for him, the English and the Germans. Greece and Poland were considered honorary additions as outposts of the West.

But there was a semantic hitch in Comte’s theory. As Varouxakis points out, the contemporary term typically used for Comte’s desired collection of peoples was ‘Europe’ or, less often, ‘Christendom’. Both these groupings, however, included Orthodox Russia, a pre-industrial despotism that in Comte’s view was far from prepared to join the ranks of the avant-garde of humanity. The other problem was that ‘Europe’ was too geographically restricted to include European settlers in the Americas and elsewhere. Comte needed a designation that could siphon off Latin Europe from Eastern Europe, but also include Britain and its colonial holdings in North and Latin America and Australasia. His solution was the coinage ‘Occidentalité’. Comte’s disciples in England at first translated the word as ‘Occidentalism’ (or simply ‘greatness’) before settling on ‘Westernness’.

It is easy to mock Comte’s notions. He wanted the world to speak Italian, and designed flags, wedding ceremonies and special uniforms for the apostles of humanity. His République occidentale – which Varouxakis translates as ‘the Western Republic’ – would have its headquarters in Paris (though Comte envisioned its moving to Istanbul), with delegations around the world sending emissaries to join their less advanced nations with the industrial age. Yet Comte was also an ardent anti-imperialist. He campaigned for French withdrawal from Algeria (its conquest had been led by his former student) and called for Britain to leave India, Gibraltar and the Caribbean. He was also an anti-nationalist, who insisted that all member countries of the Western Republic be broken up into smaller polities, each around the size of Tuscany.

Shortly before his death in 1857, Comte wrote two letters to Tsar Nicholas outlining his plan for Russia’s gradual inclusion into the progressive vanguard of humanity. By virtue of its backwardness, Comte informed Nicholas, Russia had a unique chance to leapfrog the atomising parliamentary stage of Western Europe and integrate itself directly into the finished ranks of Humanity. (Comte envisioned a similar leapfrogging for Africans, who would be able to move directly from fetishism – the first sub-stage of the theological stage – to positivism, skipping the intermediary phases of development.) The peasant communes of Russia, and the general lack of national cohesion, made it suitable for a smoother breakdown into the smaller polities Comte favoured. His British followers, however, were explicit about constructing the idea of ‘the West’ in opposition to Russia. ‘What constitutes the West?’ Richard Congreve asked in 1866. ‘The elimination of Russia from the system is the first great rectification. She is an Eastern, not a Western power, or more Eastern than Western.’

Comte’s vision galvanised the idea of ‘the West’, but is his version really the nucleus of today’s conception? Varouxakis argues that it is, but concedes there was a wider geopolitical impetus. By the time Comte was starting to formulate his more capacious version of ‘the West’, France and Britain were themselves redrawing the map. With the threat of Napoleon extinguished, Britain in particular viewed Russia as more foe than friend, especially when stray pieces of the declining Ottoman Empire became open to contestation. Already in the 1830s Palmerston was speaking of ‘the constitutional states of “the West”’, and Russia, once a fellow ‘northern’ power in the joint suppression of Napoleonic France, could be considered an ‘eastern’ power. In the mid-19th century, Comtean positivists were circulating a version of the West without Russia, while Britain, France and Austria were united in war against it. Varouxakis suggests that Palmerston picked up the phrase ‘the West’ from his discussions with French diplomats like Talleyrand, but he somewhat artificially distinguishes between more opportunistic expressions of Russophobia and Comte’s high-minded schemes, when in fact both were responding to similar geostrategic rationales, amplified in the wake of Crimea.

The Crimean War marked the decisive break between Russia and the West. Since the defeat of Napoleon, Russia had been a crucial member of the Holy Alliance, which included its fellow absolute monarchies Austria and Prussia. Together with Britain and a rehabilitated France, the Holy Alliance would form the core of the Concert of Europe. The principal purpose of the Concert was the suppression of liberalism and nationalism. It fell apart over its policy towards the Ottoman Empire, which ruled over millions of Christian subjects, the majority of them Orthodox. When France tried to lay claim to holy sites in the Middle East, which the sultan traditionally licensed to the Russian Orthodox Church, Nicholas sent Russian troops to occupy Moldavia and Wallachia (present-day Romania), igniting war between Russia and the Ottoman Empire, with most of Russia’s former allies joining the Ottoman side. Britain was concerned Russia would become too powerful were it able to rule over the Christian population of the shrinking Ottoman Empire; France wanted British power to offset Russia’s ambitions. Austria, which technically remained neutral but enabled Britain and France to triumph by pushing Russian troops out of Moldavia and Wallachia, was motivated in part by fear of pan-Slavism infecting its Balkan perimeter. While few of the maximalist war aims of the Western powers were achieved – Palmerston wanted to force Russia out of Poland, Finland, the Baltics, Crimea and Bessarabia – the Crimean War marked the excommunication of Russia from ‘the West’.

No one registered the severance more acutely than Fyodor Dostoevsky. Up until the 1850s, Dostoevsky had tacked between the ‘Westernisers’ and the ‘Slavophiles’. He was opposed both to Slavophile romanticism and to the slavish adoption of Western fashions. The Crimean War radicalised him. He was shocked to read Russian Westernisers cheering on their country’s defeat, which they thought would hasten the end of tsarism. But that was nothing compared to two nominally Christian nations joining with a Muslim power to fight Russia:

Christians with the Turks against Christ?
Christians – the defenders of Muhammad!
Shame on you, apostates of the Cross,
Extinguishers of the divine light!

For Dostoevsky, the Crimean War marked the transformation of Russia into the humiliated Christ of the nations. His post-Crimea novels became more focused on the confrontation between the West and Russia, and were supported by his own experiences in France, Germany and England. The political revolutions of Europe, while perhaps necessary for the evolution of the West, were unsuitable for Russia, where republican government was unimaginable. Russia, Dostoevsky believed, had its own mission: not to equal the West, but to develop a higher civilisation, distinct from the West as well as being its historical fulfilment. The ascent was already underway in literature, where Pushkin had surpassed Victor Hugo. Dostoevsky’s antagonism to Western-style modernity was shared by a series of major writers in the societies that Westernised in the following century, from Lu Xun in China to Yukio Mishima in Japan to Jalal Al-e-Ahmad in Iran, who popularised the term gharbzadegi (‘Westoxification’), to Oğuz Atay in Turkey, who referred to Westerners as the ‘voulez-vouses’ in his Russian-inspired tales.

As Russia became estranged from the Western powers, and was further humiliated after the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, another power began to test the identity of the West. By the end of the 19th century, Germany had not only united but had triumphed in the Franco-Prussian War and expanded its industrial capacity to overtake Britain’s. The promoters of the First World War in Britain and France left no doubt that it was a war between democratic civilisation and barbarian tyranny. For their part, German thinkers believed their society had already advanced beyond the West. ‘We must recognise everything that resembles Western European ideas or which is even distantly related to commercialism as something much inferior to us,’ Werner Sombart wrote a year into the war. Thomas Mann was more forceful: ‘Germany is in fact a much more modern state than the filthy plutocratic bourgeois republic whose capital is still venerated as the “Mecca of Civilisation”. According to French reasoning, a people is more elevated, noble and free if it is represented by an ambitious lawyer and governed by a parliament instead of a monarch.’ Taking the example of Dostoevsky, Mann rejected the civilising ‘lesson’ of the West. He cheered on the war as a means of not merely preserving but elevating Germany’s unique culture – a culture that expressed itself as much in its militarism as in its music – against the commercialising tendencies of the ‘shallower peoples’ of the West, who hid their designs behind hollow words such as ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘democracy’, and would ‘leave nothing of the German character’.

The advanced state of German industrialism, along with its proximity, made it dangerous. ‘A victory on the high seas would be a triumph of that class which aims to make Germany the leader of the East against the West,’ Walter Lippmann wrote, ‘the leader ultimately of a German-Russian-Japanese coalition against the Atlantic world.’ There were already enough West-leaning Germans within Germany, Lippmann thought, to make it possible to amalgamate the country into the West if it were done in the right way. ‘Our aim must not be to conquer Germany as Rome conquered Carthage, but to win Germany as Lincoln strove to win the South.’ But the Germans were not won over by the vindictive peace. Hitler’s speeches were full of references to the treachery and hypocrisy of ‘the West’, but he also declared Germany its saviour. A German triumph in the war, Hitler believed, would invert Spengler’s prophecy. ‘Is this then really the end of our history and hence of our peoples? No! We cannot believe or accept it! It must be called not the “Decline of the West”, but the “Resurrection of the Peoples of the Western World”!’ The Eastern Front was where their fate would be decided. As Carl Schmitt saw it, Soviet Russia combined the two chief threats to Western civilisation: proletarian class revolt and Russian anti-Westernism. It had, Schmitt argued, effectively de-Westernised itself and ‘made Russia Muscovite again’ by liquidating its Westernising land-owning classes. It was only after 1945 that Germany, first one half then the other, started along what Heinrich August Winkler called ‘the long road west’, a road smoothed by Soviet T-34 tanks and Allied carpet bombing.

Between the wars, an academic industry developed around ‘Western civilisation’ and its emergence from classical antiquity and Western Christianity. The first ‘Western Civ’ course – its original title was ‘War Issues’ – had already been taught at Columbia University during the First World War (it was better to die for Plato than for Belgium). In much of this work, the West was characterised as the homeland of reason and the individual. Despite these hymns to Western values, there were deep historical and institutional differences between the countries west of the Elbe and those to the east. Different degrees of exposure to Roman law and barbarian invasions resulted in different timelines for Western and Eastern Europe when it came to the abolition of serfdom, the crisis of feudalism, the development of absolutism, and the rise of a bourgeoisie. The representative political bodies in the West, along with its wealthy citizens, universities, capital markets and colonial conquests, made it less precarious than the autocracies of the East. Communists such as Antonio Gramsci, who recognised that the methods which had worked in the East would not work in the West, adopted the categories to clarify the strategic difference. In the East, it was possible for vanguard parties to seize power, whereas in the West communists needed to change the culture and institutional bases of legitimacy that made revolutions impracticable. The irony that Marxism – a Western political science – had made more headway in the East than the West meant that for communists (as for Dostoevsky) it was Russia that would fulfil the historical destiny originally assigned to the West.

The early proponents of the West considered the US an outlying province rather than a heartland. Varouxakis sees Francis Lieber as a key figure in the history of America’s relationship to the concept of ‘the West’. A fierce German liberal who fought on the side of the Western powers in the Greek War of Independence, Lieber moved to the US in 1827 and edited the first American encyclopedia. Like Comte, he sought a term that would include Americans but keep out Russians and other underperforming Caucasians. In 1853 Lieber wrote:

I have used the term Western History, yet it is so indistinct that I must explain what is meant by it. It ought not to be so. I mean by Western History, the history of all historically active, non-Asiatic nations and tribes – the history of the Europeans and their descendants in other parts of the world. In the grouping and division of comprehensive subjects, clearness depends in a great measure upon the distinctness of well-chosen terms. Many students of civilisation have probably felt with me the desirableness of a concise term, which should comprehend within the bounds of one word, capable of furnishing us with an acceptable adjective, the whole of the western Caucasian portion of mankind – the Europeans and all their descendants in whatever part of the world, in America, Australia, Africa, India, the Indian Archipelago and the Pacific Islands. It is an idea which constantly recurs, and makes the necessity of a proper and brief term daily felt.

Students of civilisation were unwilling to subscribe to Lieber’s proposed term, ‘Cis-Caucasian’, by which he meant the Caucasian race as distinguished from Slavs and other retrograde whites of Southern and Eastern Europe. In his books and speeches marshalling the idea of an expanded West, Lieber made every effort to include the US in the definition. As Varouxakis shows, the geopolitical wind was in his favour. The term became prominent in the American press after Matthew Perry’s naval fleet opened the commercial market of Japan in 1854. Once a junior member of the West, the US now seemed destined to lead it.

British and American liberals were the main champions of the ‘idea’ of the West in the first half of the 20th century, but they faced scepticism at home. Churchill preferred ‘Atlantic’ to ‘Western’ power, since it was the ‘English-speaking peoples’, not their Latin cousins, who were the true guardians of civilisation. Conservatives including T.S. Eliot and George Kennan thought it unnatural to include the US in the West. ‘The “Occident” is a bad term if it includes both Europe and America,’ Eliot wrote in 1927. ‘In some ways America is more like Asia than it is like Europe.’ Kennan, meanwhile, favoured Spengler’s idea of an ‘Abendland’, which excluded both the US and Russia. The concept was thrown back into question during the Second World War by the alliance with the Soviet Union, before the Cold War reaffirmed that Russia had no place in the West.

The confrontation with the Soviet Union put new pressure on the West’s self-definition. To combat a state with a universalist ideology required the US, above all, to secure universalist credentials of its own. But the domestic writers most invested in the term ‘the West’ were among the fiercest critics of its own liberal, universalising tradition. In Suicide of the West (1964), James Burnham argued that only a nationalist ideology could counter communism around the world. Liberalism, ‘the ideology of Western suicide’, was too weak a creed by comparison. After the Cold War, conservatives such as Samuel Huntington began to advocate a more restrictive posture. The West, Huntington believed, had become far too diffuse as a concept. In The Clash of Civilisations (1996), he called for the West to embrace its civilisational limits and disband its universalist pretensions – a hard sell in the America of the 1990s.

The idea of ‘the West’ came under a different kind of pressure after the Cold War. Gorbachev spoke of a ‘common European home’ and there was talk of inviting Russia back into the West, even into Nato. This was never a real prospect, but the US urged the other Western powers to overcome any doubts that the borderlands of Russia could be Westernised, a project which has culminated in the Ukraine War. It is not surprising the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, refers to his enemy as ‘the political West’. Meanwhile, in the 1990s, the Western European states considered Turkey, a Nato state since 1952, for membership in the European Union, but the process foundered when the thinness of the Kemalist project became more visible, and the cultural distance between Europe and Islam became more useful tinder in domestic European politics.

Today ‘the West’ as an idea appears endangered by the variousness of the factions that brandish its banner. For the European right, the West stands against Islam and immigration. (I remember witnessing, in 2015, the first large protests of PEGIDA – Patriotic Europeans against the Islamicisation of the Abendland – in Dresden, and being struck by the choice of ‘Abendland’, with its suggestion of anti-Americanism.) For the American right, ‘Western civilisation’ allows the elites of the MAGA coalition to paper over the differences among Catholic reactionaries, evangelicals and post-religious groupings that prefer to think of Christianity more as a style or a legacy than a faith. American liberals, meanwhile, see the Trump administration as wrecking the West, tampering with the Nato alliance – as opposed to merely readjusting its hegemony over Europe – and speculating about peace with Russia. In this they are mistaken. Donald Trump referred to ‘the West’ nine times in his 2017 speech in Poland, and launched the largest post-Cold War deployment of US troops to Europe for exercises with its Nato allies. His praise for the destiny of Western civilisation mirrors Russian and Chinese civilisation-mongering. In each case, ‘civilisation’ is summoned as a force to discipline an inadequately nationalist business class. Those who understand that it is better and more profitable to work with and through the state rather than outside it are the ones who today speak the language of ‘civilisation’. Karp’s book about Silicon Valley’s place in the fight for the West is a sign of the new alignment.

Varouxakis grew up in Crete, one of the most contested places in the history of confrontation between East and West. It has been ruled by Venice, Constantinople, Berlin and Athens, and since the 1970s has hosted a US naval base at Souda Bay. He remembers when Greece was a dictatorship located in the West, and Huntington calling for Greece’s expulsion from Nato on the grounds that it was not sufficiently Western. Varouxakis’s book ends with a call for a truce. ‘There is not one, monolithic, evil West,’ he writes, ‘and there is not one monolithic, benign, enlightened, just and liberal West.’ At the same time, he declares that while there is such a thing as a distinctive ‘Western culture’, its promulgators are best advised to couch their values in universal terms (as if the West has not done that with ‘human rights,’ ‘modernisation,’ and ‘democracy’). After a series of striking insights into the way ‘the West’ was constructed in opposition to Russia, Islam and communism, Varouxakis ends his book like another of the West-worriers he chronicles, warning us not to reject the idea of ‘the West’ if it means rejecting the ‘valuable principles and practices that came to be combined in what is called “the West”’. ‘The baby,’ he writes, ‘must not go out with the bathwater.’

One missing piece of Varouxakis’s puzzle is why ‘the West’ has been more successful than competing designations. It has to do with the term’s ability to elide contradiction. At once historical and geographically restricted, the West is also eternal and universal. It is limited to Western Europe, the United States and individual ‘Westerners’ around the globe, but all the while, as Kotkin sees it, the West is the horizon that all nations can reach if they play by its rules. This makes ‘the West’ a supple term of political art. When the going is good, the West is a limitless formation; when the going gets rough, the West cuts its losses, retreats into itself and publishes books about why it is the best.