Georgios Varouxakis, The West: The History of an Idea (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2025).
Reviewed by Ayesha Shaikh
The world is witnessing the collapse of the Western order, if not the emergence of an alternative one. The idea of ‘West’ as against the rest is still at the root of contemporary understanding of world politics. Georgios Varouxakis, a remarkable voice on Modernity and Nationalism, has provided the historical origins and modern connotations attached with the idea of ‘West’. In his book ‘The West: The History of an Idea’, Varouxakis has argued that the West is not an eternal entity, rather it is a modern socio-political construct that emerged in the political philosophy of the early 19th century and evolved with the passage of time. The book provides an in-depth historical analysis of the idea to determine the roots of its modern interpretation.
The existing literature on the emergence of the idea of ‘West’ endorses two distinct takes. Firstly, from the ‘Plato to NATO’ perspective, which establishes an ever-running linkage between the ancient Greek political thought and the contemporary Western political thought. Whereas the second perspective locates the origin of contemporary understanding of ‘West’ in the Imperial history of Britain. Varouxakis, however, challenges both of these notions when he presents that the idea emerged with the philosophy of Auguste Comte.
In 1820-1830s, in the wake of the Greek Revolution and what the author terms the ‘Russian Menace,’ the European states desired to establish an identity of Europe excluding Russia. In this context, Auguste Comte’s provision of the idea of ‘West’ in the ‘Western Republic’ provided the optimal discourse. While Comte’s discourse presented the West as an anti-imperial tradition, ironically, the idea was also endorsed by the British Imperial tradition to identify the supranational entity, excluding Russia. The idea was exported to America through German-educated Americans and European immigrants, where it associated a supremacist civilizational connotation with it. The conventional Afro-American understanding of the term, for instance, the work of Du Bois, viewed the ‘western civilization’ as a standard to be attained through education.
In the 20th century, the idea witnessed two major wars and the Cold War. On the eve of World War I, Germany came up with an alternative vision of Supreme German Kulture as against the superficial Western Zivilisation. At the same time, the fracture in discourse allowed the non-native voices like Rabindranath Tagore to criticise the moral standing of the idea and the civilisation. However, the Western apologists, like Walter Lippmann, defended the idea of Western Civilisation by advocating for the Atlantic Community. Nonetheless, the inter-war period witnessed tumultuous developments with Oswald Spengler’s ‘The Decline of the West’ on the one hand and Henri Massis’s ‘Defence of the West’ on the other. The horrors of war also instilled civilisation awareness among the Black intellectuals, but the idea persisted. During the WW II, the Soviet Union temporarily joined the Western camp, and thus the debate took a transient shift towards the threat of Americanisation of Europe. However, in the aftermath of WW II, the Cold War again classified the idea into its conventional understanding, against the Eastern bloc of communism. The author has termed this period as the spiritual consolidation of the idea, as it seeped its roots into the ideological antagonism against the East.
The end of cold-war also brought an end to the unilateral consensus on the idea of the West. The literature witnessed the emergence of conflictual thoughts like the universal model of Francis Fukuyama and the pluralistic understanding of Samuel P Huntington. Overall, the idea of ‘West’ is a sedimentation of the numerous connotations attached to it throughout history. Furthermore, the author criticises that the Western ownership of universal moral values like ‘democracy’ and ‘liberal humanitarian order’ is unfounded. Thus, the idea, its connotation, and manifestation are contested in essence.
The central challenge posed to the author of this book was the inherent indefinability of the idea with a history of its own. The study demanded a discursive re-examination of the history to deconstruct the established meaning. The author presented a tangible argument in what he terms non-academic language, without heavy jargon. The book presents evidence from different languages and genres to trace the broader understanding of the discourse at any given time. It has not only resorted to the Western take on the West, but also the non-Western voices, to provide an unconventional and all-encompassing historical analysis. However, the book assumes the reader to have a thorough understanding of Western history that goes in the backdrop of the chronology explained. Moreover, the author concludes with the thought that the idea of ‘West’ in its essence will always remain relevant for global politics; however, the existing global scenario as well as the evidence presented in the book itself suggests otherwise. The idea has managed to coexist with other alternative connotations and contradictory discourses.
Ayesha Shaikh is a Research Assistant at the Centre for Aerospace & Security Studies (CASS), Islamabad, Pakistan. The article was first published in The News. She can be reached at [email protected]
