What Does ‘the West’ Mean Today?

In 1989, the prize for Young European Film of the Year, awarded annually by the European Film Academy, went to a feature film about two young boys who escape from communist Poland to Denmark by hiding underneath a truck. The film, 300 Miles to Heaven, was based on a true story that had happened a few years earlier. The boys did not tell their parents anything. In a sense, their story was typical: Throughout the Cold War, thousands of people tried to flee East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and other places behind the Iron Curtain by digging tunnels, flying in balloons, or hiding in vehicles crossing the heavily guarded border. In 1980s Eastern Europe, even children had no doubt that the “heaven” in the movie’s title meant the capitalist West, not their own countries’ Marxist utopia. In the last scene of the film, the boys call home. When asked if their parents were angry and whether they should return, their father shouts, with tears in his eyes: “Don’t ever come back! Do you hear me?”

For nearly half a century, ordinary citizens, politicians, and scholars all knew what the West was. The idea of a well-defined West shaped the global perception of reality. From morning to night, the confrontation between the West and the East—sometimes called the First World and Second World—was covered by the mass media with political pathos, moral intensity, and emotional clarity. Today, the situation looks different. The shared definition of “the West” seems to be fading. Already after the collapse of communism, scholars began to question what the West actually was, now that its ideological adversary had disappeared. Does it refer to the European Union plus the United States and Canada? If so, what about Australia, Japan, and South Korea? With successive waves of democratization, the concept of the West began to spread beyond its traditional geographic transatlantic boundaries, taking on a civilizational rather than a merely geographical meaning. Yet the most difficult challenge for the West was still to come.

For nearly half a century, ordinary citizens, politicians, and scholars all knew what the West was. The idea of a well-defined West shaped the global perception of reality. From morning to night, the confrontation between the West and the East—sometimes called the First World and Second World—was covered by the mass media with political pathos, moral intensity, and emotional clarity. Today, the situation looks different. The shared definition of “the West” seems to be fading. Already after the collapse of communism, scholars began to question what the West actually was, now that its ideological adversary had disappeared. Does it refer to the European Union plus the United States and Canada? If so, what about Australia, Japan, and South Korea? With successive waves of democratization, the concept of the West began to spread beyond its traditional geographic transatlantic boundaries, taking on a civilizational rather than a merely geographical meaning. Yet the most difficult challenge for the West was still to come.

For at least a decade, the West has been undergoing an ideological bifurcation. This is arguably most evident from the perspective of countries that once imported the West’s constitutional and political patterns. If Taiwan or Estonia were to undertake this task today, they would face a choice à la carte. Is it the West of the Trump-era United States? Is it the West of Europe’s major liberal democracies? Is it the West of those members of the European Union that, like the United States, have chosen or may soon choose a less liberal path? The dilemma is not an abstract one. In order to survive on the map, small countries usually have to adapt to new conditions in the international arena. But which of the West’s multiple directions is normative today?

It is in this context that Georgios Varouxakis has written a much-needed book: The West: The History of an Idea. Varouxakis, a professor of the history of political thought at Queen Mary University of London, aims to pin down a protean concept that has long frustrated scholars in his discipline. Born in Crete under the Greek military dictatorship, Varouxakis studied in Greece and the United Kingdom. At the outset of the book, he recalls how central the notion of “the West” was for countries such as his own.

In the 1970s and thereafter, Greece was in search of an answer to the question of its own identification. Athens as the cradle of democracy was ancient history. Modern Greece belonged to NATO from 1952 but was not, for a considerable part of the 20th century, a democracy. Between 1967 and 1974, it was ruled by a right-wing military junta. Greece’s population was predominantly Eastern Orthodox, not Catholic or Protestant, and still digesting a legacy of centuries of Ottoman rule. The country did not belong to the European Economic Community, the predecessor of what is now the European Union. Nevertheless, after the fall of the junta, Prime Minister Konstantinos Karamanlis firmly declared on behalf of all Greeks that “We belong to the West.”

Little surprise, perhaps, that Varouxakis—who was 7 years old when the dictatorship collapsed—undertook to clarify a concept that is as politically charged as it is elusive. His childhood memories remind us that the magnetism of political cultures—what one might call “soft power” today—can leave an indelible mark on intellectual biography. The kaleidoscope of quotations in his book testifies to a Herculean scholarly effort. Varouxakis begins in antiquity, tracing how a sense of cultural superiority—more than geography—defined the “civilized” part of the ancient world. The center of civilization of what was later called “Europe” moves from Greece to Rome, from Rome to Byzantium, and later to Aachen (from where Charlemagne ruled his West European empire) and many other sites. The terms “Europe” and “Christianity”—though not synonymous—constitute the conceptual ancestors of the term “West.” Varouxakis credits Auguste Comte, a 19th century French scholar, as the foundational figure who shaped our modern idea of the West as a sociopolitical entity, a community bound by shared institutions and aspirations.

The fresco The School of Athens by Raphael, on display in the Vatican Museums in Rome on Aug. 4, 2012Lucas Schifres via Getty Images

In recent years, scholars have increasingly argued that the term “the West” is analytically vague and ideologically dangerous. Some authors predict the West’s geopolitical meltdown, for which Samir Puri borrowed the metaphor “Westlessness” in his 2024 book of the same title. Naoise Mac Sweeney, in her bestselling The West: A New History of an Old Idea, urged readers “to rid ourselves of the Grand Narrative of Western Civilization, putting it firmly aside as both factually incorrect and ideologically outdated.” Despite such iconoclasm, “the West” has not disappeared from discourse. Encyclopedia Britannica still defines “Western world” as “a cultural-geographic descriptor generally referring to the countries of western Europe and nations originating as western European settler colonies.” Varouxakis accepts this broad frame but seeks to fill it with historical and intellectual content as broad as possible, from sources in classical antiquity to the speeches of Donald Trump.

Varouxakis’s book is both chronological and thematic, but its primary limitation is the absence of a usable classification system for readers seeking to navigate the labyrinth. Thus, his declared aim—to transcend the ivory tower and offer conceptual tools of social relevance—remains only partly fulfilled. While Mac Sweeney and other deconstructive scholars want to discard the idea of a West, Varouxakis is more inclined to reclaim its positive intellectual heritage. This stance may reflect his lived experience of Greece’s democratic transformation after authoritarian rule. In that light, one may regret that he makes such sparing use of the Greek perspective. Although this is a book on the history of an idea, a more explicit engagement with the lived experience of Westernization from what came before could have greatly enhanced the book’s contemporary resonance.

The list of authors analyzed is impressive, although not all of them are given equal attention. After stepping off this conceptual merry-go-round, one encounters an empirical wall. Ultimately, in the contest between democratic and non-democratic traditions within the West, Varouxakis sides with the former. He endorses liberal democracy, the rule of law, and pluralistic tolerance as the defining features of the West—even as he presents rival interpretations, including Trump’s and other populist redefinitions of Western politics. This choice, though intellectually defensible, arises from a normative standpoint that seems entirely external to the book itself. In the 21st century, readers are left confronting an ideological battlefield over the “correct” meaning of the West. Given what we have just read, any claim to exclusive or conclusive ownership of the term is ultimately arbitrary. One can just as easily read the entire book and choose a different West than Varouxakis. James Kurth, for instance, has proposed an alternative program for defending the West not on the basis of liberal norms but “in the name of religion, nations, families, and high culture.”

The contemporary understanding of the West as a democratic political culture owes more to post-1945 sociopolitical practice than to the theories, debates, and realities that came before. While it matters how someone like Comte conceived the West, it matters equally how ordinary citizens and policymakers experienced it after World War II—which other scholars, such as Paul Betts and Martin Conway, have emphasized. In this vein, Odd Arne Westad provocatively suggested that until the 1950s, the concept of the West was “meaningless,” lacking the political, military, economic, and cultural cohesion that postwar institutions later provided.

Berliners crowd in front of the Berlin Wall as they watch border guards demolish a section near Potsdam Square in Berlin on Nov. 11, 1989. Gerard Malie/AFP via Getty Images

Above all, the concept of the West endures in the rhetoric of its opponents. Russia’s rhetoric plainly names “the West”—sometimes “the collective West”—as its adversary. Denouncing “Western hegemony” has become a diplomatic ritual in Beijing, Moscow, and elsewhere. Ironically, since 1989, the West has never been so ideologically divided, but its critics want to see only an oppressive monolith.

Contrary to those scholars who dismiss the concept of a West, it remains analytically useful—if only to clarify what the current struggle within the West is about. As Philippe Nemo argued in his short but remarkable book, What Is the West?, originally published in French in 2004, the Western project can be perceived as a succession of intellectual and moral stages. From this perspective, today’s contest over the meaning of “West” could thus be seen as a struggle over which historical layer should serve as inspiration: that which came before or after the post-1945 development of the West as a cohesive, transnational liberal project? Both can legitimately claim the name, though they diverge in spirit and practice.

Many have argued that Trumpism and other populist movements represent a post-liberal phenomenon—a reaction to the perceived failures of the dominant ideology shaping so much of the world since the end of the Cold War. Reading Varouxakis, however, convinces us that the ideas espoused by the new populists are, in fact, retrograde. What emerges is not a forward-looking redefinition of identity—whether Western, national, or something else. It is rather an exercise in ideological excavation—politicians rummaging through the dumping ground of discarded intellectual traditions in search of usable fragments. In this, the book aligns with the broader pattern identified, for instance, by Matthew Rose in his insightful World after Liberalism: Philosophers of the Radical Right, where the post-liberal right is shown to be animated less by political innovation than by selective nostalgia. This recycling of ideas has political appeal for many voters. After all, not everyone seeks novelty in the political bazaar.

Another insight from Varouxakis’s book is that the most politically potent and historically durable concepts are precisely those that are emotionally charged and flexible in meaning. As Augustine of Hippo mused about the meaning of time, “If no one asks me, I know what it is; if I wish to explain it to him who asks me, I do not know.” So too with the West: Semantic indeterminacy is partly the source of its political vitality. The societies on the periphery of the West are acutely aware of this continued vitality: They understand the practical stakes of belonging to a political culture long identified with freedom and stability—especially when both are under threat from authoritarian or totalitarian forces within and without. This was true in Greece, Portugal, and Spain during the 1970s, in post-communist Europe after 1989, and in Ukraine today. No one in Kyiv needs to be persuaded of the enduring truth behind Karamanlis’ declaration that his country belonged to the West.

Of course, once a country joins this exclusive club, it gains the Western right to question itself endlessly—to Hamletize, as it were, over what “West” actually means. And therein lies the irony of the West’s enduring intellectual and political legacy.