The West’s West and the rest’s West

A new history of a loaded term

The historian Georgios Varouxakis starts his new book with his own first encounters with the idea of the West. His native Crete « lies at the intersection between three continents », he explains, and as a Greek he was to « inhabit a complex mix of heritages »:

Did I have to choose between being Western and being Eastern? Were these self-contained entities with different essences, or were they just words, sweeping generalisations, or at least changeable, flexible narratives? Could one have multiple identities, or did one have to choose?

Varouxakis’s book is primarily about Westerners’ own conception of the West — an approach that allows him to prove that even within the so-called West, the notion was not a coherent container. It is as much a history of terms and discourses as it is about ideas, and it starts the historical clock on those terms pointedly late. Most historians trace the concept of the West back to Herodotus in the fifth century BC, when the « western » Greeks fought the « eastern » Persians. In fact, Varouxakis writes, « ‘The West’ as a potential political entity based on civilisational commonality is a modern idea that arose in the first half of the nineteenth century. »

To be sure, the « ecclesiastical distinction between Eastern and Western Christian churches was centuries old »: long before the nineteenth century, « the Greek Orthodox spoke of ‘Western’ ‘Franks’ », and the division between « the Western Roman Empire, or the Latin (Catholic) Church as opposed to the Greek (‘Eastern’) Orthodox Church, remained significant, too. » But Varouxakis is determined to isolate his inquiry from these longer-standing ecclesiastical or civil divisions.