‘Fighting shadows’
As Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov put it at a recent press conference, Russia isn’t so much in conflict with Ukraine as at war with the West—the “masters” of Kyiv. Ukraine’s government, he told the BBC, is little more than “a Nazi regime backed by the West to wage war on the Russian Federation.” President Vladimir Putin has long cast Russia as standing against what he calls the “collective West.”
In Beijing, meanwhile, Party officials have been repeating the phrase “the East is rising and the West is declining” ever since Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping used it at a plenary session of the Central Committee back in 2020. Putin and Xi both run autocracies, and the West they describe is the birthplace of democracy and still its heart.
The West, though, has no shortage of would-be champions. The U.S. National Security Strategy claims that Europe faces the “stark prospect of civilizational erasure” of its “Western identity.” This September, the U.S. State Department began moving money out of human rights promotion and into projects that back “Western civilizational norms.” The threat to the West, in other words, is coming from inside the West itself, from European governments lacking in “civilizational self-confidence.”
So how fractured is it, really?
Georgios Varouxakis is a professor of the history of political thought at Queen Mary University of London and the author of The West: The History of an Idea. Varouxakis says there is a crisis—but it’s a crisis over Western leadership, not of the West itself. For more than eight decades, the United States has been the undisputed leader of the West—now, that’s changing. But that Americans and Europeans are arguing so much over who better represents Western values, Varouxakis says, shows just how compelling the whole idea of the West still is …
This feature is open-access, courtesy of the Marlborough House Foundation.
Gustav Jönsson: Lavrov, Putin, and their flunkeys keep saying that Russia is at war with the West. What do they mean by that?
Georgios Varouxakis: They need a civilizational enemy to build cohesion in Russia. The West is therefore convenient. If there wasn’t a West, they’d have to invent it. But there is a West. I’m not arguing there isn’t a West.
By the West, they seem to mean countries that they’re worried might affect their own political system, their own culture, their own youth: dechristianized countries that are open to sexual deviancy, have too many gay people and lesbians, don’t produce enough children, are overly liberal and are to that extent anarchic, have too much immigration, and don’t believe in the nation or Christianity. So in a bizarre way, they’re saying the West is not Western. As they see it, the West has degenerated. It’s just one more version of Occidentalism, if you wish—the idea that the West is rotten. That’s nothing new.
What I find more interesting is that Ukraine has responded to the war by becoming determined to join the West and the European Union. I remember when U.S. President Donald Trump—shamefully, for him and his vice president—humiliated President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in front of the television cameras in the Oval Office. A Ukrainian member of parliament said to the BBC’s Newsnight that same evening, “Why did they do that? Aren’t we all members of the same Western civilization?”
Jönsson: It reminds me of how intellectuals on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain invoked the West, preferring to say they belonged to Central rather than Eastern Europe. But which countries in that part of Europe have people usually counted as Western?
Varouxakis: The “kidnapped West,” as the Czech novelist Milan Kundera famously called it in an article in the 1980s, meant mostly Catholic, former Habsburg Empire countries like Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary that suddenly found themselves in the Eastern Bloc, under Moscow’s rule. They had always seen Russia as civilizationally the Other, and they had all sorts of superiority complexes and fears about it. Suddenly, in the new dispensation of East–West—which was a political, ideological, and geopolitical rather than a cultural divide—they were in the East, which was painful for them because most of these countries had seen themselves as Western, and their aristocracies had rubbed shoulders with the aristocracies of Western Europe.
The very first time people invoked the West, as opposed to Europe, was when they started worrying about Russia. … The whole idea of the West had been to exclude the Orthodox, but now the West invited Greece, an Orthodox people, to join it against Russia, another Orthodox people.
Ukraine is a majority Orthodox country with a minority of Greek Catholics. The equivalent to Ukraine wouldn’t be the Eastern European countries under communist rule in the Cold War; the equivalent would be Greece 200 years ago. During the Greek Revolution of the 1820s—the very moment people first invoked the idea of the West—Western Europeans invited Greece to become a rampart of the West. And it’s fascinating to me because Greece was an Orthodox country, so from the beginning, the West wasn’t exclusively Catholic or Protestant, not exclusively Anglo, German, or Latin; in fact, expansion is coeval with the very emergence of the idea of the West.
At the time, French publicists, journalists, authors, and diplomats started saying that the Ottoman Empire wasn’t the problem. It was dying—the sick man of Europe, as Tsar Nicholas I would later call it. The real problem was Russia, which stood to inherit what the Ottomans left behind. And it wasn’t a secret that the Russians wanted Constantinople.
And so, more and more people started saying, “Greece is a godsend.” Here’s a people that was progressive, had made great strides in letters, education, shipping—the Greek fleet, capable of breaking blockades, was very impressive. The Abbé de Pradt, a French pamphleteer, said, “If the Greek Revolution had not happened, we would have had to invent it.” Greece could join the West as a rampart against Russia. The liberal thinker Benjamin Constant called Greece la garantie véritable de l’Occident contre l’Orient—the real guarantee of the West against the East. If the Greeks lost, he said, the West would lose that guarantee, and he wasn’t talking about the Ottoman Empire. The very first time people invoked the West, as opposed to Europe, was when they started worrying about Russia.
The West, of course, had a core, which was Charlemagne’s Europe, the Western Roman Empire, and the successor states. History books always called it the West, but these peoples never used the word to say who they were now or who they meant to become; for that, they always used “Europe,” or before the late seventeenth century, “Christendom.” When they finally invoked the West as a present identity and a future project, fear of Russia drove them to it. The whole idea of the West had been to exclude the Orthodox, but now the West invited Greece, an Orthodox people, to join it against Russia, another Orthodox people. In a way, it’s the same with Ukraine today. So the West somehow has this inherent open-endedness.
You may laugh, but if you talk to Iranians, they say they’re Europeans, that Iran is the most Western society in the Middle East. You can have a cultural core to which, say, Japan doesn’t belong, along with a political, geopolitical, and economic alliance that constantly shifts with circumstances and can include countries like Japan, as it did during the Cold War.
Jönsson: So it goes back to the Congress of Vienna in 1815: The allies have vanquished Napoleon, but now the Russian Empire is looming.
Varouxakis: And the way to persuade people that I’m not just making this up is to remind them of the following: From the time of Peter the Great, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Europe accepted Russia as one of its own. He imposed Russia on the European political system, and he integrated it culturally: He forced his people to dress and shave like Europeans, and he lavished money on bringing Western scientists, philosophers, and architects to build Saint Petersburg, his new capital on the Baltic Sea. Catherine the Great, who was herself ethnically German, did even more of that. By the end of the eighteenth century, nobody would dispute that Russia was European.
Jönsson: Didn’t Europeans see Russia as a “northern” power? When Sweden fought Russia in the early eighteenth century, people called the war the Great Northern War, not the Great Northern-Eastern War.
Varouxakis: Yes, but that was the problem. If Europe is your identity and you’re terribly worried about Russia dominating Europe, you start thinking, “Wait a minute, this is not the real Europe.” Russia had led the coalitions against the French in the Napoleonic Wars. It had decimated Napoleon’s Grande Armée. Tsar Alexander I had ridden into Paris as a victor—a humiliation for the French. Then he completely dominated the Congress of Vienna through personality, power, and great advisers. And he was very charming with friends and flirtatious with various German ladies. He went on to create the Holy Alliance with Austria and Prussia. So, if you’re French and you see Russia dominating Europe, you start needing a new identity—a new term—in which France would take its rightful place.
Jönsson: You say Putin needs an enemy. To him, the West stands for sexual deviancy and so on. But to your own mind, what is the West?
Varouxakis: I’d describe in positive terms what Putin is afraid of. He worries that if the West incorporates Ukraine, the Russian people will want the same. Of course, many Russians already do, but he fears it may become overwhelming if a prosperous Western liberal democracy thrives in Ukraine. Ukraine has many problems—there’s a lot of corruption—but it’s a relatively small economy that the West can absorb if it decides to. It can help Ukraine in the same way it helped Spain, Portugal, and Greece when they entered the European Union. Ukraine’s 30 million talented people would become an asset for the European Union, once they’ve worked on the corruption and the institutions.
You may laugh, but if you talk to Iranians, they say they’re Europeans, that Iran is the most Western society in the Middle East.
The West has meant all sorts of different things in the past. It isn’t a static identity. When people talk of the West as a good or bad thing, they’re fighting shadows and scarecrows, because the West has evolved over time. In the United Kingdom—as far as I’m concerned, the most liberal country in the West—courts sent gay men to prison in the 1950s. That’s changed. There was the Inquisition a few centuries ago. Horrible things have happened in the West. But the West has evolved into a political culture that respects the equality of the sexes, freedom of sexual orientation, religious freedom, separation of church and state—I could go on. It’s not some eternal Western essence; it’s the result of the history of the West through trials and errors, mistakes, tragedies, crimes, struggles. All of that has produced this culture of relative openness.
When I hear debates about what has shaped the West—is it only Christianity or only humanism or only the Enlightenment—I always reply: It’s all of them. The Enlightenment wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for Christianity. The idea of human equality is a result of Christianity plus some philosophical arguments from the cosmopolitan thinkers of Hellenistic and Roman times. This is not parthenogenesis. This is a series of battles within a conversation. There is such a thing as a Western history. There is a tradition. But it’s constantly changing, and it’s fragile. That’s why we have to treat it with the reverence you’d show a father’s wounds, as the great Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke said.
You don’t just abolish something like the West because there are these very dark periods in our past. My argument is: What are the alternatives? You want to start from scratch? On what basis? Look at what surrounds the West: China and Russia and Islamic regimes like Iran. Next to ideal political theory, the West is far from perfect. Next to the alternatives on offer today, it’s worth improving rather than abolishing.
Friedrich Nietzsche is right that you can’t give a correct or definitive definition of anything with a very long history. He was talking about Christianity. He described how it emerged through layers upon layers of reinterpretation, starting with Paul, who completely changed the emphasis of the Christianity of Jesus Christ; then others came along to change Paul’s teachings, and so on. Each time there’s a reinterpretation, the earlier meanings don’t completely disappear; they lie dormant, like the layers of a palimpsest. Depending on who wins the battle, who speaks louder, who is more vociferous, who has circumstances on their side, earlier layers can come back.
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And so, we now have an American administration saying it’s defending Western civilization against the European Union, and the European Union saying that it’s the Americans who are destroying the West. They’re both talking about the West, but they’re talking about different layers, and they don’t notice the rest of the layers.
Jönsson: Do you see the idea of the West fraying anywhere? I’ve lost count of the books that have come out over the last few years with titles along the lines of “suicide of the West,” “the crackup of the West,” “the death of the West,” or whatnot.
Varouxakis: People will ask me, “Is this the end of the West?” And I’ll reply, “Do you know how many times people have said the West is finished?” Europeans began invoking the West because it was in fatal danger, and in the two centuries since, they’ve kept saying it’s declining and in danger.
But there is a serious crisis over the leadership of the West. The United States has been the undisputed hegemon of the West since the Second World War, with the rest mere satellites. Even the British Empire, after the Suez crisis in 1956, knew who was boss. But the American government is now openly hostile to the European Union—it’s trying to impose its own line on migration, on internal policies, on what it calls “freedom of speech,” on all sorts of things to do with the rights of American companies. So there’s definitely a clash, but I don’t see it as the end of the West. The West has always been an essentially contested term. And now both sides claim to represent the West better.
In a way, that’s a compliment to the viability of the idea of the West. It’s a reminder of how attractive a term it is. It gives gravitas to whoever uses it, which is why I think it was a major mistake for the left and the center to distance themselves from the West over its associations with imperialism and all sorts of bad things in the past. Every history has dark pages, but abandoning terms like “Western civilization” to Trump and his speechwriters is an own goal. The West carries subconscious and half-conscious echoes of cultural, historical, and religious belonging—and the politics of belonging has been very attractive in recent decades. So when a Trump calls himself the only defender of Western civilization and his opponents leave him with it, he wins by default.
