The Western world, also known as the West, primarily refers to various nations and states in Europe, Northern America, and Australasia; with some debate as to whether those in the former Soviet Union and Latin America, even though its cultures are derived from Iberian cultures, also constitute the West. The Western world likewise is called the Occident (from Latin occidens 'setting down, sunset, west') in contrast to the Eastern world known as the Orient (from Latin oriens 'origin, sunrise, east'). Definitions of the "Western world" vary according to context and perspectives; the West is an evolving concept made up of cultural, political, and economic synergy among diverse groups of people, and not a rigid region with fixed borders and members.
Ancient Greece and Rome are widely regarded as the birthplaces of Western civilization. A geographical concept of the West started to take shape in the 4th century CE when Constantine, the first Christian Roman emperor, divided the Roman Empire between the Greek East and Latin West. The East Roman Empire, later called the Byzantine Empire, continued for a millennium, while the West Roman Empire lasted for only about a century and a half. Significant theological and ecclesiastical differences led Western Europeans to consider the Christians in the Byzantine Empire as heretics. In 1054 CE, when the church in Rome excommunicated the patriarch of Byzantium, the politico-religious division between the Western church and Eastern church culminated in the Great Schism or the East–West Schism. Even though friendly relations continued between the two parts of Christendom for some time, the crusades made the schism definitive with hostility. The West during these crusades tried to capture trade routes to the East and failed, it instead discovered the Americas. In the aftermath of the European colonization of the Americas, primarily involving Western European powers, an idea of the "Western" world, as an inheritor of Latin Christendom emerged. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest reference to the term "Western world" was from 1586, found in the writings of William Warner.
The countries that are considered constituents of the West vary according to perspective rather than their geographical location. Countries like Australia and New Zealand, located in the Eastern Hemisphere are included in modern definitions of the Western world, as these regions and others like them have been significantly influenced by the British—derived from colonization, and immigration of Europeans—factors that grounded such countries to the West. Depending on the context and the historical period in question, Russia has sometimes been seen as a part of the West, and at other times juxtaposed with it, as well as endorsing anti-Western sentiment. The United States became more prominently featured in the conceptualizations of the West as it rose as a great power, amidst the development of communication–transportation technologies like the telegraph and railroads "shrinking" the distance between both the Atlantic Ocean shores.
At some times between the 18th century and the mid-20th century, prominent countries in the West, such as the United States, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Australia, and New Zealand, have been envisioned by some as ethnocracies for Whites. Racism is claimed as a contributing factor to Western European colonization of the New World, which today constitutes much of the geographical Western world-split between Global North and Global South. Starting from the late 1960s, certain parts of the Western world have become notable for their diversity due to immigration and changes in fertility rates. The idea of "the West" over the course of time has evolved from a directional concept to a socio-political concept, temporalized and rendered as a concept of the future bestowed with notions of progress and modernity.
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Introduction
The origins of Western civilization can be traced back to the ancient Mediterranean world. Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome are generally considered to be the birthplaces of Western civilization—Greece having heavily influenced Rome—the former due to its impact on philosophy, democracy, science, aesthetics, as well as building designs and proportions and architecture; the latter due to its influence on art, law, warfare, governance, republicanism, engineering and religion. Western Civilization is also closely associated with Christianity, the dominant religion in the West, with roots in Greco-Roman and Jewish thought. Christian ethics, drawing from the ethical and moral principles of its historical roots in Judaism, has played a pivotal role in shaping the foundational framework of Western societies. Earlier civilizations, such as the ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians, had also significantly influenced Western civilization through their advancements in writing, law codes, and societal structures. The convergence of Greek-Roman and Judeo-Christian influences in shaping Western civilization has led certain scholars to characterize it as emerging from the legacies of Athens and Jerusalem, or Athens, Jerusalem and Rome.
In ancient Greece and Rome, individuals identified primarily as subjects of states, city-states, or empires, rather than as members of Western civilization. The distinct identification of Western civilization began to crystallize with the rise of Christianity during the Late Roman Empire. In this period, peoples in Europe started to perceive themselves as part of a unique civilization, differentiating from others like Islam, giving rise to the concept of Western civilization. By the 15th century, Renaissance intellectuals solidified this concept, associating Western civilization not only with Christianity but also with the intellectual and political achievements of the ancient Greeks and Romans.
Historians, such as Carroll Quigley in "The Evolution of Civilizations", contend that Western civilization was born around AD 500, after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, leaving a vacuum for new ideas to flourish that were impossible in Classical societies. In either view, between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the Renaissance, the West (or those regions that would later become the heartland of the culturally "western sphere") experienced a period of decline, and then readaptation, reorientation and considerable renewed material, technological and political development. Classical culture of the ancient Western world was partly preserved during this period due to the survival of the Eastern Roman Empire and the introduction of the Catholic Church; it was also greatly expanded by the Arab importation of both the Ancient Greco-Roman and new technology through the Arabs from India and China to Europe.
Historical divisions
The west of the Mediterranean region during antiquity
The geopolitical divisions in Europe that created a concept of East and West originated in the ancient tyrannical and imperialistic Graeco-Roman times. The Eastern Mediterranean was home to the highly urbanized cultures that had Greek as their common language (owing to the older empire of Alexander the Great and of the Hellenistic successors), whereas the West was much more rural in its character and more readily adopted Latin as its common language. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the linguistic and cultural distinction between a predominantly Latin West and Greek East persisted; Byzantine missionary activity later transmitted Eastern Christianity and Graeco-Roman cultural forms to many Slavic peoples.
Roman Catholic Western and Central Europe thus maintained a distinct identity, particularly as it began to redevelop during the Renaissance. Even following the Protestant Reformation, Protestant Europe continued to see itself as more tied to Roman Catholic Europe than other parts of the perceived "civilized world". Use of the term West as a specific cultural and geopolitical term developed over the course of the Age of Exploration as Europe spread its culture to other parts of the world. Roman Catholics were the first major religious group to migrate to the New World, as settlers in the colonies of Spain and Portugal (and later, France) belonged to that faith. English and Dutch colonies, on the other hand, tended to be more religiously diverse. Settlers to these colonies included Anglicans, Dutch Calvinists, English Puritans and other nonconformists, English Catholics, Scottish Presbyterians, French Huguenots, German and Swedish Lutherans, as well as Quakers, Mennonites, Amish, and Moravians.
Ancient Rome (6th century BC – AD 476) is a term to describe the ancient Roman society that conquered Central Italy assimilating the Italian Etruscan culture, growing from the Latium region since about the 8th century BC, to a massive empire straddling the Mediterranean Sea. In its 10-centuries territorial expansion, Roman civilization shifted from a small monarchy (753–509 BC), to a republic (509–27 BC), into an autocratic empire (27 BC – AD 476). Its Empire came to dominate Western, Central and Southeastern Europe, Northern Africa and, becoming an autocratic Empire a vast Middle Eastern area, when it ended. Conquest was enforced using the Roman legions and then through cultural assimilation by eventual recognition of some form of Roman citizenship's privileges. Nonetheless, despite its great legacy, a combination of political instability, civil war, fiscal and military pressures, and external invasions contributed to the long decline and eventual fall of the Western Roman Empire.
The birth of the European West during the Middle Ages
In the early 4th century, the central focus of power was on two separate imperial legacies within the Roman Empire: the older Aegean Sea Greek heritage (of Classical Greece) in the Eastern Mediterranean, and the newer most successful Tyrrhenian Sea Latin heritage (of Ancient Latium and Tuscany) in the Western Mediterranean. A turning point was Constantine the Great's decision to establish the city of Constantinople (today's Istanbul) in modern-day Turkey as the "New Rome" when he picked it as capital of his Empire (later called "Byzantine Empire" by modern historians) in AD 330.
The eastern and western halves of the Roman world developed distinct political and linguistic profiles over several centuries. Constantine established Constantinople as an imperial capital in 330, and after the death of Theodosius I in 395 the empire was governed permanently by separate eastern and western courts. The Christianization of imperial government also accelerated during the fourth century, especially under Theodosius I.
The Eastern Roman Empire included lands south-west of the Black Sea and bordering on the Eastern Mediterranean and parts of the Adriatic Sea. The older Greek–Latin cultural division was later reflected in the developing separation between Latin Christianity centered on Rome and Greek Christianity centered on Constantinople, although the ecclesiastical break was gradual and involved disputes over doctrine, jurisdiction, and practice rather than a simple dispute over a single religious capital.
As the Eastern (Orthodox) and Western (Catholic) churches spread their influence, the line between Eastern and Western Christianity was moving. Its movement was affected by the influence of the Byzantine empire and the fluctuating power and influence of the Catholic church in Rome. The resulting confessional geography broadly overlapped with older linguistic and political divisions, but it was never a perfectly fixed boundary.
On Christmas Day 800, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne emperor in Rome. The act revived an imperial title in the Latin West and created a serious problem of legitimacy in relations with the Byzantine emperor, but it is misleading to describe Charlemagne's realm straightforwardly as the later Holy Roman Empire; the imperial line conventionally associated with that polity was revived under Otto I in 962.
Expansion of the West: the Era of Colonialism (15th–20th centuries)
In the 13th and 14th centuries, a number of European travelers, many of them Christian missionaries, had sought to cultivate trading with Asia and Africa. With the Crusades came the relative contraction of the Orthodox Byzantine's large silk industry in favor of Catholic Western Europe and the rise of Western Papacy. The most famous of these merchant travelers pursuing East–west trade was Venetian Marco Polo. These journeys expanded European geographical knowledge but did not create a durable European-controlled route to Asian markets. In the fifteenth century, Portuguese rulers increasingly sponsored Atlantic and African exploration in search of direct maritime access to the sources of valuable Asian trade goods; Ottoman expansion in the eastern Mediterranean was one factor in this changing commercial environment, but the common claim that the Ottomans simply 'closed' all overland routes is an oversimplification.
The Portuguese spearheaded the drive to find oceanic routes that would provide cheaper and easier access to South and East Asian goods, by advancements in maritime technology such as the caravel ship introduced in the mid-1400s. The charting of oceanic routes between East and West began with the unprecedented voyages of Portuguese and Spanish sea captains. In 1492, European colonialism expanded across the globe with the exploring voyage of merchant, navigator, and Hispano-Italian colonizer Christopher Columbus. Such voyages were influenced by medieval European adventurers after the European spice trade with Asia, who had journeyed overland to the Far East contributing to geographical knowledge of parts of the Asian continent. They are of enormous significance in Western history as they marked the beginning of the European exploration, colonization and exploitation of the American continents and their native inhabitants. The European colonization of the Americas led to the Atlantic slave trade between the 1490s and the 1800s, which also contributed to the development of African intertribal warfare and racist ideology. Before the abolition of its slave trade in 1807, the British Empire alone (which had started colonial efforts in 1578, almost a century after Portuguese and Spanish empires) was responsible for the transportation of 3.5 million African slaves to the Americas, a third of all slaves transported across the Atlantic. The Holy Roman Empire was dissolved in 1806 amid the Napoleonic reorganization of Germany. The various inquisitorial institutions of the Catholic world were abolished at different times and places rather than in one single event immediately following 1806.
Cold War (1947–1991)
During the Cold War, geopolitical writing commonly distinguished a U.S.-led or capitalist "First World" from a Soviet-led communist "Second World"; the term "Third World" came to be associated especially with newly independent and developing states, many of which sought to avoid formal alignment with either superpower through the Non-Aligned Movement.
The Soviet-led bloc included the Soviet Union and the members of the Warsaw Pact, while the U.S.-led alliance system included NATO and other partners. Neutral European countries do not fit neatly into the three-world schema and should not automatically be classified as "Third World" merely because they were non-aligned. Finland, for example, pursued a policy of Cold War neutrality while maintaining its independence and a market economy.
Spain joined NATO on 30 May 1982, seven years after Franco's death. The Cold War ended through a sequence of events including reforms under Mikhail Gorbachev, the revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe, German reunification, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991.
Modern definitions
The exact scope of the Western world is somewhat subjective in nature, depending on whether cultural, economic, spiritual or political criteria are employed. It is a generally accepted Western view to recognize the existence of at least three "major worlds" (or "cultures", or "civilizations"), broadly in contrast with the Western: the Eastern world, the Arab and the African worlds, with no clearly specified boundaries. Additionally, Latin American and Orthodox European worlds are sometimes either a sub-civilization within Western civilization or separately considered "akin" to the West.
Many anthropologists, sociologists and historians oppose "the West and the Rest" in a categorical manner. The same has been done by Malthusian demographers with a sharp distinction between European and non-European family systems. Among anthropologists, this includes Durkheim, Dumont, and Lévi-Strauss.
Cultural definition
The Oxford English dictionary noted that the earliest use of the term "Western world" in the English language was in 1586, found in the writings of William Warner.
In modern usage, Western world refers to Europe and to areas whose populations largely originate from Europe, through the Age of Discovery's imperialism.
In the 20th century, Christianity declined in influence in many Western countries, mostly in the European Union where some member states have experienced falling church attendance and membership in recent years, and also elsewhere.
Secularism (separating religion from politics and science) increased. However, while church attendance is in decline, in some Western countries (i.e. Italy, Poland, and Portugal), more than half of the people state that religion is important, and most Westerners nominally identify themselves as Christians (e.g. 59% in the United Kingdom) and attend church on major occasions, such as Christmas and Easter. In the Americas, Christianity continues to play an important societal role, though in areas such as Canada, a low level of religiosity is common due to a European-type secularization. The official religions of the United Kingdom and some Nordic countries are forms of Christianity, while the majority of European countries have no official religion. Despite this, Christianity, in its different forms, remains the largest faith in most Western countries.
Christianity remains the dominant religion in the Western world, where 70% are Christians. A 2011 Pew Research Center survey found that 76.2% of Europeans, 73.3% in Oceania, and about 86.0% in the Americas (90% in Latin America and the Caribbean and 77.4% in Northern America) described themselves as Christians.
Since the mid-twentieth century, the west became known for its irreligious sentiments, following the Age of Enlightenment and the French Revolution, inquisitions were abolished in the 19th and 20th centuries, this hastened the separation of church and state, and secularization of the Western world where unchurched spirituality is gaining more prominence over organized religion.
Certain parts of the Western world have become notable for their diversity since the late 1960s.
Economic definition
The term "Western world" is sometimes interchangeably used with the term First World or developed countries, stressing the difference between First World and the Third World or developing countries. This usage occurs despite the fact that many countries that may be culturally Western are developing countries – in fact, a significant percentage of the Americas are developing countries. It is also used despite many developed countries or regions not being culturally Western (e.g. Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao). Privatization policies (involving government enterprises and public services) and multinational corporations are often considered a visible sign of Western nations' economic presence, especially in Third World countries, and represent a common institutional environment for powerful politicians, enterprises, trade unions and firms, bankers and thinkers of the Western world.
Other views
A series of scholars of civilization, including Arnold J. Toynbee, Alfred Kroeber and Carroll Quigley have identified and analyzed "Western civilization" as one of the civilizations that have historically existed and still exist today. Toynbee entered into quite an expansive mode, including as candidates those countries or cultures who became so heavily influenced by the West as to adopt these borrowings into their very self-identity. Carried to its limit, this would in practice include almost everyone within the West, in one way or another. In particular, Toynbee refers to the intelligentsia formed among the educated elite of countries impacted by the European expansion of centuries past. While often pointedly nationalist, these cultural and political leaders interacted within the West to such an extent as to change both themselves and the West.
The theologian and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin conceived of the West as the set of civilizations descended from the Nile Valley Civilization of Egypt.
The idea of "the West" over the course of time has evolved from a directional concept to a sociopolitical concept, and has been temporalized and rendered as a concept of the future bestowed with notions of progress and modernity.