Holland, and Switzerland (map B).

Transcription

1 Where and What is the West? Haberman, Arthur and Adrian Shubert The West and the World: Contacts, Conflicts, Connections. Toronto: Gage Publishing Inc. What is the West and how is it different from the rest of the world? Though we often encounter the term "the West," its meaning is sometimes elusive, because as an idea, or as a civilization, or as a geographical entity, it has changed, and continues to change, over time. The West denotes an area distinct from areas located in the north, east, and south. Even then, its location is unclear. There is an absolute north fixed by the polestar, but there is no such fixed point thai divides the Earth along an east-west axis. "The distinction of North and South is real and intelligible... But the difference of East and West is arbitrary and shifts round the globe."(gibbon 1986: 2)The West also conjures up a variety of ideas and images, ranging from the cities of London, Paris, and New York, to houses of parliament, to Hollywood movies, to factories and skyscrapers, to cowboys and jeans, to a political attitude. There has been no agreement on the places that make up the West, as the maps shown here illustrate. Some consider the core of the West to be the area known as Latin Christendom (map A). Yet others define its limits even more narrowly, including only Britain, France, Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland (map B). During the Cold War, in the period after World War II, the West was denned as Western Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and, sometimes, Japan (map C). Some

2 authors propose a broader cultural West that includes Western Europe, North America, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and, occasionally, the Philippines, but not Japan (map D). People who focus on "racial" origins include only those parts of Latin America where the population is predominantly European in origin Argentina, Uruguay,and southern Brazil, but not Mexico. Our definition of the West takes into account its changing nature over the past five hundred years. Geographically, the West refers to Europe, including Russia and Turkey, and the significant European settler colonies in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Culturally, the West incorporates a dual heritage of Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures, which are generally acknowledged as forming the basis of Western civilization, although it owes a debt to Islam for preserving a portion of the former, as well as for providing its own contributions. The West also includes a shared heritage of medieval Europe and ideas growing out of the Renaissance. Over the past five hundred years, the West has developed systems of belief based on the concepts of individual rights and constitutional government. The West has an economic core by which it has transformed itself and others through trade, industry, and technology. Artists, writers, and builders have helped shape Western attitudes toward human nature, social justice, truth, and beauty, while frequently drawing on models and inspiration from elsewhere. One important thing to keep in mind as you read this book is that the West is always in the process of becoming; it is never fully in a state of being. The West changes along with historical developments,and its central principles are interpreted differently at different times. It has been a powerful force in the world during the last five hundred years. Yet, there has always been a gap between Western ideals and the reality of its societies and its relations with others. Thus, we see the West as real, but fluid and evolving. We do not fully share the widely held belief in a "Western Civilization" based on a set of timeless and unique ideas and institutions. Samuel Huntington, a contemporary advocate of the need for the West to defend itself against what he sees as other, hostile civilizations, lists "individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of church and state" as "Western ideas [that] often have little resonance in Islamic, Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, Buddhist or Orthodox cultures." (Huntington 1996:40) This is a hotly contested view of the West, and one we question. Such a concept of the West relies on three separate but related premises. The first is a highly selective view of Western history. To see freedom as a permanent characteristic of Western civilization requires turning a blind eye to what actually happened during many centuries. According to historian William McNeill:

3 Within the European past, attention focussed on times and places where Freedom flourished or faced critical challenge. Classical antiquity, the barbarian invasions, the rise of representative institutions in the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation, the Enlightenment, all the magnificent advances of the nineteenth century were what deserved to be studied; eras of darkness and despotism could be properly skipped over since they made no contribution to the main stream of human achievement. (McNeill 1995: 11) Inevitably, the result was an incomplete, if not distorted view, of Western civilization. In fact, most of what are deemed to be essential and permanent characteristics of Western civilization became realities only recently. Human rights were limited to a relatively small group of people until the twentieth century. The separation of church and state in the West did not come into existence until the late eighteenth century, and then only in the United States. Even today, the role of religion in matters of state and law is controversial. Equality under the law is relatively new; social and economic equality continue to be issues of debate. Another way to selectively define the West is to consider it as a culture of intellectuals, referring to specific sources, above all its Great Books, such as The Bible, and works by Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Descartes, Dostoyevsky, and Dickens. Such an approach assumes the works of these masters are the essence of a society. Those who take this approach may see little need to concern themselves with actual history, and especially with the lives of the vast majority, most of whom were illiterate until quite recently. Thus, a small number of works produced by an elite are seen to reflect the experiences and the lives of millions over centuries. At one time, historians were themselves part of this elite, interpreting the past from a Western perspective. The West can also be defined by contrasting it with other civilizations, but only after they have been defined in a highly selective way. The most frequent contrast is with something called the East, or the Orient, or simply Asia, which includes India, Japan, China, and the Islamic world. The countries in this area are as different from each other as each is from the West. Yet, they are sometimes presented as an undifferentiated whole that shares fundamental characteristics that are diametrically opposed to those of the West. The Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has described this approach. The West is seen, in effect, as having exclusive access to the values that lie at the foundation of rationality and reasoning, science and evidence, liberty and tolerance, and of course rights and justice. Through selective emphases that point up differences [rather than similarities] with the West, other civilizations can... be redefined in alien terms,

4 which can be exotic and charming, or else bizarre and terrifying, or simply strange and engaging. (Sen 2000: 36) Sen gives the example of Indian culture, which for Westerners has meant only the study of Indian religious texts, but not works of literature, mathematics,economics, and natural science. How does the usual Western image of India absorb a figure such as Madhava, a mathematician from Kerala who "developed his own system of calculus based on his knowledge of trigonometry around 1500 A.D. [CE], more than a century before either Newton or Leibniz"?5 How does such an image account for the ideas of Akbar, the Mughal emperor of India ( ), who decreed in his multi-religious realm that the state guarantee "no man should be interfered with on account of religion, and anyone is allowed to go over to a religion that pleases him"? These ideas were being developed at precisely the same time in the West, but with greater continuity. The contrast between rationality and mysticism has been a central point of distinction between West and East. This contrast ignores much in both Western and non-western history. Some Western religious thought falls within the mystical tradition, while India, China, and the Islamic world all have histories in which there are periods of reason-based thought and scientific discovery. The Sung period in China ( CE) was an important era of rationalist thought long before Europe's Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. Jacques Gernet has written: What is strikingly manifest [in the Sung period] is the advent of a practical rationalism based on experiment, the putting of inventions, ideas and theories to the test. We find curiosity at work in every realm of knowledge arts, technology natural sciences, mathematics, society, institutions, politics. (Little 1997: 3) Gernet maintains there are differences between the West and other civilizations. Each is indeed "unique," but these differences should not prevent us from appreciating similarities and overlaps. If, as John Donne wrote, "No man is an island unto himself," exactly the same can be said about cultures and civilizations. The vast geographical expanse from China to Western Europe, a region that historians call the "Eurasian ecumene," had long been connected through trade. The expansion of Islam after the eighth century brought in much of North Africa as well. By 1400, the "Old World" was bound together by multiple networks of trade. This was the moment when Europe's Renaissance or rebirth was just getting underway. One historian called Europe at that moment in history a relatively backward and "insignificant outlier of mainland Asia."(Tingale 1997: 14)

5 Europe would move quickly from being a fringe of the Asian continent to becoming the dynamic centre of networks that spanned the globe. This process had its first, tentative steps with European essentially Portuguese and Spanish voyages of exploration during the fifteenth century. We begin not with 1500, but with While the former date is more easily remembered, it has no special historical significance. In contrast, the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453 can be seen as initiating the history of the modernity in the West. Cut off from their established trade routes to the East, Europeans undertook to find a new maritime route to the wealthy nations of Asia. These voyages brought them into direct and permanent contact with Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The outcome, however, was far from certain, for well into the seventeenth century Europe was still on the defensive against the expansive power of the Ottoman Empire. During the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, the Europeans built commercial and imperial systems that knitted their continent together with Africa, parts of Asia, and the Americas in a way that contributed significantly to the development of European power. And it was during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that a few regions of Europe broke into the revolutionary world of industrial production and mass economic prosperity, which laid the basis for more than a century of European global domination. This [course] tells two main stories. One deals with the rise and consolidation of Europe as the most powerful part of the world between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the gradual emergence of some of its offshoots and other areas, including the United States and Japan. This course of events, which very few people alive in 1500 would have thought possible, cannot be understood by focussing solely on developments within Europe and the West itself. Europeans and their colonial cousins did not live in an isolated world. At every point there were others, from the societies of the Americas, Africa, Asia, and elsewhere, who played an essential role. Some cooperated with the West for their own reasons; others were forced to comply; still others resisted, with varying degrees of success. The perceptions and actions of people from all of these societies are this [course s] other main story.