Beyond the West and Towards the Anglosphere? (original) (raw)

2009, The struggle for the West: a divided and contested …

This book is concerned with analysing the highly contested nature of the concept of the West. Without repeating arguments made elsewhere, such debates have a tendency to present the West in binary terms, with three binaries arguably standing out in contemporary debates. First, there is the enduring fascination of drawing boundaries between inside and outside; of defining who is and who is not Western and which is evident in the popular phrase, The West and the Rest, as a title for books and articles (e.g. Scruton 2003), but which, of course, often results in contradictory claims about where the boundaries lie. Second, there is a binary between those who see the West as transcendent, as having defeated its opponents, like Fukuyama (1989; Roberts 1985), and those who see it as in terminal decline and predict its imminent death (Spengler 1991; Koch and Smith 2007). Finally, there is a wealth of literature debating whether the West, triumphant or in decline, is actually breaking apart into competing subsystems. Typically this is understood in terms of a European-American divide, with the view being that an irreconcilable value-gap has become evident (Kagan 2003; Anderson et al. 2008; Lindberg 2005; Kupchan 2002). This chapter avoids such binary temptations and aims instead to highlight how clusters of ideas concerning the West have themselves been drawn in different places with different effects. This reflects our view that attempts to reify a cultural core and unity of the West are misplaced. Instead, we argue that the West is best seen as composed of a series of legacies, or narrative trajectories, which constitute the West in slightly different ways.