What is the West?

7. For a Union of the West

7 For a Union of the West The arguments of the preceding chapters are useful in a discussion of three specific issues: the endmost borders of the West, the conditions for an eventual extension of these borders and, lastly, the institutional organization that might be given to the West as a whole. T B   W If the West is a product of the cultural morphogenesis narrated above — our narrative emphasized certain key moments — and since cultures take shape over long periods of history, the following conclusion seems reasonable: those societies that exhibit all five cultural leaps are Western; those that display a few but not all are “close” to the West; and those that exhibit none are “foreign.” 99 The West. Those societies that experienced the five cultural evolutions throughout their histories are Western Europe and North America, but we need to be more specific about this. • Western Europe is comprised of Catholic and Protestant countries that experienced the Papal Revolution (the fourth historical development) and a further evolution leading to liberal and democratic institutions. These countries include the former Europe of 15 (less Greece, in a certain sense), as well as Switzerland, Norway and Iceland. • The United States of America and Canada were founded by England and France at a time when the fifth historical development was occurring. Furthermore, the United States and Canada were inhabited by peoples from other European countries as well, including Germans, Irish, Italians, and Polish, to name a few. Of course, the American Revolution moved the development of liberal democracy further forward than in England, the country of its origin. In many respects, and understandably, America saw itself as a new land. Nevertheless, American society and the peoples who prospered there reflected European traditions that had been deeply ingrained before the immigrants ever crossed the sea. The ideas of the American Revolution’s founding fathers were, for the most part, those of the English republicans of the preceding century. They, in turn, were the heirs of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation and, indeed, of theological and legal traditions rooted in the Papal Revolution.1 In short, there is no significant divergence, culturally speaking in any event, between the United States of America, modern Canada, and the countries of Western Europe identified above. Deep down, all of these societies are Western. 100 What is the West? • To this list must be added the territories directly governed by their Western European parents: the French overseas territories (Antilles, Guyana, Reunion), the Spanish and Portuguese islands (the Canaries, The Azores), Greenland and Hawaii. Likewise we must include the “new” countries, outside Europe and America, which won their independence from a Western parent country , such as Australia and New Zealand.2 In all of these countries, I believe the shared civilizational traits to be more important than any regional differences. Furthermore, I do not hesitate to claim that although distinct national identities exist in the different countries of Europe and North America, there is no European identity that can be opposed to an American one. Differences, of course, exist but they are just as significant between European countries as they are between Europe and America. Who would dare argue that a Swede resembles a Sicilian more closely than an American resembles an Englishman? Is a German from Frankfurt culturally closer to a Portuguese from Alentajo than to an American? Categorizing Europeans and Americans in two opposing camps, predisposed to disagreement, is a political obsession held by a few extremists on both sides of the Atlantic; it reflects no underlying cultural reality. Experience proves that citizens from any of these countries feel more or less at home in any of the others. Not only are they able to find their sense of direction quickly, to trade and do business , but they are also able to live in these countries without major difficulty for long periods. Countries close to the West. Some countries are “close” to the West but not entirely Western, as far as they have not experienced one or the other of the West’s historical developments. These include countries in Central Europe, 101 For a Union of the West Latin America, the Orthodox world and, for specific reasons , Israel. • Obviously countries such as Poland, the Baltic States, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary, new member states of the European Union; and the Catholic countries of the former Yugoslavia (Slovenia, Croatia) have quasi Western cultures. All were...