“L’Europa è il nucleo – l’America si è unita come un flusso”: lo storico sfidando il significato di “The West”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/sep/03/europe-is-the-core-america-joined-as-an-offshoot-the-historian-challenging-what-the-west-means
di AlexandrTheTolerable
13 commenti
This is delusional.
Sorry but modern Europe (post ww2) is a creation of the US.
“The West” is a notion that means whatever suits us.
Always have been.
Somehow makes sense to be honest.
The problem is many people can’t see the term independent from “technological progressive” or anything “leader” or something else which is heavily charged. Which is not really the case for many in Europe. Obviously, there is the feeling of some kind of superiority, which is fastly vanishing in the last years, but in Europe and the “old world”, clocks were always ticking a little more slow and change took time.
The US was and of course **is** part of the west but in many fields overtook it. The US, for many countries and especially in diplomatic circles, is still seen as somewhat of a “new” player on the board and still often called the “new world”.
(As silly and nonsensical as it sounds and is, but especially when you look at countries like Russia, they still often talk like the US is the new kid… **Not that anybody should look and take example from Russia**… but most nations in Europe fought wars literally centuries before the US was founded. There are pubs in Britain that are older. And if anything, feelings of superiority mostly come from some nonsense people are proud of with which they had nothing to do themself.)
Edit: Another example is that many in Germany don’t see the country really belonging to “the west” also. Germanys history was often influenced by east and by west and the position in europe is very much more often called “central” instead of “western”. This changed only after WW2.
They can change the meaning, but the “West” as we know it is a function of the end of WW2 and the Cold War, and the United States is definitely part of that.
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I think there is truth to that. The US is by far the most religious country of all western countries. Deeply engaged, at least partly, in mysticism and superstitions.
What a childish argument. Let’s not stoop down to the level of discourse of the Americans, ok?
The issue with the concept of the “West” is that North America and Europe were assumed to be closer to each other than to any other region, and this has historically been reflected geopolitically (e.g analyzing voting clusters at the UN is quite interesting to reveal the common interests). However, it now appears that the US, an imperialistic ultra-capitalist regime with authoritarian tendencies^+, has regressed to be closer to Russia, another imperialistic ultra-capitalistic authoritarian regime that was its geopolitical opposite just a few decades ago.
That’s why including the US within the concept of the “West” doesn’t make much sense nowadays.
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^(+ to be fair, they already were all of that, but the change is that they prey on their historical allies and not anymore only on non-west countries)
Russian bots and American bootlickers are out in force.
During the Roman republic/principate… do you think the Greeks said they “just joined as an offshoot”?
“Georgios Varouxakis argues that the idea is older, quintessentially European, and even anti-imperialist”
lol opinion discarded. Proof you can be a historian and still interpret whatever you want out of history.
Very good interview. We may not be perfect but as long we got this:
“what distinguishes the west is its capacity for self-criticism and self-correction.”
There is hope.