I mean, seriously. Greece, Rome, the Supreme Court of the United States?
The Western world was so populated at the time that people would have to migrate somewhere else. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.240.139.254 ( talk) 19:45, 11 September 2015 (UTC)
Were we to jump back a century or so and swap in upper-class images of London, we'd look at it with disdain now as a bit of imperialist propaganda. This really could use changing a bit- perhaps with the addition of some contemporary European imagery? There's more to the Western world than classical/faux-classical architeture.
All of the "views on Turkey section seem to support Turkey being a "western" country. If this section is not deleted for simply provided undue weight to an obscure topic/debate then it will also need to have some information and POVs from people who don't view Turkey as a Western country. Monopoly31121993 ( talk) 13:22, 8 September 2014 (UTC)
I'm not entirely sure the picture of the United States Supreme Court should be placed alongside the Parthenon and Roman Forum. I mean outside of the United States, the Supreme Court has/ has had very little influence on the Western world. Would a picture of a Cathedral such as St. Peter's Basilica be more appropriate seeing as the lead says "The concept of the Western part of the earth has its roots in Greco-Roman civilization in Europe, and the advent of Christianity" not "The concept of the Western part of the earth has its roots in Greco-Roman civilization in Europe, and the advent of the United States"? Tomh903 ( talk) 21:04, 12 October 2014 (UTC)
I removed the claim of doubts whether former communist countries in Central Europe are or are not part of Western Civilization. Of course, they ARE part of Western Civilization. Forty years of unhappy episode could not erase previous thousand years of history! Period. More precisely, if you want to know what part of article I removed, it is this: "Also, there is debate among some as to whether Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) is in a category of its own." Source of these doubts are allegedly these articles: This: Ghost of second-class status haunts central and eastern Europe and this: Agriculture in Transition: Land Policies and Evolving Farm Structures in Post-Soviet Countries, Lexington Books, Lanham, MD (2004), J. Swinnen, ed., Political Economy of Agrarian Reform in Central and Eastern Europe, Ashgate, Aldershot (1997). So there is one article about threat of second class status within EU and two about agriculture in these countries after fall of communism. There is NO source proving that there is any doubt whether former communist countries in Central Europe belong or not belong to Western Civilization. IMHO it is beyond all reasonable doubt that these countries BELONG to Western Civilization. I further erased these sentences: "An argument supporting Central and Eastern Europe being a part of the "West" is that Central European, Baltic, Eastern European, and Southeastern European countries such as Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Poland and Romania are now part of the European Union and NATO, which mostly comprise Western countries." It is definitely not the main argument for belonging of these countries to Western Civilization. The main argument is that these countries for more than thousand years of their histories belonged to Western Civilization and the only period when they were under non-western influence were mere forty years of Soviet oppression. I further removed following sentence which is utter nonsense: "These countries were lately both influenced by and influenced the Western World, and share sociological values. The culture however is remarkably different than in the Western Civilization." For your information Czech culture is actually remarkably similar to Austrian and Bavarian culture and forty years of Soviet oppression could not change this fact. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.103.34.73 ( talk) 00:21, 31 December 2014 (UTC)
So, there's a huge pile of changes [1]. By 3 new redfolk, with no edit summaries. Including such non-obvious changes as Russia and Eastern European countries like Bulgaria, Ukraine, Belarus, Serbia or Romania are often not counted politically as a part of the Western World changed to The Russian culture (particularly literature, music, painting, philosophy and architecture) is classified as a part of the Western culture. Those two change I've bolded look very dubious and make me suspect the rest. There are number of other footling changes - pointless cn's. Removal of It should also be noted, however, that the integration of Turkey with the West can be traced back to the 18th century, during which the Ottoman Empire was actively engaged in Westernization isn't justified. In a 2010 interview given to The Times newspaper of the United Kingdom, President Abdullah Gül of Turkey stated that his country is part of the West has been removed with no explanation William M. Connolley ( talk) 18:00, 2 August 2015 (UTC)
Which countries should be on the Western World map? The Sr Guy ( talk) 01:41, 23 June 2020 (UTC)
I think we should end this conversation once for all, three map concepts have been proposed until now, these three map concepts are the below
To keep this poll straight and simple type:
Notes:
{{
rfc}}
tag to the next timestamp) is far too long for
Legobot (
talk ·
contribs) to handle, and so it is not being shown correctly at
Wikipedia:Requests for comment/History and geography. The RfC may also not be publicised through
WP:FRS until a shorter statement is provided. --
Redrose64 🌹 (
talk) 09:56, 22 June 2020 (UTC)
References
Leaving the discussion about Latin America and the Orthodox world aside, does Huntington really includes Papua New Guinea as part of the Western World? because this source says that he doesn't include. [1] The Sr Guy ( talk) 11:06, 20 August 2020 (UTC)
References
Shouldn't Georgia (the country) be added to the Orthodox world? This also makes sense seen Georgia's aspiration to integrate into the West which mirrors the integration achieved by other Orthodox countries (such as Greece, Bulgaria, N-Macedonia, Montenegro and Romania) and the current aspiration of some others to integrate (to a debatable degree Ukraine and Belarus). Morgengave ( talk) 10:48, 1 November 2020 (UTC)
Would Cyprus be considered part of the Orthodox World by virtue of its cultural and ethnic connections to Greece? Or are there too many Muslim Turks in Cyprus (Northern Cyprus) for it to be considered that way? Jargo Nautilus ( talk) 07:53, 2 November 2020 (UTC)
Yes Latin America. It's hard to take seriously including the Eurasian region as "western." That said, I would be in favour of the full map of Huntington, perhaps with the tones muted outside of the European and American West. Eurasia, East Asia, etc. are obviously different regions within the wide umbrella of Eastern. Eastern being kore of a "not West" catch all. Also, it's strange that the map fails to label Central Asia with Russia. While they may have an Orthodox minority, their civilization is one of the steppe, the mongol empire, the Russian empire, the former Soviet Union, etc. all of which link it as most close to Russia and Mongolia or Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. Which Huntington duly noted in his version of the map. Well at least as far as Kz and Kyr. DxRxXxZx ( talk) 21:30, 25 December 2020 (UTC)
The Orthodox world is Eurasian, not purely European. DxRxXxZx ( talk) 22:03, 23 December 2020 (UTC)
The article is only a society, cultural and pollitical level but not geographicaly. -- Terlines ( talk) 21:05, 25 December 2020 (UTC)
That doesn't affect the issue as it's the same result either way. On the grounds mentioned, Eurasia is also the preferred term, note also, the growing Eurasian Union. DxRxXxZx ( talk) 21:37, 25 December 2020 (UTC)
I think you are confusing politics with culture. The culture of Russia belongs to the culture of Eastern Europe (Orthodox Christianity). Politically, no country in the Eurasian Union is in Western politics. In addition, there are countries of Muslim Turkic culture (Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan) that are part of this organization. In NATO, for example, Turkey is a member of the organization but is not included in the Western world since it is a Muslim Turkic country. -- Terlines ( talk) 00:04, 26 December 2020 (UTC)
Russia's culture is not solely descendent of Europe (noting as well that Europe and Western are not equivalent, tho often Europe only refers to Western Europe.) Moreover, if this is the argument then the Americas should be revised and labelled Europe. As this doesn't make any sense however, Eurasia is the more appropriate term for a transcontinental stretch. Vladivostok and Novosibirsk are obviously not Europe, and don't identify as Europe any more than America does. Russia as well is in both European and Asian organizations, highlighting it's transcontinental status. So politically and geographically, there is no difference. Eurasian is the concise and appropriate term choice. Lets leave the discussion here however, and allow others to comment. DxRxXxZx ( talk) 00:37, 26 December 2020 (UTC)
Why is Samuel Huntington's map being given such prominence by Wikipedia at the top of this page ? He's generally not well-regarded by international relations experts, either in his conclusions or in his methodology. Not only that, but his supposedly 'epochal' map is rooted in and dated by a very specific historical time and place. Writing almost thirty years ago, he saw the Yugoslavian war as being the barometer of allegiances in Europe, for instance. He probably expected that ex-communist South Eastern European countries would not join the EU, as they did. This is highly dated and very specifically of its time, and should not be at the top of the page.
I am removing it, just for the moment, pending any convincing refutation of these points, or particular reason to keep.
Jeremiad469 ( talk) 01:53, 25 March 2021 (UTC)
Hello Morgengave, I understand your objections but I believe there is good reason to challenge the inclusion of the map urgently. It has been quoted often and in many sources online from wikipedia, but is not considered academically credible by most researchers, so I think the benefit of the doubt should be against it unless proved otherwise. I will seek to sum up the reasons below.
Jeremiad469 ( talk) 15:41, 25 March 2021 (UTC)
While I still have a little time, and the topics are still fresh, some thoughts to put some flesh on the bones of the points above.
The most fundamental and simple point, that Huntington has gone from being a lowly regarded thinker many of whose predictions were uncertain, to being simultaneously an academically lowly regarded thinker many of whose predictions have specifically been proven wrong, still stands on its own as a doubled up reason for removing the map, but there are several more detailed points to be made.
The map should be understood in its context. As a scion of the US Cold War foreign policy establishment, Huntington and the institutions he was associated with were very worried by two particular developments at the moment of writing in 1993.
At the end of the Cold War, and the turn of the 1990s, the US, and George Bush Sr's administration in particular, had assumed, roughly, a unipolar liberal democratic order with the US as the head and exemplar - pace Fukuyama.
Instead, the US foreign policy establishment was suddenly faced with two very nasty surprises, for a group of people for whom great-power and balance-of-power theories were lifeblood ; Yugoslavia had suddenly descended into war, apparently entirely on religious-historical grounds , and simultaneously the US was suddenly becoming more aware of strategic errors it had made in the Middle East during the Cold War. At the time Huntington first started the article, in 1993 , the Serbo-Croat conflict, dating in reality as much to European strategic realpolitik of pre-World War I as to religious differences it capitalised on, had just spiralled further out of control, to take in a disastrous Christian-Muslim clash in Bosnia, which would go on to spread out further to Kosovo. American officials and policymakers, as well a broad mass of more radical post-modern thinkers at the time generally, believed they had underestimated the power of religion after the fall of communist ideology in Europe. Considering Russia's position in this, the most urgent strategic corollary and lesson, for the US in Europe at least, seemed to be that Russia may have been at the start of a process of pulling the Orthodox world back into its orbit , *despite* the end of communism.
At exactly the same time, in the wake of the defeat of the Communist government in Afghanistan partly by US-backed islamists, the Peshawar cross-community accords had just failed, and Islamists had just emerged as a distinct force in what had been previously been considered mainly a central theatre of the Cold War since the Russian invasion. The US foreign policy establishment was shocked by its errors in failing to predict the long-term consequences of supporting islamist forces against communism, as well as at other times against various secular-left and republican forces in other parts of the Middle East. This was relevant to the US position not only in Afghanistan, but crucially with Saudi Arabia, both as a monarchy and a conduit to Islamist influence all over the Sunni world at least. In the period Huntington was finishing the book three years later, thousands of people had been killed in Bosnia and the Taliban were about to take Kabul.
Part of the point so far is that there's no reason his thesis should not be understood as much, if not more, as an urgent manual for how a disorientated superpower should think in the world, at a particular time and place, and by a particular foreign policy functionary of 30 years - than any disinterested external academic analysis.
The framework was widely challenged and even mocked outside state-sponsored academic circles in the US in the mid-1990s, until one event revived it - September 11. Afghanistan, and the general rise of Islamism, had been major US foreign policy worries in 1993 when Huntington wrote his first article, and suddenly a Saudi islamist had launched a catastrophically destructive attack on US soil, from Afghanistan. There were plenty of US officials and policymakers who believed that not only the central concept of Huntington's prediction of a civilisational clash, but also the delineations of it, had been proven right. This also went on to inform George Bush Jr's actions in Afghanistan and Iraq. A number of neoconservatives believed that they were first bowing to the inevitable in his clash of civilisations, but then could also overcome this process by re-imposing the unipolar liberal democratic order, which transcended cultural boundaries, as a result of the conflict. This might have been a type of Hegelian thinking you could expect from previously Marxist thinkers.
To move back to Huntington, what has happened since then is the story of the gradual unravelling of various parts of his thesis.
For instance and to begin with, in his hierarchy of existential conflict, Huntington said that Muslim-Christian conflict would be a dominant organising principle, not intra-religious conflict. Because of the US invading Iraq and deposing a Sunni dictator, by the 2010s Iran had developed a sphere of influence stretching from the border with Afghanistan to Irag and Syria, through to Lebanon on the Mediterranean coast. This bloc then formed one half of the supply network for the catastrophic conflict in Syria and Yemen against the Sunni Muslim world, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people, with Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states and also Turkey going on to champion the other side. The conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran in particular is genuinely perceived by both sides as an existential fight for civilisational survival, which explains the ferocity of the conflict still going on in Yemen. In this conflict, Saudi Arabia not only cleaves closer to the West, but even Israel, than fellow Muslims, and Iran not only cleaves closer, but actually depends for its survival on the supposedly civilisationally and axiomatically opposed, according to Huntington's thesis, powers of Orthodox Russia and "Sinic" China.
If you move over to Europe, you're immediately struck again at how much Huntington's thesis has gone wrong. Because he was writing at the peak of the Yugoslav war for instance, he clearly imagined that Russia was at the start of exerting an ever-greater pull-factor in South-Eastern Europe by virtue of religion. Instead, not only have Bulgaria and Romania joined Nato and the EU, but now North Macedonia, Albania and even Montenegro are NATO members, too. Looking further afield, instead of feeling the inexorable pull of Russia, as in Huntington's model, Greece, as the only non ex-communist country Huntington characterised as part of the Eastern-Orthodox bloc, has clearly opted to bind itself into the Eurozone and the core of the mediterranean and north-west european EU, actually at any cost. In the process, during the Eurozone crisis, it also became even more obvious that the political economy and political culture of Greece, as by way of example a country with a strong grassroots and anarchist left, high regulation and a large public sector, had more in common, in a number of key respects, with Spain and Portugal, than its immediate neighbours. Without this, the Left mediterranean ( or Euro-atlantic, in the case of Portugal) parties of those countries would not have made, or been able to make, common cause against the EU north-western centre during the height of the Eurozone crisis, in the way they did. Cultural patterns related to this were already so obvious before the crisis, that Nicolas Sarkozy, with France itself in the conflicted position at the EU north-western centre but also as a Mediterranean nation sharing some of the characteristics, had attempted to found a "Mediterranean Union" around 2007-8, running along Spain, France, Italy and Greece, with Turkey and countries in North Africa on the balance of probability to be made next-tier members, on the strength of differences in their political and institutional set-up. This was actually an embryonic EU on a different geo-cultural basis, to be helped into being by French administrators once again. Instead, the real EU paid the ultimate tribute to it, and to how threateningly plausible the cultural substance of it actually was, by being extremely careful to knock it entirely on the head, and carefully broadened it into the essentially meaningless advisory talking shop of the "Union for the Mediterranean" , which has ended up having little influence, by including all of the EU and large parts of North Africa and the middle east.
It's too exhaustive to outline every area, but now let's have a look at South-East Asia. There are again clearly either major methodological errors, outdated research on the ground, or more probably both. When Huntington began writing in 1993, China was still an emergent middle-ranking power, not a superpower, and India was only recently emerging from a politically non-aligned status with the West - as well as negligible spheres of economic and political influence. India has now entirely moved away from a non-aligned position, but is also in simultaneous increasing conflict with China. Looking further around again, the idea that Myanmar is not now more heavily in the 'Sinic' sphere of influence than the "Buddhist Bloc" Huntington instinctively puts it in would be considered odd by many analysts today. This is because China has outgrown the political, economic and cultural role Huntington put it in.
Finally, let's have a look at Latin America. Huntington's thesis, that the entirety of Latin America is non "Western", is strikingly less nuanced, more broadbrush, and immediately more odd than for any other continent. This is probably why it was one of the most immediately questioned, contested and even ridiculed when it first came out. Chomsky's thoughts on it are useful, because they relate to points made earlier. Taking into account Huntington's personal and historical background, his account could easily be described as reflecting the history and justifications of US foreign policy, and a mandate for more in the future ; or a mandate "for the US to interfere or invade as often, or over as large an area as possible", as I think Chomsky more straightforwardly put it.
It's mentioned above, but it bears repeating : Huntington was not some random disinterested academic observer. He was an absolute stalwart of US Cold War total-realpolitik, who had been so obsessive about winning against Vietnam in 1968 for geo-strategic reasons, for instance, that he suggested deporting the entire Vietnamese population to the countryside if it was necessary to win the conflict, but without any of the underlying moral or cultural anger of later conservative strategists. He influenced ultra-realpolitik in the region throughout the '70s, which by the turn of the 1980s had culminated in one of the most astonishing moves in the history of US foreign policy, with both Reagan ( and Thatcher) ending up covertly supporting the genocidal Marxist-Leninist party of Pol Pot in exile purely on the grounds of Vietnamese policy. The point here, is that Huntington was almost as pragmatically opportunistic, rather than culturally driven, a thinker as you could possibly imagine, but here was giving a cultural analysis simply because it seemed contingent at the particular time, and was also influenced by post-modern trends of that time .
If you work from this starting-point, it's quite hard to discount anyone saying that there are good personal, professional-historical or bureaucratic reasons to be most suspicious of all of Huntington's Latin American continental characterisation, which is also the most immediately unorthodox and blanket continental characterisation of all of them. Purely because of geographical proximity, the US intervened more directly, widely and almost uniformly, and over a longer period of time, across the whole of the Latin American continent than anywhere else in the world.
An objection to all this might run : "OK, there a few errors here and there, but aren't the rough contours of the characterisation "roughly about right" ? Doesn't someone in Scotland still have more in common with someone in Germany than in Saudi Arabia ? Haven't we seen Christian-Muslim conflict" ?
The problem is that Huntington's analysis is *not* a quantitative analysis of trends, charting the balance of historical and cultural push-and-pull factors in certain places, a spectrum of more-or-less : it's qualitative and deterministic. All countries are fundamentally bound by the same equivalent historical forces, to organise themselves into the same equivalent historical groups, to fight their most existential and defining conflicts. If some of this doesn't work, none of it works. Jeremiad469 ( talk) 15:45, 25 March 2021 (UTC)
Hello Morgengave. Criticism of Huntington's schema certainly isn't new, but nearly all the points above effectively are, as they explicitly relate to specific disconfirmations of his scheme over the last ten years, when academic discussion of his work has already gone out of fashion. Although I think removing the header map is— a priority, both on the grounds of the prevailing academic view and recent disconfirmation, I do agree it is reasonable to ask for broader democratic consensus here before permanently removing. I would be interested in hearing others' views on some of the points above. Jeremiad469 ( talk) 18:14, 25 March 2021 (UTC)
Albania needs to be included as part of the Western world. Even though the designation "Western World" is not precise by any stretch of the imagination, exhibiting levels of fluidity and being under continual renegotiation, considering the origins of the West conceived initially as a self-defined Graeco-Roman identity, and the re-circumscription of that identity under the overarching realm of Christendom, the region, the peoples, and the ethnicity that constitute Albania have very much been a part of all these currents, from antiquity through medieval Christendom, and despite later being conquered by the Ottomans, Albania today stands closer to a European identity than any other. From any which way you slice it, the arguments in favour of including Albania as part of the West far outweigh any arguments against. Please be serious and edit the article to make this correction. 75.119.238.209 ( talk) 20:08, 11 April 2021 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.119.238.209 ( talk) 02:17, 9 April 2021 (UTC)
The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion:
Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. — Community Tech bot ( talk) 15:39, 1 July 2021 (UTC)
Why is this article an extended protection article? I am genuinely curious as to why that is the case. Thank you for your time.
FictiousLibrarian (
talk). 17:49, 18 July 2021 (UTC)
At a glance, the second paragraph of the lede has strong consensus. What's the problem with it specifically? Has there been past disputes about it? -- Hipal ( talk) 15:53, 16 August 2021 (UTC)
The two maps in the lead ( this and this) are, as far as I can gather, from the same source. Why, then, does the first one not feature Israel while the second one does? Thanks, thorpewilliam ( talk) 07:23, 30 September 2021 (UTC)
Huntington's nomination for the National Academy of Sciences was rejected after he was accused of misusing mathematics and engaging in pseudo-science. Therefore his views should neither be given such prominence, nor used as the basis for a map. Leutha ( talk) 11:37, 25 February 2021 (UTC)
How unique is it? Perhaps mention of it under “Cultural definition” could be removed and replaced with this (mentioning the Philippines as well as Japan)? thorpewilliam ( talk) 14:56, 30 September 2021 (UTC)
"In 1071, the Byzantine army was defeated by the Muslim Turco-Persians of medieval Asia, resulting in the loss of most of Asia Minor." To Muslim Turks. Seljuks were fully Turkic unlike some empires like Safavids or Afsharids and at that time there is no Persian impact on it. Its nonsense and should be change.
Wickelodeon ( talk) 20:53, 18 February 2022 (UTC)
I don't know why I'm not autoconfirmed and can't edit the page. Been contributing since 2006!
I suggest editing this sentence in the introduction:
The West was originally Western Christendom, opposing Catholic and Protestant Europe with the cultures and civilizations of Orthodox Europe...
to read:
The West originally identified Western Christendom (Catholic and Protestant Europe) in opposition to the cultures and civilizations of Orthodox Europe...
The word "opposing" occurring between "Western World" and its definition, "Catholic and Protestant Europe" is confusing. At first read it seems to mean the Western World was in opposition to Catholic and Protestant Europe. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Speedyboy ( talk • contribs) 01:15, 3 March 2022 (UTC)
I feel certain parts of this article go too far towards implying that the "western world" is an objectively real thing, which it's not. It is a highly subjective perception of the world that is arguably inherently flawed.
It's a vague concept, supposing it's a concept, it's a geographical word, it may have more or less sense depending on a context. It's good to give several definitions for a vague word. The word often is used as an "oppossition"
-- 83.118.219.9 ( talk) 15:12, 23 March 2022 (UTC)
This
edit request has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request. |
Request to add Anti-Western sentiment under the section Western_world#See_also. 223.25.74.34 ( talk) 14:58, 4 April 2022 (UTC)
“Since the fall of the iron curtain the following countries are generally accepted as the Western world: the United States, Canada; the countries of the European Union plus UK, Norway, Iceland and Switzerland; Australia and New Zealand.”
“In modern usage, Western world refers to Europe and to areas whose populations largely originate from Europe, through the Age of Discovery's imperialism.”
Interesting to see that the only non-European countries that are included in this definition are English-speaking. Those are not the only countries to which the above definition would apply though. Sounds to me like the above definition should rather be “...to Europe and to former British colonies whose populations largely originate from Europe...”
Bias acknowledgment: I think the whole concept of “The West” is ridiculous, but I would hope that the definition would at least be consistent. 111.65.61.181 ( talk) 10:35, 18 April 2022 (UTC)
The map is the result of an extensive previous conversations, see in the talk page archives. Any editor is of course welcome to reopen the conversation and argue for a change, but removing or changing the map should not be done unilaterally without a consensus. UlyssorZebra ( talk) 17:06, 6 June 2022 (UTC)
Why are there two sets of multiple images in the notes section? Seems rather an odd placement. -- Vsmith ( talk) 00:35, 7 November 2022 (UTC)
The 4th paragraph in the section "Cold War (1947–1991) and sexual revolution (1960s–1980s)" has several dubious or incomprehensible statements. Someone should fix it.
The Western debate on the global conflict, aligned Protestantism on the path of Woman's liberation.
What??
The Sexual revolution then unveiled in the USA as ecstatic self-congratulation for the triumphant North American culture (as well as English and French).
What??
The transition from the 1800s Industrialization to the 1900s mass production, consumerism and computing revolution was followed by a fundamental shift from physical labor (male-dominated) to intellectual, thus permitting the 1960s-80s development of revolution in gender roles and male-dominancy.
Ok.
Nonetheless, Nazi-Fascism was regarded as pejoratively masculine for having started the conflict that shed so much blood, and for having been rooted in the militaristic ancient Roman Empire (Holy Roman Empire's Germano-Italian central European hegemony lasted a millennium until early 19th century,
What??
Ttulinsky ( talk) 02:14, 18 May 2022 (UTC)
Yes, there are problem with the timeline Women's rights in UK and France, because the late date of the female suffrage rights and the late appearance of female politicians in their government and parliaments. Also women's inheritance rights appeared relatively late. If you examine legal history, France and UK are not the best examples for women's rights in Europe.-- Csataelőkészítő ( talk) 14:42, 3 December 2022 (UTC)
It is important to notice, that ancient West (Greco-Roman) located in the mediterranean, including Southern Europe North Africa and Near Eastern areas of Asia. It was the so-called hellenistic world. Both Greece and Rome had stronger and more important economic cultural and commercial relationships with North Africa Egypt etc.. than with France (then Gallia) or British Isles.
The so-called truly European West was formed with the Frankish Empire.-- Csataelőkészítő ( talk) 16:20, 3 December 2022 (UTC)
Wrote pages at No Original Research noticeboard and elsewhere, after edits on 19 November and still it different from how reliable sources suggest the Western world is to be intended. Happy white Christmas then. The basis of ( talk) 18:14, 24 December 2022 (UTC) Presently accepted version, caressing white supremacy, reads as: white people were bloodthirsty since ancient times and made it to conquer much of the planet. Is this even acceptable other than grossly wp:OR? The basis of ( talk) 06:24, 25 December 2022 (UTC)
References
The Greeks provided the chromosomes of Western civilization. One does not have to idealize the Greeks to sustain that point. Greek ways of exploring the cosmos, defining the problems of knowledge (and what is meant by knowledge itself), creating the language in which such problems are explored, representing the physical world and human society in the arts, defining the nature of value, describing the past, still underlie the Western cultural tradition.
In 1,200 years the tiny village of Rome established a republic, conquered all of the Mediterranean basin and western Europe, lost its republic, and finally, surrendered its empire. In the process the Romans laid the foundation of Western civilization. [...] The pragmatic Romans brought Greek and Hebrew ideas down to earth, modified them, and transmitted them throughout western Europe. [...] They not only provided the conditions of peace and prosperity necessary for the transmission of Greco-Roman culture and Christianity but also proved themselves the most capable administrators and lawgivers in human history. They effectively administered an empire of unprecedented size with minimal bureaucracy and technology and bequeathed to the West a system of law [...] Roman law remains the basis for the legal codes of most western European and Latin American countries — Even in English-speaking countries, where common law prevails, Roman law has exerted substantial influence. [...] Many of the founders of the United States considered Roman law more rational and more truly based on natural law than the common law. The Supreme Court justice Joseph Story led a nineteenth-century movement to use Roman legal concepts to reform the more chaotic common law and to provide guidance in those areas in which the common law was silent.
the term "Western" — refer to the culture of classical antiquity that arose in Greece and Rome; survived the collapse of the Roman Empire; spread to western and northern Europe; then during the great periods of exploration and colonization of the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries expanded to the Americas, Australia and areas of Asia and Africa; and now exercises global political, economic, cultural, and military power far greater than the size of its territory or population might otherwise suggest.
A recent by Rim sim adds a single-sentence paragraph to the lead that I think gives undue weight to a racist depiction of "The East":
Used to develop national identities, the overarching concept of the West was forged in opposition to ideas such as "the East", "the Orient", "Eastern barbarism", "Oriental despotism", or the "Asiatic mode of production" by Karl Marx.
Why do we need all of these quotes? This information is not included in the body of the article. The attention given to Marx also seems unwarranted, and it's unclear what exactly is being attributed to him. — Freoh 06:33, 22 January 2023 (UTC)
The edit was not made by me (done by someone else), I just restored it. All those strong words are mentioned in the source text; this will be modified soon. Rim sim ( talk) 06:44, 22 January 2023 (UTC)
A recent
by
Rim sim adds some text that misrepresents its source. The current version of the article says that Empowering ideals like individualism and enlightenment have been considered as ‘Western’ or ‘White’ values
. Here's what the cited text actually says:
Manichaeism – a major religion formed in the third century CE premised on a moral struggle between good and evil – was popularised as a socio-political concept by Frantz Fanon in the mid-twentieth century. In Fanon’s scathing writings on colonialism and post-colonialism, ‘the colonial world is a Manichaean world’ (Fanon 2004: 6). There is the colonising force and the colonised; while the former is imposing, dominating, controlling, the latter is portrayed as impervious to any ethics or morals. Furthermore, not only is the colonised – or native – perceived as not possessing any values, they represent the negation of values (generally that of the coloniser). To this end, the ‘native’ is perceived as the enemy of values, or ‘absolute evil’ (Fanon 2004: 6). Conversely, it is because colonisers perceive themselves as holding values that they are able to justify the violence of colonisation and colonising practices. Specifically, these are ‘Western’ or ‘White’ values that find their foundation in Greco-Roman philosophy and espouse key notions such as individualism and enlightenment. Fanon’s theory on violence as a tool and product of colonisation and its resistance is useful as a way of contextualising how ‘Manichaeism’ is used in contemporary politico-social arguments.
This does not support the idea that individualism and enlightenment have been considered as ‘Western’ or ‘White’ values
, and it contradicts the notion that these values are empowering
. —
Freoh 06:15, 22 January 2023 (UTC)
Surely, the wording will be improved in this context. Rim sim ( talk) 06:52, 22 January 2023 (UTC)
A recent
by
Rim sim added some
trivia to the lead that
isn't present in the body. It now says that The first historically recorded awareness of various regions of the world as East and West came from the people of ancient Greece in fifth century BCE.
Why are we giving so much weight to Herodotus? That aspect of Western history doesn't seem super significant. —
Freoh 06:03, 22 January 2023 (UTC)
Herodotus is referred to as " The Father of History". Mention of such an important figure in the lead is in correspondence with WP:LEDE not some trivia; note that the article is still under construction. Rim sim ( talk) 06:38, 22 January 2023 (UTC)
still under construction, then it should be draftified. — Freoh 01:32, 23 January 2023 (UTC)
Plenty of other sources. Rim sim ( talk) 16:45, 23 January 2023 (UTC)
A recent
by
Rim sim adds some text that's unclear and unsupported. The lead now says that Modern-day Western world encompasses much of the nations and states where civilization is based on Western culture
. What does it mean for civilization to be based on Western culture? The citation supports the idea that "Western culture" is a thing and that Western states tend to be powerful, but that's
different than saying that civilization is based on Western culture
. —
Freoh 05:51, 22 January 2023 (UTC)
civilization is based on Western culture
refers to societies where governance, institutions, human rights, language, legal system etc are broadly based on that of
Western culture; these civilizations are in stark contrast to others like in the
Arab world and the
Eastern world, where all the aforementioned things are different. The map in the lead corroborates this point.
Rim sim (
talk) 06:27, 22 January 2023 (UTC)
civilization is based on Western cultureis a claim that is both vague and exceptional, and it's currently not explicitly supported by any sources. — Freoh 01:29, 23 January 2023 (UTC)
I mean, seriously. Greece, Rome, the Supreme Court of the United States?
The Western world was so populated at the time that people would have to migrate somewhere else. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.240.139.254 ( talk) 19:45, 11 September 2015 (UTC)
Were we to jump back a century or so and swap in upper-class images of London, we'd look at it with disdain now as a bit of imperialist propaganda. This really could use changing a bit- perhaps with the addition of some contemporary European imagery? There's more to the Western world than classical/faux-classical architeture.
All of the "views on Turkey section seem to support Turkey being a "western" country. If this section is not deleted for simply provided undue weight to an obscure topic/debate then it will also need to have some information and POVs from people who don't view Turkey as a Western country. Monopoly31121993 ( talk) 13:22, 8 September 2014 (UTC)
I'm not entirely sure the picture of the United States Supreme Court should be placed alongside the Parthenon and Roman Forum. I mean outside of the United States, the Supreme Court has/ has had very little influence on the Western world. Would a picture of a Cathedral such as St. Peter's Basilica be more appropriate seeing as the lead says "The concept of the Western part of the earth has its roots in Greco-Roman civilization in Europe, and the advent of Christianity" not "The concept of the Western part of the earth has its roots in Greco-Roman civilization in Europe, and the advent of the United States"? Tomh903 ( talk) 21:04, 12 October 2014 (UTC)
I removed the claim of doubts whether former communist countries in Central Europe are or are not part of Western Civilization. Of course, they ARE part of Western Civilization. Forty years of unhappy episode could not erase previous thousand years of history! Period. More precisely, if you want to know what part of article I removed, it is this: "Also, there is debate among some as to whether Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) is in a category of its own." Source of these doubts are allegedly these articles: This: Ghost of second-class status haunts central and eastern Europe and this: Agriculture in Transition: Land Policies and Evolving Farm Structures in Post-Soviet Countries, Lexington Books, Lanham, MD (2004), J. Swinnen, ed., Political Economy of Agrarian Reform in Central and Eastern Europe, Ashgate, Aldershot (1997). So there is one article about threat of second class status within EU and two about agriculture in these countries after fall of communism. There is NO source proving that there is any doubt whether former communist countries in Central Europe belong or not belong to Western Civilization. IMHO it is beyond all reasonable doubt that these countries BELONG to Western Civilization. I further erased these sentences: "An argument supporting Central and Eastern Europe being a part of the "West" is that Central European, Baltic, Eastern European, and Southeastern European countries such as Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Poland and Romania are now part of the European Union and NATO, which mostly comprise Western countries." It is definitely not the main argument for belonging of these countries to Western Civilization. The main argument is that these countries for more than thousand years of their histories belonged to Western Civilization and the only period when they were under non-western influence were mere forty years of Soviet oppression. I further removed following sentence which is utter nonsense: "These countries were lately both influenced by and influenced the Western World, and share sociological values. The culture however is remarkably different than in the Western Civilization." For your information Czech culture is actually remarkably similar to Austrian and Bavarian culture and forty years of Soviet oppression could not change this fact. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.103.34.73 ( talk) 00:21, 31 December 2014 (UTC)
So, there's a huge pile of changes [1]. By 3 new redfolk, with no edit summaries. Including such non-obvious changes as Russia and Eastern European countries like Bulgaria, Ukraine, Belarus, Serbia or Romania are often not counted politically as a part of the Western World changed to The Russian culture (particularly literature, music, painting, philosophy and architecture) is classified as a part of the Western culture. Those two change I've bolded look very dubious and make me suspect the rest. There are number of other footling changes - pointless cn's. Removal of It should also be noted, however, that the integration of Turkey with the West can be traced back to the 18th century, during which the Ottoman Empire was actively engaged in Westernization isn't justified. In a 2010 interview given to The Times newspaper of the United Kingdom, President Abdullah Gül of Turkey stated that his country is part of the West has been removed with no explanation William M. Connolley ( talk) 18:00, 2 August 2015 (UTC)
Which countries should be on the Western World map? The Sr Guy ( talk) 01:41, 23 June 2020 (UTC)
I think we should end this conversation once for all, three map concepts have been proposed until now, these three map concepts are the below
To keep this poll straight and simple type:
Notes:
{{
rfc}}
tag to the next timestamp) is far too long for
Legobot (
talk ·
contribs) to handle, and so it is not being shown correctly at
Wikipedia:Requests for comment/History and geography. The RfC may also not be publicised through
WP:FRS until a shorter statement is provided. --
Redrose64 🌹 (
talk) 09:56, 22 June 2020 (UTC)
References
Leaving the discussion about Latin America and the Orthodox world aside, does Huntington really includes Papua New Guinea as part of the Western World? because this source says that he doesn't include. [1] The Sr Guy ( talk) 11:06, 20 August 2020 (UTC)
References
Shouldn't Georgia (the country) be added to the Orthodox world? This also makes sense seen Georgia's aspiration to integrate into the West which mirrors the integration achieved by other Orthodox countries (such as Greece, Bulgaria, N-Macedonia, Montenegro and Romania) and the current aspiration of some others to integrate (to a debatable degree Ukraine and Belarus). Morgengave ( talk) 10:48, 1 November 2020 (UTC)
Would Cyprus be considered part of the Orthodox World by virtue of its cultural and ethnic connections to Greece? Or are there too many Muslim Turks in Cyprus (Northern Cyprus) for it to be considered that way? Jargo Nautilus ( talk) 07:53, 2 November 2020 (UTC)
Yes Latin America. It's hard to take seriously including the Eurasian region as "western." That said, I would be in favour of the full map of Huntington, perhaps with the tones muted outside of the European and American West. Eurasia, East Asia, etc. are obviously different regions within the wide umbrella of Eastern. Eastern being kore of a "not West" catch all. Also, it's strange that the map fails to label Central Asia with Russia. While they may have an Orthodox minority, their civilization is one of the steppe, the mongol empire, the Russian empire, the former Soviet Union, etc. all of which link it as most close to Russia and Mongolia or Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. Which Huntington duly noted in his version of the map. Well at least as far as Kz and Kyr. DxRxXxZx ( talk) 21:30, 25 December 2020 (UTC)
The Orthodox world is Eurasian, not purely European. DxRxXxZx ( talk) 22:03, 23 December 2020 (UTC)
The article is only a society, cultural and pollitical level but not geographicaly. -- Terlines ( talk) 21:05, 25 December 2020 (UTC)
That doesn't affect the issue as it's the same result either way. On the grounds mentioned, Eurasia is also the preferred term, note also, the growing Eurasian Union. DxRxXxZx ( talk) 21:37, 25 December 2020 (UTC)
I think you are confusing politics with culture. The culture of Russia belongs to the culture of Eastern Europe (Orthodox Christianity). Politically, no country in the Eurasian Union is in Western politics. In addition, there are countries of Muslim Turkic culture (Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan) that are part of this organization. In NATO, for example, Turkey is a member of the organization but is not included in the Western world since it is a Muslim Turkic country. -- Terlines ( talk) 00:04, 26 December 2020 (UTC)
Russia's culture is not solely descendent of Europe (noting as well that Europe and Western are not equivalent, tho often Europe only refers to Western Europe.) Moreover, if this is the argument then the Americas should be revised and labelled Europe. As this doesn't make any sense however, Eurasia is the more appropriate term for a transcontinental stretch. Vladivostok and Novosibirsk are obviously not Europe, and don't identify as Europe any more than America does. Russia as well is in both European and Asian organizations, highlighting it's transcontinental status. So politically and geographically, there is no difference. Eurasian is the concise and appropriate term choice. Lets leave the discussion here however, and allow others to comment. DxRxXxZx ( talk) 00:37, 26 December 2020 (UTC)
Why is Samuel Huntington's map being given such prominence by Wikipedia at the top of this page ? He's generally not well-regarded by international relations experts, either in his conclusions or in his methodology. Not only that, but his supposedly 'epochal' map is rooted in and dated by a very specific historical time and place. Writing almost thirty years ago, he saw the Yugoslavian war as being the barometer of allegiances in Europe, for instance. He probably expected that ex-communist South Eastern European countries would not join the EU, as they did. This is highly dated and very specifically of its time, and should not be at the top of the page.
I am removing it, just for the moment, pending any convincing refutation of these points, or particular reason to keep.
Jeremiad469 ( talk) 01:53, 25 March 2021 (UTC)
Hello Morgengave, I understand your objections but I believe there is good reason to challenge the inclusion of the map urgently. It has been quoted often and in many sources online from wikipedia, but is not considered academically credible by most researchers, so I think the benefit of the doubt should be against it unless proved otherwise. I will seek to sum up the reasons below.
Jeremiad469 ( talk) 15:41, 25 March 2021 (UTC)
While I still have a little time, and the topics are still fresh, some thoughts to put some flesh on the bones of the points above.
The most fundamental and simple point, that Huntington has gone from being a lowly regarded thinker many of whose predictions were uncertain, to being simultaneously an academically lowly regarded thinker many of whose predictions have specifically been proven wrong, still stands on its own as a doubled up reason for removing the map, but there are several more detailed points to be made.
The map should be understood in its context. As a scion of the US Cold War foreign policy establishment, Huntington and the institutions he was associated with were very worried by two particular developments at the moment of writing in 1993.
At the end of the Cold War, and the turn of the 1990s, the US, and George Bush Sr's administration in particular, had assumed, roughly, a unipolar liberal democratic order with the US as the head and exemplar - pace Fukuyama.
Instead, the US foreign policy establishment was suddenly faced with two very nasty surprises, for a group of people for whom great-power and balance-of-power theories were lifeblood ; Yugoslavia had suddenly descended into war, apparently entirely on religious-historical grounds , and simultaneously the US was suddenly becoming more aware of strategic errors it had made in the Middle East during the Cold War. At the time Huntington first started the article, in 1993 , the Serbo-Croat conflict, dating in reality as much to European strategic realpolitik of pre-World War I as to religious differences it capitalised on, had just spiralled further out of control, to take in a disastrous Christian-Muslim clash in Bosnia, which would go on to spread out further to Kosovo. American officials and policymakers, as well a broad mass of more radical post-modern thinkers at the time generally, believed they had underestimated the power of religion after the fall of communist ideology in Europe. Considering Russia's position in this, the most urgent strategic corollary and lesson, for the US in Europe at least, seemed to be that Russia may have been at the start of a process of pulling the Orthodox world back into its orbit , *despite* the end of communism.
At exactly the same time, in the wake of the defeat of the Communist government in Afghanistan partly by US-backed islamists, the Peshawar cross-community accords had just failed, and Islamists had just emerged as a distinct force in what had been previously been considered mainly a central theatre of the Cold War since the Russian invasion. The US foreign policy establishment was shocked by its errors in failing to predict the long-term consequences of supporting islamist forces against communism, as well as at other times against various secular-left and republican forces in other parts of the Middle East. This was relevant to the US position not only in Afghanistan, but crucially with Saudi Arabia, both as a monarchy and a conduit to Islamist influence all over the Sunni world at least. In the period Huntington was finishing the book three years later, thousands of people had been killed in Bosnia and the Taliban were about to take Kabul.
Part of the point so far is that there's no reason his thesis should not be understood as much, if not more, as an urgent manual for how a disorientated superpower should think in the world, at a particular time and place, and by a particular foreign policy functionary of 30 years - than any disinterested external academic analysis.
The framework was widely challenged and even mocked outside state-sponsored academic circles in the US in the mid-1990s, until one event revived it - September 11. Afghanistan, and the general rise of Islamism, had been major US foreign policy worries in 1993 when Huntington wrote his first article, and suddenly a Saudi islamist had launched a catastrophically destructive attack on US soil, from Afghanistan. There were plenty of US officials and policymakers who believed that not only the central concept of Huntington's prediction of a civilisational clash, but also the delineations of it, had been proven right. This also went on to inform George Bush Jr's actions in Afghanistan and Iraq. A number of neoconservatives believed that they were first bowing to the inevitable in his clash of civilisations, but then could also overcome this process by re-imposing the unipolar liberal democratic order, which transcended cultural boundaries, as a result of the conflict. This might have been a type of Hegelian thinking you could expect from previously Marxist thinkers.
To move back to Huntington, what has happened since then is the story of the gradual unravelling of various parts of his thesis.
For instance and to begin with, in his hierarchy of existential conflict, Huntington said that Muslim-Christian conflict would be a dominant organising principle, not intra-religious conflict. Because of the US invading Iraq and deposing a Sunni dictator, by the 2010s Iran had developed a sphere of influence stretching from the border with Afghanistan to Irag and Syria, through to Lebanon on the Mediterranean coast. This bloc then formed one half of the supply network for the catastrophic conflict in Syria and Yemen against the Sunni Muslim world, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people, with Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states and also Turkey going on to champion the other side. The conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran in particular is genuinely perceived by both sides as an existential fight for civilisational survival, which explains the ferocity of the conflict still going on in Yemen. In this conflict, Saudi Arabia not only cleaves closer to the West, but even Israel, than fellow Muslims, and Iran not only cleaves closer, but actually depends for its survival on the supposedly civilisationally and axiomatically opposed, according to Huntington's thesis, powers of Orthodox Russia and "Sinic" China.
If you move over to Europe, you're immediately struck again at how much Huntington's thesis has gone wrong. Because he was writing at the peak of the Yugoslav war for instance, he clearly imagined that Russia was at the start of exerting an ever-greater pull-factor in South-Eastern Europe by virtue of religion. Instead, not only have Bulgaria and Romania joined Nato and the EU, but now North Macedonia, Albania and even Montenegro are NATO members, too. Looking further afield, instead of feeling the inexorable pull of Russia, as in Huntington's model, Greece, as the only non ex-communist country Huntington characterised as part of the Eastern-Orthodox bloc, has clearly opted to bind itself into the Eurozone and the core of the mediterranean and north-west european EU, actually at any cost. In the process, during the Eurozone crisis, it also became even more obvious that the political economy and political culture of Greece, as by way of example a country with a strong grassroots and anarchist left, high regulation and a large public sector, had more in common, in a number of key respects, with Spain and Portugal, than its immediate neighbours. Without this, the Left mediterranean ( or Euro-atlantic, in the case of Portugal) parties of those countries would not have made, or been able to make, common cause against the EU north-western centre during the height of the Eurozone crisis, in the way they did. Cultural patterns related to this were already so obvious before the crisis, that Nicolas Sarkozy, with France itself in the conflicted position at the EU north-western centre but also as a Mediterranean nation sharing some of the characteristics, had attempted to found a "Mediterranean Union" around 2007-8, running along Spain, France, Italy and Greece, with Turkey and countries in North Africa on the balance of probability to be made next-tier members, on the strength of differences in their political and institutional set-up. This was actually an embryonic EU on a different geo-cultural basis, to be helped into being by French administrators once again. Instead, the real EU paid the ultimate tribute to it, and to how threateningly plausible the cultural substance of it actually was, by being extremely careful to knock it entirely on the head, and carefully broadened it into the essentially meaningless advisory talking shop of the "Union for the Mediterranean" , which has ended up having little influence, by including all of the EU and large parts of North Africa and the middle east.
It's too exhaustive to outline every area, but now let's have a look at South-East Asia. There are again clearly either major methodological errors, outdated research on the ground, or more probably both. When Huntington began writing in 1993, China was still an emergent middle-ranking power, not a superpower, and India was only recently emerging from a politically non-aligned status with the West - as well as negligible spheres of economic and political influence. India has now entirely moved away from a non-aligned position, but is also in simultaneous increasing conflict with China. Looking further around again, the idea that Myanmar is not now more heavily in the 'Sinic' sphere of influence than the "Buddhist Bloc" Huntington instinctively puts it in would be considered odd by many analysts today. This is because China has outgrown the political, economic and cultural role Huntington put it in.
Finally, let's have a look at Latin America. Huntington's thesis, that the entirety of Latin America is non "Western", is strikingly less nuanced, more broadbrush, and immediately more odd than for any other continent. This is probably why it was one of the most immediately questioned, contested and even ridiculed when it first came out. Chomsky's thoughts on it are useful, because they relate to points made earlier. Taking into account Huntington's personal and historical background, his account could easily be described as reflecting the history and justifications of US foreign policy, and a mandate for more in the future ; or a mandate "for the US to interfere or invade as often, or over as large an area as possible", as I think Chomsky more straightforwardly put it.
It's mentioned above, but it bears repeating : Huntington was not some random disinterested academic observer. He was an absolute stalwart of US Cold War total-realpolitik, who had been so obsessive about winning against Vietnam in 1968 for geo-strategic reasons, for instance, that he suggested deporting the entire Vietnamese population to the countryside if it was necessary to win the conflict, but without any of the underlying moral or cultural anger of later conservative strategists. He influenced ultra-realpolitik in the region throughout the '70s, which by the turn of the 1980s had culminated in one of the most astonishing moves in the history of US foreign policy, with both Reagan ( and Thatcher) ending up covertly supporting the genocidal Marxist-Leninist party of Pol Pot in exile purely on the grounds of Vietnamese policy. The point here, is that Huntington was almost as pragmatically opportunistic, rather than culturally driven, a thinker as you could possibly imagine, but here was giving a cultural analysis simply because it seemed contingent at the particular time, and was also influenced by post-modern trends of that time .
If you work from this starting-point, it's quite hard to discount anyone saying that there are good personal, professional-historical or bureaucratic reasons to be most suspicious of all of Huntington's Latin American continental characterisation, which is also the most immediately unorthodox and blanket continental characterisation of all of them. Purely because of geographical proximity, the US intervened more directly, widely and almost uniformly, and over a longer period of time, across the whole of the Latin American continent than anywhere else in the world.
An objection to all this might run : "OK, there a few errors here and there, but aren't the rough contours of the characterisation "roughly about right" ? Doesn't someone in Scotland still have more in common with someone in Germany than in Saudi Arabia ? Haven't we seen Christian-Muslim conflict" ?
The problem is that Huntington's analysis is *not* a quantitative analysis of trends, charting the balance of historical and cultural push-and-pull factors in certain places, a spectrum of more-or-less : it's qualitative and deterministic. All countries are fundamentally bound by the same equivalent historical forces, to organise themselves into the same equivalent historical groups, to fight their most existential and defining conflicts. If some of this doesn't work, none of it works. Jeremiad469 ( talk) 15:45, 25 March 2021 (UTC)
Hello Morgengave. Criticism of Huntington's schema certainly isn't new, but nearly all the points above effectively are, as they explicitly relate to specific disconfirmations of his scheme over the last ten years, when academic discussion of his work has already gone out of fashion. Although I think removing the header map is— a priority, both on the grounds of the prevailing academic view and recent disconfirmation, I do agree it is reasonable to ask for broader democratic consensus here before permanently removing. I would be interested in hearing others' views on some of the points above. Jeremiad469 ( talk) 18:14, 25 March 2021 (UTC)
Albania needs to be included as part of the Western world. Even though the designation "Western World" is not precise by any stretch of the imagination, exhibiting levels of fluidity and being under continual renegotiation, considering the origins of the West conceived initially as a self-defined Graeco-Roman identity, and the re-circumscription of that identity under the overarching realm of Christendom, the region, the peoples, and the ethnicity that constitute Albania have very much been a part of all these currents, from antiquity through medieval Christendom, and despite later being conquered by the Ottomans, Albania today stands closer to a European identity than any other. From any which way you slice it, the arguments in favour of including Albania as part of the West far outweigh any arguments against. Please be serious and edit the article to make this correction. 75.119.238.209 ( talk) 20:08, 11 April 2021 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.119.238.209 ( talk) 02:17, 9 April 2021 (UTC)
The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion:
Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. — Community Tech bot ( talk) 15:39, 1 July 2021 (UTC)
Why is this article an extended protection article? I am genuinely curious as to why that is the case. Thank you for your time.
FictiousLibrarian (
talk). 17:49, 18 July 2021 (UTC)
At a glance, the second paragraph of the lede has strong consensus. What's the problem with it specifically? Has there been past disputes about it? -- Hipal ( talk) 15:53, 16 August 2021 (UTC)
The two maps in the lead ( this and this) are, as far as I can gather, from the same source. Why, then, does the first one not feature Israel while the second one does? Thanks, thorpewilliam ( talk) 07:23, 30 September 2021 (UTC)
Huntington's nomination for the National Academy of Sciences was rejected after he was accused of misusing mathematics and engaging in pseudo-science. Therefore his views should neither be given such prominence, nor used as the basis for a map. Leutha ( talk) 11:37, 25 February 2021 (UTC)
How unique is it? Perhaps mention of it under “Cultural definition” could be removed and replaced with this (mentioning the Philippines as well as Japan)? thorpewilliam ( talk) 14:56, 30 September 2021 (UTC)
"In 1071, the Byzantine army was defeated by the Muslim Turco-Persians of medieval Asia, resulting in the loss of most of Asia Minor." To Muslim Turks. Seljuks were fully Turkic unlike some empires like Safavids or Afsharids and at that time there is no Persian impact on it. Its nonsense and should be change.
Wickelodeon ( talk) 20:53, 18 February 2022 (UTC)
I don't know why I'm not autoconfirmed and can't edit the page. Been contributing since 2006!
I suggest editing this sentence in the introduction:
The West was originally Western Christendom, opposing Catholic and Protestant Europe with the cultures and civilizations of Orthodox Europe...
to read:
The West originally identified Western Christendom (Catholic and Protestant Europe) in opposition to the cultures and civilizations of Orthodox Europe...
The word "opposing" occurring between "Western World" and its definition, "Catholic and Protestant Europe" is confusing. At first read it seems to mean the Western World was in opposition to Catholic and Protestant Europe. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Speedyboy ( talk • contribs) 01:15, 3 March 2022 (UTC)
I feel certain parts of this article go too far towards implying that the "western world" is an objectively real thing, which it's not. It is a highly subjective perception of the world that is arguably inherently flawed.
It's a vague concept, supposing it's a concept, it's a geographical word, it may have more or less sense depending on a context. It's good to give several definitions for a vague word. The word often is used as an "oppossition"
-- 83.118.219.9 ( talk) 15:12, 23 March 2022 (UTC)
This
edit request has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request. |
Request to add Anti-Western sentiment under the section Western_world#See_also. 223.25.74.34 ( talk) 14:58, 4 April 2022 (UTC)
“Since the fall of the iron curtain the following countries are generally accepted as the Western world: the United States, Canada; the countries of the European Union plus UK, Norway, Iceland and Switzerland; Australia and New Zealand.”
“In modern usage, Western world refers to Europe and to areas whose populations largely originate from Europe, through the Age of Discovery's imperialism.”
Interesting to see that the only non-European countries that are included in this definition are English-speaking. Those are not the only countries to which the above definition would apply though. Sounds to me like the above definition should rather be “...to Europe and to former British colonies whose populations largely originate from Europe...”
Bias acknowledgment: I think the whole concept of “The West” is ridiculous, but I would hope that the definition would at least be consistent. 111.65.61.181 ( talk) 10:35, 18 April 2022 (UTC)
The map is the result of an extensive previous conversations, see in the talk page archives. Any editor is of course welcome to reopen the conversation and argue for a change, but removing or changing the map should not be done unilaterally without a consensus. UlyssorZebra ( talk) 17:06, 6 June 2022 (UTC)
Why are there two sets of multiple images in the notes section? Seems rather an odd placement. -- Vsmith ( talk) 00:35, 7 November 2022 (UTC)
The 4th paragraph in the section "Cold War (1947–1991) and sexual revolution (1960s–1980s)" has several dubious or incomprehensible statements. Someone should fix it.
The Western debate on the global conflict, aligned Protestantism on the path of Woman's liberation.
What??
The Sexual revolution then unveiled in the USA as ecstatic self-congratulation for the triumphant North American culture (as well as English and French).
What??
The transition from the 1800s Industrialization to the 1900s mass production, consumerism and computing revolution was followed by a fundamental shift from physical labor (male-dominated) to intellectual, thus permitting the 1960s-80s development of revolution in gender roles and male-dominancy.
Ok.
Nonetheless, Nazi-Fascism was regarded as pejoratively masculine for having started the conflict that shed so much blood, and for having been rooted in the militaristic ancient Roman Empire (Holy Roman Empire's Germano-Italian central European hegemony lasted a millennium until early 19th century,
What??
Ttulinsky ( talk) 02:14, 18 May 2022 (UTC)
Yes, there are problem with the timeline Women's rights in UK and France, because the late date of the female suffrage rights and the late appearance of female politicians in their government and parliaments. Also women's inheritance rights appeared relatively late. If you examine legal history, France and UK are not the best examples for women's rights in Europe.-- Csataelőkészítő ( talk) 14:42, 3 December 2022 (UTC)
It is important to notice, that ancient West (Greco-Roman) located in the mediterranean, including Southern Europe North Africa and Near Eastern areas of Asia. It was the so-called hellenistic world. Both Greece and Rome had stronger and more important economic cultural and commercial relationships with North Africa Egypt etc.. than with France (then Gallia) or British Isles.
The so-called truly European West was formed with the Frankish Empire.-- Csataelőkészítő ( talk) 16:20, 3 December 2022 (UTC)
Wrote pages at No Original Research noticeboard and elsewhere, after edits on 19 November and still it different from how reliable sources suggest the Western world is to be intended. Happy white Christmas then. The basis of ( talk) 18:14, 24 December 2022 (UTC) Presently accepted version, caressing white supremacy, reads as: white people were bloodthirsty since ancient times and made it to conquer much of the planet. Is this even acceptable other than grossly wp:OR? The basis of ( talk) 06:24, 25 December 2022 (UTC)
References
The Greeks provided the chromosomes of Western civilization. One does not have to idealize the Greeks to sustain that point. Greek ways of exploring the cosmos, defining the problems of knowledge (and what is meant by knowledge itself), creating the language in which such problems are explored, representing the physical world and human society in the arts, defining the nature of value, describing the past, still underlie the Western cultural tradition.
In 1,200 years the tiny village of Rome established a republic, conquered all of the Mediterranean basin and western Europe, lost its republic, and finally, surrendered its empire. In the process the Romans laid the foundation of Western civilization. [...] The pragmatic Romans brought Greek and Hebrew ideas down to earth, modified them, and transmitted them throughout western Europe. [...] They not only provided the conditions of peace and prosperity necessary for the transmission of Greco-Roman culture and Christianity but also proved themselves the most capable administrators and lawgivers in human history. They effectively administered an empire of unprecedented size with minimal bureaucracy and technology and bequeathed to the West a system of law [...] Roman law remains the basis for the legal codes of most western European and Latin American countries — Even in English-speaking countries, where common law prevails, Roman law has exerted substantial influence. [...] Many of the founders of the United States considered Roman law more rational and more truly based on natural law than the common law. The Supreme Court justice Joseph Story led a nineteenth-century movement to use Roman legal concepts to reform the more chaotic common law and to provide guidance in those areas in which the common law was silent.
the term "Western" — refer to the culture of classical antiquity that arose in Greece and Rome; survived the collapse of the Roman Empire; spread to western and northern Europe; then during the great periods of exploration and colonization of the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries expanded to the Americas, Australia and areas of Asia and Africa; and now exercises global political, economic, cultural, and military power far greater than the size of its territory or population might otherwise suggest.
A recent by Rim sim adds a single-sentence paragraph to the lead that I think gives undue weight to a racist depiction of "The East":
Used to develop national identities, the overarching concept of the West was forged in opposition to ideas such as "the East", "the Orient", "Eastern barbarism", "Oriental despotism", or the "Asiatic mode of production" by Karl Marx.
Why do we need all of these quotes? This information is not included in the body of the article. The attention given to Marx also seems unwarranted, and it's unclear what exactly is being attributed to him. — Freoh 06:33, 22 January 2023 (UTC)
The edit was not made by me (done by someone else), I just restored it. All those strong words are mentioned in the source text; this will be modified soon. Rim sim ( talk) 06:44, 22 January 2023 (UTC)
A recent
by
Rim sim adds some text that misrepresents its source. The current version of the article says that Empowering ideals like individualism and enlightenment have been considered as ‘Western’ or ‘White’ values
. Here's what the cited text actually says:
Manichaeism – a major religion formed in the third century CE premised on a moral struggle between good and evil – was popularised as a socio-political concept by Frantz Fanon in the mid-twentieth century. In Fanon’s scathing writings on colonialism and post-colonialism, ‘the colonial world is a Manichaean world’ (Fanon 2004: 6). There is the colonising force and the colonised; while the former is imposing, dominating, controlling, the latter is portrayed as impervious to any ethics or morals. Furthermore, not only is the colonised – or native – perceived as not possessing any values, they represent the negation of values (generally that of the coloniser). To this end, the ‘native’ is perceived as the enemy of values, or ‘absolute evil’ (Fanon 2004: 6). Conversely, it is because colonisers perceive themselves as holding values that they are able to justify the violence of colonisation and colonising practices. Specifically, these are ‘Western’ or ‘White’ values that find their foundation in Greco-Roman philosophy and espouse key notions such as individualism and enlightenment. Fanon’s theory on violence as a tool and product of colonisation and its resistance is useful as a way of contextualising how ‘Manichaeism’ is used in contemporary politico-social arguments.
This does not support the idea that individualism and enlightenment have been considered as ‘Western’ or ‘White’ values
, and it contradicts the notion that these values are empowering
. —
Freoh 06:15, 22 January 2023 (UTC)
Surely, the wording will be improved in this context. Rim sim ( talk) 06:52, 22 January 2023 (UTC)
A recent
by
Rim sim added some
trivia to the lead that
isn't present in the body. It now says that The first historically recorded awareness of various regions of the world as East and West came from the people of ancient Greece in fifth century BCE.
Why are we giving so much weight to Herodotus? That aspect of Western history doesn't seem super significant. —
Freoh 06:03, 22 January 2023 (UTC)
Herodotus is referred to as " The Father of History". Mention of such an important figure in the lead is in correspondence with WP:LEDE not some trivia; note that the article is still under construction. Rim sim ( talk) 06:38, 22 January 2023 (UTC)
still under construction, then it should be draftified. — Freoh 01:32, 23 January 2023 (UTC)
Plenty of other sources. Rim sim ( talk) 16:45, 23 January 2023 (UTC)
A recent
by
Rim sim adds some text that's unclear and unsupported. The lead now says that Modern-day Western world encompasses much of the nations and states where civilization is based on Western culture
. What does it mean for civilization to be based on Western culture? The citation supports the idea that "Western culture" is a thing and that Western states tend to be powerful, but that's
different than saying that civilization is based on Western culture
. —
Freoh 05:51, 22 January 2023 (UTC)
civilization is based on Western culture
refers to societies where governance, institutions, human rights, language, legal system etc are broadly based on that of
Western culture; these civilizations are in stark contrast to others like in the
Arab world and the
Eastern world, where all the aforementioned things are different. The map in the lead corroborates this point.
Rim sim (
talk) 06:27, 22 January 2023 (UTC)
civilization is based on Western cultureis a claim that is both vague and exceptional, and it's currently not explicitly supported by any sources. — Freoh 01:29, 23 January 2023 (UTC)