Birth (and death) of the West

"It was the East that pushed Europe towards the West," writes historian Alessandro Vanoli. Columbus and Magellan wanted to reach the Indies, where so much wealth came from, where knowledge had always come from. First and foremost, America was the West Indies. The concept of the West was born looking towards the east and was in parallel with the redefinition of Europe, a name-idea that the Greeks had invented and that had been used in the early Middle Ages, soon replaced by the term Christendom in opposition to Islam. There was then a time of alliance between Christianity and the Chinese Empire against the powerful Ottoman world.

The fall of Constantinople (1453) and especially the discovery of America (1492) things changed. The West was born and Europe was reborn. Maps took on a new form – more useful and precise – and greater legal value. It was the age of geographers, of discoverers, of the New World... and of fear of the Turks. "It was in this period that the West became not only a geographical horizon, but also a kind of synonym for Europe, for that Europe that was defined between politics and cartography," Vanoli writes to The invention of the West (Book Attic), A fascinating book, one of those that, without discovering anything, rewrites everything.

The Europe of the centuries of Humanism (15th-16th) was overcoming the concept of Christianity and becoming a system of values and an idea of culture. At the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic, America was emerging as a promised land, an open field of riches and freedom (only for some, of course), a kind of young heir, or rebel, of Europe. The idea that progress ran from east to west, from Orient to Occident, was taking shape. In the north of the new continent, they looked to the West with an air of conquest. The Europe-America axis, that is, the West, ultimately resulted in military and commercial colonialism (and lethally racist: white civilization), in an overwhelming domination of the world, until the mythical Orient was transformed into a caricature, into an exotic, lascivious, despotic and theocratic orientalism. Scientific and technological progress led to industrialization, which further strengthened this Western preeminence. America and Europe became the center of everything. The East became the Near, Middle, and Far East.

Are we reaching the end of that half-millennium of Western dominance today? Is Trump the beginning of the decline that Spengler had already predicted a century ago? Today, the economic renaissance of China and all of Asia, its demographic dominance, its scientific, technological, and urban drive, seem unstoppable. Trump simultaneously feels fear and admiration for this old-new Eastern world while he is dedicated to disdaining Europe. We have just witnessed a staging of the Xi-Modi-Putin jingle: "This will be the century of Asia," said Modi. Trump wants to strengthen the US, but what he is doing is weakening the West as a synonym for democracy and freedom, for knowledge (science, education) and economic progress. He is also weakening it as a military power (NATO). Trump is a destructive virus. Putin and Xi are delighted to have met him, and are seducing Modi. Unable to understand globalization, Trump is gleefully accelerating the end of the Western monopoly. China is putting itself at the center. Look, Europe and the Mediterranean have many points to become the Far West. Will we react?

But let's return to the origins of Vanoli's book. At the dawn of Mesopotamian civilizations, the West was the twilight, the place where the Sun died every day, the world of the dead. In the 6th century BC, the Greeks finally looked at the sky without religious prejudices, and Parmenides discovered that the Earth was round, a lesson he ended up forgetting for centuries (but not entirely). They were also the first to give geographical entity to Europe, the continent inhabited by them, by the Greeks, and opposite in Asia. The Pillars of Hercules marked the western limit. Then came the Roman Empire and its subsequent fracture: eastern empire and western empire. The latter fell into medieval fragmentation, but was eventually reborn and sailed the Atlantic, ultimately forging the West we know today. And from which we perhaps experienced the swan song. Birth and death of the West. Closed circle.