Indeed, it was the expansion of the Ottoman Empire that motivated the rulers of Western Europe to look for new trade routes and resources. Thus began the Age of Exploration , also known as the Age of Discovery, when so-called Western Civilization would expand beyond Europe to different parts of the world.
Other historical periods, such as the Age of Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution, were all centered in Western Europe, and so the ideas of these periods became synonymous with Western Civilization. In the 20 th century, the political definition of what constituted the West changed several times. Between and , Germany, despite the contributions of many Germans to the development of Western Civilization, was considered hostile to great Western powers, Britain and France, and therefore not considered part of the West from a political standpoint.
Thus, the unseen border of the West was in Central Europe. The situation was similar during the Cold War , from to , as the Iron Curtain was the de facto border separating the capitalist, democratic West and the communist East. But when the Iron Curtain fell, the political idea of East vs. West was much less relevant. Indeed, the fall of the Iron Curtain was celebrated by many as the reunification of Europe. Moreover, as more countries that were formerly part of the communist Eastern bloc join the European Union and NATO , what is identified as the Western World in a political sense now includes most of Europe, right up to the western borders of Russia.
In the contemporary world, the West can mean different things, depending on perspective. Analyzing the Economics of Financial Market The prosperity and stability of any economic struc Utilizing Evidence-Based Lessons Learned for A Systemic Perspective to Managing Complexit Organizational complexity is an unavoidable aspect Global Perspectives on Achieving Success in Competing in both high and low-cost operating envi And Muslim thinkers sometimes speak in a parallel way, distinguishing between Dar al-Islam , the home of Islam, and Dar al-Kufr , the home of unbelief.
I would like to explore this opposition further. Because European and American debates today about whether western culture is fundamentally Christian inherit a genealogy in which Christendom is replaced by Europe and then by the idea of the west. This civilisational identity has roots going back nearly 1, years, then. But to tell the full story, we need to begin even earlier.
F or the Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, the world was divided into three parts. To the east was Asia, to the south was a continent he called Libya, and the rest was Europe. He knew that people and goods and ideas could travel easily between the continents: he himself travelled up the Nile as far as Aswan, and on both sides of the Hellespont, the traditional boundary between Europe and Asia.
Still, despite his puzzlement, these continents were for the Greeks and their Roman heirs the largest significant geographical divisions of the world. He was born at Halicarnasus — Bodrum in modern Turkey. And the Celts, in the far west of Europe, were much stranger to him than the Persians or the Egyptians, about whom he knew rather a lot. For a millennium after his day, no one else spoke of Europeans as a people, either.
Then the geography Herodotus knew was radically reshaped by the rise of Islam, which burst out of Arabia in the seventh century, spreading with astonishing rapidity north and east and west. The Umayyad dynasty , which began in , pushed on west into north Africa and east into central Asia. In early , it sent an army across the straits of Gibraltar into Spain, which the Arabs called al-Andalus, where it attacked the Visigoths who had ruled much of the Roman province of Hispania for two centuries.
Within seven years, most of the Iberian Peninsula was under Muslim rule; not until , nearly years later, was the whole peninsula under Christian sovereignty again. The Muslim conquerors of Spain had not planned to stop at the Pyrenees, and they made regular attempts in the early years to move further north. The 18th-century historian Edward Gibbon, overstating somewhat, observed that if the Arabs had won at Tours, they could have sailed up the Thames.
What matters for our purposes is that the first recorded use of a word for Europeans as a kind of person, so far as I know, comes out of this history of conflict. Even this, however, is a bit of a simplification. In the middle of the eighth century much of Europe was not yet Christian. For one thing, the coast of Morocco, home of the Moors, stretches west of Ireland. For another, there were Muslim rulers in the Iberian Peninsula — part of the continent that Herodotus called Europe — until nearly the 16th century.
Starting in the late 14th century, the Turks who created the Ottoman empire gradually extended their rule into parts of Europe: Bulgaria, Greece, the Balkans, and Hungary. It was a slow process. We have, then, a clear sense of Christian Europe — Christendom — defining itself through opposition. For one thing, the educated classes of Christian Europe took many of their ideas from the pagan societies that preceded them.
The idea that the best of the culture of Greece was passed by way of Rome into western Europe gradually became, in the middle ages, a commonplace. In fact this process had a name. And it was an astonishingly persistent idea. So from the late middle ages until now, people have thought of the best in the culture of Greece and Rome as a civilisational inheritance, passed on like a precious golden nugget, dug out of the earth by the Greeks, transferred, when the Roman empire conquered them, to Rome.
Partitioned between the Flemish and Florentine courts and the Venetian Republic in the Renaissance, its fragments passed through cities such as Avignon, Paris, Amsterdam, Weimar, Edinburgh and London, and were finally reunited — pieced together like the broken shards of a Grecian urn — in the academies of Europe and the United States. The concept of the West is from the Greco-Roman civilization in Europe and the advent of Christianity.
The Western world has been influenced by the traditions of the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, and the Age of Enlightenment and was shaped by the colonialism of the 15thth centuries.
This mass exportation of culture to the rest of the world was known as Westernization. By the midth century, Western culture was widespread throughout the world with the help of mass media, such as television, film, radio, and music.
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