2.4. TERMODINAMICA DE LA CORROCION
2.8.3. Parámetros Químicos
Introduction
The concept of the West is of particular importance here because the thesis argues that the way in which Turkey is narrated in foreign policy analysis is manifestly Western in nature. What follows is that the foreign policy analysis discourse is more about the West than about Turkey. Therefore, we need to locate the tradition within the wider discourse about the West, which is an expansive and varied scholarly field. In the following sections, the attempt is to show the main currents in the scholarly field with a distinction being made between studies that probe the West’s nature and those that are more focused on the West as a category.
The debate on the idea of the West is strange in many ways. It is strange because we assume that what we are discussing is clear when it is not. In other words, when we talk about the West, we assume that we have a shared understanding of what it means. This is the case also in the media, where the West is casually discussed in the same sentence with, say, Russia or China.78 However, Russia and China can be defined in various ways: geographically, linguistically, ethnically, and so on. It does not mean that there are no disputes over the legitimacy of those definitions, but China and Russia still have a legal existence. The West, on the other hand, does not legally exist and cannot be neatly defined. As Owen Harries argues: ‘Over the last half century or so, most of us have come to think of “the West” as a given, a natural presence and one
78 See for example The Economist, ’Russia and the West: Alternative Reality’ (30 May 2015), available at
http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21652339-vladimir-putin-concocts-new-story-ukraine-leaving- west-wondering-what-he-up (10 July 2015); Natalie Nougayrede, ’The West is trying to understand China, but don’t expect trust’, The Guardian (26 March 2015); available at
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/26/west-understand-china-trust-xi-jinping (10 July 2015); Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, ’African Books for Western Eyes’, New York Times (28 November 2014), available at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/30/opinion/sunday/african-books-for-western-eyes.html (10 July 2015).
that is here to stay. It is a way of thinking that is not only wrong in itself, but is virtually certain to lead to mistaken policies. The sooner we discard it the better.’79
But we still talk about the West alongside China and Russia as if its definition was unproblematic and commonly shared. And when we read in the news that the West did this and the West did that, we all know what the news refer to. This means that we have a strong cognitive and emotional relationship to the West and that it is a particularly meaningful ‘imagined community’ akin to a nation state. But yet when you ask someone who frequently talks about the West to actually define its limits, you rarely receive an answer. Is it about geography? Perhaps it is about values? Or is the West primarily a political community? Because of this strange situation where everyone ‘knows’ what the West is but cannot really define it, it is important to analyse ‘how the West is variously conceptualised and constituted, who has the power and capacity to define its contours, and not least why debates about the West are infused with high emotion’.80
Harries argued earlier that we should discard the concept of the West, but he does not actually propose that the West as a category is redundant because of its unnaturalness, but rather advocates a particularly narrative about the nature of the West. For him, the West is a civilisation, not a political community. Harries’ argument is characteristic of the debate surrounding the concept of the West: even if the analysis is seemingly about the West as a category, it also contains a moral or aesthetic preference for a particular narrative about the nature of the West.
79 Owen Harries, ’The Collapse of the ”West”’, Foreign Affairs (September/October 1993), available at
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/southeastern-europe/1993-09-01/collapse-west (12 July 2015).
Despite often being intertwined in analysis, the distinction between studies that probe the West’s ‘nature’ and those that treat the West as a ‘category’ is a suitable way to describe the field of literature.81 The former approach is far more common than the latter with Jan Ifversen noting in 2008: ‘While works have been written on the idea of the West, typically they deal with the core values of the West and do not question the chosen term or venture into more semantic reflections.’82
Pocock challenges the strict distinction between the two approaches and argues that it is possible to accept that something is at the same time ‘constructed’ and ‘real’: ‘I do not want to suggest that there is nothing to study here except constructions in the mind, framed with discreditable intentions. I have no difficulty in accepting “Europe” as a reality as well as a construction; many things in human history can be both at once.’83 Still, to examine the West’s ‘nature’ means that the research agenda is different from a more conceptual analysis of the West.
The West’s nature
The studies that are concerned with the West’s nature focus on what the West really is or should be; they attempt to define the ‘inside’ or the essential nature of the West and impose a hegemonic narrative. The early 2000s witnessed a proliferation of such analysis for two main reasons. Firstly, the event of 9/11 in New York was widely perceived, especially in the United States, as an attack against the West and its values. This triggered a wave of analysis re-considering the basic tenets that the West was seen to represent and its relations to the
81 Heller, ’The Dawning’, p. 18.
82 Jan Ifversen, ’Who are the Westerners?’, International Politics, 45 (2008), p. 238. 83 Pocock, ’Some Europes’, p. 55.
Islamic world.84 Secondly, the Iraq War that followed in 2003 exposed a huge gap between European and American perspectives on the international system. Robert Kagan famously declared that ‘on major strategic and international questions, Americans are from Mars and Europeans from Venus’.85
This opened a whole new chapter in the debate about the West. There were those who argued that Europe and the United States are simply too different to form a united entity called the West, and might even become enemies.86 There were economic, political, cultural, and historical differences that were emphasised in arguing that the West is no more what it was during the Cold War when Europe and the United States shared a common vision and enemy: fighting against totalitarian regimes and advancing democracy and free market globally.
Now it was suggested that two Wests – European and American – have emerged.87 If the events of 9/11 formed the new formative moment in the United States, Europe’s political, economic and moral vision was tied to the 1989 experience that re-united the European continent. It was argued that the lessons of the Second World War no longer provided enough symbolism to
84 See for example Richard Koch & Chris Smith, Suicide of the West (Bloomsbury Academic, 2007); Bernard
Lewis, What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (Harper Perennial, 2002); Roger Scruton, West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat (Bloomsbury Academic, 2003).
85 Robert Kagan, ’Power and Weakness’, Policy Review, 113 (June/July, 2002). See also Kupchan, ’The End of
the West’; Thomas L. Friedman, ’The End of the West?’, The New York Times (2 November 2003), available at http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/02/opinion/02FRIE.html (20 July 2015); Jeffrey Anderson, G. John Ikenberry & Thomas Risse (eds.), The End of the West? Crisis and Change in the Atlantic Order (Cornell University Press, 2008); Anatol Lieven, ’End of the West’, Prospect, 78 (September 2002); P.H. Gordon, ’Bridging the Atlantic Divide’, Foreign Affairs, 82:1 (2003), pp. 70–83; Hanspeter Neuhold, ’Transatlantic Turbulences: Rift or Ripples?’, European Foreign Affairs Review, 8 (2003), pp. 457–468.
86 Kupchan, for example, writes that ’Europe will inevitably rise up as America’s principal competitor. Should
Washington and Brussels begin to recognise the dangers of the growing gulf between them, they may be able to contain their budding rivarly. Should they fail, however, to prepare for life after Pax Americana, they will ensure that the coming clash of civilizations will be not between the West and the rest but within a West divided against itself’. ’The End of the West’. Kagan argued that Europe’s idealism and its ‘postmodernist utopia’ of a world of peace, negotiations and international law was only possible because the realist United States provided for its security. ‘Power and Weakness’.
87 Dominique Moisi, ’Reinventing the West’, Foreign Affairs (November/December 2003), available at
bring them together to work for a common cause. 88 In other words, a synecdochal representation of a united West was overtaken by a metonymical representation that emphasised conflict and difference.
Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida famously argued that Europe and the United States are indeed very different, and that Europe should cherish the gap: ‘In this world, the reduction of politics to stupid and costly alternative of war or peace simply doesn’t pay. At the international level and in the framework of the UN, Europe has to throw its weight on the scale to counterbalance the hegemonic unilateralism of the United States.’89 Europe’s utopian idealism that Kagan presented as its main weakness was re-framed as a strong position both morally and politically. Others were more optimistic and saw the rupture in the alliance as an opportunity to ‘reinvent’ the West and increase cooperation. 90 Andrew Moravcsik proposed a ‘new transatlantic bargain’:
To get things back on track, both in Iraq and elsewhere, Washington must shift course and accept multilateral conditions for intervention. The Europeans, meanwhile, must shed their resentment of American power and be prepared to pick up much of the burden of conflict prevention and postconflict engagement. Complementarity, not conflict, should be the transatlantic
88 Friedman, ’The End of the West’.
89 Jurgen Habermas & Jacques Derrida, ’February 15, or What Binds Europeans Together: A Plea for a
Common Foreign Policy, Beginning in the Core of Europe’, Constellations, 10:3 (2003), p. 293.
90 Moisi, ’Reinventing’; Timothy Garton Ash, Free World: Why a Crisis of the West Reveals the Opportunity of Our
Time (Allen Lane, 2004); Jonathan Stevenson, ’How Europe and American Defend Themselves’, Foreign Affairs (March/April 2003), available at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2003-03- 01/how-europe-and-america-defend-themselves (20 July 2015).
watchword.91
The debate over the ‘nature’ of the West is, then, essentially a battle over how to correctly represent its true essence.
The West as a category
The literature on the West as a ‘category’, on the other hand, focuses on the practice of representing the West. If the former scholarly practice is more positivist in that it attempts to provide a realistic image of the West, the literature that treats the West as a ‘category’ is influenced by the constructivist thought. The West is perceived as an ‘idea’, 92 a ‘rhetorical claim’,93 a ‘direction’,94 a ‘concept’, 95 a ‘semantic configuration’, 96 a ‘trope’, 97 a ‘metaphysical civilization’,98 a ‘metageographical concept’,99 a ‘cult’,100 or a ‘narrative’.101 The underlying claim is that the meaning of the West is contested, fluid, and intersubjective, and that it is a construction of the mind rather than an entity that can be objectively described. They focus primarily not on the nature but the meaning of the West. In other words, to treat the West as a category is to
91 Andrew Moravcsik, ’Striking a New Transatlantic Bargain’, Foreign Policy (July/August 2003), available at
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/europe/2003-07-01/striking-new-transatlantic-bargain (20 July 2015).
92 Hall, ’The West and the Rest’, p. 278; Loren Baritz, ’The Idea of the West’, American Historical Review, 66
(1960–61), pp. 618–40.
93 Christopher GoGwilt, ’True West: The Changing Idea of the West from the 1880s to the 1920s’ in Silvia
Federici (ed.), Enduring Western Civilization: The Construction of the Concept of Western Civilization and Its ’Others’
(Westport: Praeger, 1995). See also Christopher GoGwilt, The Invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the Double- Mapping of Europe and Empire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).
94 William McNeill, ’What We Mean by the West’, Orbis, 41:4 (1997), pp. 513–25. 95 Heller, ’The Dawning’, p. 62.
96 Ifversen, ’Who are the Westerners?’, p. 238.
97 Naoki Sakai, ’The West – a Dialogic Prescription or Proscription?’, Social Identities, 11:3 (2005), pp. 177–95. 98 John McCumber, ’Dialogue as Resistance to Western Metaphysics’, Social Identities, 11:3 (2005), p. 1999. 99 Martin W. Lewis & Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1997).
100 Geoffrey Barraclough, History in a Changing World (Oxford: Blackwell, 1955).
101 David Gress, From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents (New York: Free Press, 1998);
examine how and when it has been invented and for what purposes.
Stuart Hall was one of the first scholars to analyse the West as a category, treating it as an idea that is discursively produced rather than as a natural entity.102 It was, in a sense, a meta-analysis of different historical discourses about the West. However, in arguing that the discourses he analysed produced the idea of the West as ‘modern’ and as such superior to the ‘rest’, Hall also reiterates the narrative of the West as a value-based entity. As Heller puts it,
Unfortunately, Hall is not exact about what terms were used in the historical texts he cites, and thus he treats the West, modernity, and Europe as close synonyms … While complaining that the idea of the West employs stereotypes that split the world into the more and less valuable, Hall himself employs stereotypes that split the world into the dominating and the dominated.103
Most studies of Occidentalism focus on the West as a category and pay attention to how the West is represented in discourses both within and outside the West. The edited volume Occidentalism: Images of the West is a classic work within the field.104 Occidentalism brings together Western postcolonial scholars and Third World intellectuals that take a critical approach towards the hegemonic role of the West in shaping our images of reality. The field of literature has been
102 Stuart Hall, ’The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power’ in Bram Gieben & Stuart Hall (eds.), The
Formations of Modernity (Polity, 1993).
103 Heller, ’The Dawning of the West’, pp. 25–26.
104 James Carrier (ed.), Occidentalism: Images of the West (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). See also Wang Ning,
’Orientalism versus Occidentalism’, New Literature History, 28:1 (Winter 1997), pp. 57–67; Ian Buruma & Margalit Avishai, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (New York: Penguin Books, 2004); Robin D. Gill, Orientalism and Occidentalism: Is the Mistranslation of Culture Inevitable? (Paraverse Press, 2004); Couze Venn,
criticised for wielding animosity towards the West both within and outside it by representing the West in a stereotypical and overtly negative fashion. 105
Many poststructuralist theorists that examine the meaning of the West are equally critical of the concept and seek to deconstruct it in order to challenge its hegemony.106 These studies are often intertwined with works that claim that the West as a global hegemon is uniquely evil and causes unforeseen economic, political, social, and moral destruction through Westernisation. Serge Latouche’s The Westernization of the World is a well-known work of this kind and argues that with the West ‘there emerges a face unlike any known to us and which must infallibly astonish or even frighten us: a very monster, half- mechanic, half-organic, which fits none of our categories for the definition of species’. 107
Although more interested in the West’s nature, Latouche’s work has a strong moralising impulse similar to many works that probe the meaning of the West that argue that it is employed as an ideological tool designed to advance particular interests.108 Thomas Patterson, for example, argues that the Western civilisation advances the interests of capitalism, which means that it is an ideology above all.109 White’s moralising impulse is evident in most works that discuss the West. The West is not only represented as being a triumphalist or a declining entity but either deservingly or wrongly so. In most cases, these discussions are channelled through three alternative narratives of the West’s nature: the West as a civilisation, a value-based community, or a political
105 Buruma & Avishai, Occidentalism.
106 Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1990); McCumber,
’Dialogue’.
107 Serge Latouche, The Westernization of the World: The Significance, Scope, and Limits of the Drive Towards Global
Uniformity (Polity Press, 1996), p. 26. A more positive interpretation of Westernisation include J.M. Roberts,
The Triumph of the West (London: British Broadcasting Company, 1985).
108 See for example Norman Davies, Europe: A History (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1996);
Barraclough, History.
union.110 The following sections will discuss these three narratives.
The ‘civilisation West’ narrative
The ‘civilisation West’ narrative is a particularised understanding of the West in several different ways. The West is particular rather than universal in a historical, geographical, and cultural sense with roots dating back to ancient Greece and Rome, boundaries limiting it to particular continents, and cultural traditions deriving from the Judeo-Christian legacy. Different authors emphasise some of these aspects more than others, but what they have in common is the idea that there are civilisations in the world and that the West is one of them.111 The ‘civilisation West’ narrative is largely temporal in that the West as a civilisation is represented as having survived due to different generations of Westerners from the antique, through the Enlightenment, to the modern times that have ‘passed the torch’.
The most famous scholarly contributions that present the West as a civilisation are Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West and Arnold Toynbee’s
The Study of History.112 Spengler’s pessimistic view of the West as a civilisation that will inevitably decline precisely because it has matured from being a culture to becoming a world-historical force of civilisation, was important in ‘popularising’ the concept of the West.113 At the same time, it represents a
110 Browning & Lehti, The Struggle. See also Ifversen, ’Who are the Westerners’. Ifversen refers to the
’Civilization West’ narrative as the ’Old West’ configuration and to the ’Modern West’ narrative as the ’New West’ configuration. He also includes a fourth category, Westernisation, in his list of different semantic configurations of the West.
111 See for example Gerhard Masur, ’Distinctive Traits of Western Civilization: Through the Eyes of Western
Historians’, American Historical Review, 67 (1962), pp. 591–608.