On Friday 21 November, Georgios Varouxakis will present From Plato to NATO?: What does 'The West' Mean?

While 'The West'  used to be defined by geography — as for a long time location was the determining factor — now, borders have dissolved, and the West also includes countries like Japan and South Korea.

Values such as democracy and respect for the individual are being absorbed into an expanding idea of what the West means, a concept that continues to move eastward.

But are these values really unique to the West? Is democracy or respect for women a Western value?

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From Plato to NATO? What does ‘the West’ Mean?

“The West” is on everyone’s lips, but what does the term mean? Where is “it”? Who represents “it”? When did “the West” begin to be used as a socio-political concept? And, more importantly, why? Does it have a future? Is it a good thing, a bad thing, or…? Who belongs to the West? Who decides? How many definitions of the West are there? Are they all valid, or all wrong? Does the polysemy of “the West” render it meaningless? Or could it still stand for something? – And, if the answer to the latter question is positive, what might it stand for? All these, and some more questions will be addressed in a brief lecture on a long story.

Georgios Varouxakis’s recently published book The West: The History of an Idea challenges more or less everything most of its readers thought about the idea of the West. It will certainly surprise those who thought that “it” always existed, or at least has existed “from Plato to NATO”. But it will meanwhile also challenge the assumptions of people who thought that the West must have emerged after World War II with the onset of the Cold War. It will also surprise those with more specialist knowledge, who have read in the scholarly literature that the idea of the West emerged around the 1890s. It will most certainly give second thoughts to readers who assumed that the idea of the West emerged in juxtaposition to Asia, Africa, or Islam. It will present a challenge to those who thought that the idea of the West arose to cater for the needs of high imperialism. The book will also challenge the assumptions of those who take for granted that the idea of the West had Anglo-America at its core and is simply an extension of the so-called Anglosphere.

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Recent interview on The Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/books...