In its heyday between the 1920s and the 1950s, the Western Civilization curricula took students on an intellectual journey that began in ancient Greece and culminated in present-day America, meandering quite literally from Plato to NATO. From the early 19th century onward, the concept of the West became temporalized and politicized. It became a concept of the future (Zukunftsbegriff), acquired a polemical thrust through the polarized opposition to antonyms such as Russia, the East, and the Orient, and was deployed as a tool for forging national identities. The gestation of the West went hand-in-hand with the gradual substitution of an east-west divide for the north-south divide that had dominated European mental maps for centuries. To trace the origins and the evolution of the West in 19th century Europe, one is bound to look to the east. Russia emerged as the antonym that gave birth to the West. First, it became the location of intense debates on the West and Westernization. That Western Europeans located Russia in the east, however, did not become common until the 1830s and 1840s. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegels (1770–1831) lectures on the philosophy of history, given in the 1820s, as well as Dominique Dufour de Pradts (1759–1837) study on international relations from 1822 provide an early indication that French and German scholars were starting to substitute an east-west divide for the north-south divide that had dominated European mental maps for centuries. More familiar than the evolution of the West in the 19th century – and hence treated more cursorily here – is the prominence to which it rose in the 20th. The First World War provided the catalyst for new conceptualizations of the West, in which the United States of America, the rising star on the horizon of political and economic progress, featured particularly prominently. This was fostered both by new developments in American policy and by the breath-taking advance in communication technologies and transportation techniques that practically shrank the Atlantic – a phenomenon famously described as time-space compression. The concept of the Atlantic community was created, which transformed the northern Atlantic into an inland sea and ocean of freedom, endowing the older dichotomy between Western sea powers and the Russian land power with new meanings. Not only in the eyes of Life magazine editor Henry Luce (1898–1967) , the United States became the self-declared sanctuary and inheritor of all the great principles of Western Civilization.
Posted on: Sat, 04 Oct 2014 23:51:52 +0000
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