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Georgios Varouxakis, "The West: The History of an Idea" (Princeton UP, 2025)
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Interviewer (Moteza Hajizadeh)
Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Moteza Hajizadeh from Critical Theory Channel. Today I'm honored to be speaking with Professor Georgios Varaksikas about wonderful book that is recently published with the Princeton University Press. The book is called the the History of an Idea. Professor Georgius Warwick. Warwick Sikos is Professor of History and of Political Thought in the School of History at Queen Mary University of London. And he's also the co director of the center for the Study of the History of Political Thought. Georgius, welcome to New Books Network.
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Professor Georgios Varaksikas
Hello. Very, very pleased to be here. Thank you.
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Interviewer (Moteza Hajizadeh)
Before we start to talk about the book, can you just very briefly introduce yourself and then tell us the idea behind Writing the book, the the History of an Idea.
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Professor Georgios Varaksikas
Thank you. Yeah. I grew up in Crete, Greece. I studied history in Athens and then I did my MA and my PhD at University College London in the history of political thought. I specialized in John Stuart mill and my PhD was on John Stuart Mill and his relation to France, his French influences and his overall connection to that country, which was extraordinary. And since then I've written a book on Milan nationality, another book on Victorian political thought, on France and the French. So I extended the study to other Victorians, Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, Walter Budget and many others, including novelists, of course. And then I wrote a book on Milan international relations called Liberty Abroad. And then in the last 12 years, I dedicated myself to a much more ambitious project, the History of the Idea of the West. And the two are in a way related. The initial trigger for the west book was that I read some books and articles on the history of the idea of the west, and they very correctly were saying there is a huge amount of anachronism when people assume the west has always been there as an identity or a cultural or political entity or whatever. But they were all arguing that is all anachronistic and projections from what we now understand as west to people who call themselves and thought of themselves very differently. And there was this consensus in the literature, in the academic literature, that the west, as a self conscious, as a self description, as an explicit idea, begins in the 1880s and 1890s, and it caters for the needs of British imperialism and imperialism more generally. And I thought there's something wrong with that because having worked on John Stuart Mille and the French thinkers he was related to. I had noticed that Auguste Comte, the founder of sociology, positivism and various other things, had obsessively started calling the entity he had in mind. While initially he was calling it Europe, as of the 1840s, he started calling it Locidon, the West. And both he and later his successors started being explicit that there are very clear reasons why you need a new name to call the identity of the part of the world they were talking about. And that name could not be Europe and could not be Christendom. And the name the west would fit their purposes very well. So that was the initial trigger to start looking further. And of course, that's only the beginning of the story. I found some predecessors to comte in the 1820s already, who in France in particular had started talking about a Western alliance and the west versus the new danger that they thought was Russia, the great danger to Western Europe. They thought was Russia. And I followed the story to today. So the book is obviously Kant is just a small part of a small book, of a small chapter in a very long book and a very long story. The book is about how the term then takes all sorts of different directions and meanings and memberships. So that's how it started.
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Interviewer (Moteza Hajizadeh)
Thank you. You actually raised a lot of important points. We'll try to unpack some of them as we go ahead through this interview. One thing that attracted my attention just now that you were describing the idea of the inception of the book was that it really didn't always exist. It's more or less a modern invention in the 19th century. And you talked about British imperialism being one of the reasons that they needed this concept. But what were some of the historical political pressures or factors that made the existence or the idea of the west necessary in that time in the 19th century?
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Professor Georgios Varaksikas
Yeah, very, very good question. So as soon as I start talking, people would immediately ask me. Not immediately, but when the question and time answer came in every lecture I would give, people would say, what about Edward Said? What about the theory of Westerners orientalized, the east ignored? And that's how they created their own identity. And the answer to that is yes, fine, that's very true. But my point is something else. The Westerners in question were very happy to Orientalize the East, whatever they meant by that. But they continued calling themselves Christendom in the 15th, 16th, 17th century, and then more and more Europe as of the end of 17th century. And during the 18th century, they did not call themselves the West. I have an awful lot of evidence in the book that the west was used as a historical term, as a geographical term, but not as a political term describing a contemporary entity or a future entity in the way we would understand it today. For that they call themselves Europe most of the time. Why do they need a new term? And what work does that new term, and therefore, to some extent a new concept that it creates, do? My argument is that's needed when people in Western Europe need to differentiate themselves not from Asia in general, or from Africa, or from the Orient in general, but from Russia, from a country that is also part of Europe and also Christian. So when they need to differentiate themselves from other Christians and other Europeans and create an identity that distinguishes them from that other, they need a new term. And that's where the west is needed. And that's how it starts. So the first uses of the west in the 1820s, 1830s, 1840s, overwhelmingly are used vis a vis Russia. So it's an internal intra European or intra Christian distinction that begins the use of the term the West. Of course, it overlaps with Europe. It overlaps with earlier identities. I'm not saying they have nothing to do with each other. I'm saying a new term is needed and therefore a new configuration of identities is built around that new term. As of the 19th century, and you.
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Interviewer (Moteza Hajizadeh)
Mentioned that it was used to distinguish Europe against Russia. Was there this civilizational talk that Russia was a civilizational threat to Europe at that time, or the west, let's say.
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Professor Georgios Varaksikas
Very good. Well, Russia was seen primarily as a political danger, as a military danger. Russia was enormous. Russia was militarily very powerful. So it was the first person I have identified to be as explicit as it gets about this, the Abbe de Prat, who wrote a number of books and pamphlets in the 1820s during the Greek Revolution and kept saying, the danger is not the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire is very weak and is going to collapse. The danger is that when the Ottoman Empire collapses, if the Russians go to Constantinople, as they were trying to, obviously the ambition of Catherine the Great was to go to conquer Constantinople in the 18th century, if the Russians take over the. That's the lethal danger for Western Europe. Not because they are barbarian, as everybody says, or some people say, but exactly for the opposite reason, because they are too civilized in the sense. Modernized, he meant modernized. He meant they have become sufficiently efficient through technology and since the reforms of Peter the Great in the early, you know, in the beginning of the. Since the beginning of the 18th century, that Russia was too powerful. So he started saying, we need a Western alliance, a Western federation. And he wanted Greece to join that as a kind of rampart of the west against Russia, primarily, not other east, but the European east or the Christian east, which was Russia. So that's what I mean. So Russia as a danger for him militarily and geopolitically, primarily with Kant, who comes to consolidate all this and to theorize it to great detail. With Kant, it's something related, but not exactly the same thing. Kant was not thinking in terms of geopolitics so much. Kant's plan was pacifist and utopian. He thought Kant was a kind of mathematical engineer. So he was thinking, you can solve all problems philosophically. So his solution was that Western Europe is the most advanced part of the world. Western Europe has been marching together culturally and historically since the time of Charlemagne, since the 8th, 9th century. So the great nations around Western Europe, with the addition of some that were not part of Charlemagne's empire, like the British and Spain and some little offshoots in Eastern Europe that could join them from the beginning, for some very interesting reason, they had to reorganize themselves on a completely new basis that would abolish war, abolish empires, abolish violence. And then the rest of the world, little by little, would join them on a voluntary basis when they were ready and wishing to do so. And so the west would auto destruct and become the Republic of humanity. It was a completely utopian plan, but certainly the opposite of imperialistic. It was Eurocentric because it saw Western Europe as the most advanced part of the world. Everybody was very keen to join in his opinion and would inevitably, in his opinion, follow the path of later. But his intentions were completely altruistic. By the way he coined the term altruism. Vivre pour hautry. Living for others was one of his many mottos. So for Kant in particular, it was primarily a matter of cohesiveness. This part of the world is more cohesive. It has so much in common that it has to reorganize itself. So the French, the Germans and the other Germanic nations in Scandinavia and the Netherlands, the Italians, the Spanish and Portuguese and the British and the offshoots, the colonial offshoots of all these peoples in the Americas and Australia, they should reorganize themselves on a new basis, abolish the nation state and create small republics, have a common spiritual power, not have any power except its authority, its spiritual authority. So it was. I don't want to go into too much detail because it would take more than the time we have. And he loved detail. But I would stress it was a utopian, pacifist, anti imperialist plan. He was passionate against empires. So the twist of the story is that the first time the west was invented, somehow in great detail and thoroughly as a project which was. In Kant, it was conceived as the opposite of imperialism. This was conceived as a plan to abolish empires and to abolish conquest.
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Interviewer (Moteza Hajizadeh)
You're right, there are. Well, to be honest, there are a lot of Jesus that I want to ask, but I'm afraid that I might take the conversation to all different directions. It's a very comprehensive book and I had a lot of difficulty choosing the questions. I didn't know which part to choose. They were all interesting. Lots of names that I had to leave out of my questions.
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Professor Georgios Varaksikas
But that's good because people should read the book.
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Interviewer (Moteza Hajizadeh)
Absolutely. The idea is to give them an overview. But August Comte was an important figure that you did mention you talked about in a bit. So I'm not going to focus on that much, but I studied English literature myself and you mentioned that in your previous book you also focus on some authors as well, Thomas Carlyle being one of them. So to me it was also quite interesting how the whole idea of English literature was used by the British Empire to project the idea of British being the peak of the Western civilization. But to me it was quite interesting when you discussed Britain in your book, that the inclusion of Britain in the west was not an automatic thing. It's their part of the West. What were some of the reasons that it was first resisted, they were not automatically part of the West. And what cultural political factors made this transition possible?
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Professor Georgios Varaksikas
Very good. I will start with an anecdote and then I will answer. The anecdote is when Michelet, the French historian Jules Michele, will start his his course on English history. He would tell his students, monsieur, they were gentlemen in those days. Unfortunately in the early 19th century, gentlemen, England is an island. Now you know as much as I do about its history. Obviously they didn't, but he was trying to say, you need to know this country is an island and its history is decisively shaped by its insularity. So that's one beginning of an answer. The more thorough answer is exactly one of the many surprises. My book is full of surprises. One of the many surprises is the idea of the west is not an extension of Anglo America or the Anglosphere as people would think now because they think of the Cold War and the power of the United States since after the Second World War. It's the other way around in Britain and then the United States joined into this common identity. Lust the west was first coined and first perceived as an identity by French and German thinkers, in particular Franco German. It's a Franco German idea and the reason is the history of the division of the Western Roman Empire. So the first time there was a West as a political hell identity was when the Roman Empire was divided into Eastern and Western Roman Empire in the end of the 4th century Christian era 395, not long afterwards the Western Empire was conquered by Germanic invaders. So when an ambitious Germanic prince conquered a lot of much of Western Europe, much of what used to be the Western Roman Empire, he persuaded the Pope to crown him Imperator Romanorum, Emperor of The Romans, Christmas 800, Charlemagne or Carl d' Agose is the prince in question. Except in practice. People didn't call him the Roman Emperor because there was a Roman Emperor. Well, Empress at the moment. But A couple of years later, a man again in Constantinople. There was a Roman Empire in Constantinople in continuity. So all Charlemagne and his successors could claim was that they were the successors of the Western Roman Empire. So he was called Emperor of the West. So this west as a historical identity, as a historical memory, was the parts of the world where Charlemagne and then his successors reigned. Which means in contemporary terms, in our terms, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, you know, the Benelux countries, and most of Italy and a little bit of Spain in the north of Spain. So that part of the world was the part where it was part of their history, that they were the Occident, they were the Aventland, they were the West. So once people started needing a new term to define a supranational identity or culture or potential political alliance in the future that included them and the people they saw as similar to them, they were thinking of that part of the world and perhaps some extensions. And so they started using that word. The word was available in France and Germany. It was part of their history. In Britain, it was not. It was just part of the history that Edward Gibbon, of course described. And he used the term the west hundreds of times in his history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. But if you look how he uses it, he always uses it when he describes that part of the world and that history, when he talks about himself and the world in which he lived and its dangers and future, he calls it Europe, which is exactly what I'm trying to say. In the 18th century, the supranational entity that people thought of was Europe. In the early 19th century, some people in Western Europe, France and Germany and countries around there, when they start thinking in terms of an identity that includes themselves, they think of, they start using the West. So according to my research, people who had studied in Western Europe or who were themselves Germans or who were influenced by Kant, the followers of Kant, these are the first people who start imposing the term the west in Britain. And it's. I have a lot of examples of how bewildering they found the translation of the term and how it was received as very odd initially when it was used to describe the contemporary and future world in English. So I hope I'm not complicating it too much, but Britain joined as a self identification. The British started calling themselves the west later than the Germans and the French think, as I have in mind. And in America even later, because America had its own complicated reasons, which we can discuss, perhaps.
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Interviewer (Moteza Hajizadeh)
Yeah, that was actually my next question. Because nowadays America and England are known to be the West. But again, another part of the book that I enjoyed was that it wasn't really. The idea didn't come to them organically. Right. It was through German think to German thinkers like Francois Liberty van der mispronouncing the name would be great if we could talk about how America was considered to be the west part or part of the West.
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Professor Georgios Varaksikas
Yeah, yeah, very good. Well, there are two very clear issues and reasons. One is the most obvious perhaps or the most straightforward is in America, the West already had another meaning which was their shifting frontier, their ever shifting frontier westwards. In the 19th century, until they reached the Pacific, it was moving towards the Pacific. So the west was a geographical term and also had many very important cultural connotations, sociological connotations. The people of the west were the opposite of people who identify with Europe. The west was the less cosmopolitan, the less obsessed with the old world part of the United States. The elites of the east coast were closer to Europe, but in a way they were provincial compared to Europe. In those days the west was the new America, the future looking America, the nationalist America, the self confident America somehow. So there was a West which meant something completely different and to some extent antagonistic to an identification with West Europeans which we would understand now as a Western identity. In our terms, that's one thing. The other thing, and not unrelated, is the United States, let's remind ourselves, was the first successful post colonial nation. They had just rebelled against the British Empire. In the first decades of the history of the United States, the last thing the Americans would want would be identification with the imperialistic, semi aristocratic, semi feudal Europeans. They were a new dispensation, they were a republic, they were the future, they were a city in the hill. So the idea that they would see themselves as part of a Western alliance of which they would be a junior partner by the way, because in the early decades of the 19th century they were not the most powerful country, although people could start, predict they would become, but they were not. So the last thing in the world they would think of is themselves as part of a Western which would be a cultural and political alliance with the West Europeans. They saw themselves as the antithesis, the future, something beyond and something above, something better than the West Europeans. So only gradually, through, I argue, the influence of Germans, German migrants and Americans who had studied in German universities. Because one of the paradoxes of history is in the 20th century, American universities have been more and more completely modeling themselves on American universities in especially recent decades. But in the early 19th century, it was the other way around. German universities prestige was enormous and American universities were A, imitating them and B, more importantly, they wouldn't even grant PhDs that to get a doctorate you had to go to Gettingen or to Heidelberg or to Berlin after you finished at Harvard College. So the first American PhDs, they were all Gettingen and Berlin educated and Halle and Heidelberg educated. So these people went back and started using these terms because they had learned them in Europe. And only in the. By the end of the 19th century did the term start being dominant, not dominant, but common in America. And only with the First World War did Americans start decisively, see themselves as part of a West in the way we would understand it today, because they had to go and fight for Western Europe versus the Axis powers. So I describe that as, you know, a lot in the book with great detail. Particular authors are extremely important, like John J. Chapman during the First World War, and decisively, Walter Lippmann, who started already during the First World War talking of a Western alliance, Western civilization, Atlantic community and so on. And he went on defining it and influencing American opinion until the 60s.
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Interviewer (Moteza Hajizadeh)
And the breakout of the First World War was also a defining moment because that got to decide what countries could be part of the west, what countries couldn't be part of the west, and especially Germany, which was previously considered to be. But then I guess the situation changed. Could you talk about how this First World War I just exposed these contradictions in the idea of Western civilization and also, I mean, specifically interested in Germany here, how the Allied forces use this narrative of moral superiority to challenge the idea of German culture.
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Professor Georgios Varaksikas
Yes. So it was neutral during the First World War, the Germans, in terms of German propaganda, German intellectuals, German academics and their manifestos and so on. The Germans were asserting a superiority over the west, over the West, Europe, over the French, the English, and the Americans, whom they considered superficial, materialistic, capitalistic and so on, whereas they had more depth, they had culture. So the idea of German culture being superior to civilization, civilization which they considered something superficial, something technical, something more worldly, was something the Germans celebrated. So in Western Europe and America, and let's remind ourselves, America was not yet in the war. So when the Western Allies, the British and the French, wanted to convince the Americans to join, they would say, look, they are fighting against the Western democracies. They are saying proudly, the Western democracies include you. So it became a dividing line within what we now would see as the west, because the Central Powers were fighting against the west. And West Europeans had to persuade the Americans you are part of this civilization. And as I said, Lippmann was extremely explicit about this. My section on Lippmann in that chapter is, if not civilization, at least our civilization is at stake. Quotation from Lippmann so, yeah, it's a fascinating story and one of the most interesting parts of the history of the concept. Lippmann, being the very clever man he was, insisted after the war, after victory, the Western Allies should treat Germany very gently, very leniently and generously in order to reinforce the Western elements in Germany against the eastern elements in Germany, the Prussian aristocrats and so on, who of course would be very happy to use the badge bear of the Western Allies against in order to prevail in Germany. The opposite happened with the Treaty of Versaghi being extremely punitive. And we all know how Hitler benefited from that. So Liepmann was very wise in what he was recommending. He was saying, Germany belongs to Western civilization. Historically, it has momentarily forgotten that we have to remind them and reinforce the Western elements in Germany. Germany is a divided country on this issue. That's why some of the most interesting debates on the west have always taken place in Germany in the last two centuries, because they were asking themselves whether they are part of it and what it means. So the First World War is a decisive time during which such debates took place. And one of the sections in the book, the last section on the First World War, is of course on Thomas Mann, the novelist who wrote a book that I would call a stream of consciousness tirade of attacks against the West. Betachtunggen eines und Politician Reflections of a Non Political Man. He changed his tune as of 1922. He becomes extremely interesting in terms of his reflections on the defeat. Even within 1919. All that is discussed in the book, how he changes his tune, how he changes his language under the influence of Oswald Spengler. But he's the most characteristic example of the German ambivalence towards the west at the time and for a long time after that.
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Interviewer (Moteza Hajizadeh)
And he had that Spengler had that thesis of the decline of the West. Am I right? What was the thesis and why did it have such an enormous influence?
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Professor Georgios Varaksikas
Yeah, brilliant. Well, again, long story to which we have very little to say. But let's whet the appetite of the future readers of the. I hope Spengler became extremely popular in Germany, as his critics in France and elsewhere said correctly. Of course he would become, plausibly, at least. Of course he would become very popular in Germany because he was giving the Germans A way out of their despair. He was saying, let's be clear. Spengler had written the book before the First World War. The declaration of war delayed publication. So it came out at the very end of the war. But that was very fortunate for him because the book immediately became a bestseller, first in the German speaking world and later in the rest of the world. So the crux of the matter was that Spengler was saying to the Germans, the Germans loved it because the book was saying, things are much worse than Germany has just been defeated. Germany is part of the West Abendland, as he defined it. And the whole west is in terminal decline. And it's been in decline since the end of the 18th century. Every culture has a lifespan of around a thousand years. And the is one of them. The Western culture is one of them. There comes a time when a culture stops being, stops producing original organic works of culture and becomes a congealed civilization. It becomes a museum piece for us in the urban land in the West. That started happening around 1800, according to him. So in the 19th century and in the 20th, that he had just begun, the west was in terminal decline. It had become a civilization, a civilization which means a petrified final stage of a culture after it stops being a culture. So he gave the term civilization a different meaning, a meaning that was temporal as opposed to geographical. And he was saying all of us, Germany included, but also obviously the West Europeans and the Americans. The whole west has started its decline since the beginning of the 19th century. So to the Germans it was probably a kind of consolation and a kind of confirmation that something is wrong with this world since long ago and the rest of the world. Soon, once the book was translated, started discussing the book, it became a major subject of conversations everywhere. You will find it in novels, in the Great Gatsby and so on. Because of course, there was the enormous cataclysmic shock of the First World War. The First World War, the Great War, led people to think, oh, is this what civilization means? Is this what it all was about? So as W.E.B. du Bois wrote, this is a civilization that has boasted much. That civilization that had boasted so much had gone into self destruction through a kind of civil war. And the mechanized slaughter that the First World War revealed, which was of course then unprecedented, led people to think, oh, so this is what it's all about. That we have become so sophisticated that we can kill people at this scale of slaughter, of mechanized slaughter. So that all that climate was encapsulated or summarized or encouraged by the pessimism of Spengler, who was saying, we are doomed anyway. And his prediction was that the next culture to take over and become dominant was probably the Slavic, the Russians. So all that chimed in with the pessimism of the time. As I discuss in the interwar period book. Some people started reacting, of course, and I spend a lot of time on a French thinker nobody remembers now, Henri Massi, who wrote a book, many articles, and then a book, Defense de l', Occident, Defense of the west, where he started attacking this pessimism and proposing that the west anyway did not include Germany and Russia. They were Trojan forces of the east, and the west was Latin, classical, Catholic and so on. And of course, France was its center. And much of the chapter is reactions to him all over the world. Because he became as discussed as Spengler. Exactly. Because he was the other pole of the discussion or the debate. So that's the shortest I could say about Spengler. But yeah, he caught the Zeitgeist as well as galvanized it towards more pessimism.
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Interviewer (Moteza Hajizadeh)
But I must say you're doing a great job in kind of whetting listeners appetites to read the book. And if I may just make this comment, I found the book relatively easy.
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Professor Georgios Varaksikas
To go through because it's true that.
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Interviewer (Moteza Hajizadeh)
There are a lot of chapters, but you've broken each chapter into 10, sometimes 15 or 16, 10 parts sometimes, which makes reading it quite easy. So you can read it part by part. That was one of the things I enjoyed about the book. And you have a conclusion at the end of each chapter. And I know that I'm kind of rushing through my questions, but I do want to try to get as much as I can. We talked about First World War, we talked about Spengler, but again, the Second World War was another moment of crisis in the Western identity or the idea of west, of what it means or what it has done with Holocaust. It put everything under question. And then there was another moment of crisis in the Cold War. Can you very briefly tell us what was that? Let's say identity crisis in what west meant. And you mentioned again, Albert Camus, a number of other people, but Camus caught my attention because, like I told, I studied literature, so I connected more with literary figures that you have discussed in the book. Can you talk about these two important events and how they, let's say, challenge the idea, this geopolitical idea called the West.
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Professor Georgios Varaksikas
Good. Yeah. Well, let's start with the Second World War, because the Cold War is the next question, I suppose. Well, we can go to it afterwards. During the Second World War, was again a terrible shock. Of course, some people saw it coming, some were hoping to avoid it once it happened. There was this new dimension to the discussion of ideas of the west that the Germans deliberately were promoting and explicitly were promoting themselves as creating a new Europe. So that's why Camus becomes interesting, because in letters to a German friend, he explicitly complains, we have not talked about Europe for five years because you took it over. And for us, Europe means something else to your Europe. So Europe became the watchword of the Germans, of the Nazis, and therefore various people in France had a serious issue what to do with that. The most fascinating part of the story in the Second World War, in my opinion, besides my affection for Albert Camus and Simone Weyl, who wrote immensely interesting things during the war, the most fascinating thing, though, in terms of the history of the concept, is what happened in occupied France with authors who were writing either in occupied Paris or in Vichy governed southern France, who started arguing, we shouldn't use European civilization, we should use Western civilization. Civilization, Occidental. They were even within German occupied France or the collaborationist regime of Vichy, there were brave authors who were trying to say, to preserve an identity that was not dominated by the German new European. So of course, occidental civilization, Western civilization, was more dominated by France or centered by France, or its heart was France. So those debates. And again, I'm sure we can't go to details, but some of them are fascinating in their implications. Simone Vale went to America, then desperately wanted to fight. So she came to London and was desperately trying to convince the Free French to send her to Paris, Sorry. To occupy France to fight. They thought, what will this emaciated woman do there? She will be killed immediately. So some very clever person convinced her, no, no, no, no. We need you to write a report on how to regenerate France after a hopeful victory. And she wrote her most famous book, La Cinema the Need for Roots. Both in that book that she wrote in 1943, just a few months before she died of tuberculosis in Kent, in England, and in a great number of essays that she wrote during the war, she was agonizing about the future of Europe. She saw Europe as being somehow in between Asia, the East, which was the root of its culture, that Europe had fed through ancient Greece, of eastern roots, Egypt as well as India, Phoenicia and so on, and an extreme west that was represented by the United States, that she feared would turn the world into a very materialist and superficial World, So you may call it French typical Americanophobia. Another part of her essays was her passionate attack against imperialism and what European powers had been doing in the rest of the world. And now this idea is associated with Aimee Cesaire, but she wrote a decade before Cesaire. She wrote what he is famous for, which is, unfortunately, what the Nazis are doing to Europe, is what European empires had been doing to the rest of the world. So we have to think very carefully and treat the rest of the world very differently after the war. These were some of her major messages. She's an absolutely fascinating thinker and I'm very glad that there is a renewal of interest in her for many, many reasons. She deserves it.
- [40:02]
Interviewer (Moteza Hajizadeh)
Yeah. And again, I'll go back to my love of literature. The last thing I expected to read in your book was, or the last person I expected to come across in your book was James Baldwin. But I understand why. For all the right reasons. Right. And most of his books in my library is one of my. I think he's my. He's the favorite author of mine. And again, in your book, you do go to talk about how American thinkers started critiquing the idea of the west from within. And you do mention different writers such as Baldwin and Wright, but Baldwin was the one that caught my attention. Can you talk about how these authors, American thinkers, started criticizing the idea of the west and also the Western liberalism from within? And it was during the Cold War, of course, in 1970s and 80s and civil rights movements in America.
- [40:54]
Professor Georgios Varaksikas
But. Yeah.
- [40:55]
Interviewer (Moteza Hajizadeh)
What was the critique of the Americans from within of Western liberalism and the west in general?
- [41:01]
Professor Georgios Varaksikas
Yeah, yeah. There are many, as you know, many African American thinkers discussed in the book from already the beginning of the 20th century with Alexander Krummel and then the man Krummel people Krummel influenced immensely, like W.E.B. du Bois as well as William Ferris. But in the Cold War period, the two people I discuss most are. I discussed Du Bois, who turned into. He became a communist and became very critical of the west, although he always had an affection for Europe. But in the Cold War divisions, he took the side of the Soviet Union and was celebrated by both the Soviet Union and China. But on the side of the. The most interesting thinkers in the Cold War, and perhaps most surprising are Richard Wright and James Baldwin. And I spend a lot of time on them, especially Wright. Wright receives a bulk of the attention in the Cold War chapter. Exactly. Because here is a thinker who says, wait a minute, I am Western. I have no choice on the matter. I am Western. I grew up in the West. I not only am Western, I like being Western because my interpretation and understand there are different definitions of the west, but my definition of the west, the part of the West I identify with is its secularist, rationalist, separation of church and state, freedom of speech, and various other things that he saw as positives. But his conclusion was, and I will keep it short, it's much longer in the book, as you know, the west is not Western enough. That was his major complaint. So he criticized the west from the point of view of Western ideals and Western principles that he thought Western governments and publics were not sufficiently loyal to, not sufficiently consistent with. So he comes. He explicitly says, I think I'm ahead of the West. I'm more Western than the West. And so that, of course, I find fascinating. When you are discussing the history of a concept and its meanings and uses, having somebody criticizing the west for not being Western enough, you understand why he gets the bulk of the attention in that chapter. And Baldwin, as we know, criticized Wright. He had a parricidal desire to replace him, apparently according to Wright himself. But on this issue he agreed. In both his article in the Encounter magazine, where he described the famous conference of African artists and writers in the Sorbonne in Paris in September 1956, and in correspondence related to it, he clearly sides with the Western side on the Cold War because he thinks that's the side that is most likely to protect his liberty. More importantly, he says, tragically, people don't understand, but we African Americans are the bridge between the west and Africa because of our position. A position of, you know, an argument that was made also by Du Bois long earlier when he talked about the. The double vision of African Americans. So for reasons related exactly to how passionately they were reflecting on the question of the west and Western civilization and how they might fit into it or how they might improve it, they receive a lot of attention in the book and they deserve it.
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- [45:48]
Interviewer (Moteza Hajizadeh)
When you were talking about Baltimore, I was reminded of that recent documentary, but recently I think it came out a few years ago, forgot the name of the documentary. It was a documentary about him when he was in Paris. And again he does criticize the west again in that documentary when he's interviewed. But anyhow, two important figures in the idea of the west in post Cold War. One of them is Fukuyama, the other one Samuel Huntington. And you discuss both of them in the book, their vision of the future of the West. I'm keen to know how their ideas or the debates the post Cold War shaped the idea of Western identity. And if you think Samuel Huntington's idea of civilizational model is still relevant today or not.
- [46:36]
Professor Georgios Varaksikas
So yes, that's a fascinating debate because the one was the teacher of the other earlier. Anyway, obviously Fukuyama is still alive, has modified many positions. He's a very sophisticated man. But the article in the summer of 1989 about the end of history question mark and then the book he wrote in the early 90s, projected or created, and very often books and articles are not read carefully because he was of course nuanced enough to also warn that what he was predicting might not happen because it was so boring. The end of history where everybody would agree to the capitalist economy and the liberal democratic order and so on. So he was sufficiently nuancing and undermining his own argument. But people usually don't notice. So the message that came across was a triumphalist end of history. Not in the sense that there would be no events called history, but in the sense there would be no ideological alternatives to liberal democracy and the capitalist economy. Immediately there was a special issue of the same magazine in September in 89, and his former teacher Huntington criticized him. And then of course, Huntington came up with his own article in 1993, the Clash of Civilizations question mark and in 96 with a book plus an article that should be read more carefully and more often, the west, unique, not universal, that he published that same year, 1996. By hindsight, obviously Huntington was right in the main outlines of his argument, which was it's completely ridiculous to identify modernization with Westernization. Many people around the world will modernize, adopt Western technologies, adopt Western ways of dressing and so on. That doesn't make them Western, because culture has deeper roots. And he was recommending again, there are misunderstandings because once people started talking about the title of his theory, some people assume he was recommending or predicting civilizational wars. He was not. He was saying, we have to avoid them, but they are likely. So Huntington, if you ask me to take sides, Huntington was more right than Fukuyama. In the sense cultures will not go away, potential for civilizational conflict is there. But his recommendation was not that the west should start fighting against each everybody. On the contrary, he was saying the west has to learn to live with different cultures, which will become more and more assertive and more and more powerful and able to assert themselves, which is what is happening, of course, and also has to try to understand them as much as possible in order to live with them. It has to stop thinking they are thinking like us. They will become like us, they will imitate us, as Fukuyama was saying, and to understand their ways of thinking. Confucian ways of thinking, Russian ways of thinking, religious ways of thinking. Where I would criticize Huntington severely is that he was so obsessed with religion as the most crucial identifier of culture that he almost treated people's religion or past religious identification as its destiny. So he was quite inflexible in terms of if you are Orthodox, that's it. If you're Protestant, that's it. So, for example, as I begin my section on him in the book by saying it's ironical to read him saying, given that the Ukrainians and the Russians belong to the same civilization, what he calls the Slavic Orthodox, there is no possibility of serious violence between them, because within a civilization, people are not going to fight each other passionately and bitterly. Obviously, we can see he was wrong about that. So that's my main criticism. But other than that, I think he is misunderstood, because the main thrust of his argument was the west has to stop thinking. Everybody will have to become like us, is bound to become like us, start understanding itself as a civilization that has to live with other civilizations, has to try to understand how they think in order to avoid clashes, but of course, has to also think of its interests and defend them. Because if the west just assumes everybody is going to be Western and there is no need to defend yourself or think of your interests, you are doomed. So in that debate in the 90s, he was more interesting and more prophetic than Fukuyama, although, as I said, he had an Achilles heel, which was his obsession with religion as destiny. And in my opinion, what is happening now is a redefinition of the west to include Ukraine. And he would not have predicted that and he would probably not even have approved of that. But if a people is fighting to join the west, and yesterday the Moldovans, who are also Orthodox, voted again with a big majority for their pro European president's party. These are decisions populations make. And their past religion may affect the religion or the religion of the majority may affect how they have come to what they have come. But we should allow people to make decisions about their future. And I think Huntington was more inflexible than I would like.
- [52:23]
Interviewer (Moteza Hajizadeh)
I think the question of religion is an important one as a marker of whether it constitutes being European or not given again, multiculturalism or multicultural communities that are in Europe. But I'll come to that towards the end of Mayan tv. I'll ask you a question on that as well. One other topic that I was really interested in was Habermas that he was valuing. Sorry, he was, let's say, emphasizing the values over territory geography to think of. Because west is usually associated with more or less geography as well as values.
- [52:57]
Professor Georgios Varaksikas
Maybe.
- [52:58]
Interviewer (Moteza Hajizadeh)
But I'm keen to know if you can consider think of the west as more or less a community of practice rather than a geographical or cultural block. And I guess it's a challenging distinction to make given the rise of far right in Europe as well. Not only Europe, in America, even in Australia, that they funny thing, even Australians think of themselves as Westerners. I don't know how they can justify that geographically again. But anyhow, given that it's basically. I think the far right puts emphasis on geography or place of birth and probably the skin of your color as the color of your skin as well. But anyhow, can we think of the west as more or less a community of practice or values rather than a geographical block?
- [53:45]
Professor Georgios Varaksikas
Yes. Well, it only has meaning as a community of values, principles, institutions. Otherwise it doesn't make any sense. From the beginning Kant that was so crucial to a definition that still makes sense in a way, or is the precursor of what the west became. He insisted the west is not a geographical notion. The west is a sociological notion. So obviously his west was different to our west and what the west might become in the future. But I think he was right about that. It doesn't make sense geographically. That's as a geographical term. Having said that, I try to avoid myself and I recommend that people should avoid using the term Western values as I try to argue in the conclusion. If you call values that you think are defensible, like freedom of speech or liberal democracy or justice or egalitarianism or freedom of sexual orientation, various things that we, most of us, agree in the west are good things. If you call them Western values, there is the implication that somebody from the rest of the world has to adopt them because we recommend them, because we think they're better. But if we tell them they're Western, it's as if you are losers of history. Our ancestors were right. We are winners. We were right, and you have to adopt what is ours. That's a very counterproductive way of promoting these values, if you believe in them. And it's a very. And it's also historically problematic because all sorts of values have had contributions from people from all over the world. So in the same way as I do not think that the world owes anything to modern Greece because of what the ancient Greeks may have done for the world, and Greek nationalists will not like that. But I think the modern Greeks have to behave like every other nation and not expect anybody to. Nobody owes us anything, because the ancient Greek contributions to the world, whatever they are, do not belong to those who live there now and speak the same language. They belong to the world in the same way. What many people call Western values are values that should be called with universal names. Egalitarianism, liberalism, socialism, whatever it is that one likes freedom of speech, one should promote it in terms of its own value, not because it's ours and everybody has to adopt it. And of course, it plays in the hands of dictators in the rest of the world. Putin and all sorts of strange democratically elected leaders like Modi or Erdogan would love to say, look, these are Western values, or in China or wherever else. So they are not ours. That suits them fine. So for all these reasons, I think the term Western values is problematic, and people should call them by universal names.
- [56:47]
Interviewer (Moteza Hajizadeh)
It's a good point you've made. And again, there has been, I guess, a lot of scholars like you as well, who've been writing about the whole idea of the west, that it was like more or less an intercivilizational theory, that the west, whatever we come to know as Western values, there was a lot of collaboration and communication between different cultures, civilizations that built up these values. But as you mentioned, they. You can limit them to geography. And I live in Australia. The funny thing is that there's a very common term here. It's Australian. It's very Australian, Un, Australian, Australian values. But at least when it comes to Western values, I understand that the term is problematic. There are things you can mention such as freedom of speech, but you can problematize them as well, like you just did. But when it comes to Australian values, nationalists sometimes use it, but they can't even define what is Australian value. And they come up with some great values. But then they say, okay, these are universal values, every decent human being believes in them. It's not like they were discovered or invented Australia. But that's. You can see the similar with Western rad. It can easily be co opted, hijacked by ultranationalists, ultranationalist far right movements. And you kind of touched upon the quota.
- [58:09]
Professor Georgios Varaksikas
Can I comment on that? Of course, go on. No, no, go on.
- [58:12]
Interviewer (Moteza Hajizadeh)
No, I'm, I'm.
- [58:13]
Professor Georgios Varaksikas
I'll come later.
- [58:14]
Interviewer (Moteza Hajizadeh)
No, I wanted to ask the next question, but please go ahead.
- [58:17]
Professor Georgios Varaksikas
Sorry to interrupt my comment. There would be. There has been a tendency in Canada, for example. Let's talk about Canada for a minute. To stress that the Canadian thing to do, the patriotic thing to do is to do good to the world, to be an open minded nation. And to the extent that people promote a national identity that they can be proud of because of what their country does for the world, because of its openness, because of its open minded constitution and so on. Which brings us back to Habermas in a way because his constitutional patriotism idea was Germans should be proud of their constitution and not of their ethnic origin. So to that extent Australian values, depending on what people define as Australian values, can be a good way of mobilizing people. So I'm not dismissing it completely. Although far be it from, far be it from me to interfere in Australian debates, I do not know enough about them at all. So I will leave it to you. All I'm saying is depending on what one defines as these values, one can, because we have the same now in Britain and of course British values used by various sides, but including the sides that are recommending open mindedness as a value, greatness and accepting as to the world. You're right. It depends on how you define that. You're right.
- [59:39]
Interviewer (Moteza Hajizadeh)
And that's a good point you mentioned.
- [59:41]
Professor Georgios Varaksikas
And you're right.
- [59:42]
Interviewer (Moteza Hajizadeh)
I'm glad you mentioned that because I didn't want to sound like I'm biased. And again in the past. So I've been living here for a little over 10 years now. But during COVID I do remember with the rise of anti vaxxers there were lots of people who were also lots of immigrants, people who were on visas here, students who were kind of stranded. But then there was a lot of grassroots movements to help those people who couldn't get enough, you couldn't make enough money because the industry was all shut down. And again, they were using the term Australian values. It's Australian. It's un Australian. Not to help people, let's say. So that's how they mobilized it in a positive sense. But I guess most of these things like again, the same. We can make the same point about Western values. A lot of people who are there, I guess in the west, in Australia as well, who support refugees and they say, well, it's. And they also rely on their Christian values, it's Christian part of the Christian value to help those in need and they mobilize those idea. Western values in a positive sense. But I guess my concern is that with the rise of far right everywhere, and that also, I guess is a good segue to my next question, they're also beginning to weaponize these terms they talk about. And a lot of journalists as well, not journalists. Maybe they are more or less right wing figures. Murray Douglas, for example, the decline of the West. The west is in danger. And it's not a new narrative. It's been around for a couple hundred years. What do you think of. I guess it's a speculative question I'm asking now, do you think that the west is in danger? Is it a new fear? You've read history. Or has there been precedent of the same kind of trend or rhetoric that Western wives are in danger, decline or in danger? How can we combat these ideas and better contribute to the west, like the west that we all like to believe in, as being the place with a lot of positive values?
- [61:43]
Professor Georgios Varaksikas
Great. Well, it's coming at the near the end of the interview. The best thing, the most important thing I would say is read the book, because the book is an answer for that.
- [61:55]
Interviewer (Moteza Hajizadeh)
You're right.
- [61:56]
Professor Georgios Varaksikas
Most seriously, this may sound like a joke, it's not a joke. But the book is exactly written because of that. In the sense the west does not mean necessarily what its current so called defenders say it means. It may mean all sorts of things, including the opposite. So as you were asking, I was suspecting what he would ask. So I'm going to read to you a quotation from chapter nine. During a debate in the Atlantic magazine about the speech that President Trump gave in his first term, also in 2017, and where he used a dozen of times the terms Western civilization and the West. And there was a debate why he was doing it. I explained why he was doing it. And it's not exact. It's not at all what the American debate was about. It was about Poland, which, of course, if you read my book, you know why it was very important to use these terms. And of course, I'm not crediting President Trump for all this. I'm crediting Stephen Bannon, who wrote the speech, I suppose, but an American commentator, an American conservative commentator of the National Review, Daniel Foster, whom I quote in the book, commented on those who were criticizing the use of the term. So I'm quoting to define the west the way such men as this, Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller define it. To grant to them and their handlers the right to set the terms of the debate is to have already lost it. And to hollow out the meaning of meaningful words because they once sat upon an especially odious set of lips is to let the bastards grind you down. So my comment to this question is the west does not necessarily have the term. Western civilization gives whoever uses it a certain degree of gravitas, a certain degree of credibility. It has associations that in some unconscious, half conscious way appeals to a great number of people because of cultural, religious, emotive, affective associations that people are not even aware of sometimes. So it should not be abandoned to whoever decides to use it. That's why I wrote a book, to show that it has meant, and can mean in the future and can mean today, all sorts of different things. There are many different layers of what it means. And therefore abandoning the term to those who use it for their own purposes is daft. And so I agree with Foster, this commentator, that the term doesn't belong to Trump or to his speechwriters or to whoever decides to use it for the purposes of white supremacism. It has meant very often quite the opposite. And it was invented to mean the opposite, as I show in the book. So it's exactly the reason why I wrote the book, to enrich our understanding of the meaning of terms and to enrich our debate. So those who read my book will find quite a few counterarguments to those who use these terms in ways they don't like.
- [65:03]
Interviewer (Moteza Hajizadeh)
You're absolutely right. And I think that's the reason that at the beginning of the interview I said it's a very topical issue. It's exactly because of all those points that you mentioned. And it has never been a monolithic term. And if I may just make one final comment, that some friends of mine and I who get together every weekend on Zoom and talk about different, read a book and talk about the book, and they talk about things that are happening around the world. And we're all Iranians. Some of them are very critical of the idea of the west and because of the things that are happening between Palestine and Israel and the support of the west for Israel and then the way Iran is being treated. And Iran doesn't have a good history in terms of its nuclear program, that I understand. But the west has also used those sanctions as a weapon. But then I always say to them that you're right. I do agree with all the criticism you have against the West. But do remember that the instruments, let's say, or the means to be able to fight again exist in the West. They came from the West. So don't draw a monolithic picture of the West. And the same with America. It's trendy these days to become critical of America. But again, I've read the history of America and James Baldwin like you meant and lots of others that you also mentioned in the book. It's a complex country. You can't just, you know, limited to the likes of Trump or Bush, remember that had a very, very. It still does have a very lively life and active public life who fight against these authoritative presidents. So you can't just come up with a plan, oh, America is a great Satan. No, it's one small aspect of it, but don't ignore the other aspects. And I'm guessing it's the same about the West. So these days, very trendy, sometimes maybe to just criticize the west. And I guess some postcolonial leftists have been guilty of that. To limit the west to only colonial power, which is half of the picture, but the other half is missing. And I love that complexity in your book and your argument. So that's why I do encourage the readers to, to read the book, to give them this kind of multi layered understanding of what the west is. One short final question. I know that this book just came out. Wonderful book.
- [67:27]
Professor Georgios Varaksikas
It is.
- [67:27]
Interviewer (Moteza Hajizadeh)
And I know it took a long time to write. It's not a short book. Is there any other project or books we might expect sometime soon?
- [67:35]
Professor Georgios Varaksikas
Yes, yes, I'm going to. I'm not supposed to tell you, but I'm going to write a related book, much shorter.
- [67:42]
Interviewer (Moteza Hajizadeh)
Okay.
- [67:42]
Professor Georgios Varaksikas
But exactly to what we've done. Discuss.
- [67:46]
Interviewer (Moteza Hajizadeh)
Wonderful. I hope to be able to speak to you about that book sometime soon on New Books Network.
- [67:53]
Professor Georgios Varaksikas
Absolutely. I very much look forward to that. Give me a year.
- [67:57]
Interviewer (Moteza Hajizadeh)
All right, so I'll check out your profile. I'll send you an email once the book is out, hopefully. Thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us. I do again recommend this book to our listeners. The west the History of an Idea, published by Princeton University Press. Georgius, thank you so much for your time. Really enjoyed talking to you about the book.
- [68:18]
Professor Georgios Varaksikas
May. May we mention I teach at. Oh, you mentioned it. My institution is Queen Mary University of London. But you mentioned. Thank you. Thank you. Great, huge pleasure meeting you. Thank you very much.
- [68:28]
Interviewer (Moteza Hajizadeh)
Same here.
- [68:29]
Professor Georgios Varaksikas
Thank you.