The Idea of the West: Culture, Politics and History

211 Pages·2004·4.904 MB·English

by  Alastair Bonnett (auth.)

The Idea of the West
Also by Alastair Bonnett
White Identities: Historical and International Perspectives (2000)
Anti-racism (2000)
How to Argue: A Students’ Guide (2001)
The Idea of the West
Culture, Politics and History
ALASTAIR BONNETT
© Alastair Bonnett 2004
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as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2004 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
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PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave
Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd.
Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom
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Union and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-4039-0034-0
ISBN 978-0-230-21233-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-0-230-21233-6
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04
To my father and mother, with love
Raymond Bonnett
Shirley Bonnett
Contents
Acknowledgements x
Introduction 1
The West: ancient and modern 4
Knowing the West 6
Geography and the world 7
The West in context: chapters in a global history 11
1 From White to Western: ‘Racial Decline’ and the Rise
of the Idea of the West in Britain, 1890–1930 14
Introduction 14
White decay 15
The West’s West: beginnings 23
The Western path out of white crisis 26
Conclusions 34
Further reading 37
2 Communists Like Us: The Idea of the West in the
Soviet Union 40
Introduction 40
The West versus communism 42
Russia’s West 44
The revolutionary West 47
The Western enemy 53
The ‘kidnapped West’ and Russia’s ‘return’ 56
Conclusions 60
Further reading 61
vii
viii Contents
3 Good-bye Asia: The Westernisers’ West,
Fukuzawa and Gökalp 63
Introduction 63
The uses of the West 64
Fukuzawa Yukichi: occidentalism and nationalism
in Japan 66
Ziya Gökalp: finding Turkey, inventing the West 70
Conclusions 75
Further reading 76
4 Soulless Occident/Spiritual Asia: Tagore’s West 79
Introduction 79
Asia is one: the West as spiritual void 81
Who wants to be Asian? The failure of Tagore’s
mission to the East 88
Asian spirituality: transcending the West 95
Conclusions: Tagore and modernity 103
Further reading 105
5 From Soulless to Slacker: The Idea of the West from
Pan-Asianism to Asian Values 107
Introduction: forget Tagore 107
Pan-Asianism: Eastern redemption, Western
nationalism 109
The slacker West and Asian values 112
Conclusions 120
Further reading 121
6 Occidental Utopia: The Neo-Liberal West 123
Introduction 123
Social democracy: the unproclaimed West 125
Westernisation: victory in defeat 128
Neo-liberal democracy: Western triumph and
Western blueprint 131
Conclusions: the vulnerability of the
neo-liberal model 139
Further reading 141
Contents ix
7 Western Dystopia: Radical Islamism and Anti-Westernism 143
Introduction 143
The clash of utopias? 144
The Islamisation of anti-Westernism 145
Conclusions: Islamism and neo-liberal globalisation 160
Further reading 161
Conclusion 163
Notes 167
References 179
Index 195
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Kate Wallis, Catherine Gray, and Beverley Tarquini at Palgrave
for their patience and support for this project. Also to Rachel Holland
and the members of the Social and International Development Studies
group at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne go my thanks for their
assistance and encouragement.
Chapter 1 is a substantially revised version of ‘From white to Western:
“racial decline” and the idea of the West in Britain, 1890–1930’, Journal
of Historical Sociology (2003), 16, 3. Chapter 2 is a revised version of
‘Communists like us: ethnicized modernity and the idea of “the West”
in the Soviet Union’, Ethnicities (2002), 2, 4. Chapter 3 is a revised
version of ‘Makers of the West: national identity and occidentalism in
the work of Fukuzawa Yukichi and Ziya Gökalp’, Scottish Geographical
Journal (2002), 118, 3. Chapter 4 draws on material published as
‘Occidentalism and plural modernities: or how Fukuzawa and Tagore
invented the West’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
(2004), 22.
I am grateful to the University of California Press for permission to
reprint ‘Seven Versions of the “West”’, from Martin Lewis and Karen
Wigen (1997) The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography
(Berkeley, University of California Press).
x