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on a leash have a call now are protesters killing sixteen and it would mean dozens. some call it a dirty word or phrase others call it a generalization what people mean when they say the west that's up for debate right now i'm crosstalk. can. follow in welcome to cross talk i'm peter lavelle what do we mean when we use the word west is it a place a state of mind or even a specific time in history also what is meant by the decline of the west

particularly when so many ideas associated with it are now global. can. start. to cross the meaning of the word west i'm joined by he's in cambridge he's the director of the humanity center at harvard university in chicago we go to richard lee he is a professor at the department of philosophy at de paul university and in washington we cross to william burns he's a professor at george washington university all right gentlemen cross talk rules in effect that means you can jump in anytime you want there are different subpoena in here and i'd like my viewers to see it if i go to holy bobbie in cambridge first when the word west is used first of all do you like it's usage its application and what does it mean to you. well i don't like the word west when it's used in a kind of simple polarity with something that is not the west because i think these

geographical issues have really changed quite a lot but i think on the other hand one cannot ignore the fact that there are certain institutional political financial arrangements which are very much address to the interests of what we would call euro america in a very general sense and i think that's the entity that is often associated with the west whether it's called of washington consensus at some time or some other such name so i think there is a political financial entity which we associate with the west secondly however the west is also very rightly put it a certain kind of ideology it is always stood for technical advance whether or not this is true it stood for a certain notion of liberalism or democracy and very often the notion of the west is deployed by other cultures when they're in

a period of transition when they don't quite know what they're happening why my germany was the typical moment where there was a lot of unsettled feeling in the country and people always somehow thought that was americanized nation you know the fathers of the west outside europe so the west is an ideology of a kind the west is a geopolitical set of interests but now very interesting we have a situation where across the world west and east form a kind of new hybrid culture and therefore it's very difficult to say this is western on this is non western because the a relationship changed in the new global networks we have and i pointed out here and let me jump in and let me read you let me jump in here what do you think about that bill i mean when you hear the word west you think of an idea you think of a place a mentality. what can't you know i know you're a prolific historian what what do you think of when you hear that word today.

very crazy about the concept of the west i think it's very misleading it imposes a kind of continuity over the broad sweep of european history from the greeks to whatever plato to nato as we used to say in a survey class. and i think it's a little bit misleading in terms of world history it's no you can divide the world into west and east for most of its history really up until the sixteenth century i mean european civilization was fairly peripheral. and there were several east you know we chinese east the islamic east and so forth several east that were much more important civilizations in world development up to this relatively recent period so i have a great deal of difficulty with that and i'm also not crazy about the idea of a dignified in the west as a set of ideas of liberty i mean mussolini and hitler were men of the west. records

are really going to have to live with the i said liberalism i didn't say liberty i said it's the. asian with liberalism already really don't make me go to the point still holds i mean hillary was a weenie we're not liberals ok rick i want to go to you i mean we don't hear today we use the term west all the time you know and i use it all the time i'll be honest with you but we don't hear the word we don't say east we don't people don't use that is it's polar opposite. well in philosophy we talk often about eastern philosophy and i'm reminded of the young innocent tirico magazine we have here in the united states that had a headline that went something like chinese student discovers western philosophy and his parents were horrified that he was into these radical western ideas. but i want to pick up on something that homie said earlier that i think there is a certain experience of the west from the outside that we who are so-called westerners can't ignore that is when for example the west is.

protecting the airspace over libya there is an experience on the ground that there is this entity called the west that is not internally defiant but acts terminally defiant and so along with the economic and the political institutions that homie mentioned i would add military institutions as well those are obviously related but i think there is an experience from outside or there are experiences in places of an entity that is more or less defined that they would prefer to call the west home if i could go to you i mean. recordings up a very interesting point because in every sense of corrosion if you could put all of it together and you mentioned finance and economics me it's control that's what we're hearing the term the west is in deployed here do you agree with that. yes to

a certain extent control and certain kind of coercive mechanisms because of the asymmetries in green book on freedom wealthy countries but you know having said that you also got to be aware that there are elites in countries even in developing countries who are themselves collaborating and who participate with what is known as western couldn't grow so i think the world map today is much the geo political map is more complicated and i very much take the point about this notion of an externally defined or sorry an internally defined sense of the west as being a kind of a military power bill you came up with only that's interesting because ok go ahead bob it looks to me that within the west now we're getting into trouble here because i'm using a word without really defining and that's what this program is about but we in the west tends to think of itself as positive as being giving to the world giving the

democracy giving market economy giving civil society and a lot of people say all of those kind of things are under under pressure yet in the west the west really thinks collectively that way all right go ahead i mean talk about the west thinking this i think is is a little bit for us and let me point out that if you look at it for a man truly it's not simply the traditional western countries that are part of this dominant entity should pay and clearly is its culture is remarkably different from that of the west whereas there are western countries in latin america you know base speak spanish or portuguese catholicism is the dominant religion by any civilizational definition of the west these are part of the west. but they're not dogma that they're poor and they're not very effective in terms of protecting our words so i thought it. i know i am going to say i think

that i really think it's a good point but the the point of the issue is that it does not exercise the kind of power over the rest of the world as your america does now one might start seeing and i think there's a good boy here that china and chinese relations in africa might occupy that kind of position ok bill you were just a green one and you want to replay that we're hearing a little bit of. i hate to break this to you it's not your america it's this power it's america i mean let's not kid ourselves ok powers can only get worse and we're going to bring a lot of reading with america ok rick i want to go to you i mean would you can was mentioned here a woman again let's take this term of the west then we could say defining if part of the america's geopolitical strategy in the world and the american imbroglio because again you show japan may not be exercising the same kind of power but then again it doesn't have a foreign policy that it used to have

a name on going back to before nine hundred forty one so i mean if it doesn't have a military power that it's falling under the umbrella of the united states the west . well and it seems to also have lost its economic power. and i mean they've been fairly stagnant since the eighty's and so when this first came up about. when it when they first came out when this first came up about your pan i was thinking about china and here's the ambiguity of the last. i have many colleagues in china who take up the west as a goal that they want to achieve and if you slap the label western on this become something that they think is valuable that that it gets them out of the traditional culture which has been keeping them behind now i don't want to agree or disagree with that but at the moment in which a country like china feels like they can achieve the dreams of the west for us with

a certain noblesse or bleach to collapse the whole game and say you know what the west is over we're not doing it anymore there's something there that i'm not quite comfortable with as much as i'm not comfortable with the west in the first place it's a very good lawyer for me do you want to reply that i can that's very interesting is because there's kind of this disadvantage of the west within the west and then you have countries outside of the west or is trying to trying to get to that point in time or that state of mind or whatever we however want to define the term here i mean the exhibit. languages is no longer. no i think this is exactly why i said that the there is a kind of geopolitical notion of the west but there is also a mythical india logical notion of the west so it's perfectly in keeping with the fact that there is a critique of the west critique of its notions of progress and development. a gemini i think that's all quite appropriate but at the same time there are other

places in the world where certain kinds of unfreedom as they are as they see it exist where the west is a goal and so we have to get used to this very ambivalent very ambiguous very enigmatic notion but what we can do is just dump the we have to see its complexities but we can only raise the term we have we are uncomfortable with it just as we are uncomfortable with liberty where uncomfortable with freedom but we have to see its internal contradictions and i think now the world in a way is dominated and we have to jump right in here we're going to go to a break and after the break we'll continue our discussion on the west stay with r.t. . if you can still . see if.

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welcome back to cross talk i'm peter lavelle to remind you we're discussing what the word west. can. do if i go to you and you thought maybe we should just jettison the word the concept west as it's kind of thrown around in and out in media of certainly and maybe even academia why don't we just focus our attention on modernization because i think that's really what everyone's talking about because you can modernize without westernizing with all the baggage that is associated with it and the coercion that we have talked about this socially it was because in living it i live in russia and people don't consider this a western country but it's a modernizing country and there is a great deal been given still what is called the west. it has been ever since peter

the great. well i think that modernization is certainly attempting and i think it is more appropriate in many cases and westernization of course modernization has its own ambiguity as in difficulties in baggage so it should that's quite the solution either i mean it might be that you talk about people wanting to mark or see we should look at one of democratization or if they want prosperity which of these is what they want prosperity with and sort of wrapping it all up in these kind of baggy concepts called the western modernization and of course you know when people want different things in different countries. so i'm sort of quite sure that the. us a better substitute when you think about that race is that a better substitute or is it still the same dilemma well i think it's the same dilemma not an unrelated to lemma because it seems to me that the notion of won't

guarantee and therefore modernization we was something particularly developed in the so-called west and so what counts as modern and modernizing i think is fundamentally related to this imaginary that is the last thing here or maybe i misunderstand homeys argument but i think i agree with him that we can't act as if these idiology don't have real facts on the ground and so the jettisoning jettisoning of a concept like the west in terms of modernism might rob us of a critical gaze we could have on modernizing in the tendencies toward modernization ok homie what do you think about that in cambridge. no i think actually ricky is right he's understood me very appropriately because you know we can talk about modernization theory and i think in some technical way and some historical sense it's actually more accurate to say we're in process is of modernization but as rick

said for so long right through the imperial period to period of empire even the post colonial period westernize ation has been associated certainly in the popular mind in the mythical mind with the notion of modernization been associated with westernized nation so people do articulate their desires in that way however wrong or i waver misperceive that might be this is why i feel we can jettison the idea but we've got it we are complicating it even as we speak now we're showing the complexities of it it's very simple you know sometimes you talk with me where when i'm waiting for. you to check my flight seat for reservation for instance and i talk to united airlines person in bombay i know exactly although they have a they call themselves bill or willie or something i know exactly where it's from i know the guy's name is probably venkatesh and i asked him i said look first of all

let's drive them out secondly tell me people you know people say that your coolies you'll be used for this you will be used by western companies by outsourcing companies what do you feel about it they say oh mr barber thank god that we can talk honestly about this well you know there are many things you have sitting in cambridge which we don't have and although i may be exploited in certain ways i would there are things i need and i want in fact i would quite like to come to an american university or a canadian university or a german university this is the best i can do i think people are there is an ambivalence there's a love hate relationship and people are aware of it. that complexity is something the common people are aware of that's why don't you just jettison that and get rid of the problem ok the idea will stay with us but you know if we look at the industrialized west and i put industrialized here ok its share of global g.d.p.

is steadily declining everyone's looking to the year to twenty twenty twenty thirty twenty forty whatever the years when china ultimately overtakes the united states we see the eurozone stagnant right now my point is that the what we call the west is the least it's a geographical one it will become less and less important through time but we will still have those ideas so i mean it is a kind of bill if i go to you it's kind of like we talk about greek democracy but that greek democracy was so long ago and it has turned in into a template but where we're not you know what i'm saying is when the when the west influence it's time for the last few centuries finally if you know goes into the twilight we'll still have the ideas associated with little liberty civil societies things like that go ahead what's not forget the most successful western idea in terms of world dissemination as a political idea was communism. well it was communism. when you think about their regular course communism presented and so there's

a lot of modernization i sat next to bill in graduate school for years i remember these conversations what do you think rick i mean right communism fascism those are western ideas. i mean i would say ok that's a successful idea but the interesting thing for me is that i think we in the so-called west run very far away from thomas hobbes who i think actually is the only political theorist who describes the our actual political sentiment in the west and that is we will trade all of these ideals for security and i think this is where i mean i hate to feel like homie and i are ganging up on bill or something but i feel like the point he made earlier is is related to this that the idea of liberty the idea of liberty is fine until my security is threatened and then the west is no longer about liberty anymore we're now about something else we're about the future we're about security securing the future and so i mean part of the

beauty and danger of the concept of the west is it's very mentally ability that it adapts and changes. and it's hard to get ahold of and yet sandy or bill or willie in. any other call center this is their aspiration and i think we cannot reject that is as somehow an worthy hope for them when you think about that bill i mean your abs. you want to know not rejecting it is an unworthy hope i mean certainly if people want to live more like the way i live that's five i mean obviously if everybody in any in china lives the way i live we're going to exceed the carrying capacity of the earth but that's a whole nother problem. i just don't think that the term the west as popular as it is is a very useful it's a very useful intellectual or analytic category certainly yes people do talk about it and insofar as they talk about it it's a real thing because it was

a real thing we have to talk about. refers to anything real it's interesting i mean if i go to you because in the in this part of the world i got because i like i said living in russia i mean either you people we look at it really you want something from the west or you don't want something from the ones you want their wealth but you don't want their head gemini. right and that's why i said it we're represents a very fundamental axis of ambivalence in our present moment and it has done i think for a long time in india during the period of empire people wanted the medical knowledge from the west they wanted the techno taken logical knowledge from the west they wanted the financial knowledge from the west they didn't want western more is they didn't want western customs and they didn't want western ethical and religious principles so i think we've often we've had this kind of ambivalence this is why in a way we can we can we enter

a little clique might not be interesting but we cannot do without it and we cannot live with it and i think that's one of the conundrums of our times but i got very much agree with what rick said in fact my new book the book one of the books i'm working on at the moment is called culture insecurity that what ever else we might see as a kind of you know the positive or negative the west the question of security becomes absolutely central in any in the in the value system so security i think is another issue that we need to talk about because many people in the western about security everybody wants security bill go ahead go ahead and have you know everybody wants it you know i mean everybody wants security that's absolutely right but people have felt often that their security has been in some ways destroyed by what the west suggests that they're giving the world democracy i mean the

security of iraq was destroyed by the so-called desire of the bush government amongst others in europe to provide what they saw as democracy what kind of security is that ok bill go ahead jump in. i'm not here to defend the back certainly we have no interest in doing so. with you we agreed. very. sure we agree on a lot of things ok if i could but that does bring up the point i mean you know go west i mean is the west now embodied by dropping bombs on people with the name of freedom i mean you know that's certainly a common etiological use of the west in the west ok i mean you could argue people hoping for the west but you know people in here who talk about the values of the west are often talking about in the kind of this neo imperialistic we need to go in

and change those countries we need to get to you know women out of the burka or whatever and that's to them is western values and it's very different kind of western values in which you're talking about people with the quote unquote nod was the life of prosperity and freedom all right rick i'm going to give you the last word on this program go ahead. well i mean just on this issue of security and i agree with everything that that bill just said but i doesn't this take us back into this distinction that homey made between last the west as and idiology that could be the imaginary of aspiration versus the west as a set of social political military and economic institutions and i think these are different things and that's part of the very ambiguity that makes us still today even talking about the west as if it's something. all right gentlemen i thank you very very very interesting discussion we could have got going for a lot longer many thanks my yesterday in cambridge a cargo and in washington and thanks to our viewers for watching us here r.t.

see you next time and remember crosstalk. can still. remain you the latest in science and technology from around russia. we've got the future covered.

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