That Troublesome Idea We Call “The West” — And The Price Of Letting It Die

-Analysis-

BERLIN — The question of the beginning always comes at the end, in times of crisis, when something seems to be falling apart. How did it all start? What kind of past does the present have?

In the case of the West, the question is especially tricky because a compass won’t help. “The West” is not a cardinal direction. It is both a physical space and an idea. Even far-flung places like the Australian state of Tasmania are considered part of it. At its peak, the West kept expanding; now it is shrinking again. Not long ago, Europe and the United States formed its unshakable core. Now U.S. President Donald Trump is driving a wedge into the alliance. If he succeeds, it will mark a seismic shift, the end of the transatlantic West.

So when did the West begin? According to the short version, it started on April 6, 1917, the day the United States entered World War I on the side of Britain and France. Then, 24 years later, on Aug. 9, 1941, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt renewed the alliance. No one was supposed to know about their meeting in Placentia Bay off the coast of Newfoundland. Inquisitive reporters were told Roosevelt was on a fishing trip. Aboard the HMS Prince of Wales warship, the British prime minister and the U.S. president sealed their pact against German dictator Adolf Hitler and laid out their vision for the post-war world.

In their “Atlantic Charter,” they promised to uphold human rights, national sovereignty, fair trade, disarmament and peace. Every nation should be able to “live within its borders in perfect security,” in a life free from fear and want. The West, as the Atlantic Charter solemnly declared, was not an empire. It was not a power project, but a normative one. It was meant for all of humanity.

The real beginning

But the founding moment of the West is not necessarily its true beginning. Where did the ideas in the Atlantic Charter come from? Scholars disagree. Cultural historian Naoise Mac Sweeney argues that the West took its cues from Roman antiquity. Others claim that its ideals were born under the Greek sun, in Athens during the 5th century B.C., when brilliant reformers like Solon, Cleisthenes and Pericles founded the world’s first democracy. But is that really true? Were the values of Athenian democracy the West’s original guiding light? Is there a direct line from ancient Athens to the present?

Historian Heinrich August Winkler has his doubts. In his sweeping history of the West, he notes that Athenian democracy was an exception. Women, slaves and foreigners had no right to vote. The idea that all people possess inalienable rights was alien to the Athenians.

So if Greece was not the cradle of the West, where should we look?

So if Greece was not the cradle of the West, where should we look? Perhaps in a less obvious place: the Middle Ages, around the 11th century. At that time, a man known to his followers as a “holy Satan” sat on the papal throne. That was how extreme and audacious his claim to power was. Gregory VII (1020–1085) boldly declared that he had the right to make laws and depose emperors as he pleased. Princes, he insisted, were to kiss only his feet. He called these demands the “papal dictate,” and historian Johannes Fried is not wrong to say: “Rarely have so few words captured such a turning point, one of the great revolutions in European history.”

A turning point

Just a few years into his reign, Gregory VII triggered the scandal of the century. Under the slogan “Freedom of the Church,” he bombarded Henry IV (1050–1106) with bold rebukes, until the young king lost his temper and demanded the Pope step down: “Come down!” But the “rod of God” struck back with full force. Gregory excommunicated Henry and, in 1077, forced him to stand for three days in the freezing snow outside Canossa Castle, dressed in a simple shirt, performing penance.

What does this feud have to do with the birth of the West? At first glance, it was a fight over investiture, the right to appoint bishops. From now on, Gregory insisted, no one should be allowed to buy a church office. He also condemned priestly marriage. “In secret,” his ally Peter Damian wrote, “fornication among priests was just about tolerable. But public concubines, their swollen bellies, the screaming children — that was a disgrace to the Church.”

The shockwaves from the Investiture Controversy were massive. In bitter struggles, the balance of power between emperor and church was redefined and codified. This laid the groundwork for one of the core principles of the Western tradition: the separation of secular and spiritual authority. The papal revolution also had deep social repercussions.

Gregory VII was not just a staunch church reformer; he was a radical political theologian who harbored deep contempt for the ruling elite. He was repulsed by the sanctity that “the high lords” claimed for themselves. To him, they were godless oppressors and criminals, consumed by a demonic lust for power. “Who does not know that kings and princes are descended from wicked men who, through pride, robbery, betrayal, and murder — in short, through every kind of crime — raised themselves above their fellow humans, spurred on by the devil, the prince of this world? Men blinded by greed and unbearable arrogance?”

His ally Wazo of Liège was just as blunt. Princes, kings and emperors, he declared, were forces of death. “The royal anointing marks one for killing, the episcopal anointing gives life.”

The pope as an activist

There’s no question that for Gregory VII, the Bible was the sacred benchmark against which all of everyday life had to be measured. He sympathized with the poverty preachers of northern Italy and backed the Peace of God movement, which aimed to put an end to the violence of robber barons and the rule of feuds and brute force. He was also closely connected with the reform monks of the Cluny monastery, who likewise demanded the “freedom of the Church,” meaning its independence from royal power.

In his book Law and Revolution, legal scholar Harold J. Berman portrays the pope as an activist and passionate do-gooder. Gregory did not just want to pray in silence, he wanted to make life better here on earth. He used the law as his tool, because for him, divine justice found its form in the law. “I loved justice and hated injustice,” were his last words.

The religious drive to find justice through the law also echoes in the Magna Carta.

His fight was not in vain. Over time, Judeo-Christian ideas of justice made their way into the ancient law of sovereignty inherited from the Roman Empire. For the first time, as the philosopher Jürgen Habermas writes in his work Also a History of Philosophy, the papal revolution brought together “the Old Testament concept of ‘law’ and Roman law”; the “Ten Commandments form the hinge between Roman law and Christian ethics.”

In a world full of harsh social contradictions, this nuclear fusion of Roman law and Christian morality was anything but tame. Above all, the idea that humankind was made in the image of God turned out to be explosive in the medieval order.

God and equality

“God himself is the law,” Sachsenspiegel, the most important law book of its time, declared in 1220 — a provocation that would have been unimaginable before the papal revolution. The religious drive to find justice through the law also echoes in the Magna Carta, the “Great Charter” sealed in England in 1215. And it’s no accident that John Ball, the leader of the English Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, was a fiery preacher who took the Bible literally. “When Adam dug and Eve spun, where was the nobleman?” If only God is Lord, then no person may set themselves above another. This idea cost John Ball his life. Richard II had him executed.

The most important manifesto of the German Peasants’ War, the Twelve Articles of Memmingen from 1525, also demanded an end to serfdom “from the masters.” Christ, they said, had redeemed all people equally, “the Shepherd and the Most High, with his precious bloodshed. Therefore, it follows from Scripture that we are and desire to be free.” Even in England’s Glorious Revolution and its 1689 Bill of Rights, one can hear faint echoes of the Bible’s challenge to earthly power.

And nearly a century later, the rights won in England would inspire the American Declaration of Independence of 1776. Its first sentence reads: “All men are created equal.”

The West’s great normative project appeared to have prevailed.

It was only with the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789 that these ideas were first stated without invoking God. Yet even there, traces of the sacred can still be found. What historian Winkler once wrote about all Western constitutions applies here, too: “The idea of equality before the law would not have taken hold without the belief that there is only one God before whom all people are equal.”

After the revolutions in the United States and France, it would take another 150 years before the West’s egalitarian ideals became enshrined in international law. After the United States and the Soviet Union had defeated Hitler at immense cost and the world had learned about the genocide of Europe’s Jews, the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. But it was only after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union that it seemed everything had been settled.

After a thousand years of prelude, the West’s great normative project appeared to have prevailed: freedom, equality, justice, the separation of powers and self-determination. History, it seemed, had reached its destination.

The other half of the story

This triumphant narrative is widely popular today. It serves as a soothing balm for the West’s wounded self-image. But it tells only half the story, and the other half takes us back to the 11th Century.

Gregory VII did not just fight the aristocratic elite “in the name of God,” he also wanted to march on Jerusalem to liberate the “Holy Land” from the “infidels.” Pope Urban II took up his “Eastern plan,” launched the First Crusade in 1095, and slaughtered (“Death or Baptism!”) every Jew he could on the way there. It was the original catastrophe of European Jews.

Imperial monotheism carved a bloody path through history, and just as in Islam, religion and the thirst for power were inextricably linked. Even today, the violent rampages of Catholic conquistadors in South America take your breath away. Hernán Cortés crushed the Aztec Empire, Francisco Pizarro destroyed the Inca Empire. Millions of indigenous people died at the hands of white invaders or perished in the mines. “We Spaniards,” Cortés confessed, “suffer from a disease that only gold can cure.”

“God-fearing” white men clung to slavery long after its moral disgrace was obvious.

Back in the 16th century, the Christian West discovered not only foreign continents with fire and sword but also itself. In the mirror of the so-called “savages,” it saw its own reflection as a “superior” civilization, and like the Pope’s crusaders, it believed it possessed a higher truth.

It took countless postcolonial studies to reveal how the West first admired the unfamiliar, then gleefully dominated it, and in many cases destroyed it. “God-fearing” white men clung to slavery long after its moral disgrace was obvious. While America’s Founding Fathers —after many Native Americans had already been killed — engraved the stirring phrase “all men are created equal” into the Constitution in Philadelphia, their slaves continued working back home.

These disturbing contradictions are what led scholars like Stuart Hall and Orlando Patterson to question the relationship between “The West and the Rest.” Did the West only experience its freedom by subjecting other cultures? Is oppression the flipside of its freedom? Has the West always been torn between power and morality?

The golden years fade

The appeal of Western lifestyles remains unforgettable. Just think of post-war America. The easy freedom, the promise of popular culture, the dazzling beauty of cinema, the sleek capitalist technology — those were the golden years in the “Land of the Free.” But that glow began to fade early on. In 1953, the British and Americans overthrew Mohammed Mossadegh, Iran’s democratically elected prime minister. 

To this day, as Tamim Ansary, author of a global history from an Islamic perspective, points out, the Muslim world has not forgotten the coup. Seven years later, the U.S. government ordered the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the president of newly independent Congo. And that despite the fact that U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower had only recently invoked national self-determination before the UN. It was the Vietnam War that finally shattered the Western dream.

The napalm bombings, the poisoning of the land with Agent Orange, and the U.S. Army’s atrocities shook not just the United States’ moral authority but that of the entire West. The West, once the “force for good,” had broken its own promises.

It was the ill-fated U.S. President George W. Bush who, after the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, delivered a blow to international law from which it has never recovered. His Iraq War, based on lies, destroyed the credibility of the United States. This was not the version of Pax Americana the world had hoped for. If only he had listened to his father; former U.S. President George H. W. Bush had an instinct for the tragedy of American arrogance. He understood the curse that falls on victors who overreach.

That is why Bush Senior wanted to rebuild the world order after the fall of the Berlin Wall in a way that everyone could support and that would still stand even if the West lost influence. “East and West, North and South,” he declared, “should prosper and live in harmony.”

“The rule of law replaces the rule of the jungle,” and “the strong respects the rights of the weak,” he said.

Religion makes a comeback

Last year, Americans once again elected a president who only laughs at such ideals. Donald Trump is undermining the separation of powers, disregarding the courts, and stifling the universities. For him, old Europe is the enemy, and Russian President Vladimir Putin the new friend. Trump’s betrayal of liberalism and dismantling of the Western project has nationalists around the world cheering. To them, it is as if the Vatican had renounced Catholicism. Indeed, Trump seems to embody a decadent version of the Western spirit, a kind of dark void, a pagan celebration of brute power.

It is no surprise, then, that at the point of nihilistic collapse, religion makes a comeback. In an AI-generated montage, Trump posed as the new pope, meaning he sanctified himself while chipping away at the very foundation of the West — the separation of church and state first set in motion by Gregory VII. In contrast, Trump treats religious ethics like bulky trash. He has slashed funding for child welfare programs in Africa.

Globalization is now turning against its birthplace.

“Empathy,” says his ally Elon Musk, “is the fundamental weakness of Western civilization.” Now it is up to Europe to save what little remains after America’s retreat from “Western values,” even as anti-Western forces celebrate unprecedented gains.

It is not hard to understand why anti-Western voices are gaining the upper hand. For five centuries, the West has driven capitalist globalization. It has lifted billions out of poverty but also kept many more trapped in it. It has not been a guaranteed path to democracy. In fact, the unchecked forces of the global market have weakened nation-states, set them in fierce competition, widened inequality, stoked fears, stagnated wages and slashed wealth taxes.

In the neoliberal 2000s, financial manipulators created a lawless offshore world for shady deals. They built safe havens for tax-evading capital, just when national communities were desperate for public revenue. In the end, it was ordinary people, not the culprits, who paid the price of saving financial capitalism from collapse in 2008. On top of this came global problems that no single state can solve — like migration and climate change. In short, globalization is now turning against its birthplace, feeding the very forces that oppose it. Where once freedom stood, now people look for security.

What lies ahead?

When we ask what might lie ahead for the West, even the most far-sighted are left baffled. There is a kind of madness in the air. Still, three possible futures are beginning to take shape.

First scenario: Trump fails spectacularly, the MAGA movement crumbles, and the United States wakes up from its autocratic nightmare. After staring into the abyss, the West regains its footing and begins a transatlantic reckoning. Why does its so-called unique liberalism provoke such anger and rejection? What promises have its capitalist democracies failed to keep?

The West begins to act like someone who knows it no longer calls the shots in global politics. It takes Putin’s war threats as seriously as they are meant— and yet, with unshakable diplomacy, it does everything in its power to deter the hungry imperialist. The West says it stands for humanity, and this time it means it. It pushes for UN reform, defends international law and insists that human rights are universal. Borrowing the voices of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, it calls for a global tax on the wealthy, even kleptocrats in the global South. It argues, against all resistance, that a collective climate policy is not a threat to freedom but its only hope. Is all of this improbable? Yes, but so were the constitutional revolutions of the 18th century.

In the second, and currently more likely, scenario, the West continues its decline. Trump’s angry identity politics and the catastrophic destruction of Gaza have turned talk of “Western values” into a joke. Nationalists stay in power by profiting from the global state of emergency. They promise an escape from the rat race and a smooth, secure life behind walls of hate, resentment, and high tariffs. The transatlantic alliance falls apart.

In a Chinese-led world, the economy is no longer driven by blind fate.

Europe strikes off on its own, slowly turning into a museum of the West. On the geopolitical stage, it appears as an ambitious but tiny player among giants like Russia, China, India and the United States. The law of the jungle returns. The dream of “One World” solving its biggest problems together disappears into the dusty archives of European humanism. Transnational rights in the spirit of Emmanuel Kant? Once again, princes decide who has rights and who does not. Occasionally, the Pope speaks out. The powerful are very fond of him.

This, too, may turn out to be only an interlude, a stepping-stone to something entirely new. In the third scenario, China steps into the spotlight and makes no secret of its “world-historical mission.” In the Chinese dream, described by philosopher Zhao Tingyang in his book All Under Heaven, the sun of civilization returns to its eastern home, a region the West refused to take seriously for centuries. In this Chinese-led world, the economy is no longer driven by blind fate. Security and order are restored to everyday life. Peace prevails. Democracy and human rights are no longer necessary. They belong to a bygone age, once known as “the age of the West.”