Deconstructing 'the West'? Competing visions of new world order

Peters, M.A. (2003) Deconstructing 'the West'? Competing visions of new world order. Globalization, 3(2),

Abstract

The concept of 'the West' has served important political purposes both historically and in the present foreign policy context. On the one hand it has been a cultural and philosophical unity achieved through an active historical projection back to the origins of Western civilization, at least to the classical Greeks, while on the other, it has been used as a modernist category, politically speaking, to harness the resources of Enlightenment Europe as a basis for giving assurances about the future of liberal democratic societies and the American way of life. The concept was an implicit but key one assumed in an influential analysis of new world order by Samuel Huntington (2001), who in his The Clash of Civilizations predicted a non-ideological world determined increasingly by the clash among the major civilizations. In Huntington's analysis 'the West' functions as an unquestioned and foundational unity yet the concept and its sense of cultural and historical unity has recently been questioned not only in terms of its historical fabrication but also in terms of its future continuance. Martin Bernal (1991, 2001) in Black Athena and a set of responses to his critics, questions the historical foundations of 'the West' demonstrating how the concept is a recent fiction constructed out of the Aryan myth propagated by nineteenth-century historiography. Even more recently, accounts of the so-called 'new world order' have emphasized either the dominance of an American hegemonic Empire (Hardt and Negri, 2000) or an emerging EU postmodern state system (Cooper, 2001). These accounts offer competing and influential conceptions of the 'new imperialism' based on different visions of world government and proto-world institutions. They give very different accounts of questions of international security, world order and the evolving world system of states.

• Item Type: Articles
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Peters, Prof Michael
• Authors: Peters, M.A.
• Subjects: J Political Science > JZ International relations
• College/School: College of Social Sciences > School of Education
• Journal Name: Globalization
• ISSN: 1535-9794