Opinion | Western universalism must give way to dialogue with the Rest
- Western thinkers have themselves long warned that the US-led West cannot thrive on the belief that it speaks for the whole world
- The war in Ukraine has underscored the West’s failure both to bring the East under its control and to convince the South to support its messaging
Twenty-five years ago, Harvard professor Samuel Huntington penned an influential article on “the West and the Rest”. Building on his 1993 classic The Clash of Civilisations, he argued that the West may have won the Cold War, but it cannot flourish until it abandons its universal aspirations.
Huntington outlines eight cultural civilisations: Sinic, Japanese, Hindu, Islamic, Western, Latin American, Orthodox and African. For him, “the West” refers broadly to Western Christendom, covering western Europe, North America and Australasia.
European thinkers have long debated the role of the West in sustaining modernity. America now carries the mantle of leading the West, but much of its intellectual power was boosted by European social scientists who fled from Nazism or Communism after the 1930s.
Milton Friedman’s free market views, for example, were hugely influenced by Austrian philosopher and economist Friedrich Hayek. But it was Hungarian political philosopher Karl Polanyi whose ideas proved more durable than the neoliberal thinking that pervades the West today.
In his book For a New West, Polanyi wrote presciently in 1958: “That cultural entity, the West, of which the thinkers and writers were the traditional vehicles, is no longer listened to; not on account of a hostile public, as we persuade ourselves to believe, but because it has nothing relevant to say.”