My Take | The West just ain’t what it used to be – and we all should welcome it

For many Westerners, the West used to stand for enlightenment, progress and freedom. More recently, though, more of them have lost such cultural confidence and sense of superiority.

But for most outside the West, the term has meant one thing first and foremost – domination. While many of us will freely admit those other more positive influences, non-Westerners never forget the humiliation, subjugation and destruction, which to some extent, still continue today.

As the late American political scientist Samuel Huntington once put it, “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion … but rather by its superiority in applying organised violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”

Now, at this point, someone will inevitably say: but “the West” is an overgeneralisation. The Nordics are very different from southern Europeans, the Catholic countries have historical roots very different from the Protestant ones, and Europe, whatever it stands for, is nothing like the United States. And Canada has more in common with Australia than its southern neighbour.

That is true. But “the West”, at least in the past three-quarters of a century, has had a coherent reference, thanks to the post-war American hegemony which peaked with the collapse of the Soviet communist bloc. It primarily references the transatlanticism of Europe and North America, codified by Nato membership; the even closer Anglo-American ties, exemplified by the intelligence-sharing Five Eyes of English-speaking countries; and the global institutional dominance of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, so-called Bretton Woods institutions that have long dictated, until recently, the terms and workings of the global economy.

In all these multinational links, the US has been the dominant force. But those links are now breaking down before our very eyes. France, Germany and the United Kingdom, along with Brussels (HQ of the European Union) are spearheading a restructuring of European defence forces apart from the US as hitherto established under Nato.