Available for purchase in the original French over at Revue Éléments

*TN denotes Translator Note; hyperlinks have been provided for additional background on various persons I felt may be lesser known.

The old tradition is mistaken: the West is no longer European, and Europe is no longer the West. In its march westward, the sun of our civilization has dimmed. Starting from Hellas (TN: Ancient Greece), investing Italy, then Western Europe, then England, and finally, having crossed the seas, having settled in America, the center of the “West” has slowly disfigured itself. Today, as Raymond Abellio understood¹, it is California that has established itself as the epicenter and essence of the West. Pacified land on the shores of the Pacific, it is the symbol of this happiness where our civilization dies; land of the end of history, and Hollywood land of simulacrum, it marks the asymptote that rises to madness, of the commercial society, of the society of spectacle, and of cosmopolitanism.

The West then, in a planetary movement that has already begun, will continue its march westward by establishing its center where it is already being prepared, in the far east, in the archipelagos of the Pacific Ocean, towards Japan and the East Indies… This is the absolute reversal of the movement of crossing the seas that started from Europe in the 16th century…

The West, then, is becoming something “planetary”. It presents itself as a fuzzy ensemble made up of networks of decisions, dispersed territorial zones, cultural and human blocks distributed across all countries. While the United States still dominates it, the West increasingly takes on the face of a “qualification” – and no longer a belonging – that crosses each nation. The West, or Western civilization, designates the places where the “Western system” prevails. These places are less and less qualifiable politically, geographically, and ethnically. If the epicenter still remains located in the United States, the foreseeable future leads us to anticipate a dispersion of the West, its transformation into a polycentric ensemble, with very Western nations (Germany), moderately Western nations (Ivory Coast), partially Western nations (Czechoslovakia) and minimally Western nations (Afghanistan). But few places will be able to “escape the West”.

In parallel, if the center is everywhere and “everywhere” is essentially nowhere, the West is destined to lose all specifying virtue; to be Western is to see oneself disqualified rather than qualified. And particularly for Europeans, who lose in this affair the very possibility of validly designating themselves by calling themselves Western. If the Indian, for example, can remain “Indian” and Western, the German or the Dutch are destined to be nothing more than Western, which is essentially to be nothing at all. Disregarding borders, states, religions, the West covers much more than a geopolitical reality or a diplomatic solidarity with the “free world”. It largely overflows this framework. It is, in its essence, the global installation of a type of society, that of the “Americanosphere”.

Not all peoples feel like founding members of the club called Western civilization. France, Italy, Spain or Greece will never be as integrated into Western capitalist society as, for example, New Zealand, which culturally belongs to the source from which capitalism drew its impetus, namely the Anglo-Saxon hegemony established by England and which the United States has taken over. The slightest lack of identification with the primary source of ideas and the current seat of power is inexorably a cause of anxiety and national dissatisfaction. It is the entire planet that would therefore experience an identification complex in the face of a global cultural normality in which few fully participate. The schizophrenic shame that results is perhaps, from a psycho-political point of view, a powerful engine of Westernization. Organized in concentric circles of belonging, the West has its center, its clubhouse, in the so-called developed countries where English is the mother tongue or at least secondary, as in Northern Europe, where Protestant biblicism has shaped mentalities.

The “second circle” of club membership includes, for example, France, a moral member due to its democratic universalism and the memory of Lafayette, Israel, admitted as an honorary member, Germany and Italy, associate members due to military events, etc. As for Japan, it has instituted itself as a member, and American industrialists are probably beginning to regret it. Within the so-called “Third World” countries, a Westernized class, often cut off from its culture, serves as an identifying model for the population; the latter, feeling inadequate in the face of the cultural normality of its “elites”, becomes all the more easily decultured. Many Southern countries thus find themselves in a state of internal civilizational rupture, traversed by a cultural and economic trench that opposes a hastily Westernized social sphere, to the point of caricature, and another disadvantaged social sphere that bears the debris of traditional culture. Delirious Americanism and decomposing traditional culture – which consequently appears as backward and inferior – are opposed in violent contrasts through a logic of ethnocide. Urban planning, daily customs, arts, family and social structures constitute the places of shock between a Western normality of “evolution” and “development” and a traditional culture that ends up, as in Africa, thinking of itself as backward.

One might wonder if “Western civilization,” particularly in its American aspect, isn’t also built on a rejection of Europe, even though part of the latter’s culture served as a starting point for Westernism. Let us reflect, for example, on Greece, which is often rightly presented as one of the fundamental matrices of European civilization: Westernism, in its Anglo-Saxon colors, contrasts violently with the original Greek culture, which seems to be fighting against a cancer. Greek culture, by an incredible reversal, then appears – and unfortunately not only in the eyes of tourists – as “Oriental” to Westerners, while in Europe it remains an almost unique example of authenticity and ancestral rootedness. In its linguistic, musical, religious, economic, and familial forms, it proves to be profoundly European for historians and sociologists. In Greece, and to a lesser degree in all other European countries, the Western norm renders the people “strangers to themselves,” strangers to their own culture, which becomes an object of ethnology, or is compartmentalized and neutralized into “folklore.” The essential difference between traditional cultural norms and Western normality lies in the fact that the former were defined in relation to the cultural norms of other ethnic groups or regions, according to a differentialist logic (relative normality), while the latter presents itself as the normality, claiming universal validity and effectively designating other cultures as atypical – “backward” – or morally abnormal, as “savage” and destined to be civilized, that is to say, domesticated.

This “domestication” is expressed, among other things, through a global mass culture, well analyzed in the artistic domain by Theodor Adorno, and in which the anthropologist Arnold Gehlen saw the sign of the emergence of a “neo-primitive era.” In this regard, three types of “normalized” cultures seem to coexist: the global mass culture, which imposes increasingly similar styles in music, cinema, furniture, clothing, food, etc., and which presents itself as an entertainment culture; an abstruse and elitist culture, with abstract connotations, equally universalist and whose function is social and discriminatory (substituting a vertical separation between two cultural spheres across the entire Western world for ethno-cultural divisions); and finally a “museum” culture, which codifies the “old,” rationalizes collective memory, with the aim of transforming the cultural past specific to each population into a normalized folkloric stock qualified as “heritage of humanity,” etc.

A Western imagination (a socio-mental system common to all Westernized people) has been imposing itself for about thirty years. It is generally organized around a simplified American culture and consecrates the domination, even artistic and scientific, of the Anglo-American language. The ideology of “communication” plays a central role in this regard; Gaston Doumergue, a specialist in United States studies, has clearly demonstrated, for example, that the American doctrine of information transparency and global freedom of communications, established notably on the construction of global television, telematics, and computer networks, is not devoid of hegemonic ambitions. The universalization of a language, especially when it passes through a memorized computer code, signifies the generalization of an international way of thinking, acting, and feeling, that is to say, “Americanomorphic.” Even if “freedom” presides, as the supreme ethic, over this enterprise, one must ask whether this planetary normalization of culture, supported by communication technologies, really promotes dialogue between people and populations. Can one communicate through a code that is itself deculturating?

The most striking example of global cultural normalization appears to have been, since World War II, that which affected youth culture. This culture, presented as an anti-bourgeois ideology of “liberation” and contestation, actually functioned to create the first Westernized bourgeois class in history, across about twenty countries. It was the generation born just after the war that first bore the brunt of this. Today, a significant portion of Western youth – including in non-industrial countries – communes in the same music, the same customs, and the same “practical culture.” We can say, according to Robert Jaulin‘s expression, that the West is no longer a place, a zone, but a form-of-life that “traverses” us, that internalizes itself in each ego.

But, just as it presents itself as a cultural and geopolitical reality, the West is also an ideology, coherent and structured, whose totalitarian aim is all the more present because it generally does not appear at first glance to these lovers of freedom that our intellectuals claim to be.

Footnotes:
1.           Raymond Abellio, La Structure absolue,[The Absolute Structure] Gallimard. 1965.