Western world
The Western world has no fixed borders. That simple fact, buried in dictionaries and debated by historians for centuries, turns out to be one of the most consequential ideas in human history. What we call "the West" is not a place you can draw on a map. It is an evolving concept made up of cultural, political, and economic ties among diverse groups of people. Australia sits in the Eastern Hemisphere, yet almost no one disputes that it belongs to the Western world. Russia has swung in and out of the definition depending on the era and the scholar doing the defining. The earliest recorded use of the term "Western world" in English dates to 1586, found in the writings of William Warner. Yet the idea stretches back more than a thousand years before that, to a single decision made by a Roman emperor beside the Bosphorus. How did a directional label become a civilizational identity? And who decides who belongs?
Constantine the Great planted the seed of the West in AD 330 when he established Constantinople, today's Istanbul, as the "New Rome" and capital of his empire. What had once been a single Roman world began pulling apart along a line that roughly followed language: Greek in the East, Latin in the West. The Eastern Mediterranean was densely urbanized and culturally unified by Greek as a common tongue, a legacy of Alexander the Great's older empire. The West was far more rural and adopted Latin as its working language. These were not simply administrative differences. They were the early grooves along which a thousand years of divergence would run.
In AD 395, the Roman Empire formally split into Western and Eastern halves, each with its own emperor and capital. The Western half lasted only a few more decades. Germanic tribes, including the Huns, Goths, Franks, and Vandals, pressed in from the borders. Many of these fighters were themselves trained Roman soldiers, paid by Rome to guard its vast frontiers, and had grown into what the source describes as militarily sophisticated "Romanized barbarians." The Visigoths sacked Rome in AD 410, the first time in almost 800 years the city had fallen to a foreign enemy. St. Jerome, living in Bethlehem at the time, wrote that "The City which had taken the whole world was itself taken." A second sack followed in AD 455, this one by the Vandals, lasting fourteen days.
The Western Roman Empire formally ended in AD 476. The Eastern half, governed from Constantinople, lived on for another millennium as what later historians called the Byzantine Empire. Its survival protected Roman legal and cultural traditions, fusing them with Greek and Christian elements. The inhabitants called themselves Romans, because by that point "Roman" had come to signify all Christians. It was the Pope's crowning of Charlemagne in AD 800 as Emperor of a new Holy Roman Empire that cemented the idea of a distinct Latin West, separate from the Greek East still centered in Constantinople.
Three months after Pope Leo IX died in April 1054, the Latin Church of western and central Europe formally broke with the eastern Greek patriarchates. The event is known as the Great Schism, or the East-West Schism, and it was the culmination of theological and ecclesiastical differences that had been building for generations. Rome excommunicated the patriarch of Byzantium. From that point forward, Western Europeans increasingly viewed the Christians of the Byzantine Empire as heretics, a perception the Crusades would harden into open hostility.
In 1071, the Byzantine army was defeated by Muslim Turco-Persian forces, and the emperor sent a plea to Rome for military aid. The result was a series of western European military campaigns into the eastern Mediterranean. The crusaders, drawn from the nobility of France, German territories, the Low Countries, England, and Italy, owed no allegiance to the Byzantine emperor. They carved out their own states in the conquered regions. The Latin Christian Fourth Crusade of AD 1202-04 ended with the Crusader army sacking Constantinople itself in April 1204, described in the source as one of the most profitable and disgraceful sacks of a city in history. An anti-Western riot had already broken out in Constantinople in 1182, targeting Latins. The sack of 1204 paved the way for Muslim conquests in present-day Turkey and the Balkans in the centuries that followed.
The Papal Inquisition was established on a permanent basis in AD 1229. The religious Eighty Years War ran from 1568 to 1648, and the Thirty Years War from 1618 to 1648, both fueled by conflicts between Protestant and Catholic states within the Holy Roman Empire. Both wars ended with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which enshrined the concept of the nation-state and the principle of absolute national sovereignty in international law. As European influence spread across the globe in subsequent centuries, these Westphalian principles became central to the prevailing world order.
Marco Polo, the Venetian merchant traveler, was among the most famous of those who sought to cultivate trade between Europe and Asia in the 13th and 14th centuries. But his journeys, and those of others like him, had little permanent effect. The Ottoman Turks consolidated control over the eastern Mediterranean, closing off key overland trade routes. The Portuguese responded by pioneering oceanic alternatives, introducing the caravel ship in the mid-1400s to advance their maritime reach.
In 1492, Christopher Columbus, described in the source as a merchant, navigator, and Hispano-Italian colonizer, made an exploring voyage that expanded European colonialism across the globe. The European colonization of the Americas led to the Atlantic slave trade, which ran from the 1490s to the 1800s. Before Britain abolished its slave trade in 1807, the British Empire alone was responsible for transporting 3.5 million African slaves to the Americas, a third of all those transported across the Atlantic. Britain had begun its colonial efforts in 1578, nearly a century after the Portuguese and Spanish empires.
By 1913, the British Empire held sway over 412 million people. By 1920, it covered 35,500,000 square kilometers of the Earth's total land area. The phrase "the empire on which the sun never sets" described the British Empire because its global reach meant the sun always shone on at least one of its territories. The Holy Roman Empire, meanwhile, was dissolved on the 6th of August 1806, after the French Revolutionary Wars and the creation of Napoleon's Confederation of the Rhine. Most colonized nations received independence by 1960, though the end of formal colonial imperialism gave rise to what critics described as Western neocolonialism, in which multinational corporations wielded economic influence with little accountability to affected populations.
Eric Voegelin described the 18th century as a period when "the sentiment grows that one age has come to its close and that a new age of Western civilization is about to be born." The Enlightenment, also called the Age of Reason, had precursors in John Milton and Baruch Spinoza. Milton's meeting with Galileo in 1638 left a lasting mark and influenced Milton's work Areopagitica, where he warned that without free speech, inquisitorial forces would impose "an undeserved thraldom upon learning."
Descartes and Isaac Newton were regarded as exemplars of human intellectual achievement during this era. Eighteenth-century scholars worked to extend Newton's theory of gravitation; among them were Leonhard Euler, Pierre Louis Maupertuis, Alexis-Claude Clairaut, Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, Joseph-Louis Lagrange, and Pierre-Simon de Laplace, whose five-volume Treatise on Celestial Mechanics stands as one of the great works of 18th-century Newtonianism. Astronomy became the second most popular scientific profession of the period, after medicine.
Spinoza's ideas generated sustained controversy. French writer Pierre Bayle denounced Spinoza as a pantheist, effectively accusing him of atheism, and the attention Bayle drew to Spinoza's work shaped philosophical debate for decades. In the late 18th century, Gotthold Lessing was attacked by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi for supporting Spinoza's pantheism; Moses Mendelssohn defended Lessing while diverging from pantheism, following Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in arguing that God and the world were not of the same substance. Spinoza had been excommunicated from the Dutch Sephardic community, yet for Jews seeking a path to secularism grounded in Jewish sources, he proved as significant as Voltaire and Kant. Condorcet's Sketch of the Progress of the Human Mind, published in 1794, traced humanity's advance from primitive society through the invention of writing, the printing press, and into what he called "the Period when the Sciences and Philosophy threw off the Yoke of Authority."
In 1947, a new framework for understanding the West took hold. The Cold War divided the globe into three worlds. The First World was composed of NATO members and countries aligned with the United States. The Second World was the Eastern bloc under Soviet influence, including the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries such as Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia. The Third World encompassed nations that were unaligned with either side, among them India, Yugoslavia, Finland, and Switzerland.
Some countries defied easy categorization. Finland remained neutral and non-communist despite being within the Soviet Union's military sphere of influence under the FCMA treaty. It joined the European Free Trade Association in 1986 but was not a member of the Warsaw Pact or Comecon, and sat to the west of the Iron Curtain. Austria regained full independence in 1955 under the condition that it remain neutral, yet it fell within the United States' sphere of influence. Spain did not join NATO until 1982, seven years after the death of the authoritarian Franco.
The 1980s rise of Mikhail Gorbachev eventually brought the Cold War to a close, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. With the Cold War's end, the tripartite framework lost much of its organizing power, and the question of who belongs to the West reopened with new urgency.
A 2011 Pew Research Center survey found that 76.2% of Europeans, 73.3% of people in Oceania, and about 86% of people in the Americas described themselves as Christians. Christianity remains the largest faith in most Western countries, claimed by approximately 70% of Western populations overall. Yet from the mid-twentieth century onward, church attendance has fallen in many parts of the European Union, and secularism has grown. In countries like Italy, Poland, and Portugal, more than half the population still reports that religion is important. In others, such as Canada, a low level of religiosity is common.
From 2000 to 2014, the Internet's market penetration in the West was twice that in non-Western regions, continuing a pattern of technological adoption that had characterized Western societies since the postwar expansion of television and radio. The term "Western world" is sometimes used interchangeably with "First World" or "developed countries," though the equation is imprecise: a significant portion of the Americas consists of developing countries, and some of the world's most developed economies, among them Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao, are not culturally Western.
Scholar Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a theologian and paleontologist, conceived of the West as the set of civilizations descended from the Nile Valley Civilization of Egypt, a definition that pushes the origins of Western civilization far earlier than Greece or Rome. Arnold J. Toynbee, Alfred Kroeber, and Carroll Quigley each attempted to identify and analyze Western civilization as a distinct historical formation. Quigley, in The Evolution of Civilizations, argued that Western civilization was born around AD 500, in the vacuum left by the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The idea of "the West," as Quigley and others traced it, has traveled a long distance from a compass direction to a sociopolitical concept freighted with notions of progress and modernity, a transformation that began, in the written record at least, with William Warner's pen in 1586.
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Common questions
What is the origin of the term Western world?
The earliest recorded use of the term "Western world" in English dates to 1586, found in the writings of William Warner, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The idea of a distinct Western civilization began to crystallize with the rise of Christianity during the Late Roman Empire, and the geopolitical concept took further shape when Constantine the Great divided the Roman Empire in the 4th century CE.
When did the East-West Schism split Christianity?
The Great Schism, also called the East-West Schism, occurred in 1054 CE, three months after the death of Pope Leo IX in April of that year. The church in Rome excommunicated the patriarch of Byzantium, formalizing the split between the Western Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church.
How did the Cold War change the definition of the Western world?
During the Cold War from 1947 to 1991, the Western world was redefined as the First World, composed of NATO members and countries aligned with the United States. This stood in contrast to the Soviet-aligned Second World and the unaligned Third World, a tripartite framework that dissolved after Mikhail Gorbachev's rise in the 1980s and the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Why is Australia considered part of the Western world if it is in the Eastern Hemisphere?
Australia is included in modern definitions of the Western world because of its significant cultural ties to Britain through colonization and European immigration, not because of its geographic location. Countries are grouped into the West based on shared cultural, political, and historical inheritance rather than their position on a map.
How large was the British Empire at its peak and what was its role in the Western world?
By 1913, the British Empire held sway over 412 million people, and by 1920 it covered 35,500,000 square kilometers of the Earth's total land area. Before it abolished its slave trade in 1807, the British Empire was responsible for transporting 3.5 million African slaves to the Americas, a third of all those transported across the Atlantic.
What percentage of the Western world identifies as Christian today?
Approximately 70% of Western populations are Christians. A 2011 Pew Research Center survey found that 76.2% of Europeans, 73.3% of people in Oceania, and about 86% of people in the Americas described themselves as Christians, though church attendance has declined in many European Union countries in recent decades.
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