The Struggle for the West
A Divided and Contested Legacy
Edited by Christopher Browning, Marko Lehti
Routledge – 2010 – 256 pages
In recent years debates about the nature and future of the West have been high on the political agenda. Prognoses of the West’s imminent demise have been countered by those arguing for its continued relevance, or those arguing that while the West will survive its nature, and the balance of power between its constituent units, is transforming.
This book argues that understanding contemporary developments requires subjecting the very idea of the West to critical scrutiny and in particular asking what kind of concept it actually is. Locating the West as a discursive concept the book argues attempts to save, fix or reclaim the meaning of the West are illustrative of political agendas rather than indicative of accurate claims about the essential nature of the West. In contrast, the book argues that as a concept the West is impregnated with various discursive legacies, the most embedded of which are those of a civilisational, modern and political West. However, while attempts to define the West’s essence are therefore doomed to fail, given the concept’s historical and discursive flexibility, such attempts reaffirm the legitimising role which claims to the West continue to perform.
Beyond this, the book challenges traditional genealogies of the West, which overwhelmingly depict the West as an inside-out concept. In contrast, the book argues that historically outsiders have played an important role in defining the nature of the West and constituting it as a political subject; processes that remain evident today.
This book will particularly interest students of critical security studies, critical geopolitics, European politics, American politics and IR theory.
1. Introduction: New Tensions in a Troubled Partnership Christopher S. Browning and Marko Lehti Part 1: Foundations of The West 2. The West: Contested, Narrated and Clustered Christopher S. Browning and Marko Lehti 3. The Russian Dawn: How Russia Contributed to the Emergence of ‘The West’ as a Concept Peggy Heller 4. The Perpetual Decline of the West Patrick Thaddeus Jackson Part 2: The Dividing Legacy of The West 5. Rebooting the West: Can the Western Alliance Still Engage in War? Christopher Coker 6. American West vs. European West: A Struggle for Ownership and Legitimacy Marko Lehti Part 3: Europe, America and Alternative Core Wests 7.European Identity, Post-Western Europe, and Complex Cultural Diversity Paul Blokker and Gerard Delanty 8. Difference within Similarity: The Puzzle of Transatlantic Relations Pertti Joenniemi 9. Beyond the West and Towards the Anglosphere? Christopher S. Browning and Ben Tonra Part 4: Remaking The West in the Margins 10. Western Hegemony, Global Democracy and the Russian Challenge Viatcheslav Morozov 11. Asian Occidentalism and Rediscovered Modenities Alastair Bonnett 12. Conclusion: The Resilient West? Christopher S. Browning
Christopher S. Browning is Associate Professor in International Security in the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick. Marko Lehti is Senior Research Fellow at Tampere Peace Research Institute at the University of Tampere and Academic Director of the Baltic Sea Region Studies Masters Programme at the University of Turku, Finland.