Alastair Bonnett is a lecturer in human geography at the University of Newcastle whose publications include
Radicalism, Anti-Racism, and Representation,
White Studies Revisited, and
What is Geography. From what I can glean from his most recent study,
The Idea of the West (2004), it seems his political and philosophical views are drawn from the tradition of conservative empiricism, as he is generally skeptical of universalistic claims, a priori extractions, utopian fantasies, and so forth. He avoids the jargon of post-colonial studies, which he criticizes for not addressing the two fundamental questions central to his book: What is “the West,” and what are the origins of the concept?
Bonnett's main thesis in
The Idea of the West is that the “the West” is largely a creation of non-Westerners. "Indeed,” he explains, “it appears that non-Western ideas about the West, in many cases, precede Western ones; that it was the non-West that invented the West" (2). Bonnett also challenges the commonly held notion that the Eastern world simply imported the West and adapted it through a process of hybridization. Instead, he finds that a closer look reveals that non-Western cultures often actively and creatively constructed representations of the West that suited the political demands of the day, and that these representations were more often than not entirely different from the West itself. Finally, Bonnett also takes aim at the "belligerence exhibited by
[Victor] Hanson,
[Avishai] Margalit and
[Ian] Buruma" (2-3),” contemporary writers who he condemns for continuing to propagate myths of an inevitable East-West showdown and Western triumphalism.
The idea of “the West” has been used over the years as a sort of undefined variable into which a variety of meanings could be inserted. He points out that these significations have varied considerably throughout history: in the ancient world “the west” was associated with the setting of the sun, death and whiteness, while to those in the mid-19th century “the West” came to signify progress, science, technology, and military prowess. Its geographical parameters proved equally flexible, so that to some the West was limited solely to the United Kingdom, while to many living during the Cold War it was broad enough to include Japan.
Bonnett also identifies two opposing narratives that can be found in every era since the 19th century. On the one hand is the alarmist narrative, which warns that the West has gone into decay (e.g., James Little,
Oswald Spengler,
Pat Buchanan), while on the other is the triumphalist narrative, which ceOswald Spenglerlebrates, often in paranoid language that barely conceals deep insecurities, the recent victory and enduring supremacy of Western civilization (e.g.,
Benjamin Kidd, Victor Hanson,
John McCain). The fact that these two opposing narratives can exist simultaneously proves that the notion of the West, as a tool, possesses "extraordinary intellectual and political utility" (6).
Bonnett's argument poses serious challenges not only to the alarmists and triumphalists, but also to the founder of post-colonial studies himself,
Edward Said. Bonnett sees the recent discourse on Occidentalism as divided into two camps: those "who define Occidentalism as a Western project of self-invention [e.g., Said] and those who ally it with the examination of images of the West from across the globe" (e.g., Bonnett) (7). Bonnett faults the Said camp for not sufficiently focusing on the "uses and deployment" of Occidental discourse, something which he,
Xiaomei Chen and others consciously strive to do. Bonnett faults the geographers, too, who, "paralyzed by memories" of a colonial past, are afraid to address these questions of use and deployment.
Bonnett's methodology is to "use influential intellectuals as . . . prime sources," focusing on the 19th and early 20th century for the first four chapters, and on the 20th century for the final three. (For this article, I focus most of my attention on the first four chapters.) Bonnett’s top-down approach runs the risk of becoming myopic; yet by focusing on a handful of influential intellectuals he is able to see beyond the limits of popular national narratives, so that the larger, transnational narratives can be discerned.
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In the first chapter, “From White to Western: ‘Racial Decline’ and the Rise of the Idea of the West in Britain, 1890-1930,” Bonnett traces the rise of the concept of the West as constructed by Westerners. He sees the idea of the West as arising out the earlier “idea of whiteness,” which had gone into disuse by the 1930s when “white values” were replaced by “Western values."
Whiteness discourse had a rather short history, lasting roughly from 1890-1930. Its severe limitations began to show during what Bonnett calls “the white crisis” period, which saw a proliferation of works celebrating the virtues of whiteness, and warning of the dangers posed to it. The fact that the racially reductive assumptions of the literature (namely, that whites are best) did not line up with the facts (namely, that there are plenty of stupid and inferior whites to be observed in the world) caused a great tension, eventually bringing about the decline of white supremacy discourse. Also, the fact that disparate ethnicities were all lumped together in the “white category” did not help its advocates’ case for “white unity.”
Numerous other inconsistencies helped to rupture the notion of “white unity.” Both the fratricidal First World War and the great class divide exposed whiteness as "an inadequate category of social solidarity" (18). This was the case not only in Europe but in America, too, where whites were realizing that the bond between, say, poor white trash in Alabama and elite neo-aristocratic WASPs from the east coast were more tenuous than once thought. "White identity,” they were to discover, “does not possess a discrete history" (23). The idea of “the West,” by contrast, proved far more applicable, flexible, cosmopolitan, and only subtly ethnocentric.
How did “the West,” then, which was not a common term in Britain before the late 1800s, suddenly become a central unifying idea by first two decades of the 20th century? The term, invented in the late 19th century, grew in the early 20th century with the help of three competing forces: the rise of America as an imperial power, the Bolshevik revolution, and the rise (and eventual collapse) of the colonial powers of Europe. It was during the unfolding of these three historical shifts that “the West” as a unified subject, perspective, and cultural grouping was invented.
As the terminology moved from whiteness to Western-ness, the notion of race became increasingly irrelevant, well, sort of. While there emerged a new tendency toward abstraction and universalistic sentiment, the more perceptive critics saw that behind all the lofty rhetoric was still a racial hierarchy that placed the white race on top, and that the alterations in terminology were no more than the proverbial lipstick on the pig, and were motivated by self-serving political convenience.
Nevertheless, a significant change occurred, and Bonnett traces this change from whiteness to Wester-ness by examining five key figures from this era in British history whose varying uses of the term “the West” each typified the somewhat competing notions of the day. First was
Ramsay MacDonald (1866-1937), who served as Labour Party leader, and, later, British Prime Minister. He defined the West in terms of political discourse, using a partially deracialised, sometimes secular and sometimes Christian terminology that emphasized a) humanitarianism and the alleviating of suffering, and b) the superior nature of the Western legal system and justice.
After MacDonald came Benjamin Kidd (1858-1916), who introduced the notion of "our Western civilization" in 1894. He saw the West "as a form of spirit, or consciousness, that is intellectually far-seeing and militarily enforced" (29). Though his rhetoric was often combative, he presented his ideas in mostly non-racialist terms, and in the guise of a priori truths which he saw only Westerners as capable of comprehending. These truths, he argued, must be mercilessly enforced, and that it is therefore necessary to prepare for conflict in the defense of “Western culture.” To Kidd, whiteness was merely a "prosaic fact," while the West was "a higher and more important reality" (30).
Francis Marvin (1863-1943), a follower of Kid, was the chief organizer of the Unity History Schools, which were established to maintain and propagate a coherent idea of the West, which he saw as having been severely splintered during the Great War. Marvin, somewhat oddly, saw Western man as a single racial unit, within which many other races simultaneously existed. But untroubled by such inconsistencies, he insisted that race was not something to be apprehended by the intellect alone, but to be felt by the heart as an emotional truth.
Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) too was inspired by the non-rationalist approach of Kidd. Spengler, most famous for his polemic
The Decline of the West (1912), "leaves aside evolutionary biology" to argue instead that Western man is superior because he represents a form of Destiny. Race is feeling, not science, he asserts. In his
Decline of the West he develops the notion of the life cycles of culture, which begin in growth and end in decay. The West as he saw it was now in its final stages of decay. Spengler also fought to abolish the term “Europe,” which he felt was misleading since it included Russians, who, after all, do not think like other Westerners.
Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975) wrote
A Study of History, in which he describes the rise and fall of thirty civilizations. Though he little mentions race, much of the focus is on the West. Like Spengler, he too considers the term “Europe” to be a misnomer, “since it appeared to link the West to the separate civilisation of Eastern Orthodoxy" (32). The future envisioned by Toynbee was a sort of utopia that was neither Western nor Eastern. Critics, however, would later claim that what he really describes is a world where the West has in fact eclipsed the globe, or erased itself, as it were, "in the process of its complete victory" (33). Toynbee also makes the important point that the "utility of deracialisation," rather than man’s moral development, is what led to fall of the white supremacy discourse.
Thus, by the 1930s white identity as a public ideal was largely dead, having been replaced by the idea of West-ness. (Notable exceptions of course could be found in Nazi Germany, the speeches of Winston Churchill, and pamphlets dispersed at KKK rallies). Bonnett notes, however, that
white privilege was no less real after this transformation; rather, only the nature of that privilege had changed. “[White privilege] has become less visible, less acknowledged," and has adapted to global capitalist demands (34). The idea of West, Bonnett concludes, "helped resolve some of the problematic and unsustainable characteristics of white supremacism. Yet it carried its own burden of tensions," since, like whiteness, West-ness too came to be perceived as always in a state of crisis, and always in danger of decay or extinction (36).
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In Chapter Two, “Communists Like Us: The Idea of the West in the Soviet Union,” Bonnett examines "how the idea of the West was employed and deployed by Soviet politicians in order to define the meaning of communism” (11). The West was originally associated by the Bolsheviks with socialist modernity, and, in fact, much of the non-Western world saw the West as socialist in the early 20th century. It was not until the 1930s that the West was recast as the polar opposite of the Soviet state— a change that occurred with Stalin and his condemnation of the West as corrupt, cosmopolitan, and capitalist.
In the next chapter, “Good-bye Asia: The Westernisers’ West, Fukuzawa and Gokalp,” Bonnett examines two cases of the Western-style nationalist agenda— one in Japan and the other in Turkey— in which we see a new positioning toward the West, and a distancing from Asia and its negative stereotypes. Bonnett argues, however, that the ultimate goal of these newly formed nation-states was not to join and imitate the West (as many claim), but rather to become independent and autonomous from it. These two examples thus offer a challenge to the hybridization hypothesis, and demonstrate how the East’s invention of “the West” was in fact "creative and original."
Post-colonial discourse has tended to divide the non-Western personality into two roles: slavish "colonial imitator" and “active resister." The non-Westerner could be one or the other, but never both or a combination of both. But the cases of
Fukuzawa Yūkichi 福澤諭吉 (1835-1901) and
Ziya Gokalp (1876-1924) show that the realities were often more complex, for both men were fervent nationalists who at the same time "deploy[ed] a form of Orientalism in which Asia [was] cast as a separate and primitive realm, to be distinguished from both the West and their own nations."
Fukuzawa Yūkichi was born in Nagasaki, where he was trained from a young age in rangaku 蘭学 or “Dutch studies,” the only European-style education available to Japan at the time. He was part of the famous Takenouchi mission to the West in 1862. Fukuzawa’s observations while abroad were formulated in his highly influential
An Outline of a Theory of Civilisation 『文明論の概略』 (1875), in which he argued that Japan must recreate itself "for the sake of its own future" (67), and that merely copying the Western “surfaces” would not be sufficient. “We must first reform men's minds," he argued, “before we can begin to reform the nation.”
Fukuzawa was by no means a cultural essentialist, as evidenced by the negative attitudes he held toward his native culture, which he regarded as passive and weak. He advised that the Japanese do away with their native culture themselves, as it was doomed anyway to be erased by the unforgiving boot of the Western imperial powers. He was also critical of the influence of Chinese culture, which he held partially responsible for Japan’s current low status in the world. He saw a “static and passive” China to be representative of Asia as a whole, and urged Japan to move away from the lagging East and toward the West in order to fulfill its “new destiny.” In his essay “Good-bye Asia” 「脱亜論」 (1885), he urges the Japanese to shed their “Asiatic,” passive traits and abandon “our bad [Asian] friends,” so that they may advance the nation through the creation of a modern, Westernized nation-state.
To Fukuzawa, the most important task was the creation and preservation of a national polity. To create a new modern state, Fukuzawa thought it necessary to encourage an open, meritocratic system of public education that favored innovation and individualism, and that valued and nurtured cleverness. He insisted that the old, hierarchical feudal system based on lineage had to go, and that a degree of risshin shusse 立身出世 (“social mobility”) must be allowed for new talent to rise. (His statements about traditional Japanese culture being feudal and backward reveals that he was thinking mainly of samurai culture and not the plebeian chōnin 町人 of Edo, for whom a fair amount of social mobility was in fact permitted.)
Notably, Fukuzawa did not advocate the expulsion of the authoritarian Tokugawa government; rather, he foresaw that a powerful and potentially ruthless central government would in fact be needed for creating and maintaining the modern state.
Ziya Gokalp was a "Turkish nationalist and critical proponent of Westernisation," who served as "chief ideologist [for] Turkey's creation as a modern nation" (71). Aside from his political contributions, he was also a sociologist, historian, poet, and novelist. Like Fukuzawa, Gokalp advocated leaving Asia and joining the West, citing the example of Japan. Asians, he argued, had two choices: either westernize or become enslaved to the Western powers.
Like Fukuzawa, Gokalp too regarded “East” and “West” not as discrete realities to be exported or imported, but as "categories animated and employed in the service of an attempt to create a novel political identity and national project.” For Gokalp, this meant namely the project of cultivating “Turkishness," a new concept that sought to move Turkish identity away from the “backward and doomed” Ottoman culture (71). Gokalp, like the Zionists a generation later, took the lesson from recent European history that in order for the tribe to survive it must establish a mono-cultural nation-state.
Gokalp was a staunch anti-Ottoman, and was therefore against all that it represented: imperialism, cosmopolitanism, and pluralism. His vision for a modern Turkey consisted of the “cultural homogeneity of the modern nation state" (72). He saw Turks as the victims of a cosmopolitan elite that ruled the Ottoman empire by merely copying the West. He accused this elite of marginalizing Turkish culture and language, while promoting "Arabic, Persian, Russian, and Chinese" (73). As Bonnett points out, his pro-national, anti-imperial stance, however, conveniently overlooked the inherently imperial nature of many of the modern states.
Gokalp made an important distinction between “culture” (a sort of collective imagination of the tribe) and “civilization” (the institutions and techniques of power). He insisted that Turks should retain Turkish culture, but import Western civilization.
Both the Fukuzawa and Gokalp cases challenge "the political naïveté of contemporary theories of hybridisation" (70). About Fukuzawa Bonnett writes, "I would cast doubt on the utility of conceptualising his work as an example of hybridity at all. Rather than importing or translating a ready-made idea of the West, Fukuzawa actively fashioned a certain representation of the West to suit his own (and, in large measure, his social class's) particular political ambitions" (70). Again, the driving factor being Fukuzawa’s push to westernize was the desire to stave off subjugation. In this sense, Fukuzawa— like Kidd, Spengler, and Toynbee in Europe— can be seen as a conscious manipulator of East-West representations, which he used to serve particular political ends. Gokalp, too, defies the hybridization thesis, since he also "actively constructed, rather than merely mirrored, deconstructed or mixed, a series of stereotypes of self and other." Thus, these two cases illustrate how "the West" was creatively invented by the East for certain political goals.
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In Chapter Four, “Soulless Occident/Spiritual Asia: Tagore’s West,” Bonnett examines the origins of non-Westerners’ constructions of East-West stereotypes by looking at the two cases of
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), a Bengali poet and essayist who was at the forefront of the movement to invent Asia "as a space of spirituality" (80), and
Okakura Kakuzō 岡倉覚三 (1862-1913), a Japanese scholar who articulated a similar view of East-West. These two cases show that the notions of “West-as-material” and “East-as-spirit” were to a large extent created by non-Westerners long before Bernard Lewis and other Orientalists were around to “other” them.
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was a Bengali poet, novelist, religionist, composer, and essayist who in 1913 became Asia’s first Nobel laureate. He was born into a Westernized elite class in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India. Though “pro-Western,” he saw the Western mode of modernization as "a misguided form of modernity . . . for it represented the despoliation of personality and individuality by an increasingly standarised and industrialised social system" (81). Tagore was heavily influenced by English and German romanticism, and much of his “Oriental-ness” might in fact have had its origins in his readings of Western poetry. Though critical of Western industrialism, he remained enthusiastic about the possibility of technology alleviating suffering. Throughout his life he insisted that there must be alternative forms of modernity, and he spent much of his life trying to discover and articulate these forms.
Unlike Gokalp and Fukuzawa, however, Tagore was highly critical of nationalism, which he referred to as the "cult of the nation." He was most alarmed by the case of Japan, which he saw as having adopted much of what is wrong with the Western imperial powers. Tagore thus spent much of his career trying to define and promote a “modern" that was distinct from what he considered to be Europe’s (and Japan’s) “misled” form of modernization.
Like Fukuzawa and Gokalp, Tagore too consciously employed forms of self-orientalization in order to advance certain political causes. Many of the East-West stereotypes that later took hold in the Western imperial imagination were in fact first articulated by “Rabi” (his nickname in the West). He described Asia as an ideal, remote and provincial space, while the West he presented as faceless, spiritually impoverished, and urban. He helped to create the negative essentialist image of Western man as soulless, murderous, enslaving, trapped by irreconcilable "good and evil," "inherently destructive," and incapable of "creative unity"— traits he observed from the behavior of the British during the Opium Wars.
Tagore draws an equally essentialist picture of “obedient” and “harmonious” Easterners, whose women are modest and chaste. And only in the East, he asserts, is individual and social creativity possible, since only Asians are capable of maintaining a balance between collectivism and individualism.
Tagore was loved in the West, where he was flattered and orientalized by celebrities ranging from Yeats to Einstein. By contrast, he received a far colder reception in Asia, where the bureaucratic elites faced problems far graver than the nebulous matters which concerned Tagore. Many in Asia— especially the Japanese— were skeptical of his passivity and "resignation." Tagore grew increasingly wary of the uncritical acceptance of the Western-style nationalism that he observed around him, and his three tours of Japan—in 1916, 1924, and 1929— proved to be the most difficult of his Asian tours. The Japanese people, he would later write, are “solely aesthetic and not spiritual,” and are therefore the least qualified of the Eastern peoples to lead Asia. Japan was a culture that lacked depth, he argued, citing this as the reason for their vulnerability to Western imitation.
Despite meeting resistance throughout Asia, Tagore continued to press for a non-imperial, non-national Pan-Asia, which he saw as Asia’s last defense against the imperial powers. Tagore's message, however, was increasingly ignored by the rapidly expanding and increasingly belligerent Japan, which looked at him as representative of a defeated, old, and conquered India. They dismissed his ideas as a "loser's philosophy" (90).
His 1924 trip to China, where the revolutionary Communists had moved ideologically toward a pro-Western position, was "even more bruising" (91). Their "revalourisation of [the new] West" left little room for tolerance for Tagore's anti-materialist and pro-spiritual message, which the Chinese blamed for enfeebling India. To the Chinese, Tagore's message was a recipe for disaster, and he was attacked by both conservatives and communists alike. Dejected, Tagore returned to India, disillusioned about the presumed "spiritual" nature of Orient. He lamented that Western alienation had pervaded the world, and that "Western colonialism had become the paradigm for all human contact" (94).
Okakura Kakuzō (1862-1913), a.k.a. “Tenshin,” was a scholar of the arts of Japan, most famous for his
The Book of Tea (1906). Like Tagore, Okakura too was born into a Westernizing class, which allowed him to work his way through the elite schools until reaching Tokyo University, where he studied under Ernest Fenollosa.
In 1904 Okakura published
The Ideals of the East, in which he argues that Easterners are concerned with the "Ultimate and Universal," while Westerners care only for Particulars— a very dubious claim, given that Confucianism tends to be an anti-Idealist and pragmatic philosophy. His notion of a unified Asia, too, met with skepticism to many who saw India, Japan, and China as historically and culturally distinct entities. Furthermore, his idea that Japan sat atop the "hierarchy of [Asian] authenticity" seemed rather odd to those who regarded Japan as the most Western and “least Asian” of the Asian nations.
The idea of Asia as a single entity was largely unheard of before the 20th century, and its introduction met with much skepticism. Pan-Asianists such as Okakura and Tagore had a rather hard time identifying unifying elements that could reach across the “Asian continent,” and they awkwardly tried to resolve the problem by linking the various cultures through the supposed common thread of Buddhism. The problem, of course, was that the Buddhist influence—where it existed— varied in importance from region to region.
From where and when did the concept of Asia arise? Bonnett points out that he word “Asia” has existed for centuries, and can be traced back to Babylonian roots (
asu, sun's rising). It was eventually adopted into Greek, Latin, and finally the European languages. The word was then brought to China by Italians in the 16th century. However, the word
axia (to which the Chinese assigned the characters 亜細亜“inferior-trifling-inferior”) was used by the Chinese to refer to “inferior” regions that surrounded China; so according to the Chinese, China was not a part of
axia.
From the above two cases, and from further evidence cited from the histories of Bengal, India and Japan, we can see that the commonly held notion that “Asian spirituality” is "essentially a Western idea" does not match up with the facts. Bonnett shows that the notion of Asia-as-spirit was created first by modern Asians, and within the discourse of various projects of modernization (96). "Asia is better understood,” Bonnett writes, “to have been created, re-invented and re-valued by Asians themselves" (81).
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In the next chapter, “From Soulless to Slacker: Idea of West from Pan-Asianism to Asian Values: Asia and West,” Bonnett examines some more recent stereotypes of East-West, particularly the notions of the West as "scene of social anarchy and idleness" and the East as “the home of efficiency and selfless duty."
In Chapter Six, “Occidental Utopia: The Neo-liberal West,” Bonnett discusses how the concept of the West has been narrowed to a vision of economics and politics due to the influence of neo-liberalism, which he sees as a flawed ideology that is utopian in nature, and thus prone to failure. “I use the charge of utopianism,” Bonnett proclaims, “to criticise the mythic structure of neo-liberal ideology" (12). The concept of “the West” today, he argues, is more ideologically limited than "the West" of the past, which had a much greater variety of associations.
As I have pointed out, “the West” has served throughout history as a kind of undefined variable which can be defined in any number of ways. Benjamin Kidd, for example, defined the West in terms of its militant mission to civilize the world. Ramsay MacDonald defined it in terms of its superior legal and ethical traditions, which had unfortunately been "[of late] betrayed by the imperial powers." Trotsky saw the West as the "home of the socialist imagination." Though these definitions of the West are vastly different, what they do share is a faith in Western Europe as the center of world.
Yet "the West" of one hundred years ago was far more plural in concept than today's "neo-liberal West," which Bonnett sees as stubborn, inflexible, and unwilling to adapt to recent changes in the global power structure. Bonnett holds the ideology of neo-liberalism largely responsible for this narrowing of the West. Placing himself in the long line of alarmists such as Oswald Spengler and Pat Buchanan, Bonnett makes the prediction that the West— because of its devolution into “a Utopian political discourse”— is prone to collapse.
In the seventh and final chapter, “Western Dystopia: Radical Islamism and Anti-Westernism,” Bonnett sets out accomplish two things: “(1) to illustrate how anti-Westernism [of the old Left] has been recuperated by radical Islamism; and (2) to exemplify how radical Islamism constructs a dystopian model of West.” Bonnett examines how "dystopian images of the West developed within both radical Islamism and some of its putative forbears" (12).
First, he outlines the history of anti-Western utopias, dividing them into four types: Communist utopia, primitivist utopia (e.g., anarchist, pre-industrial, man in “natural state”), indigenist utopia (e.g., xenophobic nationalisms that oppose the Western powers), and transnational cultural utopia (e.g., Pan-Asianism and Pan-Arabism). Radical Islamist utopianism has absorbed these previous models, but has been “narrowed by religious radicalism,” much in the same way that the West has been narrowed by neo-liberalism (160). Focusing on two cultural critics— the leftist
Jalal Al-e Ahmad and Islamist
Maryam Jameelah— Bonnett shows how radical Islamism has become provincialized as it refuses to engage in a public economic policy dialogue with the West to address questions of alternative forms of modernity. Instead, it has put its head in the sand and retreated to private domestic matters and Sharia law— something that can lead only to further isolation, possibly allowing the West “to triumph”in the end after all.
