Europe and the West: Two Antagonistic Forces

by Claudio Finzi

Claudio Finzi argues that the concept of the West originated in the United States to assert a distinct identity in opposition to Europe, ultimately leading to a malignant form of imperialism driven by America’s deluded belief in its moral superiority.

This essay was first published in 1996.

Our politicians and intellectuals constantly speak of Europe and the West as if the former is obviously completely subsumed within the latter. Composed of the countries of Europe, particularly Western Europe, and the United States with Canada as an appendage, the West is assumed in this understanding to be a unified entity. In other words, the West is seen as synonymous with NATO.

However, if we examine the origin of the term “West,” not in a geographical but in a political sense, we discover something entirely different from this “NATO mindset”: at the beginning of the 19th century, this term was born in the United States, not to incorporate Europe into a broader Atlantic context, but on the contrary, to allow the newly established American state to distance itself from all the states of the old continent.