Western world

Modern-day Western world essentially encompasses the nations and states where civilization or culture is considered Western^[10][11][12]—the roots of which some historians have traced to the Greco-Roman world and Christianity.^[13][14] In the Global North–South schism, the West is often correlated with Global North.^[15][16] A historic idea of Europe as the geographic West emerged in the fifth century BCE Greece.^[17][18][19] A geographical concept of the West started to take shape in the 4th century CE when Constantine, the first Christian Roman emperor, divided the Roman Empire between the Greek East and Latin West. The East Roman Empire, later called the Byzantine Empire, continued for a millennium, while the West Roman Empire lasted for only about a century and a half. This caused many people in Western Europe to envy the Byzantine Empire and consider the Christians there as heretics.^[9] In 1054 CE, when the church in Rome excommunicated the patriarch of Byzantium, the politico-religious division between the Western church and Eastern church culminated in the Great Schism or the East–West Schism.^[9][20] Even though friendly relations continued between the two parts of the Christendom for some time, the crusades made the schism definitive with hostility.^[21] The West during these crusades tried to capture trade routes to the East and failed, it instead discovered the Americas.^[22] In the aftermath of European colonization of these newly discovered lands, an idea of the Western world, as an inheritor of Latin Christendom emerged.^[23]


The English word "West" initially referred solely to the cardinal direction. By the Middle Ages, Europeans began to use it to describe Europe. Since the eighteenth century, following European exploration, the word was used to indicate the regions of the world with European settlements.^[24][25][26] In contemporary times, countries that are considered to constitute the West vary according to perspective rather than their geographical location. Countries like Australia and New Zealand, located in the Eastern Hemisphere are included in modern definitions of the Western world,^[27] as these regions and others like them have been significantly influenced by the British—derived from colonization, and immigration of Europeans—factors that grounded such countries to the West.^[28] Despite being located in the Far East, a country like Japan, in some contexts, is considered a part of the West as it aligns with the ideals of Western-style democracy; while a country like Cuba, located in the Western Hemisphere, is argued as not being a part of the West as it aligns with the ideals of communism.^[29] Depending on the context and the historical period in question, Russia was sometimes seen as a part of the West, and at other times juxtaposed with it.^[30][31][32] Running parallel to the rise of the United States as a great power and the development of communication–transportation technologies "shrinking" the distance between both the Atlantic Ocean shores, the aforementioned country (United States) became more prominently featured in the conceptualizations of the West.^[30]


Between the eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, prominent countries in the West such as the United States, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Australia, and New Zealand have been once envisioned as ethnocracies for whites.^[33][34][35] Racism is cited as a contributing factor to Westerners' colonization of the New World, which today constitutes much of the "geographical" Western world.^[36][37] Starting from the late 1960s, certain parts of the Western World have become notable for their diversity due to immigration.^[38][39] The idea of "the West" over the course of time has evolved from a directional concept to a socio-political concept that had been temporalized and rendered as a concept of the future bestowed with notions of progress and modernity.^[30]