"The West": A Conceptual Exploration

This is the first in a series of papers attempting to define the ideological concept of the so-called "West". It examines the historical roots of postmodern humanism, the emergence of a socio-cultural "ressentiment" within the "Western world", and the consequences of such intra-conflictual symptoms.

2004

Uses of the West. Security and the Politics of Order, 2017

Comenius Journal, 2017

The dominant discourse in both scholarly analysis and public narratives separate Eastern and Western Europe, but this separation comes at a hermeneutic cost. This essay's approach critiques the assumption that political theory is the instrumental result of a particular historical-political circumstance that cannot be reproduced and has mostly the value of intellectual history. This dominant perspective has favored historical process over conceptual discussion, and it has entrenched political thought in a teleological account of nationalism. The article explores the construction and implication of the East-West duality, especially in relation to the way in which we receive and interpret Eastern European political thought. I bring together an investigation of the conceptual purchase of Eastern Europe as a category and the possibility of rethinking Eastern European political thought in that context. I briefly exemplify the underlying critique by looking at the work of Václav Havel. KEY WORDS East and West-Political Theory-Eastern Europe-Václav Havel-Orientalism

2018

In this chapter I propose a new methodological tool for analyzing social and communicative phenomena that I call “a deictic perspective”. Deploying this perspective, the chapter explores various ways in which the notions of “us” has been formed by, and transformed in, the most salient parts of discourse – slogans used in public rallies in two Central European countries in two different times. In late 1989 the West was the much desired Other for many citizens of Czechoslovakia and the German Democratic Republic; at the turn of 2014 and 2015, the West frequently became a rhetoric means by which to protect “us” against the undesired Other, i.e. the (often Muslim) migrants coming from non-European territories – the East and the South. The once cheerful we-want-to-be-part-of-the-West attitude has been, by some people at least, transformed into a much less cheerful we-don’t-want-others-to-be-part-of-the-West. Based on samples of public discourse from Germany and Czech Republic, I argue that the deictic perspective suits to comparing the fine interplay among time, space and social identity. The chapter concludes by emphasizing both similarities and differences in public “we” across time and space within Central Europe, thus documenting the changing – and yet to a certain degree stable – sense(s) of belonging to the West.

Samizdat, 2023

A concise representation of Western civilization and its development as it appears to an outside orthodox observer. An attempt at a psychological profile.

The rise of the West in the context of Spengler’s “world-history” should not only confer the title of great benefactor to one source or civilization rather to all parts of the grand macrocosm of history. While western civilization and the idea of European history can be associated with huge steps in technological innovation and maritime expansion of territory, historians must not discount the fact that other civilizations especially those in the Eurasian continents and Africa have also played a role in the institutionalization of what we now recognize as world history or the modern world.

Despite the ambition of Postcolonial Studies to place deconstruction of " the West " at the heart of contemporary social sciences and humanities, the authority of this notion has never been so strong, and the West appears today to belong to a " natural order " of thinking and speaking about our current reality. Having pointed out the limits of the postcolonial critique of the West, this study then individuates and connects several lines of research to a common epistemological basis in order to map the contours of an emerging field: " the politics of imagining the West ". From this perspective, the West is no longer conceived of as a subject of history but as a historically determined narrative articulated by individuals and social groups with strategic aims in the context of wider discourses.