East-West and North-South divisions misrepresent the world’s true complexity

Evidence

The cultural bifurcation of the world division is still less useful. At some level, the West is an entity. What, however, do non-Western societies have in common other than the fact that they are non-Western? Japanese, Chinese, Hindu, Muslim, and African civilizations share little in terms of religion, social structure, institutions, and prevailing values. The unity of the non-West and the East-West dichotomy are myths created by the West. These myths suffer the defects of the Orientalism which Edward Said appropriately criticized for promoting “the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, ‘us’) and the strange (the Orient, the East, ‘them’)” and for assuming the inherent superiority of the former to the latter. During the Cold War the world was, in considerable measure, polarized along an ideological spectrum. There is, however, no single cultural spectrum. The polarization of “East” and “West” culturally is in part another consequence of the universal but unfortunate practice of calling European civilization Western civilization. Instead of “East and West,” it is more appropriate to speak of “the West and the rest,” which at least implies the existence of many non-Wests. The world is too complex to be usefully envisioned for most purposes as simply divided economically between North and South or culturally between East and West. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 61

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘West and the rest’ reframing echoes the reader’s broader interest in decolonial critique and how categories like ‘Global South’ reify what they purport to describe. — connects to: Two-thirds agreement on the UN corporate code masked irreconcilable North-South divides — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1796; Spatial categories like East and West are real yet historically constructed, not natural. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1590