The East-West distinction reflects European cultural hegemony accepted worldwide.

Evidence

Obviously East and West are arbitrary and conventional, that is historical, constructions, since outside of real history every point on the earth is East and West at the same time. This can be seen more clearly from the fact that these terms have crystallised not from the point of view of a hypothetical melancholic man in general but from the point of view of the European cultured classes who, as a result of their world-wide hegemony, have caused them to be accepted everywhere. Japan is the Far East not only for Europe but also perhaps for the American from California and even for the Japanese himself, who, through English political culture, may then call Egypt the Near East. So because of the historical content that has become attached to the geographical terms, the expressions East and West have finished up indicating specific relations between different cultural complexes. Thus Italians often, when speaking of Morocco, call it an “Eastern” country, to refer to its Moslem and Arab civilisation. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1590

Categorization

• XREF: Direct precursor to Said’s Orientalism; the mechanism of hegemonic categories being adopted even by the colonized (the Japanese calling Egypt ‘Near East’) is core toolkit material.
• SEED: The observation that Morocco counts as ‘Eastern’ for Italians despite geography shows how cultural complexes override spatial reality — a possible essay angle on how maps encode civilization rather than space.
• DEFINE: Concrete demonstration of how hegemony produces common sense categories that even their subjects internalize.