The West is as much an idea as a geographic fact

Evidence

But even this, on inspection, is not straightforward since we also use the same words to refer to a type of society, a level of development, and so on. It’s true that what we call “the West,” in this second sense, did first emerge in western Europe. But “the West” is no longer only in Europe, and not all of Europe is in “the West.” The historian John Roberts has remarked that “Europeans have long been unsure about where Europe ‘ends’ in the east. In the west and to the south, the sea provides a splendid marker … but to the east the plains roll on and on and the horizon is awfully remote” (Roberts 1985, 149). Eastern Europe doesn’t (doesn’t yet? never did?) belong properly to “the West,” whereas the United States, which is not in Europe, definitely does. These days, technologically speaking, Japan is “Western,” though on our mental map it is about as far “East” as you can get. By comparison, much of Latin America, which is in the Western Hemisphere, belongs economically to the Third World, which is struggling—not very successfully—to catch up with “the West.” What are these different societies “east” and “west” of, exactly? Clearly, “the West” is as much an idea as a fact of geography. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 505

Categorization

• XREF: The sliding referent of ‘the West’ prefigures how ‘Muslim world’ or ‘Middle East’ function in Islamophobia discourse as non-geographic categories. — connects to: The West is a historical construct defined by development traits, not geography; The West concept classifies, represents, compares, and evaluates societies — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 509; The idea of the West helped constitute the West itself — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 514 (+6 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 505

Broader Connections

• East and West are analytical distinctions, not literal geographic categories #corroborates (0.90)
• The West’s self-conception formed only in relation to the Rest #corroborates (0.85)
• The West and the Rest is a constructed, contingent discourse #corroborates (0.85)
• The Rest was constitutive of the West’s identity and knowledge #expands (0.80) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 686
• Accumulated empirical knowledge does not dispel imaginative geographical knowledge #expands (0.75) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 156