Are Germans Westerners?

To us, the word “West” may seem to carry a self-evident tradition. It appears to denote a stable civilizational community, a continuous tradition extending from ancient Greece, Rome, and Christianity through the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment to the present day. I am currently in the United States, and many Americans like to emphasize this narrative, as if the West were a concept, or, rather, a tradition, that had always existed and was subsequently inherited.

But the word “West” never appeared in the writings of the thinkers they regard as belonging to the orthodox Western canon: Plato, Locke, Hobbes, Machiavelli, and so on. Nor did these thinkers ever describe themselves as Westerners. As I discussed in the previous episode, the West is not an objective entity spanning two or several thousand years. It is a political concept that gradually took shape under the specific historical conditions of the nineteenth century, an intellectual tool used to divide up the world and mobilize people’s sense of identity.

The theme of Episode 334, “How Russia Forced Europeans to Begin Defining Themselves as Westerners,” was that before the nineteenth century, people did not use the West as a form of self-description. In medieval and early modern Europe, the term Europeans more commonly used to describe themselves was Christendom, the religious category of the Christian world, which distinguished the Latin Church from other systems of belief. Alternatively, they used “Europe,” a concept that was simultaneously geographical and cultural, to refer to a broad region that contained enormous internal differences but possessed a certain commonality in its external relations. Before the nineteenth century, the West was not a stable concept capable of designating a cultural community. The real transformation occurred in the nineteenth century.

With the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the establishment of the Vienna system, Europe’s internal power structure changed, and the rise of Russia became the key variable of the period. Before then, Europe had largely been able to accommodate Russia because Russia was also a Christian country and part of the European great-power system. But as Russia’s expansionist ambitions and influence in Eastern and Central Europe grew, British and French thinkers, especially French Enlightenment thinkers, gradually began to feel that the concept of Europe had become too broad to distinguish effectively between “us” and “them.”

Against this background, French and British thinkers increasingly began using the West as an alternative concept. Before these Europeans invented the concept of the West to refer to themselves, Europeans generally distinguished themselves in terms of north and south rather than east and west. This is also why, in my earlier podcast episodes about Mozart, I repeatedly said that Mozart, as an eighteenth-century northerner from the German-speaking world, had to go south to prove that he was a musical prodigy. He had to perform in front of the Italians before he could be certified and receive the stamp of approval that he truly was musically gifted.

At the time, Europe was still divided along a north-south boundary. The South represented civilization, and Italy represented civilization. Mozart had to travel south from the German-speaking world to Italy to prove himself. Then, in the nineteenth century, Russia rose to power. Russia was a major northern power, and its rise rendered the north-south distinction meaningless. Europeans therefore began classifying Russia as the East and themselves as the West, replacing the previous north-south distinction with an east-west distinction.

The concept of the West did not emerge because people suddenly discovered an objectively existing civilizational entity. It emerged because the existing concept of Europe no longer met the political need to draw boundaries. In the process of confronting Russia, Europeans needed to construct a new imagined community. Some European thinkers, primarily French thinkers, began consciously using “the West” to refer to a closer and more exclusive alliance. This alliance had geopolitical significance, but it also had cultural and normative significance. It emphasized a certain shared history, shared institutions, and shared spiritual character while excluding Russia.

Although Russia geographically and religiously belonged to Europe, the new distinction implied: You could call yourself a European country, but you could not call yourself a Western country. You belonged to the East.

In the comments section for that episode, I received a question: Is Germany part of the West?

Gute Frage.

Germany before Germany

When I discussed early nineteenth-century Europe in the previous episode, I focused primarily on Britain and France. Compared with those two countries, Germany lacked a stable and unified national identity for a very long time.

Beginning in the Middle Ages, the German lands did not form a powerful centralized state like those in Britain and France. Although the so-called Holy Roman Empire covered a much broader area, in practice it had an extremely loose political structure. It was made up of hundreds of principalities of varying sizes, free cities, and ecclesiastical territories. The emperor’s powers were limited, while local rulers enjoyed a high degree of autonomy. This political fragmentation meant that Germany was more a cultural or linguistic community than a unified country.

By contrast, France gradually achieved centralization under the Bourbon dynasty, while Britain developed a relatively stable state structure after the Tudor dynasty. Britain and France therefore formed clear national identities earlier. As the modern era began, this disparity widened further.

Although the Napoleonic Wars broke down the old feudal order to a certain extent, they did not immediately bring about German unification. In the early nineteenth century, the German lands remained divided into dozens of states. There was nominally a German Confederation, but its degree of political integration was far below that of a genuine country. During this period, the German nation was imagined primarily through language, literature, and philosophy. Figures such as Herder and Fichte emphasized the national spirit, the Volksgeist. This identity was cultural rather than political.

Genuine national unification was not achieved until 1871, under Prussian leadership. Through a series of wars against Denmark, Austria, and France, Bismarck established a German Empire. This unification had a clearly top-down character. It did not arise from a broadly shared civic identity; it was a state-building project achieved through military and diplomatic means.

Moreover, the new empire was centered on Prussia. This meant that Germany was, to a great extent, Prussianized rather than formed through the natural integration of a diverse range of regions. Germany’s national identity was therefore fraught with tension from the beginning. Even after unification, profound differences remained within Germany. The Catholic South and Protestant North, regions with different levels of industrialization, and states that had historically belonged to different political traditions all maintained a certain cultural and political distance from one another.

By contrast, France gradually forged a unified modern civic identity through the French Revolution and the republican system. Britain, through its parliamentary system and imperial expansion, formed a relatively continuous national narrative. I am only drawing a comparison here: Germany’s national identity always lacked this kind of long-term institutional integration.

This historical background produced a key result: Germans were more inclined to understand themselves through culture than through the state. Germany could be imagined as a cultural community possessing a certain unified spirit, but Germans rarely imagined themselves as a political community.

Compared with Britain and France, Germany’s distinctiveness lay in being a community with a highly developed cultural self-consciousness but also a country that came into political existence relatively late. Its history meant that Germany lacked, from the beginning, the kind of national identity that had been stable in Britain and France for several hundred years and had therefore become extremely clear.

When Britain and France gradually began using the concept of the West to define themselves in the early nineteenth century, Germany never really entered the heart of that discussion. One reason was that the German lands had not yet achieved national unification. They were politically fragmented and crowded with numerous states. Germany lacked a unified subject capable of speaking at the level of international politics and intellectual debate.

With the rise of Prussia and the establishment of the German Empire in 1871, Germany rapidly transformed from a dispersed cultural community into the most promising challenger for continental European hegemony. It was only against this background, around the outbreak of the First World War, as ideological conflict intensified, that an extremely fierce cultural and intellectual debate emerged within Germany.

The debate revolved around a central question: Did Germany belong to the West?

Germany entered the process of Western self-definition relatively late because it had not possessed the necessary political resources. Yet the concept itself had been formed within a political context dominated by Britain and France. As a latecomer, Germany therefore became the most unstable variable within that context.

Today, on hearing the question “Are Germans Westerners?” you might very well say, “What the hell kind of question is that? Of course they are.” It seems self-evident. Germany is a core European country, an important component of the modern democratic system, a key member of what is now called the Western world, and a leader of the European Union.

But if we turn the clock back one hundred years, this was not a self-evident question. Before the twentieth century, Germany’s membership in the West was not taken for granted.

Why did so many German thinkers actively reject a Western identity? During the First World War, Germany was explicitly de-Westernized. Between the First and Second World Wars, whether Germany belonged to the West became the subject of fierce public debate. German nationalists openly opposed the West and said, “We are Europeans. Our German culture is authentic European culture.” French intellectuals publicly declared that Germany did not belong to the West. There were also pro-Western intellectuals within Germany who argued that Germany had to belong to the West.

Don’t you find that interesting? At the time, this was a question people openly debated.

Culture against civilization

When the First World War broke out, Germany’s intellectual community did not simply understand itself as part of the West. In October 1914, ninety-three German scholars and artists published a manifesto appealing to the world of culture, the Kulturwelt, rather than the world of civilization. The choice of terminology was highly symbolic. What they emphasized was not universal civilization but nationally distinctive culture, Kultur.

This information comes from page 131 of The West: The History of an Idea, by Georgios Varouxakis, the professor of the history of political thought with whom I will be having a conversation next week.

In the eyes of these German scholars and artists, the source of genuine value was not the Western civilization represented by Britain and France. It was Germany’s distinctive spiritual tradition. In turn, they accused Britain and France of having no right to call themselves defenders of civilization because those countries had allied themselves with non-Western forces such as Russia and Serbia.

Mainstream German scholars and intellectuals did not accept the British and French monopoly over the definition of the West. They were trying to strip Britain and France of their moral legitimacy. During the early part of the First World War, German thinkers gradually developed a new line of argument: Germany was not part of the West; Germany was Europe’s savior.

Faced with British hostility and the pressures of war, Germany began emphasizing its own historical mission: to unite all of Europe against a barbaric, Asiatic Russia. Within this narrative, the West was no longer an identity worth embracing. The West was a label that had been occupied and exploited by Britain and France, and Germany was trying to transcend it. Germany sought to reorganize the continental European order in the name of Europe.

This position was especially apparent in the arguments of the philosopher Scheler. He wrote that only a powerful Germany could protect Europe from the Russian threat.

This anti-Western posture did not arise merely from Germany’s strategic calculations. At a deeper level, it was rooted in the German intellectual tradition’s critique of civilization. In Merchants and Heroes, the economist Sombart explicitly set the British nation of merchants against Germany’s national heroes. He declared that the German spirit consisted in rejecting everything that resembled English or Western European thought. In his view, Western thought represented utilitarianism, commercialism, and shallow rationalism, while Germany represented a deeper and more vital form of culture.

This rejection of the West, the rejection of civilization and affirmation of culture, led Germany to distance itself deliberately from the West on an intellectual level.

Britain and France developed the opposite argument during the First World War: not only did Germany not belong to the West, but it was actually a threat to Western civilization. French thinkers such as Boutroux and Bergson interpreted German culture, Kultur, as “learned barbarism,” a barbaric savant. How do you put that in English? “Learned barbarism.”

They believed that Germany’s brutality was not the result of an inadequate degree of civilization, but the logical consequence of its culture. In their view, the German philosophical tradition from Fichte to Hegel had given birth to an ideology that worshiped power and rejected moral constraints, directly leading to military aggression.

They therefore pushed Germany out of European civilization: “You are not part of our European civilization. You are some kind of Orientalized force.” In this French line of reasoning, the Germans were called Huns or Orientals. That’s hilarious. Germans were called Orientals too.

The key point was that, by excluding Germany from the West, Britain and France could present themselves as the true representatives of civilization. During the First World War, the concept of the West became an extremely potent political tool. For Germany, rejecting the West meant defending its cultural distinctiveness. For Britain and France, excluding Germany from the West served to establish their own moral superiority and leadership over civilization.

They were not debating an objective fact. They were fighting over the right to define a concept.

Of course, I am not saying that every voice was this extreme. Some thinkers recognized that these mutually exclusive narratives concealed a deeper reality: Britain, France, and Germany did, in fact, share a civilizational tradition.

As early as 1915, the French scholar Élie Halévy pointed out that the three countries were the inheritors and transmitters of the same civilization. This civilization existed in national forms. He sought to transcend the antagonisms of the war and reemphasize the commonalities within Europe.

But this view was not dominant at the time, and that fact shows precisely how highly politicized the definition of the West had become during the war. Some British intellectuals were also reflecting on the unity of Western civilization and trying to preserve a transnational civilizational identity in the midst of war. Despite the intensity of the conflict, they believed that Western civilization still contained certain shared elements that could not be eliminated. Yet even in Britain, this conception presupposed the exclusion of Germany or, at the very least, Germany’s temporary marginalization in the context of the war.

There was no fixed answer during the First World War to the question of whether Germany belonged to the West. From Germany’s own perspective, it often rejected the Western label and emphasized its cultural distinctiveness and European mission. From the perspective of Britain and France, Germany was gradually excluded from the West and even depicted as the West’s antithesis.

Germany’s self-understanding in this period involved a fundamental opposition between culture and civilization. This debate is very important for understanding modern German thought.

Thomas Mann’s German protest

In Thomas Mann’s writings during the First World War, we can clearly see that Germany not only failed to imagine itself as Western but, for a time, actually situated itself in opposition to the West.

In 1914, when the First World War broke out, Thomas Mann wrote an essay called “Thoughts in Wartime,” Gedanken im Krieg. Romain Rolland called it “a terrible essay.” In it, Thomas Mann directly defined the First World War as a war of German culture against civilization. He explicitly proposed that civilization and culture were mutually opposed.

In Mann’s argument, civilization represented reason, Enlightenment, moderation, and moral education. It was a bourgeois and external order centered on the spirit, while culture was a deeper form of spiritual organization. Culture could be wild, passionate, and even violent and bloody. It was precisely within this demonic force that art and vitality could be generated.

Thus, for Thomas Mann, culture was not simply civilization’s opposite. It could even encompass an elegant barbarism, and this barbarism was precisely what constituted the essence of culture.

Thomas Mann defined Germany as a nation of culture while placing Britain and France in the camp of civilization. He used the relationship between Frederick the Great and Voltaire as an example: Frederick the Great symbolized genius and destiny, while Voltaire symbolized reason and Enlightenment.

This opposition was not only philosophical; it was also political. Mann portrayed France as a filthy, greasy bourgeois republic, a purveyor of civilization, whereas Germany was a morally oriented nation whose spiritual profundity far exceeded what civilization could contain. He stated bluntly that the German soul was too profound to regard civilization as the highest value.

Within this framework, Germany was not merely outside the West. Germany was a protest against and rejection of Western civilization.

Let me emphasize that again: Germany was a protest against and rejection of Western civilization.

Thomas Mann systematized this opposition further in another work, published in 1918, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man. Drawing on Dostoevsky’s thought, he understood German history as an eternal protest. From the ancient Germanic peoples’ resistance to Rome to the modern rejection of the Western spirit, Germany had always taken an oppositional position.

Thomas Mann explicitly stated that the First World War was, in essence, Germany’s struggle against the Western spirit, and also the Roman world’s struggle against an obstinate Germany. In his view, Britain, France, and even the United States constituted the united body of the Western world, the heirs of Rome. In the name of civilization, they were trying to incorporate Germany into a unified, middle-class-centered order. Germany’s mission was to resist this civilizational imperialism.

This was a highly self-conscious argument. Thomas Mann did not deny Germany’s problematic character. On the contrary, he emphasized precisely that Germany was a problem. Germans felt confused and uneasy about themselves. This was an internal tension, and it was precisely this internal tension that made the Germans the most valuable nation. Mann warned that any attempt to replace Germanness with humanity, humanness, or reason was an act of injustice. Germany’s very existence was a challenge to the universal West.

After Germany lost the war, however, Thomas Mann’s position began to change. In a 1919 letter, he acknowledged that the British and American victory meant that Western civilizing, rationalizing, and practical tendencies had reached their pinnacle. This change arose partly from his reading of Spengler’s monumental work The Decline of the West.

Under Spengler’s influence, Thomas Mann began to transform the relationship between culture and civilization from a spatial opposition, Germany against Britain and France, into a temporal sequence. Civilization was no longer the distinguishing characteristic of certain nations but the inevitable outcome of all cultures in their aging phase. The civilization represented by Britain and the United States was no longer merely a force oppressing Germany. It represented aging, an inevitable stage of historical development.

Even so, Thomas Mann continued to insist on Germany’s distinctiveness. He believed that in a completely civilized world, Germany would play a romantic role. It would become a mature civilization’s nostalgic symbol of its youth.

Germany was like the pimple of youth on the face of Western civilization. By this point, Western civilization had already become a balding, middle-aged uncle, and Germany was that pimple growing on the middle-aged uncle’s face.

In this sense, although Germany was incorporated into the Western order in practical political terms, it still maintained a certain spiritual distance from the West. Germany could even become a means by which the West reflected on what it had lost.

Spengler’s aging West

Amid the ruins of the First World War, the German writer Oswald Spengler wrote The Decline of the West, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, a work that shook Europe. He transformed an intuition that no one at the time dared voice into a proposition: the West was not the endpoint of human history. The West was merely one stage among many civilizations, and it had already entered old age.

Spengler’s thought carried a sense of disillusionment and fatalism. He did not believe that history was progressive, and he did not believe in universal reason. He regarded civilizations as living organisms: civilizations were born, grew, achieved splendor, and then declined, ultimately sinking into deathly stillness.

In his writing, the West was not a victor. The West was a giant entering the twilight of its life. It had already lost its soul, though it had once possessed enormous power.

Spengler’s The Decline of the West established almost the entire basic tone in which people discussed the West for several decades after the war. The First World War was a catastrophe for Europe. It shook Europeans’ faith in historical progress and civilization. The most important intellectual question after the war was whether the war signified the end of Western civilization.

At precisely that moment, Spengler’s book burst onto the scene. Its title captured the spirit of the age: the West was in decline.

The book’s most important contribution to our theme was its redefinition of the West. Spengler opposed understanding world history as a linear history of progress leading from antiquity to the Middle Ages to the present, ultimately arriving in Europe and the United States. In his view, this historical narrative was a product of Western Europeans and Americans placing themselves at the center of the world.

The true unit of history was not humanity as a whole, nor the individual nation-state, but distinct cultures that independently grew, matured, and aged. The West was only one of these cultures. It had no right to pass off its own path as the path of all humanity.

Germany occupied a distinctive intellectual position in this argument. Spengler did not stand inside a British- or French-style Western civilization and defend the West. Starting from the German tradition, he diagnosed the West itself.

Spengler called the West “West European-American culture” and named it the Faustian culture. Germany was therefore included within the West, but it did not belong to the West in the manner of British and French liberal civilization. Germany entered the West as an intellectual subject capable of seeing through to the West’s fate. Within Spengler’s framework, Germany was simultaneously inside the West and on the margins of the West’s self-criticism.

Spengler explicitly opposed using the word “Europe” as an umbrella term for this civilization. Here he differed from many of the traditional German thinkers we have discussed, Nietzsche, for example, and the Germans I mentioned earlier who emphasized, “We Germans are Europe; you British and French are the West.”

Spengler was somewhat different. He believed that “Europe” was an empty sound because Europe mistakenly linked Russia with the West. By comparison, he believed that East and West were concepts with genuine historical content.

This helps explain why, in my view, the great emphasis we place today on the categories of East and West is to a large extent inseparable from the enormous influence Spengler’s book had at the time. After The Decline of the West, we essentially inherited Spengler’s idea that East and West were concepts with historical content.

In Spengler’s view, Germany’s problem was not whether Germany belonged to Europe but how Germany understood its relationship with the West and with Russia. Russia did not belong to the West, and the word “Europe” was dangerous precisely because it concealed the existential difference between Russia and the West.

By the time we reach Spengler, he had completely internalized the distinction discussed in the previous episode. He demanded that Europeans abandon the concept of Europe. He believed that East and West were the concepts that had genuine meaning. Today, we too have internalized this Spenglerian way of thinking to a considerable extent.

Spengler’s answer to the question of whether Germans were Westerners therefore becomes very complicated. Germany belonged to the historical and cultural formation of the West, but the West he described had already entered its aging phase. Germany did not join the West in a spirit of celebration: “Wow, we belong to the West now!” Instead, Germany announced that the West had already changed from a creative culture into a rigid civilization.

Spengler’s truly important distinction was the one we have been discussing continuously: the distinction between culture and civilization. Civilization was not the pinnacle of culture. Civilization was culture’s final stage. It was not the unfolding of vitality but the aged form that emerged after vitality had been exhausted. Civilization meant intellectualization, urbanization, mechanization, and ossification.

In Spengler’s sense, the term “Western civilization” already carried the scent of death.

When you see people in the United States loudly celebrating Western civilization today, you should understand that in the German-language context, this is a phrase representing zombies, death, decay, aging, and decline.

This also explains why Germany has been so divided over the question of the West. On the one hand, Germany unquestionably belonged to what Spengler called the West, or Faustian culture. On the other hand, German thought always distinguished itself from the civilization represented by Britain and France. It was unwilling to identify itself completely with a rationalized, bourgeois, pragmatic Western modernity. Germany was willing to understand itself as a nation of culture rather than a nation of civilization.

For precisely this reason, we cannot answer whether Germany belonged to the West by projecting today’s institutional standards, NATO, the European Union, and liberal democracy, backward into the past. At least during the era of the world wars, the question itself captured and represented the sense of crisis within German thought.

In the previous episode, my discussion of the West was concerned with the rise of Russia. But here we need to recognize that the countries of Europe were confronting a new problem that was even graver and more painful. After the First World War, the West’s self-confidence collapsed. Even if the West imagined itself as the West, it could no longer imagine itself as the pinnacle of world history. The main question in thinking about the West became whether Western civilization had already reached its end.

Within this context, Germany was both one of the producers of the West’s crisis and one of the diagnosticians of that crisis. Germany participated in Western history and belonged to the West, but it was also the country that most profoundly declared that the West had grown old. It inherited the West but was unwilling to accept the British, French, and American narrative of civilization. It stood at the heart of European thought yet continually questioned the very word “Europe.” It opposed incorporating Russia into the West, but it also refused to allow the West to be equated with the liberal civilization of Britain, France, and the United States.

If by “the West” we mean the British, French, and American narrative of progressive, democratic, rational civilization, then German thought between the two world wars frequently positioned itself in opposition to that West. If the West means a civilization that has already entered its aging phase, then Germans were not only Westerners; they were also the Westerners who became aware of the Western crisis earliest and most intensely.

Nazi Germany and the anti-West

Within British, French, and American discourse, Nazi Germany was explicitly excluded from the West during the Second World War. From the political and moral perspective of the British, French, and American Allies, Germany was thoroughly de-Westernized during the war.

With the establishment of the Nazi regime, Germany was portrayed in British, French, and American narratives as a fundamental threat to civilization, liberty, and human values. In this narrative, the West was neither a geographical nor a cultural concept. During the Second World War, the West was redefined as a set of normative principles. It began to represent liberty, the rule of law, individual rights, and democratic institutions.

After entering the war, the United States began using an entire set of positive grand narratives associated with Western civilization, presenting itself as the ultimate guardian of this Western value system. Within this context, Nazi Germany of course did not belong to the West. It became the paradigmatic representative of the anti-West.

Nazi ideology explicitly rejected the universalist values of the Enlightenment tradition and opposed rationalism and liberalism. It placed democracy, race, and rights at the center. Unlike the civilization emphasized by Britain and the United States, Nazi Germany emphasized a conception of history centered on bloodline, destiny, and struggle. At the time, this position was seen as a return to barbarism. It was described as a regression to the Middle Ages and as a form of Orientalized despotism.

Within the mainstream discourse of the Second World War, Germany not only failed to belong to the West; it became the antithesis against which Western countries had to define themselves.

The fact remained, however, that Nazi Germany was not an external civilization. Nazi Germany was rooted in the European intellectual tradition. Whether in terms of the Nazi form of state organization, its technological capabilities, or certain elements of its ideology, it was inseparable from Western, or European, history.

Precisely for this reason, more and more thinkers, including the most profound thinkers of the twentieth century, recognized that the narrative excluding Germany from the West did not work. Nazism was not the antithesis of the West but one of the extreme possibilities contained within Western modernity.

In my view, awareness of this problem drove the work of the most profound German Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century. These thinkers included Arendt, Strauss, Jonas, and Karl Löwith. Their political philosophies were all fundamentally bound up with this reflection. The reflection had already appeared faintly during the Second World War and became clearer after it.

People began asking: If Germany was barbaric, why did this barbarism appear in Europe’s most advanced industrial country? If Germany did not belong to the West, how were we to explain its intellectual resources, cultural traditions, science, and technology?

During the Second World War, Britain and the United States associated themselves with certain European traditions, including Roman law, Christian ethics, Enlightenment thought, and the ancient Greek city-state’s conception of liberty. At the same time, they pushed Nazi Germany out, thereby rebuilding the moral legitimacy of the West.

Another change took place during this period: the United States gradually became the center of the West. After the First World War, the United States had already begun incorporating itself into the narrative of Western civilization. During the Second World War, this identity was reinforced further. The United States not only defeated Nazi Germany as a military power but also reshaped the West’s historical narrative through its cultural and educational systems, for example, through Western Civilization courses.

Within this narrative, the West began to be depicted as a continuous tradition extending from ancient Greece to modern democracy. Nazi Germany was regarded as a deviation from, or interruption of, this Western tradition.

After Germany’s defeat, Britain and the United States began to understand themselves even more emphatically as the inheritors and leaders of Western civilization. American universities widely established Western Civilization courses, institutionalizing a narrative that moved from Socrates and Athens through the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the American Revolution, and the French Revolution, all the way to the democratic United States of the twentieth century.

Within this narrative, Germany had no natural place. What position did Germany occupy in the Western narrative? Germany had just been defeated as an enemy in the war, while the United States was beginning to understand itself as the endpoint and leader of Western civilization.

Germany as the guardian of the West

We began in the nineteenth century, when the concept of the West had only just emerged in the narratives of British and French thinkers, and considered why Germany was initially absent from this concept: the Germans themselves were not even a country.

We then moved to the First World War, when Germany actively rejected the West; to Spengler, who turned the West itself into a crisis; to the Second World War, when Germany was completely excluded from the West; and then to the postwar reconstruction, when Britain and the United States reincorporated Germany into the Western narrative.

Those of us listening today have witnessed, within our own lifetimes, the transformation of the Germany that actively rejected the West during the First World War and was completely excluded from the West during the Second World War. For us, Germany has now become the West’s principal guardian. It has become the main defender of the West’s normative order.

Today’s European Union is led by Germany and emphasizes the rule of law, procedure, norms, and consensus. Within this structure, Germany has become the EU’s de facto leader because of its economic weight, fiscal discipline, and institutional stability, especially as, over the past decade, the United States has withdrawn from the West’s grand narrative.

After the United States refused to play the role of the West’s moral and institutional center, the country that took charge of the concept of the West was, instead, Germany.

What we are seeing today is a redistribution of the West. From a political community centered on the United States after the Second World War, it is gradually becoming a normative space whose institutional center is Europe, and Germany in particular.

This once again confirms the core argument of both this episode and the previous one: the West is not something fixed. It is not a natural or eternal concept. It is a concept and category constantly redefined and continually contested amid historical change.