How Fukuyama, Huntington, and Habermas Redefined “the West” After the Cold War

Hello, everyone, and welcome to A Single Tree Does Not Make a Forest. I have broken my promise again. I said this would be a trilogy about the West, but this is now the fourth installment of the trilogy. This proves that the podcast truly has no planning whatsoever. And please do not remind me in the comments that I recorded and uploaded three podcast episodes today.

In the previous three episodes, I traced just how unstable the concept of “the West” has been. The end of the Cold War meant not only the collapse of a geopolitical structure. It also marked the moment when a concept dependent on a friend-enemy opposition, a concept that had emerged through such opposition since the nineteenth century, had to enter a period of self-reflection.

After the Cold War, the meaning of the West was bound to change, because the very reason for the West’s existence had come under question. Within this intellectual context, the American scholar Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis became one of the earliest and most influential attempts to redefine the West.

Fukuyama and the universal West

Fukuyama’s central contribution was to transform the West from a geopolitical alliance into an institutional and ideological paradigm with universal significance. In his 1989 essay “The End of History?,” Fukuyama drew on a Hegelian philosophy of history to interpret the end of the Cold War as the end of ideological competition. In his view, liberal democracy and capitalism had exhausted all viable systemic alternatives. The victory of the West was therefore manifested, first and foremost, in the complete exhaustion of every alternative to Western liberalism.

Following this argument, the West was no longer merely Europe and North America. It was equated with the liberal-democratic system itself, and thus with a universal end of history.

Fukuyama did not stop at the institutional level. In the essay, he further supported this universalist claim by pointing to cultural diffusion. From television sets in rural Chinese markets to newly fashionable restaurants in Moscow, as well as globally popular music and modes of consumption, Western culture was operating in an unstoppable fashion.

This discourse defined the West as a globalized way of life and cultural form rather than merely a political system. In Fukuyama, this gave the West a threefold unity: institutionally, it meant liberal democracy; economically, capitalism; culturally, consumerism.

Of course, the internal tensions in Fukuyama’s concept of the West have been pointed out many times by many people, myself included. In this essay, he equated the West with liberalism, and that equivalence was quite crude. He overlooked the diversity within the West, as well as the selective ways in which non-Western societies absorb these institutions. He regarded the spread of consumer culture as evidence of civilizational transformation, but that judgment confused superficial imitation with deep identification.

We could say that almost every culture ravaged by consumerism has accepted that culture with something less than unbridled joy. As [unclear] pointed out long ago, although the West held economic and political advantages, it had not culturally disarmed other civilizations. Other civilizations could still retain their own souls.

Fukuyama himself was aware of the instability in his theoretical argument. In “[unclear],” he acknowledged that the distinctiveness of Japanese culture might mean that history had not truly ended. At the end of “The End of History?,” he also depicted what was essentially Byung-Chul Han’s vision of a post-historical society filled with exhaustion. In Fukuyama’s account, heroism and idealism are replaced by economic calculation, while art and philosophy disappear. Humanity merely carries out routine maintenance in the museum of human history.

This description reveals that, when Fukuyama wrote the essay, he already understood the internal paradox of his argument. He was not joyously celebrating the end of history. He pointed out that if the “West” really did become the universal endpoint, it would simultaneously lose its own spiritual driving force.

Fukuyama’s redefinition of the West in this enormously influential essay therefore already contained an internal tension. On the one hand, he elevated the West into the universal endpoint of history, thereby transforming it from one particular civilization into the common destiny of humanity’s future. On the other hand, he recognized that this universalization would lead to the exhaustion of dissent and the disappearance of civilizational vitality. In other words, the West’s victory might mean precisely the end of the West.

This internal tension also explains why Fukuyama’s theory provoked such rapid rebuttals as soon as it was proposed. After the Cold War, discussions about the West quickly divided into two principal paths. One continued Fukuyama’s universalist vision. The other, represented by Huntington, emphasized that the West was merely one civilization among many and should be understood as particular rather than universal. Huntington explicitly argued that equating the spread of popular culture with the victory of Western civilization both demeaned other cultures and represented a vulgarized understanding of the West.

From the broader perspective of intellectual history, Fukuyama’s concept of the West marked an elevation from geopolitics to the philosophy of history. To use a term from Hegelian philosophy of history, it was a kind of Aufhebung, a sublation. During the Cold War, the West existed primarily as a political alliance confronting the Soviet bloc. With Fukuyama, this West was redefined as the endpoint of liberal history.

The price of this reconstruction was that it had to confront two unavoidable questions. First, would non-Western civilizations accept this endpoint? Second, even if they accepted it, would that endpoint have meaning?

In any event, this is basic intellectual common sense. What I have been saying throughout this entire trilogy about the West is that, since the nineteenth century, the West itself has been a concept continuously redefined and transformed through history. Fukuyama’s fixing of it as a combination of liberal democracy and capitalism was itself a historical phenomenon.

During the overwhelming majority of historical periods, people living in the West did not define themselves in terms of “the West.” They defined themselves using concepts such as Christendom, Europe, or the civilized nations. The meaning of the West has varied enormously across historical periods, sometimes even contradicting itself. It could refer to the nineteenth-century Western European political alliance against Russia. It could also refer to an ideal anti-imperialist community. For a brief period, it could even include the Soviet Union itself.

After the Cold War ended, Fukuyama defined the West as the inevitable endpoint of historical development, but that definition was itself a historical phenomenon. From the perspective of intellectual history, the West is not a concept with a single institutional content. It is a container that different political systems and thinkers have filled with completely different content during different historical periods.

Fukuyama filled this container with liberalism. That was a new ideological appropriation. It was just like Britain and France inventing the concept of the West in order to oppose the Russian Empire, or German thinkers in the twentieth century describing themselves as anti-Western in order to distinguish Germany from Britain and France. They, too, were filling this container with an ideology rather than revealing the container’s essence.

Fukuyama’s theory also contained an important implicit assumption. The universalization of the West meant that he believed the West had boundaries, because those boundaries were expanding until they covered the entire globe. But as we discussed in this series, the boundaries of the West have always been contested.

Russia, for instance, has been regarded during different historical periods both as part of Europe and as an Other arriving from the East. During the Second World War, the Soviet Union was incorporated into Western civilization. The countries of Eastern Europe were long described as the “kidnapped West.” These changes show that the West does not have fixed boundaries. It does not have boundaries at all. It is a tool of political division.

The concept of the West often arises out of confrontation with a particular Other. If the West was formed from the outset by excluding an Other, then once that antagonistic structure disappeared, once the Cold War ended, the foundation for its existence would be shaken. Fukuyama tried to preserve the unity of the West after the Cold War by forcibly transforming a concept created through confrontation from the very beginning into a universal civilization. Logically, this may have been unsustainable.

Huntington and the particular West

Fukuyama’s teacher, Samuel Huntington, quickly responded with a criticism. Fukuyama wrote “The End of History?” in 1989. In 1993, Huntington published “The Clash of Civilizations?,” which criticized Fukuyama.

Let me first summarize their arguments. During the Cold War, the West primarily acquired its meaning through confrontation with the Soviet bloc. The West was the free world, the NATO camp, a community of capitalist democracies. After the Soviet Union disintegrated, this external enemy suddenly disappeared. If the West still wanted to exist, it had to find a new way to define itself.

Fukuyama’s answer was that the West had already won: Western liberal democracy and market capitalism represented the endpoint of historical development. Huntington’s answer was almost exactly the opposite. The end of the Cold War did not mean that the Western model had become universal. It meant that world politics was shifting from ideological conflict to civilizational conflict. The West was not a universal civilization; it was merely one civilization among many.

To put it another way, the central proposition in Huntington’s post-Cold War redefinition of the West was that the West was not universal. It might be unique.

Huntington first rejected Fukuyama’s optimistic thesis about the end of history. He argued that one could not infer the global victory of liberalism simply from the decline of communism. In his view, the end of the Cold War was not the end of conflict. It was merely a change in the form that conflict took.

In the past, the central contradiction in world politics had been ideological: the conflict between capitalism and communism, and the confrontation between liberal democracy and the socialist bloc. After the Cold War, what would truly determine the shape of the world would no longer be ideology or economic systems, but civilization and culture.

This was the starting point of Huntington’s famous clash-of-civilizations thesis. In his 1993 essay “The Clash of Civilizations?,” he proposed that the principal conflicts of future global politics would occur between different civilizations. Nation-states would remain important, but they would increasingly position themselves according to their civilizational affiliations.

By “civilization,” Huntington meant the highest-level cultural community. A civilization is constituted jointly by language, history, religion, customs, institutions, and people’s subjective self-identification. Huntington’s definition was that civilization is humanity’s broadest cultural identity below the level of the species, the highest-level cultural community to which an individual can belong.

Consequently, the world would no longer be divided into the two camps of capitalism and communism. Instead, it would be divided into blocs such as Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic, Orthodox, Latin American, and possibly African civilization, and so on and so forth.

Within this framework, Huntington redefined the West as a civilization rather than a universal system. Fukuyama understood the West as the endpoint of liberal democracy. Huntington placed the West back within civilizational history, emphasizing its particular historical sources, religious traditions, institutional structures, and cultural character.

In other words, the West was not modernity itself. Modern societies would naturally have things in common, such as industrialization, urbanization, technological development, and market exchange. But modernization did not necessarily equal Westernization.

One of Huntington’s most important judgments was his rejection of the equation between modern civilization and Western civilization. He believed that the West had already been the West long before modernization. The West took shape in the eighth and ninth centuries and began to modernize in the eighteenth century. Westernness was therefore not the product of modernity, but a historical characteristic that had existed before modernization.

So where exactly is the West? What does it mean? What are its constituent elements?

Huntington listed a set of core elements: the classical legacy, Western Christianity, European languages, the separation of spiritual and secular authority, the rule of law, social pluralism, civil society, representative institutions, individualism, and so on and so forth. You can read about all of these in his book The Clash of Civilizations.

Considered individually, these elements may not have belonged exclusively to the West, but their combination constituted the distinctiveness of Western civilization. This is what Huntington meant by “unique, not universal.” Western civilization did not represent the future of all humanity, but it had indeed formed a distinctive institutional and cultural combination.

Huntington’s redefinition of the West therefore involved a withdrawal from universalism. He acknowledged that Western consumer goods, popular music, and the American way of life had spread widely around the world, but he believed that these were merely surface phenomena. Deep civilizational structures would not undergo a fundamental transformation merely because of the spread of jeans, Coca-Cola, popular music, and television sets.

Western liberalism, individualism, human rights, the rule of law, the separation of church and state, and democratic systems did not necessarily possess the same appeal within Islamic, Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, Buddhist, or Orthodox cultures. On the contrary, the more the West attempted to package these values as universal values, the more likely it was to provoke a backlash from other civilizations. Huntington believed that the West’s promotion of these ideas was often understood as a form of human-rights imperialism and could provoke non-Western societies to reassert their indigenous values.

What was Huntington opposing? He was opposing the West’s mistake of regarding its own values as universal human values. In his view, the very idea of a universal civilization was itself a Western idea. It reflected the powerful universalist impulse within Western thought, not a premise jointly accepted by all civilizations.

The problem with the West, in other words, was not that it had its own values. The problem was that it often forgot that those values had their own historical origins and consequently mistook them for ultimate standards that all humanity would naturally accept.

From this perspective, Huntington was asking the West to reduce its historical ambitions. After the Cold War, the West should no longer regard transforming the world as its mission. Instead, it should recognize that it lived in a multicivilizational world. It should preserve the vitality, cohesion, and boundaries of its own civilization rather than blindly pursuing global universalization.

Huntington argued that the West should abandon the illusion of universalism and preserve the coherence and vitality of its own civilization in a world of civilizations. The task of the “West” was not to export itself, but to preserve itself.

This also explains why, at the level of practical politics, Huntington attached particular importance to NATO, immigration, and civilizational boundaries. In his view, post-Cold War NATO was not merely a military alliance. It was the security organization of Western civilization, and its function was to defend Western civilization itself.

Which countries could join NATO should therefore not be determined solely by strategic interests. It should also depend on whether a country’s history, religion, and culture belonged to the West. To put it bluntly, Huntington believed that NATO should not be opened to countries that had historically belonged primarily to Muslim or Orthodox civilization. Here we can see him reinterpreting a geopolitical organization as a civilizational organization.

I would summarize Huntington’s method of redefining the West in terms of three shifts. First, he shifted from an ideological community to a civilizational community. The West was no longer primarily an anti-communist alliance, but a civilization jointly shaped by history, religion, institutions, and culture.

Second, he shifted from universalism to particularism. Western values were not naturally universal; they were particular products of Western civilization.

Third, he asked the West to shift from a mission of expansion to a mission of defense. The West should not fantasize about Westernizing the entire world. It should preserve the cohesion of its own civilization and learn to coexist with other civilizations.

Huntington’s post-Cold War redefinition of the West was a systematic rebuttal of Fukuyama’s narrative of Western victory. Fukuyama said that the West had won because all civilizations had been replaced by Westerners. Huntington said no: the end of the Cold War marked only the conclusion of an ideological civil war within the West. World politics was only then emerging from its Western phase and entering a phase of coexistence and competition among multiple civilizations.

Fukuyama understood the West as the universal form of the future. Huntington understood the West as a distinctive but limited civilization. Huntington’s West was not the endpoint of world history. It was a particular civilization that, in a multicivilizational world, had to understand itself anew, defend itself, and impose limits on itself.

I want to offer two criticisms of Huntington. The first comes from George Varoukakis, professor of the history of political thought at Queen Mary University of London and the author of a new book whom Princeton University Press has asked me to interview next week. The other is my own personal criticism. The two of us are dissatisfied with Huntington for different reasons, and of course I will ask Varoukakis about this when I interview him next week.

George Varoukakis’s criticism is that Huntington’s analysis relies too heavily on religion as the criterion for determining civilizational affiliation. As a result, Huntington cannot explain the choices made by countries on the margins of the West, such as Greece and Ukraine.

Huntington’s theory, for example, ceased to work when the Russo-Ukrainian War broke out. Huntington explicitly wrote in his book that Ukrainians and Russians both belonged to Slavic and Orthodox civilization and that violent conflict between them was therefore relatively unlikely. Subsequent history has obviously made that judgment seem extremely ironic. Varoukakis therefore criticizes Huntington for relying excessively on religious criteria and argues that his theory possesses an inappropriate rigidity.

My objection to Huntington cannot exactly be called a criticism. I simply think that his entire framework inherited, copied, really, or relied upon, the German morphology of civilizations.

Everyone should listen to the second installment of my series about the West, “Are Germans Westerners?” It contains an introduction to Oswald Spengler. If you then read Huntington, you will experience a sense of déjà vu. Huntington’s view of Western civilization does indeed rebut Fukuyama’s universalism, but his line of thought is simply Spengler’s approach of treating civilizations as closed organisms.

If we regard Fukuyama’s philosophy of history as what it in fact is, a popularized version of Hegel’s philosophy of history, and then use that perspective to examine the twentieth-century dispute between Fukuyama and Huntington over the West, isn’t it simply a popularized version of Spengler’s critique of Hegel? We have already seen this theory once in Germany. Moreover, Spengler’s critique of Hegel was broader and more profound. Fukuyama and Huntington merely relocated that critique into an American context.

In essence, it is still Hegel’s philosophy of history set against Spengler’s civilizational organisms. Spengler opposed a linear, progressive view of history. He believed that world history was not a common process of progress, but consisted of multiple cultures that, like organisms, were born, grew, matured, and declined. What Spengler called the West was one such culture. He called it Faustian culture. Its creative power had already been exhausted in the modern era, and it had therefore entered the rigid stage of civilization.

Huntington adopted this Spenglerian framework: the world consists of several civilizational blocs, profound differences exist between civilizations, and political conflicts will ultimately unfold along civilizational boundaries. Isn’t that simply the American version of the Spengler-Toynbee tradition?

There is nothing wrong with inheriting an idea. I simply think that Huntington’s particular inheritance led him to underestimate the concept of the West itself: the internal struggle between Germany and France, the Russian question, and the West’s internal divisions.

Huntington fixed the West as a civilizational entity, obscuring the political nature that had originally belonged to it. That is what I discussed in this series: how the rise of Russia in the nineteenth century created a new consciousness of the “Western question,” for example, and the consciousness of the “Western question” within Germany during the two world wars. In my view, all of these interesting topics are obscured by Huntington’s clash-of-civilizations thesis.

When I first read The Clash of Civilizations in college, I also thought that what Huntington said made a lot of sense. In practice, however, he really did simplify, and even completely erase, the political nature of the concept of the West itself.

Habermas and Germany’s turn toward the West

I promised three people: Fukuyama, Huntington, and now Habermas. We are coming to postwar Germany.

After the Cold War, the concept of the West faced two completely different redefinitions in the United States. Fukuyama understood the West as the universal victory of liberal democracy and market capitalism. Huntington understood the West as a unique but non-universal civilization. Habermas took a third path.

For Habermas, the West was neither Fukuyama’s endpoint of history nor Huntington’s civilizational bloc. The West was a political and cultural choice that could be seriously embraced only after the German catastrophe. The key to Habermas’s redefinition of the West was not proving that liberal democracy and market capitalism were naturally superior. It was explaining why Germany had to complete its own identity formation and democratic reconstruction by orienting itself toward the West.

We need a brief historical digression because the context has now changed. We have moved from the United States, the victor of the Cold War, to Germany. Here we need to introduce a political concept that is extremely important to Germany and directly related to how we understand postwar Germany’s redefinition of the West.

The concept is Westbindung. Literally, Westbindung means a Western orientation, or binding oneself to the West. The term refers to the historical process after the Second World War through which West Germany voluntarily incorporated itself into the Western narrative and into Western political, military, economic, and value systems.

What did Westbindung mean? The second installment of my now four-part series about the West, “Are Germans Westerners?,” was about the German refusal to regard themselves as Westerners and their refusal to join the West. From the time of its unification until the Second World War, Germany consistently refused to join the West.

After being defeated in both world wars, German Westbindung, binding itself to the West, therefore meant a political and cultural transformation. Germany began to abandon the position I discussed two podcast episodes ago. It abandoned the idea of a special path and the fantasy of refusing to acknowledge itself as Western.

Westbindung meant that after the Second World War, after both world wars, Germany began to acknowledge that it was a Western country committed to liberal democracy, constitutional government, and the rule of law. It surrendered to the West.

This concept is associated first with the foreign-policy course of West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer. After the Second World War, Germany was divided into occupation zones, its national sovereignty was shattered, and Nazi crimes had deprived Germany of moral legitimacy. Against this background, the course Adenauer chose was not neutrality, nor was it the pursuit of some distinctive German great-power strategy. He chose to anchor the Federal Republic of Germany firmly within the Western camp by joining the European Coal and Steel Community, promoting Franco-German reconciliation, accepting American security protection, and joining NATO.

All of these were concrete political manifestations of Westbindung, or binding Germany to the West. Through this binding, West Germany obtained security, economic recovery, and an opportunity to reenter international society.

Binding itself to the West was part of reconstructing postwar German identity. Since the nineteenth century, an anti-Western tradition had always existed in German thought. Germans imagined themselves as a middle country situated between East and West. Germany was supposedly different both from Anglo-French liberalism and from Russian despotism. Germans believed that Germany possessed a deeper Kultur, while the West possessed only a shallow civilisation.

This self-understanding in terms of culture rather than civilization reached its peak during the First World War and continued in various forms during the Weimar and Nazi periods. This was the so-called German Sonderweg, the “special path.” The Sonderweg rejected the incorporation of Germany into the historical narrative of the Western traditions of the rule of law, parliamentarianism, and liberal democracy.

Germany’s turn toward the West was therefore equivalent to abandoning its special path. Joining the West meant that Germany acknowledged it would no longer take pride in a Sonderweg. After Auschwitz, Germany’s supposed unique mission, national spirit, and anti-Western sense of cultural superiority had all lost their moral legitimacy.

West Germany’s Westernization therefore meant that Germany had to accept constitutional democracy, the rule of law, human rights, the separation of powers, parliamentary government, and civil society, and regard these principles as the foundation of its own political community.

On this basis, we can introduce Habermas. Habermas later emphasized that Germany’s orientation toward the West, its Westbindung, should not be understood merely as a military alliance, nor simply as something pursued for economic benefit. It was a new beginning for German political culture. In this sense, Westbindung, turning toward the West, was a form of reeducation.

The Western Allies carried out denazification and democratic reconstruction in postwar Germany, and the Federal Republic gradually formed the new political culture that it had to form. Habermas would describe himself as a product of reeducation.

It was in this context that he proposed what is known as constitutional patriotism, Verfassungspatriotismus. Habermas said that Germans should no longer define themselves through bloodline, nation, territory, Volk, or a völkisch community. Instead, they should make law, democratic institutions, and the liberal constitutional order the core of their political identity.

Germans could be proud of their constitution, proud of their institutions, and proud of their democratic accomplishments. Germans should not be proud of some national myth or of their own Han-chauvinist bloodline.

The Cold War also reinforced the necessity of this orientation toward the West, because West Germany stood on the front line of the confrontation between East and West. Soviet-controlled East Germany represented another possible form of Germany. West Germany’s binding to the West was therefore also a rejection of the East.

West Germany’s entry into NATO in 1955 marked its formal incorporation into the Western security system. At the same time, West Germany participated in European integration, which embedded German power within European institutions. In other words, Westbindung also meant preventing Germany from rising again as a dangerous great power. Through the European Community and NATO, German power was institutionalized, brought under control, and made predictable.

Westbindung, or orienting Germany toward the West, was postwar Germany’s most important political transformation. It changed Germany from a destroyer of the European order into a core state of European integration and the Western alliance.

What makes Habermas distinctive is that he understood the West within this German context. For Britain or France, belonging to the West was self-evident. Britain and France did not need to prove that they belonged to the West. For Germany, however, this was never a natural fact. Joining the West was therefore a historical choice.

In his 1987 lecture “A Kind of Settlement of Damages,” Habermas said that it had always been taken for granted that the English, French, Danes, and Swedes belonged to the West. But it was only in the decades after the Second World War that Germans west of the Elbe and Werra rivers began to understand themselves as part of Western Europe.

Germany’s Westernization was not the continuation of an ancient tradition. It was the result of the reconstruction of political culture after the war. This determined the strongly anti-Sonderweg character of Habermas’s concept of the West. He opposed the idea that Germany should follow a special path. He opposed interpreting German history as a path different from, or even superior to, the West.

Since the nineteenth century, German thought had long contained a myth of an intermediate position. In intellectual history, Germans believed that Germany was neither Western nor Eastern and that it possessed a cultural mission more profound than Anglo-French liberalism. This anti-civilizational, anti-Western undercurrent in Germany extended from Romanticism all the way to Heidegger.

Habermas believed that Auschwitz had completely destroyed this myth of a German Sonderweg stretching from Romanticism to Heidegger. Germany had to orient itself toward the West, join the West, and bind itself to the West. It had to do so not because the West was powerful and Germany wanted to cling to its coattails, and not because joining the West brought economic or military benefits, but because Germany had to make a clear-eyed break with its own catastrophic tradition.

What, then, was the West for Habermas?

The West was not a geographical concept. It was a political and cultural concept. For Habermas, the West meant public reason, democratic institutions, constitutional order, the rule of law, and overcoming nationalist myths.

He was particularly opposed to understanding Germany’s Western orientation as merely a realist strategic alliance or a choice based on Realpolitik. The significance of joining NATO, accepting the Marshall Plan, and siding with the American camp lay not in practical calculations, but in spiritual considerations. For Habermas, Germany had to accept Western political culture at a spiritual level and complete a democratic transformation in its mentality.

This is the constitutional patriotism he proposed. Habermas did not want German political identity or patriotism to be grounded once again in dangerous, mythical categories such as nation, bloodline, territory, or an essentialized culture. He wanted citizens to establish their political belonging on the constitution and democratic institutions.

Constitutional patriotism attached citizens to the constitution and democratic institutions rather than to national or ethnic bonds. It directed citizens’ self-respect toward identification with the democratic institutions of the Federal Republic, rather than attachment to a spiritual national community.

Habermas therefore defined the West by transforming it from a civilizational essence into a constitutional practice. Huntington’s question was: Which religious, historical, and cultural traditions constitute Western civilization? Habermas’s question was: How can a country use democratic institutions and public reason to free itself from a disastrous tradition?

In this respect, Habermas’s West did not ask, “Who are we?” It asked, “What kind of culture, politics, and institutions should we use to constrain ourselves?”

This also explains why Habermas was pro-Western without simply being an Anglo-American liberal. On the one hand, he continually criticized the notion of a special path in German culture: no more Sonderweg. He advocated Germany’s full participation in Western culture. On the other hand, he also believed that no actually existing Western country was democratic enough.

He therefore did not fully identify with the existing liberal West. He supported Germany’s Westernization, but he did not unconditionally worship the West as it actually existed. He defended Western political culture while also demanding that the West become more democratic. For Habermas, the West was not a completed condition. It was a normative, unfinished project.

The end of the Cold War and German reunification made this issue even more immediate and acute. For many Germans, reunification meant that the nation-state had been made whole again. For Habermas, however, it entailed a risk: the republican consciousness that West Germany had formed with such difficulty after the war might be diluted by a reawakened national consciousness.

Habermas had an ambivalent attitude toward German reunification because the polity with which he had long identified was West Germany, a liberal-democratic, Westernized political system. East Germany appeared to represent a threat from the past. He feared that reunified Germany might retreat from being a constitutional state and revert to being a nation-state.

His concerns were not entirely without foundation. After reunification, Habermas observed a further erosion of republican consciousness. Some intellectuals began describing West Germany’s Westernization as a form of colonization by the West, as though West Germany had been spiritually occupied by the United States in the same way that East Germany had been politically occupied by the Soviet Union.

Habermas consequently feared that anti-Western West German intellectuals and disillusioned East German intellectuals would form a reactionary alliance and once again summon forth the irrational, anti-Western tradition in German thought. Listeners who have heard the second part of my series about the West, “Are Germans Westerners?,” will know that the anti-Western tradition is a very natural and mainstream part of the German intellectual tradition.

From this, we can see that Habermas’s concept of the West had a clearly defined enemy. The enemy was not Eastern civilization, Islam, or Russia. It was the anti-Western temptation within Germany: the Germans’ own anti-Western temptation.

We must recognize what makes Habermas distinctive here. For American intellectuals, including Huntington, the boundary of the West lay outside. For Habermas, the boundary of the West lay inside, within Germany itself. Even if a country was geographically situated in Europe, it could still voluntarily depart from the West through nationalist myths, anti-Enlightenment traditions, and political irrationalism, especially a country like Germany.

By the time of the Iraq War in 2003, Habermas’s understanding of the West had changed somewhat again. The war launched by U.S. president George W. Bush led Habermas to raise the question of a “divided West.” He no longer simply equated the West with the American-led free world. Instead, he emphasized that Europe might develop a political identity that showed greater respect for international law, transnational constitutionalism, and public reason.

Habermas and Jacques Derrida jointly published an article that took antiwar demonstrations in major European cities as its point of departure. They emphasized that Europe should respond to the international order and thereby consolidate a European identity.

This shows that Habermas’s West was not bound to the United States either. Germany’s postwar Westernization had been inseparable from the United States, but after the Iraq War, Habermas began to distinguish between an American West and a European West. What he valued were normative principles such as constitutionalism, democracy, the rule of law, international law, and public reason.

When the United States departed from these principles, Europe could criticize the United States in a more Western manner. Here, the West was a normative standard, not a political camp.

Habermas’s post-Cold War redefinition of the West can therefore be summarized in three points. First, the West was not a civilizational bloodline; it was a political and cultural choice. Germany belonged to the West because, after the war, it used democratic institutions and constitutional patriotism to sever itself from the myth of the German Sonderweg.

Second, for Habermas, the West was not an alliance based on practical politics, but a normative commitment. In his view, NATO, the United States, and the European Union did not constitute the whole of the West. The true West was the rule of law, democracy, public reason, and self-restraint in relation to nationalism.

Third, the West was not a completed reality. It was an unfinished undertaking. Actual Western countries might not be democratic enough. They might launch wrongful wars and violate international law. For Habermas, loyalty to the West therefore meant continually criticizing the West.

Habermas’s post-Cold War redefinition of the West differed both from Fukuyama’s and from Huntington’s because his starting point was different. Fukuyama understood the West as the endpoint of history. Huntington understood it as a unique civilization. Habermas understood the West as a constitutional-democratic culture that had to be chosen after the catastrophe in the German context.

For Germany, Westbindung, binding itself to the West, did not mean throwing itself in with the victors. It was an act of political self-rescue through which Germany escaped its own dangerous traditions. The West provided Germany with a public culture and institutions capable of resisting national myths, the worship of power, and political irrationalism.

What concerned Habermas was whether Germany, and indeed Europe, could continue to preserve democratic reason and the capacity for self-criticism within the West’s normative legacy.

A container continually refilled

I swear I have finished. I should now be done with my four-part series about the West. There probably will not be a fifth installment. There probably won’t. Even if there is, it will not be uploaded today. I know that I have already uploaded three podcast episodes today.

This episode introduced what I regard as the three most influential post-Cold War redefinitions of the West. These three thinkers were answering the same question: After the Cold War ended, did the West still exist? And if it did, why should it exist?

They represented the three most influential post-Cold War narratives about what the West is. We can still see their influence in today’s discussions of international politics, in the media, and in academia.

What I have wanted to say throughout this four-part series is that, from beginning to end, the West has always been a container that can continually be refilled and rewritten. If our imaginations are expansive enough, anyone can be Western. The West is a broken basket: you can throw anything into it.

That is enough. I’m leaving. That is all for today. See you next time. Bye-bye!