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Qu'est-ce que l'Occident?

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Philippe Nemo, who teaches at the ESCP-EAP Business School in Paris , published a small book in 2004 entitled: “What is the West?”.  In that treatise he outlined the five major events which have created a tradition that all Western European countries, the United States , Canada , Australia and New Zealand have in common.  Robert Bartlett and Rodney Stark have published books in English which complement Nemo's.

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The Five Major Events

1.      The Greek “miracle” of the invention of the Polis, the invention of the rule of law, the invention of “modern” science and schooling beginning in the late 6^th century BCE (Before the Common Era).

2.      The Roman invention of a universal law, private property, the “individual” person and humanism, between approximately the 2^nd century BCE and the 4^th century of the Common Era (CE).  

3.      The Biblical revolution, beginning in the 1^st century CE and becoming more important as Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire with the arrival of the Emperor Constantine in 306 CE.  This revolution was both ethical and eschatological[1].  Christian “Charity”, the “spirit of the law” became just as important as the letter of the law.  And eschatological tension created linear time, the time of history and the idea of “progress”. 

4.      The “Papal Revolution” between the 11^th and 13^th centuries of the common era (CE), which began to remember the importance of the frameworks of  Greek Science and Roman Law as ways of respecting Biblical eschatology and ethics, in the need to undertake actions and to make progress, thus bringing about a synthesis of Athens, Rome and Jerusalem. 

5.       The championing of “Liberal Democracy”, which was brought about first by the great democratic revolutions in England, (17^th century CE), Holland,  the United States and France (all three in the 18^th century CE).  

The West is not made up of one single, homogenous “people” and cannot be defined along ethnic lines.  It is, instead, says Nemo, a form of shared culture that has been successively developed and adopted by a number of peoples.

1.      The Romans adopted major parts of Greek civilisation

2.      Rome made Christianity its State Religion

3.      Peoples conquered by the Romans, such as the French “Gauls”  accepted the Latin of Rome as their language in a matter of two or three centuries

4.      Pagan Europeans, from Northern Europe , converted en masse to Christianity or were often brutally converted en masse to Christianity (See Robert Bartlett's book, "The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950-1350").

5.      Christian Europe integrated the Roman legal system and Greek Science into its own way of functioning

6.      And this has led to a modern-day situation where Northern European Germans and Swedes, Eastern Europeans such as the Poles and Southern Europeans such as the Spaniards have accepted as their intellectual ancestors the Greek Socrates, the Roman Cicero, and the Jews Moses and Jesus Christ.

Another great book on the Western Tradition is : "The Victory of Reason" by Rodney Stark.

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