Between evolutionary and container concept: Western self-assertions, German Westernizers, and the spatialization of political thought

This keynote lecture was held at the conference „The End of Western Hegemonies?“, University of Jyväskylä, 6 June 2019. For a video recording see here.

The lecture made the following points:

1) In the discourse on “the West”, there is often a tension at play between an open-ended evolutionary concept and a spatially confined container concept. The evolutionary concept implies a universal trajectory and a standard of civilizational progress (in terms of social norms, technical advance, economic development, and political values) that, in principle, is attainable by every part of the world. The underlying assumption is the existence of one single universal civilization that originates in the West, with a special emphasis on the “Atlantic revolutions” of the late eighteenth century, and a cluster of norms and ideas centred on human rights, the rule of law, separation of powers, and parliamentary democracy. The container concept, instead, is largely defined along cultural, religious, linguistic and also ethnic lines; it is, therefore, constituted by features that, even in principle, are much less universalizable. This concept implies a plurality of civilizations with different trajectories and only a limited degree of convergence. The classic example would be the notion of a “historical West”, or “the Occident” (Abendland in German), as an area dominated by Latin Christianity, as opposed to the world of Eastern Orthodoxy.

2) Both conceptual variants – evolutionary concept / container concept – are not mutually exclusive but often coexist in varying degrees of conflation, which create tensions between “the West’s” universality and “Western” particularities, typically limiting the universalizability of “Western ideas”. Sometimes, the drawing of civilizational boundaries remains implicit and works more like an unspoken assumption; sometimes it is made explicit – for instance, when commenting on the war in eastern Ukraine or Russian politics in general; the question of Turkey’s accession to the EU would be another example.

3) When exploring the question of why historical actors have found the concept of the West so useful and effective to articulate their political views, one needs to consider the spatiality of the concept. Spatial concepts – once they metamorphose into socio-political ones (for “the West”, that happened in the early nineteenth century) – are distinct from non-spatial ones in their specific ability, namely by homogenizing space, to reduce complexity, create orientation, and shape identities. They evoke an “imagined community” (Benedict Anderson), and create a sense of cultural, historical and ideological cohesion, which is attached to a certain geographical area. Sometimes, the boundaries of this area are defined very clearly; often, they are amorphous, and they also tend to shift over time.

4) When examining the ways in which the political thought of Ernst Fraenkel and Richard Löwenthal spatialized (i.e. incorporated and/or modified spatio-political frameworks), a number of arguments can be put forward: Fraenkel – a left-socialist labour law expert in the Weimar Republic, who had fled Nazi persecution in 1938 and had spent most of his exile in the United States – returned to Germany in 1951 as a vocal advocate of U.S. constitutionalism, but he only became an avowed “Westernizer” in the early 1960s. A conceptual Westernization only occurred in the academic environment of the Free University Berlin, with its direct exposition to the front line of the Cold War. The frequent use of the term “Western democracy” from 1960 onward was part of Fraenkel’s art of persuasion. The conflation of a spatial concept and a key word of political thought allowed him to anchor West Germany’s political culture firmly in the realm of pluralist democracies, effectively making a case for its democratization. Moreover, the question of Germany’s historical relationship to ‘the West’ – usually framed as the question of a German Special Path (Sonderweg) – featured increasingly prominently on the academic agenda in the mid and late 1950s, and it was a logical step for Fraenkel, “primed” by his Weimar background, to engage with the critical Special Path discourse on German anti-“Westernism”. As the notion of a fundamental dichotomy between Germany and “the West” still fuelled what Fraenkel and others saw as a German “special consciousness”, both the term “Western democracies” and Germany’s relationship to that spatio-political construct needed to be redefined, and the imaginary geography of “Western democracies” needed expanding.

Lastly, Fraenkel’s increasing determination to help transform West Germany’s political culture manifested itself, around 1960, in a shift in spatial identity. The self-declared “American in Berlin”, who had sworn never to use the word ‘we’ again because he could never any more identify himself with “the Germans”, suddenly switched to the “we” form again, and this was just around the time he started to avail himself of the language of “Western democracy”. He was still proud of his U.S. citizenship, but from 1960 onward he spoke of “we – the Germans”. The full incorporation of the concept of the West into his rhetorical register allowed Fraenkel to solve an identity dilemma: instead of choosing between two national identities (American or German), he transformed into a German-American “Westerner”.

Fraenkel’s colleague Richard Löwenthal became a “Westerner” as well. He started off as the member of a Communist student association in the Weimar Republic, and found himself signing up, in 1950, as a founding member of the Congress for Cultural Freedom – a decidedly anti-Communist organization, and a major conduit of transatlantic cultural transfer that spread ideas of Cold War liberalism and “Western Civilization”. Three factors stand out when accounting for this intellectual transformation: first, the shock waves sent out by the Soviet Union; second, Löwenthal’s time in exile in London; and third, the emerging spatial logic of the Cold War in 1946-47, which prompted him to discard his previous preference for a socialist Europe as a “third force”. From then on, one of the key characteristics of his spatio-political framework was a container-space rhetoric that distinguished between a dynamic, creative “Western” and a static, “invertebrate” “Eastern civilization”.

Löwenthal’s concept of the West was influenced both by Max Weber and the British historian Arnold Toynbee, who reached the height of his fame in the aftermath of the Second World War – at a time when the frequency of references to “Western civilization” soared. Toynbee’s gargantuan, multi-volume study of world civilizations advanced the theory that “Western civilization”, alongside twenty other civilizations in world history, was an ”intelligible unit of historical study” – a statement that was repeatedly quoted by Löwenthal. When Löwenthal tried to make sense of the rapid transformation of industrially advanced pluralist societies from the mid and late 1960s, he resorted to a political language that was shot through with Toynbeean notions of “rhythms”, “crises”, and “breakdowns” of civilizations. For Löwenthal, the disaffection of the “young Western intelligentsia” with parliamentary democracy in “1968” was merely an epiphenomenon of a “long-term cultural crisis” that undermined the authority of “Western” institutions. Deploying the “Western crisis” rhetoric also as a means to create a sense of urgency, Löwenthal’s main aim was to preserve the status quo through stabilizing an identity “nested” in the narrative community of “Western civilization”.