Western world
Countries with an originally European shared culture / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The Western world, also known as the West, primarily refers to various nations and states in the regions of Australasia,[lower-alpha 1] Western Europe,[lower-alpha 2] and Northern America; with some debate as to whether those in Eastern Europe and Latin America[lower-alpha 3] also constitute the West.[2][3] The Western world likewise is called the Occident (from Latin occidens 'setting down, sunset, west') in contrast to the Eastern world known as the Orient (from Latin oriens 'origin, sunrise, east'). The West is considered an evolving concept; made up of cultural, political, and economic synergy among diverse groups of people, and not a rigid region with fixed borders and members.[4] Definitions of "Western world" vary according to context and perspectives.
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Some historians contend that a linear development of the West can be traced from Ancient Greece and Rome,[5] while others argue that such a projection constructs a false genealogy.[6][7] A geographical concept of the West started to take shape in the 4th century CE when Constantine, the first Christian Roman emperor, divided the Roman Empire between the Greek East and Latin West. The East Roman Empire, later called the Byzantine Empire, continued for a millennium, while the West Roman Empire lasted for only about a century and a half. Significant theological and ecclesiastical differences led Western Europeans to consider the Christians in the Byzantine Empire as heretics. In 1054 CE, when the church in Rome excommunicated the patriarch of Byzantium, the politico-religious division between the Western church and Eastern church culminated in the Great Schism or the East–West Schism.[8] Even though friendly relations continued between the two parts of the Christendom for some time, the crusades made the schism definitive with hostility.[9] The West during these crusades tried to capture trade routes to the East and failed, it instead discovered the Americas.[10] In the aftermath of European colonization of the Americas, an idea of the "West", as an inheritor of Latin Christendom emerged.[11] According to the Oxford English dictionary, the earliest reference to the term "Western world" was from 1586, found in the writings of William Warner.[12]
Countries that are considered to constitute the West vary according to perspective rather than their geographical location. Countries like Australia and New Zealand, located in the Eastern Hemisphere are included in modern definitions of the Western world, as these regions and others like them have been significantly influenced by the British—derived from colonization, and immigration of Europeans—factors that grounded such countries to the West.[13] Depending on the context and the historical period in question, Russia was sometimes seen as a part of the West, and at other times juxtaposed with it.[14][15][16] Running parallel to the rise of the United States as a great power and the development of communication–transportation technologies "shrinking" the distance between both the Atlantic Ocean shores, the US became more prominently featured in the conceptualizations of the West.[14]
Between the eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, prominent countries in the West such as the United States, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Australia, and New Zealand have been once envisioned as ethnocracies for Whites.[17][18][19] Racism is cited as a contributing factor to European colonization of the New World, which today constitutes much of the "geographical" Western world.[20][21] Starting from the late 1960s, certain parts of the Western World have become notable for their diversity due to immigration.[22][23] The idea of "the West" over the course of time has evolved from a directional concept to a socio-political concept that had been temporalized and rendered as a concept of the future bestowed with notions of progress and modernity.[14]