I. The Atlantic Perspective and the emergence of a Concrete West

III. Definitions

With every new paradigm, there are terms that need definition, points that need clarification, consequences that need elucidation. And there are always many, many objections to be dealt with, emanating from the entrenched assumptions of old paradigms.

What is “the Concrete West”?

First let us delimit the term by clarifying its place in a series of related terms.

1. “The West” has had, as mentioned earlier, a dual meaning: the civilizational West and the modern democratic West. The civilizational West originated as a term in distinction from other, “Eastern” or “Oriental” civilizations. The modern democratic West began inside the civilizational West, but has been capable of extending gradually beyond the historical boundaries of the civilizational West.
Both meanings are legitimate. Historically they are somewhat intertwined, which is why we speak of a “dual meaning”, not two separate or opposing meanings.
2. The “Concrete West”. The definition used herein is based on the modern democratic West, which has by now absorbed nearly all of the civilizational West and grown somewhat beyond it. This West became Concrete when it accrued an additional element: joint institutions, providing a meta-level of existence alongside the unit-level existence of its national members. The whole has an evolving existence as an international entity. Defining its membership space is complicated but feasible; it involves both institutional and cultural factors, i.e. the spaces of its several institutions and the space of modern Western practices. More on all this below.
3. The Atlantic. A related term; it essentially means the same thing. It has a similar duality of meaning: the original democratic Western nations on the two shores of the North Atlantic, later gradually including the democratized rest of Europe and the Westernized non-Western countries far away from the Atlantic; and the institutions that unite them.
4. The First World. Another related term; it too refers essentially to the same thing. It is often seen as defined vis-a-vis the Third World; the latter in turn is a term that emerged with “Third Way” thinking in opposition to both the West and its major adversary (formerly the Soviets): thus First World, Second World, Third World. It can be misleading, as there have been countries graduating from Third to First, Third to Second, and Second to First. Indeed, the entire Soviet bloc tried to join the First en masse after 1989, and more or less succeeded, vacating the “Second World” slot; a case can be made that the Islamic world, with its semi-rich yet undeveloped countries, has moved into the slot. The tripartite differentiation has also been expressed in World System theory with the terms “Center”, “Periphery”, and “Near-Periphery”; this has the merit of hinting that the intermediate category is the least stable of the three.
5. The North. Also related, but somewhat broader than West, Atlantic, or First World. The Global North is the First World plus the post-Soviet space. It is defined vis-a-vis the Global South, meaning the Third World. Like the Atlantic, “Global North” and “Global South” diverge significantly from the geographical significance of the words.
Next let us look at the relevance of these several categories for current debate on decline.
Which “West” is relevant for the decline debate?
Presentations on the economic decline of the West assume a fixed set of countries, or a fixed geographical space in Europe and North America. This is an ahistorical conception of the West. It leads to sometimes amusing mistakes, as when a prominent declinist compared the Western share of the world economy in 1500 and later dates by adding the European plus North American shares. There was no “Western” economy in North America in 1500; all economic activity there in 1500 would properly belong in the non-Western category! The Western economy in North America began a century later, with colonization; and did not cover all of today’s Anglo North America until the 1800s.
This example is enough to show that the West cannot be a fixed space over time, nor a fixed set of countries. A meaningful power comparison, the one that is needed for evaluating propositions about decline, is not achieved when simple sets of countries, bunched according to location, are compared. The relevant comparison is of sets of countries that have bundled themselves into being collective actors; and of sets that plausibly could so bundle themselves and are advocated as bundling. The relevant “West” is therefore the one -- the Concrete West -- that is a set self-bundled as a collective actor.
The West is most accurately defined for comparisons, therefore, as a concrete international entity, the Concrete West. This is an entity that lives and changes in historical time, not a category that lives on paper as a fixed list of countries. It cannot be a rigid category; it has proved capable of growth geographically. Dead categories are invariant over time. Paper lists of countries are capable of growth only domestically within their separate member countries; the Concrete West grows also in its membership roster and in their intertwining.
Now that we see why it is important to understand and define the Concrete West, let us define it more thoroughly.

The Concrete West: membership, structure, nature, history
Membership - There has been debate about the exact membership of the Concrete West at any given time, and about its exact date of origin and original members. The same is true of any evolving entity that is not a single living biological entity but a live grouping of entities: there are ambiguities about where exactly it begins and where are its present boundaries, not to mention its possible future boundaries. It does not contradict the fact of its being a concrete entity. It simply shows that it is alive as a grouping, a real thing not just a paper thing.
Further: there are always varying degrees of depth of belonging to and participating in the West. The West can never be precisely described as any single set of countries. Western Europe and Anglo North America are more “Western” than southern or eastern Europe, and than Japan. Japan is more Western than most of the Asian tigers. Nevertheless, almost all of these countries, and some others beyond them, are primarily Western in their domestic character and global role, and most of them participate in joint Western organizations.
Structure - The Concrete West consists, on its own system level, of the collection of Atlantic and extended Atlantic (Trilateral and pan-European) institutions and arrangements; on the subsystem level, of the national governments of its member states, and sub-Atlantic groupings of them such as the EU. Those member states in turn can be defined through a series of concentric circles. Full membership in the West belongs to those countries that are modern industrial democracies (with a cut off point at a p.c.i. of approximately half the OECD average) and that are members of some of the institutions including a core alliance (NATO, ANZUS, or a bilateral alliance with the U.S.). The other members of the varying Western institutions qualify as partial members of the West. It can be readily calculated who qualifies as full members; the full membership approximates to OECD, plus a few countries that have not been able to join OECD for diplomatic reasons, minus Mexico, Chile, Turkey, and perhaps some of Eastern Europe, which are as yet partial members.
Nature (categories) - To provide a more precise terminology:
The Concrete West is a concrete international entity, with a life that takes place in international history, evolving and most of the time growing in the course of that history. It exists as a society or community on the intercontinental system level; it contains member entities or subsystems on the national and continental levels. It has concentric circles of institutions and of membership; its present group of consolidated members approximates to OECD.
The Concrete West is not, then, a list of countries that meet some specified standards. Rather it is the international entity that has these standards for its national members and candidates. It is a set of system-level institutions, each of which has a list of current members on the sub-system or unit level.
Could the Concrete West be immortal, a “collective immortal” to use a term that has been applied to nations? Yes; Raymond Aron pointed out that a collective societal entity is a potential immortal, unlike a single biological organism (since then, medical science and futurology have raised the possibility that individual biological organisms could also become immortal). Karl Deutsch added that societal entities have not just organic and mechanical characteristics but also cybernetic ones, providing space for flexibility and creativity in growth. The organic concept of society, used by Romantics, implied a deterministic cycle of life and death, and dreams of prolonging the life a little longer through heroic exertions; the mechanical analogy, used by the Enlightenment, implied a gradual running down under the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Cybernetics allowed a chance for something better: cumulative growth, in which capabilities would keep growing faster than problems and death would always seem farther away. Fractal geometry added a further refinement to cybernetics; it showed how society, like an individual organism, naturally tends to grow, through mutual connections and branchings off, but without the death-requirement of individual organisms.
The belief that civilizations must live and die as organisms was an illogical deduction of Danilevsky and Spengler from Darwin; illogical because, unlike Darwin himself, it assumed that civilizations function as biological organisms. That premise came from the romantics. Beneath the scientific veneer of Darwinism, Declinism was the old romantic lament -- that medieval Christendom had been an organic faith-community; that the modern West, having dissipated the organism through individualism and skepticism, was rotting, decadent, doomed.
The actual West has the same elements -- individual and community, freedom and government, beliefs and doubts -- that there have always been. It has them in a better mix and balance in modern times than in medieval times, which is why it has done so much better in modern times. The Concrete West has in the last century half-overcome the worst imbalance that long existed in this mix, namely, the insufficiency of collective governance on the international level; it was the right answer, unlike the romantics’ one of pursuing an organicist consummation of unity on the national level. Thanks to this, the West is in better health today than in most of its long history. The Concrete West is the West today, alive, well, and growing.
The real risks to the West’s immortality are not from its being overtaken by other growing societies, which are in fact learning from it and being drawn into its world system, but from insufficient regulation of its technological achievements, creating ever more means of universal destruction and ever larger environmental side-effects. Not from death of the organism from age, or loss of an imagined ancient organic unity, but from the very youth of its international structure, which is far from a finished product; it could still be undermined by emotional political tides in its member nations, with their longer histories and loyalties.
History - The history of the Concrete West begins formally with its institutions, a century ago; and most of them are unaware of even this length of history. Fortunately it goes back informally many more centuries. The West was always conceived as a somewhat concrete entity -- “Western civilization”, “the West”, “Europe”, “Christendom” -- not just a collection-list of nations or feudal principalities; but its concreteness was mostly in the mental image of it as a whole, not so much in institutions encompassing the whole. The mental image included a perception of a shared history and development, tracing back to era when there really were strong concrete common institutions in the Roman Empire. An element of institutional unity was perpetuated loosely in the Roman Church and the somewhat mythical Holy Roman Empire, coupled with enormous practical chaos in the medieval era. With the Renaissance, when the West began its predominance in the world, the chaos receded, and so did the Church and Empire; with the Reformation and Enlightenment, “Europe” and “the West” edged out “Christendom” as the ongoing name of the concrete mental image-entity. It was an entity that seemed at times to exist almost solely in the mind, with its borders accordingly defined by each mind; yet there was so much overlap in these mental images that they cannot be dismissed as subjective chimeras. Its mental concreteness had a real significance: “the West”-“Europe” (and to some extent still “Christendom”) formed a meta-portion of the identity of persons and nations. It was appealed to as a norm and organizing principle in some decisions; but it was vulnerable, in moments of hard political choice, to being dismissed as “just a geographical expression”: so Bismarck said of “Europe”, when he wished to disregard its collective norms. Europe at that time actually did have some institutional concreteness, in the form of the Concert of Europe; Bismarck’s bon mot was, like most reductionisms, not entirely accurate, nor so bon. It was easy for a strong subsystem-level sovereign Germany to do this to a weak system-level Europe; in the 1900s it came to be seen as too easy, and unbearable. The insufficiencies of the unconsummated unified image gave rise to recurrent efforts at institutionalization, of which the Concert of Europe was only one in a series; the efforts gradually came to increasing fruition in the 20^th century, and after some more fits and starts, the organizational process became cumulative. This institutionalization has enabled a more precise definition of the West as a concrete entity. At the same time it has enabled a more rapid expansion of the West, something that ensures continued fuzziness at the borders. That, in outline, is the history of the definition of the West as a concrete historical entity.
The comparative statistics for the Concrete West -- the only West that is relevant to the question of decline -- show a continued strengthening of Western predominance in the world, not a Western decline. Once the West is thus defined, accurately, as a concrete living international entity, it follows immediately, deductively, that the contemporary writings on Western decline are misconceived. The declinist writings invariably assume a definition of the West that is irrelevant for the issue at hand: a geographically fixed set of separate national or continental entities. Declinist writings vary as to which countries are considered “West”; sometimes it is Western Europe and the U.S., sometimes also Canada, sometimes also Eastern Europe. Reduction of the West to a dead paper list, it turns out, is no cure for determining who to list; rather it makes the lists arbitrary. The Concrete West is not arbitrary. Its institutions are real; its circles are real; its degrees of membership are natural blurs, not logical contradictions. Living ambiguities are better in the social sciences than arbitrary contradictory lists. It is normal for there to be ambiguity in the definition of a living social phenomenon and its boundaries. It would be a sign of something wrong if there were not.

Valuation of the Concrete West: a normative note
The Concrete West is an historical achievement. It is a union based on positive commonalities which enable its members to perceive similar interests, and to have similar perceptions of friends and foes, in nearly all situations.
Human beings do not unions easily; not national unions, not international unions. The Concrete West was advocated for centuries; it came into being in the course of the last 130 years. Its most important structures were forged only in face of life and death struggle during the two World Wars, and given permanent peacetime form during the Cold War. Many people, shaped by the Cold War and by their opposition to the Western side of it, lack the longer perspective and are prone to dismiss the Concrete West as a “relic of the Cold War”. However, it would be reckless to discard or dilute it. It was built only with great difficulty; a high price was paid for the delays in getting national polities to proceed with the international construction. It is the positive product of the Western effort in the era of those terrible conflicts, as they learned the second and third times around from the consequences of their failure to build earlier. In the 1940s, they had the wisdom to use the emergency atmosphere to forge a consensus for building what they by then knew would have been needed anyway. The Concrete West can continue growing today at much lower cost; but, if frittered away, could not be replaced except at an even higher price. It needs to be valued for the entire outlay that went into it.

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