How to define the West today? As an arrogant, racist and colonialist concept with which Europe claimed for centuries the condition of the only rational continent, which had the task of "civilizing" the rest of the planet, that is, the right to colonize and plunder it at will? Or as a power whose command was assumed almost a century ago by the United States (EU) turning Europe into a sub-West that acts as its docile foreman? Or, from the perspective of the new geopolitics that is being announced today, as the rude domination of a Yankee-European world, exhausted and old, that is rotting, dragging Europe to the abyss with its imperial master, or rather, being this, almost as exhausted and rotten as Europe, the one that drags her without pause towards that abyss?
And how was that West forged?
The most remote reference in which Europe could be related to the West is found in ancient Greece. But it is a false and abusive reference that was only revived in a totally different context 23 centuries later, when the world was another and that Europe was already largely its colonial owner, which made ancient Greece a means to nurture its racism. . The so-and-so reference intends to rely on the wars of that ancient Greece with the Persian Empire at that time (V century before our era), in which the Athenians called the Persians Medes, so they were called Persian Wars instead of Wars. Persians. The triumphant Greece of that time turned her victory against Persia into a triumph of freedom and democracy against the tyranny and despotism embodied by it. Geographically, Greece is to the west of Persia and Persia to the east of Greece. But that Athens, which was not then Greece but only the main city-state of a scattered and conflictive Hellas, did not claim to represent Europe because Europe as such did not yet exist. The extensive territory (seen then as mountains and snakes), located to the north of Greece and that the Greeks barely knew, was sparsely inhabited by peoples that they called barbarians, such as the Scythians and others. And, by the way, the name given later to that continent, of which Greece is just a southern part of its eastern end, is Phoenician, Asiatic, coming from the same vast East in which Persia is located, although closer to Earth. current Europe than this. In Greek mythology, Europa is the name of a beautiful Phoenician princess whom Zeus, their main god, kidnaps in the form of a beautiful bull and takes to Crete to possess her (as a god, not as a bull). But then European history turned everything upside down, because 23-24 centuries later it was Europe, turned male and armed with bombs and cannons, that kidnapped and possessed poor Greece.
The concept of Europe, confused, is slowly defined in the Hellenistic world, and it is the Roman Republic and Empire that give it sustenance and begin to know its history. In those centuries Greece, which has already fallen into the power of Rome, forms the eastern part of her Empire; the European north continues to be a barbaric and poorly known territory whose peoples begin to move, united with other peoples, or pressured by them, and to advance, threatening Rome from the north or from the east. But at its height, which goes from the first century BC to the fourth century AD, the Roman Empire controls and colonizes the central part of that Europe, to the south it owns North Africa, and to the east, much of East Asia that the Europeans call Near and that once again limits, somewhat further to the east, with that eternal rival that is renewed from time to time as a new Persian Empire.
The Roman Empire is the field in which, in the first Christian centuries, the concepts of Europe and the West are defined, which soon become associated with religion. And Christianity, its religion since the fourth century, is key to understanding this process, of which I can only give a quick idea here.
The decline of Rome begins, the already Christianized Empire is divided into a western, Roman, Latin half, and an eastern, Greek, Greek-speaking half. Christianity begins to generate 2 branches. In 325 the Council of Nicaea fixed the Christian dogma condemning Arianism and approving the dogma of the Trinity that converts Christian polytheism into monotheism by making 3 different gods, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, be at the same time one. Emperor Constantine, who presides over the Council, moves to the eastern half and makes Byzantium, soon called Constantinople, the capital of the eastern part of the Empire. The division of Christianity takes shape. There are 2 different worlds, the Greek and the Roman, and the western, Latin part turns the bishop of Rome into a pope, which the Greek part only accepts by force, and the European West led by the pope imposes the issue of filioque, violating the Nicene text that derived the Holy Spirit only from the Father to make it derive also from the Son. Today this seems like a trifle, but it was a key cause of the division of Christianity also in the religious sphere between the Latin, Catholic, papist West, and the Greek, Orthodox East; division that after many attempts to reach agreements became definitive from the XI-XII century. In other words, the opposition between the West and the East became an internal rivalry in Europe by opposing Romans to Greeks, the former being good and the latter bad. The unity between the two was only valid to face Muslims. But not always, because centuries later, thanks to that Christian rivalry between Latins and Greeks, the Venetians, who wanted to assault the Byzantine Empire, led the Fourth Crusade in 1204, not against the Muslim Arabs, but against the Christian Greeks. They took and looted Constantinople and made the Byzantine Empire their colony until decades later the Greeks finally kicked them out and rebuilt their Empire.
However, despite the various conflicts of those centuries and the frequent rivalries between Christians: heresies, Inquisition, torture, and invasions, plagues, crusades and religious wars, medieval Europe, which from the year one thousand grew and urbanized century After century, it was Christian and Christianity was imposing itself everywhere. With vague and fanciful knowledge of Asia, where the earthly paradise was located, and almost none of Africa, Europe was already the West, the western limit of the Earth, the nec plus ultra, and discovered with pride that God, creator of the world, had left irrefutable proof of the truth of the Christian dogma of the Trinity, that 3 were 1, in the same continental geography.
Indeed, although it is usually divided into 3, the continent occupied by Europe, Asia and Africa is one. In geography, a continent is dry land surrounded by oceans on all sides as long as it is large enough to avoid being called an island. This is the case of that supercontinent. Indeed, you can go by land from Le Havre, a French port facing the Atlantic, to Vladivostok, the extreme port of Russian Siberia, facing the Pacific. Europe is separated from Africa by a medium-sized lake that Europeans call the Mediterranean Sea, and before 1869, when the Suez Canal opened, you could go overland from Europe or Asia to Africa along the Mediterranean and from Palestine to Egypt. The huge continent, divided into 3 by geopolitics and cultural clashes and not by geography, was, and is, one continent. The geography of that time showed that triple continent as the only one on the planet. For a Christian theologian it was not difficult to infer that his God had left in it an advanced proof of the Trinity, which exalted Europe, his West. But, as we will see in a future article, that vision lost all possible physical support since the year 1492.
