- This topic has 3 voices and 9 replies.
-
Posts
-
a) Is Australia or the Republic of South Africa part of Western civilization?b) Are colonized nations (like India, some African nations, and some Southern Hemisphere nations) that are no longer ruled by the colonizers part of Western civilization? If not, then why not?
A) yesB) partial yes, they have taken parts of it.Read Nial Ferguson's new book Civilisation: The West and the Rest, he answers your questions.
I would answer yes so long as they institutions are “Western” ones. Not all colonized nations are part of the West, though, since they have heavy non-Western institutions by which they abide. For example, the caste system in India puts it as a non-Western nation, even though there is some Western component to the nation as a whole.
I would answer yes so long as they institutions are "Western" ones.
I sort of lean that way myself. Australia and RSA kept the western style government after G. Brit backed off and allowed home rule. I would not consider Japan a western nation because it was never colonized by the west and has a different set of cultures.
AH, but did not Japan harvest what they needed from the West in order to not only survive, but prosper in a world dominated by the Europeans? I would claim that the Meiji Restoration and the subsequent rise of Imperial Japan marked them as just as “western” as any country in Europe. Culture does not make a country western so much as a shared set of attitudes and assumptions about the world and science. I would definitely consider Japan “western” in that sense.Or have you not played PlayStation recently?
I know we went over the question of whether Japan is part of the West in another thread a while back, so to revisit it, I think that Japan is part of the West in some regards today, but not in others. Yes, it is heavily invested in capitalism and technology and materialism, but do they alone define the West? What about Christianity of Roman ideals? Those seem to be amiss in Japan.
I think with Japan, it is more about globalism than it is Western. If Japan is part of Western Civ, then Kenya is too.
Does Kenya have loads of tech products that they don't sell in the U.S.? Is Kenya home to corporations that sell top-line products in the U.S.? Is Kenya even First-World Country? Basically, I think that there are distinctions between Japan and Kenya. Yes, I agree that more and more of the world has entered into the global marketplace, but still I do not think that this means the whole world has joined the West.At the end of the day, we could probably categorize those countries who have traditional been part of Western Civ and those who joined late in the game. If Japan is "in", then it joined late in the game.
You definitely have to get into the 'why not' part. But I don't think certain things automatically make a nation Western. Economic prosperity or advanced technology doesn't make one western, although being that way may make them interract more with the west.I don't think Japan or Kenya are part of Western Civ. Is Russia?
I don't think that economic prosperity alone makes one part of the West, either (see, e.g., Saudi Arabia). But I do think that it often accompanies that which is “Western”. I would add that things such as as a Judao-Christian heritage, democratic government, and free market are all hallmarks of Western Civilization in modern times.
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.
