According to Huntington it isn’t. According to most educated Latin Americans, of course it is Western, and I agree with them.
So, just to hear your oppinions. Answer at your own risk 
Opinion threads belong in IMHO.
Who is Huntington, and why ought I to listen to him?
But since you ask in GD, here’s a thesis for debate: "Western nations are those in which the culture is predominantly derived from a European, as opposed to indigenous origin, though with varying degrees of indigenous and other-immigrant influence. This would include lingua franca, cultural institutions, etc.
By this definition the Western nations include:
- The Americas
- European nations, including Russia and Turkey (which are European in culture though with Asian territory)
- Australia and New Zealand
Many nations are influenced to varying degrees by Western culture, but these are the ones predominantly founded on it.
I agree with your definition. Huntington is Samuel Huntington, author of The Clash of Civilizations. He draw a map puting Latin America outside of his civilization.
Original article, from Foreign Affairs, 1993
Huntington was one of a number of writers commenting on the fall of the Soviet Union. You might put him as opposite to Frances Fukuyama’s The End of History, which was published as a book in 1992, though based on a 1989 essay.
Personally, I prefer Fukuyama, but it took me a while to understand that he was writing philosophy rather than political science. Similarly, Huntington’s case for Latin America not being “Western” can probably be better understood more a matter of theoretical academic divisions than what people use in everyday language.
I think there’s a risk whenever people discuss technical distinctions with slippery and never-defined everyday words. There will be heat but no light.
Great answers, guys. I agree.
As long as Latin America is a third world region with struggling democratic (or not) governments, I’d guess not.
That being said, people often call Israel “Western”. :o
Samuel Huntington was a cold warrior trying to cast the new world in terms he understood. His work is useless except as a justification for neoconservative foreign policy.
And what’s your solution? Put a McDonald’s in every area of the world? :rolleyes:
My solution to… what?
So, if the U.S. get poorer after the deficit devast it, that country will stop to be Western?
We are talking about civilization here, if you didn’t noticed, not about GDP.
There’s no such thing as a western civilization.
Of course there is
Western Civilization=Greek Roman roots + Jewish Christian religious ideas.
Some characteristics=originated in Europe, matured during the Middle Ages and spread during the age of Discovery.
Languages=Romance and Germanic languages, mainly.
Scripts=Latin script.
Law=Roman and British common law
It is so easy.
Then Turkey isn’t all that Western, it’s Asiatic. And Europe has Napoleonic civil law. I think you’re accidentally defining Western more narrowly, as “To the East” German nationalists might have: to mean the Anglophone powers.
Let’s take some general criteria (criterion?) for being a Western country:
*Allied with other major Western countries
*Western legal systems/democratic governments
*Developed economies
*Some poorly-defined and arbitrary ties to things like TVs, pop culture, and Hollywood
“Third World” is usually applied to countries that are economically underdeveloped and/or not ‘democratic’.
A Depression wouldn’t make us a third world country.
Ooh youz is so snarkay snarkay you iz!
I didn’t say anything about the GDP, though there does seem to be a correlation. :o We’re not talking about what makes a country civilized, we are talking about civilizations.
I was just curious if you had any other alternatives to neocon foreign policy.
Like a McWorld?
Do you have an idea for a post Cold War foreign relations policy that isn’t cold warrior-like and neocon? And happens to be useful?
I think you’re really oversimplifying. His work is really the seminal one on military-state relations in the developing world. And in Clash of Civilizations, Huntington rejected the universalism implicit in neoconservativism.
Why the surprise? Insomuch as we’re similar to anyone, we’re most similar to western countries.
:eek: is a surprise, and :o is embarrassment, but :o seemed to fit what I was feeling.
I’m down with Israel being Western. :o
Not really. This is a country that receives vast amounts a foreign aid from the developed world, a country where a large proportion of the population live in third world conditions without adequate access to basics such as medicine, housing or education. A country where a sizable proportion of the population have no representation in government, highly inferior legal rights and so forth.
I can’t think of a single western country remotely like that. Israel is more akin to cold-war era South Africa or Burma, insofar some of the population maintains a high standard of living at the expense of the underclass with the assistance of foreign capital.
So what? At various points in time both the USA and Western Europe were in the same situation - they were still Western?
Also South Africa is arguably a Western country as well…