The Rise and Decline of the Political West

The ‘Political West’ describes the distinctive combination of political, military and economic dimensions of the post-1945 Atlantic power system. This is a Washington-led alliance created during Cold War I and shaped by cold war pressures. Its logic of conflict preserves the hegemony of the Political West in general and the primacy of the United States in particular. Following the end of the first cold war, instead of dissolving into its constitutive elements, the Political West radicalised. In the absence of a peer competitor, it claimed to be the unique form of modernity towards which all other states and social systems should converge. This was universalism of a new type, although reminiscent of earlier religious forms. The Political Wests’ secular universalism and global ambitions eroded its internal coherence. Instead of dissolving after the collapse of the Soviet-led alternative order in 1989-91, the Political West radicalised, intensifying the disintegrative processes associated with post-modernity. By the second quarter of the twenty-first century, the Political West is characterised by geopolitical and ideological incoherence.