Westlessness

The Munich Security Conference and the Report (2020) throws a spotlight on the phenomenon of “Westlessness”. Westlessness define a widespread feeling of discomfort and restlessness in the face of growing uncertainty about the future and destiny of the West. A multitude of current security challenges seem to be directly related to the much-described disintegration and retreat of the West. Additionally, the understanding of what it actually means to be part of the West seems to have been lost in Western societies. It remains unclear to what extent the West will find a strategy and common response to an emerging era of great power rivalry and therein lies perhaps the greatest strategic challenge for the transatlantic partnership (https://securityconference.org, 14.03.2021).

Since many years, the West was dominating and representing every kind of values from culture to art, from development to civilization and political and economic unity. Its basic motto was ‘unity in diversity’. To mean the West was to the most developed civilization as a role model for all nations of the world. To be a civilized and developed state or nation for the world, it was to follow the footsteps of the West and to be like what it is. With the power that the West takes from the world’s belief and opinion against the West in positive manner, the West has been dominated all processes related to the world and tried to consolidate its values, culture, economy, politics, people, etc. from its sovereignty and domination on the world and its people. But in the meantime when we have come, it becomes clear what it is not like that and the West starts to experience a reverse process: Westlessness.

What was the Westernism or Westernization? It was “shaped according to Western forms, emerged with the discourse of progress and the idea of unity of and tries to achieve secularization in religion” (https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/877918, 15.03.2021). In addition, modernization, secularization, progress, development, industrialization and so on; all of these things always meant ‘Westernization’. However, today the West forgets its own identity and main discourse which make the West westernization. It began to ignore the Western values and behave in a disrespectful manner to all nations outside the West. The facts of the productive personality of the West in Islamophobia, Otherization, ethnocentrism, and xenophobia; additionally, its entering into the wars of Afghanistan and Iraq, which was included under the alliance of NATO and the US; the silence of the West against the crises of humanity like in Syria, Rohingya, Yemen, etc… all of them become downfall and collapse signs of the West.

Today in when we experience the West and “the rest” (for the Westerners) should find an exit way through the glass bell in which they are unwillingly and should prefer their own choices by themselves without interference of another power. They should establish their own world that is completely original. Particularly the West has to build its ‘new’ and ‘specific’ identity and ontological existence not on the other’s suffers and future expectations but their own (Westerner) people’s destiny and will. The fact of Westlessness is also an opportunity for the West to set its own future and it is a chance for ‘the rest’ world outside the West to rebuild their existence without the Westernizing intervening and the tyrannical authority of the West…