Recently, Javier Ortega Smith, the leader of Vox, the populist radical right party in Spain, came under scrutiny for language that Spanish Attorney General Luis Navajas called "abominable" and "repulsive" but not a hate crime. Ortega Smith claimed: "Our common enemy, the enemy of Europe, the enemy of liberty, the enemy of progress, the enemy of democracy, the enemy of family, the enemy of life, the enemy of the future is an invasion, an Islamic invasion… What we know and understand as civilization is at risk." Ortega Smith called upon old concepts of "western civilization" that have long been used to mask hate and excuse violence.
Most semesters, I teach a class titled Western Civilization II, a survey of European history that covers from the Enlightenment to the present. The course, which has been taught under that title for decades, is typically taken after students finish Western Civilization I, which covers antiquity to the Middle Ages. Instead of beginning with the Enlightenment, I like to start with the beginning of Spanish colonisation of the Americas and the expulsion of Muslims and Jews from Spain in 1492 – an important year in the construction of ‘The West’. We talk about ‘the West’ as a social construct – something that is not a natural fact, but a concept invented by humans. Indeed, before 1492, ‘the West’ existed differently in the imagination of peoples living in Europe than it does today. With colonisation and global trade, the idea of the West literally expanded. Using this framework, we end the course discussing refugees, antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe today – bringing it full circle.
The promise of ‘Western civilization’ became an excuse to dominate – to ‘civilize’ others.
Historically, being ‘western’ or ‘civilised’ was a powerful weapon used to legitimate the domination of others who were outside Europe. Despite the fact that the first recorded civilizations or settled groups of people began in ancient Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq, the promise of ‘civilisation’ somehow became the provenance of Europe. The promise of ‘Western civilization’ became an excuse to dominate – to ‘civilize’ others. In the Spanish case, this was readily made apparent in the encomienda system that systematically enslaved native populations in the Americas. Other European colonial powers adopted similar rationales for their empires; it came ‘the white man’s burden’ to spread western civilization. Of course, native populations in the Americas and elsewhere already had civilizations long before Europeans arrived, and were rarely admitted as part of the Western club.
