I came across this passage by Michael Wintle, speaking of "European civilization",
"To talk in terms of quintessential or single European culture, civilization, or identity leads quickly to unsustainable generalization, and to all manner of heady and evidently false claims for one's own conteinent. Nonetheless, if the triumphalism can be left to one side there is a long history of shared influences and experiences, a heritage, which has not touched all parts of Europe or all Europeans equally, and which is therefore hard and perhaps dangerous to define in single sentences or even paragraphs, but which is felt and experienced in varying ways and degrees by those whose home is Europe, and which is recognized - whether approvingly or disapprovingly - by many from the outside."
(emphasis mine)
We are of course familiar with the idea of "Western civilization" as a shared, single universal development across "the Western countries". This is a narrative often discussed again and again: as a feeling of shared history from the Roman Empire, Christianity, Enlightenment, and industrialization.
But where does it come from? When and how did people first invent the idea of a shared "Western civilization"? This is a wild guess - but I'm sure this idea is relatively modern. Does it have anything to do with the European Christendom (or even older)?
If it is so - why and how it persists for ages, constantly produced in popular narrative?
Paul Cohen, an American historian of China, addresses this in his 1985 monograph Discovering History in China: American Historical Writings on the Recent Chinese Past.
When critiquing the old, aged paradigm of analyzing China in a "Western Impact, Eastern Response" framework, Cohen remarks:
"It is a truism, easily forgotten, that the West, in its modern phase, has not stood still. Also easily forgotten is the fact that "the West" is a relative concept only. Without an "East" or a "non-West" to compare it with, it would quite simply not exist; there would be no word for it in our vocabulary. If the concept of the West did not exist, of course, the spatial variations within the geographical area now subsumed under "the West" would loom larger in our minds. The difference between France and America might seem just as great as those between China and the West." - Paul Cohen, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writings on the Recent Chinese Past, 12-13.
Cohen seems to be saying that our current conception of "the West" is a modern concept. If we did not have an "eastern Other" to contrast with the West, then the West would not exist. In such a world, the "feeling of shared history from the Roman Empire, Christianity, Enlightenment, and industrialization" would not be so pronounced, and we can imagine a dramatically weaker notion of common heritage between nations like France and England.
Although Cohen is correct in his claim that the current version of the conceptual "west" is modern, it certainly has ancient antecedents. William T. Rowe, another historian of late imperial China, points out that the notion of a coherent entity called "the West" was a response to ancient perceptions of eastern "oriental despotism." Rowe writes:
"The European self-conception as a culture founded on the ideal of individual liberty, and the contrasting image of Asian societies as repressive and despotic, seems to have originated in classical Greece, possibly as a propaganda device during the Persian Wars. It was pointedly revived in the thought of Montesquieu and other Enlightenment thinkers, pervaded British liberalism, and gained modern social science legitimacy with Max Weber's characterization of China as a "patrimonial state."" - William T. Rowe, Approaches to Modern Chinese Social History, 261.
So the concept is an old one. But it has come to delineate many different geographical boundaries over time. "The West" has grown: initially only encompassing the Greek peninsula, it has now expanded in its modern incarnation to incorporate such far-flung territories as the United States and Australia. The "east" has changed as well. In its older usage, it referred to Europe's Muslim and non-Christian neighbors. But now these regions are "the near East" or "the Middle East" and the notion of the "East" has shifted further outward into Asia, sometimes called the "Far East."
Reading "The road to serfdom" by Hayek suggested that the term "The West" - as we understand the term today - was a remark on countries that existed "west of the Rhine". The term the 'West' was, according to him, a remark on the differences of economic philosophies among European Nations. That is, central economic planning vs. mercantile freedom.
As for why the term is so popular and known, I would speculate that the cold war had a huge factor which still made the term relevant. capitalists vs. communists AKA The West vs. The East.