In Praise of the Western World

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Today it is widely reported that the West is in crisis, with Europe at the forefront. There are plenty of arguments to sustain this claim, as the ranks of Europe's critics currently confirm, including those who continue to try and attribute Europe with anything bad that happens in the world. Franco La Cecla, however, warns us not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, as this unstoppable disenchantment is closing our eyes to the exception the West continues to represent, and which an external gaze appears to perceive more readily than an internal one. Despite capitalism, world wars, colonialism and neoliberalism (a list that could certainly be much extended), the West is in fact seen by the rest of the world as a place that is host to an enviable tollerance, in which the individual, women and children can exercise their own rights irrespective of any form of religious creed, ethnicity, clan, tribe or family; a place in which a form of citizenship is practiced that allows the establishing of free, revocable bonds, an idea founded in Pericles' democracy and then reformulated in the light of concepts of fraternity and equality. It is this extraordinary exception that risks being thrown away, when instead we ought not only make claim to it, but re-take it for ourselves and radicalize it.