It hasn't been a directional term for centuries. Everyone intuitively knows this based on the usage but, every now and then, someone like you thinks they are clever and nobody else understands.
Which is wild, cause Americans also love Rome and it's influence in western culture, and Latin America literally speaks languages that are direct descendants of Latin.
Yep. This is the definition I use.
But it makes no sense to use them as topological area boundaries. It's a globe, nothing is "in the west". Things can just be "west of something" which really just is shorthand for "you'll get there faster going west than east".
Plenty of people genuinely believed that if you were to navigate to the West of Europe you would fall off the border of the world (well, some still do).
What about Africa? North and South America?
> Plenty of people genuinely believed that if you were to navigate to the West of Europe you would fall off the border of the world (well, some still do).
Did they? Who in particular are you referencing here? Are you perhaps falling for the myth of the flat earth[1]?
An outright majority of the world’s population was, and still is, in Asia, so I'm not sure what this split between is supposed to refer to. If you mean Europe was #2 behind Asi, that was true until the 1980s if the Americas are counted as one continent, otherwise the 1990s when Africa took the #2 spot, not “a couple centuries ago”.
It gets unconfusing if you realize it just means White.
It definitely does not. Russia, for example, would be considered "White", but is decidedly not part of "the West".
Also the "only in the Northern Hemisphere" part goes out the window as soon as Australia is mentioned.
It doesn't matter that Canada and USA have strong Native populations, "it's different in the south".
In my view the "you're not West" discourse is just another tool to fuck with the souther hemisphere. Fucks you in the head to get this crap from "both sides".
In terms of Latin America being a part of the West or not, that's more interesting. I'm currently reading Samuel P. Huntington's "A Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order" and in it he talks a lot about civilizations which he defines as the highest cultural grouping of people short of what makes us human. Language, law, and religion in Latin America largely derive from Europe, although there are other aspects like economics that tend can differ. Some people consider Latin America as part of the West, others believe it's peripheral to the West or its part of its own civilization as Huntington does.
As others have pointed out Russia is not part of the West and at least according to Huntington would be placed in the Orthodox Civilization. Interestingly Huntington also argues that Greece, despite being the center of Classical Civilization which is the bases for Western Civilization, is not a part of the West, rather they too are Orthodox.
Regardless of whether you agree with these groupings, I think distilling it down to skin color is incorrect and not useful. The West itself is not even remotely homogenous in this aspect. You wouldn't go to sections of the Deep South in the US and declare it as not being a part of the West anymore than you would include Belarus as part of the West.
There is a saying in Florida, that the farther North you go, the more South you get.
It doesn't even make sense there. It's not really a logical group of things that are geographically West of anything. The abstract cultural idea of "Western Civilization" or "the West" are poorly named.
I’m not sure there is one simple & correct definition of “the West”.
