News Snapshot:
East and west German citizens celebrate in 1989 as they climb the Berlin wall at the Brandenburg gate. The Cold War helped to intensify a sense of Western identity. Photograph: Fabrizio Bensch/ Reuters In times of rapid change we struggle to find a vocabulary and ideas to express it. These often take an ideological form that distorts and obscures more than it reveals. “The West” is one of these changing ideological terms in contemporary geopolitical discourse. Firmly ensconced in the political geography of the Cold War years, its liberal democratic values and market capitalism were counterpoised to the collective and...
