Description
What is the future of “The West”? One’s answer to this question will likely depend on one’s understanding of that category: (i) As a seemingly essentialist form of civilisation; (ii) as a historical transatlantic bloc that reached its zenith with NATO; or (iii) as an identity that is contested through the rhetoric of “The West”. Rejecting the first approach as unrigorous, but synthesising and developing the latter two, this paper presents an exploratory study into the remaking of the West. It focusses on two areas: (1) The Anglospheric “war on woke”, a form of reactionary politics against certain kinds of contemporary social justice politics; and (2) “Sinoscepticism”, a catch-all term for the political mobilisation against the (prospective) power of China. These seemingly detached issues are connected together by the so-called defenders of “Western civilisation” as the two major threats facing the West — and occasionally explicitly brought together — thereby representing a new kind of "red scare". Drawing on a span of illustrative examples, ranging from social media memes and basketball, to AUKUS and “Asian NATO” (i.e. the Quad), this paper contributes to debates on the meaning of the West and the future of international liberal order.
