Is Latin America Western?

Yes, we are very multicultural in the sense that we have strong Italian, French and German adding to the Spanish base (actually we have more Italian influence than Spanish), plus minority influences too (Slavic, Irish, Danish, etc).

In Argentina, if you study at any university, you need to know English, no matter the subject. In every school there's English too. If you go to Buenos Aires almost all the youth speaks English.

It's a matter of class too, the middle class learns English to position themselves in a sort of higher status in the liberal Americanized world. Some time ago the same hapenned with French here, now it's English. 

We are Western indeed, but the question is not an easy one.

Modern Western Culture includes freethought, democracy, human rights, etc; and some countries in Latin America do not follow this. Though, it's still Western, denying it would be like saying that Nazi Germany or Franco's Spain wasn't Western.

Now, Argentina is not only Western but also modernized. Our most important thinker, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, had some ideas for this countries that would have probably make us part of the First World if we followed them all. We did have setbacks but we are still Western.

As for the race, we are Whiter than many parts of the USA, Argentina is 70-80% White and Buenos Aires is around 90-95%.

I know, though, that there are some people that consider that because we had a dictatorship and so we cannot be Western, but there's no way you can correctly say Argentina is not Western but Spain or Portugal are, not even by that standards.

We have five Nobel Laureates (even when genious like Borges didn't get one), I know it's not much but it's more than New Zealand (3) or Greece (2).

People always think we are like Mexico or Brasil, well, let me show you a picture of our people in Crespo (Entre Rios, Argentina): http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archivo:Multitud_Crespo.jpg

And here's a famous Argentine model, "Luisana Lopilato": http://i42.tinypic.com/mwte90.jpg

Do you still think we are "American Indian"?

And lastly, we are not poor. We have the 31th largest nominal GDP, and the 23rd largest by purchasing power. Also, when we first started as an economy we were considered similar to Canada and Australia, it was only later that we had a big setback, but even with that I don't consider Argentina a poor country. Buenos Aires's Human Development is 0,923, higher than Czech Republic for example (0,903) or Portugal (0,909); and much higher than a country like Poland (0,880). You consider all of those countries as Western, don't you?

Latin American is not an identity by the way, it's just a word that Americans invented to refer to everything in the Americas that is not Canada and the USA. Mexico is nothing like Cuba, that is nothing like Peru, that is nothing like Argentina.

Latin America is for the most part Western. Sure, it has a great number of mixed race Mestizos and some blend of Native culture in it, but it is the culture brought on by the European immirgrants that are prevalent, particularly language and religion which do play a large part in culture. Also, it is important to note that there are many descendants of immirgrants from Northern and Eastern Europe in countries such as Brazil and Argentina. So really like Canada and US it has people from all over Europe.

Originally posted by Reginmund Oh they are. They have adopted Western clothing styles, hair styles, entertainment, technology, even thoughts. Prior to Western influence no Chinese wore suits, they didn't watch movies or listen to pop music, they didn't have cars, railroads, TVs, computers, internet or skyscrapers of steel and concrete, neither did they think in terms of communism and capitalism. I'm not saying Western culture has replaced the Chinese one, but it has certainly pervaded their society and altered it beyond recognition to anyone who lived before the transformation took place. Most of this is also true for developed African and Middle Eastern countries, and those for whom it isn't true are considered backwards for that very reason.

Same goes for the West itself the past 100 years though ;)

Hello.  I am the person who actually wrote the article.  I'm pleased to see that it has generated such a huge amount of discussion!

Originally posted by pinguin I don't express myself well, then. What I meant is that the West gives quite a lot more merit to the Greek-Roman world than to the contributions of the Middle East, or even China.

Originally posted by pinguin     Indeed. Europe and the West hardly recognizes how much is indebt with the Middle East.

Originally posted by Reginmund To avoid the same misunderstanding I’ve been the victim of before I’ll say right away that I don’t use the word “civilization” in a moral sense, to me “civilized” merely implies a relatively high level of development. From this POV it doesn’t make sense to say Nazi Germany or the colonial powers were uncivilized for causing tens of millions of deaths, on the contrary the fact that they were able to kill so efficiently merely speaks in favour of how advanced their civilization was. In the same way it doesn’t make sense to say a tribal society living in mudhut villages is civilized even if it has gender equality, respect for human rights, democracy etc.

It is an other concept of civilisation, I tend to think the most objective criteria to call a nation civilised is not only technological advances and the best organisation to mass exterminate human beings, but moral and human values, like democracy and human rights for instance.

The Graeco-Roman culture never pervaded so many societies on such a vast scale over so short a time.

Egypt and the rest of the Middle-East dominated by Greek dynasties quickly Hellenised themselves though, Carthage and Numidia were influenced by Greece as well. In the huge territory Rome conquered, the whole Mediterranea and surrounding areas, the locals have been Romanised and adopted the civilisation of their conquerants. This legacy is reflected by the Latin languages of Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium, which were once Celtic speaking, not to mention Romania.

Today people speak Western languages

How do people speak Western languages? People speak their native tongues, and many people can speak English as a second language because it appears to be one of the easiest tongue of the world and is universally intelligible.

You're using a writing system originating from the ancient Arab World to communicate on the net right now, even when you write in Norwegian in everyday life, at school or university, at work, it doesn't mean you're Middle-Easternised.

wear Western clothing and think Western thoughts from the Inuits of North America to the harbors of Shanghai. A mere two hundred years ago the picture was quite different.

Chinese are not adopting Western culture, and it is logical the Inuits are "Westernised" because they are living under a Western government in a Western society. Americas and Oceania are exceptions because they're mostly inhabited by European people, but Africa and Asia follow their own cultures, especially Islamic societies.

You can say the world is Westernised because people use cars, besides the concept of transporting human beings and goods by wheeled vehicles existed in the Middle-East since ancient times, and having added a motor to make it easier and less archaic doesn't change the basis of the concept.

But if you base your reasoning that people are Westernised on a simple element as clothing, which are not seen as Western clothes as said above because they now became standard in the world and are only Western varieties of clothes that always existed long before (trousers, tee-shirts, skirts, and so on), not to mention they're mostly made with cotton, an other thing brought to Westerners by the Muslim Arabs, then one can say Westerners have a Middle-Eastern life-style since the concept of mass grouping humans to inhabit in a common sedentary settlement called city is purely Middle-Eastern, same for your house and your town's shops and buildings, because they contain glasses everywhere.

An other major argument is the Middle-Eastern religion of Christianism, and its moral values, they shaped the European society and still dominate Europe and the West to this day, not to mention Algerian Saint Augustine whose theology is the basis of the teachings of the various branches of European Christianity (Orthodoxism, Catholicism, Protestantism including Norwegian Lutherism).

Sugar is found in every basic dish and noone could accept to be deprived from it, using sugar is also a concept brought into Europe by Middle-Easterners, just like drinking coffee ,  Western people drink coffee every morning at home, at work, in coffee shops, same for the act of using Arabic algebra constantly in everyday life for everything from calculating how much flour is needed to bake a certain number of cookies to figuring out how long it will take to travel by car at a certain speed to a destination that is a specific distance away.

The earliest traces of books, writing, sciences, mathematics, and banking, are found in countries like Iraq. The simple acts of writting something, educating yourself by reading books, in other words the basis of your life, is influenced by the Middle-East.

Western economy, industry, sciences, all work with mathematical branches adopted from the Midlde-East, and just like Latin letters are found everywhere in Western cities while they're derivated from Semitic scripts from Lebanon and Palestine (same for the Cyrillic alphabet in Eastern Europe), the Arabic numerals are found everywhere in the West and Europe too (in the whole world actually, as a result of European colonisation), but were created in North Africa during the Middle-Ages. Arabic numerals are based on the system of the civilisation of the Indus Valley (today Pakistan, and a part of India), adopted by Middle-Eastern Arabs but changed in their current form (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9) by Maghrebi Arabs.

If you add the fact Europeans grow food by cultivating their lands to survive, and the fact they practise animal husbandry to drink milk and eat meat and eggs, or to make clothes with then you can say Europeans are totally Middle-Eastern, no matter how many centuries lasted since their ancient ancestors adopted such foreign habits from other civilisations.


I still doubt you feel Middle-Easternised in every day life, and If you're a woman, you probably take care of your body and use cosmetics, an other idea influenced by Middle-Eastern women, and I doubt Western women feel they're being Middle-Easternising themselves every 3 weeks when they remove their body hair through sugaring, the most common method of epilation, originating from the Middle-East too. By the way, I do not feel I am becoming Italian when I make pizza or spaghetti at home, but if you trace the exact origins, then yes it is Italian, even if some sources say Muslims introduced pasta in Sicily in the Middle-Ages.





Edited by goldenstar - 26-Mar-2009 at 18:29

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Originally posted by goldenstar It is a bit exaggerated to say it is the only viable model of civilisation, not a long time ago it was the civilisation that put the whole world 2 times in chaos and caused tens of millions of deaths because at this time the West was dominated by totalitarian regimes and brutal colonial powers self-proclaiming themselves democracies, in the sense of letting men (and not women) choose their politicians, even if they practised racist apartheids and conquered the world not differently from the Hitlerian or Stalinian governments they accused to be evil.

To avoid the same misunderstanding I’ve been the victim of before I’ll say right away that I don’t use the word “civilization” in a moral sense, to me “civilized” merely implies a relatively high level of development. From this POV it doesn’t make sense to say Nazi Germany or the colonial powers were uncivilized for causing tens of millions of deaths, on the contrary the fact that they were able to kill so efficiently merely speaks in favour of how advanced their civilization was. In the same way it doesn’t make sense to say a tribal society living in mudhut villages is civilized even if it has gender equality, respect for human rights, democracy etc.

Originally posted by goldenstar But Western is not only a way to govern, it is especially an identity and a culture, rooted in European populations and their descendents in the New World, and I don't think the world is going to become Western in this sense as whole nations used to Romanise or Hellenise themselves.

The Graeco-Roman culture never pervaded so many societies on such a vast scale over so short a time. Today people speak Western languages, wear Western clothing and think Western thoughts from the Inuits of North America to the harbors of Shanghai. A mere two hundred years ago the picture was quite different.

Originally posted by Pebbles Just a side note   US regards Russia Japan & Eastern Europe as " second-world " nations.

 

Eastern Europe and Russia, maybe, but Japan? That makes no sense. The country is as technologically advanced as the foremost Western nations, their economy is bigger than Germany’s and their society is arguably more well-organized than any in the West.

Originally posted by pinguin For instance, Bush confussed Slovenia with Slovakia.

Who doesn't? The Slovaks call their own country Slovensko for Christ's sake.