🌍 Western influence 💭 Belief in Western values 🤠 Cowboy style

Westernism

8.1

Belief that Western political, economic, and cultural ways are better and should be followed

noun
/ˈwɛstərnɪzəm/

Formal

: occidentalismo

Many countries have adopted elements of Westernism in their governance to promote democracy and individual freedoms.

You know, there's this Russian anti westernism, Chinese anti westernism, Middle Eastern anti westernism, all, all types.

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Examples

Unfortunately, this point is missed not only by radical pluralists from the Left but also by Great Books advocates who conflate or confuse their essentialism with Westernism and Americanism.

Academic text (1991)
By organizing the public sphere around the ideology of Westernism, the state was able to incorporate whatever it imagined constituted Western-ness into its display.

Academic text (2000)
A clear-cut distinction between Westernism and Islamism came out in the one-party period.

Academic text (2018)
One year after the famous Afro-Asian Unity Conference in Bandung in 1955, about which Wright wrote a book, black intellectuals around the world, through Negritude, through Pan-Africanism, were rejecting the very Westernism that made them possible but made their situation, as they saw it, impossible.

Academic text (1998)
Each of the four other main political-ideological movements in Turkey, classified as Ottomanism, Westernism, Islamism, and Turkism, especially after the period of the 2nd Constitution, placed varying levels of emphasis on the protection of certain ideas and institutions that were remnants of the past.

Academic text (2000)
(n8) Kemalism, a form of authoritarian Westernism, not only became the ideology that created a new "white" Turk but was also deeply involved in the establishment and regulation of a state-monitored public sphere.

Academic text (2000)
The spread of Westernism around the globe has sparked debates about cultural identity and values.
Critics argue that Westernism disregards the rich traditions of non-Western societies in favor of a singular worldview.

Synonyms

Eurocentrism

vsWesternism

1 9.6

Seeing European people, values or history as more important than others

promotes that region's political economic and cultural values should be adopted by others

ethnocentricity

vsWesternism

Offensive

1 9.8

A belief that your own culture is better and used to judge other cultures

focuses on promoting an external region's values as superior and to be adopted

cultural chauvinism

vsWesternism

Offensive

8.9

Thinking your own culture is better than other cultures

argues for adoption of another region's political economic and cultural systems

Surface Forms

Westernism singular

Westernisms plural

Morphology

Westernism = western (transparent) = western + ism

Typical noun formation where '-ism' denotes a doctrine or ideology derived from 'western'; the ideological sense is directly signalled by '-ism'.

Etymology

Westernism joins Western, meaning 'from the west' (Europe and North America), with -ism, meaning a 'belief' or 'doctrine' like in patriotism. So Westernism can mean the belief that Western political, economic, or cultural values should be followed.