The West and the Rest of Civilizational Space

On 14 February this year, Marco Rubio declared that there is only one civilization—and that civilization is Western. Rubio’s rhetoric invokes a shared history rooted in Christianity, alongside a common culture, language, heritage and ancestry. The American Secretary of State was speaking to both European pundits and diplomats at the Munich Security Conference.  The theme of the civilizing mission is revived, grounded in claims of ethno-cultural unity and superiority.

We see a celebration of Europe’s colonial past and the return of colonialism. Stuart Hall was prescient when he wrote the seminal essay “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power” in 1992.  In January of this year, I began a series of readings on the essay as part of my public discourse on modern civilizations at the International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilization, International Islamic University Malaysia (ISTAC-IIUM). I started with two earlier texts: the classic Muqaddimah by Ibn Khaldun and the 1978 work by the late Royal Laureate Professor Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas, Islam and Secularism. Taken together, these three texts provide a framework for understanding civilization, history and power.

Hall’s essay is little known in the Islamic world, except for those who study sociology, postcolonialism and cultural studies. Against the backdrop of the genocide in Gaza, which has laid bare Euro-American complicity and the contradictory currents of decline and resurgence, I returned to The West and the Rest, a foundational text in postcolonial theory and historical sociology. The essay dismantles the idea of the “West” as a mere geographical entity, revealing it instead as a concept, an ideology and a tool of hegemony and global power.

Rubio’s 14 February speech, arguably the most explicit pro-colonialist, imperialist pronouncement since the Second World War, extols “Western civilization” as the world’s only future. I told my audience that it is now more important than ever to revisit the idea of the West to understand how the modern world operates and how we are racially, culturally and geopolitically mapped. The West is not a geographical fact, but a historical and ideological construction. “West” and “Western” represent very complex ideas with no simple or single meaning. The work of cultural theorist Stuart Hall deserves renewed attention.

Professor Stuart Hall (1932–2014). © Eamonn McCabe

“The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power” is not merely a historical text read in cultural studies seminars. It functions as a cultural lens to dissect how we produce knowledge. It does not pretend to be neutral. Hall does not claim to be the arbiter of objective truth.  Rather, he exposes the discourse of Western superiority.  As an architect of British cultural studies, Hall challenged Eurocentric sociology. When he established the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham, his primary challenge was to confront the illusion of epistemic and media neutrality.  At the level of popular discourse, he argues that the press does not merely reflect a pre-existing reality. It produces that reality, encodes meaning within a specific ideological framework, and reproduces the “dominant-hegemonic” view of the world to maintain consensus. Hall writes from what Edward W. Said described as one side of the metropolitan divide. Hall’s essay resonates far beyond Britain, including what was once regarded as the “far reaches of the West”: the Malay Archipelago, or Nusantara, known today in postcolonial parlance as Southeast Asia. Rubio’s remarks illustrate that this civilizational framing remains deeply embedded in contemporary Western political discourse. This part of the world has likewise become a foundational element of the Euro-American-centric colonial matrix of power.

Rubio’s 14 February speech, arguably the most explicit pro-colonialist, imperialist pronouncement since the Second World War, extols “Western civilization” as the world’s only future.

The Western gaze did not merely encode a narrative; it constructed an entire episteme, rendering the native invisible and ahistorical. The White gaze renders the Brown epistemically voiceless, disarming histories, identities and ways of knowing. In the process, time and geography themselves are colonized.

Hall, a member of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora in Britain, the colonized subject abroad, articulates his critique of what he saw and experienced as racialized tropes. He understood the tension between where we are from and where we are going. The dominant Western paradigm places us between “routes” and “roots”—a constant process of translation within the dynamics of production (and reproduction) of ourselves through history and power; or rather by grappling with the power—and disempowerment—of history.  This casts an image in the mind’s eye—both verbal and visual. In characterizing the “Western” and the “non-Western”, our understanding is shaped by structures of thought and knowledge that construct a composite picture of who we are.

The centre of power lies in language and discourse—in prose, poetry, digital spaces and algorithms. This is the essence of narrative. As AI increasingly mediates language and discourse, we are drawn into a new frontier of cognitive colonialism. In doing so, it reproduces the logic of older colonial ideologies. AI thus risks becoming an automated instrument for the erasure of non-Western civilizational futures.

If Hall analyses power from within the belly of the Western metropolis, we now see that same power extending beyond it and threatening the very civilizational space of the Rest. Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum, “the medium is the message”, first articulated in his 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, now appears more prophetic than ever.

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Featured Image: Secretary of State Marco Rubio © IMAGO / UPI Photo