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The widespread assumption that peoples of many nations are growing ever more like twenty-first-century Euro-Americans, that these are identical with Western civilization, and that something like Western civilization is mankind's future may well be the biggest barrier to understanding our world. In fact, the most important question of all, whether the West can remain the West, is as uncertain as how other civilizations may develop. Confidence in universal, permanent Westernization is supported by appearances. Anyone traveling across the continents notices diminishing differences in how disparate peoples dress and in the technology they use in daily life. Here, Codevilla determines whether and to what extent the West itself may retain the qualities and that heritage. Adapted from the source document.

For a long time now discussions on European identity have been deeply embedded in political discourses of the old continent. It has often been said that Europe has always been the idea present in the minds of the enlightened Europeans (not to mention rulers of holy empires), and that the present process of integration is only a natural realisation of a spiritual condition called European culture. Leaving alone the question whether it makes sense to speak of European culture in the times when the classical model of education has largely gone out of use, we nevertheless have to have a closer look at the origin of our contemporary situation and ask ourselves the uneasy question whether the Europe we are talking about here, the Europe of the last fifty years, the post-war Europe of market economy and post-colonial nostalgia has been, in fact, European at all. [fragm. tekstu]