Maximum West

[Kalan]

Seriously if you want to deny Latin America from the west, you'd have to kick out Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy and the other European nations that have been just as dysfunctional in the past century.

No, because they have been, but aren't anymore. So they became "western".
But Wyldcard has started a new topic anyway, in which he defines western as first world livingstandards and democratic. https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=84380

So your beating a dead horse.

 

[Hendryk]

Seriously if you want to deny Latin America from the west, you'd have to kick out Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy and the other European nations that have been just as dysfunctional in the past century.

Exactly. Are Spain, Portugal and Greece part of "the West"? Well, all three were dictatorships well into the 1970s.

 

[Matthais Corvinus]

Exactly. Are Spain, Portugal and Greece part of "the West"? Well, all three were dictatorships well into the 1970s.

I think that quite a good argument can be made that those countries were not part of "the West." Spain and Portugal were both being ruled by what amounted to Iberian "Caudillos" (sp?). And Greece was not a part of the "the West" until quite recently.

All three of those countries benefited greatly from their geographic proximity to more industrialized and democratizied Europe (UK, France, Low Countries). If Europe's First world was less interested in helping out their less developed geographic compatriots, then I would argue that those countries would be far less politically developed then they now are.

Its not that I'm saying that Latin America is some kind of Sub-Saharan Africa, I'm just saying that during the 19th century and into the 20th it was very much a region in which other powers acted in, rather than being a power which acted upon other regions. And that its political structures were (indeed are) distinctly less developed then comtemporaries in North America and Europe.

 

[Faeelin]

I think that quite a good argument can be made that those countries were not part of "the West." Spain and Portugal were both being ruled by what amounted to Iberian "Caudillos" (sp?). And Greece was not a part of the "the West" until quite recently.

So, nations can fall out of the West?

I dislike this term, because it's vague enough to mean anything. And therefore means nothing.