Occident

History of the term

The adjectival term "Occidental" has been used to mean cultures, peoples, countries, European rugs, and goods from the Occident. "Occidental" means generally "western". It is a traditional designation (especially when capitalized) for anything belonging to the Occident or "West" (for Europe), and especially of its Western culture. It indicated the western direction in historical astronomy, often abbreviated "Occ".

In Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of its Enemies (2004), Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit said that nationalist and nativist resistance to the West replicates Eastern-world responses against the socioeconomic forces of modernization, which originated in Western culture, among utopian radicals and conservative nationalists who viewed capitalism, liberalism, and secularism as forces destructive of their societies and cultures. While the early responses to the West were a genuine encounter between alien cultures, many of the later manifestations of Occidentalism betray the influence of Western ideas upon Eastern intellectuals, such as the supremacy of the nation-state, the Romantic rejection of rationality, and the spiritual impoverishment of the citizenry of liberal democracies.

Buruma and Margalit trace that resistance to German Romanticism and to the debates, between the Westernizers and the Slavophiles in 19th century Russia, and show that like arguments appear in the ideologies of Zionism, Maoism, Islamism, and Imperial Japanese nationalism. Nonetheless, Alastair Bonnett rejects the analyses of Buruma and Margalit as Eurocentric, and said that the field of Occidentalism emerged from the interconnection of Eastern and Western intellectual traditions.