Cold war liberalism in West Germany: Richard Löwenthal and ‘Western civilization’

ABSTRACT Richard Löwenthal’s response to the challenges of ‘1968’ was more complex than that of most of his liberal colleagues. He did not simply remain beholden to the interpretative patterns of a German ‘special path’ (Sonderweg). He also, and increasingly so, drew on the conceptual framework of ‘Western civilization’ to make sense of and cope with the socio-cultural transformations of his times. What many like-minded intellectuals perceived solely as a ‘deviation from the West’, he also viewed as a ‘crisis of the West’. This article argues that this transnationally ‘Western’ stance was part and parcel of Löwenthal’s intellectual profile as ‘cold war liberal’. This was a relatively rare species in Cold War Germany, and Löwenthal was rather exceptional in his sustained engagement with the topic of ‘Western civilization’. Compared with luminaries such as Carl Joachim Friedrich, Ernst Fraenkel or Karl Loewenstein, Richard Löwenthal may be lesser known in English-speaking scholarship, but he makes for a particularly instructive case when discussing ‘cold war liberalism’ in West Germany. With its focus on the spatialization of political thought, and ‘the West’ as a spatial imaginary, this article also seeks to contribute to the growing discussion of how to ‘spatialize’ intellectual history.

Liberal scholars in the Federal Republic typically viewed the student activism of the mid and late 1960s as yet another fatal deviation of German history from 'the West'. 2 While this may be surprising given the transnational scope of the student protest, West German liberals often fell back on the critical 'special path' paradigm that had gained currency in the previous decade. 3 They had been determined to drag the Federal Republic away, through incorporation in a 'Western value community', from what they perceived as the murky currents of a 'German special consciousness', and they saw their goal torpedoed by radical students who had a rather ambiguous relationship to 'the West'. 4 Löwenthal's response to the challenge of student activism was, however, more complex than that of most of his liberal colleagues. 5 He did not simply remain beholden to the interpretative patterns of a German 'special path'; he also, and increasingly so, drew on the conceptual framework of 'Western civilization' to make sense of and cope with the socio-cultural transformations of his times. What many like-minded intellectuals perceived solely as a 'deviation from the West', he also viewed as a 'crisis of the West'. This article argues that this transnationally 'Western' stance was part and parcel of Löwenthal's intellectual profile as 'cold war liberal'. This was a relatively rare species in Cold War Germany, and Löwenthal was rather exceptional in his sustained engagement with the topic of 'Western civilization'. Compared with luminaries such as Carl Joachim Friedrich, Ernst Fraenkel or Karl Loewenstein, Richard Löwenthal may be lesser known in English-speaking scholarship, but he makes for a particularly instructive case when discussing 'cold war liberalism' in West Germany.
One of the key issues this article seeks to address is the extent to which a cold war liberal's intellectual trajectory, as well as the space of action and opportunity available to a cold war liberal, was shaped by some of the principal dynamics of the cold war. Certainly, 'cold war liberalism' drew on intellectual resources that predated the cold war. But the question this concept prompts us to ask is how those resources were activated, adapted, and redeployed in specific cold war contexts. In line with much other scholarship, 6 this article highlights the mid and late 1960s as a watershed moment, and socio-cultural transformations at that time were no doubt also driven by factors beyond any cold war dynamics. The point this article aims to make, however, is that, in Löwenthal's case, the framework used as a sense-making strategy to come to grips with those transformations had been appropriated and forged very much in response to the crystallization of cold war bipolarity.
The article first provides an overview of various conceptual approaches to West German liberalism, before reflecting on the concept of 'cold war liberalism' as a heuristic device and organizing principle. It then offers a profile of Richard Löwenthal as cold war liberal, firstly demonstrating how he appropriated the spatio-political framework of 'the West', as well as elucidating which spatial contexts were key to this transformation, and secondly exploring the ways in which he deployed this framework to make sense of the socio-cultural transformations of the 1960s and 1970s. With its focus on the spatialization of political thought, and 'the West' as a spatial imaginary, this article also seeks to contribute to the growing discussion of how to 'historiciz[e] conceptions of space' 7 and of how to '"spatialize" intellectual history'. 8

Cold war liberalism
'Cold war liberalism' is not a prominent concept in the historiography on West Germany. If distinctions are made between different variants of liberalism, they typically include 'social liberalism', 'left liberalism', 'ordoliberalism' or 'neoliberalism'. 9 Scholarship on West Germany's avowed standardbearer of liberalism, Ralf Dahrendorf, usually avoids the label 'cold war liberalism', 10 and so do studies that, in principle, would make for likely candidates in this regard, such as German Émigrés and the Ideological Foundations of the Cold War, or Bringing Cold War Democracy to West Berlin. 11 The same is true for the important research, carried out in the 1990s, that emerged from the Tübingen-based 'Westernization' project. Focussing, for instance, on the Congress for Cultural Freedom, or the contribution of socialist émigrés to the 'Westernization' of German Social Democracy, the project examined intellectual transfers between the United States, Britain and West Germany. The main purpose was to explain West Germany's intellectual transformation between 1945 and 1970; the key argument was the emergence of an 'Atlantic value community' grounded in ideas of 'consensus liberalism'. 12 The term 'consensus liberalism', which had not been a reference point among West Germans at the time, was imported from US scholarship as an analytical tool to capture both a 'liberal consensus' holding sway in US political culture between the late 1940s and early 1960s and a consensual compromise between individual freedom and social equality more generally. 13 As an ideal type, 'consensus liberalism' was defined as a distinct if multi-faceted mode of thought consisting of an anti-totalitarian and especially anti-Communist standpoint; a commitment to pluralism, parliamentary democracy, and the market economy; an orientation towards political freedom and a social reformist welfare state. Rooted in 'New Deal liberalism' (which was another crucial concept for the Tübingen group), 14 this cluster of political ideas and attitudes corresponded with an understanding that notions of 'negative freedom', i.e. freedom from governmental restraint, were modified and complemented by notions of 'positive freedom', especially the notion of a government actively creating the conditions necessary for individuals to be self-sufficient or to achieve something approaching self-realization, or self-actualization.
Research on 'consensus liberalism' has been complemented, both chronologically and thematically, by the now vibrant scholarship on post-1970 'neoliberalism', 15 as well as studies exploring, from various methodological angles, the shifting relationship and cross-fertilization between liberalism and conservatism during the 1960s and 1970s. 16 Of particular note is Jens Hacke's investigation of the so-called Ritter School, named after the Münster philosopher Joachim Ritter, whose students Hermann Lübbe, Odo Marquard and Robert Spaemann, very much in response to the New Left and student activism, formulated a political philosophy Hacke calls 'liberal conservatism'. Dismissed as 'neo-conservative' by their intellectual rivals at the time, this philosophy was held together by a scepticism towards grand schemes of societal transformation and a resistance to 'neo-Marxism'. More specifically, it consisted of a range of predispositions such as a belief in 'common sense' and 'practical reason'; political stability and parliamentary government; academic freedom and civic norms such as tolerance, self-discipline and achievement (Leistung); and the imperative to put the burden of proof on those who sought change as opposed to those keen to preserve the status quo. Not least, it encompassed a proclivity for historical tradition, regional heritage, religion and culture as counterpoints, or counterbalances, compensating for the repercussions of modernization and technical progress. Most notably, 'liberal conservatism' is not only identified as an important building block for the 'intellectual foundation of the Federal Republic'; it is also placed in the transnational context of 'cold war liberalism'. Hacke is, in fact, one of very few scholars of twentieth-century Germany engaging with this term. 17 Contrary to 'liberal conservatism', however, the term 'cold war liberalism' remains underdefined. To be sure, scholars such as Jan-Werner Müller have elucidated with great subtlety a number of key featuresfeatures that mostly dovetail with adjacent concepts such as those discussed above: a philosophical stance of 'value pluralism and antideterminism'; a political standpoint informed by 'negative liberty, liberal constitutionalism and social security'; a preference for continuous adjustment, balance and compromise; and an anti-Rousseauistic commitment to a 'constraint form of democracy'. Crucially, 'cold war liberalism's' kinship with Judith Shklar's 'liberalism of fear' (1989) has been plausibly stated, and there is little doubt about the significance of the 'experience of totalitarianism'. 18 What is less clear, though, is the significance of the cold war itself. 19 Shklar's emphasis on 'historical memory' and 'never again', while pertinent, may not be specific enough for an ideal-type definition of 'cold war liberalism'. It is no coincidence that the term 'cold war' is conspicuous by its absence in her reflections on 'the liberalism of fear', which are much more oriented to the temporal ('the history of the world since 1914') and the universal ('the evil of cruelty and fear') than the spatial and geopolitical peculiarities of the cold war. 20 I would argue, instead, that ideological bipolarity, the geopolitical competition between 'East' and 'West', and the unambiguous commitment to fighting Soviet communism, though not sufficient features in themselves, ought to be at the core of any analytical framework of 'cold war liberalism'. 21 This was not only a 'liberalism after the failure of liberalism'; it was also a liberalism shaped by the very current exigencies and delimitations of the cold war. 22 As indicated, there is much overlap between the terms 'consensus liberalism', 'New Deal liberalism', 'liberal conservatism' and 'cold war liberalism'to which one could add other neighbouring terms such as 'Vital Center liberalism', 'social democratic liberalism' and 'tempered liberalism'. 23 What matters is that each of them, as analytical tool or heuristic device, opens up slightly different avenues of research and enables slightly different conversations. Which term to choose is primarily a matter of geographical and chronological scope, as well as analytical emphasis and argumentative thrust. Not everything during the cold war was about the cold war, and not every liberal in the cold war was a 'cold war liberal'. The term 'cold war liberalism' directs attention to the 'intellectual cold wars' of the time, 24 and prompts scholars to determine 'how far intellectual life in the Cold War was about the Cold War'. 25 The remainder of this article hones in on Richard Löwenthal as a German intellectual who in many ways can be seen as prototypical of a 'cold war liberal'both in thought and action. He was involved in the work of a whole range of cold war agencies; his intellectual trajectory was significantly shaped by the cold war; and he became West Germany's most prominent defender of 'Western civilization'. He very much fits the image of the 'politically engaged' thinker described by Müller in his Reflections on Cold War Liberalismboth 'militant' and 'dialogic'and he was also typical of those continental European figures who shied away from the 'l-word' and primarily understood themselves as social democrats. 26 The article's main argument is that for Löwenthal the language of 'Western civilization' offered an effective way to appropriate the ideology of 'cold war liberalism' without resorting to the terms 'liberal' or 'liberalism', which among socialists and non-socialists alike were much discredited in early cold-war West Germany. 27 In contrast to the US discourse on 'the West', which from early on also comprised conservative 'Western' self-assertions, 28 German conservatives of the early cold-war years were still enthralled by explicitly anti-'Western' notions of the Abendland ('land of evening', or Occident). 29 In other words, positive renderings of 'the West' typically conveyed liberal norms and ideas (rule of law, separation of powers, parliamentary government, and so on), as well as progressive meanings of temporalized space: 'moving westward' meant 'moving forward'. 30 'Fear' was neither a central category for Löwenthal nor a characteristic temperament (contrary, for instance, to his fellow intellectual Ernst Fraenkel), and it is one of this article's contentions that 'cold war liberalism' was neither by default one-sidedly defensive nor necessarily without a critical edge towards the status quo. 31 Like many West German liberals, Löwenthal had conceived of himself as part of a progressive force pushing for political reform and offering intellectual critique, and it is no wonder that he first saw student activists as harbingers of a much-needed democratization of West Germany's political culture. It was only when gradually realizing that the most articulate exponents of student protest envisioned a 'democratized' society very different from his own visions of the future that he became increasingly concerned about the stability of the Federal Republic's still fledgling political order and placed more and more emphasis on preserving rather than changing the status quoa status quo, of course, that was looking rather different after West Germany's passing of the democratic litmus test of a peaceful change of government in 1969 and with a social-liberal coalition under Chancellor Willy Brandt.

Profile of a cold war liberal
Who was Richard Löwenthal? 32 As mentioned, he taught as Professor of International Relations, with a focus on world communism, at the Free University Berlina main conduit of transatlantic knowledge transfer, and part and parcel of West Berlin's liberal cold-war image as an 'outpost of freedom' 33 and 'showcase of the West'. 34 In the 1920s, Löwenthal had studied economics, law, and sociology in Berlin and Heidelberg, and had been a member of the Communist Party before being ostracized, as he did not toe the new party line that declared 'social fascism' to be the party's 'main enemy'. In 1933, he joined a left-socialist resistance group called 'New Beginning' (Neu Beginnen). 35 He soon had to leave Germany and spent most of his exile in London, where he started working for the news agency Reuters and was later hired by the liberal weekly The Observer. In 1947, he became a British citizen. While working for the Observer, Löwenthal became a regular contributor to various high-brow journals such as Der Monat, Encounter, The Twentieth Century, and Dissent. From the mid-1960s, he frequently wrote for the liberal weekly Die Zeit as well as the New York Times Magazine. He appeared on the Berlin-based Radio in the American Sector (RIAS), which like the 'America Houses' had been created by the U.S. military government following the end of the war, and also worked for its international sibling Radio Free Europe. 36 A self-stylized 'voice of the West', RIAS sought to convey cultural norms and political values from the socalled 'free world' to the zones of Communist oppression. 37 Löwenthal's commitments to transnational networks of 'cold war liberalism' were manifold. He was part of the Trilateral Commission, the International Council on the Future of the University, the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies, and was also an early member of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, widely known as the 'quintessential institution of Cold War liberalism'. 38 Löwenthal became part of a transnational elite, firmly embedded in the networks of prominent 'cold war liberals' such as Edward Shils, Daniel Bell and Raymond Aron. Most of his major works and essay collections found publishers on both sides of the pond. With fellowships at Harvard, Columbia, Berkeley and Stanford, Löwenthal established a presence in the U.S. in the overlapping fields of journalism and academia. Against this background it is hardly surprising that the political scientist and éminence grise of U.S. foreign policy, Zbigniew Brzezinski, recruited Löwenthal for the think tank of the Trilateral Commission. 39 The Trilateral Commission was formed in 1973 to discuss current problems common to Western Europe, Japan, and North America. In 1977, Löwenthal served as principal drafter of a trilateral task force on East-West relations. 40 At the same time, Löwenthal was an integral part of West Germany's Labour Movement and in high demand as a political adviser and programmatic thinker in the Social Democratic Party. 41 The former intellectual leader of 'New Beginning' played a vital role in defining the SPD's relationship to communism and in drafting a catalogue of basic values which was meant to inform Social Democratic policy. Most importantly, he authored an intensely-debated discussion paper on the 'identity and future' of German Social Democracy, which delineated the boundaries of the SPD's core constituency in response to the foundation of the Green Party in 1980. His programmatic work for the SPD was very much informed by his commitment to 'Western values', which in his understanding comprised a commitment to pragmatic reason and the Weberian work ethic. It was on these grounds that he dismissed the Greens' critique of industrial society, as well as attempts, especially by party leader and former Chancellor Willy Brandt, to open up German Social Democracy to trends of 'subculture' and 'counterculture' (Gegenund Aussteigerkultur). 42 Löwenthal's engagement in party politics received wide press coverage, with peaks of attention around 1968 and 1980. This made him a central reference point both in the closed associational publics of the SPD and the spheres of public debate and mass media.

Long road West
The path of Löwenthal's intellectual journey to 'the West' was long and circuitous. He started off as the member of a Communist student association in the Weimar Republic, and found himself signing up, in 1950, as a founding member of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. How can we account for this intellectual transformation? Three factors stick out: first, the shock waves sent out by the Soviet Union; second, the specific circumstances of Löwenthal's time in exile; and third, the spatial logic of the cold war that became apparent in 1946-47.
Typical of many Communist and left-socialist intellectuals, Löwenthal became increasingly disenchanted with the social experiment of the Soviet Union's Communist Party. It was the combination of the Moscow 'show trials', the persecution of anti-Stalinist Marxists by the Soviet secret police during the Spanish Civil War and, of course, the Hitler-Stalin-Pact, which caused a lasting alienation from a country initially perceived as a beacon of promise. While, in 1936, he still praised the Soviet Union as a 'tremendously progressive state […] freed from the fetters of capitalism' 43 , he increasingly castigated the 'totalitarian degeneration' of Stalin's dictatorship. 44 His critical stance to the Soviet Union, however, did not imply the embrace of a system of parliamentary government nor did it include a more conciliatory attitude towards capitalism. It was not until the second half of the war that he gradually abandoned his belief in a proletarian dictatorship as the essential prerequisite of socialism.
There were two main reasons for this transformation of Löwenthal's political thought: first, the close interaction between German socialist organizations in London, which included the moderate leadership of the Social Democrats, and which fostered an atmosphere of constructive discourse and political compromise. Formed in 1941, the 'Union of German socialist organizations in Great Britain' provided a particularly important venue of intellectual exchange. 45 However, as left-socialist émigrés who fled to America underwent similar intellectual transformations without engaging in a closer cooperation with leading Social Democrats, a further influencing factor must be found.
Emigration studiesand this is the second reasonhave stressed the importance of acculturation, i.e. the transformation of norms and beliefs through cultural contacts. 46 Richard Löwenthal provides a good example of this process. He adapted to the new environment with an ease for which some of his friends admired him. He stood out not only because of his job at Reuters but also because of his contacts to British socialists, which were much closer than those enjoyed by most of his friends from 'New Beginning'. From the middle of the Second World War, Löwenthal became a regular contributor to Tribune, Labour's independent weekly, and to Victor Gollancz's monthly The Left News. And he also joined the newly-founded International Bureau of the Fabian Society, a key forum of intellectual exchange, to which he remained committed for many years to come.
By the end of the war, however, Löwenthal had not yet fallen for 'the West'. In his book Beyond Capitalism, which came out in 1947, he demanded the formation of a socialist Europe as a 'third force' situated between the two world powers of 'East' and 'West'. 47 This demand was firmly rooted in previous socialist discussions and was part of several schemes of a European 'third force', which were popping up like mushrooms in various political camps following the end of the war. 48 The more evidently the binary logic of the cold war began to crystallize, though, the less plausible these schemes became. His adaptation to the new realities of international relations manifested itself in an article he wrote for Tribune in October 1947, which he concluded by stating that 'Communist intransigence' was forcing socialists to confine their work to the 'Marshall sphere' and 'to act as a progressive force within the Western World rather than as an independent third entity trying to mediate between the forces of West and East'. 49 Already in a letter from December 1946 he had pointed out that the conception of a 'third force', while envisioning a Germany independent of all occupation powers, did not imply neutrality between 'East' and 'West', as long as 'West' meant 'democratic Europe': 'Germany is part of Europe, namely a Europe to which Russia does not belong.' 50 Here already, we see signs of a container-space rhetoric that would become characteristic of Löwenthal's spatio-political framework. As he put it in another letter, Russia had manoeuvred itself into the 'dead end of world history', while America had the potential to develop in all directions. 51 As so often in the conceptual history of 'the West', 52 it was the increasing antagonism towards Russia that contributed to a westward shift of spatio-political imaginations. 53 Löwenthal had certainly arrived in 'the West'. His concept of the West, however, was not static but dynamic, and provided a cipher for various visions of the future. Later he even highlighted this inner dynamic of 'Western civilization' as its defining feature. 54 He would bring to bear a previously dormant facet of his intellectual socialization at the University of Heidelberg, as his writings on 'Western civilization' would owe much to Max Weber's theory of Occidental rationalization and the Protestant ethic of capitalism. 55 More important still was the impact of his political mentor, the Vienna-born historian Franz Borkenau, who was the former leader of the Communist student association (Kommunistische Studentenfraktion) that Löwenthal had joined in 1926. In the early cold-war years, Borkenau developed a strong interest in the evolution of 'Western civilization', and Löwenthal, after discarding his preference for building a socialist Europe as a 'third force', largely adopted Borkenau's spatio-political framework. 56 One of its key characteristics was a container-space rhetoric that distinguished between a dynamic, creative Western and a static, 'invertebrate' Eastern civilization. Again, particularly striking was the mental mapping of Russia: the creation of a timeless, fast-frozen image of barbaric Russian authoritarianism. 57 Typical of the discourse of 'Western civilization' in general, Borkenau was not merely concerned with the beginnings of 'the West' but also with its (potential) end. In 1947, he published an article in the British monthly Horizon which carried the laconic title 'After the Atom'. In it, he painted the dark scenario of the 'real possibility' of an atomic war leading to the collapse of Western civilization.
The assumption that its European heartland was 'already in a process of decline' strengthened his belief that Western civilization, devastated by an atomic war, would enter an age of disintegration and 'relapse into barbarism'. 58 Both Löwenthal and Borkenau were influenced, moreover, by the British historian Arnold Toynbee, who reached the height of his fame in the early cold-war yearsat a time when the frequency of references to 'Western civilization' soared. 59 Toynbee's gargantuan, multi-volume study of world civilizations, which to this day has remained unmatched though certainly not unchallenged, elaborated the view that 'Western civilization', alongside twenty or so other civilizations in world history, was an 'intelligible unit of historical study'a statement that was repeatedly quoted by both Borkenau and Löwenthal. 60 Crisis of the West When Löwenthal tried to make sense of the rapid transformation of 'Western societies' from the mid-1960s, 61 he resorted to a political language that was shot through with Toynbeean notions of 'rhythms', 'crises', and 'breakdowns' of civilizations. From that time on, it was his mantra that 'the West' was facing a 'cultural crisis'a situation of collective anomie. He first turned to this subject in 1965 while on a one-year fellowship at Columbia University. There he prepared a lecture, broadcast on Radio Free Europe, on 'totalitarianism and the future of civilization', in which he discussed 'symptoms of moral and cultural crisis' that 'were now visible in the most advanced Western countries'. 62 He further elaborated on this theme while on a research visit to Stanford University in 1968-69, during which he gave a lecture at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, entitled Unreason and Revolution 63 (a play on the title of Marcuse's Hegel book 64 ). For the rest of his life, Löwenthal remained preoccupied with the subject of 'Western civilization'its defence and preservation. He engaged with it most prominently in a collection of essays titled Social Change and Cultural Crisis that first appeared in German in 1979. A revised version was published in English five years later. 65 For Löwenthal, the disaffection of the 'young Western intelligentsia' with parliamentary democracy in '1968' was merely an epiphenomenon of a 'long-term cultural crisis'. He was particularly worried about 'West-wide phenomena' such as a decline in work ethic and social cohesion, which in his view pointed to severe problems in identity formation. Far more serious than the abstract sloganeering of a 'Great Refusal' during the student revolt, these symptoms of social 'decay' revealed a serious 'cultural crisis' that undermined the authority of 'Western' institutions. 66 In Löwenthal's view, the loss of belief in a meaningful course of history had led to a 'loss of world orientation' (Weltbildverlust). The faith in a continual progress of reason had become discredited by a 'series of historical shocks'not least the Vietnam War, but also a growing awareness of the ecological costs and natural limits of economic growth: 'We are living in an age of Western selfdoubt'. 67 Löwenthal's worries about 'the most important part of the young generation' 68 , as he frequently put it, were exacerbated by the sociological diagnosis advanced by Daniel Bell that industrial societies were undergoing a far-reaching transition, which gave well-educated elites greater societal importance. 69 Like Löwenthal he worried about 'crises of belief' and 'societal instability'a 'loss of nerve' and a 'widespread questioning of the legitimacy of institutions, especially on the part of the young who would normally move into elite positions'. Again like Löwenthal, he was concerned about the waning 'continuity of generations': 'Who today defends tradition? And where is the power of the past to hold back any tides of the new?' 70 While the social structure was still ruled by economic principles, the realm of culture had become dominated by an 'anti-rational, anti-intellectual temper': 'Being straight by day and swingers by night' was probably Bell's most graphic description of what he dubbed the 'cultural contradictions of capitalism' -'a radical disjunction of culture and social structure'. It was this disjunction that amounted to nothing less than a 'historic cultural crisis of all Western bourgeois society'. 71 The rhetorical construct of 'crisis', it has been suggested, is marked by an inner ambiguity, as it may provide a tool for pushing an alternative, future-oriented agenda, which lends the 'crisis' notion a forward-looking meaning. 72 In fact, if one were to turn to socialist intellectuals such as Michael Harrington or Irving Howe, one would indeed see 'crisis' rhetoric used with the intention of opening up the horizon of expectation. 73 'Cold war liberals' like Richard Löwenthal, however, deployed the 'Western crisis' paradigm from a purely defensive angle. Far from widening the space of possibility, they were trying to narrow it down. Their concern with the future of 'Western democracies' became a concern about their survival. Whatever they suggested to change, from the mid-1960s, it was for the purpose of preserving the status quo.

Conclusion
The spatio-political language of 'Western civilization', which since the nineteenth century tended to thrive in situations of international conflict, crisis, and war (with shifting Orientalist antonyms), gained considerable traction in the context of cold-war bipolarity and East-West antagonism. Long intertwined with notions of progress, liberty, and reason, it also offered an intuitive way of appropriating the ideology of 'cold war liberalism' and negotiating the future of industrially advanced pluralist societies. Confronted with the socio-cultural transformations of the 1960s and 1970s, including the mounting challenges to the model of 'self-disciplined democracies' (Jan-Werner Müller), 'cold war liberals' such as Löwenthal resorted to rhetorical patterns of 'crisis', 'demise', and the fear for 'survival'. Their central goal was to preserve socio-political stability by bolstering an identity 'nested' 74 in the narrative community of 'Western civilization'. This stabilization strategy became especially important with rising tensions between East and West from the mid-1970s: the more strained the relationship between East and West, the more important the socio-cultural cohesion and ideological 'confidence' of 'Western democracies'.
This example illuminates a wider point about the function, appeal, and usefulness of the spatiopolitical framework of 'the West'. 'The West' is not only a cipher for political values, cultural norms, and (Weberian) religious traditions. It is also an effective rhetorical tool to mobilize people for a cause, to fight for a political agenda, and to forge national, as well as transnational, identities. What needs to be recognized is the spatiality of the concept. Spatial conceptsonce they metamorphose into socio-political ones (which for 'the West' occurred in the early nineteenth century) 75 are distinct from non-spatial ones in their specific ability to reduce complexity, create orientation, and shape identities. They do so by homogenizing space. They evoke an 'imagined community' (Benedict Anderson) and form part of processes of inclusion and exclusiondetermining who is part of this community, and who is not (e.g. Russia, or the Soviet Union). They create a sense of cultural, historical and ideological belonging, which is attached to a certain geographical area. Sometimes, the boundaries of this area are defined very clearly; often they are amorphous, and they also tend to shift over time. In Löwenthal's case, the spatio-political framework of 'the West' was deployed in a way that conveyed meanings of temporalized space (dynamic, progressive, creative), while based on a frozen, 'logo map'-like image of the West as a geographically delineated, Latin Christianity-infused world region: the Occidentwith a clear polemical edge against 'Eastern barbarism' and 'Oriental despotism'. 76 A spatially attuned analysis of 'cold war liberalism' and 'Western civilization', with a focus on the spatialization of political thought and the spatial contexts of intellectual change, may help to gauge the 'added value' of spatial concepts in political and public discourse: What were the advantages of using spatial concepts? What was the difference between political languages that were spatialized and those that were not? Which historical contexts facilitated, or indeed required, the use of particular spatio-political concepts? 77 The question of when, how and why historical actors appropriated spatio-political frameworks may probably not mark 'the final frontier for intellectual history' 78 ; but it is one deserving of greater attentionin studies on 'cold war liberalism' and beyond.