Abstract
The chapter sheds light on different uses of the West in recent German debate focusing on patterns of argumentation by the political establishment on one hand and by the New Right on the other. The Islamist terror attack on a Christmas market in Berlin on December 19, 2016, which in public discourse was regarded as attack against the West, serves as a case study for this chapter. Based on the analysis of speeches, newspaper articles, and posts in the social media, the chapter identifies different definitions of the West which are partly contradictory. Leading representatives of Germany’s political establishment and the majority of German press defines the West in the lines of Karl Popper’s model of the open society. This definition is also reflected in the historiographic narrative of Germany’s continuous and successful Westernization. Germany’s New Right, on the other hand, bases its understanding of the West on the concept of ethnopluralism, which focuses on the protection of single national cultures. In this worldview, a Christian West is represented as a closed society which finds its opposite in Islam.
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