"Westsplaining"
A hot, trendy word to go with the word "agency" in arguments about the West, Eastern Europe, and NATO
The Russian military’s aggression against Ukraine menaces not only Ukraine but Eastern Europe in general. Now academics and commentators are publicizing another menace to Eastern Europeans: Westsplaining.
What is Westsplaining? Wikipedia’s page about it has been deleted, but since the word “Westsplaining” is in current circulation I can turn to Twitter. A few days ago philosopher Tereza Hendl posted a popular thread of sources about Westsplaining.
Hendl’s second tweet links to the New Republic Soapbox article “The American Pundits Who Can’t Resist “Westsplaining” Ukraine”, the opening paragraph of which defines Westsplaining:
it’s galling to watch the unending stream of Western scholars and pundits condescend to explain the situation in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, often in ways that either ignore voices from the region, treating it as an object rather than a subject of history, or claiming to perfectly understand Russian logic and motives. Eastern European online circles have started using a new term to describe this phenomenon of people from the Anglosphere loudly foisting their analytical schema and political prescriptions onto the region: “westsplaining.” And the problem with “westsplaining” is illustrated particularly well when pundits westsplain the role of the eastward expansion of NATO in triggering Russia’s attack.
That definition, and the article, do get at a real problem of ignorant outsiders’ erroneous analyses and poorly founded prescriptions being taken too seriously.
However.
The article’s definition isn’t targeted at that problem. It doesn’t just refer to bad analyses or bad prescriptions from the Anglosphere; it writes off any analysis or prescription from the Anglosphere, regardless of quality, if it’s “foist[ed]” “loudly” on Eastern Europeans. The word “Westsplaining” is patently geographic. It isn’t interested in quality and isn’t interested in singling out discourse that’s incompetent.
Disregard for the quality of arguments spills over to the rest of the New Republic article. For instance, the article’s opening acknowledges “the eastward expansion of NATO” but further on the article contradicts itself by denying that expansion.
NATO did not expand into “Eastern Europe.” Czechia, Poland, and Hungary in 1999 and the Baltic countries among others in 2004 actively sought membership in the alliance. This is not just semantics. […] Being at the receiving end of Russian imperialism, many Eastern Europeans looked forward to membership in NATO as a means of securing their sovereignty. NATO, in other words, would not have “expanded” into Eastern Europe if the Eastern European nations had not wanted it and actively pursued it.
In fact, that paragraph manages to be contradictory on a second level, insisting that its semantic quibble “is not just semantics”.
Whether NATO expanded into Eastern Europe is an empirical question. NATO itself has a clear answer: it expanded. Which is why the New Republic article can’t explain why “NATO did not expand” — that claim is just factually false. Instead the article disputes the connotations of the word “expand” — literally semantics.
Anyway, having extracted a definition of Westsplaining from the NR article, I return to Hendl’s thread. After introducing Westsplaining as a problem generic to “US debates” and “Western internationalism”, the thread narrows its target to “the Western Left” and “US Left”, linking 3 pieces that take aim at the Western left.
Each of the pieces is worth reading. I recommend Artiukh’s without reservation. The other two are not above criticism.
For instance, Taras Bilous’s “A letter to the Western Left from Kyiv” falsely accuses a Jacobin article by Branko Marcetic of limiting its criticism of Putin’s actions to a remark about Putin signaling “less-than-benign ambitions” (in reality Marcetic also called Putin’s actions “reckless and illegal”).
And Zosia Brom’s “Fuck leftist westsplaining” justifies a wish for Poland, Czechia, Hungary, and the Baltic states to stay in NATO by invoking “a self-preservation instinct” that “doesn’t have much to do with politics tbh”, which is at best self-delusion and at worst a pretense at being above politics.
Brom, an editor at anarchist publisher Freedom News, also blasts NATO’s opponents because (to Brom’s ear) they “do not care about the safety and wellbeing of my Eastern European friends, family and comrades”, but expresses no concern about NATO’s demonstrated impact on the “safety and wellbeing” of Afghans and Libyans beyond Eastern Europe. I explained recently that justifying NATO expansion with “agency” could lead to the fallacy of neglecting NATO’s externalities; Brom commits that fallacy, just using the neologism “westsplaining” instead.
Westerners are also prone to fuzzy thinking when complaining about Westsplaining.
Take yet another popular Twitter thread, this one from British Guardian columnist George Monbiot, who (re)defines Westsplaining as “a tendency of certain Western leftists to ascribe everything that happens east of Germany to Western policy” that “supposes that anyone living beyond 15° East has no agency”. His definition differs a lot from the New Republic’s, but let that pass.
Monbiot’s thread links the pieces I discuss above, but in purely complimentary terms that mention none of the logical and factual problems I identify. His definition also builds in the idea of “agency”, which risks building in the symmetry problem that “agency” has in this context: if the agency of Eastern Europeans in general should determine one’s position on NATO and Ukraine, how does one justify relying on the agency of pro-NATO (or at least anti-anti-NATO), anti-war-on-Ukraine Eastern Europeans over the agency of anti-NATO, pro-war-on-Ukraine Eastern Europeans like Vladimir Putin?
These hurdles to using the term “Westsplaining” in a rigorous way suggest that it’s a rhetorical device and a polemical term, not an analytical term. Another sign that it’s just a polemical term is its expanding meaning, with people wielding it in assorted odd ways.
Here’s a self-described “Proud Neoliberal globalist shill, funded by the CIA and Soros” expanding it to cover any rational-choice interpretation of Putin’s actions:
Another tweet of theirs:
Here’s a professor at the University of Oxford dismissing a Guardian editorial — which cites a BMJ study co-authored by multiple Muscovites — as “More Westsplaining” in which “C-E European voices are ignored”:
Here’s someone justifying a “charge of Westsplaining” leveled at Yanis Varoufakis (born and raised some way east of George Monbiot’s “15° East” meridian!) with the fact that Varoufakis used the word “expansion” to describe NATO’s expansion.
Here’s someone applying “westsplaining” to World War II:
This semantic inflation leaves the word ripe for mockery:
Used with restraint, the word “Westsplaining” might have played the useful, specific role of warning people when they were recycling their ideas about the West into ill-informed commentary about Eastern Europe. In practice the word is more often a boxing glove for people punching left; a cute all-purpose catchphrase to dismiss criticism of NATO and Western policy without making a logical counterargument; a vehicle for assumptions that all Eastern Europeans believe that Russia is imperialist, that modeling Putin as a rational actor is impossible, that Western actors had exactly zero role in setting the stage for Putin’s war, that pausing NATO’s expansion is absurd, or that ending NATO is absurd. Knowing the actual work the word “Westsplaining” does, I don’t foresee it being redeemed.