De-Westernization
The Twilight of a Center, the Dawn of a World
By Louis Perez y Cid
There are moments in history when the world's tectonic plates shift silently. Contemporaries continue to live as they did yesterday, to think as they did yesterday, to use the same words, without always perceiving that the order to which they were accustomed is slowly fading beneath their feet.
We are living through one of these moments.
For nearly five centuries, the West has occupied a unique position in human history. Through conquest, trade, the Industrial Revolution, military power, technological mastery, and cultural dominance, it has shaped a large part of the global narrative. Its values have aspired to be universal. Its artistic references have become standards. Its view of the world has often been synonymous with the world itself.
And now, this center of gravity is shifting.
What geopolitician Didier Billion calls "de-Westernization" heralds neither catastrophe nor revenge. He describes a deeper phenomenon: the gradual end of a historical centrality. Not the disappearance of the West, but the loss of its symbolic monopoly.
This distinction is essential.
For behind the geopolitical debates, behind the economic statistics and power dynamics, lies an even more fundamental question: who now tells the story of the world?
For a long time, narratives originated in a few capital cities. Paris, London, and New York produced imaginaries that spread across the globe. Contemporary art, cinema, literature, philosophy, and even the intellectual categories through which we interpret reality have largely borne the imprint of this dominance.
But the 21st century is witnessing the emergence of other voices. African filmmakers are telling their own stories of modernity. Asian novelists are reinventing narrative forms. Latin American artists are questioning colonial legacies without waiting for validation from Western institutions. Everywhere, new perspectives are emerging, not as peripheries seeking recognition, but as fully-fledged centers of creation.
The world is not becoming provincial. It is becoming decentralized.
This evolution is sometimes unsettling. It forces us to relinquish a comfortable illusion: that the universal has a particular accent, a precise geography, an exclusive memory. It reminds us that authentic universality is never the influence of a single civilization, but the fruitful encounter of multiple human experiences.
For Legion'Arts, this reflection is essential. Observing the transformations of the world is also observing the transformations of art. Artists are often the first to perceive the profound movements of their time.
For art flourishes when intellectual boundaries open, when certainties waver, when perspectives intersect. Great renaissances have been born from exchange. Great aesthetic revolutions have emerged when creators have ceased to contemplate their own reflection and have begun to explore new horizons.
Art history teaches us that major political, philosophical, or spiritual shifts often give rise to new aesthetic forms.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the Russian avant-garde already sensed the exhaustion of the old world. With Malevich, Tatlin, Kandinsky, and Chagall, art no longer sought merely to represent reality; it attempted to invent forms capable of expressing an era breaking with its heritage.
Kazimir Malevich's famous Black Square thus appears as much more than a work of art—a manifesto. As if the gradual erosion of old religious, political, and social reference points also called for a new artistic language. These artists had perceived, before many others, that their era was changing in nature. They were not simply describing the world; they were already attempting to inhabit the one to come.
De-Westernization is therefore not just a matter for diplomats or economists. It concerns our way of creating, transmitting, and dreaming.
It invites us to move beyond a vertical vision of culture and enter a broader, more complex, and more demanding geography. A geography where no single civilization occupies center stage, where heritages interact without a predetermined hierarchy.
Perhaps we are witnessing a comparable phenomenon today. Not a single ideological revolution, but a gradual shift toward a polycentric world.
Here again, artists seem to be at the forefront. They are already exploring imaginaries that no longer look exclusively toward Europe or North America. They translate into their works the emergence of a world where references, narratives, and sensibilities are multiplying.
As is often the case in history, creation precedes of the analysis.
Perhaps this is the true challenge of our time: learning to inhabit a world that has become plural.
Accepting that history no longer converges toward a single model. Recognizing, finally, that the richness of humanity lies less in uniformity than in the diversity of its voices.
The 21st century will not be Western. Nor will it be Chinese, Indian, Russian, or African. It will be one of unprecedented coexistence between several centers of power, several memories, and several imaginaries.
For artists, writers, and creators, this is not a threat.
It is a call.
The call to explore a world that, for the first time in a long time, no longer has a single center, but a multitude of horizons. For it is often when certainties fade that the true adventure of the mind begins.
Before empires falter, artists change their language.
Before geopolitical maps are redrawn, imaginations shift.
De-Westernization is perhaps primarily this: a transformation of perspective.
Future centuries will reveal what ends and what begins.
Our task today is perhaps simply to learn how to see.
There are moments in history when the world's tectonic plates shift silently. Contemporaries continue to live as they did yesterday, to think as they did yesterday, to use the same words, without always perceiving that the order to which they were accustomed is slowly fading beneath their feet.
We are living through one of these moments.
For nearly five centuries, the West has occupied a unique position in human history. Through conquest, trade, the Industrial Revolution, military power, technological mastery, and cultural dominance, it has shaped a large part of the global narrative. Its values have aspired to be universal. Its artistic references have become standards. Its view of the world has often been synonymous with the world itself.
And now, this center of gravity is shifting.
What geopolitician Didier Billion calls "de-Westernization" heralds neither catastrophe nor revenge. He describes a deeper phenomenon: the gradual end of a historical centrality. Not the disappearance of the West, but the loss of its symbolic monopoly.
This distinction is essential.
For behind the geopolitical debates, behind the economic statistics and power dynamics, lies an even more fundamental question: who now tells the story of the world?
For a long time, narratives originated in a few capital cities. Paris, London, and New York produced imaginaries that spread across the globe. Contemporary art, cinema, literature, philosophy, and even the intellectual categories through which we interpret reality have largely borne the imprint of this dominance.
But the 21st century is witnessing the emergence of other voices. African filmmakers are telling their own stories of modernity. Asian novelists are reinventing narrative forms. Latin American artists are questioning colonial legacies without waiting for validation from Western institutions. Everywhere, new perspectives are emerging, not as peripheries seeking recognition, but as fully-fledged centers of creation.
The world is not becoming provincial. It is becoming decentralized.
This evolution is sometimes unsettling. It forces us to relinquish a comfortable illusion: that the universal has a particular accent, a precise geography, an exclusive memory. It reminds us that authentic universality is never the influence of a single civilization, but the fruitful encounter of multiple human experiences.
For Legion'Arts, this reflection is essential. Observing the transformations of the world is also observing the transformations of art. Artists are often the first to perceive the profound movements of their time.
For art flourishes when intellectual boundaries open, when certainties waver, when perspectives intersect. Great renaissances have been born from exchange. Great aesthetic revolutions have emerged when creators have ceased to contemplate their own reflection and have begun to explore new horizons.
Art history teaches us that major political, philosophical, or spiritual shifts often give rise to new aesthetic forms.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the Russian avant-garde already sensed the exhaustion of the old world. With Malevich, Tatlin, Kandinsky, and Chagall, art no longer sought merely to represent reality; it attempted to invent forms capable of expressing an era breaking with its heritage.
Kazimir Malevich's famous Black Square thus appears as much more than a work of art—a manifesto. As if the gradual erosion of old religious, political, and social reference points also called for a new artistic language. These artists had perceived, before many others, that their era was changing in nature. They were not simply describing the world; they were already attempting to inhabit the one to come.
De-Westernization is therefore not just a matter for diplomats or economists. It concerns our way of creating, transmitting, and dreaming.
It invites us to move beyond a vertical vision of culture and enter a broader, more complex, and more demanding geography. A geography where no single civilization occupies center stage, where heritages interact without a predetermined hierarchy.
Perhaps we are witnessing a comparable phenomenon today. Not a single ideological revolution, but a gradual shift toward a polycentric world.
Here again, artists seem to be at the forefront. They are already exploring imaginaries that no longer look exclusively toward Europe or North America. They translate into their works the emergence of a world where references, narratives, and sensibilities are multiplying.
As is often the case in history, creation precedes of the analysis.
Perhaps this is the true challenge of our time: learning to inhabit a world that has become plural.
Accepting that history no longer converges toward a single model. Recognizing, finally, that the richness of humanity lies less in uniformity than in the diversity of its voices.
The 21st century will not be Western. Nor will it be Chinese, Indian, Russian, or African. It will be one of unprecedented coexistence between several centers of power, several memories, and several imaginaries.
For artists, writers, and creators, this is not a threat.
It is a call.
The call to explore a world that, for the first time in a long time, no longer has a single center, but a multitude of horizons. For it is often when certainties fade that the true adventure of the mind begins.
Before empires falter, artists change their language.
Before geopolitical maps are redrawn, imaginations shift.
De-Westernization is perhaps primarily this: a transformation of perspective.
Future centuries will reveal what ends and what begins.
Our task today is perhaps simply to learn how to see.