Again and again we see in the FT, and particularly in the headlines, the term “the west” as if the world boiled down to a purely geopolitical confrontation, a very Putinesque view of things.
Picking on one day last week, you had a letter from the Swedish finance minister entitled, “West must test Putin’s claims about the Russian economy” (Letters, August 16) and an opinion piece by Wamkele Mene with the headline, “A single integrated market across Africa is in the west’s interests” (Opinion, August 16).
Apart from the fact that north-south opposition would be just as relevant in many cases (including this last one), shouldn’t we systematically say “the free world”, in both the political and economic sense of the term? Taiwan is not so much a “western” country as a democracy and a market economy.
“To name things wrongly is to add to the misfortune of the world”, wrote the philosopher and novelist Albert Camus. Let’s avoid playing into Vladimir Putin’s hands (or Xi Jinping’s hands for that matter) in the way we name things.
François Poirier
Neuilly-sur-Seine, France
