The Common Distinction between East and West

When looking at the people of the world as a whole, in the broadest possible sense, cultural distinctions are still made, no matter how value and inaccurate they are. For instance it is not uncommon to find many people who like to talk about the cultural differences between East and West. What exactly demarcates these two distinctly different cultures along with their apparent accompanying geographical locations depends on the circumstances and topic under investigation. When people are talking politics, economics or values, the locations they are talking about are most likely Asia in the East and Western Europe and its colonial offspring in the West.

In the year 2005, referring to the East mainly means East Asia, the part Asia that includes everything east of the western edge of China. Western Europe includes the wealthy countries spun-off of Western European colonialism (e.g. USA, Canada, Australia). The reason these East and West definition are used at present, leaving other areas out of the discussion, is related to politics and economics. These two areas of earth include the nations that hold most of the world’s wealth and military power.

This type of geographically based discussion is rather simplified and leaves out whole continents and large populations in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and South America. Such general categorizations are extremely simplified and often mainly subjective terms. This research acknowledges these problems, but also uses these East and West classifications. The main reason for this is these terms are commonly used by other research, therefore we use them to add congruity with previous research and also to allow testing of this ideas to see if they are accurate.