right, but most people in india and singapore don’t speak english fluently as their first language. in both countries it has strong class connotations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_where_English_is_an_official_language

…sounds more like the ‘english-speaking peoples.’ which is also a real cultural construct IMO.

well, sure it is situational. where you start matters. if you’re a muslim obviously ‘the west’ is going to be viewed through a muslim-christian interaction lens. to a large extent ‘the west’ and ‘islam’ developed through a dialectical process simultaneously. but during the early medieval period the borderlands of the west were not just with islam; they were with pagan scandinavia and the baltics. when the pagans were gone there was also a fissure with orthodox christianity; which is not really part of the west.

what is the west? probably the most useful “all around” definition would encompass the societies which arose out of the synthesis of the late antique latin christian societies and the barbarians. there was a civilizational boundary that you were are crossing when you moved from poland to belarus, from transylvania (which until recently was mostly german and hungarian, and catholic and reformed) to wallachia (the core of romania, which though latinate in language is orthodox christian). this compound of roman, christian and barbarian (whether german, slav or magyar) was conditional upon islam in places like italy, spain and france (far less so in scandinavia where baltic pagans are more critical), but its genesis predates islam. it arose during the period that the roman empire had collapsed in the west, while it persisted in the east….

precisely - the US is a nation-civilization on its own, akin to Iran or India. If anything the West has come to mean the sphere of Anglo-US influence.

i don’t think it’s nebulous or silly. you can disagree, but i don’t believe cultural traits are characterized by a uniform distribution or lack of correlation structure across independent dimensions. the borders on the margins are contestable, but i don’t think that the categories are useless (i think it is useful, up to a point, to talk about an “islamic world” despite its diversity). the idea of the west is less relevant in the united states; we’re basically a nation-civilization. but it is going to be more salient in europe for a whole host of reasons (not least due to the post-national trajectory due to the EU integration process).