Often, in recent years, “the West” means the North Atlantic: Europe and her former colonies in North America. The opposite here is a non-Western world in Africa, Asia, and Latin America—now dubbed “the Global South”—though many people in Latin America will claim a Western inheritance, too. This way of speaking takes notice of the whole world, but lumps a whole lot of extremely different societies together; at the same time, it delicately carves around nonindigenous Australians and New Zealanders and South Africans, so that “Western” here can look simply like a euphemism for white.
