Western culture or Western civilization is a term often used to refer to most of the cultures of European origin and most of their descendants. It comprises the broad, geographically based heritage of social norms, ethical values, traditional customs (such as religious beliefs) and specific artifacts and technologies as shared within the Western sphere of influence.
The East–West contrast is sometimes criticized as relativistic and arbitrary. It can be difficult to determine which individuals fit into which category. In some ways it has grown out of use, or has been transformed or clarified to fit more precise uses. Though it is directly descendent from academic Orientalism and Occidentalism, the changing usage of the distinction "East–West" has come to be useful as a means to identify important cultural similarities and differences — both within an increasingly larger concept of local region, as well as with regard to increasingly familiar "alien" cultures.
During the Cold War, the West–East contrast became synonymous with the competing governments of the United States and the Soviet Union and their allies, respectively, although the nature of that contrast is not in any way based on the distinction between Eastern and Western cultures. The culture of the most of the Soviet Union (Russia and other former Soviet republics from Eastern European region) and its Eastern European allies is pronouncedly Western, as defined below. In the United States during the Cold War period the terms "East" and "Asia" were often used disparagingly by the official propaganda machine, which explains the general tendency to apply these terms to the Soviet Union and its allies and misguided attempts to represent it as a conflict between the Western and Eastern cultures.
The concept of Western culture is generally linked to the classical definition of Western world. In this definition, Western culture is the set of literary, scientific, musical and philosophical principles which set it apart from other civilizations. It applies to countries whose history is strongly marked by Western European immigration or settlement, and is not restricted to Western Europe. Much of this set of traditions and knowledge is collected in the Western canon. Various uses of the concept of Western culture have included, rightly or wrongly, critiques of American culture, materialism, industrialism, capitalism, commercialism, hedonism, imperialism, communism, Nazism, fascism, racism or modernism.
Other tendencies that define modern Western societies are the existence of political pluralism, prominent subcultures or countercultures (such as New Age movements), increasing cultural syncretism resulting from globalization and human migration.
