In the second of a two-part series, Robin Brown and Nick Bogiatzis show how it is the politicians most loudly claiming to defend “Western values” who are among the most dedicated to undermining them.

Pauline Hanson stands on the myth of a monocultural Western civilisation under siege. So does Reform UK’s Nigel Farage. US Vice President JD Vance does too. The Liberal Party’s new president Tony Abbott has made a career out of it. These politicians share the political usefulness of invoking “Western values” to exclude, demean and restrict the rights of people outside their preferred cultural group. They are either ignorant of, or dishonest about, the values they claim to defend.

The trick works by invoking genuinely important values – dignity, freedom, the rule of law – and claiming exclusive ownership of them on behalf of a particular cultural group. Then the claim is used to exclude, demean or restrict the rights of people outside that group, hypocritically undermining the very values being trumpeted.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, in his 2016 BBC Reith Lectures, argued that the very notion of “western culture” as a coherent, bounded thing is a modern invention. The classical inheritance routinely claimed as distinctively Western was substantially preserved and transmitted by Islamic scholarship. The works of Plato and Aristotle reached Renaissance Europe largely via Arabic translations made in ninth-century Baghdad. The phrase “western civilisation”, Appiah points out, is more recent than the phonograph.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, by many seen as founded in “western” values, was not a Western document but an international negotiation. Chinese Confucian philosopher Peng-chun Chang, who was the drafting committee’s vice-chair, explicitly pushed back against Western philosophical categories. Hansa Mehta of India........

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