This introductory chapter deals with the positioning of post-war Western Europe in the ‘Atlantic Century’. During this period of emerging American leadership in international affairs—starting roughly around the time of the American intervention in the First World War—the United States not only gradually accepted the leadership of the free world, it also offered Western Europe protection under the umbrella of an ‘Atlantic Community’. These transatlantic realities offered material and moral comfort, which were indispensable for the reconstruction and resurrection of Europe. Moreover, this new community offered a world of rational policies and democratic politics that was immediately familiar to Europeans. These shared mores fortified the two most resilient beacons of freedom: capitalism and democracy. As such, this transatlantic community transcended national borders while at the same time respecting the concept of the nation-state as the basic model for a new world of cooperation aimed at peace, stability, and prosperity for all. This community of ‘liberal’ states and societies was perceived from the outset as ‘the progeny of Western Christendom’.

The conclusion ties together the framing of obscenity in how we evaluate corpse politics. It draws out five key points. First, dead bodies are vital matter, and examining dead bodies can not only shed light on cultural contexts, but it also blurs and complicates previous approaches to visuality and materiality. Second, dead bodies are inscribed with the workings of statecraft. The process of visually manifesting and narrativizing particular dead bodies is a complex social, cultural, and political process that is worth looking at. Third, what counts as obscene is a social construction and graphicness serves particular political ends. Fourth, obscene death is often characterized using the language of the extreme, the exceptional, and at times the unrepresentable. We should be asking ourselves what politics this state of exception serves, particularly about how images can both sustain and resist particular political orders. Lastly, the conclusion examines the idea of ethical witnessing, seeking to complicate the picture often painted of it, and reflect on what it means to write a book on corpse politics and the visceral experiences it often involves.

This chapter applies material drawn from previous chapters to the West, specifically the modernization/secularization narrative of progressive development. It challenges this by viewing religion as more than belief, comprised of four dimensions: the theoretical, practical, experiential, and political, and showing how concentrated and diffuse spirituality are distributed across these, sometimes in complementary, sometimes in dialectical opposition.

Chapter 2, ‘Women in Composition during the Cold War in Music’, focuses on women active in the West, where, for all the apparent government liberalism, in musical terms, composers had to face what could often, at the time, seem like the monolithic regime of total serialism, as advocated by Pierre Boulez and his circle. Through a range of case studies, including Grace Williams, ElizabethMaconchy (whose pre-war careers are both also discussed in Chapter 1), Elisabeth Lutyens, Thea Musgrave, Betsy Jolas, Louise Talma, Julia Perry, and Miriam Gideon, Rhiannon Mathias deftly considers the compositional strategies which women developed to respond to this musical environment.

This chapter argues, contrary to most of the other contributions, that for all their perceived differences human rights and humanitarianism are in fact indistinguishable in practice. That said, humanitarianism is more likely to survive the decline of liberalism than is human rights.

This chapter draws attention to the centrality of gender in liberal cultural diversity regimes. It shows that the construction of nations and other cultural groups centrally relies on gender: by helping to generate a sense of familiarity among national/cultural strangers; by serving as a means by which cultural boundaries are drawn between the national/cultural Self and foreign Others; and by assigning women the primary role in the intergenerational transmission of national or ethnic culture. The chapter then challenges claims about a major cultural cleavage on gender equality between 'the West' and 'Islam' by drawing attention to the rise of a transnational constellation of self-identified Western actors that mobilize against gender equality in the name of 'Western' or 'European' civilization. Gender has undeniably become central in mobilizing actors against liberalism. The chapter helps illustrate the editors’ argument that diversity regimes always create social hierarchies, in this case gender hierarchy.