We very rarely conceptualise Latin America as a part of the West. Most societies have very different challenges. And in a way what one has to decide is, is this a second iteration of Edward Gibbon or not? That sounds like a very bizarre remark but Gibbon, you will recall, in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire asks the question: can it happen again? Can Western civilisation decline again? He explains why he does not think it is going to happen again — he actually takes the view that if groups from the outside are going to overthrow the West they will only do so by becoming Westernised and he cites the example of Russia. But he then says, at the end of the day it simply does not matter because civilisation has already been reborn across the other side of the Atlantic. We'll leave aside, in this politically correct age, the question of what one would have thought of that remark if one was a Native American, an Aztec or an Inca. 

But that proposes a geography of civilisation which I'm not sure still pertains. I think the relationship now is much less integrated between Europe and the New World, and within the New World, between the US and the Latin American societies that were created. If you were writing in the 1760s or the 1780s you could feel that Mexico was not too different from the Thirteen Colonies. But now we have at least three Wests. We also have to consider the extent to which what we understand as aspects of Western society have been adopted by Eastern societies and sometimes transformed. For example, Japan is not the same society now as Japan was in 1850 and the process of Westernisation is not identical — Tokyo is not the same as Dublin — but nevertheless it is in its way an explicitly Western society. I do sometimes feel that we have a very Anglocentric, or even Eurocentric, view of the West when in some respects we are just a spare wheel on the car.

NS: Oh, I don't know about that...

JB: I'm being provocative, Norman.

NS: Everyone knows vaguely what is meant by the term "West": it's good old women's rights and voting and so on. You can define it in the way its enemies would look at it.

JB: Take women's rights and voting, which you mentioned. I think that's very cogent — we'll leave out champagne for a second. What is interesting is that societies across the world which we would rightly see as authoritarian — and in some respects, what Daniel would correctly see as enemies of the West — often actually formally endorse Western values. If you look at the constitution of states such as Libya or Syria, in some respects these are joke documents but in some respects what they capture is the sense that almost everybody is signed up to Western values now. 

The point is that many places do not follow them. Which then opens a way to start thinking about some of our more classic Western countries — and I am in no way comparing us to Libya — and those aspects of them which we are not proud about: where you can see similar challenges to the reality of freedom, whatever the formal constitutional purchase on it is. Those challenges exist here as well. So we are in this rather bizarre world in which people everywhere across the world — there are exceptions of course like North Korea — sign up to aspects of Western values but what is really troubling is how deeply grounded these values are. 

There I would agree with you, Daniel, when you say that you are worried about aspects of social breakdown. The easiest way to have a failure to respond to people's wish for liberty and freedom is in a society where there is a high level of social breakdown, because either people do not care or they are more concerned with bread and circuses. 

I was very struck when I was canvassing during the General Election in Plymouth Sutton and Devonport that on the one hand you would have very interesting conversations with electors about all sorts of things, ranging from politics to tulips, but on the other hand there were some people who made absolutely explicit that they could not care less. They did not wish to engage. Now obviously for that latter group freedom is in part a matter of feeling that they can opt out of society. But then, actually, they are unfree. If somebody chooses to take freedom away from them they don't really care, as long as they have their television and cigarettes.