Establishing the cultural identity of the west in the early Cold War: A conceptual approach Despina Papadimitriou Panteion University, Athens Exploring the semantic field of antitotalitarianism “Totalitarianism” was both an influential para- digm in political sciences in the United States in the 1950s and a well-propagated concept. The term entered the political debate back in the 1920s but the early Cold War marked the high point of its presence in western public dis- course. Though the Anglo-Saxon or Germanic paradigms had been more influential than those developed in France, Italy or Greece during the period, political lexicons, reflecting various ideo- logical premises, were replete with words and expressions that treated the aforementioned concept. This article does not study the theory of totalitarianism – either in its scholarly or vul- gar version – per se; that is to say, as a political theory and a philosophy of history, 1 but as the frame that supported semantically the concepts implicated in an ideological struggle initiated by the emergence of east–west dualism; the new world division between two irreconcilable cul- tural and ideological entities tied to two distinct economic and political systems. What it seeks to do is to explore the conceptual features of this new semantic field by attempt- ing to interpret the conceptualisation of the en- emy and the self within this field as an impor- tant historical moment in the construction of the identity of the west. The text corpora constructed from a variety of Anglo- and Francophone and Greek primary sources (the German and Italian historical experience is drawn from secondary sources) make a conceptual-ideological analy- sis possible. It not only puts emphasis on units of words but also on units of concepts, on the conceptual interrelationship, as well as on the interdiscursive materiality that is being con- structed. Τhe primary material is drawn from