On the bottom floor of the thousand-gallery Hermitage museum, far from the crowds craning their necks to glimpse a Raphael or a Rembrandt, are a series of rooms designed by a German architect in the mid-nineteenth century. A marriage of tsarist opulence and neoclassical order—like a Greek temple built with an unlimited budget—each room places the visitor in a different symmetrical space defined by columns, arches, and pilasters of richly polished marble, one room a somber gray, the next an arresting red, another a flighty pink. In each of these pseudo-Greek rooms stand pseudo-Greek statues: Roman copies of Greek originals.

The wall labels next to the sculptures proudly proclaim their pilfered provenance: “Apollo, Marble, Roman work. 1st c. A.D. After the Greek original of the 4th c. B.C.”; “Eros, Marble, Roman work. 2nd c. A.D. After the Greek original of the first half of the 4th c. B.C.”; “Athena, Marble, Roman work. 2nd c. A.D. After the Greek original of the late 5th c. B.C.” In these neoclassical rooms of the Hermitage, as in the larger neoclassical city that surrounds it, the Russians lay claim to the glories of Western civilization through impersonation, desperately trying to write themselves into the history of the West. And yet in these statues, we see the Romans, seemingly the font of Western civilization, doing exactly the same thing. By copying the glories of ancient Greece, they, too, are willing themselves heirs to its culture.

That the Romans copied the Greeks hardly means that their civilization was a fraud. The Romans went on to make their own contributions, far surpassing the Greeks in fields like engineering and logistics. That the Romans copied does not mean that history is nothing but copying. But it does mean that copying is an integral part of history.

If even the Romans needed to will themselves Western, what does the vaunted East-West distinction even mean? If Westernness or Easternness is a choice rather than an immutable fact, what power does it really have? Though it feels like an immutable inheritance, whether a people sees itself as Eastern or Western is actually a conscious decision that only later becomes an unconscious patrimony. Many of the Egyptians and Syrians of today are the descendants of Roman citizens, and yet they see themselves as non-Western peoples. Many even consider themselves to be in a struggle against the West. Meanwhile the Germans, descended from the barbarians who sacked Rome, consider themselves heirs to Western civilization. A city like Berlin, with its neoclassical parliament and museum buildings, is no different than St. Petersburg in its ex post facto writing of its people into the Western tradition. Berlin feels less Disneyfied than St. Petersburg only because the ruse has worked. While only 12 percent of Russians tell pollsters that they “always feel European,” no pollster would even think to ask the Germans if they felt that way. It’s just accepted that Germans are Europeans.

But the entire Europe-Asia distinction is a mental one, not a geographic one. The distinction began with the ancient Greeks, who used it to distinguish their civilized European selves from the Asian barbarians to the East, across the Aegean Sea. Medieval scholars assumed there must be some narrow isthmus separating Europe and Asia, but when no such natural feature was found, in the early modern period, geographers seized on the Ural Mountains as the dividing line. But the Ural Mountains are not much of a barrier. No higher than the Appalachians of North America, they were easily crossable long before the advent of trains, automobiles, and airplanes. Ukrainian Cossacks invaded Siberia in the late sixteenth century by carrying their riverboats in a brief portage over the Urals.

Though the physical barrier is chimerical, the mental barrier has had real effects. Looking backward, we cannot understand world history without the East-West distinction, whatever we may think of it today. That would be like an atheist studying the history of medieval Europe and ignoring Christianity because she is not a believer. But looking forward, if there is any hope for the world, we must see beyond the notions of East and West that have long divided us. The divisions themselves are arbitrary, and they were created for a world dominated by Europe—a world that is no longer with us. The proposed Gazprom tower in St. Petersburg looked for inspiration not to Amsterdam but to Dubai, where its architect began his career. In America’s burgeoning Chinatowns, high-rise buildings that stack offices atop a karaoke parlor atop a restaurant atop a shopping mall bring the distinctive urbanism of twenty-first-century China to the United States just as Americans brought their architecture to their Shanghai concession 150 years before. This is not to deny that the skyscraper was initially an American innovation, but as with Art Deco, born in Paris during that last great age of globalization, in a porous world styles can transcend their birthplaces. And in this Asian Century, no doubt, forms originating in Asia will be imported to—or perhaps even foisted on—the West. The hope, however, is that as Asia rises, the thinking-makes-it-so distinction between East and West can fade, that we can will ourselves from rivalry and resentment to amity and understanding. But only free minds can think themselves to freedom.

At first glance, the Chinese boomtown of Shenzhen does not inspire much hope. The instant metropolis of fourteen million people and counting seems a self-inflicted redux of the most imitative aspects of nineteenth-century colonial Shanghai. Among Shenzhen’s tallest structures is a 1:3 scale replica of the Eiffel Tower, less innovative even than Old Shanghai’s “Big Ching.” In a downtown city park, a massive photomontage shows Deng Xiaoping, the Communist ruler who in his youth had lived in France and in his old age founded this experimental city, admiring its skyline, complete with fake Parisian tower. Frozen posthumously by photography, the grandfatherly Deng keeps a straight face; Western visitors taking in the display typically do not.

The Eiffel Tower replica is the centerpiece of a Shenzhen theme park, called Window of the World, which offers visitors scale-model replicas of all the globe’s architectural masterpieces. “See The World Landmarks In One Day!” a poster on the ticket booth crows. The park embodies contemporary China at its tawdriest. Guests who grow bored of the park’s architectural wonders can amuse themselves by renting human-sized clear plastic hamster balls, locking themselves in, and taking them out for a spin on a man-made lake.

And yet the theme park is actually quite inspiring. While its central replica of the Eiffel Tower is its most famous attraction, the park gives the wonders of Asia, including Angkor Wat and the Taj Mahal, equal billing with the monuments of the West. And in its replica of the Washington DC monuments, the plaque for the 1:15 scale model of the Lincoln Memorial reads, “Completed in 1922, this white marble building resembles the Parthenon of Greece,” a humbling reminder that the United States, too, like the Germans and the Romans, consciously wrote itself into the Western tradition. Placing all of the world’s architectural wonders on an equal platform breaks down the distinctions between peoples and inspires a cosmopolitan, human pride in visitors. As Syrian-born MIT architecture professor Nasser Rabbat has observed, “All architecture is the heritage of all people, although some architecture is the heritage of some people more so than others. It’s only a question of degree. But there is no exclusionary architecture that says that you do not belong.” The theme park is a paean to the wonders we have made—not we the Chinese, or we the Americans, or we the Asians, or we the Westerners, but we the human race. We build our world—and our future.

The Russia section of the Window of the World park includes a 1:15 scale model of the Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg, but it is the sculpture garden, set off in a quiet green section of the park away from the crowds, that holds the copy of its masterpiece, Houdon’s sculpture of Voltaire. In the heart of Deng Xiaoping’s instant city of skyscrapers sits the elderly philosophe, draped in a robe, his aged face enlightened by his mercurial grin. The awkward English of the plaque reads, “Author: Antoine Houdon, Imitator: Da Liusheng. Voltaire was the spiritual leader in the French Enlightenment. The statue reflects the humorous and harsh individualities of this sagacious philosopher who had to endure many hardships.” Voltaire, the hardship-enduring dissident, stares out silently at “the people’s democratic dictatorship” all around him. From the grin Houdon so masterfully captured and Da Liusheng so proficiently channeled, it is clear that Voltaire would appreciate the humor of the situation.

Catherine the Great, of course, had Houdon’s Voltaire banished to an attic after the French Revolution. But she could never fully exorcize his spirit. Even at the height of Stalin’s repression, the little marble man sitting in the Hermitage never lost the gleam in his eye or the wry smile on his face. He continues to haunt St. Petersburg to this day. That a copy of him now silently haunts Shenzhen as well means that though this book is at its end, its story will continue.