Particularly in the history of Greece and Byzantium, this concept has been largely used by noted historians like Arnold J. Toynbee, Leften Stavrianos, Alexander Vasiliev and Nicolae Iorga, at the beginning of the 20th century and later by Dimitri Kitsikis.
At the eve of the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, three friends (writer Pericles Giannopoulos, diplomat Ion Dragoumis and officer Athanase Souliotis-Nikolaidis) struggled in their writings and political action to defeat the so-called "Frankish fanatics".
The gist of the intellectual differences between the two parties was explained by the minister of Foreign Affairs of Eleftherios Venizelos in 1919, Alexandros Diomidis (who signed Diomède in French) in the following words: "Monasticism, especially Mount Athos, a bastion of radical Orthodoxy... was overwhelmingly directing what we call today public opinion....
This uncompromising Byzantine mentality as represented by the leaders of the reactionary party, [Joseph] Bryennios [1350-1431], Markos Evgenikos and Gennadios, with their Easternized psychosynthesis and their phanatical antipathy to any Greek classical education, was nearer to the mentality of the Eastern Turks than to the spirit of classical Antiquity which flourished in the West.
[14] The dispute between the Western and the Eastern Parties took paramount proportions after the Greek economic crisis started in 2009 and in the summer of 2015, with the decision of the leftist Tsipras government to organize a referendum on the relations of the country with the European Union, Greece was once more split between West and East.