Everything about Eurocentrism totally explained
Eurocentrism is the practice of viewing the world from a
European perspective, with an implied belief, either consciously or subconsciously, in the preeminence of European (and, more generally, of
Western) culture. The term Eurocentrism implies criticism of the concerns and values at the expense of non-Europeans and isn't used by those who consider it factually justified.
The Eurocentrism prevalent in
international affairs in the 19th to 20th centuries has its historical roots in European
colonialism and
imperialism from the
Early Modern period (16th to 18th centuries). Many
international standards (such as the
Prime Meridian, the
Dionysian Era or the worldwide spread of the
Latin alphabet) have their roots in this period.
In both Europe and North America, the heyday of Eurocentricism was in the 19th century, today it's much less prevalent due to developments in popular culture and teaching.
Alternatively,
Eurocentric and
Eurocentrist are occasionally used in British political discourse to describe supporters of
European integration and the
European Union, in other words as an
antonym of
Eurosceptic.
Origins
Early Eurocentrism can be traced to the European
Renaissance, in which the revival of learning based on classical sources were focused on the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations, due to their being a significant source of contemporary European civilization.
The effects of these assumptions of European
superiority increased during the period of European
imperialism, which started slowly in the
15th century, accelerated in the
16th,
17th and
18th centuries, and reached its zenith in the
19th century. The progressively mechanised character of European culture was contrasted with traditional hunting, farming and herding societies in many of the areas of the world being newly conquered & colonised by Europeans, such as
the Americas, most of
Africa, and later the
Pacific and
Australasia. Even the complex civilizations of
Arabia,
Persia,
India,
China,
Mexico,
Peru and
Japan were counted as underdeveloped when compared to Europe, and were often characterised as static. Many European writers of this time construed the history of Europe as paradigmatic for the rest of the world. Other cultures were identified as having reached a stage through which Europe itself had already passed – primitive
hunter-gatherer;
farming; early
civilisation;
feudalism;and modern liberal-capitalism. Only Europe was considered to have achieved the last stage.
For some writers, such as
Karl Marx, the centrality of Europe to an understanding of world history didn't imply any innate European superiority, but he nevertheless assumed that Europe provided a model for the world as a whole. Others looked forward to the expansion of modernity throughout the world through trade,
imperialism or both. By the late 19th Century, the theory that European achievements arose from innate racial superiority became widespread, justifying race-based
slavery,
genocide, colonisation and other forms of political and economic exploitation.
The colonising period involved the widespread settlement of parts of the Americas and Australasia with European people, and the establishment of outposts and colonial administrations in parts of Asia and
Africa. As a result, the majority populations of the Americas, Australia and New Zealand typically trace their ancestry to Europe. A Eurocentric history is taught in such countries, despite geographic isolation from Europe, with many European cultural traditions.
Examples of Eurocentrism
Cartography
The division of the landmass of
Eurasia into the separate
continents of
Asia and
Europe is an anomaly with no basis in physical geography. An alternative view is that Eurasia is a single continent, one of six continents in total. This view is held by some geographers and is preferred in Russia (which spans Asia and Europe). The separation is maintained for historical and cultural reasons.
Arno Peters highlighted the political implications of map design by promoting the
Gall- Peters projection, as a contrasting world map to the
Mercator projection, a commonly used world map projection at the time. The Mercator projection distorts areas further from the equator, making Europe and North America appear disproportionately large compared to similar sized areas closer to the equator, such as Africa, Central America and Australia. Alaska, for example, is presented as being similar or even slightly larger in size than Brazil, when Brazil's area is actually almost 5 times that of Alaska.
The longitude meridians of world maps have also evolved from a Eurocentric worldview, with the original definition of the
prime meridian, placing
Greenwich, London in the centre. This also has practical advantages- for example, it places the
International Date Line in the
Pacific, inconveniencing the smallest number of people.
A residual effect of these Eurocentric origins are that regional names around the world are named in relation to their location compared to Europe- '
Middle East' describes an area slightly east of Europe, and the Orient is described as the '
Far East'. Alternatively, the
Western World, or 'Western civilisation' are terms that group culturally similar countries- not only Central and Western Europe, but the former European colonies of North America, Australia and New Zealand.
Although many of these terms are not intentionally designed to relegate other groups to a subordinate role to the people of Europe, the effects of Eurocentricism create a self-sustaining belief, that Europe and Europeans are central and most important to all meaningful aspects of the world's social values, and cultural heritage.
Education
Eurocentrism was once embedded in the study of
Greek classic literature.
In the
1960s a reaction against the priority given to a
canon of "
Dead White European Males" provided a slogan which neatly sums up the charge of Eurocentrism (alongside other important -centrisms.)
Garry Wills, the journalist and professor of American Studies at Northwestern University, writes that Eurocentrism created a false picture of the classics themselves.
Since the 1970s, the indebtedness of
Classical Greece to "the Orient" (notably the
Neo-Assyrian Empire) at the time of its formation during the
Early Iron Age has been given more prominence.
The European Miracle
The European miracle theory, developed initially by Eric Jones in 1987, describes his position that Europe was more advanced and progressive than all other civilizations prior to the year 1492, allowing it to develop capitalism, reach the New World first, and dominate world trade and politics. The theory is criticised for Eurocentrism, with
critics of the theory pointing out that progress in the rest of the world paralleled Europe before 1492, and that more than half of the world's population living in urban settlements (over 10,000 people) lived in China during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Jones' work can be seen as building on a Eurocentric view of earlier European thinkers, with
Max Weber's idea of the
Protestant work ethic and
Georg Hegel's
Spirit providing a rationale for claiming the European mind (and European religion) is inherently superior to that of all other continents.
Immanuel Wallerstein's idea of a world-economy and world-system originating in Europe also appear to come through in European miracle theory.
Eurocentrism in Africa
During the
colonisation of Africa by European nations, Eurocentric systems of second-class citizenship were often set up in order to give Europeans political power far in excess of their numbers in those nations that had substantial European populations, such as
Rhodesia (now
Zimbabwe) and
South Africa. The
Congo Free State was claimed as the personal property of
King Leopold II of Belgium, with a subsequent inhumane treatment and forced labour of the native population.
Eurocentrism has been said to deny Africans agency in the creation of their own history. For example, until recently, in Western scholarship cities such as
Dakar,
Banjul (Bathhurst),
Abidjan, Conakry and others were assumed to be creations of Western colonisers. However, though they were transformed in both negative and positive ways by colonisation, these cities predate colonisation as did many of the economic and institutional patterns found in Africa.
Eurocentrism in Australia
The
Immigration Restriction Act 1901 was one of the first Acts of Australia's Federal Parliament after nationalism lead to the country's independence from European (British) rule. The Act placed "certain restrictions on immigration and... for the removal... of prohibited immigrants".
Edmund Barton, the prime minister, argued in support of the Bill with the following statement: "The doctrine of the equality of man was never intended to apply to the equality of the Englishman and the Chinaman." The
White Australia Policy was gradually removed after World War Two until the 1970s.
Less overtly Eurocentric was the view that the Indigenous people of Australia didn't require any compensation or consideration when their land was claimed as a British colony, as their use of the land did fit with recognised (European) views of land ownership. They were later specifically denied citizenship in the Australian constitution, and traditional European views of appropriate lifestyles and attitudes lead to a policy of
cultural assimilation, designed to eradicate the race through measures including the
forced removal of children.
Eurocentrism in Argentina
In Argentina an extensive racist ideology has been built on the notion of European supremacy. This ideology forwards the idea that Argentina is a country populated by European immigrants "bajados de los barcos" (straight off the boat), frequently referred to as "our grandfathers", who founded a special type of "white" and European society that isn't Latin-American. In addition, this ideology holds forth that cultural influences from other communities such as the Aborigines, Africans, Latin-Americans, or Asians are not relevant and even undesirable. White-European racism in Argentina shares similarities with the
White Australia policy that was practiced during the beginning of the 20th century.
White-European racism in Argentina has a history of government participation. The ideology even has a legal foundation that was set forth in Article 25 of the National Constitution sponsored by
Juan B. Alberdi. The article establishes a difference between
European immigration (which should be encouraged) and non-European immigration.
Eurocentrism in America
During the 17th century, British settlers and immigrants from across Europe brought their Eurocentrism with them to America. After the
American Revolution, the colonists Eurocentrism morphed into the Americentrism that was epitomised in the
zeitgeist of the
Jacksonian Era and
Manifest Destiny.
Decline
Even in the 19th century, anti-colonial movements had developed claims about national traditions and values that were set against those of Europe. In some cases, as with China, where local ideology was even more exclusionist than the Eurocentric one, Westernisation didn't overwhelm long-established Chinese attitudes to its own cultural centrality.
In contrast, countries such as Australia defined their nationhood entirely in terms of an overseas extension of European history. It was, until recently, thought to have had no history or serious culture before colonisation. The history of the native inhabitants was subsumed by the Western disciplines of
ethnology and
archaeology. In Central America and South America a merger of immigrant and native histories was constructed. Nationalist movements appropriated the history of native civilizations such as the
Mayans and
Incas, to construct models of cultural identity that claimed a fusion between immigrant and native identity.
At the same time, the intellectual traditions of Eastern cultures were becoming more widely known in the West, mediated by figures such as
Rabindranath Tagore. By the early 20th century some historians such as
Arnold J. Toynbee were attempting to construct multi-focal models of world civilizations.
Since the end of
World War II, the former worldwide dominance of European culture has waned drastically (
Decolonization). The change has been most drastic in the
USA, triggered by the 1950s to 1960s
civil rights movement and perpetuated by the
political correctness of the 1970s to 1980s. Today, Eurocentrism remains a topic in the US "
culture wars", notably when juxtaposed to
Afrocentrism, but its prominence is limited compared to topics of religion or social issues.
Bibliography
- Samir Amin: L´Eurocentrisme, critique d´une idéologie. Paris 1988, engl. Eurocentrism, Monthly Review Press 1989, ISBN 0853457867
- J.M. Blaut: The Colonizer's Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History . Guilford Press 1993. ISBN 0898623480
- J.M. Blaut: Eight Eurocentric Historians. Guilford Press 2000. ISBN 1572305916
- Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton UP 2000
- Gerhard Hauck, Die Gesellschaftstheorie und ihr Anderes : wider den Eurozentrismus der Sozialwissenschaften, Münster 2003
- Vassilis Lambropoulos, The rise of Eurocentrism : anatomy of interpretation, Princeton, NJ : Princeton Univ. Press, 1993
- Jose Rabasa, Inventing America: Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentrism (Oklahoma Project for Discourse and Theory, Vol 2), University of Oklahoma Press 1994
- Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: multiculturalism and the media, Routledge 1994
- Charlotte Spitzer, Neorassismus und Europa : rassistische Strukturen in der Selbstvergewisserung Europäischer Identität, Frankfurt am Main [etc.] : Lang, 2003
- Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedom, Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1993
- Robert J.C. Young, White mythologies : writing history and the west, 2nd edition, Taylor & Francis, 2004
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