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Eurocentrism
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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 is not 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).
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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 is not 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, or the worldwide spread of the Dionysian Era and Latin alphabet) have their roots in this period.
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, Japan, Korea and Indochina 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 did not 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.
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.
The longitude meridians of world maps based on the prime meridian, placing Greenwich, London in the centre, has been in use since 1851. Various other prime meridians were in use during the Age of Exploration.
The current prime meridian has the advantage that it places the International Date Line in the Pacific, inconveniencing the smallest number of people.
The European Miracle
"European miracle (a term coined by Eric Jones in 1981),
refers to the surprising rise of Europe during the Early Modern period.
By the end of the Middle Ages, Europe in terms of economy and technology did not compare favourably to the Islamic empires (the Ottoman empire and Mughal India) or Ming China, but during the 16th to 18th centuries, a "great divergence" took place, comprising the European age of discovery, the formation of the colonial empires, the Age of Reason and the associated leap forward in technology, and the development of capitalism and early Industrialisation. The result was that by the 19th century, European powers dominated world trade and world politics.
Examples
Special position of Europe
Historical encyclopedias under the lemma "Europe" often sought to give a rationale for the predominance of European rule during the colonial period by referring to a special position taken by Europe compared to the other continents.
Thus, Johann Heinrich Zedler in 1741 wrote that
"even though Europe is the smallest of the world's four continents, it has for various reasons a position that places it before all others [...] its inhabitants have excellent customs, they are courteous and erudite in both sciences and crafts."
The Brockhaus Enzyklopädie of 1854 still has an ostensibly Eurocentric approach,
claiming that Europe "due to its geographical situation and its cultural and political significance is clearly the most important of the five continents, over which it has gained a most influential government both in material and even more so in cultural aspects."
View of "primitive" cultures
While even during colonialism, western thought generally recognized the achievements of non-Western civilizations, mostly Near Eastern, Indian and Chinese, it tended to under-estimate cultures it regarded as "primitive", in particular the cultures of Sub-Saharan Africa and of the New World.
Thus, Western scholarship until recently considered a number of African cities, including Dakar, Banjul (Bathhurst), Abidjan, Conakry and others, to be creations of Western colonisers, while these cities have since been shown to predate colonisation.
White supremacy
To be distinguished from (conscious or unconscious) Eurocentrism as the tendency to explain non-European cultures in terms of European culture are positive claims of European superiority in racism or cultural chauvinism.
Such ideas are at the origin of the racial segregation in colonies and former colonies, including the United States (where after the American Revolution, Eurocentrism has been superseded by Americentrism), Australia and South Africa.
White Australia policy was gradually abolished in the 1945 to 1970s period.
In Argentina an extensive racist ideology has been built on the notion of European supremacy. This ideology forwarded the idea that Argentina was 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 is not Latin-American. In addition, this ideology held forth that cultural influences from other communities such as the Aborigines, Africans, Latin-Americans, or Asians were not relevant and even undesirable. White-European racism in Argentina shared similarities with the White Australia policy that was practiced during the beginning of the 20th century.
Eurocentrism compared to other ethnocentrisms
There has been some debate on whether historical Eurocentrism qualifies as "just another ethnocentrism" as it is found in most of the world's culture, and especially in cultures with imperial aspirations, as in the Sinocentrism ubiquitous in China, which is natively known as ??, literally the "central kingdom".
James M. Blaut argued that Eurocentrism did indeed go beyond other ethnocentrisms, due to the formation of a "colonizer’s model of the world" as a result of the unprecedented scale of imperial expansion during the colonial period.
Decline
Early anticolonialism
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 did not overwhelm long-established Chinese attitudes to its own cultural centrality.
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.
Decolonization
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.
Peters World Map
The Mercator projection distorts areas further from the equator, making the Arctic and the Antarctic, but to a lesser degree also Europe and North America and Northern Asia, appear disproportionately large compared to areas closer to the equator, such as Africa or Central America.
Arno Peters highlighted the political implications of map design, and in an attempt to counteract Eurocentric bias that may be implicit in the Mercator projection promoted the Gall-Peters projection, which he introduced in 1974.
Peters' map was endorsed by German Chancellor Willy Brandt, who esteemed it as "a powerful symbol of the equality of nations", and the map found subsequently its way on to the walls of every head and branch office of every United Nations agency.
See also
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
- Vassilis Lambropoulos, The rise of eurocentrism : anatomy of interpretation, Princeton, NJ : Princeton Univ. Press, 1993
- Ella Shohat; Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: multiculturalism and the media, Routledge 1994, ISBN 0415063256
- 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
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