Eurocentrism

History and the social sciences have a long history of viewing the West, whatever that might be, as the socalled motor of history, that is, as the dynamic power that instigates change and progress while the rest of the world passively waits for the benefits of its wisdom and wealth. The doctrine that upholds the West as inherently superior to non-Western cultures is Eurocentrism, which has a long historical record. The very definition of Europe, for example, may be traced back to Vasilli Tatischev, Peter the Great's geographer during the 18th century, who defined the east end of Europe at the Ural Mountains as part of the Russian elite's desire to differentiate Europe from Asia as meaningful entities. Similarly, Georg Hegel, who viewed world history as the product of a spirit (or geist), argued that it reached its zenith in the European nation-state. Karl Marx viewed Western capitalism as alive and dynamic, in contrast to the static Asiatic mode of production. Max Weber ascribed rationality to European cultures, especially Protestant ones, dismissing Islam, Hinduism, and Confucianism, a view that undergirded modernization theory. In 20th-century environmental determinism, Karl Wittfogel advocated a hydraulic theory that dismissed the possibility of democracy in Asia as Oriental despotism. All of these perspectives put the West on center stage as the engine that drives the world economy, with everyone else allegedly hanging on.

The assumption of European and, by extension, Western superiority takes a variety of forms. In earlier versions, it hinged on a crude racism (e.g., the “white man's burden”). Martin Bernal, in Black Athena, noted that 19th-century European historians constructed a mythology in which Europe invented itself without reliance on earlier, wealthier, and darker-skinned cultures such as the Egyptians and Phoenicians.

James Blaut traced a model of history he called the Orient Express, in which the locus of progress moves from Southeast Europe (classical Greece) to the Northwest. Subsequently, via colonialism, everything good, progressive, innovative, and productive is held to diffuse out of Europe.

Edward Said's highly influential book Orientalism opened new ground in the discovery of Eurocentrism. In this view, colonialism was every bit as much a cultural and ideological project as it was economic and political in nature. Orientalism was the flip side of Eurocentrism, that is, the symbolic construction of unrealistic mythologized Orient that bore little relation to the complex societies of Asia or the Middle East but revealed much about Western views of themselves and their biases. Eurocentrism led to a conceptual reordering of the world through forms of knowledge that legitimized Western dominance. Typically, this move is organized around binary divisions; the West is white, progressive, powerful, rational, democratic, and superior, whereas the Orient is nonwhite, feminine, traditional, static, mysterious, irrational, despotic, and inferior. (Said himself was criticized for essentializing the West, i.e., stereotyping Europeans as racists as if they lacked diversity among them.) Coupled with modernization theory, Eurocentrism constructed a sense of historical time that represented the West as the present and the future, whereas the Orient was relegated to the past; thus, beyond Europe was before Europe. Eurocentrism and Orientalism revealed that every regionalization is a power relation—a way of representing the world in ways that serve some interests and not others.

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