Eurocentrism

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

Eurocentrism first emerged as a discursive rationale that justified colonialism, the process by which the European powers reached positions of hegemony. Historically, the term West has been associated with ideas, values, and ideals reflecting the prevailing views of Europe—perceived to be the center of the world. As a form of thinking, Eurocentrism still permeates and structures contemporary practices, representations, and knowledge even after the formal end of colonialism. Eurocentric discourses present history as a linear trajectory, and Europe and, more recently North America, as the center of progressive, historical, democratic thought and change.

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Early Eurocentrism can be traced back to the Renaissance, during which learning approaches focused on the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations, which were significant to contemporary European civilization. The assumptions of European superiority increased with European imperialism in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries and flourished in the 19th century. Cartography was particularly instrumental in representing the progressive industrialized character of this region, which was contrasted with hunting, farming, and herding societies in other regions of the world such as the Americas, Australia, and Africa, which had been colonized by European empires. Even the complex civilizations of Mexico, Persia, Japan, and Peru were not considered as well developed as Europe and were often characterized as being static and traditional. European writers of this time constructed the history of Europe as a paradigm to be followed by the rest of the world through either colonialism or trade. By the 19th century, assumptions about European superiority had been translated into racial superiority.

By ignoring colonial relationships between the West and non-Western peoples and cultures, Eurocentric knowledge constructs progress and modernity as an inherent and unique product of European internal conditions. In contrast, non-Western societies' “backwardness” is constructed as a result of their specific evolutionary stage or level of progress and development. These hegemonic assumptions not only ignore history but also have had important consequences for the development of social knowledge. Eurocentrism has influenced the cartographic centering of Europe; the division of global history based on European events; the portrayal of history, philosophy, and arts as being exclusively European; and the use of race as a category to classify non-Western peoples.

Immanuel Wallerstein, who has critically assessed Eurocentrism, argues that although modern social sciences were developed in England, France, Italy, and Germany, the theories and methods based on European and North American materials have been used as universal tools. Social science has been Eurocentric throughout its institutional history: (a) It grounds European dominance based on its specific historical achievements; (b) it claims that scientific truths are valid across time and space; (c) it reproduces the view that Europe's history is universal history; (d) it separates subject from object; (e) it constructs non-Western peoples as a European projection; and (f) it centers on progress, which became the explanation of the world's history and the motor of applied social science. These different dimensions have been part of notions of progress, the binary backwardness/modernization, and rigid demarcations between fact and value judgments and the production of knowledge.

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