Over the last five years or so, the European Institute has wanted to affirm the strategic objective to cultivate its research and teaching in a way that would go ‘beyond Eurocentrism’. This expression is intended to play a twin role in our thinking about what we do and who we are: it serves to highlight that we both look beyond Europe in a regional sense and look beyond Eurocentrism in a philosophical-political sense.
The first of these ambitions is perhaps the more straightforward. It means that we do not want to explore Europe in an exclusively inward-looking way. We do, of course, attempt to understand Europe from within, and this is an ambition we should steadfastly retain. But we know too that this ‘inside’ is, like a benign hydra, already a diverse space and calls for multiple perspectives. If we investigate the history and institutions of European integration and the European Union, for example, this should draw in rather than exclude the tensions, contradictions and conflicts that mark them. And this will always include the international context that these developments both confront and help to forge and form.
So even where our interest has a strongly European focus, our ambition is to avoid looking at Europe in isolation. This internationalised perspective is explicit in three of our four MSc degree titles: European and International Public Policy, Culture and Conflict in a Global Europe, International Migration and Public Policy. But it is implicit in the fourth too: Political Economy of Europe. As the poet and essayist Paul Valéry had already said in the 1930s, we no longer live in a time in which economics and politics could be ‘localized’: there is no political economy of Europe that is a political economy of Europe only. Our teaching programmes require us to develop a certain degree of coherence, formulated around Europe as a problem. But here too a suitably internationalised focus here is not only methodologically appropriate, it is, in our time, ultimately inescapable.
Our now more and more “globalized” condition, globalisation itself, is not something we can ignore. Nor, however, is it some exogenous state that has simply befallen Europe. On the contrary, if, as the American born poet and essayist T.S. Eliot put it in the 1940s, ‘the notion of a self-contained European culture’ is ‘fatal’, totally incoherent, then that is in part a reflection of the fact that the globalised world-order we see today unfolds historically, in its dominant political-economic form, from a European beachhead. Globalisation is, as one says in French, mondialisation: world-wide-isation. And at issue is the world-wide-isation of the modern European world.
This takes me to the second, and more complex, of our strategic ambitions. Europe’s historically determining position in the modern world order was not founded on its exemplary civility or its centrality to the development of a cosmopolitan end to world history, but the colonial barbarity that belongs to that very sense of centrality. There was nothing civilised in Europe’s ‘mission civilisatrice’. As the philosopher Immanuel Kant put in in 1795, ‘if we compare with this ultimate [cosmopolitan] end the inhospitable conduct of the civilised states of our continent, especially the commercial states, the injustice which they display in visiting foreign countries and peoples (which in their case is the same as conquering them) seems appallingly great’.
This historical legacy is, of course, anything but invisible to the people and peoples of the world whose fate it for so long sealed and whose existence it so humiliated. The desire to go beyond Eurocentrism perhaps begins here. We might take our bearings in this regard from the Welsh-Polish historian Norman Davies, from the ‘Introduction’ to his book Europe: A History, in which he identifies ‘four main sources’ of ‘opposition to Eurocentrism’ across the globe. I say we might take our bearings from his text, but I mean that in a loose sense only. Davies’s summary is deformed by the very Eurocentrism it reports opposition to. It is primarily in that sense that thinking critically about Eurocentrism might find a point of departure with it:
Opposition to Eurocentrism comes at present from four main sources. In North America is has emerged from that part of the Black community, and their political sympathisers, who are rebelling against an educational system allegedly dominated by ‘white supremacist values’ […] In its most militant form it […] is based on the contention that European civilisation has ‘stolen’ the birthright of mankind, and of Africans in particular. In the world of Islam, especially in Iran, a similar opposition is mounted by religious fundamentalists, who see ‘the West’ as the domain of Satan. Elsewhere in the Third World, it is espoused by intellectuals, often of a Marxian complexion, who regard Eurocentric views as part and parcel of capitalist ideology. In Europe it is widespread, though not always well articulated, in a generation which, when they paused to think, have been thoroughly ashamed of many of their elders’ attitudes.
‘Four main sources’. Perhaps. But Davies might have sketched a somewhat more judicious conception of what is at issue had he given prominence to what is nevertheless just about visible in his own (frighteningly disrespectful) description of regional variations: there is more than one anti-Eurocentrism, more than one cultural configuration of ‘opposition’ to it – and something very distinctive about the anti-Eurocentrism that is found and articulated ‘in Europe’.
Anti-Eurocentrism in Europe must be, in some way, distinctive – after all it is shaped by its own historical guilt and shame, not the abuse and humiliation it meted on others. And there really is a good deal guiltily to remember from Europe’s history, at home as well as abroad – memories of totalitarianism, genocides, the Shoah, as well as colonization, at the very least. Having said that, the anti-Eurocentrism one finds in Europe is not the perspective we wish to cultivate when we say we want to go beyond Eurocentrism in the European Institute. If, in general, Eurocentrism defines Europe in terms that places greatest weight on its comparative achievements, past and present, then anti-Eurocentrism defines Europe in terms that places greatest weight on its comparative crimes, past and present. But neither perspective should be taken as the last word on Europe, at least not Europe today. Indeed, it is Europe today, with all its memories and all its amnesias, that interests us most.
We will not forget the enormity of guilt that belongs to Europe’s bloody history. It may, indeed, be the first word on Europe that needs to be heard today. But it is not the last word. ‘Beyond Eurocentrism’ – this, for us, is the new ‘today’ for Europe that we want to be part of in the European Institute at LSE. But we are not hostile to Europe, we do not seek to destroy it, we have not come to bury it – though doubtless in calling into question its historical Eurocentrism we cannot but be betraying something of it too. Nevertheless, and without the slightest sense of European nationalism, we are profoundly and constructively involved in questions concerning what Europe has meant and what it means today. This includes Europe’s Enlightenment heritage, its scientific and critical achievements, it includes embracing a European present that is home to what British author Johny Pitts has called its ‘Afropean’ voices, and it includes too a developing sense that Europe’s origins are also diverse, not one, that the culture of the other was already and always inside Europe’s culture from the very beginning – but, yes, it includes too an awareness and regretful acceptance of the totalitarian, genocidal and colonialist crimes of Europe’s past, and their still lingering life.
Europe is not over: beyond both Eurocentrism and anti-Eurocentrism in Europe, it remains to come. The Algerian-born French philosopher Jacques Derrida invokes this opening in our today to another Europe near the start of his book on European cultural identity, The Other Heading, and speaking for himself about it, he does more than speak for himself. Indeed, I think he speaks for us:
Is there then a completely new ‘today’ of Europe beyond all the exhausted programs of Eurocentrism and anti-Eurocentrism, these exhausting yet unforgettable programs? (We cannot and must not forget them since they do not forget us.) Am I taking advantage of the ‘we’ when I begin saying that, in knowing them now by heart, and to the point of exhaustion – since these unforgettable programs are exhausting and exhausted – we today no longer want either Eurocentrism or anti-Eurocentrism?
Since the end of the Second World War, Europe has tried hard to make up for the atrocities of the first half of the twentieth century. But it did so, first, and perhaps unavoidably, by turning in on itself. The first fifty years of the EU reflect that, and it is not obvious that the EU could have been brought into being otherwise. And as a result, perhaps Europe today is emerging from some of the darkest shadows of its own fratricidal past and is slowly, cautiously and unevenly making step beyond a condition in which it was, as the German philosopher Martin Heidegger put it in the 1930s, ‘in its ruinous blindness, forever on the point of cutting its own throat’. Moreover, perhaps one can see recent European efforts to re-organise the world economy developing in ways that are more compatible with non-European as well as narrowly European concerns. Think of the open strategic autonomy debate linked to environmental concerns, for example, or using labour and human rights standards in trade agreements.
One should not exaggerate the altruism or the optimism in this European story, and it is an open question how much or how far Europe has changed since the last terrible world war of European origin. But Europe is a porous place, and its identity is never fixed or given. Its future is, as ever, in the making. The staff and students of the European Institute are part of this.