Is eurocentrism dead?
A historic debate just took place in the heart of the Catholic world. And it was decolonial! On the 30-31 March, at the invitation of the Pope Francis I—the highest hierarch of the Catholic Church and head of the Vatican state—key thinkers of the post & decolonial debate from the global south went to the Vatican to discuss colonialism, decolonization and neo-colonialism: an anti-imperialist conference at the epicenter of the Christendom.
Here is an extract from the debate between the Argentinian-Mexican philosopher E. Dussel, the Indian-British critical theorist Homi K. Bhabha and the Puerto Rican sociologist Ramón Grosfoguel.
Eurocentrism; supremacy and democracy; nationalisms of the Global South; modernity, and atheism: under debate.
Transcription—>
[original in Spanish]
Moderator 1: I would ask Professor Dussel if, understanding all the real foundations of democracy in the sense of freedom, equality, sovereignty and internal independence of nations...Why do international bodies not comply with these precepts? Every time a body is created, i.e. FAO, OAS, UN, etc., these bodies serve two purposes: they serve the world powers, but they never serve democracy, autonomy and the real foundations of self-determination of peoples. What is the point of changing everything so that everything remains the same? Thank you, Professor.
E. Dussel: Yes, because Eurocentrism still exists, on the one hand, and at the same time, the conception that the peoples of the global south are not equal. You have to see that Aristotle said that the human being was a political being. That seems to be universal. But in reality Aristotle said something very different. He said: the human being - anthropos - is the living being that inhabits the polis, which was Greek. And those who do not inhabit the polis - in Egypt, in Asia, in Europe - were the barbarians. And these, in a way, did not have the definition of human beings. They were second class. And also, going back to the Greeks, Parmenides said: "Being is; non-being is not". And that, then, seems so obvious that why did he say it? Being is Greek and that which is not Greek is not: it was the barbarians. And this is still true today: the human being is a member of a military and economic power and therefore has all the rights. But those who do not have this military, economic and cultural power - Africa, Latin America and part of Asia - are not human. They are second class. And that is precisely the basis of coloniality. The coloniality of being. And we have to reverse this and free ourselves from this assumption of superior humans. Racist, because they are white. Macho, because they are men. Rich, when they have wealth and despise the poor. In short, many power relations that discredit the other: the alterity. This is the thought of a great and humble Jewish philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas. That one must know how to listen to the other in order to learn from the other every morning. And that other is the South, despised by the dominant culture. And we must revalue this colonized world, which must be decolonised and fight for a common good, for human equality, which is an ideal of the future, as yet, which has not been realized for the moment.
Moderator 2: I give the floor to Professor Bhabha.
[original in English]
H. Bhabha: Thank you very much for this interesting discussion. My concern now is with the question of sovereign and supremacy. And not so much with the question of eurocentrism. That does not mean that the eurocentric does not exist. Of course it exists in all kinds of ways. You know, now the eurocentric exists through Netflix. Even when Netflix is making content in Lebanon or wherever, it's still a fairly eurocentric mode. But I'm concerned with two things. First of all, in the countries I know, where I deplore what is going on, this is not a question of eurocentrism. In India, it's not a question of eurocentrism, it's completely a question of hindu-centrism. And it is aimed against Muslims. There's no question of euro [sic]. In fact, all forms of informal or formal forms of so-called eurocentrism are removed. The Ford Foundation can no longer make a NGO donation because they say the Ford foundation is trying to convert, is anti-national. It seems to me the same thing is happening in Turkey. The same thing is happening in Russia. There’s no eurocentrism in Russia. It's a very different way of thinking about sovereignty and territoriality. So, it’s my senses that, I just think that, I need–when you think about decolonization today–we have to think about many different forms of hegemony. And they're not simply the eurocentrism that was so dominant and so disastrous, you know, in the first anti-colonial movement. Of course there are elements of that–economic elements in particular–that continue. But, when you said that, you were interested not only in the economic, but you where all interested in the cultural aspect of this, I mean, in many countries now there is no cultural eurocentrism. There's absolutely cultural [inaudible]. Not only I agree with you. I'm agreeing with you. So,it seems that that's one of the problems. The other problem I feel is why people, the people of a country, now use democratic processes to elect profoundly autocratic leaders. Nobody ever said that in India–I mean, there's corruption in everywhere, so I, you know, I've seen it in America all the time–but nobody said really that the elections in India which had brought Modi back again are corrupt. They are not corrupt. But people have changed the things they identify with. Look at England. At a time when you have leaders, the English leaders, are diasporic Indians, at that same time, the same Prime Minister now was a brexiter. So it seems to me that the world, as far as I could see, the world picture is very complex, and it is, you know, the paradigms that we had–that's what I tried to say in my lecture– that the paradigms we have, have to be recalled. And the global south, which we’ve always– I mean, I’ve just wrote something about the concept of the Third World–well, this was a very remarkable concept: the Third World. It was non sovereign. It believed in regional and international linkages. It was a very open-minded thing. What happened after that is the sad story. But that's, at least my feeling, that eurocentrism is often now used and blamed by countries of the global south just to make their grips on their own people much much firmer and to reinforce power. Thank you.
Moderator 2: Thank you professor Bhabha. Professor Grosfoguel…
R. Grosfoguel: I want to respond in English to the point made by Professor Bhabha. Out of hospitality because my first language is spanish. I think that it all depends on what you define as Eurocentrism. Eurocentrism..you could be Eurocentric citing the Quran. You could be Eurocentric citing the Bhagavad Gita. You could be Eurocentric citing the Torah. You could be Eurocentric citing, you know, from different epistemic perspectives that are classified in the modern world as non-western–quote unquote. In my opinion, and in the decolonial perspective that Enrique Dussel had defended, the brand being Eurocentric is not just citing European authors. Being Eurocentric is about the binaries that the West in its colonial expansion has imposed worldwide. That is: the constitution of the modern world, of modernity, as a form of civilization, of domination, and not as a form of emancipation, okay?, this imposition of modernity around the world–which is a civilizational project of the West–has imposed binaries such as: the West and the rest. And in “the West and the rest” you have the following. I will give you an example: that everything coming from the West is superior to your rest. For example, the idea of the superiority of the West in the sense that [it] has democracy–a form of democracy–and the rest of the world have despotism. The idea that the West promotes women liberation,the rest of the world are patriarchal. The idea that the West is for liberty and the rest of the world are for enslavement, or whatever. These binaries had been imposed all over the world. So, the third world fundamentalists that you rightly criticize are inversions of eurocentric binaries. That is, they’re just inverting the eurocentric binaries. Because these forms of fundamentalism are recent in history. They are a result and a consequence of the colonial expansion around the world and the imposition of binaries that have been imposed through colonialism and they are still alive today. And, so, these forms of Hindu fundamentalist [inaudible], yes, I'm going to finish in a second, yeah [inaudible.] OK, just to say that: we need to define what exactly is eurocentrism, otherwise we get into discussions that don't make any sense. Thank you.
Moderator 2: A last brief word? Maybe Professor Dussel, first.
[original in Spanish]
E. Dussel: Yes. I would like to talk about atheism. Christians, in the first centuries, were against all the Roman gods and were attacked for being ateorum teum romanorum. They were attacked for being atheists of the Roman gods, and cause to go to the circus. For being atheists, of the gods! That the Christian god was another. None of the Romans. And it was cause for death to be an atheist. But of the Roman gods. And then, back in 1970, I have an article on the atheism of the prophets of Israel and Marx. Marx was not an atheist. He was just of a certain deism of European culture. When they told him: there is a Christian state. Marx said: read St. Augustine and the church fathers, and tell me, where is a Christian state? A Christian state cannot be, because it would be the kingdom of God. So you have to be careful with the word atheism. You have to see from which god Marx was an atheist. He was an atheist from Hegel's conception of God, but not in general.
Secondly, about Eurocentrism, I have a big "History of the Shiites" in Iran. So, they are talking about history and it says: in the Middle Ages the Shiites did this and that. I say: how does an Arab talk about the Middle Ages? No Arab country was in the Middle Ages. Because the Middle Ages is a Latin-German phenomenon. And in Europe, and only in Europe, there was the Middle Ages: feudalism. The Arabs were never in the Middle Ages, while the Europeans were isolated. And the Arab world was universal from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In the Arab world there was no Middle Ages, there were no feuds. It was an urban society that moved from the Pacific to the Atlantic. So that means that the Shia who wrote the history of the Shia was Eurocentric. Without realizing it, he had adopted Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Modern Age as a periodisation valid for the whole Earth, invented by the German Romantics, and valid only for Europe, not for humanity. So, Eurocentrism is fundamental, because it can still be projected onto the Arabs and they, who were in a situation outside Europe, also used the ideological categories of Eurocentrism. Eurocentrism is very deep, and it has to be overcome also in legal philosophy, and in the conception of the state, and in the conception of law and many things.
[applauses-inaudible]
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The source video of this transcript is available here.
The moderators were—>
Moderator 1: María Julia Fuigueredo Vivas.
Moderator 2: Marcelo Suárez-Orozco.
Transcription and translation by [decoco]
Special thanks to Jamie Burton and Francisco Tunez for their help in reviewing this transcript.
