BY WAY OF AN OPENING

Although critical human geography has witnessed

a growing interest in the conceptual and thematic

concerns emanating from the post-colonial turn

(see, for example, Gregory, 1995; Sidaway,

2000), and although more analytical attention

has been recently given to questions of the

spatiality of democracy (Massey, 1995; Robinson,

1998; Slater, 1998), so far little work has been

developed around the spatiality or geopolitics of

democracy and democratization from a post-

colonial perspective. For this chapter my use of

the term ‘post-colonial perspective’ refers to three

interconnected objectives: (1) to provide a critical

approach to certain influential western visions

of democracy; (2) to emphasize the mutually

constitutive, although unequal, role played by

colonizer and colonized or globalizer and global-

ized within the domain of west/non-west encoun-

ters, including here an awareness of the crucial

links between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’; and (3) within

this same domain, to briefly touch on certain

facets of the politics of conceptual knowledge, for

example, how global are our geographiesof refer-

ence, how ethnocentric are western theorists of

democracy, and what can we learn from other

non-western theorists? I shall return to these

points at the end of the chapter.

The continuing critique of westocentrism or

Euro-Americanism has been nurtured by post-

colonial perspectives, but not infrequently these

critical appraisals have tended to bypass the

ways political theory in general and democratic

theory in particular are constructed and deployed,

and similarly political geography has tended not

to be a predominant site for the application of

post-colonial theory. In this chapter I plan to

examine two interconnected issues. First, I want

to discuss what might be meant by Euro-

Americanism and how such a prevailing vision

has become rooted in western social science; and

second, I intend to illustrate the argument devel-

oped in this first section by briefly examining

certain problems with the western theorization of

democracy and democratization. These two

sections will then lead me to conclude by drawing

out one or two implications for the way the

geographies of the cultural and the political

might be reframed.

TOWARDS A SPECIFICATION

OF EURO-AMERICANISM

To begin with I shall not differentiate

Eurocentrism from Euro-Americanism, but

rather marshall my points from the literature in

general, a literature which overall tends to

employ the former term much more frequently

than the latter, and which often fails to specify

the possible differences between the two, giving

rise to the possible implication that the differ-

ences if discernible are not particularly signifi-

cant. Before considering the distinction between

these two terms, and in particular in the context

of west/non-west relations, let us begin by

specifying three constituent elements of Euro-

Americanism which can give us a working

definition of the concept.

22

Beyond Euro-Americanism –

Democracy and Post-colonialism

David Slater

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