BEYOND EURO-AMERICANISM 421First, Euro-Americanist theoretical imaginations
or historical interpretations emphasize the
posited leading civilizational role of the west in
modern times by reference to some special and
primaryfeature of its own socio-economic, politi-
cal and cultural life. This positing of the special
and the primary has been reflected in a variety
of ways. From Max Weber western thought has
inherited the notion that the occident is the ‘dis-
tinctive seat of economic rationalism’ (1978:
480) or that outside Europe neither scientific nor
artistic nor political nor economic development
entered upon that ‘path of rationalization, which
is peculiar to the Occident’ (1992: 25). From the
annals of critical Marxist theory we read in
Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks that European
culture is the onlyhistorically and concretely
universal culture (Gramsci, 1971: 416, emphasis
added). More recently, and in a not dissimilar
fashion, Zizek (1998), from a post-Marxist posi-
tion, argues that Europe is the key home of
democracy and democratic theory. From other
sources, which focus on materiality, emphasis
falls on the posited historical superiority of
western science and technology (for a critique
see Adas, 1990), and in the ethico-political
realm, the west has been constructed as the
cradle of human rights, progress, enlightened
thought, reason and philosophical reflection.
Specifically, in the domain of philosophy,
western culture has been customarily portrayed
as being the only culture capable of self-critique
and evaluation (see, for example, Castoriadis,
1998: 94) or the only culture to claim an ‘experi-
mental success’ through bringing people into
some degree of comity and of ‘increasing human
happiness, which looks more promising than any
other way which has been proposed so far’
(Rorty, 1999: 273).
Second, the special or primary feature or
essential set of features uniquely possessed by
the west are regarded within Euro-Americanism
as essentially internalto European and American
development. This set of features or overall
model is enframed in a way that assumes the
existence of an independent logic and dynamism
of Euro-American development. There is cer-
tainly no sense of such development being a
copy or the result of a process of cross-cultural
encounters. Moreover, and rather critically, there
tends to be an ethos of superiority – neatly
captured in Foucault’s notion of the ‘historical
sovereignty of European thought’ (1973: 376–7) –
which permeates the idea of an independent logic
of western progress, or civilization, or more
recently modernization and development. The
sense of the superiority of the west was clearly
reflected in the modernization theory of the 1950sand 1960s where, for instance, particular definitions
of industrialization, agrarian change, and social
and political development were rooted in a certain
interpretation of Euro-American experience and
then modelled for export to the Third World. The
ethos of superiority fuels the drive to expand, and
this aspect of westocentrism has been carefully and
critically evaluated by Blaut (1993) in his discus-
sion of colonialism and diffusionist models of
western development.
Third, the development of the west within a
Euro-Americanist frame is held to constitute a
universalstep forward for humanity as a whole
(for a critical discussion, see Shohat and Stam,
1994). Such a view has been reflected in both
traditional Marxist views of a progressive
succession of modes of production, and in the
well-known Rostowian notion of the ‘stages of
economic growth’ (Rostow, 1960) with the west
offering a mirror of development for the future of
non-western societies. At the end of the 1950s, in
a symptomatic expression of this orientation, the
prominent American social scientist Daniel
Lerner, in his well-known text on The Passing of
Traditional Society, asserted that Middle East
modernizers would do well to study the historical
sequence of western growth since ‘what the West
is ... the Middle East seeks to become’ (1958:
47). Such a standpoint finds a historical prece-
dent in the nineteenth-century writing of the
influential philosopher Hegel (1967: 212), who
defined the principle of the modern world, i.e.
Europe, as thought and the universal. And subse-
quently in the twentieth century Husserl stated
that ‘philosophy has constantly to exercise
through European man its role of leadership for
the whole of mankind’ (1965: 178).
Taking these three elements as a whole, the
primary, the internally independent and the
universal, we also find that in the representation
of the history of relations between the west and
the non-west, the other, i.e. the non-west, is por-
trayed in ways which are pervasively negative,
thus constituting a positivity for the west. The
complexities and pluralities of both the west and
the non-west are reduced to a driving vector of
meaning that assigns to the west the key historical
and geopolitical significance of being the essen-
tial and superior motor of progress, civilization,
science, development and modernity.
On the negative essentialization of the non-
western other, Mbembe (2001), in his thought-
provoking text on the ‘postcolony’, reminds us
that in the context of western representations of
Africa, the negativity is always present and that
the African human experience continually
appears as an experience that can only be under-
stood through a negative interpretation. Africa,∨∨3029-ch22.qxd 03-10-02 11:01 AM Page 421