Eurocentrism and civilization

In his study of the word civilization, the French linguist Émile Benveniste (1971: 289) states, ‘the whole history of modern thought and the principal intellectual achievements in the western world are connected with the creation and handling of a few dozen essential words which are all the common possession of the western European languages.’ Civilization is one of the words; in fact, he asserts that it is ‘one of the most important terms of our modern lexicon.’ This might sound reasonable enough; I have argued at length myself (Bowden, 2009) that civilization is a significant concept in world history and international affairs. However, when we consider that Eurocentrism entails the privileging of Europe (or the West) over other parts of the world, then this statement itself might be considered an example of Eurocentrism. How so? The idea that civilization and everything that it entails is uniquely Western suggests that those attributes do not apply to rest of the world, that the non-Western world represents something other than civilization, perhaps its antitheses – barbarism or savagery. Furthermore, it overlooks the fact that Ibn Khaldûn’s (1332–1406) Muqaddimah of 1377, an Islamic history of the world, includes concepts very similar to civilization. As stated in the text, ‘It deals with such conditions affecting the nature of civilization as, for instance, savagery and sociability, group feelings, and the different ways by which one group of human beings achieves superiority over another’ (Ibn Khaldûn, 2005: 35). This sounds very much like the Western conception of civilization. This is not the only example of the close links between Eurocentrism and civilization, particularly in international history and international relations. As will be explained, the ideas and ideals of civilization, progress, and universal history, which are closely related with similar intellectual heritage, by their very nature are deeply enmeshed in discourses that many would identify as Eurocentric. In exploring these close links further, this chapter first discusses the idea of Eurocentrism in a little more detail and then takes a closer look at the concept of civilization and the associated idea of universal history