It is not surprising, nor is it any news, that US/Euro -centrism is present in most if not all higher educational institutions, i.e., European and American universities. I distinctly recall that the first course I took for my political science bachelor’s, as a first year student ‘fresh off the boat’, was History of the Modern World. This course intended to regularize all students (from all diverse backgrounds) with the history of modernity from 1750 onwards as the basis of the current world system. Some conscious students enquired about the name of the course and, importantly, the content of the course. The supposed History of the modern ‘world’ was singlehandedly European (with a little inclusion of the US). As such, the students argued, it excluded from the ‘development’ of the world the non-European. I could not find the exact response so as to quote it, but, in sum, it was something along the lines of: “we are aware European history is not world history, but European modernity has moved beyond the continent of Europe and can be found everywhere. To study the sources of modernity one can thus understand the world”.
Several comments are deemed necessary regarding this course. First, why choose from 1750 onwards? The course started with the enlightenment as the departure point of modernity with, unsurprisingly, Kant’s ‘Was ist Aüfklarung?’ as the delineation or guidance of what we ought to understand as the Enlightenment. As such the course, while appearing to be a fact-based course, that is, focusing on what happened and not how we can understand it, clearly had an ideological or metaphysical perspective which is not without trouble. One can point to Foucault’s 1983 ‘Qu’est-ce que les Lumières?’ as one of the most influential critiques or alternative viewpoints of what the enlightenment was. The philosophical presupposition then, which was not contested, is that Modernity consisted in (like Kant) “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity”. That is, a transition to rationality as opposed to myth or immature ways of thinking. What this entails, given that the enlightenment and modernity are endemically European, is that the non-European, the Oriental, the Other, is (or was before Europe ‘saved us’) immature. One can be very open minded regarding different cultures but presupposing that modernity as emergence (Ausgang) is European, and that such emergence is ‘higher’, entails that the European is always, necessarily more developed. More on this later.
Second, why start with the 1750s? Aside from the ideological and philosophical presuppositions of what modernity is, one can point to the fact that modernity as a European emergence did not start in the 1750s. Descartes’ cogito ergo sum dates from 1637, Erasmus was born in the 1500s, and Machiavelli even before, Spinoza and Hobbes were active in the early 1600s. All of them could or should be qualified as moderns ––some were, however, only treated in passing by the course. Hence, it is not truly the ideological or philosophical presuppositions of Kant which guided the course. I find it then that the course implicitly and perhaps unwantedly accepted Dussel’s theory of modernity.
Dussel argues that there is not one modernity, but two. If we are to treat seriously the claim that modernity was an emergence, and that such emergence was so superior that it extended everywhere, then we must recognize that modernity entails a totalization, a “management of the centrality of the first world system”.1 That is, before modernity there was no central or hegemonic region. There were influential regions which had diverging degrees of influence in certain areas but these were not global as modernity seems to be today. Hence, the truly first global center was Spain after the stumbling upon with Amerindia. “Spain managed centrality as domination through the hegemony of an integral culture, language, and religion […] as military occupation, bureaucratic-political organization, economic expropriation” and so on.2 This is a Hispanic and Renaissance Modernity. The second modernity, which the course treated as the only one or at least the only important one, “is the Anglo-Germanic Europe, which began with Amsterdam, and which frequently passes as the only Modernity”.3 Such modernity starts around the Dutch independence which was, until then, a province of Spain. It is thus interesting how the Eighty Years’ war was not studied in the course. The course thus starts from a ‘consolidated’ Europe, one which is already a hegemon, without showing how this came to be or what the consequences were. Hence, while giving Dussel another example of misunderstanding modernity, the course went even further by not only disregarding the first modernity, but even disregarding how it came to be, and thus proposing a picture of Europe as always already superior.
What I want to show or learn from this is not an evil or racist picture of universities, which they may have. For all we know the intention of the course was to standardize knowledge on all students from all backgrounds, and the course, given it was the first university course for 500 people, practically needed to simplify a dense concept such as modernity. I should also note that this course is the one I have struggled the most ever, to the extent that it has my lowest recorded grade. So I do appreciate the efforts of trying to simplify history, perhaps if it was more exhaustive I would not even pass. Nonetheless, the well-intended simplification does serve an ideological and self-congratulating purpose. It sets, for the rest of your university education, that Europe (and the US, first as Europe’s firstborn, and second as Europe’s radicalized self) is the Geist of the world.
If it is true, however simplified it may be, that European modernity is now global, it must be because the ideals carried with it are superior, and something all strive to. As Habermas notes: “modernity today represents something like the shared arena in which different civilizations encounter one another as they modify this infrastructure in more or less culture-specific ways”.4 As such, ideals of democracy, personal freedom, economic development, etc., are global (although they stem from modernity), and each region or country only works towards such goals in different ways. It is thus not surprising that in courses studying democracy, rule of law, public policy, it is always the European which is set as the standard and the non-European which is the deficient. Even when the non-European may seem to succeed it is treated as an outlier. For example, the South East Asian (China, South Korea, Singapore) economic development is not treated as a success story, rather, they study how their success can be measured by European standards. And when the European is not doing well, for example Hungary’s corruption or populism, it is treated as following a non-European road.
What all of this reveals is that, however well-intended, university courses always presupposed the European as the target, and everything else as in the process of getting there. Since, however, they are well-intended they will not treat their own as universal, because alas, political science is about falsifiability. That is, their standards can be, supposedly, challenged and rejected. Nonetheless, since they already presuppose that their particular way of being is ‘superior’ no matter how open they are, they cannot escape a “cognitive obstacle”. As Allen notes: “A Western participant who views […] her own form of life” as superior, “can never be sure whether she is disagreeing with the content of their [non-Western] views for good reasons or dismissing them out of hand because she views their adherents as developmentally inferior”.5 Take for example the following not uncommon situation. A non-Western student raises a point about the applicability of a theory in their non-Western region. Western students and teachers disagree with the point made. Since the Western students and teachers are taught that their system is superior, they cannot know whether they rejected the point of the non-Western because it was not a good point or because they deem the speaker as inferior. It is not enough that they are open to hear the points made by others, they need to be willing to have “[their] own’s commitments destabilized in the encounter with other forms of life”.6 It is not the same to say: “I have my views but I will listen to you” than to say “I will listen to you and test if my views are true”.
What is important or worrying is that the non-Western knowledge does not only consist of claims that relate to concrete geographical spaces like “Democracy is not suitable for Latin America”, but to all speech-acts carried out by the non-Western. The cognitive obstacle is not only ‘activated’, so to speak, when the Eurocentric listens to something from a non-Western area, but is also activated by non-Western our being-in-the-world. That is, non-Western people have distinct ways of being which are viewed by Westerns as not-Western: certain ways of dressing, diet, hair style, even body language. Even more so, academia is often carried out in English. The status of speaking English with a hispanic accent is not the same as speaking English with a German accent. Hence, the non-Western may state something about the West and the cognitive obstacle may appear simply because of the accent or because of how the person looks. Think now that this problem, this ontological violence, is not solely apparent in academia but in everyday life whenever a non-Western and a Western interact.
I thus want to conclude with the following remarks. The Eurocentric, no matter how well-intended they are, how open-minded, will never be able to take seriously the non-Western. By taking seriously I mean granting the non-Western with the dignity they deserve as a human being. If the Westerns are only open to listing others but not open to questioning their own views, to the fullest extent, then they will never know if they rejected a view because of its epistemic strength or because they deemed us inferior. “Come, say whatever you want, we want to hear your inferior views! We are open ears.” No matter how hard we scream, how hard we fight, and how much effort we place in being recognized, so long as open-mindness reigns in the public sphere we will never be able to unfold. We are aware of such violence, whenever we raise a point and get disregarded, whenever we pitch an idea and do not get treated seriously, whenever they view our culture as a spectacle, as archaic, as fantasy. Importantly, we are always capable of doing the same to others. Do not be open-minded, be radically deconstructive; what you think and know must be recognized to be particular not universal.
Killed by Achiles 
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