Understanding Eurocentrism in International Relations

Open almost any standard textbook on International Relations and you will meet a familiar cast of ideas: sovereign nation-states, the balance of power, anarchy in the international system, and the Treaty of Westphalia as the moment modern politics supposedly began. What rarely gets stated out loud is that nearly all of these foundational ideas grew out of one continent’s history. This is the heart of Eurocentrism – a way of organising knowledge that treats Europe’s particular experience as the universal story of humanity. For students of International Relations Theory (IRT), recognising this bias is not just an academic exercise. It shapes which questions get asked, whose history counts, and how global politics is explained.

What is Eurocentrism? 🔗

Eurocentrism is the worldview that places Europe and the West at the centre of knowledge, history, and civilisation. It assumes that modern thought, science, and political organisation originated in Europe and then spread outward to the rest of the world. In one careful working definition developed by researchers at the London School of Economics, Eurocentrism is the belief – whether stated openly or held silently – that non-Western history has little value or relevance to a wider understanding of the world.

This is more than simple favouritism towards Europe. Eurocentrism is a complete framework for interpreting the past and present. As one influential account puts it, it is an interpretation of history that gives primacy to the European-Western world in shaping the economic, political, and cultural systems that make up the modern world. The trouble is that this interpretation often presents itself not as one perspective among many, but as the only objective and neutral way of seeing things.

The difference between bias and a worldview 🔗

It helps to separate ordinary bias from Eurocentrism as a structured worldview. A biased opinion is a preference that can be corrected with more information. Eurocentrism, by contrast, is woven into the very categories we use to think. When the concepts, the timeline, and the standards of judgement are all drawn from European history, the bias does not sit on top of the analysis – it is built into the foundations. This is what makes it so difficult to spot and so persistent in academic study.

Sujata Patel and the structure of Eurocentric thought 🔗

The sociologist Sujata Patel offers one of the clearest accounts of how Eurocentrism actually works as a system of ideas. In her writing on modernity and colonialism, she identifies several devices that hold the Eurocentric worldview together. Understanding these makes the abstract idea far more concrete.

Linear time and the myth of progress 🔗

The first device is evolutionism. According to Patel, Eurocentrism organises history as a linear narrative that moves in a single direction – from the primitive to the modern. This sense of time was conceptualised during the early period of European modernity and then imposed on the rest of the world. Every society is placed somewhere on the same straight line of development, with Europe positioned at the front. Other societies are not seen as different, but as merely behind, still travelling the road that Europe has already completed.

This linear conception of time does quiet but powerful work. It turns difference into delay. A society with a distinct political tradition is recast as a society that has not yet “caught up.” The European pathway becomes the destination everyone is supposed to reach.

Dualism and the construction of the ‘other’ 🔗

The second device Patel highlights is dualism. Eurocentrism constantly works through binaries: modern and traditional, rational and superstitious, developed and underdeveloped, West and East. Through this dualism, the knowledge of the “other” is built as the opposite of Europe. The non-European world is defined not on its own terms but as a negative image – whatever Europe is, the rest is assumed to be the reverse.

Hierarchy embedded in the binary 🔗

The third element ties the first two together. As Patel explains, embedded within the binary is a hierarchy. Because Europe is treated as the first to create modernity, European history and society are ranked as superior, and the rest of the world as inferior. The binary is never neutral; it always carries a ranking. This is the link between describing the world and dominating it, because once a group is defined as backward, treating it as needing guidance starts to feel natural and even generous.

Patel’s broader point, developed in her work on whether theories of multiple modernities are Eurocentric, is that this whole episteme became part of the “background understandings” of the social sciences – the assumptions that scholars absorb without ever questioning them. Eurocentrism survives precisely because it is invisible to those who carry it.

The Europe-East binary in practice 🔗

The dualism Patel describes has a long and concrete history. The most famous critique of it comes from Edward Said’s 1978 book Orientalism, which examined how Western scholarship constructed an image of “the East.” Said argued that this body of knowledge portrayed Eastern societies as inferior, subservient, and in need of saving, and that these representations were never innocent – they actively shaped the world they claimed merely to describe.

In this framework, Europe stands for modernity, reason, science, and progress. The East stands for tradition, emotion, mysticism, and stagnation. The two are placed in a strict opposition where the West dominates and the East is dominated. What looks like objective study of foreign cultures turns out to be deeply tied to relationships of power.

Colonialism as a ‘civilising mission’ 🔗

This binary had enormous practical consequences. If the East was genuinely backward and the West genuinely advanced, then colonial conquest could be repackaged as a gift. European empires justified their rule as a civilising mission – a benevolent project of bringing progress and modernity to supposedly backward lands.

The subcontinent offers a textbook case. British rule was routinely defended as an effort to civilise and modernise a land portrayed as static and underdeveloped. This narrative, repeated in colonial literature and scholarship, allowed the harsh realities of conquest, resource extraction, and the suppression of rebellions to be reframed as acts of benevolence. The poet Rudyard Kipling captured the sentiment in his notion of a duty falling on the colonisers to uplift others. The “civilising” language masked the economic and political domination underneath.

The key insight is that knowledge and power reinforced each other. Scholarly descriptions of the East as inferior justified colonial rule, and colonial rule in turn produced more scholarship confirming that inferiority. This is what makes Eurocentrism so much more than an innocent intellectual habit.

Why this matters for International Relations Theory 🔗

International Relations as a discipline is built almost entirely on this European foundation. As one IGNOU teaching unit on the subject puts it plainly, IRT is a West-centric discourse that tries to pass off as a global phenomenon. Because the theories rely so heavily on knowledge that emerged from Western experience – particularly the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution – they are culture-bound even while claiming to be universal.

The nation-state and Westphalia 🔗

Consider the most basic building block of IR: the sovereign nation-state. This model is drawn directly from European history and is usually traced to the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648. IRT then treats this specifically European arrangement of territorial sovereignty as if it applied naturally to the entire planet. But many societies across Asia, Africa, and the Americas organised political authority in very different ways – through empires, confederations, kinship networks, and overlapping loyalties. By assuming the Westphalian model is universal, mainstream theory erases these alternatives from view.

Realism and the assumptions we never question 🔗

The dominant theories themselves carry the same imprint. Realism and neorealism, which describe international politics as a struggle for power under conditions of anarchy, generalise from European patterns of inter-state competition. These assumptions are presented as timeless laws of politics rather than as ideas rooted in a particular regional history. When the European experience becomes the silent standard, the security concerns, histories, and ideas of the rest of the world get pushed to the margins.

Beyond Eurocentrism: perspectives from the Global South 🔗

Recognising Eurocentrism is the first step; the more interesting question is what comes next. A growing body of scholarship from the Global South argues that the goal is not to throw away all Western theory but to widen the conversation. Scholars across regions have begun developing approaches grounded in their own experiences – modifications of realism that reflect the distinct security situation of formerly colonised states, and theoretical traditions drawing on African, Chinese, and other intellectual histories.

Patel’s own prescription is instructive here. She calls on the global North to provincialise its knowledge – to recognise that European thought is local and particular rather than universal – while encouraging the global South to build its own networks of endogenous knowledge. The aim is not to reject reason or science, but to stop treating one region’s history as the measure of all others. A more honest International Relations would draw on many traditions rather than dressing up a single European story as the universal truth.

The trap of simply reversing the binary 🔗

One caution is worth holding onto. Escaping Eurocentrism does not mean inventing an equally rigid binary in the opposite direction or romanticising the past. The deeper problem is the structure of thinking – the linear timeline, the dualism, the hierarchy. Genuine progress means being critical of inherited frameworks while still engaging with them, and contributing new ideas drawn from previously ignored experiences. The point is to make the discipline more accurate and more complete, not to swap one form of bias for another.

Recognising the water we swim in 🔗

The hardest thing about Eurocentrism is that it rarely announces itself. It hides inside the words we use, the dates we treat as turning points, and the standards we apply without thinking. When a textbook describes one society as “modern” and another as “traditional,” or treats a European treaty as the birth of international politics, the Eurocentric framework is quietly at work. Learning to notice these assumptions is what allows students of International Relations to read their own field critically rather than simply absorbing it.

Eurocentrism, then, is not a single mistake to be corrected but a whole way of organising knowledge that has shaped how generations have understood the world. Seeing it clearly is the beginning of asking better questions about whose stories the discipline tells, and whose it leaves out.

What do you think? If so many core concepts in International Relations come from European history, what might a theory built on the political traditions of your own region look like instead? And is it truly possible to study global politics from a position with no cultural bias at all – or is the honest goal simply to make our biases visible?

References

1. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/internationalrelations/2018/04/18/what-is-eurocentrism-locating-a-suitable-definition-for-qualitative-research-on-the-possible-eurocentric-bias-in-ir/
2. https://3sjournal.com/ben-haldane-the-eurocentric-foundations-of-international-relations-theory-and-why-they-matter/
3. https://globaldialogue.isa-sociology.org/global-modernity/
4. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0038022917708383
5. https://theconversation.com/orientalism-edward-saids-groundbreaking-book-explained-197429
6. https://www.dawn.com/news/1777778
7. https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/71854/1/Unit-11.pdf
8. https://globalsocialtheory.org/thinkers/sujata-patel/