中欧社会论坛 - China Europa ForumThe Myth of Chinese and European Identities in Socio-Economic History
Authors: Dr. Gerrit De Vylder, Lessius University College, affiliated to Leuven University, Belgium
The rise of the West from the 18th to the 20th century has so far been the focus of attention of conventional international historiography. But in the very near future the main object of historical scholarship may be how the explain the rise of China and its neighbours in the 21st century. Other perspectives and historical facts will most probably come to the forefront. Meanwhile a Eurocentric approach of world history continues to dominate historiography. Considering the scale of globalization today, should there not be a more balanced approach to world history?
Teaching history has become a very sensitive issue of which most West-Europeans are hardly aware of. An example of this is how globalization is presented. Both pro-globalists and anti-globalists like to present globalization as a “Western” phenomenon. Anti-globalists include it in their argument that everything that originates (and originated) in the so-called “West” is bad, while pro-globalists maintain that Western values and products are universal and that there are no substitutes. In doing so they both assume that there is indeed a concept like the “West”, which can be identified, defined and described. Hardly any specialist on globalization has ever tried to do so but that did not seem to bother them. A recurrent argument is that there is an Asiatic, often Chinese alternative, which proves that the “West” actually exists. What is not considered is the possibility that many movements against West-European or American globalization actually derive from the continuous claim that principles considered as universal, like scientific and rational thought, economic behaviour, democracy, equality, freedom, etc., were of European origin and had no relationship with so-called non-Western civilizations like China. Once people identify certain values as foreign or alien, even worse, if they link them to what they historically and psychologically perceive as the oppressor or the opponent, then these values also come to represent the oppressor or the opponent. I argue that this is the core of the problem of present-day globalization, which seems to invite almost automatically extreme forms of nationalism.
There are two questions here to be answered. First, is there indeed a “West” from which all universal values and institutions originate from? Second, if this is not the case, what caused this phenomenon, and how do we correct it? Of course this leads us to an alternative way of presenting and teaching both world history and the history of China and Europe.