‘Decenter: to cause to lose or shift from an established center or focus. Especially: to disconnect from practical or theoretical assumptions of origin, priority, or essence’ (Thesaurus dictionary, 2024).
The call for decentring European studies has grown stronger and louder by the year. The need for a re-thinking of Eurocentrism in EU external action has been undeniable – one could think about the example of the (in)famous speech Borrell delivered in November 2022 at the College of Europe, whereby he made clear that the EU is a well-tended garden whose ‘gardeners’ shall, at all costs, protect it from the jungle threatening its borders.
Even though the decentring agenda is known mainly in academia and selected policy circles, the importance of bringing this discussion one step further is increasingly such in a growing complex world, whereby issues of race, inequality, and coloniality are becoming increasingly central. This blog argues that this agenda should be further radicalised and (re)constructed because, in its current formulation, it carries two main dangers: creating dynamics of ‘Othering’ and promoting forms of ‘narcissistic recentering’. This argument is based on the draft review paper on decentring presented at the UACES Graduate Forum, where I critically analyse over 30 academic publications that embrace and operationalise the decentring agenda.
The decentring framework as it is currently conceived welcomes us to reason in three fundamental steps: provincializing, engaging, and reconstructing. The three intellectual steps would allow both academics (and, one day, policymakers) to engage in an interesting exercise: first, provincializing means abandoning Eurocentric ontological and epistemological frames, moving beyond the ever-historical, cultural, racial, political, and social centrality of Europe as the ultimate model to imitate economically, socially, and politically. Secondly, engaging means entering relations with partners (or ‘Others’ more in general) to discover their own historical, cultural, social, and political structures – how they matter, how they came to be, and how they relate to “ours”. Finally, reconstructing means bringing the two perspectives together – but in an optic to make the European Union a more legitimate and stronger actor on the global scene, rather than to even more strongly recognize the need to provincialize our understanding of the world.
These intellectual steps come together as a sort of Hegelian dialectics, whereby a thesis (the EU) meets an antithesis (the ‘Others’) to engage in a synthesis (understanding each other better) which, however, is dangerously producing and reproducing hierarchies of power that are currently structuring our world.
First, the provincializing exercise should be one of re-learning, more than un-learning, first and foremost to understand that ‘Others’ also form part of our shared history, and their values, world views, struggles and identities have been profoundly shaped, altered, and directed by their relationship to Europe, through colonial exploitation and violence. Ignoring dynamics of co-constitution, especially with specific regions of the world where colonialism had its most significant impact, means rejecting in the first place the provincialisation effort that the framework prays for in the first place. Re-learning, rather than unlearning, is fundamental in disentangling complex dynamics of co-creation, while, at the same time also seeking to understand, to uncover and to incorporate those epistemologies and ontologies that were silenced during colonial times. This intellectual engagement is much more complex than simply looking into how “different” others seemingly are from the European model. Decentring would mean eliminating the idea that Europe is the model in the first place.
Secondly, from this reasoning, it naturally follows that the step of engagement derives directly from the genuine need to re-learn, together with un-learning, to abandon existing hierarchies that put Europe at the center.
Thirdly, reconstruction should not consist of a ‘narcissistic recentering’ exercise – reconstruction should not be about making the European Union stronger, more legitimate, and more capable of ‘extracting’ good deals from its partners. It should be about reparative justice, the destruction of built-in hierarchies, and the end of Western capitalism as the go-to models that the world should adhere to. It should be about recovering and uncovering common epistemologies and ontologies that would make the world a more diverse, inclusive, and just.
To do so, the European Union – and by that, I mean both the academics studying it, and the policymakers building it – should come to terms with a complex past, built around civilisational hierarchies and race, whose consequences are still impacting third countries and ‘internal Others’ in the EU to this day, but are too often left invisible.
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