The End of EurocentrismAuthor(s): Mark Mazower

Source: Critical Inquiry , Vol. 40, No. 4, Around 1948: Interdisciplinary Approaches to
Global Transformation, edited by Leela Gandhi and Deborah L. Nelson (Summer 2014),
pp. 298-313
Published by: The University of Chicago Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/676409

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to Critical Inquiry

This content downloaded from

128.112.203.193 on Tue, 14 May 2019 15:49:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The End of Eurocentrism
Mark Mazower

Georges Bidault, the French foreign minister, in London for the first
United Nations General Assembly meeting in January 1946, looked around
the room and noted his surprise at “the extent to which Europe is absent.”1
A few months later, Gilbert Murray, who was a supporter of the League of
Nations and a prominent internationalist, touched on the same theme. In
an article entitled “Retrospect and Prospect” on the shift from the League
of Nations to the United Nations, he wrote that we need to restore Europe
to restore civilization: “Some great movement for unity and constructive
reconciliation in Europe is an absolute necessity for civilization. . . . Of
course Europe is not everything. There are other continents.”2
From one viewpoint, the years from 1945 to 1948 can be seen as a story
about European reconstruction; from another, they emerge as the opening
chapter of decolonization. Putting these two stories together raises the
question of how Europe’s relations with the world changed in these years
and, in particular, how contemporaries thought about Europe’s changing
place in the world. This in turn was bound up with the ways in which they
read the war and how the experience itself shaped their sense of Europe’s
relationship with the world. This helps explain both Bidault’s surprise and
Murray’s anxious discovery that there are other continents.
The Second World War marked the end of a long period of European
ascendency, whose critical starting point was not the sixteenth century, let
alone the Renaissance, but somewhere at the end of the eighteenth or the

1. Quoted in Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological
Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, N.J., 2009), p. 151; hereafter abbreviated N.
2. Gilbert Murray, “Retrospect and Prospect,” From the League to the U.N. (New York,
1948), pp. 191, 197.

Critical Inquiry 40 (Summer 2014)

© 2014 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/14/4004-0007$10.00. All rights reserved.

298
This content downloaded from
128.112.203.193 on Tue, 14 May 2019 15:49:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Critical Inquiry / Summer 2014 299
early nineteenth century. The age of Eurocentrism spanned the period
from 1800 to 1945 in several senses. First, it marked the emergence of Eu-
rope as a center of world power through its formal colonialism and the
technology gap created by the Industrial Revolution. Concurrently, there
was the rise of settler societies, of which the “Anglo-world,” as James Belich
tells it, was the most successful—although there was also the German-
Russian settlement expansion south and eastwards, as well as its smaller
Ottoman version.3 Subsequently, there was a kind of diplomatic intellec-
tual counterpart to this European ascendancy: a new discipline of interna-
tional law, one that enshrined the notion of a standard of civilization, that
Gerrit Gong wrote about and that rested on a differentiated categorization
of sovereignties in different parts of the world.4 This was accompanied by
a changing conception of Europe. Paradoxically, as Europe expanded in
power, Europe as a concept shrank. In 1840, for instance, the European
powers could plausibly propose to Mehmet Ali that if he stopped threat-
ening to invade Istanbul they would allow him to become part of the
system of Europe. Forty years later, that was not an offer anybody was
making. The geographical conception of Europe had become more fo-
cused even as Europe became more powerful.
In this epoch, the rest of the world increasingly functioned as a place
for exploration and scientific inquiry, as a resource base for commod-
ities and labor, and as a proving ground for ruling virtues and the
spread of civilization. The notable exception to most of this was, of
course, the Western hemisphere. It was of enormous significance that
the Americas came to define themselves, or to be defined by Washing-
ton, as a place where European states could not do as they pleased. The
emergence of the United States initially, as a hemispheric power (as
distinguished from a world power) pitted against European ascen-
dancy, was critical to later developments.
Taking the story through to 1945 implies that this great age of European
expansion did not, as it is sometimes presented in older history books, end
with the Scramble for Africa between 1880 and 1914. It would be more

3. See James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-
World, 1783–1939 (New York, 2009).
4. See Gerrit W. Gong, The Standard of “Civilization” in International Society (New York,
1984).

M A R K M A Z O W E R is Ira D. Wallach Professor of History at Columbia

University. His most recent work is Governing the World: The History of an Idea,
1815 to the Present (2012).

This content downloaded from

128.112.203.193 on Tue, 14 May 2019 15:49:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
300 Mark Mazower / The End of Eurocentrism
accurate to identify a longer process of acute imperial rivalry that began
with the Scramble for Africa but that continued into the 1950s. It was, after
all, the scramble for the Middle East between 1914 and 1939 that saw the
emergence of a new British empire in the region, while the Second World
War was, among other things, an attempt by the Axis powers, their allies,
and supporters to continue this struggle in the Mediterranean. We can
date the start of this phase to 1935, when the Italians invaded Ethiopia, or
perhaps further back to 1911 and the invasion of Libya. After Abyssinia
came further efforts to overthrow the Mediterranean status quo in Albania
and Greece. The French defeat in 1940 and the German desire to bring
Spain into the war that summer and autumn once again threw into ques-
tion the early twentieth-century North African settlement. Trying to ad-
judicate among the impossibly contradictory claims of three powers that
had once been on the same side (the Spaniards, the Italians, and the
French), the Germans complicated an already impossible task by looking
for territories of their own. The following year, Germany also became the
arbiter of the Balkans and potentially, if only Adolf Hitler had woken up to
this, of the Middle East, too. Fortunately he failed to do so.
These events underscored the importance of the Middle East in an on-
going intra-European imperial contestation. If the Germans failed to un-
derstand its significance, the British certainly did not. At the heart of the
British involvment was the extraordinary figure of Robert Jackson, the
young Australian naval officer who ran the Middle East Supply Center,
which started off trying to unblock supply bottlenecks in the ports of the
eastern Mediterranean and ended up essentially coordinating the entire
Middle East as a regional economy. (Apparently, more than one British
general had received a telegram from Churchill instructing him that “when
Jackson appears in front of him, do whatever this man says.”)5 Jackson
virtually ran the Middle East as a unified realm. When the war ended, the
British tried to preserve this unity politically through a new creation, the
Arab League, which was founded just as the Middle East Supply Center
wound down.
The key new element of the 1940s was the emergence of the United
States as a world power, as a result of the war. The shift from its hemi-
spheric to global role can be traced through the discussions that took place
in 1939 and 1940 about the Monroe Doctrine. These discussions began
among historians, who were joined by political commentators once Hitler
started talking about a Monroe Doctrine for Europe. (The Japanese had

5. Anecdote conveyed in Robert Jackson oral testimony, Oral History Archives, Butler
Library, Columbia University.

This content downloaded from

128.112.203.193 on Tue, 14 May 2019 15:49:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Critical Inquiry / Summer 2014 301
been talking about a similar doctrine for Japan for some years prior.) In
this period, the Monroe Doctrine was redefined to justify a vastly intensi-
fied American air presence, including bases and new flight paths through
South America in the middle of the war in order to stop the Germans. The
Americas thus become an American zone in a way that they had not been
before. By the end of the war, the American Navy was moving toward a
view that permanent bases in the Pacific Ocean were necessary for Amer-
ican national security. Even Africa came to be defined as an American
security concern; after all, there were American technicians all over the
Belgian Congo by the end of the war because of its uranium. If a European
diplomat in the 1880s had been told that in the spring of 1943 American
diplomats would be sitting in Morocco deciding the future of Europe, he
would have thought the prospect completely ludicrous.
At this point, two things are worth bearing in mind. First, it was not in
any way predetermined that the United States would commit to a peace-
time global role of the kind that it did when the war ended. A massive
demobilization of the American army took place in 1945 that was only
reversed well into the cold war. The year 1947 was obviously a critical
turning point—the moment when the Truman administration overcame
the considerable political opposition within Congress to any major redef-
inition of America’s peacetime role in the world. But the real break with
Eurocentrism did not come until 1949. Second, the European empires
obviously did not simply roll over and die. Fred Cooper has been helping
us reassess the degree to which the Europeans, on the contrary, came out of
the war and the attendant experiences of occupation and humiliation de-
termined not only to hang on to empire but also to reconquer lost territo-
ries wherever possible. Where necessary, the Europeans deployed a very
high level of force, as at Setif in Algeria in May 1945, in the Dutch East
Indies, or briefly in Syria. Is the explanation for this simply that they did
not recognize that the age of empire was over? Perhaps. It was not only that
empire and European hierarchy had been assumptions naturalized in peo-
ples’ minds but also the fact that wartime thinking about the causes of the
war itself had actually helped to reinforce older views about Europe’s re-
lationship with the rest of the world. This confirmed the economic and
strategic importance of colonies and thus helped to explain the tenacity of
the procolonial argument.
This brings us to the question of what people during the war thought
the war was about. In 1948, the crucial year for this special issue, an émigré
Russian demographer named Eugene Kulischer published his magnum
opus, still worth reading, called Europe on the Move—a study of popula-

This content downloaded from

128.112.203.193 on Tue, 14 May 2019 15:49:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
302 Mark Mazower / The End of Eurocentrism
tion movements in Europe between 1917 and 1947.6 In it, Kulischer, who
had been doing a lot of work for the Office of Strategic Services and the
International Labor Organization during the war, presented a picture in
which population movements formed, as he puts it, the mechanical foun-
dations of history (a view he learned, of course, from his imperial Russian
geography teachers). In particular, Kulischer was inclined to posit a very
close connection between war and migration; migration caused by over-
population becomes in his telling a major source of international conflict.
History, in his view (and, for that matter, in the Nazis’ view, too) is essen-
tially a movement of peoples from east to west. It had been thus for
G. W. F. Hegel, too. Europe’s surplus population had been bottled up
between the wars by American immigration quotas and the impact of the
Russian Civil War, but actually erecting barriers to migration was futile
because that simply provoked conflict (as it will always do). In Kulischer’s
words, “millions in desperate search of outlets may become an aggressive
force, especially if led by totalitarian governments.”7 In 1948, everybody
was terribly worried that the Germanies were going to turn into another
Weimar, that there was another Hitler waiting in the wings, in fact, that it
was going to be far worse the second time because there were far more
millions of refugees in Germany than there had been in 1919. As late as 1956,
Elizabeth Wiskemann (an English commentator who was very knowledge-
able about Germany) wrote a very good book about Germany’s eastern
neighbors. The preface reflects her disbelief that there had been no return
to the problems of the interwar period.8
For Kulischer, and for many other people, the basic problem was that
Europe was overcrowded; the only solution was for the surplus to be set-
tled in underdeveloped areas by what he calls migratory and colonizing
movements.9 There was an international aspect to this because, if war in
Europe meant world war—and two wars in Europe had just meant world
war—then world peace meant solving Europe’s demographic problems.
Of course, the connections among overpopulation, refugees, and the
growth of war tensions in Europe had been around since the late 1930s, and
in 1938 an international conference at Evian had attempted to find a solu-
tion and failed. After that, as we learn in Neil Smith’s biography of Isaiah
Bowman, Franklin D. Roosevelt approached Bowman, the most famous

6. See Eugene Kulischer, Europe on the Move: War and Population Changes, 1917– 47 (New
York, 1948).
7. Ibid., p. 312.
8. See Elizabeth Wiskemann, Germany’s Eastern Neighbours: Problems Relating to the Oder-
Neisse Line and the Czech Frontier Regions (London, 1956).
9. See Kulischer, Europe on the Move, chap. 2.

This content downloaded from

128.112.203.193 on Tue, 14 May 2019 15:49:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Critical Inquiry / Summer 2014 303
geographer in America at that time, and asked him to try and find unin-
habited parts of the world where Europeans could be settled.10 This was the
origin of a secret Washington wartime project called the M project (M
stood for migration). Kulischer himself had worked for the M project, in
which dozens of geographers were set to work, eventually producing hun-
dreds of studies of different bits of the world in the search for places where
surplus Europeans might be settled. Thus, there was a postwar vision in the
air that, as part of this new international organization of the globe, there
would be an international settlement agency to rationally resettle surplus
Europeans all around the world, thus carving out a path to world peace.
Of course, none of that happened, and refugee resettlement was han-
dled instead as if it was a temporary problem. One of the reasons for that
was the wartime shift in attitudes to minority rights. The war saw the
demise of the idea that had been prevalent in the interwar period (or that
at least had been tried in the interwar period), that minority rights schemes
were the way to solve the problem of minorities; the League of Nations had
aimed to be the guarantor of minority rights in Eastern Europe, and the
hope in 1919 had been that these would be rights enshrined in international
law and connected to the peace treaties that the various new states of
Eastern Europe would sign. In effect, it tied international recognition of
new states to their commitment to minority rights. By 1939 the general
view on all sides was that this had been a complete failure. In fact, many
said that it had been worse than a failure. Because of the minority rights
regime of the Germans in Eastern Europe, the largest minority there had
been exploited or had allowed themselves to be exploited by Berlin and
turned into a fifth column. Consequently, Europe had slid to war much
faster than if there had been no minority rights regime and the Poles and
the Czechs had been able to do what they wanted with their minorities.
And so, somewhere in the middle of the war, sentiment shifted rather
abruptly toward the idea of transfer. (It is in this context that Palestine took
on a new significance in Zionist thought.) Transfer was a policy that was
implemented initially by the Nazis. Indeed one of the first things the Nazis
did in October 1939 was to draw up the agreement with Italy to repatriate
German speakers from northeastern Italy. As in the case of Israel/Palestine,
there were dimensions both of homecoming and of expulsion to it. From
1944 onwards, this was the policy that was in effect put into place in Eastern
Europe by the conquerors of the Nazis as well. Perhaps this helps to explain
why the 1947 UN General Assembly resolution on Palestine, calling for

10. See Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to
Globalization (Berkeley, 2003).

This content downloaded from

128.112.203.193 on Tue, 14 May 2019 15:49:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
304 Mark Mazower / The End of Eurocentrism
partition and minority rights in the two halves of Palestine, made no men-
tion of monitoring compliance (which would have been too reminiscent
of the old international minority rights regime).
This comprehensive shift of attitudes had implications far beyond Eu-
rope. Take the plan, cooked up (or reheated) in the German foreign office
in the summer of 1940 to resettle Jews in Madagascar. This was one of
many instances that might be seen as a kind of common conversation or
repertoire of attitudes and policies running right across war lines. In the
late 1930s there had been lots of discussion, already involving Polish dip-
lomats, the French, and some Zionists, about how to “evacuate” Poland’s
surplus Jewish population outside Europe. The Polish ambassador in
Washington discussed the possibility of using Angola, for instance. In 1941
David Ben-Gurion and Lord Moyn discussed the possibility of using South
America and Madagascar (see N, chap. 3). So around the time that Fritz
Rademacher in Berlin was suggesting using Madagascar as—he actually
uses the term, bizarrely—a Nazi mandate, Ben-Gurion and Lord Moyn
were discussing much the same thing.11
Such thinking did not end in 1941. In 1943, Jan Smuts called for the
international management of Jewish refugee resettlement in Africa be-
cause, at least in his mind, they would have counted as white and thus
helped to build a larger white population in Africa (see N, p. 121). Behind
all this lies the broader idea of seeing the world as a resource to solve
Europe’s problems. Of course, it is not surprising that Nazis and anti-
Nazis should have shared this outlook, as almost everyone in Europe was
inclined to see things that way, at least at the turn of the century. J. A.
Hobson talks about international control of Africa as a way of insuring the
impartial and equitable sharing of its resources.12 What he doesn’t like is
private sector selfishness. In the 1920s it was common for white racial
theorists to see Africa in much the same way, as a kind of common pos-
session of the white race. The American Lothrop Stoddard, who in 1920
wrote the bestselling The Rising Tide of Color against White World-
Supremacy, worried about whether Europeans could hang on in Africa
precisely because, as he put it, Africa is the natural source of Europe’s
tropical raw materials and food stuffs.13 In the late 1930s, there were very
similar arguments when the Germans briefly raised the issue of colonial
compensation in Africa, and some British and French politicians toyed
with the idea that the Germans might be bought off in Africa.

11. See Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (New York, 2008), p. 119.
12. See J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (London, 1902).
13. See Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy (New
York, 1920).

This content downloaded from

128.112.203.193 on Tue, 14 May 2019 15:49:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Critical Inquiry / Summer 2014 305
As for the war itself, surely one thing it did, or could be forgiven for
seeming to do, was demonstrate the indispensability of empire. Britain
survived solely because of its empire, along with the help of a former
colonial possession in North America; the Free French similarly survived
thanks to the fact that Vichy and the Nazis really could not gain full control
over the French colonies. Likewise, the fact that they hung on to their
colonies and that the Germans couldn’t really control them meant that the
Nazis also treated Belgium and the Netherlands very differently when they
were occupied, compared to how they would have been treated if they
hadn’t had colonies. The Dutch and Belgians retained some leverage in
negotiations with the German occupying power because the latter had no
direct control over those colonial resources. This outlook continued after
the war. Hjalmar Schacht, the former Nazi economics minister, believed
that while he was in Allied captivity he could gain a sympathetic hearing
among his captors if he offered to help the Allies by drawing up a plan for
the mass migration of Germans to Africa, as this would simultaneously
bring peace to Germany by removing overcrowding and secure white con-
trol in Africa.14
The problem for those who took these racial fears seriously was that
much of the world seemed indifferent. Smuts feared that “the world is
reeling between the two poles of white and color”; it was “in a precarious
and dangerous position such as has not existed since the fall of Rome”
(quoted in N, p. 183). Yet, whenever he approached Whitehall with
schemes for increasing white settler population in Africa the British civil
servants basically responded that they had enough problems with white
settlers as it was. As I have written elsewhere: “settler colonialism in general
was an expensive proposition for the modern state” (N, p. 121). That was
another lesson of the war.
All of this raised in the mind of Smuts, but also of Smuts’s opponents,
the question of world organization and what the proposed new world
organization was really going to be about. Smuts himself had been very
clear when he proposed to the League of Nations back in 1917 that its great
advantage would be that it would bolster the power of the British empire in
the world—keeping the empire in existence at a time when it would oth-
erwise decline. As the discussion turned to the successor of the league in
1945, the people asked what a future United Nations organization would be
for. Was it to rescue or to marginalize Europe? To preserve empire or to
end it? Nobody in 1945 was quite clear.
As others and I have described elsewhere in greater detail, this new

14. See Mazower, Hitler’s Empire, p. 595.

This content downloaded from

128.112.203.193 on Tue, 14 May 2019 15:49:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
306 Mark Mazower / The End of Eurocentrism
United Nations organization became the crucial forum for this debate. In
particular, the domestic racial policies of Smuts in South Africa brought to
the fore the confrontation between the older assumption of imperial hier-
archy and the new claims, for instance, of Indian nationalists and pan-
Asianists. The critical ideological preparation for this was provided by
arguments that had been going on from the late 1930s onwards about the
collapse of European civilization. And two brief illustrations. First, in the
mid-1940s, one can chart a crisis of intellectual orientation, a shift from an
older vision of civilization based on the classics—by which, obviously, was
meant ancient Greek and Latin and a belief in the applicability of the
eternal truths of Hellenism—to the universalism of science and scientific
humanism. That shift from a world dominated by elites with one forma-
tion to a world dominated by elites with a different formation, happens, I
think, exactly then. You can map it very precisely in UNESCO. The pre-
cursor to UNESCO under the League of Nations, the Institute for Intellec-
tual Cooperation (IIC), had no mention of science in the title because,
perhaps, it was run by classicists. These were men like Murray and, more
directly, the once-deputy director of the IIC Alfred Zimmern. In 1945,
Zimmern organized the meeting that gave rise to IIC’s successor organi-
zation, UNESCO (now with science in the title), and hoped to be named its
first director general. In fact, Zimmern was passed over for that post in
favor of the biologist and science popularizer Julian Huxley. Evidently
there was, at the war’s end, no problem in anyone’s mind in having a
stalwart member of the British Eugenics Society at the head of UNESCO.
What was preposterous in Zimmern’s mind was that they’d choose a sci-
entist instead of a classicist. But he was now outgunned. That’s the key
point.
We can also see a deep crisis in what remained of a Victorian conception
of an international civilization among those who hoped that international
law would become the instrument of world government and world peace.
In fact, they learned from the 1930s that international law norms had failed
to win sufficient adherence to stem the move to war or regulate the way it
was waged; worse than that, a prominent European power, Germany, had
led the charge against the old assumptions. Wolfgang Friedmann, a young
émigré international lawyer in London, writes before migrating to the US
that the rise of the Third Reich itself means the disintegration of European
civilization. This was a very typical sentiment for the time and one that
raised the question of the very future of international law. US Secretary of
State Cordell Hull said that international law was seriously discredited and
on the defensive (see N, p. 123). And, in fact, the diplomatic uses of the term
standard of civilization, which had provided the criteria for the recognition

This content downloaded from

128.112.203.193 on Tue, 14 May 2019 15:49:48 UT 12:34:56 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Critical Inquiry / Summer 2014 307
of new states in international legal discourse at the end of the nineteenth
and early twentieth century, basically vanished in this new world of the
United Nations. There was a much more open attitude to the basis upon
which a new state could obtain recognition, and many more new states
were recognized as a result. It was not that they conformed to a European
norm; it was rather that the European norm was discredited and ceased to
apply.
This suggests that a reinvigorated international law regime did not
emerge from the United Nations in 1945, as some have argued. Take, for
example, the debates inside the UN over the genocide convention and the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). These two international
law achievements took place concurrently and were enacted within a day
of one another. Yet, rather then seeing them as emerging in tandem, we
should see them as pulling in entirely opposite directions, which is how
they were seen by many of the lawyers involved in the drafting at the time.
The genocide convention was basically a one-man show—Raphael Lem-
kin trying to shore up the older idea of a powerful international law re-
gime. Yet Lemkin angered many of his former colleagues who were at the
time trying to draft and get support for the UDHR precisely because he
insisted it was still possible to have a powerful and binding legal regime and
to make states obey international legal obligations that would cut deep into
their domestic jurisdiction.15 Bear in mind that the UN charter, unlike the
league, in its article 2.7—not some article buried down in the charter—has
a powerful domestic jurisdiction clause, which suggested real limitations
to Lemkin’s approach from the outset. Lemkin got his genocide conven-
tion, but it was eviscerated. He was obliged to drop the clause that he really
cared about, concerning the criminalization of cultural genocide, some-
thing that would have been smuggled in through the back door of minority
rights. Basically, Lemkin wanted to bring minority rights back in more or
less single-handedly. In fact, he failed. Once the genocide convention was
passed, no international panel tribunal was established as it had envisaged.
The US refused ratification, and it took a very long time for the genocide
convention to reemerge as a kind of diplomatic achievement. As for the
UDHR, it was promoted by many of Lemkin’s colleagues because they had
come to the conclusion—again, based on their own interwar experience
and what they were reading about the war—that in the era of power poli-
tics (and that was certainly how they read the post-1945 era), only the most
sensitive gradualism in matters of international law would give the rule of

15. See Mira Siegelberg, “Unoffical Men, Efficient Civil Servants: Raphael Lemkin in the
History of International Law,” Journal of Genocide Research 15 (Sept. 2013): 297–316.

This content downloaded from

128.112.203.193 on Tue, 14 May 2019 15:49:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
308 Mark Mazower / The End of Eurocentrism
law any kind of chance of success at all. The diplomatic process, for exam-
ple, makes it perfectly obvious that neither Joseph Stalin nor the US Con-
gress were going to pass any kind of binding human rights regime. In fact,
shortly after George Marshall had hailed the draft declaration as necessary
to “free men in a free world” in September 1948,16 John Foster Dulles, who
was actually one of America’s most stalwart internationalists at this time,
started worrying, as he sat in a hotel room in Paris with some other Amer-
ican diplomats, that perhaps they had actually committed the US to some-
thing concrete and far-reaching. His younger colleague, the legal advisor
Benjamin Cohen, reassured him that they hadn’t committed themselves to
anything. They were all very relieved. Hans Kelsen, maybe the most au-
thoritative figure in international law at that time, agreed, and he used the
words “empty phrases” to describe the UDHR.17 In other words, by the late
1940s international law had really been evacuated of a lot of its power and
prestige; it had not gained it. And that I think is probably connected with
the collapse of this hierarchical Eurocentric world upon which an older
and paradoxically more powerful conception of international law had
been based. If you look at the composition of the League of Nations as-
sembly in 1920, twenty-two of the forty-eight members were European and
sixteen were American. That is a very significant weighting toward Europe
in particular. A mere four members were Asian. At the founding compo-
sition of the UN in 1945, a mere fourteen out of fifty-one were European.
That explains Bidault’s earlier comment. There was a consolidation of
European influence with the big expansion of the United Nations in 1955
when a large number of European powers came in, but then between the
late 1950s and the late 1960s there was a complete reorientation, and the
majority of new members of the United Nations general assembly were
from Africa and Asia. Hence, internationalists like Murray, who had been
fervent liberals in the 1900s and supporters of the League of Nations, could
not prevent their most conservative and indeed racist impulses from
emerging when they looked at the UN General Assembly. Murray himself
was a supporter of the premiership of Anthony Eden later in life; he thus
changed from pro-Boer, anti-British-imperialist in 1900 to pro-League of
Nations between the wars, and finally to pro-Eden and anti-UN by the
mid-1950s.
The end of Eurocentrism, which Murray deplored, meant for some-
body like Jawaharlal Nehru the possibility of the rise of Asia and the rise of

16. Quoted in Mazower, “The Strange Triumph of Human Rights, 1933–1950,” Historical
Journal 47 (June 2004): 396.
17. Quoted in ibid., p. 393.

This content downloaded from

128.112.203.193 on Tue, 14 May 2019 15:49:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Critical Inquiry / Summer 2014 309
the rest of the world (see N, chap. 4). Of course, before the rise of India,
there was the rise of Japan—whose wartime East Asia coprosperity sphere
was premised on the idea that the Europeans’ days in Asia were over and
that Asia should be for the Asians. Based on a very limited reading of the
Indian Congress Party attitude, we could wager that the Congress Party
hedged its bets as long as the war was on. Subhas Chandra Bose went with
the Japanese (and the Germans); and Nehru, if he did not exactly go with
the British, remained in a position from which he could install India as the
successor to British rule in the event of a British victory in Europe. Thus,
the Congress Party was going to win either way. Nehru’s Asianism went
back well into the 1930s, of course, and it was not opportunistic; he be-
lieved in it very deeply (see N). For him, Japan’s defeat was India’s oppor-
tunity. But why did the British let India into the running in the UN General
Assembly in 1946 over South Africa? That was not the normal procedure
for settling questions of internal empire, of which this was one. India was
not even independent in 1946. It had an interim government. So it is an
interesting commentary on the British, as well as the Indian attitude to
empire and its aftermath, that in 1946 Nehru was able very successfully to
take the case of the treatment of Indians in South Africa to the General
Assembly and to force a vote against South Africa. This shocked Smuts,
who believed the treatment of Indians in South Africa to be entirely a
matter of domestic jurisdiction in South Africa and therefore contrary to
any strict reading of the UN Charter. He was probably right about that, but
people didn’t care. And when the Indian delegation took this course of
action, the charge they brought did not concern minority rights, which
they might well have chosen by claiming that the rights of the Asian mi-
nority in South Africa were being infringed. In fact nobody, least of all the
Indian delegation at that point, actually wanted to raise the issue of mi-
nority rights. Preferring to see it buried, they couched their accusation in
terms of racial discrimination. On that ground, they could be sure to ob-
tain wide global acceptance, and South Africa found itself in the dock.
There were other dimensions to Nehru’s achievement as well. The
inter-Asia relations conference in Delhi in 1947 was a major assertion that
the center of diplomatic gravity was moving outside Europe. That is what
it meant to have such a conference at all, and that is when Nehru hailed the
centrality of Asian civilization and the departure of the British. Why did he
see things this way? Because they had cut India off from the rest of Asia,
when it was really, as he put it, a vital bridge (see N). The following year,
India again assumed a leading role, this time where the Dutch East Indies
were concerned; India became a leader of the cause of Indonesian inde-
pendence inside and outside the UN. They did not succeed immediately,

This content downloaded from

128.112.203.193 on Tue, 14 May 2019 15:49:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
310 Mark Mazower / The End of Eurocentrism
but by the end of 1949 (in fact thanks in no small part to Indian diplomatic
pressure) America had completely altered its policy on Indonesian inde-
pendence, and the Indonesians were in fact independent. So the reality was
that power had been swept well away from the British and the Dutch into
the hands of governments like Nehru’s.
It’s true, South Africa was put in the dock in 1946, 1947, and 1948; but
what outcome did such a move produce? As Smuts warned Nehru, in fact,
an election victory for the nationalists in 1948 marked the onset of the
apartheid regime, and neither Nehru nor the United Nations could do
anything about that. The other limitation was to the very conception of a
common Asian policy at all. How real was it? How often could you pit Asia
against Europe? Was this in fact just like the dying moment of an older
interwar discourse of pan-Asianism, one that would go into the dustbin of
history along with pan-Islamism and pan-Arabism and turn out to be
unsuited to the modern world? You could say that the war with China
marks the definitive end of any pan-Asianism, but I think one should go
back earlier than that. A close reading of the Bandung Conference would
suggest that it brought up real arguments amongst the members over this
very issue. Nehru himself asserted in 1955 that “to talk about [Asia] as one
entity is to confuse ourselves” (quoted in N, p. 188).
So there was a moment, an end-of-Europe moment, where to talk about
Asia was to gain a kind of diplomatic standing. But then one had to face the
question of whether or not Asia really existed, especially as Europe re-
mained central even after this moment, if only in a more subtle way. It was
scarcely to be expected that the significance of a power center that had
lasted for so long would vanish overnight in every domain just because its
military and political predominance was shrinking. Look in particular at
the continued intellectual influence of European thought—especially its
slowly waning nineteenth-century influence. In the 1940s everybody was
still reading and printing Mazzini. His life through the era of decoloniza-
tion would richly repay systematic investigation; what is clear is his appeal
to Third World intellectuals and activists. In India alone, this included
everyone from the founders of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) to
Congress. But it was not just an Indian story; everywhere, nationalism—as
a kind of nineteenth-century doctrine on which people like Mazzini were
felt to have a lot to say—was very widely diffused; anticolonialism fosters
this and certainly did not close it down. With nationalism, moreover, a
whole series of discussions emerged about the role of the state and the
state’s role in the economy in urban planning manuals. I think of the
interesting German geographer Walter Christaller, who had worked for

This content downloaded from

128.112.203.193 on Tue, 14 May 2019 15:49:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Critical Inquiry / Summer 2014 311
the SS on optimizing settlement planning in Eastern Europe.18 By the end
of the 1940s, everyone was reading him from the Punjab to Israel—anyone,
that is, with a ministry or agency to run who wanted to know where to
settle people properly.
More specifically, for the US, I think there is a sense in which Europe
retained its importance. Making Europe secure and safe in 1945 was the
first task—to reconstruct it in both the short- and the long-term; that was
more important to Washington than any other foreign policy issue. The
real question was under whose aegis: the United Nations (with UNRRA or,
later, the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe) or Washing-
ton (with the Marshall Plan and the World Bank). Let us recall that what
ended up as the World Bank started life as the International Bank for
Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), a United Nations agency dis-
bursing reconstruction loans to European states; only when the Marshall
Plan came along with sums of money that dwarfed the IBRD did the IBRD
rebrand itself as the World Bank and start the process of turning itself into
a development bank.
For policy makers charged with reconstruction, Europe was a labora-
tory, a series of technics that one could then apply around the world. And
it was Paul Hoffman, the head of the Marshall Plan, who provided a series
of lessons that could be applied around the world.19 Hoffman became head
of the Ford Foundation and then ran the UN development program. He is,
in a sense, a segue from the European experience of US-led reconstruction
to a global development experience in the 1950s and 1960s. A very similar
trajectory was followed by Robert Jackson, the man who had shot to fame
running the wartime Middle East Supply Center before working for UN-
RRA where he had a long career in development and crisis management
inside and outside the UN.
This notion of Europe as a laboratory for a series of technics that can be
applied to the rest of the world was central to understanding what was to
happen globally and, in particular, under American control. The story of
development and modernization theory can only be told as a story that
starts in Europe and then ramifies around the world. Walt Rostow pro-
vides a classic case at the heart of postwar US policy making. His wartime
service was in and of Europe: he was with the US bombing survey, involved
in the Marshall Plan, and then he went back to MIT where he constructed
a series of policy prescriptions that were dressed up as economic history,

18. See Mazower, Hitler’s Empire, pp. 599–600.

19. See Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present (New
York, 2012), p. 289.

This content downloaded from

128.112.203.193 on Tue, 14 May 2019 15:49:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
312 Mark Mazower / The End of Eurocentrism
based partly on the experience of reconstructing Germany and partly on
his reading of the Industrial Revolution, to provide a kind of policy blue-
print for modernization around the world.
One could perhaps construct a parallel narrative for the USSR, but the
Soviet case involved less ambition and a less steep learning curve. The
Soviet Union was, after all, the heir, in the way that the US was not, to
an older globalizing imperium. For all the developmentalist rhetoric
and—on a much more restricted budget—policy, it was following es-
sentially the czarist security program in Eastern Europe and in the South-
ern Tier. Only when Stalin died and the borders in Europe were largely
stabilized could Khrushchev experiment (and even then in the most ten-
tative way) by dabbling in Egypt and the Middle East, with possible ways
into Africa. But actually, in the late 1940s, there was only one global power
that had an activist sense of itself as a global power and that was the United
States.
Finally, what was it that happened in Western Europe under American
auspices? One of the things that Murray had talked about was the impor-
tance of reconciliation in Europe, as a necessity for the restoration of civ-
ilization. Reconciliation however involved a kind of introversion. The new
sense of an incipient unitary legal community was one expression of what
this produced. One European reading of the war experience confirmed the
need to reinvigorate laws—with a robust legal system to shackle parlia-
ments and executives—in order to avoid a replay of anything like the Third
Reich and everything that followed from it. Accordingly, when the UDHR
was promulgated, the Council of Europe and many Europeans felt that this
was a weak, nonbinding form of legal regime. The proposal in Europe was
that something more binding was needed for Europe. Thus began the
discussions that were to lead to the European Convention on Human
Rights. This is at once much humbler than any European document would
have been before—there is no mention of civilized states—but it did even-
tually establish a much more robust legal regime than any previously.
The policies that led to integration and the creation of a new economic
community involved a similar deepening of relations among European
states at the expense of their connections overseas. This was most obvious
in the institutionalization of agricultural protectionism and the creation of
a common external tariff on overseas trade. The Americans did not get
their way on what had been dearest to the heart of Secretary of State Hull:
the building of a global free trade regime after 1945. This was something in
which Hull had invested a great deal of hope and which collapsed in the
American Congress after the Havana meeting. Although that had pro-
duced a blueprint for an international trade organization, Truman realized

This content downloaded from

128.112.203.193 on Tue, 14 May 2019 15:49:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Critical Inquiry / Summer 2014 313
that he would never get the proposal for a global free trade regime through
Congress, and it languished until a few years ago when the World Trade
Organization was founded in place of the ITO. Thus what emerged in
Europe in the 1950s was a new trading community in which Europe was
essentially defined as a series of tariff walls protecting increasingly inte-
grated markets.
The mid-1940s, then, may have marked the moment when contempo-
raries began to talk about the end of the European era, if not quite the end
of Eurocentrism. For it was only with the loss of China, the Korean War,
and Stalin’s death that Americans finally felt that Europe had been stabi-
lized and that they could and should go on to think about other things.
Nobody remembers it now, but in 1955 the expansion of UN membership
seemed terribly important. If the Americans and the Russians had not been
able to agree on an expansion of membership, the UN would not have
turned into a universal organization. The expansion, then, was essentially
a European bargain. The Americans wanted Spain and Portugal in, the
Russians wanted Bulgaria and Rumania in; those were the countries that
still counted for them in 1955. It was from that point onwards that the US
moved from a Europe-first policy to something closer to a Third Worldist
stance. Algeria was a kind of test case, as Matthew Connelly has persua-
sively argued; the point at which Washington could prioritize Algeria
marked the US belief that France itself—and by extension Western Eu-
rope—had become stable.20 Was it a coincidence that this was both the
moment of geographical and generational transition and the moment at
which the presidency of the US moved from the man who commanded
victorious American armies in Europe to the much younger figure who
had been a naval commander in the South Pacific?

20. Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the
Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (New York, 2003).

This content downloaded from

128.112.203.193 on Tue, 14 May 2019 15:49:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms