Humanocentrism against Ethnocentrism: placing the human experience at the center of the discipline of International Relations

Abstract

This paper deals with tracing the origins of Eurocentrism, as well as its consolidation in the form of an Anglo-Saxon ethnocentrism, as the dominant views in the study of International Relations (IR). These approaches have influenced not only the academic discipline but also the very political structure of the international system, ignoring the voices of the peripheral regions outside the European/Anglo-Saxon center. Larry Buzan and Richard Little have thoroughly documented five problems in the study of IR: Eurocentrism, Presentism, Anarchophilia, State-centrism and Ahistoricism. Upon their examination, some scholars have suggested that the geotemporal perspective should be broadened to address the fact that, within our discipline, history has long been viewed as an exogenous, if not superfluous, tool. At best, as Nick Vaugham-Williams argues, it has only served as a quarry from which to extract the facts that have helped shape the theories of the present. If history has been an instrument, used by the dominant ideology to contribute to this Eurocentric paradigm, it is also valid to use it to give voice to all regions of the world, especially those overlooked by the mainstream. Eurocentrism has been deemed a historical epiphenomenon that arose at a time when the great European powers dominated the world almost in its entirety, and that emerged from a very particular point of view around the concepts of modernity that related the birth of the international system with the conditions in which the modern world originated. The theoretical discussion of International Relations, according to Celestino Del Arenal, begins with the first interpretations of international life embodied in classic documents such as Thucydides'Peloponnesian War.

However, it will be in the Christian and hegemonic Renaissance of 15th century Europe with its political, philosophical, legal, economic and sociological thought along with the modernization processes, first, and then, the conformation of the current international society when the world scenario opens for the theory of International Relations. Both social reality and theory were conditioned by a civilizing reasoning from the beginning where capitalism and the State were central to the foundation of Westernization. The “founding myth” of the origin of the international system was also conceived as a linear progression of history that moved in successive events and stages until it reached a civilizational apogee. The consolidation as an epistemological paradigm comes from a second historical process: the dominance of the American academy in the study of International Relations at the same time that the hegemony of the United States in world politics was achieved. Stanley Hoffman attributed to the United States the development of the scientific discipline, appropriating it for three causes that came together in the wake of World War II and its rise to world power: an intellectual predisposition based on a realistic academic community, the political context of a democratic government reinforced by sound and critical foundations, and the strength of its institutions, and the “check and balance” system.

From this perspective, the discipline suffered a bias towards the political concerns of the United States and the fact of ensuring that the theories available to study these issues were theories that conformed to the American definition of what a social science should be. In addition, we examine the reasons why this ideology is still in force by proposing an all-encompassing alternative that allows the elaboration of “home-made” theories. This document recovers the theory of continuity envisioned by André Gunder Frank, Robert A. Denemark and Barry K. Gills within the hypothesis of the 5,000 year-old international system to propose a humanocentric approach. Such perspective would allow the broadening of our discipline’s analytical framework, as suggested by Jacques Derrida, not with the aim of dissolving or destroying it but rather to review the structures on which the discursive elements are based, the way we think, and how we conduct our research. A starting point to enrich this vision is to look into the history of each of the regions of the world trying to find the origins of human interactions and learn from the experience of each one of them in order to answer what truly constitutes the“international”. With this comprehensive vision we can rightly build a global and inclusive discipline, improving the dominant conception. The methodology of this article is based on analyzing various documents, focusing particularly on those written outside the traditional European academic center, such as the works of Deniz Kuru, from Turkey, Melody Fonseca, from Puerto Rico, and the opinions of academics from various research centers in Latin America.

From this starting point I analyze the differences, similarities and convergences of Eurocentrism and ethnocentrism, then I look at what is considered the consolidation of Eurocentrism into an Anglo-saxon ethnocentric mentality. Consequently, I explore the possibility of a new humanocentrism and propose a new historiography of International Relations in which the historian is able to differentiate between significant and accidental causes. To achieve this, academics must act from their own perspectives, setting aside ideology, any supremacist epistemology, and the conditioned mindset to emancipate their research from these. Therefore, dominant theories such as realism are not the only theoretical framework to understand the history of the international system. Constructivist and Reflexive perspectives that illustrate how other regions contributed to this configuration and of what we know today as the modern civilization should also be taken into account. I conclude that we as researchers must begin to design new forms to collect the historical information coming from all corners of the globe, as Peter Frankopan posits, to deconstruct the IR discipline, expanding regional and inter-regional dialogues, training students to develop a critical eye that can challenge the vision of the mainstream, in order to transform the system towards a better, and more truly global, IR.