Mainstream political and cultural discourse often projects us into highly sensitive discourses with the analytical skills of football fans. One of these is the casualness with which questions of international politics , geopolitics, political-institutional concepts, value systems, rights, conflicts and the systemic events arising from them (e.g. immigration) are addressed. According to Immanuel Wallerstein in The Rhetoric of Power: A Critique of European Universalism (2007), " there is nothing more ethnocentric and particularistic than universalist claims ," and no definition is more fitting to describe the Western worldview.
Diplomatic incidents
In 1999, at a World Bank conference in Florence, an American economist said that societies struggling to become prosperous need a “suitable” cultural traditionSince neither tenth-century China nor fifteenth-century Southern Europe, dominated by the Catholic Church, had this "suitable" cultural tradition, they failed. This greatly irritated the Chinese delegates, who left.
Another episode occurred in 2000, at another important World Bank conference in Washington dedicated to "gender differences." In the introductory speech, a famous American feminist said that Africa was doing badly even before colonialism because local cultures were “patriarchal” and “oppressive” towards women. Even in this case, the public, predominantly female and African, did not digest the statement well.
But even more significant was the episode of the conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, organized by the Academy for International and Area Studies at Harvard University in 1999. The organizers, emphasizing the equation between economic development and the Protestant ethic , argued that it was thanks to it that Northern Europe and the United States had developed. For them, the world would be better if these values were spread throughout the planet.
The alleged superiority of the Western model
This speech shows us the presumption of superiority that the West, at least in its conceptual categorization, pours upon other peoples, their lifestyles, and their traditional reference models. This discourse brings us back to that whole set of clichés, stereotypes, and, at best, axioms that are valid for the Western model, but not for the rest of the world, and which goes by the name of "civil and human rights”. In the name of “human rights”, and similar logic, we proceeded to invasion wars, looting e extermination to the detriment of numerous states, disparagingly labeled "rogue" and led by so-called "dictators" and "tyrants." From the Gulf Wars to Yugoslavia, from Afghanistan to the Arab Spring (Libya and Syria above all), from Ukraine to the Baltics, and including the countless frictions with Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, and South America in general, all these scenarios have been affected by this reasoning.
Civilization of savages?
Finally, the Palestinian question , where the genocide of a people is being carried out before the eyes of the entire world for various reasons, all dubious and questionable. Not to mention Africa, where the already long-standing work of twentieth-century colonization continues with an even worsened logic, see the issue of the CFA franc or the migration processes facilitated by economic business and humanitarianism aimed at unlimited acceptance. All operations that have worn and continue to wear the guise of human rights or Westernization, and where, except for a few specific cases, the political leaderships guiding the West in this work of civilizing savages are of a democratic and social democratic nature.
“Dignity” of societies
But then what would be this superior point of view capable of judging and deciding the fate of others? What are we exporting to these countries, the American democracyThe moral, civil, and in some ways mystical superiority of the chosen people, if not even theocratic, of the USA and Israel? Or better yet, Western lifestyles, or the phantom European Union, founded on currency, a degrading concept in and of itself—far from savage! Every society on the planet, within its geopolitical framework, is based on a level of political, cultural, economic, and value-based equilibrium, and must be respected as such. The processes of modifying these structures are the sole responsibility of these peoples and based on "self-conscious" processes. Other solutions are interferences that lead imbalance e injustice in those societies, with consequences that inevitably also spill over into the Western world.
Robert Siconolfi
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