Modernity and Eurocentrism

Abstract

The Semantic Slippage of the Concept of "Europe" Let me begin by underlining the change in meaning of the concept of "Europe." This semantic slippage has generally been overlooked, making it difficult to address this issue in a productive manner. First, the mythological Europa was the daughter of a Phoeni-cian king and thus was Semitic. 1 This Europe that comes from the Orient bears little resemblance to the "definitive" Europe (the modern Europe); one should not mistake Greece with the future Europe. This future Europe was situated north of Macedonia and north of Magna Graecia in Italy. The future Europe was the home of everything that was considered barbaric (thus, in later times, Europe eventually usurped a name that did not belong to it). The classical Greeks were well aware that both Asia (the area that would later become a province in the Roman Empire and which corresponded to contemporary Turkey) and Africa (Egypt) were home to the most developed cultures. Asia and Africa were not considered barbaric, although neither were they considered wholly human. 2 What became modern Europe lay beyond Greece's horizon and therefore could not in any way coincide with the originary Greece. Modern Europe, situated to the north and west of Greece, was simply considered the uncivilized, the nonpolitical, the nonhu-man. By stating this I am trying to emphasize that the unilineal diachrony Greece-Rome-Europe is an ideological construct that can be traced back to late-eighteenth-century German romanticism. Therefore, the single line N e p a n t l a : Vi e w s f r o m S o u t h 1.3