The Dictionary of Human Geography (61 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

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Euclidean space
The metric space defined by the geometric system devised by the Greek mathematician Euclid of Alexandria. Euclidean space (sometimes called Cartesian space: see cartesianism) is the space typically presumed in everyday discussion and in more formal accounts of distance, interaction or spatial distribution in human geography. Euclidean space is based on five axioms: (NEW PARAGRAPH) Any two points can be joined by a straight line. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Any straight line segment can be extended indefinitely in a straight line. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Given any straight line segment, a circle can be drawn having the segment as radius and one endpoint as centre. (NEW PARAGRAPH) All right angles are congruent. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The parallel postulate. If two lines intersect a third in such a way that the sum of the inner angles on one side is less than two right angles, then the two lines inevitably must intersect each other on that side if extended far enough. (NEW PARAGRAPH) From the 1970s, geographers explored both the power and the limits of Euclidean space for mapping the Earth (see cartography), recog nizing that the surface of the gLobe is not Euclidean but a two dimensional surface of constant positive curvature. Spatial analytical modelling often presupposes Euclidean space, although there have been some experiments with non Euclidean spaces, such as Riemannian and Lobachevskian geometries and multi dimensional spaces (see also spatiaL science). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Euclidean space has long been treated as absolute and homogeneous, properties that for Lefebvre (1991b) guarantee its social and (NEW PARAGRAPH) political utility. This utility emerges first as ?nature?s space? and later as all of social life is reduced to Euclidean space. The result is a double reduction of complex three dimen sional realities to a two dimensional space, and to the space of two dimensional objects that can be ?naively? mapped or represented. At this point, the spaces of lived experience are normalized and seen as reducible to abstract and transparent spaces: the god trick has ren dered the world as something to be looked at from a distance, as a world as picture or world as exhibition, where complex social and natural worlds have become intelligible to the eye, to be read and represented (Heidegger, 1962 [1927]: see also epistemoLogy; produc tion of space). jpi (NEW PARAGRAPH)
Eurocentrism
A world view that places ?Europe? at the centre of human history, social analysis and political practice. These three spheres are closely connected, and revolve around the constitution of ?Europe? as subject and object of enquiry, as architect and arbiter of method, and as exemplar and engineer of progress. Thus: (NEW PARAGRAPH) ?Europe? is placed at the centre of human history through the assumption that it provides the model and master narrative of world history: that its histories (and geographies) are the norm and the rule, from which others learn or deviate. (NEW PARAGRAPH) ?Europe? is placed at the centre of social analysis through the assumption that its theoretical formulations and methods of analysis provide the most power ful resources for all explanation and interpretation. (NEW PARAGRAPH) ?Europe? is placed at the centre of poli tical practice through the assumption that its cultural and political systems act as the bearers of a universal Reason that maps out the ideal course of all human history (see enLightenment). (NEW PARAGRAPH) europe appears in scare quotes throughout the preceding paragraph to draw attention to its cultural construction. The very idea of ?Europe? has a long and far from unitary history. Eurocentrism has a long history (or rather historical geography) too, through which it has been so closely entwined with the projects of coLoniaLism and imperiaLism (Blaut, 1993) that it cannot sensibly be con fined to the continent of Europe. In the course of those discursive expansions, ?Europe? has turned into ?the west? (cf. orientalism), which has more recently been turned into the global ?north? (cf. south). Each one of these transi tions has been freighted with its own cultural and political baggage, but their general burden is clear. ?Eurocentrism is not merely the ethnocentrism of people located in the West?, Dhareshwar (1990, p. 235) notes, but rather ?permeates the cultural apparatus in which we participate?: it is a global ideology. It follows from these characterizations that it is possible to study Europe without being Eurocentric, and that it is equally possible to study non European societies in thoroughly Eurocentric ways. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Geography has a particular and a general interest in Eurocentrism. Historians of the modern discipline have argued that it is a con stitutively ?European science? (Stoddart, 1986). Critics have objected that this erases the con tributions of other geographical traditions (Arab, Chinese and Indian among them) and that geography in its modern, transnational and hegemonic forms (see hegemony) is more accurately described as a ?Eurocentric science? (Gregory, 1994; see also Sidaway, 1997). Work in the history of geography (see geog raphy, history of) has drawn attention to these issues through an interrogation of geography?s complicity in the adventures of colonialism and imperialism and, in particular, of the reciprocities between the intellectual formation of the discipline and the political trajectory of European expansion, exploitation and dispossession (Driver, 1992b). During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the discipline invested heavily in activities that had considerable instrumental value (some historians have suggested that it was precisely these practical contributions that helped secure the formal incorporation of the modern discipline within the Western academy). Its strategic contributions included mapping and surveying other territories, compiling resource inventories, and producing imaginative geog raphies of other peoples and places. These investments contributed to the formation of the modern discipline as a ?white mythology? that: (a) postulated a racially unmarked sub ject position as the condition of objective truth and scientific discourse; (b) effaced alternative subject positions; and (c) appropriated other forms of knowledge all three gestures are diagnostics of Eurocentrism (Barnett, 1998; see also whiteness). (NEW PARAGRAPH) In the course of the twentieth century, Eurocentrism bled into what Peet (2005) describes as the ?even more virulent geo cultural form? of Americentrism. There are crucial differences as well as affinities between the two (Slater, 2004, pp. 13 16), but both cultural formations have underwritten and been propelled by military force and capitalist globalization. Their conjunction was regis tered within the modern discipline by the designation of a singular ?Anglo American geography? in the 1960s and 1970s, but this was a double exclusion: apart from some key contributions from German and Swedish writers, non Anglophone European geograph ers were marginalized (Eurocentrism had con tracted to an anglocentrism), and classical spatial science offered a series of supposedly general models that were in fact predicated on specifically European and American cases (Christaller?s Germany, Burgess?s Chicago) (cf. McGee, 1995). Since then, however, while the intellectual corpus of ?Anglo American geography? has become increasingly fractured here too there are differences as well as affinities Slater (1992) could still argue that much of it continued to rely on a Euro Americanism that projected its own situations as ?lineages of universalism?. Slater claimed that the dependence of an ostensibly critical human geography on European and American traditions of critical theory, his torical materialism and postmodernism (the list could now be extended: feminist geography and post structuralism have been exercised by the same questions) tacitly licensed assumptions of ?universal applicabil ity? that concealed ?a particularity based to a large extent on the specific experiences of the USA and the UK?. Geographies written under the sign of post colonialism have been directly interested in these issues in the need to ?provincialize? the assumptions of Euro American geography, to attend to other voices and to ?learn from other regions? but they also often draw directly on European high theory, and Slater (2004) has demonstrated that they have much to learn from other politico intellectual traditions too (cf. tricontinentalism). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Geography is scarcely alone in these pre dicaments, and in the sense of discourse rather than discipline it has a more general involvement in Eurocentrism. Gregory (1998) has drawn attention to four conceptual strat egies ?geo graphs? that entered directly into the formation of a colonial modernity: (NEW PARAGRAPH) Absolutizing time and space: the construc tion of concepts through which Euro pean metrics and meanings of history and geography were taken to be natural and inviolable, as marking the centre around which other histories and other geographies were to be organized (cf. Young, 1990b). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Exhibiting the world: the production of a space within which particular objects were made visible in particular ways, and by means of which particular claims to knowledge made by viewing subjects were negotiated and legitimized. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Normalizing the subject: the production of spaces of inclusion and exclusion that treated the subject position of the white, middle class, heterosexual male as the norm. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Abstracting culture and nature: the produc tion of ?nature? as a realm separate from ?culture?, in which European culture had made nature yield its secrets and its re sources, and in which temperate nature was ?normal nature? (cf. Blaut, 1999). (NEW PARAGRAPH) This argumentation sketch is more than an exercise in historical reconstruction. ?In eluci dating the conceptual orders of Eurocentrism,? Gregory argues, ?it becomes much more diffi cult to assume that we have left such predica ments behind, and much more likely that we will be forced to recognise that Eurocentrism and its geo graphs continue to invest our geog raphies with their troubling meanings.? dg (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Slater (1992); Gregory (1998a). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
Europe, idea of
The region that we now call Europe is the western part of the Eurasian landmass. Europe has no clearly defined bor ders, particularly in the east, but the region?s history can be read as an ongoing attempt to define what it means to be European and to fix that identity on the map (Heffernan, 1998). This process has generated a series of non European ?others?, against whom Europeans have defined themselves. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The term ?Europe? is derived from Europa, a female character in Greek mythology. The word had no geographical meaning for the Classical civilizations centred on the middLe east and the Mediterranean basin, and little significance in the Roman Empire. It is absent from the Bible, but was used alongside ?Christendom? in the early medieval period to describe the area where Christianity prevailed and where a literate elite shared a common Latin language. On medieval world maps, Europe was depicted as a small, internally undifferentiated area, vulnerable to incursion from the Islamic regions of asia and africa, which were Europe?s first constituting ?others? (Hay, 1968; Wilson and van den Dussen, (NEW PARAGRAPH) 1993). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The expansion of Europe into the americas from the late fifteenth century was both a cause and a consequence of the intellectual and tech nological changes associated with the European Renaissance, and provoked a major reassess ment of Europe?s place in a world still seen as divinely created (Wintle, 1999, 2008). The opening of the Americas also generated a new economic system based on long distance Atlantic trade and a new political system based on competitive European nation states, whose interests clashed repeatedly in Europe and the Americas during the collapse in the fragile unity of the Christian church following the Reformation. As ?Christendom? disinte grated into a complex mosaic of Catholic and Protestant communities in the Old and the New Worlds, the word ?Europe? lost its reli gious connotation. In the wake of the Treaties of Westphalia (1648), which ended the European wars of reLigion, Europe was defined as the region in which a ?balance of power? might operate between rival nation states by mutual consent (Pagden, 2002). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The geographical limits of this arrangement were famously outlined in the Duc de Sully?s mid seventeenth century Grand Design for European unity. For Sully, the Ottoman Empire had no part in the ?concert of Europe?, because international agreements ultimately rested on Christian values. Christian Russia was also excluded, because the Russian people were deemed essentially Asiatic and hence culturally inferior. Europe now had two con stituting ?others?, a traditional religious enemy in the Islamic south and a new cultural enemy in the Asiatic east. Sully?s cultural definition of Europe highlights a fundamental irony at the heart of the European debate. At the very moment when Europe was defined politically in the most enlightened terms as an area where permanent peace might be established by international agreement, it was also defined geographically to exclude the peoples of other regions who were deemed unworthy on cultural or civilizational grounds (Heater, 1992; Wolff, 1994; Neumann, 1996: see also civilization; nomos). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The legitimacy of imposing geographical limits on supposedly universal human rights was hotly debated during the eighteenth century enLightenment, but the freedom educated Europeans (including those who had settled beyond Europe) claimed for them selves in their hard won battles against the tyranny of unelected rulers in Europe was never extended to the native peoples of Asia, Africa and the Americas. The fate of these people was to be decided by the colonizing Europeans. The values of enlightened demo cracy shone brightly in eighteenth century Europe and the newly independent European North America, partly because the rest of the world had been simultaneously darkened. (NEW PARAGRAPH) During the nineteenth century, the high point of European imperiaLism, the cultural criteria used to define Europe were recast yet again, this time in racial and biological terms inspired by the prevalent theories of social darwiNism and environmental determiN ism. The European peoples were deemed not merely to have acquired a superior level of civilization but, rather, to possess an inherent racial superiority, a consequence of their uniquely benevolent physical environment (see race). This both explained and justified the European domination of the world. (NEW PARAGRAPH) As the last remaining uncolonized regions of the world gradually diminished, so the tensions between different European nations increased, unleashing a more or less continuous period of intra European warfare from 1914 to 1945. This ended with the attempt by the Nazi authorities in Germany to eradicate long estab lished European communities, notably the Jews, in the name of a racially ?pure? Europe. If a ?dark continent? has ever existed, it was surely Europe between 1914 and 1945 (Mazower, 1998: see also gENocide; holocaust). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Europe was divided in 1945, the western and eastern parts of the region dominated by the opposing military superpowers of the USA and the Soviet Union, respectively. New meas ures to foster economic integration developed on both sides during the coLd war from the 1950s to 1980s, most successfully through the European Economic Community (EEC) and its successor the European Community (EC), which eventually encompassed most of the national economies of western Europe. This generated remarkable economic success but little additional discussion about the essential meaning of Europe, mainly because the regioN previously regarded as Europe seemed permanently divided. The word ?Europe? had little currency in eastern Europe in this period and acquired only a limited economic mean ing in western Europe (Judt, 1996, 2005). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The realignment of central and eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany has been achieved with remarkable speed, and amid continuing economic success. The enlarged (NEW PARAGRAPH) European Union (EU) now includes 27 coun tries with a combined population approaching 500 million. Twelve countries, with a total population in excess of 300 million, share a single currency (the euro), established in 1999. These seismic developments have begun to generate new reflections on the fun damental idea of Europe, but it remains to be seen whether an enlarged Europe will develop a distinctive identity in the twenty first century and emerge as a political and economic coun terbalance to the USA. Whether the new Europe needs such a ?nation like? identity is a moot point, however, for it might more usefully be defined as a set of values and aspir ations that consciously reject the exclusive geographies of the past (Delanty, 1995, 2005a; Amin 2004a; Levy, Pensky and Torpey, 2005; Beck and Grande, 2007; Heffernan, 2007: see also cosmopolitanism). MjH (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Amin (2004a); Heffernan (1998). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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