Page 31 - AEI Insights 2020 - Vol. 6, Issue 1

Bajrektarevic, 2020a

itself melts and is melted constantly. In the world of our realities; periphery sends, center
absorbs.)
The rise of the West was portrayed as a pure virgin birth as John M. Hobson fairly concluded.
Europeans delineated themselves as the, only or the most, progressive subject of the world’s
history in past, presence and future. At the same time, the Eastern peoples – e.g. Asian as ‘the
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people without history’ – were seen as inert, passive and corrosive. While the Solar system
‘became’ heliocentric, the sake and fate of our planet turned plain – Europocentric. The world
is flat mantra set the stage, turning all beyond Europe into a sanitary corridor, a no-fly-zone.

Ambient, anti-Orient
“The idea of Europe found its most enduring expression in the confrontation with the Orient
in the age of imperialism. It was in the encounter with other civilizations that the identity of
Europe was shaped. Europe did not derive its identity from itself but from the formation of a
set of global contrasts. In the discourse that sustained this dichotomy of Self and Other, Europe
and the Orient became opposite poles in a system of civilizational values which were defined
by Europe.” – notes Delantry.
Even the English word to determine, position, adapt, adjust, align, identify, conform, direct,
steer, navigate or command has an oriental connotation. To find and locate itself opposite to
Orient, means to orient oneself.
Feudal Europe had identified itself negatory towards Levant and Islam. It reinvented a
historical unity and continuity of Roman Empire (precursor of today’s Euro-MED) into an us-
them binary categorisation: The peripheral outcast became thus Rome (Western Empire) and
the legitimate successor – who outlived its move to Bosporus for over 1.000 years – became
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‘Byzantium’. No wonder, tireless binary categorisation is an essential glue and galvaniser.
Clearly, it was an identity heavily resting on insecurity. Proof? An external manifestation of
inner insecurity is always aggressive assertiveness.
Is this still alive or even operative? How does it correlate today?

22 Undoubtedly, (western) Europe owes its prosperity to extension of its commerce and colonial expansion. But
let us take a closer look: “The profitability of European colonial empires was often built on the destruction of
independent polities and indigenous economies around the world, or on the creation of extractive institutions
essentially from the ground up, as in the Caribbean islands, where following the almost total collapse of the native
populations, Europeans imported African slaves and set up plantations systems. … We will never know the
trajectories of independent city states such as those in the Banda Islands, in Aceh, or in Burma would have been
without the European intervention. They may have had their own indigenous Glorious Revolution. But this
possibility was removed by the expansion of the Dutch East India Company. … The British East India Company
looted local wealth and took over, and perhaps intensified, the extractive taxation institutions of the Mughal rulers
of India – coinciding with the massive contraction of Indian textile industry. The contraction went along with the
de-urbanisation and increased poverty. It initiated a long period of reversed development in India. (Find the living
parallel with a colossal de-industrialisation and de-population of Eastern Europe past its westernisation from 1989
on – op.aut.) Soon, instead of producing textiles, Indians were buying them from Britain and growing opium for
the East India Company to sell in China. … The Atlantic slave trade repeated the same pattern in Africa. Many
African states were turned into war machines intent on capturing and selling slaves to Europeans…” – noted
Acemoglu and Robinson (Why Nations Fail, page 271-273).
23 All until late XVIII century, the word ‘Byzantium’ was unknown beyond the old-Illyrian name for a small
ancient Greek colony of Byzantion. The emperors from Constantinople everybody referred as the Romans. Even
the famous codification of Roman law under Iustinianus (Corpus Iuris Civilis) – which lawyers celebrate as the
origins of modern law and planetary legal systems – physically took place in Constantinople.

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