Ethnocentrism Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Ethnocentrism is the inability to understand other countries except through the lens of one’s own country’s culture, customs, values, and institutions. Ethnocentrism plagues all peoples and countries, but its consequences are particularly important for a global power such as the United States. Americans tend to view the rest of the world from the presumption that U.S. institutions and practices are superior. Ethnocentrism pervades all aspects of American life, including scholarly works in the field of comparative politics as well as U.S. foreign policies and practices.

Ethnocentrism dominated the works of the earliest scholars in comparative politics, such as Karl Loewenstein, Carl Friedrich, and Hannah Arendt. These scholars analyzed other countries from a Western-centric position, focusing their study on comparative constitutions, comparative legal systems, and various institutions of government such as the Parliament, the executive, and judicial institutions. The logic was that if countries imitated the United States or Western Europe, they would improve. However, others, such as Roy Macridis, contended their approach was not genuinely applicable to non-Western and developing countries, which had their own ways of doing things. Although his critique spurred subsequent scholars to pursue a systematic comparative approach, their work continued to be plagued with ethnocentrism.

David Easton, for example, attempted to establish a general, unbiased, presumably universal theory through integrating different aspects of political life as a system. His analysis, however, included inputs (e.g., culture, history, interest groups) and outputs (e.g., government decisions or policies) that sounded hauntingly similar to the functions of the Western system. Gabriel Almond applied Easton’s schematic and attempted to identify common functions that all political systems performed, but he still used a Western-centric approach to analyze non-Western countries.

Exogenous factors, for instance, the decline of colonialism and the resulting independence of many former colonies of the British Empire, presented the opportunity to shift farther away from the legalistic-formalistic approach and toward a less ethnocentric analysis of world politics, but the new field of political development continued to be grounded in ethnocentrism in practice.

Economists Karl Polanyi, W. W. Rostow, and Alexander Gerschenkron asserted that economic growth drove social and political development or democratization, but their approach remained as ethnocentric as the legalistic-formalistic approach because it featured a universal model of a linear trajectory resulting in a democratic-capitalistic society. In fact, their theoretical progression has failed to manifest in the new developing nations; economic and social change seem uncorrelated.

Ethnocentrism also affected sociologists such as Talcott Parsons, who advanced a set of presumably universally valid categories (e.g., affective vs. affective neutrality; ascriptive vs. merit; particularism vs. universalism) for comparing “modern” and “traditional” societies. Yet his pattern variables dichotomized traditional and modern systems, creating an absoluteness about development, and it wreaked havoc on the developing nations as it sometimes undermined the very institutions (e.g., family, religion, tribe, the caste, and the clan) that gave coherence and stability to the developing nations. Other sociologists, including Daniel Lerner, Seymour Lipset, and Karl Deutsch, developed their own theses of modernization and democratization that made Western political and economic institutions the inevitable conclusion of a unilinear development model. The economists and sociologists had a heavy influence on political scientists, including Easton and Almond. Some scholars, such as Lucian Pye, acknowledged a diversity of definitions generally associated with change; however, Pye’s work still reveals his biases toward Western democracy.

Some scholars, notably Samuel Huntington, challenged ethnocentrism, and a few constructed indigenous models of development. These challenges, however, failed to affect the field significantly. They also failed to affect American foreign policies, which have been deeply shaped by the unilinear development model. For instance, American foreign aid to promote democracy, capitalism, and civil society failed to consider indigenous conditions and imposed a U.S. model of development on emerging nations. Recently, however, a trend is emerging in the United States to counter ethnocentrism. Universities are promoting multiculturalism through the introduction of new courses in non-Western languages and area studies, there is a greater emphasis on understanding other religions such as Islam, and there are efforts to teach students about other cultures.

Nonetheless, American foreign policies and practices, particularly democracy programs, foreign aid programs, and belief in free markets, remain ethnocentric because they are based on the American model of development. Even today Americans fail to grasp that the sequences, stages, and processes of development that the West experienced cannot be repeated in today’s developing nations (e.g., Afghanistan and Iraq).

Bibliography:

Geertz, Clifford. Negara:The Theater State in Nineteenth Century Bali. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980.
Somjee, A. H. Political Capacity in Developing Societies. New York: St. Martin’s, 1982.
Wiarda, Howard J. Ethnocentrism and Foreign Policy: Can We Understand the Third World? Washington D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1983.