Ethnocentrism Even in the Most Democratic of

Ethnocentrism Even in the most democratic of the Western capitalist nations, equal rights were not extended to all individuals until fairly recent times. Racism and ethnocentrism were built into the world political and economic system, and authoritarian forms of government remained the norm well into the 20th Century. Defining ethnocentrism is not necessarily as simple a matter as it might appear to be at first sight, however.

This tendency to ascribe negative characteristics to those of other colors, cultures, languages and religions has hardly been unusual in history, and is by no means confined to the Western capitalist powers. Even after the end of feudalism in the West in the early modern period, ethnocentrism and racism continued in new forms, even if the labor system was no longer as violent and coercive as slavery or serfdom. Slave labor was generally relegated to the colonies and the periphery, including Russia and the Southern United States.

Apart from throwbacks like fascism and Nazism in the 20th Century, however, outright slavery has long since been in decline in the core capitalist nations. Although formal colonialism had ended by the 1960s and 1970s, the present global economy has its roots in the conquest of the Americas that began with Christopher Columbus in 1492. For centuries, the main role of the colonial and semi-colonial economies in the world was to supply raw materials and agricultural commodities to the few Western nations that controlled almost the entire planet.

Some of these products like cotton and tobacco were produced by slave labor, which in the Americas was based on a racial caste system that still exists today. Originally, the United States was part of this colonial system, and in fact was the first European overseas colony to gain its independence, although the Southern part of the country continued to be dependent on export commodities produced by slave labor. As W.E.B.

DuBois pointed out in the early-20th Century, the majority of workers and peasants in the world were always yellow, black and brown, while women in the colonial area were often oppressed by gender and race as well as social class. In this analysis, these mutually reinforcing systems of oppression like racism, patriarchy, colonialism and capitalism are inseparable and all part of the same phenomenon.

For DuBois, real democracy would only be possible through revolutionary transformation although he did not and could not put a timeline on when such change would finally take place (Eisenstein, 2004, p. 123). Martin Luther King also envisioned a "more inclusive" form of democracy than the one that privileged white males of the middle and upper classes, although like Gandhi he hoped the revolution would be a nonviolent one (Eisenstein, p. 179).

Racism as an ideology is a modern invention, originating with proslavery writers in the United States before the Civil War, and later with Social Darwinists who argued that so-called "Aryans" or "Nordics" were naturally superior to all others in the evolutionary hierarchy, and also that males were biologically superior to women.

These pseudo-scientific ideologies copied social practices and power relations that had long existed, and took their most extreme and genocidal form under the German National Socialist regime during the Second World War -- especially in Eastern Europe with the enslavement and mass murder of the Jews, Roma and Slavic peoples. Needless to say, Hitler hardly invented racism, ethnocentrism and anti-Semitism, even if his particular ideology was more systematic and destructive than any of its predecessors.

He regarded his conquest and exploitation of Poland and Russia very much as a part of the European imperial tradition, on par with the conquest of the Americas or British rule in India and Africa. Hitler did not consider the Jews, Gypsies and Slavs as 'white' and "used against Europeans the European colonialist practices" that had been commonplace in Asia, Africa and the Americas for centuries (Eisenstein, p. 5).

For example, the genocide of millions of Africans in the Congo by the Belgian colonial administration in the late-19th and early-20th Centuries remains one of the least well-known and researched acts of mass extermination in history and the victims largely forgotten. So it has been with the wars in the Congo of the past ten years, in which millions have also died and the former colonial powers have been deeply implicated. Today's global system combines traditional types of oppression with industrial and even postindustrial forms of capitalism.

Globalization is nothing new, however, and the basic patterns of the world economy that exist today were set in the distant past. In the past.