Title: ﻿The European conquest of the world - Global Learning
Headings: 
﻿The European conquest of the world
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Content: It is a question of a Eurocentric understanding as against a universal understanding. The Third World perspective, tied to emancipatory movements, is the most advanced understanding of which the human species is capable at this stage in its development
Even the European Left suffers from Eurocentrism. When we formulate issues in the historical and social context of Europe or the United States, ignoring issues and frames that are emerging in the Third World, this is a form of ethnocentrism. When we treat the history of popular struggles primarily in the context of Europe and the United States, and pay little attention to the various popular revolutions that have been unfolding in the Third World, we are thinking in a Eurocentric way. If we study Marx and Lenin; but not Ho Chi Minh, Fidel, and Chávez; we are developing Eurocentric blinders. But we Europeans and peoples of European descent can overcome Eurocentrism. By encountering the popular revolutionary movements that have been forged by the peoples of the Third World, we can make their experiences and understandings part of our own, and we thus can emancipate ourselves from the ideological distortions of Western culture. We can arrive to understand that colonial domination was the principal cause of the development of the West, and that neocolonial structures continue to promote the development of the North and the underdevelopment of the South.