Eurocentrism, ‘civilization’ and the ‘barbarians’

In the nineteenth century, the idea of European cultural and moral superiority was at its peak, with a presumed historical mission to civilize the rest of the world by expanding European influence and by colonization.¹ At the level of the selfdefined Eurocentric international society and law, countries and peoples were distinguished as either ‘civilized’ or ‘uncivilized’ (‘barbarians’), with Europe the basis of comparison, in what came to be known as the ‘standard of civilization’.² International society as it emerged from the Renaissance was the Christian society of states, despite the fact that the classic jurists from the sixteenth to the