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Nigel Biggar: Eurocentricity is justified

'Decolonization' is a means to smuggle in anti-western ideology

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Three years ago, the acting vice-chancellor of Cambridge University, Anthony Freeling, made a confession, widely reported in the British press. He confessed that he was baffled by “decolonization.” The word, he said, “has been misused to such an extent that I don’t think, if I’m honest, I can give an accurate definition.”

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I sympathize — as, I strongly suspect, do millions of others. That’s because “decolonization” can mean a variety of different things, some of which make good sense, but others, very bad sense indeed. And the bad ones have smuggled themselves into schools and university departments under cover of the good.

Nigel Biggar: Eurocentricity is justified Back to video

The original and most natural home of “decolonization” is in former European colonies. There it can mean something entirely reasonable. For example, in 1986 the Kenyan novelist and playwright Ngugi wa Thiong’o published a book with the title, Decolonising the Mind. Here he argued that African literature should be written in African languages, such as his own Gikuyu. Why? So that Africans can recover a sense of self-respect and stop being in thrall to the assumption that whatever comes out of Europe is better. To which the only sensible response is surely, Yes, of course.

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When translated out of its original, post-colony context and into contemporary Britain or Canada, “decolonization” can still make some good sense. It can mean correcting the neglect in school curricula of the history of immigration and the contribution of immigrants to our country.

Or it can mean that important texts that have been excluded from reading lists in schools and universities, just because of prejudice against the race of their authors (and not because of their poor quality) should be included.

If it is true that the history of immigration and the multicultural reality of Britain and Canada have been neglected, and if it is true that important texts have been excluded just because of the author’s skin colour, then curricula should indeed be “decolonized.” If those things are true — and have been shown to be true.

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So far, so much good sense.

Much less reasonable, however, is the opposition of “decolonization” to “Eurocentricity” and its insistence on shifting attention to non-European histories and cultures. On the contrary, a certain Eurocentricity in British and Canadian education is entirely justified.

Britain is not Anywhere. It is located in North-West Europe, it has a particular history, and it has developed particular institutions and traditions. It is important, therefore, that British primary and secondary education should focus on helping budding citizens understand the immediate cultural and political environment in which they stand and for which they are about to become directly responsible.

Much the same applies to Canada. Notwithstanding the contribution of Indigenous Canadians and recent immigrants from Asia and Africa, the original builders of the nation-state of Canada were European — predominantly French and British, especially Scottish. Its primary languages, parliamentary institutions, legal system, and liberal traditions are not part of the eternal, cosmic furniture. They didn’t drop from heaven. They aren’t universal. The were created over centuries — sometimes at considerable human cost — in certain parts of Europe. Nascent Canadian citizens need to know that. For, whatever non-European cultural “diversity” Canada contains, Canadians need to remember and appreciate the European particularity of the country’s origins. Otherwise, they risk squandering the rights and liberties that their European heritage has — uniquely — bequeathed them.

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Besides, when school pupils go to university, those intent on throwing off “Eurocentricity” are entirely at liberty to immerse themselves in courses about Indigenous Canadian culture, African history, or Chinese language, if they so wish. So, the systematic, indiscriminate hostility of the “decolonizers” to “Eurocentricity” is not reasonable and makes bad sense.

Equally bad is their claim that school and university reading-lists should contain an ethnic diversity of authors, so that an ethnic diversity of students can identify with them. This brings us to the dogma of “inclusion” — the idea that, in order for an ethnic minority student to feel at home in a school or university, he or she must find their own cultural heritage reflected in their curriculum.

Yet, it is manifestly untrue that people of a certain race can only relate to, understand, be inspired by, and learn from someone of the same race. White Britons and Canadians have been admiring the Semitic Jesus for two millennia and the Indian Mahatma Gandhi for over a century. After the Second World War, many West Indian parents took to naming their male children “Winston” out of admiration for Winston Churchill. And judging by the occasion in Christ Church college, Oxford over a decade ago, when I was surrounded by a troupe of Shakespearean actors from Kabul, Afghans are perfectly capable of appreciating England’s most famous dramatist.

Most happily, we really are not intellectually imprisoned in racial silos. It is therefore a mistake to assume that a “diverse,” ethnic minority student in Britain or Canada will naturally warm toward the poetry of the Indian Rabindranath Tagore or the West Indian Derek Walcott, rather than that of the Anglo-American T. S. Eliot. And since ethnic minority students are not themselves culturally homogenous, it is also a mistake to assume that a student of Punjabi heritage will naturally identify at all with a Bengali poet such as Tagore.

The reason that “decolonization,” “diversity” and “inclusion” have gained such traction in our institutions — not least schools and universities — is that they contain perfectly reasonable, liberal ideas. After all, who could decently object to former subjects of European colonial rule recovering a due sense of cultural self-respect? Who could reasonably deny that a measure of cultural diversity can be enriching? And who could possibly champion exclusion?

The problem is, however, that under cover of these reasonable, liberal ideas a radically anti-Western worldview has been smuggled in — namely, the idea that the legacy of Britain’s history and Canada’s colonial past is nothing but a litany of racism, oppression, dispossession, and exploitation. Historically, that is nonsense and those who propagate it are either ignorant or lying. But it isn’t just nonsense; it’s poisonous nonsense, eating away at Canadian national identity and unity. For the sake of all Canadians, it needs to be called out.

Nigel Biggar, CBE, is Lord Biggar of Castle Douglas and author of The New Dark Age: Why ‘Liberals’ must Win the Culture Wars (2026) and Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (2024).

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