“Assad must go”
Eurocentric discourse in International relations
The state system going back to the peace of Westphalia in 1648, contrary to dominant discourse in the mainstream media(MSM) and the content of the textbooks dedicated to the history of international relations is not of equal relations between all its members. A close examination of international relations since the peace of Westphalia shows that the modern world order have been profoundly shaped by unequal power relations, embedded over many centuries embedded in knowledge and ideas and concepts and in cultural body as Edward Said has obviously shown in his two seminal books, “Orientalism” and “Culture and imperialism”. This Eurocentric distorted thought must be linked therefore to imperialism and its set of ideological and cultural corpus based on the belief that some people and races are superior on other, and that ultimately the Europeans peoples or their fellow all over the world, in the United states, in Canada, In Australia, New Zeeland, in south Africa, are considering themselves as superior to other “people of color”, have a duty and a special mission, that of civilizing the backward non-European peoples This Eurocentric and supremacist posture remains the prevailing feature of International relations, even longtime after the masquerade of the so called decolonization process and the political liberation from colonial rule of formerly colonized peoples and the accession of a significant number of “new states” to the “international society” .
Nowadays, a such Eurocentric and supremacist discourse shows obviously through the western imperialist waged against Syria supposed to be, according to the International Law, an independent member of the UN organization, in Syria. At the beginning of the Syrian crisis, President Obama and Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton launched the slogan “President Bashar Al Assad must go” Let us now dream and imagine in the opposite direction where Assad and his foreign minister Walid El Mouallem would launch the slogan “President Obama must go” . or “President Hollande must go” or “David Cameroun must go” . The supremacist and Eurocentric mainstream media, the well thinking and the ruling class in the West would have retorted that first Obama and Hollande are two legitimate presidents democratically elected through fair and honest election and secondly, Assad and his foreign minister have not to interfere neither in the American nor in French and British domestic affairs.
By examining the two present cases, we can say without be mistaken that if Obama and Hollande were a democratically elected president, the Syrian president Bachar al Assad is a democratically elected president too. Let us remember that President Assad has been elected twice, in 2007 and last year despite the difficult conditions in which the presidential election has been held last year. Their outcome had been considered by delegates from more than 30 countries as “free, fair and transparent”
The Eurocentric bias and the imperialist foundations of International relations appear clearly in broad daylight when US imperialism and its allies in Europe and the Middle East were trying since 2011 to overthrow Bachar Al Assad and to change the regime in Damascus. Behind the slogan “ Assad must go” , we cannot find democracy and human rights but a will expressed by a hegemonic and imperialist power in its perpetual quest for domination and perpetuated hegemony over the whole world.