International Relations: Eurocentrism in Civilization VI

Last week, I talked through the basics of strict geographic determinism: the argument that the environment of a people defines them and lays the track to their historical endpoint. I said that the interactivity and social simulations of Civilization VI bit back at racist theories of predestination. However, the game also doesn't have to write like Thomas Jefferson to Tipp-Ex over the cultures of non-European people.^[1] Geographic determinism is one pool in the repugnant swamp of Eurocentrism, and at times, Civ boils over with Eurocentrism.

Eurocentrism is an ideology that uses the cultural understandings and normative lenses of the West to assess other peoples, and it devastated the study of history, politics, geography, and anthropology. Cultures that did not originate in Europe went underexplained as Western academics were unwilling or unable to recognise legitimate cultural traits and products that were not their own. The sophistication, worth, and degree of development of a people were treated as synonymous with how Western they were.^{[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]}

Eurocentrism in Civilization

Even today, Eurocentric spectacles still threaten to slump down over the eyes of many a writer and policymaker. We must keep that context in mind as we read any text discussing history or anthropology, including Civilization. Back in 2014, Chris Franklin did a bang-up job reviewing how Civ V uses its Barbarian factions to insist that anyone living tribally must also lack art, military strategy, or substantial self-organisation. I want to expand on that argument by talking about how the design of the civilisations is also biased towards a colonial perspective.

The series has never gotten its full due for the diversity under its sun. It gave us playable Zulu and Central American characters in a game in 1991. Later, Civ V and VI expanded the series' horizons beyond the societies known for their grand palaces and feats of civil engineering. A player picking up one of these items or their DLC might govern the Iroquois, Cree, Kongolese, Mapuche, or Maori. Sadly, Civilization has never been able to reconcile its aspirational theme of all of human history with the narrower "Global Northern" perspective of Firaxis. In Civ, your "Great Works" are crucial measures of your cultural achievement. The Great Works are a small set of globally respected art pieces, each one a child of one person and often reducible to a single object. The set includes Ovid's Metamorphoses, Qiu Ying's Spring Morning in the Han Palace, and Chopin's Nocturne in E Flat Major.

But what if a population vests more worth in personal curios and stories than in a minority of siren artefacts? What if a society, rather than impeccably replicating the same text through mechanical printers, has a tradition of oral storytelling, where the vast game of telephone means the tales can mutate into a hundred different canons? Or maybe this country is less interested in the art that hangs in a museum, but it is normal for textiles to be worn and displayed by everyone in the society collectively?^[9][10] Such cultures can be found all across the ancient world and outside of affluent modern nations, but Civ hasn't laid a place for them. "Great Musicians" can't even be born in your cities before the Industrial Era. To the extent Civ VI acknowledges that outsider cultures could create something worthy of codifying in the annals of history, it places a premium on the external validation of those cultural products.

Civ VI's Culture Victory condition requires that you have more tourists visiting your civilisation than there are domestic tourists in any other empire. If that's an unintuitive concept, just know you need a surge of foreign tourists for the Culture Victory, and the clarion call for visitors is the Great Work. To give this system its due, it is empowering for historically non-white locales. You can see a Chile or Zulu nation that draws pilgrims from across the Earth to worship at their altars, secular or otherwise, in much the same way Europe and colonised North America have historically drawn visitors. Still, the rules are such that if you pick the Zulu and spawn into the same world as the Dutch and English, you can't win a Cultural Victory on the basis of Zulu culture being self-supporting. You can only win with the sign-off of the same nations that have played arbiters of world culture through imperialism.

What about Civ's Great Wonders? It might sound implausible to us that any society would forgo constructing cathedrals and castles. Yet, there are plenty of non-European communities that have altars in their homes or local shrines as places of worship and that have homes but don't have stately homes. Those places of worship and huts still mean as much to them as Mont St. Michel or the Alhambra mean to their respective European cultures. Yet, with the neat exception of the Great Zimbabwe Wonder, Civ VI doesn't celebrate small villages like it does monolithic marvels.

When underprivileged nations are graced with genius thinkers or Pantheonic megastructures, they are never their own thinkers or their own megastructures. Indonesia can be the birthplace of a Great Scientist who boosts the Natural History Civic for you, but they cannot have an Indonesian name; they will always be Charles Darwin. In the Middle Ages, the preeminent Nubian literary work cannot be a North African epic unseen in our timeline; it has to be Romeo & Juliet or Canterbury Tales. The Mapuche cannot construct the Santiago Opera House in a personal architectural style; it will always be the Sydney Opera House, and it will always materialise in the mould of Western modernism.

Civilization believes that indigenous populations and "developing" nations can be every bit as prodigious as a France or a Portugal. However, it believes they crest that greatness by adopting the luminaries, art, and population management strategies of the "developed" nations, nations which are sometimes their very colonisers. The series recognised the Eurocentrism in its existing cast of characters, and, attempting damage control, introduced a more diverse set of faces and cultures into its ludonarrative framework. However, it didn't stop to think that the framework itself might also be Eurocentric. And that's true not just in the internal composition and values of Civ's civs, but also in how they treat each other and how the game treats that treatment.

War

It goes without saying that wars of conquest are both part of Civ and integral to imperialism. Civ VI even lets you declare a "colonial war" on societies that are technologically or civically outdated from your perspective. Civ illuminates how an expansionist mindset flows from the goal of becoming the cultural "best" and is excellent at putting you in the shoes of someone thinking acquisitively. Whether you want to grow your military, your academia, your agriculture, your art, or your economy, there are going to be finite material resources, labour, and land to do so within your own borders. But there are plenty more in foreign territory. You'll need them if you want to become the most prolific empire in space travel, culture, war, or organised religion.

In Civ, you can watch your progress towards Technology and Civics get supercharged as you pillage Campuses and ransack Theatre Squares. Armies don't really heist foreign museums and walk out with sacks full of culture, but the series captures the dynamic of appropriation. I know the centrist to centre-right line is that global commerce has obsoleted the need for invasion. Neoliberals sing us to sleep with the lullaby that there is no need to steal resources when you can obtain them on the markets, but in the face of this argument, Civ holds firm to its position that trade does not outmode theft. Let's look at some discoveries we can make about trade in this game:

1. There's a long list of goodies other peoples won't trade with you, typically including land and labourers. If you want those prizes, you'll have to beat them out of the other factions.
2. Attacking and colonising other nations can tenderise their bargaining muscles, effectively making their goods cheaper for you.
3. If you want money or goods to exchange, they have to come from somewhere. Metabolising someone else's people and territory gives you improved economic output with which to trade.

Colonialism doesn't obsolete trade but lubricates it, as reflected in the flurry of exchange between colonising powers. Look at the Transatlantic Slave Trade or the Opium Wars. Not to mention, if your goal is to be top dog on the globe, you'd do well to soften up any up-and-coming contenders.

These are the material concerns, but we're also interested in an ideological understanding of societies. To reach that ideological understanding with respect to economies, we need to recall that in colonial thought, and quite frankly, conservative thought, every sector of human exchange becomes a battleground. In domineering philosophies, different perspectives and practices cannot coexist and are viewed through the lens of the "culture war", in which your culture must extort the submission of all others. In practice, that extortion is "civlising the natives" or "defending western values". It's bringing the light of the lord to "the heathens" or "destroying woke". Alone, it's cultural vandalism, but it has also historically been the accompaniment to or precursor for genocides.^[1][11]

If you want to justify the subjugation of a people, a handy excuse is that you're culturally superior to them and improving the augustness of the world by replacing their values or those people with your own. A parallel self-pardon is that the people you're colonising don't have as developed a set of human products as you, thereby making them less human. You have frigates, and they only have fishing boats. You have symphonies, but they don't even have amphitheatres. They are closer to animals and can be displaced or culled like them. Plainly speaking, it's not symphonies and frigates that make humans human. People don't hurt any less from being enslaved or having their values disrespected because they were born in Nairobi instead of Nottingham.

The Olympics of culture also isn't cogent to me. If Tchaivosky debuts Swan Lake in Moscow and Dvorak conducts his Serenade for Strings in Prague, who has won music? It's a silly question, but one that Civ takes seriously, with most matches debating who on that timeline of human history is the victor of science, culture, or religion. These fields of endeavour are all flattened into weapons with which to disembowel other societies. In Civ's empire of the zero-sum, that is the point of the arts, sciences, and philosophy, with running points tallies telling you which Civilizations have the objectively grandest capitals or are the most cultural, whatever that means.

Tentatively, I'd say that just because a game gives you a goal doesn't mean it believes in that goal. An objective can represent the motivations of the protagonist, an instruction the main character has been fed, or just something it's possible to do in the world, and none of those ideas are synonymous with what's moral or desirable. But a game can signal its normative values relative to that goal through graphics, sounds, writing, and mechanics. The classic example would be Spec Ops: The Line, where the game directs us to commit war atrocities, but through mournful music, ugly controls, and writing that paints us as the villain, it concedes that our objective was evil.

I'm not arraigning Civ because it incites us to flatten neighbouring countries under our tank treads or eradicate Islam with our Protestant missionaries. But if Civilization is going to score those theatrics with sweeping anthems, gilded textboxes, and empowering gameplay aesthetics, that is it getting jubilant about some pretty colonialist notions. Because Great works, Museums, and Broadcast Centres generate Culture, and Culture unlocks Civics, Firaxis's game says that it's the orchestras and sculptures, the markers of dignity in rich countries that convert into exploration, cultural heritage, and conservation, as if peoples outside Western paradigms can't have those exploration, cultural heritage, or conservation.

Global Collaboration

Civ's alpha wolf mentality also elides the collaborative nature of art and science. Early societies lacked the connections to exchange ideas and goods over long distances, and to the extent they could transmit them, they could only do so at low baud rates. With time, some of those thinkers and creators expanded the distance over which they could trade and talk, until today, when scientists collaborate across borders to craft theory and all popular media are uploaded to an international computer network. In the modern era, a state may be able to keep a technology secret in the short term, but even the most clandestine projects, if sizeable enough, eventually show up on someone's radar and any mass-manufactured good will be reverse-engineered to within an inch of its life. Secrets pour out of nations like water from a sieve.

There's a reason that even though the first opera was written in Italy, we think of them existing all over Europe, or that you don't have to fly to South Africa for a heart transplant even though that's where the procedure was first performed.^[12] But things could well be different if you lived on Civilization's Earth where knowledge becomes imprisoned in countries and the unification of humanity in pursuit of that knowledge is forgotten. I want to tell Civ that science and art are not sports; they're group projects.

Conclusion

"propaganda" with a small "p" describes any media designed to politically persuade. Using that definition, Civilization is colonial propaganda, but when I issue that reproachment, I'm not saying that there aren't Eurocentrist concepts Civ controverts. I'm also not saying that I don't feel awe-inspired when I finish constructing the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus or when Galileo is born in Pisa. I'm not saying there's no anticipation and accomplishment in watching that Civic be just two turns from completion or in dealing a death blow to a besieged city. Good lord, does Civ have anticipation and accomplishment. All successful propaganda is effective because, like the greatest empires, it is monumental. Thanks for reading.

Notes

1. Jefferson, T. (1832). Notes on the State of Virginia. Lilly and Wait (p. 144-151).
2. Eurocentrism by Sarah Trembath (Date Unknown, Accessed September 29, 2024), American University.
3. Lal, V. (2012). The Politics and Consequences of Eurocentrism in University Disciplines. European Higher Education at the Crossroads (Abstract).
4. Maeso, S.R., Araújo, M. (2015). Eurocentrism, Political Struggles and the Entrenched Will-to-Ignorance: An Introduction. Palgrave Macmillan (p. 1).
5. Early Modern State-Making & Critiquing Eurocentric Biases by Yunkyo Kim & Hendrik Spruyt (Date Unknown, Accessed September 29, 2024), Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences.
6. Mcgee, T.G. (1991). Presidential Address: Eurocentrism in Geography -The Case of Asian Urbanization. Canadian Geographies / Géographies Canadiennes vol. 35, issue 4 (Abstract).
7. Keita, L. (2020). Eurocentrism and the Contemporary Social Sciences. Africa Development / Afrique et Développement vol. 45, no. 2 (p. 17).
8. Learning from anthropology by Ricarda Rösch (February 19, 2018), Völkerrechtsblog.
9. LaGamma, A., Giutini, C. (2008). The Essential Art of African Textiles: Design Without End. Yale University Press (p. 9).
10. Lemi, L.D.M. (2024). Commemorative textiles: an African narrative of identity and power. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (Abstract).
11. Moses, A.D. (2011). The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies. Oxford Academic (Chapter 4 Abstract).
12. Here, I am referring to the first human-to-human heart transplant.

All other sources linked at relevant points in article.