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Europe From the Outside – and the Inside

European Societies, as a universalistic scholarly journal, welcomes, and has already published, studies of Europe by non-Europeans. However, it is only to be expected that a publication put out by the European Sociological Association should mainly attract European scholars. In the year of the World Congress of sociology, we have therefore thought it interesting to pay some special attention to how Europe is seen from the outside. We have asked a small set of distinguished scholars from other continents to give us a brief statement about how they see European society and/or European scholarship. Given the historical links and the still frequently invoked commonality of ‘the West’, we have in this round, with its limited space, refrained from asking any North American. We did ask several African colleagues, though, twice – unfortunately with no answer. Communication with African universities – outside the most central South African ones – is still difficult and unpredictable. Since this year’s World Congress is in Japan, our enquête focuses on the perspectives of Asian colleagues, by Rajeev Bhargava, a political philosopher directing the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, in Delhi; by Chang Kyung-sup, a sociologist at Seoul National University; by Emiko Ochiai, a sociologist at Kyoto University, where she leads a Global Center of Excellence Program on Reconstruction of the Intimate and Public Spheres in Twenty-first Century Asia; and by Wei Xiaoping, a social philosopher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. From Latin America comes the voice of Elisabeth Jelín, a sociologist at the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research in Argentina and at the Institute of Social and Economic Development in Buenos Aires. Each of our contributors has had a special interest in and experience of Europe, and each of them has thought and written about issues of ‘the Rest versus the West’, of ‘North-South’, and of emerging ‘South-South’ relations. What comes out of the enquête might be summarized under four different themes.