European egalitarianism myths were maintained by hierarchies that divided peoples for domination

Evidence

As a civilization of free and equal beings, Europe was as much a fiction in the nineteenth century (and later) as its very unity had been during the Merovingian and Carolingian eras. Both the church and the more powerful nobilities of the Holy Roman Empire and its predecessor had been the source of the illusion in those earlier periods. From the twelfth century forward, it was the bourgeoisie and the administrators of state power who initiated and nurtured myths of egalitarianism while seizing every occasion to divide peoples for the purpose of their domination. The carnage of wars and revolutions precipitated by the bourgeoisies of Europe to sanctify their masques was enormous. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 206

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Marx’s and Engels’s critique of the ‘myth’ of bourgeois equality and to the Marxist argument that liberal universalism masks class division.