European otherness was historically internal and only recently projected outward.

Evidence

This shows that “Europe’s others” were located primarily within Europe. The contemporary perspective of “others” as being located outside Europe, also retroactively, is a recent development of the last two hundred years, if only because the consciousness of Europeanness is recent. Second, otherness outside Europe was not necessarily as important as otherness within Europe, and was generally conceived along lines first developed in relation to Europe’s internal others. Third, “otherness” refers to a complex layer or web of differences that ramifies multidimensionally in many directions. If it is coded in cultural terms (in terms of religion, language, or ethnicity) it also signifies geographical, historical, political, class and status, urban and rural differences, all mingling within a fluid mosaic. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 184

Categorization

• XREF: Challenges the vault-wide tendency to frame race/ethnicity as primarily a colonial/outward-facing category; connects to Omi-Winant racialization debates and how ‘othering’ precedes formal racial formation.
• DEFINE: Grounds ‘otherness’ as a multidimensional, self-referential web rather than a fixed binary category.
• SEED: The claim that Europe’s others were internal until ~200 years ago is a sharp corrective angle for an essay on the genealogy of racial/ethnic othering.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 184