Can a game called Europa Universalis V be anything but Eurocentric? Does it really matter if such a game is Eurocentric? One could argue perhaps not… following Dabashi (2015: 33) we could say “of course Europeans are Eurocentric”. However, it is worth investigating Europa Universalis V and the wider Europa Universalis game series for the simple reason that it shows how we are still haunted by the Eurocentric, even after the decolonial has emerged and become established as a field of thought (though now undergoing a concerted attack in Western plutocracies). Originally created as a board game published by Azure Wish Enterprise in French, Europa Universalis went on to become a successful video game series. Published by Paradox Interactive, who are described as, “the Swedish developer… known primarily for its unique brand of deep historical simulation games” (Hall, 2013), the video game series enjoys huge success (Frost, 2025). Europa Universalis V is the latest entry in this series in which you guide any polity on the globe from 1337 to 1836. IGN, a major gaming and entertainment website with a global audience of 433 million (Ziff Davis, 2025), did a review of the game shortly prior to release. The reviewer for IGN was Leana Hafer, who has reviewed many strategy games for IGN including Civilization 7 and Old World. How Eurocentrism plays out in the Europa Universalis series, and Leana’s review, can be seen in IGN’s video review of Europa Universalis V. Highlighting the Eurocentrism in both the series as a whole and the review will then help towards providing pointers for a post-Eurocentric grand strategy game.

Leana, towards the end of the video, starts to talk about potential pitfalls that the game falls into. The key one for our purposes is worth quoting in full:

“And weirdest of all, the Europeans colonised most of Australia but never even discovered India… historical countries don’t often form. There are a lot of interesting situations and flavour events but they don’t result in a globe that reads as authentic. Also, despite efforts to slow down colonisation, I still saw stuff like all of South America filled in with formalised states by 1700. And the entire Congo basin speaking Italian… that stuff really bothers me. I don’t need history to play out exactly how not did in our world but some of this is just silly. I want it to look kind of plausible by the end, historical-ish” (IGN, 2025).

In this quote we see both Leana’s own, perhaps unwitting, Eurocentrism but also their run in with the continued Eurocentrism that has arguably always been at the heart of the Europa Universalis series. Eurocentrism is discussed extensively in Sayyid ([1997] 2003) where Samir Amin ([1989] 2009) is taken to task for his Marxist analysis of Eurocentrism, that ends up placing Eurocentrism as arising out of the capitalist system, which places him firmly within “the discourse of modernity” (Sayyid, 2003: 128). Instead, Sayyid (2003) argues that Eurocentrism is the discourse that emerges in response to calls to decentre the West. It is the attempt to roll back the work that has been done which argues that the West and the universal/the centre are not synonyms. I believe that this can be seen clearly in both Leana’s own Eurocentrism and that of Paradox Interactive.

I want to focus on two words that Leana uses in the quote above: “authentic” and “silly”. I wish to focus on these two words because they work as polar opposites in relation to a criteria that is, again perhaps unwittingly, working in Leana’s mind; that of the Plato-NATO sequence (Sayyid, 2014). The Plato-NATO sequence is a historical narrative, peddled by those steeped in Westernese (Sayyid, 2014: 22), that places the current West as the destiny of the planet. Thus, the only way to interpret events and the work of scholars of the past is to see them as adding the building blocks of what would eventually become the modern West.

For something to be authentic and for something to be silly, they must be these things in relation to something else. One cannot know what the silly is without having a firm grasp on what the serious is and one cannot know authenticity without being keenly aware of what is inauthentic. So, all that remains is to fill these concepts (authentic and silly) with content. Leana helpfully provides the content in the quote above. The serious and the authentic is the “historical-ish” that they wish Europa Universalis V displayed more of. So naturally the next question becomes what is the content of the “historical-ish”. Again, Leana helpfully provides an answer through their comments on the Europeans colonising Australia and not discovering India. Why would this be an issue, or in their words “weirdest of all”, unless one understands the historical(-ish) as being a container for the Plato-NATO sequence? It is that sequence then that emerges as the criteria for what is “authentic” and what is “silly”. The authentic is that which conforms to the Plato-NATO sequence and the silly is that which attempts to write another history. Thus, we can see that Leana’s Eurocentrism is being deployed in response to the potential moving away from the West as universal/central (or to use Leana’s terminology, the “authentic”) to the story of the world.

The fact that Leana tried to slow down colonization, but it still went ahead regardless, points to the way that Europa Universalis V has been constructed to allow for the Plato-NATO sequence to become actualised regardless of any attempts at counterfactuality. This is not the first time the Europa Universalis series/community has brushed with an outdated Eurocentrism (and it most likely will not be the last). Europa Universalis IV was released to critical acclaim in 2013. Upon release, players noticed an odd section in the UI which allowed the player to click a button that started a process termed “Westernisation”. This would allow non-Western nations to have the technological and socio-political advances that the West made historically. In order to allow this process to begin one had to be bordering a Western nation. This system was eventually reworked into the institutions system with players complaining on paradox forums about the historical inaccuracies that both of these systems created (*Bubble_Gum*, 2022; Terixis, 2022). Thus, we find that, even in spaces where we are told we can create counterfactual histories, the Plato-NATO sequence is sacrosanct and must be maintained. It is a huge impairment if one does not achieve the institution of colonialism, for example, meaning even if one were to take a non-Western country to greatness this could only be done through the path laid out by the historical West. The institutions system, and the Westernisation system that preceded it, can be seen as Eurocentrism being deployed in the face of any player potentially decentring the West. Thus, these game systems are important to implement for the Eurocentric as they maintain the West as the universal/the centre.

Given the above, what would a Critical Muslim Studies version of Europa Universalis look like? I would like to provide some starting points towards such a project, taking as my guide both Sayyid’s work (1997; 2014) as well as the opening statement of the first issue of the ReOrient journal (Editorial Board, 2015). In the first instance, the name of the game would be changed, thus moving towards a provincializing of Europe (Chakrabarty, 2007). The technological and socio-political advancements system would be reworked such that discoveries could be made anywhere on the globe at any time provided the right amount of investment is committed into research. Most importantly of all however, whilst yes one could engage in colonialism if one wished, this would come with penalties as well as benefits and there would be a path to greatness which did not involve stealing the lands of others but living and trading together which would bring the benefits of colonialism but none of its penalties. In such a post-Eurocentric game, would a truly counterfactual history be possible.