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National Collective Identity: Social Constructs and International Systems
Rodney Bruce Hall (ed.)
1999
8. National Sovereignty and the New Imperialism: The Global Transmission of Bourgeois-National Identity and Culture
The truth was that only far from home could a citizen of England, Germany, or France be nothing but an Englishman or German or Frenchman. In his own country he was so entangled in economic interests or social loyalties that he felt closer to a member of his own class in a foreign country than to a man of another class in his own. Expansion gave nationalism a new lease on life and therefore as accepted as an instrument of national politics....The alliance between capital and mob is to be found at the genesis of every consistently imperial policy. In some countries, particularly in Great Britain, this new alliance between the much-too-rich and the much-too-poor was and remained confined to overseas possessions.
—Hannah Arendt
...the Bwana shone so brightly in his uniform that we could not look upon him.
—Kapijimpanga (Solwezian Chief)
In one sense, imperialism dramatized the triumph of these [bourgeois] classes and the societies created in their image as nothing else could possibly have done.
—E.J. Hobsbawm
Take up the White Man’s Burden, Send forth the best ye breed Go bind your sons to exile, To serve your captives’ need;To wait in heavy harness, On fluttered fold and wildYour new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child.
—Rudyard Kipling, 1899
From the period beginning with the close of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, to the onset of the First World War in 1914, European nation-states expanded into the previously peripheral regions of Asia and Africa at a rate and with a purpose unprecedented in the history of European colonialism. As Hobsbawm has noted, economic and military supremacy of the capitalist nation-states of Europe over the Asian and African hinterland had at this time been unquestioned for more than a century. Europe could have partitioned the rest of the globe among its members long before it did, given its economic, technological and military supremacy.
but no systematic attempt to translate it into formal conquest, annexation and administration had been made between the end of the eighteenth and the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Between 1880 and 1914 it was made, and most of the world outside Europe and the Americas was formally partitioned into territories under the formal rule or informal political dominance of one or another of a handful of states: mainly Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, the USA and Japan. 1
What amounted to a quarter of the land surface of the globe was distributed between a few states between 1876 and 1915. Great Britain’s colonial possession grew, in this period by 4 million square miles, France’s by 3.5 million, Germany’s by more than a million square miles. Portugal added 300,000 square miles of colonial territory, and the United States and Japan 100,000 square miles each. 2 In this chapter I first explore some existing and competing explanations of the new imperialism as a point of departure. I will then develop the new imperialism from the perspective of its radically new social purpose in the transmission of the culture and social identities of the newly nationalized states of Europe, America, and Asia. I will conclude the chapter with an argument (outlined in chapter 2) regarding how the new imperialism illustrates how the sequencing of the variables in my matrix in figure 1 may, under very specific conditions, be reversed. I will argue that changes in the collective identity of specific types of societies and states result in transformation of the international system. But these systemic transformations, conversely, result in changes in the collective identities of different, but quite specific types of societies. In essence I will argue that the national collective identities of newly nationalized western societies transformed the system, but that this agency and its effect in turn transformed the collective identities of contemporarily peripheral societies.
Explaining the New Imperialism
Explanations for the onslaught of this “new imperialism,” which have been offered since its inception, have varied widely in terms of the explanatory variables put forward. Some have missed it more, and some less. Woodruff Smith has pointed out that “[m]ost contemporaries of the new imperial expansion tended to view it as a result of recent economic and diplomatic changes.” 3 A number of economic and diplomatic changes had indeed occurred. The rise of the new imperialism was temporally coincident with the revival of protective tariffs as a beggar-thy-neighbor tool to mitigate the effects of the economic downturn that plagued the European and especially the British economy in the later 1870s. Yet the 1840s to the early 1870s had been an era of liberal ascendancy in Britain. British policy in this period had seen a decline in enthusiasm for colonial ventures, a denigration of the eighteenth-century political economy of mercantilism, and the reign of the Manchester liberals and free traders in British financial and trade policy. 4 The liberal free-trading and anti-imperial policies of Granville’s administration were never really attacked at all in the British Parliament until 1869&-;70, and then at the instigation of a rather small coterie of imperialist enthusiasts, only a few of whom were well-connected in parliament. 5
Marxist economic explanations of the new imperialism have always been prolific. Lenin had been quick to argue that the new imperialism was simply a monopoly phase of capitalism in which capitalists seeking monopoly rents were dividing up the globe among themselves and would turn on one another when this had been accomplished. 6 While there was a flight of capital from Europe in this period, there was actually very little capital investment by Europeans in Africa, nor is there much evidence that the companies which did have a financial stake in Africa were very influential with their governments. 7 A larger problem with Lenin’s argument is his assertion that capitalists had “invented nationalistic and strategic elements of imperialist theory in order to hoodwink public and government opinion so as to get European governments to bear the burden of securing overseas investment.” 8 As I have argued throughout this work, nationalism would not have been possible without the bourgeoisie or their capitalism, but self-conscious national collective identity was not confined to the bourgeoisie, as was most dramatically evident when the working masses, even the socialists, marched in 1914.
European decisionmakers certainly faced various economic and political pressures during this period which might have contributed to the development of imperialist policies. They were hard-pressed to deal with the short-term effects of the 1873 economic downturn in Britain. Britain for the first time faced an unfavorable balance of trade, and real competition from abroad, especially from the United States and from a newly united Germany. 9 Certainly there was political agitation at home from vested overseas economic concerns. Such men had founded the Colonial Society in Great Britain with the express intent to “combat the anti-colonial sentiments expressed by many of the leading adherents of the Manchester group of economists.” 10 Certainly bankers in Britain and elsewhere expressed concern that overseas investments which they had underwritten be protected by their respective national armed forces. These concerns at this time were no doubt careful to portray given overseas investments as vital to national interests, therefore to be protected at all costs. 11
Yet Carleton Hayes suggests quite correctly that the commercial expansion during these decades does not begin to explain the political imperialism with which the capitalist nation-states of Europe (and the United States and Japan) exploded into the periphery starting with the mid-1870s. As Hayes observed in 1941:
This [political imperialism] was inaugurated prior to any general resort to tariff protectionism in Europe, and prior also to any universal export of capital. Neither Russia nor Italy had surplus manufactures to dispose of or surplus wealth to invest; yet both engaged in the scramble for imperial domination....Apparently the flag of a European nation did not have to follow its trade—or its financial investments. But once flag raising became common and competitive in Africa and in the Pacific, economic considerations spurred...keener competition in these regions. 12
Michael Doyle travels some way with a systemic, economic-strategic interpretation for the European explosion into the periphery by arguing that exchange at this time was increasingly based upon an international division of labor, and that the British economy, for example, was increasingly an imperial economy. 13 He argues that after the founding of the Second Reich, the existing European balance of power had been shattered and the subsequent “multipolar national period in the center after 1871 was bound to have effects on the periphery” 14 if only by enhancing metropolitan interest in the raw materials in the periphery useful for metropolitan economic and strategic competition. Yet, as I have argued earlier, this motivation for peripheral expansion and control is more nearly consistent with a mercantilist, absolutist, territorial-sovereign structure of identities and interests, which had by this date been supplanted with a national-sovereign structure of identities and interests. Doyle stresses the limitations of a systemic interpretation of the new imperialism, even when combined with his persuasive pericentric analysis. He moves on to analyze domestic and transnational interests peculiar to each metropole, and then to an extensive and again highly persuasive analysis of the utility of the empire in helping the Tories to dominate British domestic politics in this period. 15 Yet he constrains his analysis to the political economy of the British metropole and the domestic requirements of two-party politics, and he does so without explaining “the shift to conservatism of the dissatisfied national public” 16 which played such a large role in sustaining conservative rule. He claims quite clearly that “the dispositional imperialisms of Hobson, Lenin and Schumpeter do not explain nineteenth century imperialism.” 17 The present chapter is oriented toward developing and explanation of a “dispositional imperialism” that better explains the new imperialism.
What of the middle and lower bourgeoisie, and the working classes? What might have been their motivation for joining in imperialist ventures halfway across the planet? Hannah Arendt, who with Hobson credits the generation of surplus capital to a much greater extent than did Hayes as a motivation for imperialist ventures, has suggested that the nonpropertied classes were motivated by the logic of capitalist expansion which carried them along in the venture. Imperialism appeared to be the only means by which surplus capital could be exported to good effect. Imperialism, for Arendt was a product of:
superfluous wealth...[and]...another by-product of capitalist production: the human debris that every crisis, following each period of industrial growth, eliminated permanently from producing society. Men who had become permanently idle were as superfluous to the community as the owners of superfluous wealth....The new fact in the imperialist era is that these two superfluous forces, superfluous capital and superfluous working power, joined hands and left the country together....The owners of superfluous wealth were the only men who could use the superfluous men who came from the four corners of the earth. Together they established the first paradise of parasites whose lifeblood was gold. 18
And she quotes arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes for a plausible economic motivation for working-class enthusiasm for imperialism that resonates with the rampant economic protectionism that became more prevalent toward the end of the century. According to Rhodes:
The workmen find that although the Americans are exceedingly fond of them, and are just now exchanging the most brotherly sentiments with them yet are shutting out their goods. The workmen also find that Russia, France and Germany locally are doing the same, and the workmen see that if they do not look out they will have no place in the world to trade at all. And so the workmen have become Imperialist and the Liberal Party are following. 19
Marxist and other purely economic explanations of late-nineteenth-century imperialism are too simplistic, as they overestimate the influence of commercial and investment capital upon government policy. Arendt’s corrective explanation, however, also appears to overestimate explicitly economic motivations across the European socioeconomic strata in explaining the new imperialism. One major issue that these arguments miss is the cultural aggression of the new imperialism. Even in asserting that international economic competition was a motivation for imperialism, the Marxist theories of imperialism do not adequately recognize that the protectionist neomercantilism that accompanied these activities was not the absolutist mercantilism that had provided so much impetus to eighteenth-century colonialism. Neither was it in harmony with the Manchester liberalism that had guided European and specifically British foreign and trade policy throughout the earlier decades of the nineteenth century.
It was a specifically national imperialism. As Hobsbawm suggests, “[l]iberalism was the anarchism of the bourgeoisie and, as in revolutionary anarchism, it had no place for the state.” 20 Certainly, as Marxist critics and theorists of the new imperialism have observed, capitalism had become international in both theory and practice, and had extended the operation of the market all over the globe with an international division of labor. But as Hobsbawm observes, even transnational firms wished to benefit from the stability of a national economy. 21 The enthusiasts of the new imperialism, whether they were capitalist commercial or financial concerns, or “superfluous labor,” had a very prominent place for the state in their plans. The intervening decades had seen the emergence of a growing skepticism regarding the existence, or at least of the efficacy, of the “hidden hand” that the Manchester school’s economists asserted would set all to rights in the global economy.
The emergence of vibrant German and American export industries in manufactured goods, the persistence of severe poverty among the industrialized working classes, and the modern necessity of engaging in the politics of participatory democracy had all provided a motivation to search for statist solutions to these problems. With the emergence of state activism in the forms of protectionist tariffs, and state-sponsored ventures abroad the “hand was becoming visible in all sorts of ways.” 22 This situation was exacerbated by the growth of popular nationalism. “Not only firms but nations competed....Protectionism expressed a situation of international economic competition, in part as a national popular reaction against the cosmopolitanism of Manchester economic liberalism.” 23 The national-state economy was clearly emerging as an institutional consequence of the rapid escalation of popular nationalist sentiment. It would then appear odd if imperialism did not represent, in part, a similar expression.
One stark distinction between the new imperialism (national-sovereign) and the imperialism of mercantilist absolutism (territorial-sovereign) that we encountered in Chapters 4 and 5 is that the eighteenth-century variant had subordinated private economic interest to that of the state. In the late nineteenth century, private economic interest often led the state into an imperialist venture. The territorial-sovereign, mercantilist absolutist state had pursued colonialism for “reasons of state” that were bound up with the zero-sum assumptions of strategic economic policy that had been predicated on the notion of scarcity. In the late nineteenth century, some zero-sum mercantilist thinking regarding the scarcity of strategic goods remained, but as J. A. Hobson 24 and Hannah Arendt have suggested, the economic motives for imperialist ventures were more likely to be bound up in positive-sum thinking predicated on the notion of surplus. All capitalist powers could benefit by exporting surplus goods and labor. This school of thought argued that surplus capital could find profitable investment and domestic unemployment could be reduced by the “shoveling out of paupers.” 25 Nevertheless, the push for the foundation of new colonial empires certainly antedated the rise of neomercantilist economic nationalism. 26 We must look beyond purely economic explanations of the new imperialism to explain this, and to explain why imperialist policies came to be embraced across socioeconomic strata in the nation-states that propagated this aggressive policy. Not surprisingly, the explanation to both of these questions may be found within the same set of related phenomena.
Imperialism and the Transmission of Bourgeois-National Culture
The explanation stems in large measure from the simultaneous maturation and fusion of two forms of collective identity within the imperialist societies. These identities might most easily be delineated as “bourgeois” and “national.” Hans Kohn, in a rarely cited tome written early in his career, begins to frame the issues for us in a couple of trenchant passages that are worth quoting at length.
Nationalism strives to unite the members of one nation, politically and territorially, in a state organization. When that is accomplished the struggle for the possession of the earth proceeds further. The tendency towards political and economic expansion incites the nation to extend its political and economic domination to foreign peoples or fractions of peoples and the territory they inhabit, and in various ways to organize their government under the suzerainty of the expanding nation. 27
Kohn might have suggested as well that the nation extends its cultural domination to foreign peoples. I will return to this point. I would pause here to note, however, that Kohn’s assertion strongly indicates his belief that national collective identity is an impetus to social action at the level of international politics. Kohn goes on to assert that there is nothing fundamentally new about the new imperialism—a point I shall refute. But we should note in reading this passage that Kohn’s observation of continuity in the imperialist impulse is correct insofar as he means to identify it as an expression of what Morgenthau identifies as the will-to-power. So for Kohn the new imperialism is:
in principle...not different from earlier types. It, like nationalism, is an expression of the collective egotism and love of domination of the social group which is the active political unit of the present day, namely, the nation. Ours is an age of highly developed nationalism. 28
What Kohn calls collective egoism, I have identified as the will-to-manifest a collective identity. Imperialist nation-states have already acted on their will-to-manifest-identity as a collective, in this case a nation-state. What Kohn identifies as their “love of domination,” this collective will-to-power, manifests itself in the case of nationalist imperialist expansion as the desire to transmit their collective social, political and institutional culture to other societies. It is extremely important that we recognize that capitalism had by the last quarter of the nineteenth century thoroughly established what Rosenberg calls the “empire of civil society” and was thus a thoroughly bourgeois society. 29 It is just as important, as Mann suggests in proposing his “polymorphous crystallization model” that society “crystallized” as more than capitalist, 30 but explicitly as nationalist, precisely because the bourgeoisie had been required to extend the franchise and participatory government down into the lower strata of society in order to ensure their participation in the projects of the emerging bourgeois regimes. In extending the franchise, they had established the requisite preconditions for the emergence of a societal collective identity that no longer segmented the domestic political realm merely in accordance with the principle of territoriality. The principle of territoriality had served to delineate who is “us” from who is ‘them’ in the era of mercantilist absolutism. Segmentation of the political realm in accordance with the principle of nationality now delineated who is “us” from who is “them” by what amounted to identifiable peculiarities of regional (now “national”) bourgeois culture.
As Anderson suggests, shared language, shared ethnicity, shared culture now served as the segmental delimiters of inclusion or exclusion from the nation. As the bourgeois class had indeed, just as classical Marxist theory suggests, acquired the characteristics of a ruling class by this period, it was they who defined these delimiters of inclusion or exclusion for the nation. As Gellner has suggested, language is the “minimum requirement for full citizenship...[in]...modern society. Bourgeois society had attempted to universalize literacy in its own vernacular and to create, for its own needs, a society in which “every man [is] a clerk.” 31 The language, ethnicity and culture that one needed to possess to be a member of the nation were the language and/or ethnicity of the bourgeoisie. Precisely because one needed to be a member of the bourgeoisie to have access to power and resources within domestic society, bourgeois culture became an object of study and emulation by all classes within domestic society. Bourgeois culture was national culture. 32 Once bourgeois culture had thoroughly triumphed in domestic society, its self-confident transmission to the peripheral regions, whose peoples were ostensibly languishing in the grasp of “inferior” cultures, became a “mission” for bourgeois European society. The European bourgeoisie, triumphant on the continent, and having already replicated itself in North America, would now move to transmit the “blessings” of its culture and institutions throughout the globe with a “civilizing mission,” which it somehow managed to pull off in a manner that was as aggressive as it was fatuous.
The attack on the periphery was multipronged. It was all at once military, technological, ideational, cultural, political, and institutional in nature. All of these tools of assault were experienced by the peripheral peoples as artifacts of the bourgeois nationalist culture of their respective invaders. All of them were employed quite intentionally to transform every facet of the lives and indigenous cultures of the peoples that the individual agents of imperialism—these tools of bourgeois nationalism triumphant—had encountered. The peripheral peoples “were equally at the mercy of the ships that came from abroad bringing cargoes of goods, armed men and ideas against which they were powerless, and which transformed their universes in ways which suited the invaders, whatever the sentiments of the invaded.” 33
The extent to which the new imperialism was a manifestation of national cultural aggression may be seen in the social and cultural standings of those within European imperialist societies who actively promoted imperialist expansion and those who did not. While bourgeois culture had become national culture, the commercial and financial professions within bourgeois society were by no means among the most enthusiastic advocates and promoters of imperialist expansion, as had been the case with the imperialist ventures of eighteenth-century mercantilist absolutism. Hayes insists that within the domestic political realm it was not the liberal parties “with their superabundance of industrialists and bankers,” but conservative parties which agitated and stumped for imperialist expansion. 34 And “above all, it was patriotic professors and publicists regardless of political affiliation and unmindful of personal economic interest.” 35 It was that segment of the bourgeoisie that had been most intimately responsible for creating a nationalist gloss for triumphant bourgeois culture which became the advocates for the global transmission of this culture abroad. 36 As Hans Kohn asserted with respect to British imperialism: “It was in her struggle with the selfish colonizing ambitions of white, Englishmen and others, in Africa and other parts of the British Empire that England’s striving after reform developed into a conscious mission, a great trusteeship, on behalf of backward nations.” 37
But what, precisely, does “civilization” mean in this context but for the values, norms, rules, legitimating principles and social, sacral, and political institutions of the fully nationalized European bourgeoisie? When England, or France, or whoever asserted that they strove to “civilize” the peoples over whom they had extended the sovereignty of their nation, what did this “civilizing mission” entail? Eighteenth-century European imperialists had been content to exploit the raw materials and aboriginal labor of the virgin continents that they had encountered—often through the imposition of chattel slavery. As they had been pleased by these methods to fill the cargo holds of their ships with precious metals, precious spices, timbers, and all manner of exotic foodstuffs that would command a premium price in European markets, they had not paused to concern themselves with the “improvement” or “civilization” of the aborigines whose labor and lands they had so lustily exploited. Even in those few places where eighteenth-century imperialists had founded colonies of Europeans, those Europeans who were not explicitly engaged in Christian missionary activities had been content enough to leave the “heathen” natives, particularly of North America, just as “heathen” as they had found them. 38
In the nineteenth century we find, conversely, European imperialists anxious to extend the sovereignty of their national states over remote regions of the periphery in order to ensure the abolition of indigenous slavery practices in these regions, and to thwart, for example, an internal African slave trade. 39 Here we are treated to the spectacle of the bourgeoisie of late-nineteenth-century Europe reacting in horror to the aboriginal exercise of oppressive institutions which the English (and especially French and Spanish) bourgeoisie’s own ancestors had developed and encouraged a century earlier. While representatives of the eighteenth-century variant of this class had created a trade in human chattel for the purpose of ensuring a steady flow of cheaply produced raw cotton, sugar, and precious metals, nineteenth-century bourgeois culture had developed to the extent that at least chattel slavery finally offended its sensibilities. Moreover, the Christian missions were “an important adjunct to imperialism” as most were happy to call upon the military and naval protection of their home countries to protect their operations abroad, and thus many imperial “footholds” were established in reaction to aboriginal persecution of Christian missionaries. 40
Racism, Imperialism, and Bourgeois Status Anxiety
Irrespective of whether the European bourgeoisie was now offended by the notion of chattel slavery, they were certainly not offended by the notion of white supremacy. Popular bourgeois culture had quickly reached into Darwin’s ideas on natural selection and, discarding the kernel of Darwin’s thought, extracted the chaff of the Victorian pseudo-science of philology and racist pseudo-scientific variants of eugenics. 41 The “scientific” status that the vulgarized Darwin had provided to racism and xenophobia supplied white, bourgeois, European society with self-confident assurance that they were naturally, racially, and culturally superior not only to all peripheral peoples and societies, but to rival European peoples as well. Racism now paraded itself more respectably within bourgeois society as “evolutionary biology.” When in 1861 Du Chaillu found gorillas, previously unknown to Europeans, in the jungles of equatorial Africa, he immediately regarded the species as the “missing link” between man and his simian evolutionary ancestors. 42
The imaginations and inflated self-images of the triumphant European bourgeoisie required no further stimulus than this to place dark-skinned Asian and African peoples at some step beneath them but some step above the newly discovered simian species on the “evolutionary scale.” This vulgarization of evolutionary biology, in itself a product of triumphant, bourgeois European culture, relegitimated the tribal notion, with all of its implications for mob action against other “tribes.” As the European working classes were at this time more likely to be aspirants for admission to bourgeois society than self-class-conscious proletarian socialists, they were more than happy to accept these assertions to assert their own ascendancy, at least as members of the white race that vulgarized Darwinism had declared to be “superior.” Arendt reminds us that Marxist theories of imperialism have never given adequate play to the specifically racist, culturally aggressive component of European imperialism because:
In Marxist terms the new phenomenon of the alliance between mob and capital seemed so unnatural, so obviously in conflict with the doctrine of class struggle, that the actual dangers of the Imperialist attempt—to divide mankind into master races and slave races, into higher and lower breeds, into colored peoples and white men, all of which were attempts to unify people on the basis of the mob, were completely overlooked. 43
Neither should we overlook the impact of social Darwinism in this period on the development of a racist nationalism in Japan. The racialist, Darwinist thought of Kato Hiroyuki, then president of Tokyo University, was published in 1905 in a book that was to inspire a wave of national-racial thought in Japan, appealing to derivative pseudo-scientific theories of racial, geographical or climatic determinisms in which the Japanese race was cast as a naturally determined master race. 44 In consequence:
A critical element within the Japanese colonial project was the assumption that differences in economic and political capacity among the peoples of East Asia were the result of natural or biological law...racial ideology thus offered more than a convenient explanation of contemporary international relations. It reflected a global perspective which justified that subordination and rendered it unavoidable. This perspective, founded upon the assumed inability of native populations to manage their own affairs, reaffirmed a sense of national solidarity and racial superiority among the Japanese people, regardless of their class position at home. 45
Similarly, for the working classes, and the lower strata of the European bourgeoisie, the supposition of their inherent supremacy over their subject races carried with it enormous status advantages within colonial society as well. One major implication was that any white European arriving in, for example, African colonial society, acquired the collective social identity (and importantly, the co-constituted self-identity) of “boss.” For example:
In Africa, no white agriculturist saw himself as a peasant. White workers in the mines of Southern Africa drew upon the invented rituals of European craft unionism but they did so partly because they were rituals of exclusiveness and could be used to prevent Africans from being defined as workers. 46
Similarly, those who would have been surely viewed as plebeian in European bourgeois society could by virtue of race alone, by taking on the mantle of white empire-builder, acquire the status of “gentleman,” or “proprietor” in colonial society.
Younger sons, well-born orphans, the sons of the clergy had experienced the “traditions” of the public school, the regiment, the university, but were not guaranteed secure advancement in British administrative hierarchies. Such men were deployed in Africa as soldiers, hunters, shop-keepers, concession-seekers, policemen, missionaries. Very often they found themselves engaged in tasks which by definition would have been menial in Britain and which only the glamour of empire-building made acceptable; the emphasis which they placed on their neo-traditional title to gentility became more intense. 47
Thus clearly the new imperialism provided the positive benefit to European bourgeois society not so much as an outlet for superfluous capital or superfluous labor, but as a vehicle for the alleviation of bourgeois status anxiety, which surely amounted to the most prolific and pitiable malady of the vast majority of Europeans during this period. The importance of this bourgeois status anxiety as an impetus to political action should not be overlooked. Insofar as national collective identity was founded upon a particularistic form of bourgeois identity within domestic society, any threat to the bourgeois identity of specific individuals within society was a threat to their identity within the society of the nation-state.
While I have argued, in chapter 2, that threats to the group can be perceived as threats to individual identity and security, threats to an individual’s credentials as a member of a group or society can similarly evoke an anxiety response. Insofar as imperialism ennobled the lowly and accorded bourgeois status (respectability) to those who could not otherwise attain it, it was an enormous impetus for a policy of imperialism among the lower bourgeois, and working classes. The European colonials appear to have carefully and uniformly cultivated a self-image of superiority. They regarded themselves as superior men and representatives of a superior culture and society, quite irrespective of their social or economic function within colonial society and quite irrespective of the status that function would have earned them back home. This was evidently also the case irrespective of logic or of consequences. Then as now, bourgeois status anxiety was powerful enough to conquer all of the impediments to its mitigation that reason is capable of erecting. Precisely because the retention of “an ample supply of servants” 48 was a talisman of bourgeois status, colonial aspirants to bourgeois status decided they must have them. They would have them in abundance, engaged in trivial domestic servitude, at home or abroad, irrespective of the consequences.
Part of the self-image of the European in Africa was his prescriptive right to have black servants—at the height of the labor crisis in the South African mines, there were more black men employed in Johannesburg as domestic servants than as mine workers....For most Europeans the favored image of their relationship with Africans was that of paternal master and loyal servant. 49
In consequence, Terence Ranger argues that white colonial society witnessed a redefinition of occupations “so that it became gentlemanly to be a shopkeeper or a prospector” to address precisely this need. 50 These occupations were more profitable than attempting to grow crops and run a “landed estate,” even as a “gentlemen farmers...drawing upon their neo-traditional powers of command in order to manage [aboriginal] labor.” 51 Certainly this occupational status-anxiety was no small matter. In the new bourgeois aristocracy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, gentility was conferred by money more than birth. Acquiring the financial means to buy leisure was the unmistakable mark of bourgeois gentility. Hobsbawm asserts that formal, post-secondary education was one bourgeois status symbol that money could acquire, as its “major function” could not have been utilitarian.
What counted was the demonstration that adolescents were able to postpone earning a living. The content of education was secondary, and indeed the vocational value of the Greek and Latin on which British “public school” boys spent so much of their time, of the philosophy, letters, history and geography which filled 77 per cent of the hours in the French lycées (1890) was negligible. 52
Similarly, Gramsci derided the bourgeois scion of the feminine gender, and abandoned himself to amusement that the bourgeois male industrialist continued to work “even if he is a millionaire, but his wife and daughters are turning, more and more, into ‘luxury mammals.’ ” 53
If one could not acquire the wealth necessary for idleness and dissipation, one could at least seek to acquire and announce one’s bourgeois credentials by service to the empire of the bourgeois national-state of one’s birth. Nearly any colonial occupation would serve this goal. Irrespective of the social class to which his occupation might have relegated him at home, any occupation that the colonial settler undertook, in this context, elevated him to the status of a full member in the bourgeois nation-state. This permitted him to effect the posture of a “civilizing” agent of his nation-state, a progressive transmitter of the national culture. In the very act of mitigating his own shallow, bourgeois status anxiety, the colonial settler became a glorious agent and servant of the nation. This was particularly true of the perennially status-anxious civil servant. As Arendt intones so effectively, near the close of the century, in Britain:
the owning classes had become so dominant that it was almost ridiculous for a state employee to keep up the pretense of serving the nation. Division into classes left them outside the social body and forced them to form a clique of their own....In ruling foreign peoples in far away countries, they could much better pretend to be heroic servants of the nation...than if they had stayed at home. The colonies were no longer simply “a vast system of outdoor relief for the upper classes.”...they were to become the very backbone of British nationalism, which discovered in the domination of distant countries and the rule over strange peoples the only way to serve British and nothing but British interests. 54
For the peoples on the receiving end of these imperialist ventures, in many cases no amount of service to the home country of their European masters would gain them similar status. In the case of the German colonies, while the culturally and linguistically French peoples in Alsace-Lorraine, annexed to the Second Reich in 1871, had been granted legal German citizenship, this franchise was certainly not to be granted to the native African denizens of the late-arriving extra-European German Empire. A German authority on constitutional law, writing in 1909, affirmed that the natives were “subjects (Untertanen)” of the German Empire, and only Europeans could be “imperial citizens (Reichsangehörige).” 55 Lacking the status of imperial citizens, they lacked freedom of movement, among many other very rudimentary freedoms attaining to the citizenship franchise. It should be evident at this point in my analysis that racist, bourgeois, national-social Darwinism was the first legitimating principle of the new imperialism, for European, American, and Asian imperialists alike.
The Transmission of Bourgeois-NAtional Culture
Significantly, and in contrast to eighteenth-century colonialism, nineteenth-century imperialists were careful to instill in their colonial subjects the notion of their subjection not only to the nation-state which their white (in the European case) rulers represented, but to the values, culture, and institutions that nation-state manifested. Ranger has argued that there were typically three phases in the course of African exposure to what he calls “European invented traditions” 56 which appear to me to correspond to what I would suggest were at least three phases in the transmission of European culture to peripheral societies. These may be rendered roughly and sequentially as the military phase, the missionary phase, and the bureaucratic phase. 57
The military phase was the first in which the utter subordination of indigenous peoples and cultures to those of the imperial metropole was emphasized. Once established by brute force and effective demonstration of the superiority of European military technology, this military culture (but not the technology) was transmitted to the conquered aboriginal society. The reasons the military culture could be transmitted, so long as the technology remained in European hands, is well illustrated in this rhyme:
Whatever happens we have got
the Maxim Gun, and they have not. 58
This pattern appears to have been to be as true of French imperialism as of British imperialism, and as true of British imperialism in India as in Africa. While French colonial policy considered theoretical relationships between the colonies and the metropole ranging from subjection to autonomy to assimilation and association, 59 nearly all of these relationships either began or ended with peripheral subjection, which was rarely accomplished peaceably. Michael Doyle’s distinctions between tribal peripheries and formal empires and patrimonial peripheries and informal empires are useful, 60 but as he also notes, they all tended to end in formal control of the periphery by bourgeois-nationalist imperial metropoles.
Significantly, the transmission of European culture and institutions followed upon the acceptance of the conquest by the aboriginal society. The French recruited young Africans from an early age to consider a military career, and regularized aboriginal troops rather quickly. The British would later move to regularize their own African regiments. Ranger notes that the contemporary Professor George Sheppison, had observed: “the narrowness of the line between the civilian and the military [in British colonial society]...It was through its forces as much as its missions that European culture was brought to the indigenous inhabitants of British Central Africa.” 61
In India, which had been under British rule for a longer period, military subjection of India had been sure and swift. Britain had acquired all of France’s Indian colonial possessions a century before, as a consequence of France’s defeat in the Seven Years’ War. Britain was therefore slow to equip and regularize Indian troops. For a good part of the nineteenth century, British rule featured numerous festivals and parades, normally with a properly intimidating display of British force, while “Indians participated marginally in the parades, as servants or as audiences for the public parts of the celebrations.” 62
During the missionary phase, natives, subdued by force and habituated to servitude through its continuous display, were socialized not only into the sacral institutions and ecclesiology of the cultures of their conquerors, but also educated, through the activities of mission schools, to become participants in the administration of their own subordination. It was self-evident to the Europeans that an integral part of their “civilizing” mission required the conversion of the “heathen” and their instruction in the rudiments of bourgeois morality. As Hobsbawm and Doyle have both suggested, the didactic function of the mission schools succeeded more often in socializing the aboriginal peoples than in converting them to Christianity. 63 In India conversion was actively discouraged by colonial authorities, and in the Islamic regions it was quite impractical in any event. Certainly the missionaries were often at cross purposes with the secular colonial authorities, and generally intervened on the side of their newly gathered flocks. But:
if Christianity insisted on the equality of souls, it underlined the inequality of bodies—even of clerical bodies. It was something done by whites for natives, and paid for by whites. And though it multiplied native believers, at least half the clergy remained white. As for a colored bishop, it would require a powerful microscope to detect one anywhere between 1880 and 1914. 64
The educational function of missionary schools prepared the groundwork for the administrative-bureaucratic phase in the transmission of European culture to peripheral societies. A large number of Africans educated in these schools were subsequently drafted into the lower ranks of the colonial bureaucracy. African clergymen were recruited and trained, and “African clerks came to value the rubber stamp and the row of pens in the breast pocket.” 65 Even more significantly, according to Terence Ranger, it was in the discipline of the missionary school where the sub-Saharan African was socialized into the distinctly bourgeois, European concept of industrial time. Upon their encounter with this regimen, even the notion of time was to take on a new meaning to the peripheral peoples.
Embedded in the neo-traditions of governance and subordination there were very clear-cut requirements for the observance of industrial time and work discipline—the neatly, even frantically prescribed segments of the schoolboys’ day at Budo; the drill square as the source and symbol of discipline and punctuality. 66
Having been socialized into European culture, the bureaucratic phase followed. The peripheral schoolboy was to educated in the language of his colonial master, according to a curriculum devised by his colonial master, within a strict schedule laid out by, and in the time of his colonial master, to prepare him for service in the military, bureaucratic, ecclesiastical and administrative institutions of his colonial master. The culture of his colonial master was to become the schoolboy’s culture. Most importantly he was to be socialized into the political culture of his colonial master. The master’s ruler would be the schoolboy’s ruler, and it was desperately important to the nineteenth-century imperialist that the schoolboy not only accept this rule, but also that he embrace it—that he participate in it, willingly and enthusiastically. To this end the nineteenth-century imperialists first went about replicating their institutions, separate and quite unequal, all over their peripheral realms. Thus, the “College of Arms in Calcutta was to be the Indian equivalent of the British College of Arms in London, which would in effect establish and order a ‘peerage’ for India.” 67 In sub-Saharan Africa:
They began socializing Africans into one or another readily available European neo-traditional modes of conduct—the historical literature is full of Africans proud of having mastered the business of being a member of a regiment or having learnt how to be an effective practitioner of the ritual of nineteenth century Anglicanism. 68
But even the transmission of bureaucratic-administrative culture and institutions on the periphery did not, in itself, ensure the remaking of the periphery in the image of the bourgeois-nationalist society that had invaded it. Importantly, and not surprisingly—if I have not failed utterly in highlighting the major threads of the arguments of this work—the imperialists felt the need to legitimate not only to themselves, but also to their colonial subjects, their peripheral rule. Their “civilizing mission” could serve as an adequate legitimating principle for their actions for themselves, and for domestic political consumption back home in the bourgeois-nationalist European metropole; but something much grander was required to put the stamp of legitimacy on the new imperialism in the eyes of their colonial subjects. The imperialists “felt the need for a shared ideology of Empire which could embrace whites and blacks alike, dignify the practicalities of collaboration and justify white rule.” 69 This was to emerge as the ideology of imperial monarchy. It was the incessant subject of pedagogic discourse from the inception of the German colonies in the mid-1880s to their transfer in 1918, and for much longer in the British colonies. It was so effective in the British colonies that during World War II Britain was capable of calling on troops from as far away from as India, South Africa, Australia, and Singapore to assist in the defense of some threatened and far-flung corner of the Empire. 70
A major opportunity appeared to further the development of the ideology of imperial monarchy when Queen Victoria expressed the desire to acquire the title of Empress of India. There can be little doubt that Disraeli saw an additional benefit: the Queen’s new title constituted a warning against external European designs on the British interest in India and to indicate to Russia in particular that “ ‘it was the unanimous determination of the people of this country to retain our connection with the Indian empire.’ ” 71 Yet we should not surmise that the primary purpose of this move was diplomatic and oriented toward impressing European opinion of Britain’s imperial resolve. Cohn, who has studied the records of the parliamentary debate over the Royal Titles Act of 1876, which awarded the imperial title to Victoria, argues that:
at the base of the Conservative defense of the bill was the idea that Indians were a different kind of people from the British. The Indians were more susceptible to high-sounding phrases, and would be better ruled by appeal to their Oriental imaginations, as “they attach enormous value to very slight distinctions.” 72
Lytton, who served at that time as Viceroy of India, sought to underscore this ideology of imperial monarchy by numerous machinations, not the least of which was the gathering and pageantry of an imperial assemblage, for which he had ordered banners for the Indian princes and chiefs, designed “shield-shaped in the European mode. The crests were also European with the heraldic devices derived from the history of a particular [Indian] royal house.” 73 All was designed to encourage a self-identification of the Indian nobility with their newly proclaimed Empress and to foster “the redefinition of the relationship between the ruler and the ruled.” 74 Sadly, this endeavor was mounted with the most derisive intent on the part of the British authorities in charge of it. The reliance on pageantry and symbolism to earn the self-identification of the once-proud Indian nobility with the British Crown was an act of studied condescension, as is evidenced by Lytton’s revolting explanation that “the further East you go, the greater becomes the importance of a bit of bunting.” 75
Nor were the employment of symbols of monarchy, pageantry, and ceremony to be less patronizingly relied upon in awing and cowing the native British subjects of British sub-Saharan Africa. The monarchy was carefully spoken of in quasi-sacral terms by secular and Anglican Church administrators alike, presenting “to African audiences a king who was almost divine; omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent.” 76 The royal message to the Sotho, transmitted to them directly in 1910, is a sterling indicator of the paternal relationship between the colonial natives and the British Crown that the ideology of imperial monarchy had attempted to encourage. It is difficult to imagine, given the progress of participatory democracy in Europe by this date, the contempt for the native inhabitants of Sotho that must have encouraged Edward to address them with the condescending tripe that follows:
When a child is in trouble he will go to his father, and his father after hearing all about the matter will decide what must be done. Then the child must trust and obey his father, for he is but one of a large family and his father has had great experience in settling the troubles of his older children and is able to judge what is best not only for the young child but...for the whole family...The Basuto nation is a very young child among the many people of the British Empire. 77
In the German Colonies, this paternalistic relationship was extended to the frequent employment of corporal punishment against African natives, something that the British to their credit, condescending as they might have been, appear to have employed relatively rarely. 78 “Paternalistic” corporal punishment seems to have become quite fashionable in the German colonies by 1907, as we read of the complaint of Colonial Secretary Bernhard Dernburg, reporting from Dar es Salaam, that “ ‘nearly every white man walks around with a whip...and almost every white man indulges in striking any black man he chooses to.’ ” 79 Neither should it surprise us that the racial paternalism that animated British and German imperial ideology found its counterpart in the ideology of Japanese imperialism. Michael Wiener has recently argued that:
the principle of naichi enchōshugi (extension of the homeland) implied that both the spatial and psychological boundaries of the nation could be expanded to incorporate all populations within the empire. At the same time, the existence of a family state, presided over by the father / emperor, provided further impetus for the Japanization of colonial peoples...the replacement of indigenous institutions and culture by Japanese forms of behavior....The relationship between the colonizer and the colonized was likened to that between the parent and child. In nurturing the progress of its client states, Japan was responsible for ensuring that subject populations assumed their proper place in a well defined racial hierarchy. 80
And it must be admitted that Japan had learned the value of imperialist aggression from the United States. While the Japanese had not likely experienced racial brutalization at the hands of the Americans, it is clear enough that their encounter with Perry’s fleet a mere generation before Japan began to launch its own imperialist ventures had left a quite significant impression upon the Japanese. They had learned from the United States, at the least, the benefits of commercial imperialism, and of forcibly opening up an area previously closed to commercial, or more overt forms of exploitation. As a recent analyst suggests, in this context, “[i]t may be that the United States’s [sic] most enduring export has been a new world order based on the principles of liberal capitalism.” 81 This is not at all to suggest that the United States was in any way exonerated from the role of “paternal” brutalizer of native peoples. Clearly, not only had a large portion of the American economy been dependent upon the maintenance of the institution of black, chattel slavery through the middle of the nineteenth century, but the American development of a continental nation-state had been dependent upon a policy, conscious or otherwise, of genocide against aboriginal peoples. 82 Recent analysis even suggests that the Jim Crow legal structure was essential in solidifying American national identity well into the twentieth century, and even into the lifetime of the present author. 83
Peripheral Nationalisms: Agents and Objects of Systemic Transformation
The effects on the new imperialism on the periphery were cataclysmic and permanent. To borrow the lexicon of Michael Mann, they were ideological, economic, military, and political at a minimum. Every form of social power at the command of the imperialist states was harnessed to thoroughly penetrate and transform peripheral society, economy, ideas, and self-perceptions. As noted earlier, the imperial experience had transformed even the notion of time for the peripheral peoples. It is important to break, for a moment, from the historical analysis to demonstrate that the sequencing of the variables introduced back in the third chapter of this work may, under specific conditions, be reversed. Reversing this sequence helps to explain why the impact of imperialism on the periphery led, in the twentieth century, to the development of national collective identity in the peripheral societies that developed after the experience of European, or Japanese, or American social and economic imperialism. It is crucially important to note that this sequence may be reversed only under specific conditions, which I will shortly specify. The reader should not infer that the sequencing of the variables is irrelevant or haphazard. Changes in the collective identity of specific types of societies result in systemic transformation. Change in the system induced by these societies, conversely, results in changes in the collective identity of societies of a specifically different nature than systemic agent societies.
First, the discussion above emphasizes my earlier assertion that the development of national collective identity has both international and domestic (systemic and unit level, in neorealist parlance) sources. We now have examples of two distinct, and mirror-image sequences of changes in the variables in Figure 1 (chapter 2) available to us to illustrate this assertion. As in the case of the European nation-states that instigated the new imperialism, national collective identity can develop from a very large number of domestic sources of that identity, and then provide a new legitimating principle for a domestic social order. 84 The new legitimating principles then require a new institutional form 85 —leading to a new global social order and “system” when aggregated with those of societies which have achieved a similar collective identity by their own path. Conversely, national collective identity can develop in response to what might amount to a structural condition of the privileging of a specific institutional form of collective action, and therefore, of specific legitimating principles of that institutional form. This is what happened to the peripheral societies upon suffering the experience of Western imperialism. Again, in shorthand, and with reference to figure 1:
Sequence 1:
{
collective identity 
legitimating principles
institutions
domestic & international norms/rules/principles
system}.
or, conversely, under different circumstances,
Sequence 2:
{system
domestic & international norms/rules/principles
institutions
legitimating principles
collective identity}
In sequence 1, changes in the collective identity of agents of systemic transformation transform the international system. European territorial-sovereign states, for example, developed national collective identity and transformed the system from the Westphalian, territorial-sovereign system to the present national-sovereign system. In sequence 2, the collective identity of the objects of systemic transformation is transformed by changes in the system. In neorealist parlance they are “socialized” by the system made manifest by the agents of the system’s construction. This is indeed, again, where the distribution of capabilities 86 in the system so central to Kenneth Waltz’s view of systemic change is useful. This is also where it becomes clear that culture and ideological resources are capabilities, which dominant rational choice theories of international relations would tend to deny.
The sequencing of this transformational logic, for a given society that is en route to a change in collective identity, depends strongly upon whether that society is experiencing transformations in domestic relations (irrespective of whether the source of this transformation is exogenous to that society) and whether that society is in a position to make its agency felt throughout international society. The second of these criteria is, of course, fertile ground for bringing the structural variables of classical and neorealism into the analysis, such as the distribution of capabilities across the system, with the caveat that we must expand what counts as a capability to include, at a minimum, cultural and ideational resources.
Societies that experience rapid and/or far-reaching transformations in domestic relations, and that are well positioned to exert influence on other societies, tend to follow Sequence 1. Chapters 3–8 were designed to illustrate this as effectively as possible. They constitute agents of systemic transformation. Societies that are domestically socially conservative or stagnant tend to reproduce their social structure and institutions domestically and, to the extent that they are in a position to exert influence on other societies, to reproduce international systemic structure as well. The societies of the peripheral peoples prior to their encounter with the new imperialism constituted precisely such societies, in comparison with the dynamic and aggressive societies that would become their colonial masters. If these domestically socially conservative societies are poorly positioned to exert influence on other societies, they tend to follow Sequence 2. They become objects of systemic transformation. The agency of those who follow Sequence 1 creates a systemic transformation, whose influential norms and rules the target society cannot avoid, when forced into interaction with them. To the extent that the norms and rules of the international system privilege an institutional form at variance with the institutional form of collective action of the target society, the latter experiences powerful incentives to replicate the privileged institutional forms, their legitimating principles, and associated collective identities. These traditional societies find themselves under siege by the agency of the system transforming societies, irrespective of the form these traditions take. This is so precisely because the legitimating principles of the traditional social orders are challenged when their institutional forms cannot replicate the success of the institutions of the system-transforming societies. In both of these sequences, societies encounter the transience of institutional facts. In the first sequence societies are impelled to create new institutions. In the second sequence they are required to adopt new institutions.
The success of aggressive, Western, bourgeois-nationalist culture, norms, practices and institutions created new institutions for previously peripheral societies. The agency of the imperialist nation-states consciously transformed peripheral societies and remade them in their own image. It was precisely because the successful, imperialist actors were nationalist, as well as imperialist, as well as bourgeois societies, that they purposefully transformed peripheral societies. Toward the end of the colonial experience, and during and after the wave of decolonization that was to follow the Second World War, the peripheral peoples had begun to learn to develop national collective identity as a final lesson under the tutelage of their colonial masters. According to Kohn: “The nationalism of the Eastern [peripheral] peoples has been organized under European influence, and the social changes caused by European penetration have supplied its new dominant class.” 87
The literature on third world and post colonial nationalisms is vast, and their discussion, as well as the discussion of competing theories of their origins is outside of the scope of the present work. We can catch a glimpse of the impetus and consequences of these nationalisms in this insightful passage by Theodore Von Laue, describing the task of the third world nationalist leaders who have generally been constrained to attempt to create “westernized” societies in aboriginal dress as a salve to “national” pride:
Western ascendancy was so complete that it left only one rational response: abject imitation as a condition of survival and self-affirmation....For the sake of feeding, housing, transporting, educating, and employing the world’s populations, “Westernization” is now pressed forward by non-Westerners themselves. Culturally neutralized, it has become “modernization” or simply “development,” the common goal of all peoples and governments no matter how handicapped in achieving it. 88
Yet we should recognize that nationalism has taken on different meanings to different peoples historically, and resulted in different practices, with interesting consequences. 89
Imperialism and Nationalism: National-Sovereign Status Competition
Thus far this analysis has focused on explaining the impetus for and the effects of the transmission of bourgeois-nationalist culture to the peripheral peoples in large measure from the perspective of explanations of why individuals or significant social groupings within the polities of the imperialist nation-states were motivated to replicate their societies and culture abroad. I will now proceed to link their “bourgeois” imperialism more closely to their “national” imperialism. In doing so I hope to more fully emphasize the systemic agency and transnational consequences of their novel social identities. While capitalists, aspirants to bourgeois status, adventurers, fortune seekers, racists, missionaries, and status-anxious petty bureaucrats and petty bourgeoisie all had individual and class-collective motivations to participate in imperialist ventures, the flag did follow them. National-state governments that supported and abetted late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century imperialist ventures were rewarded with popular acclaim at home, and competed with other national-state governments in doing so. The new imperialism was a collective enterprise, however disparate might have been the personal motivations of its individual propagators.
Early arguments in favor of French imperialism flowed in 1874 from the pen of French political economist Paul LeRoy-Beaulieu, and for German Imperialism from the historian Heinrich von Treitschke, each arguing in imperative, “either / or” form for their respective imperialisms. These arguments took the form that “either” France / Germany (fill in the blank) would become an imperial power “or” they would become a third or fourth rate world power. 90 These geostrategic oriented arguments may well have abounded in the academy, and may have been played back to the public through the mouthpiece of public officials, but it is as difficult to make a case that the impetus for the new imperialism was diplomatic or geostrategic as it is to make the case that the motive was primarily economic.
Michael Doyle provides us with an admirable critique of what he considers to be largely “pericentric” and largely “metrocentric” theories of the impetus behind the new imperialism, and argues persuasively that such formulations miss a geostrategic element that he feels must have impelled European statesmen to compete for colonial territory in the periphery. Yet he tends to reduce competing European peripheral claims to what he calls “predictable effects of multipolar, non-collective competition in the periphery.” 91 This focus on the economic and strategic logic ignores the cultural and ideational impetus to European bourgeois-nationalist expansion and most importantly ignores the novel social purposes of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century imperialism. Doyle agrees that multipolar competition alone does not explain the new imperialism as it “should have led to incentives for containing Germany [on the continent].” 92 He emphasizes the mastery of Bismarck’s policy of creating competing constellations of diplomatic concentration, each with an axis in Berlin, in diverting European attention toward the periphery. Yet it is difficult to simultaneously argue that Bismarck consciously attempted to divert European attention to the periphery—an argument which is likely correct—and that there was a serious geostrategic rationale for European competition in the periphery. Bismarck clearly did not see any pressing geostrategic requirement for German peripheral expansion. Popular nationalist pressure, and pressure from specific capital ventures, not geostrategy, led European governments into the imperial scramble. He emphasizes, as evidence, the move to formal rule over the periphery as necessary for the requirements of multipower status competition. 93 Doyle’s arguments are well constructed, tightly reasoned, and entirely plausible. Yet they miss the fact that formal rule over peripheral peoples was also increasingly necessary to thoroughly and irresistibly socialize peripheral peoples into the prevailing metropolitan, bourgeois-nationalist culture and institutions. Formal rule was also increasingly a requirement of the novel social purpose of the new imperialism; the reproduction of bourgeois-national culture and institutions abroad.
We cannot escape the conclusion that the new imperialism was a collective expression of expansion. Having become a national community, the societies of the imperialist states then projected that collective personality to the world around them. Von Laue captures the issue succinctly, though, perhaps he overdraws the argument somewhat. Collectivities, like individuals, project themselves into their external environment, hoping not only to control it, but to transform it.
In order to make the most of their lives individuals assert themselves, radiating their personalities into their environment. Heads of families want more progeny, more land, more trade, more influence. The ambition to prevail and enlarge one’s identity becomes collectivized, growing in scale with the size of the community. It becomes part of its religion, its essence, omnipresent, all-powerful God mightier than all other gods. What, in short, holds together all societies, religions, and cultures down to the core of individual wills is a pervasive faith in the practical and metaphysical superiority of the common bonds: in pursuit of community people need to universalize their ways to the limit or else community falls apart for lack of common conviction. 94
No truncated, purely “third image” logic could lead us to this understanding. 95 The national community’s domestic requirements for social cohesion generate an aggressive (culturally, economically, politically, and militarily) response to the environment external to the national community. The external environment becomes friendly, palatable, “tolerable” 96 only inasmuch as it reflects the culture, norms, rules, and principles of the national community back toward that community. If rival national communities, reflecting different national cultures, appear to threaten to project their own collective personalities into the environment, this may appear to a different national community to be a form of a threat.
Nationalism had arisen in response to both internal and external threats to this notion of community. Bourgeois society was domestically, highly socially atomized in this period. Extended networks of kinship had become defunct in helping people to manage their lives, and survive in the rapidly changing economy. In such an environment, the citizen had need for the “imaginary [sic] community of ‘the nation’...[to]...fill this void...[while]...the state...needed to make the nation...[as]...a counterweight to those who appealed to loyalties other than state loyalty...above all to class.” 97 Nationalism had provided a solution to the socially centrifugal forces of the emerging “crisis of bourgeois liberalism” that had developed as a bourgeois response to the anxiety and xenophobia attending competition for jobs with foreign migrants. Neotraditionalism and nationalism had emerged as a socially conservative reaction against social atomization in this context. Rather than squandering their hard-won (largely imaginary) bourgeois social status on a proletarian socialist venture—the other possible outcome this crisis—the middle and lower bourgeoisie had opted for xenophobic, neotraditional reaction against the migrants. It is worth noting that this option does not appear to have lost its popularity. In present-day Europe and North America, particularly in France, Germany, and the United States, it appears that the lower and middle economic strata of society are reacting to the economic insecurity attending the movement of productive capital to lower wage markets by xenophobic reaction against migrants and foreigners rather than by reacting and legislating against capital mobility, which is a much more plausible source of their economic insecurity.
Bourgeois timidity had foreclosed the “solution” of proletarian revolution. Rightist and ultra-rightist, racist, culturally aggressive nationalism became a natural palliative to this crisis. Bourgeois identity had been salvaged, and emerged as distinctly nationalist. 98 This is the aggressive social identity, manifest in the potent institutional form of the national state, that had then proceeded to descend upon the peripheral peoples. As with imperialism, support for nationalism had its social rewards for status-anxious aspirants to bourgeois status. As Hobsbawm suggests, echoing my earlier citation of Hannah Arendt:
For this widening body of middle strata, nationalism also had a wider and less instrumental appeal. It provided them with a collective identity as the “true defenders” of the nation which eluded them as a class, or as aspirants to the full bourgeois status they so much coveted. Patriotism compensated for social inferiority....In Britain, as the [First World] war was to show, even clerks and salesmen in the service of the nation could become officers and—in the brutally frank terminology of the British upper class—“temporary gentlemen.” 99
But bourgeois status had been accorded to the clerk-imperialist precisely because imperialism came to be viewed as national competition with other Western societies. As Carleton Hayes has argued, the sequence of the march of European imperialism after 1870 had entailed (1) “pleas for colonies on the ground of national prestige” (2) “getting them” (3) “disarming critics by economic argument” and finally (4) “carrying this into effect and relating the results to the neo-mercantilism of tariff protection and social legislation at home.” 100 Significantly, as Cecil Rhodes had quipped, governments “followed” popular pressures for imperialist ventures rather than leading them. One can quickly understand why a racist capitalist would welcome national support for imperial expansion. Contra Doyle, it is more difficult to find objective geostrategic rationale for doing so.
No less a “realist” than Bismarck had seen no practical value in acquiring colonies that would have made it an attractive policy from the perspective of an objective Realpolitik calculus. When approached in the 1870s regarding the question of acquiring colonies for Germany to match those being snapped up by the French and British and others Bismarck had simply pointed to the map of Europe and quipped that “[h]ere is Russia and here is France and here we are in the middle. That is my map of Africa.” 101 Bismarck’s policy later changed in response to popular national pressure 102 , diplomatic maneuvering as the colonial issue was employed in an attempt by Bismarck to forge an entente with France, 103 and from the “desire to secure new markets and raw materials.” 104 The German case was, relative to that of Britain and France, indeed a rather “marginal” colonialism. There is no reason to doubt, of course, that Bismarck’s attentions was clearly focused on European affairs. Moreover, Bismarck at this time still enjoyed an insularity in his decisionmaking that Granville or Disraeli in Britain, or Jules Ferry in France, could only envy. Yet ultimately the same Bismarck that had wittily insisted that his map of Africa was to be found in Europe in the 1870s sat at table at the Berlin Conference from November 1884 to February 1885, and carved up the globe with fourteen other powers. 105
Where in the eighteenth century the acquisition of colonies had been a status symbol of territorial sovereigns, in the late nineteenth century they had become an ornament to the greatness of peoples, of self-aware, self-identified national communities. Statesmen who wished to garner public support did not deny their polities, which constituted these national communities, the objects of their vanity. Imperialist conquest of other societies papered over remaining differences in bourgeois, domestic society. The spectacle of watching the agents of the national community conquer other societies, and replicate the national community abroad reified the national community, and remanded real social cleavages to the status of mere quibbles among brothers. As Woodruff Smith suggests, an imperialist policy:
seemed the ideal way to link together disparate interests and social groups and to create broad public support. The elements of an imperialist ideology were...cemented with the popular identification of colonies with national self-esteem. A highly emotional imperialist ideology could perhaps overcome seemingly irreconcilable class and interest differences by emphasizing shared images of national greatness and shared fears of dangers to that greatness. Such images could also hide the many internal contradictions that an ideology appealing to so many different groups and interests was bound to contain. 106
Thus for western societies, the new imperialism had, in the terms of Weberian sociology, a social control function. Upon discovering this, western governments never ceased to exploit every opportunity to manipulate public opinion to cement the social cohesion that a policy of imperialism had helped to accomplish by all possible means, vehicles and media. 107 The new imperialism was more significant for its impact on the societies that were the objects of the social agency, and subjects of the rule, of the newly nationalized states of the West than for its impact on relations between Western states. Yet the Western competition for colonies after 1870 was very much an expression of this national-collective identity. In this context I will give the last word to the historian Carleton Hayes.
Basically the new imperialism was a nationalistic phenomenon. It followed hard upon the national wars which created an all-powerful Germany and a united Italy, which carried Russia within sight of Constantinople, and which left England fearful and France eclipsed. It expressed a resulting psychological reaction, an ardent desire to retain or recover national prestige. France sought compensation for European loss in overseas gain. England would offset her European isolation by enlarging and glorifying the British Empire. Russia, halted in the Balkans [by Austria-Hungary], would turn anew to Asia, and before long Germany and Italy would show the world that the prestige they had won by might inside Europe they were entitled to enhance by imperial exploits outside. 108
When the periphery no longer served as an adequate forum for the national-sovereign competition for Western societies and states that it once had, a more suitable forum was found. The colonial periphery, in many ways, served as a venue for a late-nineteenth century “cold war” among national-sovereign, principally European states. As economic, military, political, and importantly, cultural tensions between these societies escalated very early in the twentieth century, this cold war was to heat up, as will be discussed in the next chapter.
Conclusions and Theoretical Reprise
The chapter illustrates that the new imperialism was a mass phenomenon that is inexplicable without recourse to analysis of the social collective identities of the European masses that perpetrated it on peripheral peoples. The acquisition of bourgeois status was the key to full bourgeois-national citizenship in this period and generally impossible without it. Bourgeois status anxiety could be mitigated, and bourgeois status attained, through peripheral colonial service as an agent of the “nation.” Bourgeois culture, in its local, European manifestation, largely constituted national culture. Mass self-identification with these bourgeois-national cultures was axiomatic when we consider the requirements of attaining bourgeois status to enjoy even limited social mobility in class-conscious, Victorian society. Co-constituted, bourgeois-national self-identity and collective identity were then purposefully transmitted to peripheral peoples. The social purposes of this new imperialism differed radically, in this regard, from the commercial, mercantilist, quasi-strategic ventures of earlier absolutist, territorial-sovereign colonialisms. Collectivities, like individuals, project themselves into their external environment hoping not simply to control, but to transform it.
The sequencing of my theoretical model was illustrated to also work in reverse order for peripheral peoples who found themselves to be objects rather than agents of systemic transformation. After their colonial subjection, which transformed the social and institutional universes of peripheral peoples, third world leaders of newly decolonized peripheral states engaged in active and self-conscious “nation-building” projects. They had been left in control of administrative institutions that generally constituted fully functional territorially contiguous states. National collective identity then either developed in response to ressentiment induced by colonial oppression, or more often was consciously cultivated by the “official nationalism” of newly aboriginally administered states.
Endnotes
Note 1: Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire: 1875–1914 (New York: Vintage Books, 1987), p. 57. Back.
Note 3: Woodruff D. Smith, European Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1982), p. 75 Back.
Note 4: See Carleton J.H. Hayes, A Generation of Materialism, 1871–1900 (New York: Harper, 1941), p. 216. Back.
Note 5: See C. C. Eldridge, England’s Mission: The Imperial Idea in the Age of Gladstone and Disraeli 1868–1880 (London: Macmillan, 1973). See especially Chapter 3, pp. 52–91, and chapter 4, pp. 93–119. Back.
Note 6: See Anthony Brewer, Marxist Theories of Imperialism: A Critical Survey (2nd Edition) (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 116–23. For crucial excerpts of Lenin’s influential pamphlet see V. I. Lenin, “The Highest Stage of Capitalism” in Harrison M. Wright (ed.), The New Imperialism: An Analysis of Late-Nineteenth-Century Expansion (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1976), pp. 44–59. Back.
Note 7: Smith, European Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, p. 78. Back.
Note 10: Eldridge, England’s Mission, pp. 95–97. Back.
Note 11: Smith, European Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, pp. 91–92. Back.
Note 12: Hayes, A Generation of Materialism, p. 219. Back.
Note 13: Doyle, Empires, p. 258. Back.
Note 15: Ibid. pp. 257–96. Back.
Note 18: Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace 1951), pp. 150–51. Back.
Note 19: Rhodes is quoted in Ibid. p. 151. Back.
Note 20: Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, p. 40. Back.
Note 21: Ibid. pp. 41–42. Back.
Note 24: J. A. Hobson, “Imperialism: A Study,” in Harrison M. Wright (ed.), The New Imperialism, pp. 5–44. Back.
Note 25: Klaus Knorr reminds us that this term originated in Britain at the end of the Napoleonic wars when the demobilization of large numbers of British soldiers generated a labor surplus in Britain, with the attendant miseries. This thinking is more consistent with the Malthusian critique of liberal political economy [see Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (London: Penguin, 1970)], than with the Marxian critique, or with the popular nationalist pressure that generated protectionist and imperialist policies in the late nineteenth century. (See Klaus E. Knorr, British Colonial Theories 1570–1850 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1944). See especially portions of Chapter 9, “Emigration and Colonization 1815–1850,” pp. 269–300). Back.
Note 26: Hayes, A Generation of Materialism, p. 220. Back.
Note 27: Hans Kohn, Nationalism and Imperialism in the Hither East, Margaret M. Green (trans.) (London: Routledge, 1932), p. 49. The emphasis is mine. Back.
Note 28: Ibid. p. 50. The emphasis is mine. My interpretation of Kohn’s assertion of behavioral continuity in the new imperialism stems in part from his elaboration of this on page 51, where he asserts, as would Morgenthau, that “[t]he common exercise of power is the fundamental and essential object of political activity.” Back.
Note 29: For Rosenberg, the “empire of civil society” is the “condition of social relations mediated through things rather than through personalized relations of domination.” This is the dramatic innovation that makes possible the shift from empire to the state as a basis for political authority in the modern era in his argument. See Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society, p. 155. It is interesting that in the case of the new imperialism, which entailed both the economic exploitation and cultural and political subjection of indigenous societies, that social relations between imperialist and aborigine were mediated through both “things” and through “personalized relations of domination.” Back.
Note 30: Mann, The Sources of Social Power, II, p. 69. For an extended development of Mann’s “polymorphous crystallization model” of social power by which he aims to explain the form in which states “crystallize” in terms of power and institutional structures, see Ibid. Chapter 3, “A Theory of the Modern State,” pp. 44–91. Back.
Note 31: See Ernest Gellner’s essay “Nationalism” in Ernest A. Gellner, Thought and Change (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1964), pp. 158–69. Back.
Note 32: In a later book Gellner refines his 1964 argument and argues that nationalisms are based upon education-dependent “high cultures,” which are protected by their own state. These culture come to be seen as repositories of political legitimacy. Nationalism is seen as “societal self-worship” in this view. See Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, pp. 48–62. I would emphasize that Gellner does not, as I do, explicitly identify this “high culture” as bourgeois culture. Back.
Note 33: Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, p. 20. Back.
Note 34: A Generation of Materialism, p. 220. Back.
Note 36: For numerous treatments of the importance of intellectuals in the invention, propagation and transmission of nationalist ideology and nationalist culture in various contexts see, for example, Karl W. Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry Into the Foundations of Nationality (2nd ed.) (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1966); Gellner’s essay “Nationalism” in Ernest A. Gellner, Thought and Change, pp. 158–69; E. J. Hobsbawm, “Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870–1914” in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 263–307; Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism, pp. 329–31; Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism (2nd ed.) (London: New Left Books, 1977), pp. 332–41; Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Revival (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 90–104; Anthony D. Smith, “The Origins of Nations,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 12 (3) (1989): 349–56; Max Weber, “The Nation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, H. H. Gerth and C. Wright-Mills (trans. and ed.) (London: Routledge, 1948), pp. 171–9: among many other authors in a vast literature. Back.
Note 37: Kohn, Nationalism and Imperialism in the Hither East, p. 59. The emphasis is mine. Back.
Note 38: Spanish and French Catholic missionary activities in Central and South America and what had been French North America prior to the Seven Years’ War are significant exceptions to this rule. Back.
Note 39: Smith, European Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, p. 93. For a description of the political pressures brought to bear, and the operations of such groups as the British Anti-Slavery Society and the Aborigines Protection Society see Eldridge, England’s Mission, pp. 149–67. Back.
Note 40: Hayes, A Generation of Materialism, pp. 223–24. See also Doyle, Empires, pp. 170–71. Back.
Note 41: Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, pp. 252–58. Back.
Note 42: Hayes, A Generation of Materialism, p. 224. Back.
Note 43: Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 152. Back.
Note 44: Michael Weiner, “Discourses of Race, Nation and Empire in pre-1945 Japan,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 18 (3) (1995): 446–48. Back.
Note 46: Terence Ranger, “The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa,” in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 211. Back.
Note 48: Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, p. 165. Back.
Note 52: Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, p. 174. Back.
Note 53: Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 306. Back.
Note 54: Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 154. Arendt quotes James Mill in this passage. The emphasis is mine. Back.
Note 55: Helmuth Stoecker, “The Position of Africans in the German Colonies,” in Arthur J. Knoll and Lewis H. Gann (eds.) Germans in the Tropics: Essays in German Colonial History (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1987), p. 123. Back.
Note 56: Ranger, “The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa,” p. 226. Back.
Note 57: Ibid. p. 227. Note that Ranger refers to these phases as “neo-traditions” and he is primarily interested in the “invention of traditions” as much as their subsequent transmission to peripheral societies. Back.
Note 58: Hillaire Belloc (London, 1898), quoted in Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, p. 20. Back.
Note 59: Stephen H. Roberts, The History of French Colonial Policy 1870–1925 (London: Frank Cass, 1963), pp. 64–65. Back.
Note 60: Doyle, Empires, 163–229. Back.
Note 61: Ranger, “The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa,” p. 224. Back.
Note 62: Bernard S. Cohn, “Representing Authority in Victorian India,” in Hobsbawm and Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition, p. 178. Back.
Note 63: Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, p. 76. Doyle, Empires, pp. 170–71. Back.
Note 65: Ranger, “The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa,” p. 226. Back.
Note 67: Cohn, “Representing Authority in Victorian India,” p. 190. Back.
Note 68: Ranger, “The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa,” p. 227. Back.
Note 70: Churchillian imperial rhetoric and mobilization orders ring out in telegrams and dispatches throughout his six-volume history of the Second World War, but see especially Winston S. Churchill, The Hinge of Fate (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1950), especially pp. 3–59, and 416–17, Winston S. Churchill, Closing the Ring, 1951, especially pp. 687–8, and Winston S. Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy, 1953. Back.
Note 71: See Eldridge, England’s Mission, p. 213, and Cohn, “Representing Authority in Victorian India,” p. 184. Back.
Note 72: Cohn, “Representing Authority in Victorian India,” p. 184. Back.
Note 76: Ranger, “The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa” pp. 230–31. Back.
Note 77: Edward is quoted in Ibid., p. 231. Back.
Note 78: See the complaint of the German acting governor of Togo, in 1904, contrasting this situation with that of the natives under the control of the British in the nearby Gold Coast Colony in Stoecker, “The Position of Africans in the German Colonies,” p. 124. Back.
Note 80: Weiner, “Race, Nation and Empire in pre-1945 Japan,” pp. 452–53. Back.
Note 81: William Earl Weeks, “American Nationalism, American Imperialism: An Interpretation of United States Political Economy, 1789–1861,” Journal of the Early Republic 14 (Winter 1994): 490. Back.
Note 82: See, for example, the classic account by Dee Alexander Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (New York: Holt, 1970). Back.
Note 83: See Anthony W. Marx, “Race-Making and the Nation-State,” World Politics 48 (2) (1996): 180–208. Back.
Note 84: Most recently this principle is “national self-determination.” Back.
Note 85: The nation-state. Back.
Note 86: Waltz, Theory of International Politics, pp. 97–99. Back.
Note 87: Kohn, Nationalism and Imperialism in the Hither East, p. 60. Back.
Note 88: Theodore H. Von Laue, The World Revolution of Westernization: The Twentieth Century in Global Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 4. Back.
Note 89: See, for example, Barnett’s argument regarding the case of pan-Arab nationalism in Michael N. Barnett, “Sovereignty, Nationalism and Regional Order in the Arab States System,” International Organization 49 (3) (1995): 479–510. Back.
Note 90: Hayes, A Generation of Materialism, pp. 221–22. Back.
Note 91: Doyle, Empires, p. 251. Back.
Note 93: Ibid. pp. 252–56. Back.
Note 94: Von Laue, The World Revolution of Westernization, p. 18. The emphasis is mine. Back.
Note 95: For synopsis of the value of “third image” theoretical analysis of political systems see Waltz, Man the State and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), pp. 159–86. Back.
Note 96: For a discussion of nationalist imperialist aggression as a problem of “intolerance” see Carleton J. H. Hayes, Nationalism: A Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1960), pp. 97–115. Back.
Note 97: Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, pp. 148–49. Back.
Note 98: Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, pp. 152–60. Back.
Note 99: Ibid. pp. 160–61. Back.
Note 100: Hayes, A Generation of Materialism, p. 223. Back.
Note 101: Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 146. Back.
Note 102: Ibid. For a study of the activities and social composition of the domestic German enthusiasts for colonial ventures in this period see Richard Pierard, “The German Colonial Society,” in Knoll and Gann (eds.), Germans in the Tropics, pp. 19–37. Back.
Note 103: See this diplomatic argument in A. J. P. Taylor, Germany’s First Bid for Colonies:1884–1885: A Move in Bismarck’s European Policy (New York: MacMillan, 1967). Back.
Note 104: Lewis H. Gann, “Marginal Colonialism: The German Case,” in Knoll and Gann (eds.) Germans in the Tropics, p. 5. Back.
Note 105: Hayes, A Generation of Materialism, pp. 232–34. Back.
Note 106: Smith, European Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, p. 96. Back.
Note 107: A fascinating study of the manipulation of British public opinion in support of a policy of imperialism, over many decades is found in John M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). See also Gary S. Messinger, British Propaganda and the State in the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992). Back.
Note 108: Hayes, A Generation of Materialism, pp. 220. Back.
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