Deep Thoughts: colonialist revisionism

Imperialism and the Corruption of Democracies -- by Herman Lebovics

Today, a bit more than a half century since the postwar tsunami of decolonization, we are seeing systematic efforts in former imperialist nations to rehabilitate their colonialist pasts. Just two examples of many more: Niall Ferguson has devoted the energy that his Scottish ancestors used to build the overseas empire to retrospectively defending it. And acknowledging that Britain is no longer in a position to carry the white man’s burden, he has newly endorsed Kipling’s call for the United States to do so. His imperial revisionism is not unique.

The elegantly-done online magazine, Etudes Coloniales , run by a group of historians, old colonial hands, and journalists, is devoted to correcting the negative reputation of imperial France. The May 2006 number carried an interview with author of the recently published (in French), “We are not Guilty: Enough Repentance,” Paul-François Paouli, in which he called colonization, “an emancipatory project born of the Enlightenment.”

Nor is this just a quarrel in the academy. In February 2006 the conservative majority of the French parliament voted a clause to a bill to increase the pensions of Algerians who had served with the French army and now live in France that French school children be taught the positive accomplishments of the colonial empire. A petition followed by a campaign of over a thousand French and foreign scholars forced the government to withdraw the clause. The historians who led the fight framed their complaint as one of political interference in the research and teaching of history. And so it was. But of course it was even more about whether politicians could legislate the laundering of France’s colonial past.

At stake in all this imperial nostalgia in Britain, France, and the US is the contemporary renewal of a hoary anti-democratic domestic project imported from the colonies. So quite aside from sympathy or indignation that we might feel in behalf of the colonized when Westerners tell them that their domination was good for them, we might consider the corruption of our own democratic institutions that we have suffered and may continue to suffer.

Forget Lenin, the antidemocratic offensive began long before democracy had been institutionalized. The founder of the Anglo-American theory of representative government was of course John Locke. Remember, he argued that participation in government was the right of all those who had a stake in the commonwealth, i.e. who owned property. So, rather than fighting civil wars as the English had just done in his day, the disenfranchised should acquire a “fixed interest” in the land and become full citizens. But in an era when Dutch engineers were being brought in to add a just little more cultivatable soil to the British Isles, where was this land that Locke offered as his solution to the question of political rights? Why, in America, where there was plenty of land ready to be worked and so possessed. Locke, who lived from colonial investments, avidly followed the “discoveries,” and served as the equivalent in his day as Britain’s minister for colonies, meant “America” as a synecdoche for the colonial empire then taking shape. But—as he knew better than most Englishmen of his generation—these were not empty lands.

Oh, yes, it was legitimate to remove the Indians for they didn’t use money, Locke’s benchmark for a commonweal united by a social contract. Nor did American Indians maximize production, which sinfully wasted what God had provided human kind. The point is not Locke’s quaint coin trick and Calvinist apologia for Indian-removal—that would have happened without his imprimatur—but rather the more historically interesting point that he ballasted parliamentary liberalism by assuming imperial control of exploitable resources of conquered overseas societies. Since Locke, Western societies have promised their discontented non-owning classes more and have looked covetously at their imperial holdings and spheres of influence in search of fulfillment of the promise. That the strategy didn’t, doesn’t, always work—history can be chancy —is evidenced by the rising price of gasoline in the US as a result of our Iraq debacle. The temptation of empire is the permanently structured economic danger to democracy. Let’s move forward some centuries, for a clear view of the related social risk.

George Orwell (still Eric Blair), serving as a policeman in Burma was asked to shoot an elephant that had become violent. By the time he found the beast it had calmed down and posed no threat. There was no longer any point in shooting the elephant. But several thousand Burmese of the town had come to see the shooting and would not be denied. Not to lose face as a sahib, Orwell fired again and again until the animal lay mortally wounded. Under the pressure of the ruled, as a necessary act of imperial domination, the sahib had had to perform his role. But who was in charge; who had decided the outcome? Eric Blair left Burma so that he did not become the sahib he would have had to be. Then once back in Britain he became a socialist to fight the sahibism of Britain’s hierarchical society. Sahibism came home to France too.

As part of a project to repair French cultural unity after years of pre-WW II social division, German occupation, and near-civil war of the retention of Algeria, Charles de Gaulle appointed the writer André Malraux to establish a new cultural ministry. Who would staff it and how would it work? In the late 1950s and early 1960s the colonial empire was dissolving, putting several thousand colonial administrators out of work. Malraux asked one of them, Emile Biasini, to recruit colleagues to work in the new French culture administration: “What you did in Africa, can you come back and do it in France?” “Sure,” said Biasini, “it’s just a matter of adapting.” And the colonial administrators did their best to shape French culture. But the colonies helped the socially anti-democratic cause in yet another way.

In the wake of the May 68 upheaval, France experienced an explosion of radical regionalism. Regionalist advocates in Brittany, Alsace, the Midi, the Caribbean, New Caledonia, and Réunion reproached Paris’s “colonial” relationship with its provinces. They supported their charges with historical accounts of the exploitive relationships between their cultures and that of the metropolitan center. Characterizing these local stories as unscientific “guerrilla ethnology” ( ethnologie sauvage ), the government of Giscard d’Estaing hired unemployed anthropologists—the postcolonial states wanted foreign experts who knew about machines, not kinship charts—to investigate and tell less divisive tales of the regions’ history. And after 1980, the government-proclaimed year of the regional heritages, the regionalists’ movements largely dissolved. From 1981 attention increasingly turned to the “problem” of the millions of immigrant workers from—yes—the former colonial empire.

I want to highlight a final deep colonial obstruction to democratic thought, this time in its most global dimension. That is bad thinking about “the Other.” Edward Said’s work on “Orientalism,” on the invidious view cultivated in the West of non-Western cultures, has taken us part of the way. But what about the uses in our imaginative literature, art, theater, opera, films, popular culture of “natives” that we all have seen always languishing lazily under palm trees, or loved and left, or doing savage dances and rituals, or shot, or trying to kill us, or—and this is perhaps the great crime of aesthetic modernism—put in a work to represent a world empty of content and meaning. As in Baudelaire’s Black Venus , in the paintings, poems, and novels of modernism, salvage blacks, or their equivalents have been markers of modern formalist invention. Their humanness dissolves into art.

Of course the reader could name many more issues than the economic, social, and aesthetic ones I have singled out. But I did this exercise to bring more attention to how the enemies of democracy within often get their best ideas from conquering peoples far away. In this respect, Jürgen Habermas’s concern that capitalism “colonizes the lifeworld” assumes an even more ominous meaning.

(Mr. Lebovics is a Professor of History at Stony Brook University. He is the author of Bringing the Empire Back Home: France in the Global Age.)