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Liberal Imperialism/ Nation-Statism:Manifest Destiny?

Week 7 – Lecture 1

26 February 2008

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II. Liberal Imperialist Racialism:

From Self-surveillance to Surveillance abroad

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• Colonialist fantasies: natives are depraved / without restraint no European recognition of order already in these societies

• Colonial project: impose liberal notions of order, restraint, surveillance, discipline

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“Le Singe” [The Monkey]

L’Assiette au Beurre

[October 1902]

http://www.assietteaubeurre.org/

“L’Eglise anglicaine”[The Church of England]

L’Assiette au Beurre[October 1902]

http://www.assietteaubeurre.org/

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• Colonialist fantasies: natives are depraved / without restraint no European recognition of order already in these societies

• Colonial project: impose liberal notions of order, restraint, surveillance, discipline

Karl Marx, 1848: Communist Manifesto

A VISION OF HUMAN HISTORY AS CONFLICT:

“In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.

“Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.”

COMPARE COPERNICUS, GALILEO, OR NEWTON!!! Predictable, orderly, eternal, providential circles

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Herbert Spencer --- “Social Darwinism” [NB: before Darwin!]

Belief that strongest / fittest should survive and flourish;

weak and unfit should be allowed to die.

[Invents the term “survival of the fittest”]

1852: The Developmental Hypothesis

Popularizes the term “Evolution”

1857: "Progress: Its Law and Causes“:

society evolves toward increasing freedom for individuals

holds for minimal government intervention

1859 Charles Darwin: On the Origin of Species,

or, the Preservation of Favoured Racesin the Struggle for Life

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WILL

Übermensch

[Superman / Overman]

Evolutionary Hierarchy written on the skull / cranium

• Fig 339 ---”Apollo Belvidere”

• Fig. 341 ---”Negro”

• Fig. 345 --- “Young Chimpanzee”

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Race: Biology as Destiny or Cultural Construction?

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• Race: always a politically driven category– neither “scientific” nor “natural” nor even “physical” !

e.g.: Middle Ages: religious: the “Christian race”;– America: White = Protestant

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V. 19th-century Imperialism

New v. Old Imperialism

Pre-19th c.: A trade colonialism

--Europeans want to invest capital in resorts, hotels, plantations, factories

--Ask local governments [at least in theory!] to let them invest

New: “acquisition” colonialism

--They simply displace the local governments;

--Want political control as well as economic investment

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19th-c. Hardware is the precondition for “acquisition” colonialism:

made possible by railroad and telegraph: hardware necessary to unite a massive landmass

3 reasons for late 19 c. Imperialism

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• A. Economic [Lenin]– Thesis: capitalists need new

markets and new sources of raw materials

– Objections: • capital investment was higher

in USA / W. Europe than in colonies;

• colonialism never profitable. Colonies cost more than they produced

• B. Political =Nationalism– How does a “nation-state”

“measure” its “national strength”?

• E.g., 1960s USA: “space race”; “arms race”

• Today: Putin!!!

– Late 19c: National strength defined by territorial acquisition.

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Tom Ripley

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“Europeans and the ‘Chinese Cake’”[Petit Journal, 1898]

Imperialist Expansion in late 19th century

• Territorial “acquisition”: note metaphors of “acquisition,”“consumption,” “ownership”

• The Other is something I acquire

• Carving up “a piece of cake”: Africa, S.E. Asia, India: 1/4 of world’s land-mass!

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“Determining the new borders of the Congo between France and Germany”

[Petit Journal, Nov. 1913]

• C. Ideological: “The Civilizing Mission”– need for Europe to civilize “savages”– Heart of Darkness --- Conrad is not interested in telling us about

the reality of colonialism; rather--- interested in telling us about the cultural fantasy of it all

– A fantasized version [in Western imagination] about what rest of world is like

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“The Civilizing Mission to Morocco”

[Le Petit Journal, 1911]

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Civilization: the “White Man’s Burden”

Take up the White Man's burden--Send forth the best ye breed--Go bind your sons to exileTo serve your captives' need;To wait in heavy harness,On fluttered folk and wild--Your new-caught, sullen peoples,Half-devil and half-child.

etc.

Rudyard Kiplinghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Man's_Burden

“You have a means of traveling freely and to study on site at your leisure and without cost.”

“Young men who hesitate about the choice of what to do:

GO TO THE COLONIES.

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VI. The New “Redemption”:

Exporting Liberal Self-discipline and saving the primitive “Other”

Liberal Discipline: Education

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Missionary school pre-1914: Dar es Salaam in German East AfricaSwahili boy leads classmates in reading lesson

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Liberal Discipline: Bodily Punishment by Overseer [Whipping with the chicotte]

Liberal Order: Urban Design for City of Cairo

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• Urban design: a city expresses a set of social relations– Hermann Melville [Moby Dick] on Cairo: disorder, chaos,

depravity– “Normalize” Cairo as Paris: light, air, sewers; geometrical;

anti-revolutionary!!!

Haussmann’s Paris

• Note irony: these societies are fantasized as depraved and without restraint: no recognition of order already in these societies. Colonial project: impose liberal notions of order, restraint, surveillance, discipline

• BUT REMEMBER Bittersweet !!! The only people who don’t work in the book are the Northern Europeans!!!

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Postcards from the colonies [Algeria]

Ne t’ennuies pas [Don’t get bored]

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What is the cultural-political significance of lesbian representations?? cf. Marie-Antoinette!

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Colonial Harem: projection of one’s deepest fears about the self

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Edward Said: Orientalism“defines Europe by projecting the ‘Other’ onto the ‘Orient’”

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– always binary opposites [a “melodramatic imagination”!]:

• civilized v. savages; • men v. children; • educated v. ignorant

– Europeans: rational, adult, virtuous, industry

– Orient: irrational, childlike, depraved, lazy

– NB: Most common images of Orient = Woman

1935-2003

“Sorcery” flourishes in the British Empire among indigenous Bengalis, “feeble even to effeminacy”[The worst thing you can say about the sorcerers is something gendered, i.e., they are ‘effeminate’!]

Alison Winters, Mesmerized

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Cecil Rhodes

Arthur Rimbaud

André Gide

"England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.”

~ E.M. Forster, Maurice (1914)

Sum:

If “race” is not about biology or destiny,

then what is it about?

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Defining the “self”by means of the “alien”

via “biology” [“natural”]

What is “the Dark Continent” /the “heart of darkness”?The European heart projected onto the Other.

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Conrad: the “Heart of Darkness” is a projection of the imperialist heart

Solving the problem of Liberalism:

1) Class

2) Gender

3) Race

4) Normal

5) Nation

NATION

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I. What is a state? What is a nation?

NATIONALISM

“State”• Max Weber: “A state

is the monopolization of the means of violence.”

– NO• militias; • independent militaries;• nobles warring; • blood feuds; • mobs; • mafias

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“Nation”

1) An imagined community--spread out geographically;

not actual physical contact

2) Based on common birth as what we share most deeply

-- land (USA); blood (Germany)

3) PROMISE: we can live together without confronting difference (in race, class, gender, etc.) because we have this deeper identity

natus” “to be born”

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• “Nationalism” originates in Enlightenment / Liberalism– Analogy with the

individual person: the right to self-determination

– A “nation” [or “people” or “race” or Volk] has the “right to self-determination

PROMISE of nationalism

• 1) Nationalism is a myth, a promise: desires, yearnings, escapes--- “the mythic projection of our longings for wholeness / togetherness/ unity.”

• 2) Deep national passions.--replacement for feudal loyalty /

blood / religion

• 3) Note peculiar power to move/ mobilize us: power to kill and make worth giving one’s life for.

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PERIL of nationalism• 1) Created with bloodshed

• 2) Sustained by waging wars without and persecuting minorities within

• 3) Unattainable promise: conflict cannot be indefinitely banished from within communities– Internal divisions re-surface: ethnic;

class; religious; geographical/cultural

A. Population Density

[urban v. non-urban]

Does “nation” trump other categories of identity???

B. Total number of voters: both geographical location and population density

http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/JAVA/election2004/3d_lowangle.gif

http://www.geog.ucsb.edu/~sara/html/mapping/election/map.html

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“Germany”: invented in 1871

• Difficulty: students think of “Germany” as something “natural” or “given”

• Why? hard thinking of alternative sources of identity to “nation-states”

• 1) EMPIRE: – “Holy Roman Empire”

– “European Union” ?• 2) CITY-STATE

• Florence; Venice

• 3) MONARCHY• “I am a “loyal subject

<feudal vassal> of the King”

• 4) CONFESSION– “Wars of Religion”:

“Protestant” v. “Catholic”

• E.g., “Catholic Spain”; German cuius religio

Think back: other sources of identity

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5) TRIBES

European Tribes [“Barbarians”]

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Ironies of Liberal Nationalism

• 1) “Nations” not created from “ground up”; unification achieved from above by force of arms [From Rousseau “social contract” to Bismarck “blood and iron”]

• 2) Results in stronger, not weaker central authority• 3) Shift: from being a “movement on the left” (i.e., Enlightenment Liberalism v.

Feudal Monarchy) to an “instrument of the right” (i.e., Liberalism v. Socialism)

The function of ideology is to mask origins… and all origins are bloody.

• Nothing “natural” about a “nation”• Formed through bloodshed and coercion• Maintained by memory and imagination• Must hide its foundations / past for it to seem “held together”