Empire
Imperialism and the Anti-imperialist Mind.
by Lewis Feuer.
Prometheus. 265 pp. $22.95.
The Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt.
by Pascal Bruckner.
Translated by William R. Beer. Free Press. 244 pp. $17.95.
Nearly thirty years ago, a group of conservative American academics led by Robert Strausz-Hupé produced a volume pointing out some of the accomplishments of the old European empires; the British journalist Peregrine Worsthorne, whose Tory sympathies might have been expected to be engaged by such an enterprise, nevertheless likened it to an effort at resuscitating the divine right of kings.
But if the issue of imperialism has thus long been closed on the political Right, elsewhere it has been kept alive for polemical purposes. The international Left has worked tirelessly to make imperialism a synonym for America’s role in the world. Among historians, a lively controversy has centered on the question of where precisely to affix the blame for what is unanimously considered a crime. The suspects include the big banks, industrial cartels, military men acting without state authority, the nationalist passions of the European and/or American publics, and ruling elites threatened by domestic pressures.
The appearance of Lewis Feuer’s new book may be a sign that the issue of imperialism is once again becoming open to free-wheeling debate. Feuer’s book is not so much a systematic defense of imperialism as it is a series of sporadic raids on the anti-imperalist consensus. Feuer, a sociologist best known for his massive The Conflict of Generations and for a number of works on subjects ranging from Marx to the sociology of scientific discovery, here offers a study rich in anecdotes and based on a broad array of sources. His varied thrusts make for challenging reading, but it must be said that his central thesis is more asserted than proved.
Essentially, Feuer maintains that the Europeans brought progress in its various manifestations to the peoples whom they ruled. Driven by altruism and a sense of the solidarity of mankind, they were responsible for conferring the blessings of education, economic infrastructure, and improved health care wherever their dominion extended. This is of course a dusting-off of the old arguments made by defenders of imperialism earlier in this century. Such briefs were always self-serving, but they contained a certain part of the truth as well.
Feuer is not enthusiastic about all forms of imperialism. He makes a fundamental distinction between “regressive imperialism,” which seeks to extract short-term profits from its subjects by pillaging the economy, and “progressive imperialism,” which aims to elevate living standards. As examples of the latter Feuer cites the Alexandrian, Roman, British, French, and Dutch empires; “regressive” examples are Spanish and Mongol imperialism, and the extreme case of the Nazis. One obvious measure of distinction between the two types is demographic: in progressive empires the population increases, in regressive ones it tends to fall. Another indicator is whether or not labor markets are free; regressive empires consistently resort to force to set wage rates below where they would settle on the open market.
Feuer devotes a lengthy chapter to the subject of Jews and empire. Here he flips through the centuries to bring out case after case in which Jewish communal life has flourished at the peak of empire, and suffered when empire declines. He paints vivid portraits of Jews who forged striking careers in Britain’s imperial domain—as scientists, administrators, and capitalists. British imperialism in particular, he argues, unleashed society’s “surplus energies,” and among the beneficiaries were many Jews who in the outposts of empire found horizons for their ambitions and talents wider than in Victorian England. Among Feuer’s portraits are Randlords like Barney Barnato and Alfred Beit who built South Africa’s mining industries, and Julius Vogel, one of the constructors of New Zealand.
There is something quite brash about all this; one can easily enough imagine the uses to which a hostile eye could turn Feuer’s disquisition on the community of interest between Jews and imperialism. But it is entirely in the spirit of this book to offer not the slightest concession to rhetorical fashion. Feuer pushes ahead relentlessly: his imperialists, by building roads, bridges, schools, hospitals, and industries where there had been none before, were among the heroes of their age.
Feuer’s brashness may derive in part from his disdain for the best-known European anti-imperialists of the early 20th century. He is especially tough on J.A. Hobson and E.D. Morel, both of whom played a vital role in delegitimizing the idea of empire among Britain’s intellectuals. In today’s history texts, Hobson and Morel are generally presented as moral exemplars. Most students would never know that Hobson—Lenin’s tutor in the political economy of imperialism—was a pronounced anti-Semite whose widely read book Imperialism worked as hard to create a myth of behind-the-scenes Jewish financial manipulation as it did to create opposition to empire. The case of Morel is just as instructive. The writings of this leading British anti-imperialist organizer show him to be racist to the bone; his commentary, for instance, on the French use of troops from Senegal during World War I and later in the Ruhr is classic Ku Klux Klan material.
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Unfortunately, Feuer himself is capable of carelessness in his use of language. His justification of imperialism rests on a debatable value judgment—that men are better off in an “advanced” civilization than they are in a more “backward” state of self-determination. This idea springs from a bias shared by 19th-century imperialists and Marxists alike, and there are grounds for caution in expounding it. Feuer defines “undercivilized societies” as those in which there is systemic animosity toward free thought and speech, in which science is absent, and in which non-logical beliefs predominate. This definition stakes out ground from which an argument for “progressive imperialism” could, at least, be defended (although even so one should remark that it silently consigns to the ranks of the “under-civilized” both medieval Christendom and ancient Israel). But, incomprehensibly, Feuer keeps his definition to himself until, late in his narrative, he reveals it in a footnote. Prior to this we are treated to two hundred pages laden with references to “backward” and “undercivilized” societies, terms that have historically come all too readily to the lips of those whose plans for the “undercivilized” have had precious little to do with freedom of thought and speech.
Feuer closes his book with a call for a resurgence of American imperialism, which he deems the only effective counter to the growing Soviet empire. Europe’s empires, he acknowledges, ultimately collapsed under the weight of the race question: neither Britain nor France was willing to give its colonial peoples the political rights enjoyed by Englishmen and Frenchmen. Whether the United States could do better is a tantalizing question. Feuer argues for what he calls a non-racial, “participatory” imperialism, a vague term which he fails to elucidate. Since an American empire would evidently mean a limitation on the sovereignty of those former nation-states which would comprise it, one way to explore Feuer’s concept is to ask outright whether there are areas in the world that would be better off as full parts of the United States.
Take, for instance, the Philippines. One can imagine circumstances under which Filipinos might wish they had the chance to vote on whether to become part of an American empire, and to acquire the social and political rights which belong to Americans. Yet quite apart from the fact that anti-imperialism is now so entrenched in the American fabric that virtually no one here would be ready to advocate such a course, the costs of doing what would be necessary to raise Filipino living standards to American levels are daunting to contemplate. One wishes that Feuer had confronted such issues, for they are the specific dilemmas which any “progressive” imperialist must face.
Despite its weaknesses, however, this is a provocative and original book. Feuer’s blunt attempt to reintroduce such concepts as progress, civilization, and empire into the discussion of what is at stake in today’s world can only be regarded as salutary. For why should one assume that the issue of imperialism will never again appear on the world’s agenda? After all, the European empires ended more suddenly than most people writing about them in 1930 would have dared to imagine, and the structure which replaced them, now featuring some 160 sovereign nation-states, totters. If the history of Europe’s last imperial surge is any indication, no factor is more likely to set the stage for a resurgence of imperialism—though not necessarily, or even probably, stemming from Europe or the United States—than the accelerating breakdown of local and national authority in the post-colonial world.
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The freshness of Feuer’s approach can perhaps be appreciated against the background of cant and hypocrisy which play such a large part in the contemporary debate about relations between rich and poor countries. Some striking examples of these qualities are adduced by Pascal Bruckner in The Tears of the White Man, a biting commentary on the French political cult of the Third World which grew out of the ashes of French colonialism.
In his first and most powerful chapter, Bruckner deals with the highly politicized “solidarity groups” that pushed the causes of leftist dictators and guerrilla movements during the late 60’s and after. The North Vietnamese and the Palestinians were two such causes, but it was above all Maoism that achieved major status among French intellectuals, and that elicited the most egregious instances of sophistry and crass dishonesty.
In France’s most respected periodicals, writers fawned over the “socialist man” created by Mao’s rule. Socialist man in China, asserted one French intellectual, had no need of safety devices in his factories because he was “an extraordinary acrobat”; the sight of socialist man spending his day tied to a wagon pulling heavy loads inspired another writer to dilate on the outpouring of China’s new-found physical strength; others gloated over socialist man’s ability to transcend the need for bourgeois freedoms.
Bruckner reminds us that the cult of Mao was at its zenith as China was passing through its most repressive and xenophobic period, and paradoxically began to decline only when the terror of the Cultural Revolution abated somewhat, and China made an opening to the West. In its heyday, the cult was not the ideology of a marginal and sectarian fringe but a central element in an avant-garde consensus in which the most prominent French academics and journalists participated. When such dissenting writers as Simon Leys tried to point out the extent of outright oppression involved in the Cultural Revolution, their evidence was dismissed as American fabrications.
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It is a telling fact that Westerners who have involved themselves with Third World solidarity movements have invariably chosen those most hostile to the West. From this Bruckner concludes that such movements have nothing to do with the real Third World, which serves only as a convenient “mental province,” and everything to do with hostility to one’s own society. Bruckner has compiled a rich dossier of quotations to illustrate his point.
Explaining the source of this self-hatred is another matter, however. Early in his book, Bruckner suggests that it has something to do with a stream of Christian guilt which runs deep in the foundations of Western political culture. This is an intriguing if finally unconvincing explanation; it is a shame that Bruckner does not work to pursue it further. But in any event an opposite view seems more plausible: that the Western intellectual’s affinity for foreign tyrants has its source in a vacuum in the symbolic realm left by the West’s long century of secularization. As Paul Hollander has written, intellectuals have “turned out to be the least able to confront without pain a world from which ‘the gods have retreated.’”
Bruckner also dissects two other movements through which Frenchmen (and other Westerners) encounter the Third World. One is represented by the various organized groups professing compassion for those suffering from hunger and deprivation and thereby tending the flame of Western guilt. Another is made up of the hordes of young Westerners who travel, in the literal and figurative sense, to the East in search of religion, wisdom, and style.
Such people hardly deserve (and do not receive from Bruckner) the kind of scorn appropriate to the admirers of revolutionary dictators. They do, however, provide Bruckner with a rich field of opportunity for some pungent writing. His imaginary rendition of the internal monologue of a Westerner forced to wade through crowds of beggars ensconced outside his Third World hotel is calculated to bring to many readers an uncomfortable shock of recognition. He has mischievous observations to make as well on those Indian religious entrepreneurs who were among the principal beneficiaries of the 60’s infatuation with things Eastern. According to Bruckner, these gentlemen were the first to recognize that the legions of American and European youth coming in search of Oriental spirituality could be best satisfied by the tight discipline of an authoritarian ashram, and would pay for the privilege.
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Taken together, these two books indicate that relations between the West and the less developed countries are every bit as troubled and unnatural today as they were during the colonial era. Indeed, Bruckner’s work would support the argument that in the realm of ideas and communication, things are worse than they have ever been. As for Feuer’s revisionist argument concerning the imperialism of the past, today’s chaos cannot but lend it a certain retroactive plausibility. Yet even for one who favors a more expansive American role in the world, a resurgence of American imperialism sounds like a leap into the abyss; one can only wish that the many trends that promise to make such a leap seem necessary would reverse themselves.
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