Colonialism – Integral Part of European Modernity

THE arguments exchanged between the philosopher Gines de Sepulveda and the Dominican padre and bishop Bartholome de Las Casas at the Spanish court in Valladolid in 1550 over the annihilating effects of the Conquista on the South American population marks the final entry into what might be termed European modernity in the wake of its first stages of colonial-imperialist expansion some 500 years ago.

The legal-philosophical exchange over the fate of the Indian people combined the emerging era of enlightenment (considered to be of emancipatory substance and nature) as represented in its infant stage by Las Casas, with a racial hierarchy. The world’s people were since then structured by a pyramid as the model – on top were the most civilised European nations and their members.The South American Indians deserved – according to Las Casas – to be spared instead of sacrificed as victims of the forced labour in the mines.Instead, Las Casas as the humanist opponent to Sepulveda, suggested making use of the Negro slaves from Africa, since they were in his view inferior to the Indians.What was widely celebrated (at times until today) as an achievement, was actually at a closer look merely another ideological articulation of the civilising mission abused for centuries to follow.This view has since then been modified, but has survived as an integral part of European modernity and the rationality of the enlightenment (as among others sensibly reflected upon by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W.Adorno as the most prominent protagonists of the Critical Theory).The French aristocrat and citoyen Condorcet (in 1794 himself a victim of the guillotine) embodied a similar mystification of progress already advocated by Las Casas, which was appealing to a bourgeois humanism with all its inherent discriminations.His linear evolutionism represented the absolute belief in progress and development within a hierarchical worldview, which considered the central European nations and people at the top of a pyramid.All other people, while recognised as human beings, had to be uplifted to this level in the course of the civilising mission – or had to disappear.An advocate of the abolishment of slavery, he nevertheless was caught in a mindset which considered emancipation of the fellow human beings as the domestication of the “savage” to copy the French and Anglo-Americans as the most civilised human beings.The German philosophers and “Spaetaufklaerer” Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) were the most prominent protagonists of the Eurocentric civilising mission in Germany.John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) represented within the tradition of the “Philosophical Radicals” the ambiguities of such an era of enlightenment with its two-sided message in the English industrial-capitalist society emerging.The colonising mission of the imperial European was in such ideological packaging the civilising mission.A civilising mission, which aimed at both the subjects at home and in the colonies who haven’t yet internalised the virtues and norms of the industrial-capitalist mode of production emerging.In parallel processes, “savages” both at home and abroad were trained to become either citizens or subjects, and commodities within a new system of social reproduction.The founder of the Salvation Army, who published in the late 19th century a programmatic manifesto, gave it – in clear reference to Stanley’s travelogues from Africa – the title “Through Darkest England”.These processes of forming workers with responding ethics were qualified as modes of modelling the affect (Norbert Elias), or as disciplinary society (Michel Foucault).It was the domestication of the inner nature, which went hand in hand with the one of the outer nature.The expansion into other territories took place with regard to both, the interior, mental landscape (socialisation of the “savage” psyche) as well as the exterior and geographical map (subjugation of “savages” in the colonies).The dispositions created were corresponding with the power structures and had long-term effects.They were an inherent part of every modernisation philosophy, no matter of which political-ideological orientation.The decolonisation processes since the mid-20th century never emancipated the people – neither colonisers nor colonised – from the dominant paradigms of “developmentalism” and the mental affinities to such modernity.The virus survived, even in the ambivalences of a Eurocentric critique of the origins of totalitarian rule as presented in the pioneering work of Hannah Arendt, who herself was infected by racist perceptions.A clear indication of the “success story” of bringing Europe to most other parts of the world is that the institutions created by colonialism to reproduce societies (state, school, etc.) survived colonialism and remained largely unquestioned and intact.While those controlling and executing social power might have changed, the concept of power has not.Similarly, the colonial legacy has remained in most former colonising nations a chapter, which had never been fundamentally questioned and critically explored in terms of the dominant ideology applied also within these countries to civilise the “natives” – both at home and abroad.That the hegemonic discourse has in its principles changed very little since then, could be among else witnessed with regard to the approach by the West German society to the unification of Germany since 1990, which in its nature was hardly different from colonial subjugation and imposing the self-declared superiority of the guardian upon the foster child or “Muendel”.The patronising, paternalistic hierarchy imposed on the inferior system and its individual members resembled basic features of the colonial mind.It therefore is still possibly a sign of bad taste but not as misleading as it might have looked at first sight, when a prominent ‘unification politician’ from the former GDR with reference to the redistribution of property used in an article in “Die Zeit” around 2004 the analogy that the East Germans were treated like the Herero.They were of course not, since the Herero and Nama were annihilated to an extent, which qualified the colonial war by the German “Schutztruppe” (sic!) in South West Africa a century earlier as genocide.Hence such an analogy is at the same time a deeply offending statement adding insult to injury and itself an expression of subtly racist dispositions (expressed at a time, when commemoration activities aimed at bringing this dark chapter into public discourse and collective memory).The point I would like to make is, that with reference to the colonial era and its treatment in former colonial powers “Die Unfaehigkeit zu trauern” (“The inability to mourn”, as diagnosed by Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich in the mid-1960s with reference to the reluctant remorse of the post-World War 2 Germany to come to terms with the Holocaust) is a phenomenon, which is also applicable to the processes refusing to accept the fundamental challenges in terms of re-thinking power and dominance (as well as their appliance in forms of subjugation and oppression, culminating at times in extermination) in the context of conceptual notions such as “development”, “progress” and “modernity” – all concepts defined in an linear mode of thought as normative and absolute paradigms.None of the previous colonial powers has to my knowledge accepted so far the fundamental challenge in their collective memories and commemoration practices to deconstruct the fundaments, upon which the colonial mindset abused the “civilising mission” as forms of predatory capitalism.A mode of production, by the way, upon which the relative prosperity and wealth of most industrialised Western societies are based.There might exist different forms of dealing with a colonial past in these former colonial powers.But none of them would accept that many forms and ways of colonialism were a prelude of European modernity to two world wars, the Shoah and the Gulag, as much as the atomic bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and other forms of mass extermi
nation aimed at those defined or perceived as enemies to be destroyed.The forms of indiscriminate violence applied merit the classification as “brutes” more to the perpetrators instead of the victims of such extermination strategies.The “garden state” (a term introduced by Zygmunt Bauman to characterise the systems, which are prepared to include mass destruction and extinction strategies in their system of dominance and subordination) consolidated its (self-)image and outer appearance in the era of colonial expansion and has never been rigorously deconstructed since then.The Herero and Nama in South West Africa, as well as the victims of the scorched-earth warfare in response to the Maji-Maji uprising in East Africa, were not only a singular phenomenon of a particular German trajectory, although the German “Sonderweg” might be still a worthwhile, albeit inconclusive debate – if only to suggest, that such “Sonderweg” could have happened elsewhere too, and therefore is no “Sonderweg”.Belgian massacres since the late 19th century in the Congo, described by Joseph Conrad as “The Heart of Darkness”, were of a similar nature.Settler colonial extermination strategies of autochthonous people in North America, Canada and Australia hardly differed.US-American warfare in the Philippines and British military slaughters in the Sudan were of no other category, neither the Spanish or Italian bombings of civilian populations in North Africa and the Horn of Africa respectively, or the Portuguese massacres in Angola and Mozambique.The resistance of the Mau Mau movement among the Kikuyu in Kenya was met with similar indiscriminate force by the British colonial army as late as the 1950s, followed by the French massacres of the Algerian population.All these and many more organised and systematic atrocities committed in the name of a superior Western civilisation reflected the uncompromising will of extermination, which is reproduced since then in other places and times of this world.Colonial strategies of oppression, subjugation, annihilation, imposition of foreign or minority rule and warfare against those who resist have by no means been confined to colonialism and survived unabated into our presence.The necessary question which ought to be explored, namely to what extent these current practices and mindsets represent a continuity of (hardly modified) colonial thinking and its application is rarely asked – and even less explored further with the aim to be answered.It certainly has never so far been a so-called mainstream issue in any of the former colonial powers, which as a debate in itself would be willing to accept that the past is not even past but reproduced in manifold (though not always as obvious) ways.Colonialism, as the title of my admittedly rather cryptic and necessarily fragmentary presentation dares to suggest, remains – at least through the colonial mindset created and since then not abandoned – an integral part of European modernity.Worse: it hasn’t even been acknowledged so far in the dominant cultures of the former colonial powers as such, not to mention the missing efforts of a true decolonisation.Such efforts would need to allow questioning the fundamental values and norms, which guide our legitimacy of power executed and the inherent practices of dealing with deviations from what is considered to be the acceptable norm.It would, I dare to hope, invite for a fundamental re-definition of concepts currently applied in terms of social engineering and “good governance”.It would require replacing the hegemonic discourse by new concepts of power and equality, of the same and the other, and the implicit justification of discriminatory practices would loose its legitimacy.It would allow us to move maybe a bit closer towards a true emancipation of human beings.It is a long way ahead, but I believe it’s worth trying to overcome all the obstacles in the efforts to reach the goal.* Keynote presented at the European workshop “The Politics of Memory in European Migration Societies: Consequences for citizenship education”, Berlin, October 11-13, 2006.Dr Henning Melber is Executive Director of the Dag Hammarskjoeld Foundation from November 2006.He has been Research Director of The Nordic Africa Institute (2000-2006) and Director of The Namibian Economic Policy Research Unit (1992-2000).The world’s people were since then structured by a pyramid as the model – on top were the most civilised European nations and their members.The South American Indians deserved – according to Las Casas – to be spared instead of sacrificed as victims of the forced labour in the mines.Instead, Las Casas as the humanist opponent to Sepulveda, suggested making use of the Negro slaves from Africa, since they were in his view inferior to the Indians.What was widely celebrated (at times until today) as an achievement, was actually at a closer look merely another ideological articulation of the civilising mission abused for centuries to follow.This view has since then been modified, but has survived as an integral part of European modernity and the rationality of the enlightenment (as among others sensibly reflected upon by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W.Adorno as the most prominent protagonists of the Critical Theory).The French aristocrat and citoyen Condorcet (in 1794 himself a victim of the guillotine) embodied a similar mystification of progress already advocated by Las Casas, which was appealing to a bourgeois humanism with all its inherent discriminations.His linear evolutionism represented the absolute belief in progress and development within a hierarchical worldview, which considered the central European nations and people at the top of a pyramid.All other people, while recognised as human beings, had to be uplifted to this level in the course of the civilising mission – or had to disappear.An advocate of the abolishment of slavery, he nevertheless was caught in a mindset which considered emancipation of the fellow human beings as the domestication of the “savage” to copy the French and Anglo-Americans as the most civilised human beings.The German philosophers and “Spaetaufklaerer” Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) were the most prominent protagonists of the Eurocentric civilising mission in Germany.John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) represented within the tradition of the “Philosophical Radicals” the ambiguities of such an era of enlightenment with its two-sided message in the English industrial-capitalist society emerging.The colonising mission of the imperial European was in such ideological packaging the civilising mission.A civilising mission, which aimed at both the subjects at home and in the colonies who haven’t yet internalised the virtues and norms of the industrial-capitalist mode of production emerging.In parallel processes, “savages” both at home and abroad were trained to become either citizens or subjects, and commodities within a new system of social reproduction.The founder of the Salvation Army, who published in the late 19th century a programmatic manifesto, gave it – in clear reference to Stanley’s travelogues from Africa – the title “Through Darkest England”.These processes of forming workers with responding ethics were qualified as modes of modelling the affect (Norbert Elias), or as disciplinary society (Michel Foucault).It was the domestication of the inner nature, which went hand in hand with the one of the outer nature.The expansion into other territories took place with regard to both, the interior, mental landscape (socialisation of the “savage” psyche) as well as the exterior and geographical map (subjugation of “savages” in the colonies).The dispositions created were corresponding with the power structures and had long-term effects.They were an inherent part of every modernisation philosophy, no matter of which political-ideological orientation.The decolonisation processes since the mid-20th century never emancipated the people – neither colonisers nor colonised – from the dominant paradigms of “developmentalism” and the mental affinities to such modernity.The virus survived, even in the ambivalences of a Eur
ocentric critique of the origins of totalitarian rule as presented in the pioneering work of Hannah Arendt, who herself was infected by racist perceptions.A clear indication of the “success story” of bringing Europe to most other parts of the world is that the institutions created by colonialism to reproduce societies (state, school, etc.) survived colonialism and remained largely unquestioned and intact.While those controlling and executing social power might have changed, the concept of power has not.Similarly, the colonial legacy has remained in most former colonising nations a chapter, which had never been fundamentally questioned and critically explored in terms of the dominant ideology applied also within these countries to civilise the “natives” – both at home and abroad.That the hegemonic discourse has in its principles changed very little since then, could be among else witnessed with regard to the approach by the West German society to the unification of Germany since 1990, which in its nature was hardly different from colonial subjugation and imposing the self-declared superiority of the guardian upon the foster child or “Muendel”.The patronising, paternalistic hierarchy imposed on the inferior system and its individual members resembled basic features of the colonial mind.It therefore is still possibly a sign of bad taste but not as misleading as it might have looked at first sight, when a prominent ‘unification politician’ from the former GDR with reference to the redistribution of property used in an article in “Die Zeit” around 2004 the analogy that the East Germans were treated like the Herero.They were of course not, since the Herero and Nama were annihilated to an extent, which qualified the colonial war by the German “Schutztruppe” (sic!) in South West Africa a century earlier as genocide.Hence such an analogy is at the same time a deeply offending statement adding insult to injury and itself an expression of subtly racist dispositions (expressed at a time, when commemoration activities aimed at bringing this dark chapter into public discourse and collective memory).The point I would like to make is, that with reference to the colonial era and its treatment in former colonial powers “Die Unfaehigkeit zu trauern” (“The inability to mourn”, as diagnosed by Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich in the mid-1960s with reference to the reluctant remorse of the post-World War 2 Germany to come to terms with the Holocaust) is a phenomenon, which is also applicable to the processes refusing to accept the fundamental challenges in terms of re-thinking power and dominance (as well as their appliance in forms of subjugation and oppression, culminating at times in extermination) in the context of conceptual notions such as “development”, “progress” and “modernity” – all concepts defined in an linear mode of thought as normative and absolute paradigms.None of the previous colonial powers has to my knowledge accepted so far the fundamental challenge in their collective memories and commemoration practices to deconstruct the fundaments, upon which the colonial mindset abused the “civilising mission” as forms of predatory capitalism.A mode of production, by the way, upon which the relative prosperity and wealth of most industrialised Western societies are based.There might exist different forms of dealing with a colonial past in these former colonial powers.But none of them would accept that many forms and ways of colonialism were a prelude of European modernity to two world wars, the Shoah and the Gulag, as much as the atomic bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and other forms of mass extermination aimed at those defined or perceived as enemies to be destroyed.The forms of indiscriminate violence applied merit the classification as “brutes” more to the perpetrators instead of the victims of such extermination strategies.The “garden state” (a term introduced by Zygmunt Bauman to characterise the systems, which are prepared to include mass destruction and extinction strategies in their system of dominance and subordination) consolidated its (self-)image and outer appearance in the era of colonial expansion and has never been rigorously deconstructed since then.The Herero and Nama in South West Africa, as well as the victims of the scorched-earth warfare in response to the Maji-Maji uprising in East Africa, were not only a singular phenomenon of a particular German trajectory, although the German “Sonderweg” might be still a worthwhile, albeit inconclusive debate – if only to suggest, that such “Sonderweg” could have happened elsewhere too, and therefore is no “Sonderweg”.Belgian massacres since the late 19th century in the Congo, described by Joseph Conrad as “The Heart of Darkness”, were of a similar nature.Settler colonial extermination strategies of autochthonous people in North America, Canada and Australia hardly differed.US-American warfare in the Philippines and British military slaughters in the Sudan were of no other category, neither the Spanish or Italian bombings of civilian populations in North Africa and the Horn of Africa respectively, or the Portuguese massacres in Angola and Mozambique.The resistance of the Mau Mau movement among the Kikuyu in Kenya was met with similar indiscriminate force by the British colonial army as late as the 1950s, followed by the French massacres of the Algerian population.All these and many more organised and systematic atrocities committed in the name of a superior Western civilisation reflected the uncompromising will of extermination, which is reproduced since then in other places and times of this world.Colonial strategies of oppression, subjugation, annihilation, imposition of foreign or minority rule and warfare against those who resist have by no means been confined to colonialism and survived unabated into our presence. The necessary question which ought to be explored, namely to what extent these current practices and mindsets represent a continuity of (hardly modified) colonial thinking and its application is rarely asked – and even less explored further with the aim to be answered.It certainly has never so far been a so-called mainstream issue in any of the former colonial powers, which as a debate in itself would be willing to accept that the past is not even past but reproduced in manifold (though not always as obvious) ways.Colonialism, as the title of my admittedly rather cryptic and necessarily fragmentary presentation dares to suggest, remains – at least through the colonial mindset created and since then not abandoned – an integral part of European modernity.Worse: it hasn’t even been acknowledged so far in the dominant cultures of the former colonial powers as such, not to mention the missing efforts of a true decolonisation.Such efforts would need to allow questioning the fundamental values and norms, which guide our legitimacy of power executed and the inherent practices of dealing with deviations from what is considered to be the acceptable norm.It would, I dare to hope, invite for a fundamental re-definition of concepts currently applied in terms of social engineering and “good governance”.It would require replacing the hegemonic discourse by new concepts of power and equality, of the same and the other, and the implicit justification of discriminatory practices would loose its legitimacy.It would allow us to move maybe a bit closer towards a true emancipation of human beings.It is a long way ahead, but I believe it’s worth trying to overcome all the obstacles in the efforts to reach the goal.* Keynote presented at the European workshop “The Politics of Memory in European Migration Societies: Consequences for citizenship education”, Berlin, October 11-13, 2006.Dr Henning Melber is Executive Director of the Dag Hammarskjoeld Foundation from November 2006.He has been Research Director of The Nordic Africa Institute (2000-2006) and Director of The Namibian Economic Policy Research Unit (1992-2000).