Summary
The era of imperialism, which spans from roughly 1884-1914, is significant for Arendt not only because of its many similarities to later totalitarianism but because it marked the end of so many features of the 19th century. In many ways, the era can be seen in hindsight as the groundwork of totalitarianism, but it still retained a 19th century charm in its relative tranquillity and innocence to later catastrophes. What sets imperialism apart from earlier eras is, first and foremost, what Arendt terms the "political emancipation of the bourgeoisie" (123). If you will recall from the previous section, no class was able to replace the aristocracy after the French Revolution as the ruling class for society; however, the bourgeoisie did attain economic pre-eminence without class rule of the state. All of this changed in imperialism.
Imperialism was a response to the crisis of the nation-state which presented itself both economically and politically. The economic crisis was the overproduction of capital which needed an outlet, and mass unemployment. The political crisis, which follows from the economic crisis, was the political emancipation of the bourgeoisie, who began to act politically in order to export capital abroad as a solution to the limitations of the nation-state.
While capital is exported to the colonies, law is not. This is the primary difference between conquest and the new form of imperial expansion. While conquest exports the national institutions and law, expansion has no interest in establishing the home government abroad in any way. The "rule" that one finds in imperial colonies is the alliance between capital and mob. Their sole purpose is the accumulation of capital and power. This political formation would give rise to modern racism.
Before diving straight into the concept of racism, Arendt steps back to examine its earlier incarnation: race-thinking. While racism is an ideology that grasps the masses, race-thinking is an opinion like any other in liberal society. In France, the origins of race-thinking were found in the dying aristocracy's attempt to preserve itself against the revolution, and it was explicitly anti-national, a characteristic that will be passed on to racism. Another important characteristic of race-thinking was that it claimed to hold the key to history. Before Darwin, racial theorists like Gobineau were claiming that there was a promised historical and natural development of race.
Racism and bureaucracy are both discovered during the imperial age as a means of ruling foreign peoples without conquest or assimilation. What type of people were the “rulers” of this new empire? And how did they come to embrace race and bureaucracy as their primary means? Arendt uses South Africa as a case for studying this social formation. In the South African gold rush, the men made "superfluous" in 19th century Europe settled the colonies, and they brought their illegal habits and lack of social structures with them.
Arendt argues that these “superfluous men” encountered a people and set of values they absolutely could not understand while in Africa. Their inability to grasp rationally that a people who seemed so primitive and at times ruthless could be related to or equal to themselves made racism appealing. These superfluous men, the Boers, established themselves as gods over the natives with the use of race doctrines. Rather than attempting to impose Western standards, the Boers actively feared the industrialization or Westernization of South Africa, because they thought it would undermine the power they used to turn the natives into their slaves.
If race was discovered in South Africa, then bureaucracy was discovered in Algeria, Egypt and India. In India, Lord Cromer, who started his job as Viceroy of India with high ideals of leadership, later reconciled himself to what he called a “hybrid form of government.” In this form of government, Cromer adopted Cecil Rhodes’ style of rule through secrecy and established a bureaucracy in India in the late 19th century. The creation of this bureaucracy and the perfection of rule by secrecy was made possible by the discovery that expansion is not driven by any desires, but rather is a means to further expansion. Thus the bureaucracy was born.
While bureaucracy enforces law, it has no respect for any law except the law of expansion, of an unending movement. This characterizes the foundation of bureaucracy for Arendt: law is replaced by decree. The destruction of the universal validity of law through bureaucracy, Arendt argues, is the perfect ideological pair to racism, which justifies the disregard for law in the colonies.
Analysis
When the word "imperialism" is used today, it is usually exclusively used to describe actions of a government abroad. But this definition is too narrow for the purposes of Arendt. The crisis of the nation-state required the “political emancipation” of the bourgeoisie, meaning here that they make what was their private economic interest a political interest, preferably of the imperial state. Thus, imperialism is not merely a way of interacting with with the periphery (the colonies), but also impacts the method of rule and government in the metropole (the mainland of the imperial power).
Arendt argues that in imperialism, Hobbes’ theoretical work in Leviathan has become reality. Hobbes had argued that power is the motor of "all things human and divine" (143). The primary relation of bourgeois society is property, and property can never be fully secured. But by accumulating property beyond all reasonable measures, property can be liberated from the limitations of the private sphere, i.e., death. Arendt argues that bourgeois society is based on the unending accumulation of property and therefore the unending accumulation of power, and that these two processes finally merged in imperialism. The political emancipation of the bourgeoisie is the only thing that can provide continued life for bourgeois property relations, but it comes at the cost of the nation-state and the body politic.
Racism is similarly antagonistic to the nation-state, which explains why it only takes off as an ideology during imperialism. Individuals might have held varying opinions about race in the liberal era, but these opinions were treated like any other and had to compete for attention. Such opinions were never able to sway masses of people irrationally, until they were transformed into the ideology of racism. Much like "eternal antisemitism," there is no "eternal racism" for Arendt. Race-thinking, while racism's precursor, was only able to develop into racism as the result of the historical process of imperialism. The first example of this transformation is the Boers in South Africa.
While earlier colonialism would have tried to incorporate native populations into national law and politics, the men settling new imperial holdings were not interested in incorporating the native population at all. Such a task would have made it impossible to treat the differences between peoples as a natural phenomenon rather than one of human society. However, the superfluous men who came to Africa were already themselves lacking social bonds. They were unable and unwilling to accept their relation to the native inhabitants as humans, so they used racial doctrines to explain, and hold at bay, a people who seemed so different from them.
Since native inhabitants in imperial colonies are not incorporated into national law and government, bureaucracy and decree are what rules in imperial colonies. A law is created by men of a body politic and it becomes a rule they all agree to follow. In contrast, decrees are not subject to the nation as a whole and only exist for people in their execution. The law is correct because men decide through reason that it is; a decree is correct because it simply "is." This is why the bureaucratic decree is perfect for adapting to the law of unlimited expansion. Decrees require no theoretical or reasonable justification and are completely disconnected from human freedom, so they can be altered at any time in accordance with the end of expansion. The bureaucrats that create the decrees serve merely as cogs in the bureaucratic machine, not as citizens in the body politic, because they issue decrees for the purpose of aiding imperialist expansion, not to create a community.
