I would say that I find Hannah Arendt to be a difficult but very worthwhile read. I had to come back to this after some time, and even as I was reading it, I had to revisit lots of passages multiple times to understand them. Imperialism covers the period from 1884 to 1914 in which the European powers extended their empires across the globe to extract resources from abroad.
Imperialism is defined by its goal of permanent expansion. Arendt says it was a novel idea in world history because it involved neither temporary looting nor a permanent conquest that would bring about assimilation. This originality comes from the fact that it was not a political idea, but an economic one, with its origin in business speculation. Imperialism was the result of the ruling capitalist class reaching the national limits of its economic expansion. Reaching these economic limits, they turned to politics to stretch the outward bounds of their money-making abilities. They needed to invest abroad to make more money, and then they needed the state to come in and protect their investments. It is ironic that this phenomenon appeared in the nation-state first, because the nation-state is uniquely unsuited to growth. Since the nation-state derives its legitimacy from the "people" or the "nation," once the state grows beyond one nation it loses legitimacy. The nation conceives of its law as the development of its unique national qualities that would not be valid beyond its own people. So the nation-state can apply the law equally within in the nation-state, but then runs into a contradiction when the state swallows up other nations. It can either abandon equality and create different statuses, or it can apply equality, but lose the elevated sense of nationhood that binds the state together.
The book is organized in X parts: The Political Emancipation of the Bourgeoisie, Race-Thinking Before Racism, Race and Bureaucracy, Continental Imperialism: The Pan-Movements, and The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man. They generally track the chronological development of imperialism. First, the bourgeoisie was emancipated and grew strong enough to shape policy, and race-thinking developed at the same time, setting the tone for the racist nature of imperialism to come. Then in Race and Bureaucracy, she discusses how those two concepts were tools of imperialism. She then focuses on the two countries that would eventually become totalitarian: Russia and Germany, which were home to pan-German and pan-Slavic movements. And finally, she discusses the First World War and how the nation-state was delegitimized in the inter-war period.
Arendt distinguishes race-thinking as a phenomenon that emerged earlier than racism, coming about in all Western countries simultaneously in the nineteenth century. Racism, on the other hand, is the ideology of imperialism in the turn of the century period. Racism is not nationalism, but actually destroys the nation. It cuts across national boundaries and is not defined by geography, language, tradition, or other elements that create a nation. Racists also deny the basis of the nation-state, which is that there is a community of nations operating in equality and peace. Racists, on the other hand, believe in Social Darwinism, that one race will conquer all the others. She says that racism, not nationalism, is the major world ideology along with socialism: "Few ideologies have won enough prominence to survive the hard competitive struggle of persuasion, and only two have come out on top and essentially defeated all others: the ideology which interprets history as an economic struggle of classes, and the other that interprets history as a natural fight of races." She argues that race-thinking came out of France, but always identified the Scandinavians and Germans as a superior race (identified with the aristocracy in France) and spread to Germany with Napoleon.
Race and bureaucracy are the two primary tools of imperialism according to Arendt. Race served as a substitute for the nation and an explanation for why Africans could not be of the same species as Europeans. It was useful since it created a system in which no white man needed to really work. White would serve as supervisors and essentially extract rents from their whiteness like passive income. While race was discovered in South Africa, bureaucracy was discovered in Algeria, Egypt, and India. Race was an escape into irresponsibility over humanity by denying their humanness, and bureaucracy was the attempt to shoulder responsibility over "civilizing" broad swathes of poor people--an impossible task. The colonial bureaucracy also had the utility of giving people who would otherwise destabilize the imperial power something to do abroad. Adventurers, idealists, and criminals were sent to the colonies to administer or expand them, and therefore did not direct their energies inward towards the nation-state at the center of the empire.
This outlet was useful to France and England, but did not exist for Germany and Russia. Since those countries had no overseas colonies, it was more difficult conceptually to separate the policies of the colonies from those of the nation-state. The same rules were made to apply to both, which led to an oppression over everyone, rather than just the colonized peoples. The "continental imperialism" of Germany and Russia was motivated not by a bourgeoisie's quest for expansion, and their leaders did not include businessmen. It could not offer a panacea for social ills by sending undesirables abroad, and could only offer "an ideology and a movement." Continental imperialism lacked the overseas distance to separate illegality abroad from legality at home, and so they jsut embraced illegality altogether in governance.
On nationalism, Arendt writes that it "became the precious cement for binding together a centralized state and an atomized society, and it actually proved to be the only working, live connection between the individuals of the nation-state." Citizens can't all share a class, but they can all share a nation. That makes nationalism more suited to activity within a state while class-based movements are necessarily international. Nationalism perverts the concepts of the family of nations into a hierarchical structure in which a nationality follows a "national mission." But that concept of a family of nations is less and less attractive the more that people are in contact with other nations. Those contacts create conflicts and make people less sympathetic to their neighbor-enemies. This was especially bad for the Jews, who were in contact with lots of nationalities, had no state of their own to protect them, and also proclaimed a race-like chosenness that inspired envy and hate. Anyone else who saw themselves as "chosen" would have a problem with that. That might be the difference between old anti-Semitism and modern anti-Semitism in which different races see themselves as chosen.
One of the most interesting things Arendt talks about towards the end of the books is how rights of individuals are not as logical as rights of the nation. No rights can exist unless they can be guaranteed, which is why there are no individual rights. No individual can protect his or her own rights without a larger group to help them. The concept of the nation allows a group of people who identify with each other to create equal rights within their group. But by guaranteeing equality within the nation it is likely to create inequalities between the nations. But the takeaway is also that human rights can't really work since there is no one actually willing to enforce human rights outside of their own nation or state in a serious way. That is why statelessness is so horrible. Because a human can lose all their rights and retain their dignity, but once they lose their polity itself, they no longer have any representation or protection by a larger group in the world. This was proven in many genocides, but especially the Holocaust, in which the first step towards depriving people of all rights was to make them stateless. When the world was confronted with stateless people, it did not and still usually does not protect their rights as human beings alone. As Arendt puts it, "we are not born equal; we become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights."
Miscellaneous:
- Arendt makes so many negative remarks about "survival of the fittest" that I am actually wondering if she didn't believe in evolution.
- Arendt claims the Zulu King Shaka killed one million members of weaker tribes but I am skeptical. That number seems huge.
- The book made me think that it is good the US Constitution was written in the 1780s and not the 1880s since the world got so much more divided by that point and universal ideas of equality were at a low point.
- Arendt has a whole issue with multi-party politics, and thinks it is less stable as a form of democracy than the two-party system. In the two-party system, since the parties essentially alternate, the opposition party remains loyal since it knows it will be in power again. And the King represents the nation. She thinks radicals are held in check by the actual necessities of governance. Whereas in a multi-party system, no party represents the nation, and they can develop enough particularity to endorse specific ideologies. But in the two-party system, a party cannot be ideological since it needs to win a large portion of the vote.
- Similar to Eric Hoffer's thoughts: "Long before Nazism proudly pronounced that though it had a program it did not need one, Pan-Germanism discovered how much more important for mass appeal a general mood was than laid-down outlines and platforms. For the only thing that counts in a movement is precisely that it keeps itself in constant movement."
- I thought his passage regarding Israel and India was prescient: "For these new states this curse bears the germs of a deadly sickness. For the nation-state cannot exist once its principle of equality before the law has broken down. Without this legal equality, which originally was destined to replace the older laws and orders of the feudal society, the nation dissolves into an anarchic mass of over- and underprivileged individuals. Laws that are not equal for all revert to rights and privileges, something contradictory to the very nature of nation-states. The clearer the proof of their inability to treat stateless people as legal persons and the greater the extension of arbitrary rule by police decree, the more difficult it is for states to resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them with an omnipotent police."
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