Jennifer Gaffney
Hannah Arendt’s discourse on the European imperial period between 1884 and 1914 is indispensable for her broader analysis of totalitarianism. Indeed, following her discussion of modern anti-Semitism in The Origins of Totalitarianism, she devotes the second part of this work to European imperialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, maintaining that “it may be justifiable to consider the whole period a preparatory stage for the coming catastrophes.”1 Whereas Europe’s earlier colonial enterprises had treated expansion as a means to conquering new territories and establishing new settlements that could absorb the law of the mother country, expansion became an end in itself during the imperial period, one that furthered Europe’s rapid economic development but that was fundamentally at odds with the structure of the nation-state.2 The nation-state, in conceiving of its law as an outgrowth of a unique national substance, loses its legitimacy when it is expanded beyond the consent of its people and territorial boundaries.3 Yet by the end of the nineteenth century, when capital had reached further into foreign markets than ever before, national governments realized that the export of government power would have to follow the export of money to prevent the loss of a major part of the national wealth.4 These governments thus extended a new kind of power into the colonies, one that served not to establish political bodies but to protect the limitless growth of capital development. As Arendt explains, such aimless power, “when left to itself, can achieve nothing but more power, and violence administered for power’s (and not for law’s) sake turns into a destructive principle that will stop at nothing until there is nothing left to violate.”5 Hence, it was during this period, when business had been transformed into a political issue and power had been cut free from any political goal, that a new form of politics emerged.6 Far from establishing political bodies, imperial politics reached its logical consequence in “the destruction of all living communities, those of the conquered people as well as of the people at home.”7 With this, Arendt argues, came a new form of nationalism that no longer needed the law or state to sustain itself, but that relied instead on a principle of racial superiority that was able to transcended class distinctions and national borders. In Arendt’s view, this brand of racism coupled with the lawless and aimless power of imperial governments had real and immediate “boomerang effects” on the European continent, creating fertile ground for the rise of totalitarianism in the period between the World Wars.8
Arendt’s analysis of the European imperial experience, and particularly, her “boomerang thesis,” has proven to be as contentious as it is complex. On the one hand, Arendt was among the first of her generation in Europe to suggest that European imperial expansion and the racist, proto-genocidal political strategies that drove it played a decisive role in producing the political culture necessary for the rise of totalitarianism after the First World War.9 In exposing this relation, her political project bears greater resemblance to the work of her contemporaries such as W. E. B. Dubois, Aimé Césaire, and Frantz Fanon than it does to many of her European counterparts. In view of this, scholars have suggested that Arendt has an important contribution to make to discourses in postcolonialism, critical race theory, and African studies that has yet to be fully appreciated within these fields.10
On the other hand, this aspect of Arendt’s work has also been heavily criticized in two regards. First, scholars have challenged the viability of Arendt’s boomerang thesis, arguing that the connection she establishes between European imperialism abroad and the rise of totalitarianism at home is tenuous at best, failing to provide a theoretical framework to establish a clear relationship between the two. Second, and more recently, scholars have suggested that Arendt employs a rhetoric to describe the subjects of European imperial and colonial rule that seems to reaffirm the very racism that she attempts to challenge in her discourse on Europe’s imperial experience.11 The question thus arises as to how to understand Arendt’s contribution to discourses concerning the global impact of Europe’s imperial and colonial enterprises, no less than her broader concerns for human plurality and political belonging, in light of these critical receptions of her project. While Arendt’s analysis of European imperialism has received less attention than other aspects of her work, it nevertheless constitutes an important part of the interpretative frame she uses in her enduring effort throughout her career to comprehend the phenomenon of totalitarianism. As such, Arendt’s discourse on imperialism provides a decisive point of departure for understanding the scope and limits of her broader political project and, especially, her analysis of the experience of alienation, domination, and exclusion in modern political life.
From Imperialism to Totalitarianism: The Boomerang Thesis and Its Critics
The first line of criticism that has emerged in response to Arendt’s discourse on imperialism concerns her “boomerang thesis,” which she introduces in The Origins of Totalitarianism to establish a dynamic link between the European imperial experience in Africa between 1884 and 1914 and the rise of totalitarianism on the continent after the First World War.12 It was during this period of European expansion, Arendt argues, that “the race principle” became a fully functioning mechanism for transforming “stranger and alien others” into superfluous, nonhuman entities in order to justify their domination, exploitation, and extermination.13 Such justification depended on the development of a structure of government that could reinforce and reproduce this superfluity. Two new political devices were thus discovered during the imperial period in the service of this end—namely, racism as a principle of the body politic and bureaucracy as a principle of foreign domination.14
Arendt explains that while racism has always attracted the worst parts of European civilization, bureaucracy has attracted those who view themselves as fulfilling the highest ideals of the nation and who are willing to travel abroad to assume responsibility for these ideals in the context of those thought to be primitive and inferior.15 In this, she says, “Race . . . was an escape into an irresponsibility where nothing human could any longer exist, and bureaucracy was the result of a responsibility that no man can bear for his fellow man and no people for another people.”16 During the imperial period, Arendt argues, race became a substitute for the nation, allowing national unity to expand beyond the territorial boundaries of the nation-state, while bureaucracy became a substitute for the state, enabling colonial administrators to suspend the law through temporary and changing decrees in order to accelerate the unending process of expansion.17 Taken together, racism and bureaucracy became the organizing principles of imperial politics, creating a mechanism for the suspension of the law and the total domination of the subjected races. In Arendt’s view, the political culture that this bureaucratic racism produced had real and immediate “boomerang effects” on the behaviors of European peoples.18 She says:
The full impact of the African experience was first realized by leaders of the mob like Carl Peters, who decided that they too had to belong to a master race. African colonial possessions became the most fertile soil for the flowering of what later was to become the Nazi elite. Here they had seen with their own eyes how peoples could be converted into races and how, simply by taking the initiative in the process, one might push one’s own people into the position of the master race.19
Likewise, she argues that the use of bureaucracy to dominate foreign peoples led officials in the colonies to become increasingly indifferent to the law, declaring that “‘no ethical considerations such as the rights of man will be allowed to stand in the way’ of white rule.”20 In light of this, Arendt maintains that Europe’s imperial experience abroad provided the crucial ingredients for the rise of totalitarianism at home, making possible the dissolution of the classes into the masses by means of a principle of race unity and the transformation of the state into a secretive and lawless instrument of total domination.21
While the novelty of Arendt’s “boomerang thesis” has been widely acknowledged, scholars have nevertheless suggested that the link she attempts to establish between European imperial practices in the colonies and the rise of totalitarianism on the continent lacks explanatory power. Margaret Canovan set the stage for this line of criticism in her 1974 work The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt. There, Canovan argues that while Arendt offers some of her most brilliant insights in this part of The Origins of Totalitarianism, she only succeeds in establishing a “quasi-link” between the ideologies that Europe’s imperial practices produced in the colonies and th e emergence of ideologies in Europe, such as pan-Germanism and pan-Slavism, which provided a foothold for the rise totalitarianism in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.22 Even in the more compelling case of Germany, Canovan argues, the boomerang thesis is neither obvious nor necessary to explain the rise of totalitarianism.23
Likewise, L. H. Gann and Peter Duignan have argued that while “Arendt sees colonialism abroad as a source of fascism at home,” the German colonial experience in Africa was too short-lived to have a significant impact on the political or intellectual climate of Germany.24 In their view, it was the First World War that gave rise to totalitarianism, not colonialism, and while Germany’s involvement in the scramble for Africa might have played some role in the formation of the totalitarian ideologies of Nazi Germany, the leaders of National Socialism had little interest in overseas colonialism.25 More recently, Seyla Benhabib has reiterated Canovan’s claim that Arendt fails to provide adequate support for her boomerang thesis and its implications for liberalism.26 Like Canovan, Benhabib challenges Arendt’s view that imperial racism and bureaucracy had a destructive impact on the political and cultural values of Europe, suggesting that Arendt’s discussion is based on hunches and intuitions rather than sound historical evidence.27 Hence, while these scholars agree that Arendt’s boomerang thesis is intriguing, they nevertheless believe that she stops short of transforming this insight into a theory that has explanatory force, failing to demonstrate how European imperialism and colonialism corrupted the democratic structures and liberal values of the West.28
Overlooked Legacies of Exclusion: Arendt on Sub-Saharan Africa
The second line of criticism that has emerged in response to Arendt’s discourse on imperialism focuses on a conflict between her insights into the proto-genocidal racism that drove this period of colonial expansion in Europe and her problematic characterization of non-European indigenous populations.29 Shiraz Dossa initiated this line of criticism in his 1980 essay, “Human Status and Politics: Hannah Arendt on the Holocaust.” Here, Dossa argues that Arendt employs a notion of the human being throughout her work that is ethnocentric, privileging the values and traditions of the European over the colonized other, and especially the sub-Saharan African.30 According to Dossa, Arendt acknowledges throughout much of her work that the political practices of the West have, since antiquity, been accompanied by genocidal massacre and the violent domination of foreign peoples.31 In spite of this, however, Arendt believes that the Holocaust, in particular, was a novel and unprecedented moment in the history of the West, revealing, for the first time, the way in which this violence can be thrown back on itself, resulting not only in mass murder but also in an assault on the culture and civilization that gave birth to the idea of human freedom.
It is here that Dossa locates Arendt’s ethnocentrism. He explains that Arendt took the rise of totalitarianism in Europe to reveal that “freedom can be used to eliminate its own conditions of existence: plurality and individuality. Totalitarianism is an exercise in the liquidation of freedom and restraint, and the arbitrary mastery of men.”32 In Dossa’s view, Arendt assumes that those colonized others whose fate had been similar to the Jewish people in Nazi Germany lacked a culture, history, and civilization that was expressly human. He suggests that for Arendt, similar events of extermination in the colonies did not reveal the same horrifying possibility of human freedom. This, Dossa thinks, comes into view most clearly in Arendt’s characterization of the sub-Saharan African in The Origins of Totalitarianism. He says:
Inability to master nature sufficiently, to fabricate an artifice beyond the one naturally given, to establish public bodies—that is the combined political human failure of the Africans. In broader and related terms the blacks testify, in Arendt’s view, to a general lack of human culture and morality: people who had “escaped the reality of civilization.” For Arendt, although their murder is clearly unjust it is somehow not immoral.33
On the basis of this, Dossa argues that the European moral and cultural context in which Arendt was writing produced an ethnocentric strain in her thought that framed her claims regarding the uniqueness of the Holocaust. This ethnocentric strain, Dossa says, is explicit in Arendt’s characterization of sub-Saharan Africans in The Origins of Totalitarianism and implicit in her broader project.34 He argues that Arendt repeats this characterization of non-European peoples in subsequent works concerning race and racism in the African Diaspora and thus calls for the interrogation of Arendt’s racial attitudes and the role they play in shaping her political assumptions.35
More recently, scholars, including Robert Bernasconi and Kathryn Gines, have given further contour to this criticism, drawing attention to Arendt’s blindness to non-European peoples in The Origins of Totalitarianism while highlight ing an analogous problem in her later works concerning race and racism, particularly in the United States. Bernasconi, for instance, challenges Arendt’s boomerang thesis from the perspective of her racial attitudes and her commitment to the heritage of Western thought. He argues that Arendt hesitated to go as far as other non-European thinkers in establishing a clear connection between European imperialism and the rise of totalitarianism for fear of undermining the dignity of the Western tradition altogether. Bernasconi thus maintains that Arendt’s insights into the question of imperialism not only lack the novelty that is often ascribed to them but also perpetuate the racist assumptions inherent in Western political thought.36
With this, he suggests that Arendt’s concern for undermining the dignity of the Western tradition colors other aspects of her work such as her appeal to the distinction between the social and the political realms. This, he argues, blinds her to the distinctive forms of exclusion that have been produced by anti-black racism, particularly in the United States.37 Bernasconi notes that Arendt acknowledges in On Revolution as well as in “Civil Disobedience” the original crime of slavery and the tacit exclusion of African descended people from the American Constitution. In spite of this, however, he argues that she nevertheless favors a mythical reading of the original spirit of the American Revolution in her criticism of the civil rights movement in her 1959 essay, “Reflections on Little Rock.” In this essay, Arendt criticizes NAACP leaders for focusing on social issues concerning discrimination in employment, housing, and education rather than political goals that sought to open a space of freedom.38 Bernasconi argues that Arendt fails to appreciate in her criticism of school desegregation that a white racial hierarchy is bound up with the American political tradition, creating conditions in American social life that keep nonwhite Americans from appearing in the space of politics.39 For this reason, Bernasconi says, “She has provided an account of political community that lacks the resources necessary to address the divisions sustained by racism.”40 Arendt’s attachment to the Western tradition, he suggests, thus leads her to neglect the distinctive forms of exclusion that have been produced by the global impact of European empire building.41
Similarly, Gines has argued in her recent work, Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question, that Arendt has a fundamentally flawed orientation to what Gines calls “the Negro question.” Specifically, Gines maintains that Arendt frames issues of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism in ways that neglect the role that white institutions and political practices play in perpetuating anti-black racism. Gines argues, too, that while Arendt’s discourse on the Jewish question has direct bearing on the Negro question, Arendt overlooks these implications of her own analysis.42 While Arendt is able to see the Jewish experience of exclusion as a political phenomenon, Gines explains that she is unable to do the same in the case of anti-black racism, leading Arendt to represent African descended people in a distorted manner throughout her work.43
In Gines’s view, Arendt demonstrates this not only in texts such as “Reflections on Little Rock” and “On Violence” but also in The Origins of Totalitarianism, where she recognizes the impact of imperial ideology on European culture, but nevertheless assumes the perspective of the European in her representation of Africans.44 Arendt, Gines argues, correctly identifies racism as a tool used by Europeans to exploit and oppress non-Europeans. Yet in focusing solely on the imperial period between 1884 and 1914 to develop her boomerang thesis, Gines argues, Arendt overlooks the European legacy of slavery and colonization in the Americas that became a powerful force in European politics as early as the seventeenth century.45 In so doing, Gines argues, Arendt fails to see the broader impact of this legacy on European political and intellectual culture, leading Arendt to overlook the racist assumptions that might have been at work in her own representation of African descended people.46 On the basis of this, Gines maintains that while she is “not attempting to dismiss Arendt’s thoug ht altogether and label her as a racist,” we should not dismiss these aspects of Arendt’s thought as mere idiosyncrasies, or else we run the risk of missing the role that her broader political philosophy plays in perpetuating Eurocentric assumptions and anti-black racism in political thought today.47
Conclusion
In light of these two lines of criticism, we may wonder whether there is anything to glean from Arendt’s discourse on the European imperial experience, and, moreover, if the limits of this aspect of Arendt’s work undermine the viability of her larger political framework. While this is certainly one way to proceed, other scholars, including Richard H. King, Christopher Lee, Pascal Grosse, David Scott, and Nick Nesbitt, have taken a different angle of approach in their responses to these criticisms. To this end, they have expanded Arendt’s thought beyond the European nation-state to those regions and peoples most impacted by the European legacy of imperialism and the forms of exclusion that it has produced.48 In so doing, they complicate and challenge Arendt’s project, while also reimagining her thought within these contexts in order to open new paths for addressing pressing issues in fields such as de-colonial and postcolonial theory, European imperial history, and diasporic studies. In view of this, we find that while Arendt certainly does not go far enough, there is still much work to be done to deepen, challenge, and shed new light on this aspect of her thought in order to address the global impact of the European imperial experience on contemporary political life.
Notes
1 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1973), 127.
2 Ibid., 123, 126.
3 Ibid., 127.
4 Ibid., 135.
5 Ibid., 137.
6 Ibid., xvii.
7 Ibid., 137.
8 Ibid., 206.
9 I have borrowed the term “proto-genocidal” from Richard H. King’s introduction to Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Nation, Race and Genocide, ed. Richard H. King and Dan Stone (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 3.
10 See for instance Christopher J. Lee, “Locating Arendt within Post-colonial Thought: A Prospectus,” College Literature 38, no. 1 (2011): 95–114, and “Race and Bureaucracy Revisited: Hannah Arendt’s Recent Reemergence in African Studies,” in Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Nation, Race and Genocide, ed. Richard H. King and Dan Stone (New York: Bergahan Books, 2007), 68–86. See also, Pascal Grosse, “From Colonialism to National Socialism to Post-colonialism: Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism,” Postcolonial Studies 9, no. 1 (2006): 35–52, Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, “Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: An Introduction,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 1–20, and Norma Claire Moruzzi, “Re-placing the Margin: (Non)Representations of Colonialism in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 10, no. 1 (1991): 109–20.
11 See Kathryn T. Gines, “Race Thinking and Racism in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism,” in Hanna h Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Nation, Race and Genocide, ed. Richard H. King and Dan Stone (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 49.
12 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 3.
13 Ibid., 206.
14 Ibid., 185.
15 Ibid., 207.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid., 215.
18 Ibid., 206.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid., 221.
21 King, Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History, 3. While Arendt’s specific claims regarding bureaucratic racism are indeed novel, other non-European scholars in the Americas and the Caribbean had been engaged in a similar effort to establish a link between European imperialism and fascism. Perhaps the most notable articulation of this appears in Amié Césaire’s 1955 work Discourse on Colonialism, where Césaire argues that the ascendance of National Socialism in Germany cannot be thought apart from Europe’s legacy of empire, colonialism, and slavery. In this, Césaire attempts to challenge the view that Hitler’s rise to power was an aberration in the progression of Europe’s enlightenment. Instead, he argues that this impulse toward totalitarian terror was already deeply engrained in the European psyche, a product, he suggests, of the colonial violence that Europeans had been committing against non-European peoples across the globe for centuries. See Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1955).
22 Margaret Canovan, The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt (Slingsby: Methuen, 1977), 38. See also, King, Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History, 9.
23 Ibid.
24 L. H. Gann and Peter Duignan, The Rulers of German Africa, 1884-1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1977), 215, n. 4.
25 Ibid., 213–15.
26 Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000), 83.
27 King, Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History, 12.
28 Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, 83.
29 King, Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History, 10.
30 Shiraz Dossa, “Human Status and Politics: Hannah Arendt on the Holocaust,” The Canadian Journal of Political Science 13, no. 2 (1980): 309–23, 310.
31 Ibid., 317.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid., 319.
34 Ibid., 320.
35 Ibid.
36 See Robert Bernasconi, “When the Real Crime Began: Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and the Dignity of the Western Philosophical Tradition,” in Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Nation, Race and Genocide, ed. Richard King and Dan Stone (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 55–67.
37 Robert Bernasconi, “The Double Face of the Political and the Social: Hannah Arendt and America’s Racial Divisions,” in Research in Phenomenology 26, no. 1 (1996): 3–24, 4.
38 Ibid., 16.
39 Ibid., 18.
40 Ibid., 4.
41 Ibid.
42 Kathryn T. Gines, Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014), 123.
43 For instance, Gines argues that Arendt fails to connect her own childhood experience of anti-Semitism to the experience of anti-black racism and the challenges it poses for black parents attempting to raise their children to be political agents in a world that refuses to allow them to appear. Moreover, Gines maintains that while Arendt advocates for the political importance of a Jewish army in the context of the Warsaw ghetto and is keenly aware of analogous forms of violent oppression that have been carried out against African descended people through the colonial system, she nevertheless arrives at the opposite conclusion in her analysis of the violence that figures like Sartre and Fanon call for in response to colonial oppression. See Gines, Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question, 123.
44 Ibid.
45 Gines, “Race Thinking and Racism in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism,” 39.
46 Gines turns specifically to Arendt’s use of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in The Origins of Totalitarianism, arguing that “Heart of Darkness is a thoroughly racist text, even if it also functions to expose and possibly condemn imperialism. . . . The fact that Arendt accepts and embraces this racist image of Africa undermines her efforts to position herself against racism.” See Gines, “Race Thinking and Racism in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism,” 50.
47 Gines, Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question, 1.
48 See, for instance, Richard H. King, “Hannah Arendt and the Concept of Revolution,” New Formations 71, no. 03 (2011): 30–45, 30, Christopher Lee, “Locating Hannah Arendt within Postcolonial Thought: A Prospectus,” College Literature 38, no. 1 (2011): 95–114, Nick Nesbitt, Universal Emancipation (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2008), and David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).