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A Qualified Defense
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12925 |
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BOOK WORLD
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5 / 1987 |
1,238 Words |
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Paul Gottfried
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Benoist's critique of imperialism has two parts: one of them intellectually sound and timely, and the other flawed and trite. The stronger part of his critique concerns the leftist sources of European imperialism. Benoist reveals the already half-forgotten record of liberal democratic and socialist support for Western colonial expansion, from the last quarter of the nineteenth into the third decade of the twentieth century. Without the political support and intellectual assumptions of self-styled progressives, Benoist maintains, Western imperialism would have been a far less thriving enterprise. It was those who hoped to achieve universal social and material advancement, from the bourgeois democrats of the French Third Republic to the English Fabian socialists and the mature Karl Marx, who had perhaps the least difficulty seeing the positive side of imperialism.
Benoist piles text upon text to demonstrate the leftist sources of imperialist thinking. He does not claim that there were no grizzled aristocratic officers or other social reactionaries among the advocates of imperialism. Rather he criticizes the theory of Joseph Schumpeter - who challenged Lenin's association of imperialism with advanced capitalism. Schumpeter tried to refute the Marxist-Lenist account of imperialism by introducing an explanation that turned out to be equally dubious. He blamed imperialism (which he assumed was wicked) not on capitalists (whom he defended as soft-hearted democrats), but on a resurgent military aristocracy. Using nationalism to take back power from an overly rationalistic and pacifistic middle class, the military, the church, and feudal monarchy, according to Schumpeter, were the true driving forces behind imperialist expansion.
The Schumpeter thesis, though presented by a defender of capitalism, fits in with modern Marxist interpretations of imperialism. Much of the recent research on the social history of Germany during the Second Empire (1871-1918) stresses the fateful link between the military-aristocratic elite and big business. It is argued, correctly, that members of the old ruling order and the rising Grosskapitalisten were both represented in the German naval league and in various groups that advocated colonial expansion for the German Empire. The discovery that such groups also enjoyed the backing of much of the German working class and even of declared Marxists should have discredited the attempt to link German, or any European, imperialism to any one particular social class. Instead, Fritz Fischer, Fritz Stern, and other prominent historians of Germany point to the popular base of German imperialism in order to show a peculiarly German susceptibility to racist and expansionist views.
In point of fact, imperialism was popular among French and English as well as German workers. One particularly fervent and effective advocate of imperialist expansion in the late nineteenth century was the great French republican politician Jules Ferry. Like Karl Marx and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Ferry considered imperialism to be a modernizing force that would bring backward parts of the world into a socially and materially advanced civilization. Although it would be wrong to deny that at least some conservatives also supported imperialism, Benoist is correct to observe that European leftists were not acting contrary to their beliefs by backing imperialist adventures. Imperialism was thoroughly consonant with the Left's belief in modernization. Moreover, until its recent obsession (partly in reaction to American capitalism) with Third World life-styles, the European and American Left made no secret of its
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