France is neither a unitary state nor a federal state: it is, like England, an imperial state.1
Joseph-Barthélemy, Paul Duez, Traité de droit constitutionnel, 1933
The dream Europe was meant to be shaped by the Treaty of Versailles, now that many saw it as a continent free of ethnic conflicts. The international community would see that the rights of national minorities were respected—whether in the framework of the Little Treaty of Versailles, obliging Poland to give equal treatment to non-Poles, or supervising population exchanges between Greece and Turkey.2
The struggle against discrimination did not mean spreading these concepts past the borders of the Old Continent. When Japan suggested introducing principles of racial equality to the Covenant of the League of Nations, Lord Balfour found it distasteful—for him equality was the kind of “eighteenth-century idea” that had failed to stand the test of time and the new scientific developments of the nineteenth century (social Darwinism).3
In 1913 over half of the world’s territories were under European domain, and more or less a similar percentage of the population.4 After 1918, the colonies seized from the Germans and Turks were divvied up between Great Britain and France as mandates, while retaining their inferior status, of course. Decolonization only took place two decades after World War Two, in part due to the economic and social changes this conflict brought, both in Europe and in Africa and Asia.5 After 1945, it was increasingly difficult to maintain that a racial hierarchy could be reconciled with the principles of democracy.
The conquest of Ethiopia, a symbol of the brutality of fascism. In many respects it signified less a new quality than an extension of Europe’s nineteenth-century imperialism.
In the picture: Ethiopians greeting an image of Benito Mussolini, 1935.
photo: NAC 3/1/0/17/209/1
By some interpretations, Hitler’s New Order subjected Europeans to the same regime to which inhabitants of what came to be known as the Third World were exposed.6 This interpretation is not entirely off-base, though we ought to recall that the colonial administrative apparatuses cannot entirely be compared with the genocidal precision of the Third Reich. In most cases, whites had to accept negotiations with the local populations, however lopsided they were—the highly Catholic Portuguese New State built mosques, and then already ultra-Catholic Francisco Franco organized pilgrimages to Mecca for his Moroccan soldiers.7 Naturally, the slightest germ of a rebellion was ruthlessly quashed—prior to 1914 the German Imperial Army practically exterminated the Herero tribes, while in the 1920s, Spain used chemical weapons against the Moroccans. Putting down challenges to colonial authority after 1945 also sometimes meant resorting to bloodshed, as was the case with both the French and the British.
The idea that Europeans brought economic development to Africa and Asia is highly dubious.8 The crippled state of many of the new countries’ economies prompts us to remain cautious here—if the development was so great, why did the Africans ultimately receive so little? On the other hand, India’s democracy undoubtedly bears the stamp of its British legacy. Taking up the “white colonizers/oppressed natives” dichotomy, however, might well be seen as a kind of patriarchal approach. Japanese imperialism was among the most brutal;9 the wars and dictatorships marking the histories of decolonized states can not be seen exclusively as a European heritage.