Imperialism and the anti-imperialist mind.

Imperialism and the Anti-Imperialist Mind

Imperialism and the Anti-Imperialist Mind, by Lewis S. Feuer (Prometheus, 258 pp., $22.95)

FOR THE PAST hundred years or so, few words in the Western political vocabulary have produced so much froth on the lips as "imperialism.' The unenviable task that Professor Feuer has set himself in this small but learned and provocative book is to reconsider the case against imperialism, and he constructs a powerful critique of anti-imperialist theories from Hobson and Lenin to Fanon and Mannoni. The result is a courageous defense of the role of imperialism as an agent of civilizational expansion. "When civilization has moved forward in the past, it has invariably been propelled by a strong imperialist movement on the part of the most advancing society.'

Feuer distinguishes between "progressive imperialism'--"in which energies are liberated for the advancement of civilization and creative activity,' and which he sees exemplified in Alexandrian, Roman, British, French, and Dutch expansion--and "regressive imperialism' --manifested in Nazi conquests and, "in several respects, the Mongolian and Spanish' empires, and which "aims at a perpetual exploitation or extermination of peoples whether less or more advanced.' It is Feuer's goal to vindicate the historical record of progressive imperialism, "founded on a cosmopolitan view of man, a conception of human worth to be found among all men,' and leading to "participatory imperialism,' in which the subjects as well as the rulers of empire are able to achieve political, economic, and cultural advancement.

So far from exploiting their subjects, Feuer finds, progressive empires and their rulers have suppressed piracy and the slave trade, ended tribal wars, abolished cannibalism and suttee, and drastically improved the hygienic, educational, technological, and economic levels of the peoples they ruled. There is a powerful altruistic element in these missionary, medical, scientific, educational, and abolitionist activities, which contradicts both the conventional and the Marxist ideas of the motivations for expansion. It is precisely from this altruism that the anti-imperialist leaders of colonized peoples obtain the ideological basis for criticizing and rejecting their status. Absorbing the anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, and often anti-Western ideas disseminated by missionary schools and capitalist diffusion, leaders like Nkrumah and Kenyatta turned against the very source of their own leadership and ideas in rejecting the imperial structure. It is the weakness, perhaps the tragedy, of progressive imperialism that it ultimately undermines itself, not because, as Marxist theory would have it, it succumbs to the contradictions of advanced capitalism, but because of the virtues of its bourgeois and Christian roots.

Lest it be thought that "anti-Semitism and racism arise from an inherent dynamic of imperialism,' Feuer devotes considerable space to inquiring "how the Jews, as a persecutable minority, have fared in the setting of progressive imperialism.' Apart from the regressive imperialism of the Nazis and of Catholic Spain, "the Jews' experience of imperialism throughout history has . . . mostly been a happy one,' and they "have felt their own creative social energies awakened by the imperialist opportunity.' Jews were eligible for public office in the Roman empire until the time of the later Christian emperors, who began to revoke their access to the army, political office, and the secret service. In the eighteenth century, the progressive imperialism of the French Revolution and Napoleon "finally afforded to European Jewry the chance to break the Ghetto walls and partake of equality and justice.' Jews also supported Dutch and British imperialism; by choosing to re-admit the Jews to England, "Britain's imperialism chose the liberal, progressive direction.' Theodore Roosevelt, whom Feuer sees as the archetype of American progressive imperialism, "boldly originated the concept of the making of a new American race, as he told American historians that they would record in the future the "formation of a new ethnic type in this melting pot of the nations.'' Indeed, it was to Roosevelt that Israel Zangwill dedicated The Melting Pot, and the President enthusiastically and publicly praised the play on its opening night.

Feuer subjects to a devastating critique the psychoanalytic profiles of imperialists constructed by the critics of imperialism. He shows that the personalities of the builders and administrators of the British Empire did not exhibit the repressed, sadistic, and racist urges attributed to them by recent theorists, and by examining the personalities of leading anti-imperialists of the nineteenth century he suggests that these urges may be more characteristic of the enemies of imperialism than of its supporters. Anti-imperialists often expressed concerns that empire would result in racial mixture and degeneration; many leading anti-imperialists were anti-Semitic, and others were sexually abnormal.

In a concluding section, Feuer suggests the possibility of an American empire that would "try to solve the conflict of the world's races by admitting into its governing and administrative elite those of all races and nationalities who had high abilities.' An American empire, in Feuer's view, would be a progressive and liberating substitute for and a challenge to the regressive and predatory imperialism of the Soviets as well as an emancipation from the terrorism, fanaticism, and barbarity of "backward Arab countries' and other Third World states.

There are, of course, weaknesses in Feuer's presentation. His recourse to a kind of armchair psychoanalysis to explain the anti-imperialist psyche is suggestive but can hardly be any more conclusive than the same technique applied by the opponents of imperialism. Nor does Feuer consider the costs of empire to the expanding society itself: Imperialism has often instigated internal political, economic, and cultural changes that undermine the institutional and moral fabric that sustains an empire. He also tends to neglect the very important and legitimate concerns for strategic and military defense against external enemies that motivated much British and Roman imperial expansion. In the nineteenth century it was less altruism than the need to protect the route to India around Africa, and later through Suez, that led the British to take the Cape Colony and Egypt. To protect the approaches to Egypt, they were led into East Africa. Whatever the virtues of progressive imperialism in civilizing other peoples, this kind of resolute attention to geostrategic self-interest is more salutary than the vacuous moralizing that appears to have predominated among American policy-makers in recent years.

Yet such flaws do not seriously mar this book. Professor Feuer supports his argument with a wealth of detailed and varied erudition, and the kind of imperialism he admires should be clear to even the most unsympathetic critic.