Empires of the Mind

by Robert Gildea

  The language of legitimacy, meanwhile, could be turned against the imperial powers. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers recruited from the British and French colonies were told that they were fighting for freedom against the tyranny of the enemy and came to think that they might enjoy some of that from their colonial masters. The United States, intervening in 1917, and the League of Nations proclaimed the principle of the equality of all nations and their right to self-government. Educated leaders of Arab and Asian peoples duly turned up in Paris and London, demanding their slice of freedom and self-government. This was a wonderful occasion on which the imperial powers might have acknowledged the change of historical era and the appropriation of legitimacy by the subject peoples, and granted them the liberty they craved. The opportunity was missed. Concessions were debated for Algeria and India but then shelved, and protesters at Amritsar were duly massacred. Former German colonies became mandates under the League of Nations but were administered by France and Britain like their other colonies, and aerial bombardment was tested in Iraq in 1920 and Syria in 1925. A new generation of colonial subjects was radicalised: Ho Chi Minh became an anti-colonial communist while Sayyid Abdul Ala Mawdudi published his Jihad in Islam in 1927.

  The Second World War brought the colonial powers to their knees. In 1940 France was defeated and occupied by the Germans and the Japanese occupied its Indochinese Empire. In 1942 the British colonial citadel of Singapore fell to the Japanese. The same principles of freedom and equality that had been proclaimed in 1917–19 were announced in the Atlantic Charter of 1941 and above all by the United Nations Charter of 1945. Decolonisation was now firmly on the agenda. But it was precisely the trauma of almost losing their empires which made France and Britain desperate to reclaim them after the defeat of Germany and Japan. On VE Day, 8 May 1945, the French massacred Algerians demanding independence at Setif. They returned to Indo-China and fought a long and bloody war against Ho Chi Minh until they were overwhelmed at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Losing Indo-China made them even less willing to lose Algeria, where settlers held the whip hand, and they committed themselves to a six-year war, resorting to torture and massacre. The British abandoned India and handed Palestine over to the State of Israel, which became a new colonial power. They were determined, however, to hold on to their possessions in the Middle East and Africa, especially in Eastern and Southern Africa where settlers demanded protection from indigenous revolt.

  In the 1960s the Third World exploded in colonial revolt. Anti-colonial wars of liberation rocked Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Newly independent countries asserted themselves in the 1955 Bandung Conference and in the United Nations. The colonial powers were still not prepared to give up. The Suez intervention of 1956 has been seen as a last attempt at colonial intervention against a nation demanding independence, except that it was far from being the last attempt. Gestures were made in de Gaulle’s offer of an Algerian referendum in September 1959 and Macmillan’s ‘wind of change’ speech in February 1980, but the public drama of decolonisation concessions concealed the private development of neo-colonialism. France abandoned its Algerian settlers but promoted Françafrique under the radar. Britain let its settlers in Kenya and Rhodesia go but continued to pursue its economic and strategic interests in South Africa which, outside the Commonwealth, intensified the apartheid regime. Troops from the British Empire were repatriated to defend Protestant settlers in Northern Ireland, and then dispatched across the Atlantic to defend a small number of sheep farmers but above all Britain’s self-image as an imperial power.

  There were two moments at which neo-colonialism might have evolved into something less destructive and less divisive. The first was after the oil crisis of 1973 when the balance of power shifted back to those Third World countries that were oil-producing. Countries like Algeria began to speak of a new economic order in which they took back control of the productive forces through nationalisation and trade controls. The reaction of the leading industrial countries was to exploit Third World debt in order to impose a global financial empire, forcing privatisation and dismantling trade restrictions in order to benefit their governments and multinational corporations. It was in many ways a reinvention of the informal empires of the nineteenth century. Dealing with local opposition could be devolved to local governments who were heavily indebted to the West. A worldwide anti-globalisation movement which took off in 1999 made more serious challenges but was sidelined after the Iraq War of 2003.

  The second moment was the end of the Cold War and the global triumph of the United States. This allowed the United States to claim that it was furthering a new world order based on the market economy and democracy and operating a strategy of liberal or humanitarian intervention only when that order was challenged. Unfortunately, what was seen as the ‘Great Satan’ American imperialism was challenged by the Iranian Republic after 1979 while Soviet imperialism in Afghanistan was resisted by Islamist guerrillas. Each were vehicles of a global Islamism that culminated in 9/11 and drove the United States and its allies to launch what was called the War on Terrorism. This was none other than a neo-imperialist movement, fought with massive military superiority in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, and against the Islamic State that rose from the rubble of Iraq and Syria in 2014. Very little thinking was done about the cost of military interventions in these regions, which were seen locally as simply repeating the colonial crimes of earlier eras. They produced a ‘blow-back’ of Islamist attacks in Britain and France, including the 7 July 2005 bombings in London, the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan attacks in Paris in January and November 2015 and attacks in London and Manchester in the spring of 2017.

  Colonial violence in the metropolis reached a crescendo in 2015–17, but the effects of colonialism on metropolitan society had manifested themselves for decades. Colonisation produced what Louise Bennett called ‘colonising in reverse’ or, as Sri Lankan writer Ambalavaner Sivanandan put it, ‘we are here because you were there’.

  Many migrants from the colonies and former colonies had fought in the armed forces of Britain and France and had been encouraged to rebuild the economies there after the Second World War. Far from being welcomed into the host societies, however, these migrants were subjected to racial discrimination and racial violence. This may been seen not as pure racial antagonism but as the re-establishment ‘back here’ of colonial hierarchies that had existed ‘out there’. It involved segregation in inner cities or specific banlieues, exclusion from decent housing, jobs and education, and subjection to police harassment and violence. The loss of empire by Britain and France produced in the metropolis a sense of having been defeated not only in the colonies but also on home ground, prompting hostility to immigration as ‘swamping’ or ‘invasion’. Political movements sprang up to reassert the supremacy of white populations. Although sporadic attempts were made to develop multiracial, multicultural societies, these were generally seen as a threat to the host societies which defended themselves by recourse to monocultural nationalism. Behind the rhetoric of free speech that greeted the burnings of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses and the rhetoric of laïcité that greeted the wearing of veils by Muslim students lay colonialist strategies to redefine British and French identities in ways that excluded minorities who identified with Islam.

  Although generations of immigrants tried to assimilate with the host society, espousing their values and attitudes, exclusion forced them to develop their own identities in opposition to those of the country they were living in. Their alienation was increased by each lethal military intervention in Afghanistan or the Middle East, by each tightening of immigration and detention rules, by each announcement of ‘British values’ or combative laïcité and by each police offensive against immigrant banlieues. Colonial wars and oppression were replayed in their minds. ‘I get angry when I hear that word “empire”’, said poet Benjamin Zephaniah, turning down an OBE after the Iraq War. ‘It reminds me of slavery, it reminds me of thousands of years of brutality, it remind
s me of how my foremothers were raped and my forefathers brutalised.’ In France the term ‘colonial fracture’ was coined to describe the opposition of those who identified as makers of empire and those who identified as the heirs of the colonised. When the French parliament passed a law in 2005 requiring schools and universities to teach the benefits of French colonial rule, especially in North Africa, it provoked the formation of Les Indigènes de la République by a group of young French citizens of North African origin, who announced that the French massacre of Algerians in Sétif in 1945 was their founding moment and that for them Dien Bien Phu was a victory.

  The fantasies and anguish of empires had a powerful effect on the European project. The construction of Europe first as an economic, then as a political entity, coincided with the process of decolonisation. Colonies were lost, but a new future in Europe beckoned. France and Britain had very different experiences of this challenge. France took the initiative in building the new Europe, and Charles de Gaulle actually saw it as a continental French empire that would keep Britain out. France also saw no contradiction between her neo-colonial ambitions and her ambitions in Europe. Britain, by contrast, was absent from the first phase of European integration. When she finally joined in 1973 it was felt in some quarters as timely modernisation but in others as a defeat, a poor alternative to her Empire and a Europe over which she had precious little influence.

  The reunification of Germany in 1990, it is true, provoked similar feelings of disquiet in both France and Britain. There were fears that Germany would seek to dominate Europe, as she had in 1870, 1914 and 1939. France had nightmares about the Franco-Prussian War and the defeat of 1940, Britain about winning the Second World War in vain. Right-wing nationalist parties in both countries opposed not only immigration but also European integration. The French solution to the challenge, however, was very different to the British. France promoted federalism as a way to contain Germany, but Britain regarded federalism as vehicle of European empire, controlled first by the French, then by the Germans. Eurosceptical attitudes steadily gained traction, appealing to the defence of British sovereignty, British national identity defined against immigration, and British ambitions which had historically been less European and more ‘global’.

  The anguish of losing an empire and the fantasy of rediscovering it came to a head with the referendum of 2016. Britain, it was said, would leave the European Union but she would not be alone. She would rediscover her past as a ‘swashbuckling […] buccaneer nation’, free to make trade treaties of her own design across the world. She would commune again with the ‘Anglosphere’ of the white Dominions which she had cruelly betrayed in 1973 but which had always been kith and kin and spoke the same English language. She would found an Empire 2.0 with countries like India, once the Raj, now partners, but also linked by deep historical connection and understanding. France, meanwhile, under Emmanuel Macron, brought up with no memories of the French Empire, was able to draw France’s twenty-first century ambitions on a clean sheet. He apologised for colonialism as a ‘crime against humanity’ in order to placate those who condemned France’s colonial past but moved swiftly on in order not to antagonise unduly those who were still nostalgic for it. He jettisoned the baggage of imperial fantasy while promoting strategic projects in Africa and reviving the concept of Francophonie in which France was one among equals. Above all he saw no contradiction between ambitions to lead in Europe and ambitions to do business with world leaders, mobilising the charm of soft diplomacy.

  Britain and France stand at a crossroads in their history. They both have proud imperial pasts and a legacy of colonial challenges. Neither of them is any longer a world power; they are both still permanent members of the UN Security Council but they are medium-sized powers who cannot seriously compete with the United States, Russia and China. They have been sustained in their belief that they are still great powers by fantasies of empire which they have repeatedly attempted to recreate. These fantasies have been shadowed by the anguish of the loss of empire. The anguish of the former colonisers, however, is of little weight compared to the anguish of former colonial peoples who have come to live and work in the metropolis, both about the exclusion and oppression their families suffered in the colonies and the exclusion and oppression they too often encounter in the metropolis today.

  The challenge for both France and Britain is to work through their colonial pasts. No one history of empire will ever be agreed; the colonial and the postcolonial approaches are defined against each other. Each side, however, must listen to the other’s story, the other’s history, and seek to understand it. As Emmanuel Macron said to Rouen schoolteacher Barbara Lefebvre, ‘There is a problem of divided memories. We have to reconcile memories.’ Connections between what happened ‘out there’ and what has happened ‘back here’ have to be thought about. Salman Rusdie was probably right that the British were ignorant of much of their history because it happened ‘out there’. The ‘radicalisation’ of young people of immigrant origin may be explained by the impact of Western military strikes against insurgents in the Middle East or Afghanistan and the suffering of civilian victims with whom they identify. Racist attacks in the metropolis on those of immigrant origin may be an acting out of the colonial superiority felt by white people. The final challenge is one of equality, that in society and politics all individuals and all communities should be considered as entitled to the same rights, the same respect and the same justice. This was something colonialism manifestly and repeatedly failed to do. To remedy this, it is never too late.

  Acknowledgements

  This study began as the 2013 Wiles Lectures, delivered in Queen’s University Belfast. I am very grateful to John Gray, Professor of Modern Irish History at Queen’s, and to the sponsors of the lectures. Their generosity made it possible to invite a wonderful group of colleagues to come to Belfast to discuss the lectures, notably Manu Braganca, Emile Chabal, Hannah Diamond, Laurent Douzou, Julian Jackson, Christopher Lloyd and Guillaume Piketty.

  I am deeply indebted to Michael Watson of Cambridge University Press, who has overseen the project from the beginning. His vision, patience, clarity and encouragement to detail have been crucial in seeing it to completion. I am also grateful to Ruth Boyes, Lisa Carter and Chris Burrows at Cambridge University Press for their good-humoured professionalism, and to Joanna North for her impeccable copy-editing.

  A first draft was the subject of a ‘monograph workshop’ in June 2017. This experiment in collective critique by colleagues expert in a range of fields was a landmark in its development. Profuse thanks are due to Joya Chatterji, Patricia Clavin, Richard Drayton, Margret Frenz, James McDougall, Guillaume Piketty and to International Relations doctoral student Angharad Jones Buxton.

  My doctoral students working in the field provided invaluable inspiration and advice. Particular thanks are due to Hannah al-Hassan Ali, Gabrielle Maas, Avner Ofrath, Alex Paulin-Booth and Sarah Stokes.

  Many other colleagues offered support and advice over the course of this project. Among them I must thank Paul Betts, Andrea Brazzoduro, Ludivine Broch, Rebecca Clifford, Aurélie Daher, John Davis, Jennifer Dueck, Martin Evans, Sudhir Hazareesingh, Dan Hicks, Daniel Lee, Karma Nabulsi, Ed Naylor, Kalypso Nicolaïdis, Lyndal Roper, Nick Stargardt, Martin Thomas, Imaobong Umoren and Natalya Vince.

  The enthusiasm of undergraduate students has been uplifting. I am especially grateful to those I worked with on Oxford History Faculty’s ‘Global Twentieth Century’ option and to those active in the Common Ground and Oxford and Colonialism initiatives.

  As ever, my family has been unstinting in their generosity and encouragement. Their diverse projects to make the world a better place inspire me. Thank you Lucy-Jean, Rachel, Georgia, William and Adam.

  The Wiles Lectures

  The Wiles Lectures, given at The Queen’s University of Belfast, is a regular, occasional series of lectures on an historical theme, sponsored by the University and published (usually in extended and modified form) b
y Cambridge University Press. The lecture series was established in the 1950s with the encouragement of the historian Herbert Butterfield, whose 1954 inaugural lecture series was published as ‘Man on his Past’ (1955). Later lecture series have produced many notable Cambridge titles, such as Alfred Cobban’s ‘The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution’ (1964), J. H. Elliott’s ‘The Old World and the New’ (1970), E. J. Hobsbawm’s ‘Nations and Nationalism since 1780’ (1990), and Adrian Hastings’ ‘The Construction of Nationhood’ (1997).

  A full list of titles in the series can be found at: www.cambridge.org/wileslectures.

  Notes

  Introduction

  1 www.ibtimes.co.uk/eu-referendum-boris-johnson-warns-risks-leaving-eu-will-be-exaggerated-uk-better-off-out-1545161.

  2 www.lemonde.fr/election-presidentielle-2017/article/2017/02/16/pour-macron-la-colonisation-fut-un-crime-contre-l-humanite_5080621_4854003.html.