New Empires of the Twentieth Century and Their Regimes of Difference

As noted earlier, Japan conducted its own imperial ventures; its attempt to position itself as a big brother to subordinated Asian polities had much in common with the attitudes of western European colonizers.

But the fact that an Asian power acted this way represented a reconfiguration of the global politics of difference that the European powers were slow to appreciate. When Japan not only defeated China in the 1890s but prevailed over Russia in 1904-1905, it asserted its entry into the competitive imperial world. Japan gradually repudiated the unequal treaties that European intruders had imposed on Asian polities.

The Japanese high command cooperated with European powers in repressing the Boxer rebellion in China at the turn ofthe century, but it was not clear that Europeans— although taken aback by Japan's victory over Russia—had more than a condescending view of Asian empires. Japan's attempt to get a clause repudiating racial discrimination into the post-World War I peace treaties—hypocritical as it might have been— was dismissed by the European powers. Most important, Japan's ambitions in Asia ran directly into those of the British, French, Dutch, and American imperial ventures, and Japan's need for resources its islands lacked—oil and other minerals—led its leaders to fear that rival powers might monopolize what Japan wanted most. The aggressions and dealings that led to the Pacific War of 1941-1945 stemmed directly from the fact that Japan was playing a similar game to its European and American rivals and was equally willing to subordinate other peoples to its interests.^[996]

The Soviet Union, emerging from the collapse of imperial Russia in world and civil wars, created another variant on empire. The new communist polity recovered most of the territories conquered by the tsars, but refined the Romanovs' politics of difference.

Distinctive ethnic groups were recognized, with their particular cultural needs, and in this sense, as well as in an explicit politics of inherited class belonging, the management of differentiated collectivities was retained from tsarist times. Communist rulers went further by giving political form to their multinational domain. The new state was in principle federal—a “union” of national republics, each led by communists from the dominant ethnic group in the territory. The whole was held together by linkages to the center, to which national cadres were recruited, in some cases to become the country's leaders.^[997]

While recognizing national particularity, the communist state was also universalizing: the goal was to extend its combination of centralizing authority and developmentalism around the world. When after the defeat of Nazi Germany, the USSR could extend its reach into eastern Europe, it helped local communists to shape replica states—each juridically independent, each run by its “own” people, but following the model of the single-party state and direction from Moscow.^[998]

If the Soviet Union's “empire of nations”^[999] was a communist variant on empires of difference, the Nazi empire took exclusionary empire to an extreme. After World War II, Hannah Arendt and Aime Cesaire described Nazi racism as colonial empire coming back to haunt Europe. Germany's earlier history of colonization includes instances of genocidal massacres—of the Herero in southwest Africa most noto- riously.^[1000] But the historical line leading from colonial atrocities to Hitler is not straight. Other colonial powers committed their share of atrocities, but England did not produce its own Auschwitz.

Unlike France, Great Britain, and other western European empires, Germany lost its colonies in 1919. Between then and the rise of Nazism in the 1930s, the sensibility of being a nation worthy of empire, of Germans as a civilized people who had been unjustly deprived of territory and honor, was not mediated by the practicalities of ruling real people.

In this cauldron of resentment, anti-Semitism and other forms of racism became increasingly virulent.

The interaction of British or French colonizers with Africans and Asians did not make these Europeans more humane, but the realities of governing made rulers aware of the limitations of their own power. Above all, they knew—as indeed German governors in Africa had learned before 1914—that they needed intermediaries and that if they acted too wantonly they risked inciting rebellions whose repression would generate high costs and bad publicity.^[1001] Nazi Germany insisted on exercising direct rule over Poland, Ukraine, and other eastern territories that it conquered. The Nazis saw Slavic people as of little use except as slave labor. Consequently, German rule reduced the Ukrainian breadbasket to famine and the Nazi leadership missed, until far too late, opportunities to exploit the resentment many Ukrainians held toward the Soviet government. To the west, collaborators were admissible and found, but the Nazis' refusal to seek assistance in the Slavic lands was a major reason why the thousand-year Reich lasted only 12 years.^[1002] This radical variant on the politics of difference—the elimination of difference altogether—destroyed not only millions of people, but the empire itself.

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Source: Bang Peter F., Bayly C.A., Scheidel Walter (eds.). The Oxford World History of Empire. Volume One: The Imperial Experience. Oxford University Press,2020. — 584 p.. 2020

New Empires of the Twentieth Century and Their Regimes of Difference

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