"NOT AS
PEOPLE BUT AS GERMANS"
GERMAN AND
AMERICAN VIEWS ON THE ETHNIC IMPACT OF IMPERIALISM
Frank M. Baglione
Tallahassee Community College
When the advocates of western imperialism marshaled their arguments for why their respective countries should engage in a policy of overseas expansion, their focus nearly always fell on the issue of nationality. Long before the thinkers analyzing imperialism became enthralled by the idea that it was an expression of the dominant economic system, long before it became evident that this imperialism would have little colonizing aspect, the writers urging a new effort of expansionism claimed that its true nature was to be found in the struggle for the survival of a people and their culture.
That at least was the case for imperialist writers in countries like Germany, which had not had colonial empires. No matter how satisfied they may have been with their country's position in the world, it was clear to these writers that in the coming century power and growth implied the ability to establish a global presence. To survive, they believed, a nation must expand. It must provide the land needed for its growing population and the opportunity for the vital spirit of its people to achieve its full potential. As A. P. Thornton wrote in his study of imperialism, "The only known road to survival, let alone security, takes the well-traveled imperialist route. (1)
American imperialist writers used many of these same arguments. Although somewhat less haunted by the specter of national extinction, these writers were concerned that America might not reach her full potential if she failed to expand overseas. And if not immediately threatened, these writers felt that America had a special obligation to continue the work of spreading the ideas and institutions peculiar to her people and Anglo-Saxon culture. Like all imperialist literature, the central idea is that the nation is but the vessel holding the precious linguistic, ethnic, and cultural elements that make up a people, and but the vehicle through which these elements can be spread across the globe.
The ground for the German imperialists had been prepared earlier by the work of two political economists, Friedrich List and Wilhelm Roscher. In their works, List and Roscher stressed the importance of colonies in the planning of national economic development. On this subject, they had the advantage in their argument with free trade economists who had to face the paradox of the greatest free trade state, England, also being the possessor and chief benefactor of a huge colonial empire. But according to List, expansion was more than the key to economic resources and strength, it was also "an unalterable law of our nature, an instinct of humanity," and the true mission of a national power and intelligence which leads civilized nations to extend their power over peoples of less culture.(2) List predicted that nations ignoring this law of and instinct of humanity would put in jeopardy their independence and political existence.(3)
Roscher addressed a second question of critical importance to German imperialists--emigration from the mother country. If such emigration could be organized through the acquisition of colonies, Roscher wrote, it would provide some "elbow room" for the people, as well as additional markets for manufactures and a supply of raw materials. England had enjoyed these advantages to the fullest extent, Roscher pointed out, while Germany had not, and he urged immediate action, or Germany would see the last appropriate areas for colonization occupied by other more resolute nations.(4)
These arguments appeared again in 1881 in Friedrich Fabri's book, Bedarf Deutschland der Kolonien?, which spoke to the issue of national self-preservation.(5) Fabri, a leading member of the colonial societies springing up in Germany, wrote,
Every powerful state must have at its disposal room for expansion, room in which it can engage its surplus energies in such a way that they will later be channeled back to the mother country in a process of constant dynamic interchange. No state which has excluded itself from this law of expansion has ever been capable of maintaining its power and prosperity over a long period of time.(6)
Fabri's colleague in the colonial societies, Wilhelm Hubbe-Schleiden, also published a book on German colonization containing the same message. He wrote that Germany must extend its enterprise, intelligence, capital, and labor to colonial areas. These areas must be won and held for the German language and way of life. "By strengthening our national character abroad in this manner," he wrote, "we strengthen it at home as well, just as the English have done."(7)
The work of these imperialist writers was aided by German nationalist historians, like Heinrich von Treitschke, whose lectures and written works increased the circulation of expansionist ideas. Treitschke, after seeing his passion for German unification realized, feared the new state's existence was threatened by its weakness in international affairs. He argued that Germany's continued existence as a great power would be determined by its ability to become an imperial power overseas.(8) The colonial adventurer Carl Peters, another member of the colonial societies, also saw the connection between the unification movement and imperialism. "The German colonial movement, " Peters said, "is the natural continuation of the German struggle for unity."(9)
The major area of concern for the German imperialists was German emigration. Just as the lack of political unity had caused a tremendous waste of German energy and productivity, Germany's lack of colonial possessions prevented her from making effective use of her procreative energies. The result was what the imperialists called a loss of racial elements--the loss of German nationals through emigration to other nations or to the colonies of other nations. Fabri regretted that this enormous wealth of labor, along with the products of that labor, were being lost to Germany, becoming instead an asset to other countries, in particular the United States.(10) In an analogy, Hubbe-Schleiden compared this emigration to the cuckoo bird which lays its eggs in the nests of strangers,(11) and Treitschke regretted what he saw as a debilitating loss of precious resources, that is, Germans, without the slightest compensating advantage to Germany.(12)
The imperialists were alarmed by the massive loss of German emigrants for cultural reasons as well. Emigrants going to foreign areas would eventually lose their German language and nationality and become submerged among the peoples of the non-German country in which they had settled.(13) The solution, said Fabri, was to establish German colonies which would allow the emigrants to continue an active national and economic interchange with the mother country and retain their German language and nationality.(14) Peters' assessment was the same--Germans should go to German colonies where they would retain their national character. He believed that unless the loss of German emigrants was stemmed through the creation of German colonies, the future existence of the German nationality itself stood in question.(15) The implication is quite clear. The survival of the group is conditioned on its ability to reproduce its forms in new areas. Without such growth, not even the original ethnic group can long survive.
The model for such a policy was, of course, England. The population of that little island, Treitschke noted, had sent off so many offshoots that there were millions of her people around the globe. Germany must do likewise, Treitschke thought, capturing new areas to nourish her increasing numbers and taking her share in the domination of the world by the white races.(16) Peters both admired and envied the example of the British Empire, which he described as the extension of the English state and nationality. Only by acquiring her own colonial empire would Germany be able to extend her national institutions and language and prevent the erosion of German culture and language among those who left to settle overseas.(17)
The British experience in America also allowed the imperialists to make the point that even when a colonizing country was forced to give up a large part of her colonial possessions, these still remained an enormous cultural, political, and economic advantage to her because of the ties of a common language and culture.(18) Here the imperialists touched the essential question, which concerned not economics but the instinct for self-preservation. Natural increase within limited boundaries meant overpopulation, the solution to which could never be population control or emigration to non-Germanic areas for these limited the growth of a people and put them at a disadvantage with respect to cultures that were expanding. The only sound and moral solution to the dangers of overpopulation was colonization. As Treitschke noted, colonization was a natural form of increase that added to the strength of the mother country. Not even the separation of colonies was a worry, he said, "when we consider what the importance of even emancipated colonies is to the parent state. It is impossible to exaggerate the material and moral advantage of such a national increase."(19)
What the imperialists wanted for Germany was natural increase and the expansion necessary for the survival of the parent language, culture, and nationality. Hubbe-Schleiden believed that a nation's existence was a result of, and was determined by, autonomous cultural activities, and that without the active development of culture, the existence of a nation over a long period of time was not possible.(20) He further asserted that the whole of humanity was continually striving toward the goal of culture and the development of civilization. To remain a vital part of humanity, nations must take part in this common striving. Those who did not participate in the development of civilization, or those who did not create new forms, were doomed, in Hubbe-Schleiden's words, "according to the common laws of nature and culture, to watch their own forms go down in ruin." He wrote,
The forms of a civilization which cannot become dominant must assimilate themselves to other forms or perish. The states of Europe which do not develop ever greater self-sufficiency through continuous cultural activity . . . will in time degenerate and disappear, being divided up among those of our race which have shown greater initiative.(21)
Peoples facing this awful truth of mortality, said Treitschke, could continue in existence by expanding, by setting their mark upon barbarous lands.(22) Hubbe-Schleiden, anticipating the great struggles of the next century which this activity would cause, wrote that problems of overpopulation and food supply would cause the competition between peoples, this fight for the existence of nationalities, to reach an intensity "far greater than anything we can imagine today."(23)
The. German imperialists felt confident that the German race would be victorious in this battle and that Germanism would provide the future leadership and support for world civilization. If in the next century the richest parts of the earth were occupied by "Germanics" with a few Latins and ill-organized masses of Slavs, Hubbe-Schleiden wrote, then the European race, and thereby the cultural aristocracy of mankind, would have become Germanic. But whether some of these Germans would still actually be Germans, or whether they would think and speak as, say, Englishmen, he warned, would depend "on an aggressive national policy which would provide for the existence of our descendants not as people but as Germans."(24)
Here was a significant statement--"not as people but as Germans." The fear of the German imperialists was that if Germany did not dominate in the areas settled by her emigrants, then these Germans would be submerged not only in the culture of their foreign hosts, but in their blood. They would become, from a ethnic point of view, mere people as opposed to Germans. And the more Germans were submerged in other nationalities, the weaker the entire German community would become.
Fabri made exactly that point, saying that cultural law imposed this simple choice--either absorb culturally inferior neighboring peoples or be absorbed by culturally stronger nationalities. "The colonial problem is in no way a question of political power . . . a means for extending Germany's political power in the world. The colonial question is cultural."(25) Then Fabri gave voice to the fundamental imperialist impulse, that of self-preservation. The colonial question, he wrote, was an existential question, "and it is the right and duty of every state to seek its continued existence by utilizing the whole weight of its influence, and, where necessary, its might. "(26)
Thus the German imperialists appealed to the most basic pattern of human behavior--the struggle for continued existence. This for the German imperialist writers was the meaning and purpose of imperialism.
The fact that America had been such an effective vehicle for the extension of English culture and language was as useful to the American imperialists as it was to the Germans. In their case, however, the argument obviously was that this work should be continued. American imperialists dreamed of inheriting this work and making it their own civilizing mission. In 1885, historian John Fiske wrote that the Anglo-Saxon race had a genius for political organization that would eventually lead to Anglo-Saxon dominance in a united world.(27) Another academic, the political scientist John Burgess at Columbia, arrived at a similar conclusion in a work published in 1891, although he claimed that the entire Teutonic race, not just its Anglo-Saxon branch, possessed this genius for political organization. To fulfill its mission in the world, Burgess thought, the Teutonic peoples must have a colonial policy.(28) Josiah Strong, a Congregationalist minister, published a work which claimed the highest authority for this mission of Teutonic peoples. Strong believed he saw the hand of God "preparing in our Anglo-Saxon civilization the die with which to stamp the peoples of the earth."(29)
The best known of the American imperialists, Alfred Thayer Mahan, a U. S. naval officer, was also convinced that the United States must adopt a policy of colonization. He wrote:
The annexation, even of Hawaii, would be no mere sporadic effort, irrational because disconnected from an adequate motive, but a first fruit and a token that the nation in its evolution has aroused itself to the necessity of carrying its life--that has been the happiness of those under its influence--beyond the borders which heretofore had sufficed for its activities."(30)
The United States was itself the best example of what the German imperialists had in mind when they spoke of the magnificent cultural and commercial benefits which accrued to the mother country from colonization. Through it the English had extended their civilization, language, and culture, and the Americans were well aware of what they represented in this process of expansion and what they, in turn, might accomplish.
The work which the English race had begun when it colonized North America, the imperialists believed, was destined to go on until every land that was not the seat of an older civilization would become English in its language, political habits, customs, traditions and, to a large extent, its blood. Powers like France and Germany, as they themselves already feared, would in this new order be, relatively speaking, a Holland or a Switzerland politically.(31) America, Fiske believed, was preparing to give the benefits of its political genius to the world, and he viewed what was occurring in Africa at the time as a process of development similar to that which had been followed in North America during the seventeenth century.(32)
For the Americans, expansion was not only natural and necessary in a cultural sense, it seemed also to have a divine sanction. Mahan saw the direction of western expansion and wondered if it were not "the exhibition of a Personal Will, acting through all time, with purpose deliberate and constructive."(33) Strong was more certain. To him it demonstrated that the Anglo-Saxon had been "divinely commissioned to be, in a peculiar sense, his brother's keeper."(34)
This divine mission of imperialism had little to do with commercial fleets or coaling stations. Rather, the imperialists believed it signaled that the time had come for America to join England in nothing less than the struggle for human civilization. There were no more new worlds; soon all the unoccupied lands on earth would be taken. When this was accomplished, Strong wrote, then there would begin the final competition of the races.(35)
Mahan had already begun working on the strategy for the struggle--America would establish a Pacific fleet through which the sea power of the civilized world would be energized against a China which had burst her boundaries, while the armies of Europe defended civilization on the eastern front.(36) Once the battle had begun, Strong was certain of the result. He wrote:
Is there any doubt that this race, unless devitalized by alcohol and tobacco, is destined to dispossess many weaker races, assimilate others, and mold the remainder, until in a very true sense it has Anglo-Saxonized mankind.(37)
Thus while the German imperialists might be planning to make the culture of the world Germanic, the Americans were preparing, probably a good deal more plausibly, to teach everyone English. However, to the extent that the Germans saw in this struggle among the races a victory for the Germanic world, they had a friend in the American Burgess. Burgess had spent a number of years studying in Germany and had become convinced that it was the Teutonic nice that was uniquely qualified for the leadership of all humanity, something which Anglo-Saxons and Germans would share. This was an idea that the German imperialist Carl Peters had also flirted with, looking toward a type of joint Anglo-German world dominance.' Burgess also believed that the historical inevitability of this Anglo-German world dominance was not open to question. He felt that history was moving toward the subjugation of the barbarian races by the civilized. Because this was the case, Burgess was for having at it, directly and without remorse. He wrote:
There is no right to the status of barbarism. The civilized states have a claim upon the uncivilized populations, as well as a duty towards them, and that claim is that they shall become civilized. . . . If the barbarian populations resist the same, a l'outrance, then the civilized state may clear the territory of their presence. . . . [The state] should not be troubled in its conscience about the morality of this policy when it becomes manifestly necessary. It violates thereby no rights in these populations which are not petty and trifling in comparison with its translucent right and duty to establish political and legal order everywhere.(39)
Burgess called humanitarian objections to such a policy "weak sentimentality."(40) The political subjugation and attachment of primitive peoples were as truly a part of history as was the national organization of states, Burgess believed. Morality, where it applied, was on the side of the superior group imposing its cultural forms on the inferior. He wrote,
The morality of a policy which insists upon the common use of a common language and upon the establishment of homogeneous institutions and laws cannot be successfully disputed. Under certain circumstances the exercise of force to secure these ends is not only justifiable but commendable, and not only commendable but morally obligatory.(41)
Fiske's estimation of the situation was not unlike that of Burgess'. To Fiske, the only question posed by the spread of civilization was not if subject peoples should be pushed aside, but whether the 'barbarians can maintain their foothold upon the earth at all."(42) Thus in a sense, American imperialist policy, had these writers been directing it, would have followed the pattern established in the extension of Anglo-Saxon culture in North America.
It is clear, therefore, that the arguments put forward to justify a policy of imperial expansion centered on the impact the engagement or non-engagement in imperialist activity would have on a people's culture. Imperialism would insure a continuation of the linguistic, ethnic, and cultural attributes of a people, while the failure of a people to expand would mark them and their culture for decline and ultimate destruction.
***
Frank M. Baglione received his Ph.D. in modem European history from Tufts University in 1981. His dissertation was entitled, "Mysticism and Domination: Theories of Self-Preservation, Extension, and Racial Superiority in German Imperialist Ideology." He has contributed several essays on twentieth-century German and French writers to the volume, Twentieth Century Thinkers. Dr. Baglione has taught history at Tallahassee Community College since 1991.
ENDNOTES
1. A. P. Thornton, Doctrines of Imperialism (New York: John Wiley, 1965), 15.
2. Friedrich List, National System of Political Economy, trans. G. A. Matile, Vol. 2 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1856), 71.
3. Ibid., 199, 351.
4. Wilhelm Roscher, Principles of Political Economy, trans. John J. Lalor, Vol. 2, 13th ed. (New York: H. Holt, 1978), 367-69.
5. Fabri was an important member of the Kolonialverin, Germany's largest colonial society. In 1880, he founded his own society, the West Deutsch Verein fur Kolonisation und Export.
6. Friedrich Fabri, Bedarf Deutschland der Kolonien?, Eine politisch-okonomische Betrachtung (Dritte Ausgabe, Gotha: Friedrich Andreas Berthes, 1884), 13.
7. Wilhelm Hubbe-Schleiden, Deutsche Kolonialisation (Hamburg: L. Friederischen, 1881), 54_55. Hubbe-Schleiden was the business manager for Fabri's West Deutsch Verein fur Kolonisation und Export. Historian Mary Townsend describes him as the prophet of a new era for Germany characterized by an intensive, overgrown nationalism, and Woodruff D. Smith calls him the first well-known point of contact between colonial theory and the ideological conservatism represented by Paul Anton De Lagarde, Julius Langbehn, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. See, Mary Townsend, Origins of Modern German Colonialism, 1871-1885, Studies in History, Economics and Public Law, Vol. 98, No. 1 (New York: Columbia University, 1921), 87; and Woodruff D. Smith, "The Ideology of German Colonialism 1848-1918" (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1972), 171-72.
8. Heinrich von Treitschke, Politics, trans. Blanche Dugdale and Torben Bebille (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 33.
9. Henry M. Blair, Jr., "Carl Peters and German Colonialism: A Study in the Ideas and Actions of Imperialism" (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1968), 213.
10. Fabri, Kolonien, 16.
11. Wilhelm Hubbe-Schleiden, Uberseeische Politik, Vol. 1 (Hamburg: L. Friederichsen, 1881), 127.
12. Treitschke, Politics, 118, 120.
13. Fabri, Kolonien, 26-27.
14. Ibid., 27.
15. Blair, "Carl Peters," 20-21.
16. Treitschke, Politics, 231.
17. Blair, "Carl Peters," 17, 19-20.
18. Treitschke, Politics, 117.
19. Ibid., 232.
20. Hubbe-Schleiden, Uberseeische Politik, 129-130.
21. Ibid., 130.
22. Treitschke, Politics, 115-16.
23. Hubbe-Schleiden, Uberseeische Politik, 135.
24. Ibid., 135-137.
25. Fabri, Kolonien, 56.
26. Ibid., 77.
27. John Fiske, American Political Ideas (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1885), 101 ff.
28. John W. Burgess, Political Science and Comparative Constitutional Law (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1991), 45.
29. Josiah Strong, Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis, rev. ed. (New York: Baker and Taylor, 1891), 214.
30. Julius W. Pratt, Expansionists of 1898 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1936), 15.
31. Fiske, Political Ideas, 143, 145.
32. Ibid., 140-41.
33. Pratt, Expansionists, 17.
34. Strong, Our Country, 209.
35. Ibid., 222. Strong fell that the Anglo-Saxons were being schooled for this final struggle and had developed peculiarly aggressive traits calculated to impress their institutions upon mankind. Because of this, the powerful Anglo-Saxon race would expand toward Mexico and South America, and into Africa and beyond.
36. Pratt, Expansionists, 16-17.
37. Strong, Our Country, 255.
38. Peters believed that England and Germany, as the two chief representatives of the Germanic race, could in collaboration become the sole masters of the world. See, Blair, "Carl Peters," 18, 25, 26n.
39. Burgess, Political Science, 46.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid., 42
42. Fiske, Political Ideas, 115.