Sent: Monday, November 16, 2009 11:35:44 AM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: Re: Colonial state's claim to be a civilising force : REPLY


An interesting example of colonial thinking on the the question of
legitimacy is found in the thinking of the important 20th century French
colonial figure Albert Sarraut. The working theory behind his post-WWI
reform plans for governance in Indochina and elsewhere was that "les
colonies sont des Etats en devenir" (Patrice Morlat, *Indochine années
vingt: Le rendez-vous manqué (1918-1928)*, p 83; Sarraut, *La mise en valeur
des colonies française*, p 107). In short, the colonial mission was to
create independent states for the colonized territories. Thinking on
civilization/development/race, combined with the perceived reality
of geopolitical competition (that if one colonizing state pulled out,
another would take its place) produced the belief in the necessity of
colonial domination in the "short" term. But for Sarraut, at least in
theory, the purpose of colonialism was for the colonizing state producing
another "Etat" (the Etat being inherently sovereign), and I think this was a
widespread assumption. The formulation seems to have been meant to provide
the basis for a measure of legitimacy for the colonial regime as the vehicle
for creating a truly legitimate, because independent, state in the
territory. If my analysis of this is right, this example points to the
continued utility of Ibra Sene's argument about illegitimacy without
"majority rule" (though that concept must be nuanced as Ben White did in his
insightful contribution here).

Further on the question of the "legitimacy" of colonial (or any) states, I
would argue that the Gramscian concept of hegemony is more useful for
historians than the Weberian term legitimacy, as the latter references
ahistorical morality while the former looks only at measurable
phenomena. The basic reference here is Ranajit Guha's *Dominance without
Hegemony*, where he posits a ratio between dominance (which this email
discussion might read as "violence") and hegemony (the acceptance by the
colonized population of the colonial government's right to exist) and argues
that in the British Raj, dominance always outweighed hegemony. If we replace
"legitimacy" with "hegemony" (or at least read the former in the sense of
the latter), it doesn't matter, to reference Ben White's email
again, whether colonial states are inherently more "legitimate" than
nationalist movements. All that matters is whether they are more popular.

A related issue for this discussion is the danger of "reading history
backward," in Fred Cooper's phrase. Cooper has been arguing that until the
middle of the twentieth century, political thinking was mainly imperial
rather than national. States were empires, relatively continuous across
divisions between metropoles and colonies. Until the nation-state became the
global standard between WWII and the 1960s, nationalism was not the first
political option for colonized subjects, at least nationalism with
independence in mind was not. Thus if a given colonial government was
"illegitimate", achieving "legitimacy" did not necessarily mean
anticolonialism/nationalism, but rather the reform of the empire. This
relates to Ben White's intervention about the lack of fundamental
differences between colonial and non-colonial states as well as Keith
Midkiff's, where he encourages us to think about the 18th and 19th centuries
as well as the twentieth.

On another thread, some here have asked whether "the colonial state" is
really a state. There is a small problem in the use of the category
"colonial state" in that it tends to conjure an image of autonomy, the same
level of autonomy conjured by the general category "the state." It helps us
forget that colonial "states" are an appendage of metropolitan states, on
which they are dependent and to which they are subservient. It may be
relevant to look at colonial-era language on this: at least in the early
decades of the twentieth century, French usage never referred to a "colonial
state," but only "colonial administrations," i.e., just sections of the
"Etat" (always capitalized in French, probably a kind of reference to
sovereignty). This may be merely a semantic distinction, but it may be worth
keeping in mind.

Lastly, Martin Klein just cautioned against assuming colonizers always
wanted to modernize, but didn't they virtually always in theory if not in
practice? We are talking about theory here.

Thanks to all for an interesting discussion

Paul Sager
New York University





On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 7:42 AM, Thomas Lappas
<tlappas4@zimbra.naz.edu>wrote:

> From: "Martin Klein" <martin.klein@utoronto.ca>
> Sent: Saturday, November 14, 2009 10:22:25 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
> Subject: Re: Fwd: Colonial state's claim to be a civilising force : REPLY
>
> A lot of percpetive things have been said in this discussion, but some
> contributors seem to think that colonial regimes were interested in
> modernizing the areas they ruled. There were some modernizers in the
> colonial regimes, but at best, most administrators thought that they
> would "civilize" Africans, and even that was limited and seen as a long
> term operation. Colonial authority was very weak, dependent on African
> intermediaries. Some of the clerks were modernizer, but administrators
> and chiefs were often threatened by modernization, something best
> depicted in the fiction of Joyce Cary and the autobiographical writings
> of Amadou Hampate Ba.
>
> Martin Klein
>
> Thomas Lappas wrote:
> > ----
> > Date: Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:48:52 -0500
> > From: "Brett O'Bannon" <bobannon@depauw.edu>
> >
> > ------------------
> >
> > Ibra certainly sparked an interesting discussion with his usual spot
on
> > observation. He sees the colonial state as consubstantially one with
> > violence. I understand Ibra to have used intentionally the Christian
> > theological term consubstantiation, Luther's notion that Christ's
body
> > and blood are inseparably one with the bread and wine shared at mass.
> > Given the announcement's reference to the (Christian) civilizing
> > mission, exploration of a consubstantial relationship seems perfectly
in
> > order.
> >
> > I'm reminded of how Iris Marion-Young (que la terre...) employed
Hanna
> > Arendt's distinction between power and violence (in Chatterjee and
> > Scheid (eds.) Ethics and Foreign Intervention, Cambridge Press,
2003).
> > Arendt notes that political theorists erroneously assume they have
> > "theorized violence when they discuss political power," when in fact
> > the former can only destroy the latter. Recalling Arendt's view that
> > violence is almost always instrumentally employed in a calculated way
as
> > a means to an end, it is rarely wanton. Fremigacci seems to agree:
"La
> > violence n'a donc pas découlé de l'arbitraire du pouvoir comme on
le
> > croit, mais de la loi.," I think Abou is correct that Fremigacci is
in
> > agreement with Ibra. It would be interesting to see what the lecture
> > does, but I assume the Hegelian perspective on law as the "pure
> > expression de la volonté de l'Etat" is actually problematized. The
> > abstract suggests a view that the colonial state may have been
> > articulated in the same early social theoretical terms that were
applied
> > to the emergent state form in Europe. But this was despite the fact
that
> > none of the conditions to which Comte, Hegel, Marx, Durkheim or Weber
> > were witness, and to which they ascribed a causal relationship to the
> > rise of the early modern state, were present. There was no organic
> > relationship between the colonial state and indigenous society. The
> > former was not a functional response to the latter's growing division
of
> > labor (though Boone's work demonstrates how metropolitan divisions of
> > labor impacted the form of the colonial state), etc.
> >
> > Fremigacci's reference to totalitarianism is certainly consistent
with
> > an Arendtian framework for an analysis of the colonial state. Lacking
> > any organic relationship between state and society, the former had no
> > power (a legitimate basis for exercising force - and states indeed
have
> > all manner of reasons for legitimately using force - en"forcing"
> > environmental regulations, maintaining sufficient domestic order to
> > allow citizens to realize their potential, etc.). Having no power -
no
> > ability to facilitate people "jointly [constituting] their manner of
> > living together" (Young 254) -- it had to rely on sheer violence.
> >
> > I would argue that today's state crisis in Africa is well understood
as
> > a problem of the lack of power, therefore the abundance of violence.
As
> > Crawford Young notes, the state has an assiduous capacity to recreate
> > itself over time. Bula Matari may not be what it once was, bit its
> > inherent flaw persists: no power, just violence. And not even a
monopoly
> > on that.
> >
> > Brett O'Bannon
> > DePauw University
> >
> >
> >
> > Brett R. O'Bannon
> > Associate Professor
> > Department of Political Science
> > DePauw University
> > tel.: 765.658.4157
> > fax: 765.658.4799
> >
>

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