Timothy Snyder: Hitler and Stalin Today: Class 8: Back to Colonialism

All right. Greetings. Good morning. The title of this lecture, Back to Colonialism, seems even more timely now than when I put it in the syllabus a few months ago. The notion of history repeating — first time as tragedy, second time as farce — which we owe to Marx, seems ever more apt.

But as I walked across — and I'm buying some time for people like me who might have fallen down four or five times on the way to a lecture — as I was walking across the ice this morning, I couldn't help but think of a very important aspect of colonialism, which is resource extraction.

So one habit of colonialism which is still with us is that it can seem easier to extract physical resources from people who are politically weaker than you are than to develop technologies in your own country that could allow you to become energy independent. And I just — you see the connection, right? The wild weather that we are having is connected to global warming, and global warming is connected to hydrocarbon dependence, and hydrocarbon dependence in turn is a legacy of imperialism. It still seems easier to extract oil and gas, at least to the elites who make money from it, than it can seem to extract energy from wind and solar and nuclear and fusion. In other words, technologies that you can build on your own territory.

So this bizarre weather that we're having, and the need that I'm feeling now to buy time for students who might be coming in late, is connected directly to the legacy of imperialism. And it's worth, of course, thinking about if this is a legacy of imperialism which will bring us down. There are many candidates for which legacy of imperialism will bring us down as a species, but this is one of them, right? Because if other countries follow what's now the lead of the Americans and push aside alternative forms of energy, and we don't make as a planet a green energy transition, then it will be very specifically a legacy of imperialism — the legacy of hydrocarbon use — that if it doesn't do us in as a species, radically changes the way that we live.

If I don't get to it — and I may not get to it to the end — another candidate for how the legacy of imperialism can do us in as a species, or at least radically change how we exist, is the habit of being imperialized. Right? The habit of being imperialized is the thing, or one of the things, which makes it seem so natural to imagine that machines can be our masters. And like other forms of imperialism, it may not seem like imperialism when it's happening. It may just seem like the way that things are. It may just seem like the natural order of things. It may just seem like what the older people are doing and therefore the younger people should do, or the younger people are doing and therefore the older people should do.

But I will just make this very minor remark. There's a reason why the podium — I've already given you the trick, but I'm going to give it to you again. There's a reason why the podium is over to the right. And the reason why the podium is over to the right is that it's now the assumption in all universities and pretty much all places of teaching that it's not the human being who's at the center, but it's the slides that are at the center. Right? And that again may seem natural to you, but 20 years ago the lectern was not on the right. 20 years ago the lectern was in the center because the human was in the center. And this is just — it's a very small example of how things change in the environment around you and then they seem natural. But the thing that seems natural may actually be precisely a form of imperialism. Right?

So, and the thing that's being colonized — again, hopefully I'll have more time for this in the last lecture — but the thing that can be colonized is your body, but the thing that can be colonized is also your mind. And as it happens, it may seem natural. It may seem like the course of nature, but the things that seem like the course of nature are very often in fact the course of history. And as the course of history, insofar as it can be understood, it can also be changed.

Okay, we have a number of things that we have to get done today, and I encourage you, if any of these things are unclear or if I seem to be moving too fast, go ahead and take the risk of asking a question. The things that I want to get through today are: number one, a reminder of some of the concepts of imperialism, which I hope that you'll think about and apply for yourself over the course of the lecture and over the course of doing the reading. Number two, I want to talk about the United States specifically as an imperial country. And I want you to know that Canada is only getting a pass this year just because I don't know enough about Canada. Right? So that just is a very specific proviso for why I'm doing this the way that I'm doing this.

This class, by the way, in the US was called Hitler, Stalin, and Us. And I find it hilarious that the University of Toronto forced me to change the title to whatever it is now, to whatever less interesting version it is now. Right. But I'm going to get my revenge by talking about Canada in years to come. I just don't know enough about Canada now. So the second part is the United States specifically and the imperial character of US history. The third part is the history of decolonization of European empires, including Russia and the Soviet Union. And then the fourth part is a kind of reprise where we look at specifically the reason why the Soviet Union or communism might have been popular to people who opposed colonialism, and why that appeal or why that sense of attraction broke down over time.

Okay. So to start out then, I'm just — just a reminder of — that looked like a question, but you're just yawning. I can tell the difference. Okay. I gotta laugh at my own jokes because, you know, if you don't laugh at your own jokes, who else is going to laugh at your jokes? Exactly. You got to set a good example, especially when they're not that funny. All right.

So, so number one is just a reminder of certain notions of what imperialism might be. And these are all ideas that have appeared in the reading, or all ideas that should already be familiar. So one definition of imperialism would be the, so to speak, the natural definition or the neutral definition, that there are just, there are so to speak, just higher and lower civilizations, and that it's normal that they will encounter each other and the higher civilization will win. So this is a common sense idea that, of course, you can encounter among imperialists today.

I note also that it was Marx's common sense understanding of the world as well. So Marx was a big supporter of the American frontier colonization of the native population of North America on precisely the logic that the Europeans represented a higher form of civilization. This was just the kind of thing which was going to naturally happen. Okay. So the number one definition of imperialism is actually kind of the absence of a definition, like the absence of introspection. It's just the notion that this happens: there are higher, there are lower civilizations, and naturally the higher ones are going to destroy the lower ones.

A second definition of imperialism is a more historical one. And this is Marx when he's being more self-conscious. So the historical definition of imperialism would be something like: there was a capitalist system which was able to marshal or generate certain kinds of technologies. These technologies allowed it to allow certain governments to control territory and, says Marx, to spread a kind of generic way of doing things around the world.

So if you remember Marx in the Communist Manifesto, the way he talks about what we would call imperialism is not very national. He's not that concerned with the Dutch, the British, the French, how they do things differently. What he sees is capitalism as having a kind of logic. It has an efficiency. It has a way of doing things which allows it to spread around the world and smooth everything out. So that is a kind of historical definition of what imperialism is, which Lenin then — and this is important to the class — which Lenin then specifies or makes practical or operationalizes in a certain way.

Lenin says that if it's true that capitalism spreads imperialism around the world, that means that this is a world system that we're opposing. And if it's a world system that we're opposing, we can oppose it at any time, right, at any place. And if it works, if our opposition works, then that proves that we were right. It proves that our science of history turned out to be correct. It means that we, as scientists of history, turned out to be correct.

And that understanding, that Leninist understanding of imperialism, was critical to the revolution of 1917, which is one of the most important turning points in modern history. Certainly one of the most important turning points in the 20th century. Not just because 1917 is the beginning of a certain kind of Leninist system, which by the way is still with us in North Korea and in China, but also because the revolution of 1917 was directly related to its antipodes. It was directly related to fascism. Without the one-party example of Lenin, it's very hard to imagine that Mussolini would have had the idea of a one-party state. Without Mussolini's one-party state, it's very unlikely that other fascist movements would have taken off as well. So for various reasons, 1917 is a world historical turning point.

Now the way that the USSR handles imperialism is then very special. And we will have covered this, but I'll remind you: from the point of view of the USSR, imperialism doctrinally is something which happens outside the USSR. So nothing the USSR does can be imperialist, no matter what it is. By definition, imperialism is something that happens in the capitalist world. So if a capitalist country invades another country, that's imperialism. If the USSR invades another country, that's the defense of socialism.

And I point this out to you not just to make a point about hypocrisy, but rather to describe the way that things in fact were. The USSR defined national questions as progressive outside the Soviet Union. So, and we'll get to this by the end, the African-American question in the United States was progressive, but it defined national questions inside the Soviet Union as reactionary and feudal. So the Ukrainian question inside the Soviet Union was not progressive. It was reactionary. It was nationalist. It was to be dismissed. Those who raised it were to be punished.

Okay, a third way of conceptualizing imperialism — and Mark Mazower's work is very strong on this, if you want to read some more history — it's a point which was made in reaction to Carl Schmitt during the Second World War. It has a long legacy. The point is the legal one: that imperialism involves a kind of legal exceptionality. Imperialism works in this way legally. What I have is a state, and what you have is a clan.

And so therefore, there's something called international law, but it applies only to states. It applies to what I have because I'm a state. But you don't have access to international law because you don't have a state. You just have a clan or a tribe or something else. So when I encounter you, you may have a political organization. In fact, you surely do, because everyone has some kind of political organization. But I, the imperial power, say that your political organization is not a state. It's something else. It's a clan. It's something primitive. And therefore, the law doesn't apply to you.

So that's the legal definition of imperialism: that an imperialist is someone who, so to speak, monopolizes the law. A German imperialist might recognize that the law applies to the British Empire, and a British imperialist might recognize that the law applies to the German Empire, but they can agree that the various political subjects that they encounter in Africa in the 1880s, 1890s are not political subjects, are not states. Okay. So that's the third definition, the legal one.

A fourth one which is very important and which you encounter in the reading, and which is relevant to all of this, is Frantz Fanon's point about the recognition now not of states but of human beings. So Fanon says that imperialism is possible in part because one group of people is capable of seeing another group of people as not human.

And he makes the more painful point that the people who are seen as not human are perfectly capable of internalizing that, right, by way of education, by way of generational experience, and thereby in their own way taking part. And Fanon uses himself. Fanon was a psychiatrist. He studied the imperial experience as a cognitive and as a developmental experience. So Fanon in his writing has a number of very touching moments where he describes himself or where he describes others as being dehumanized, so to speak, by the look, by the glance, that it's possible for a person to understand that he's not being seen as a human being.

And that this experience is part of the history of empire. This experience is part of what makes empire possible. And he has in mind very specifically the experience of race and of being seen as African.

Okay. Now, all of these points are relevant to Nazi Germany and Nazi colonialism. They're all relevant to Nazi colonialism. But I want you to notice that most of them, probably all of them, are also relevant to forms of colonialism that came before the Nazis. And so there is an interesting point made by someone I'm going to talk more about, which is Hannah Arendt, who in her famous book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, starts out with the history of empire.

And many people ask, well, why did you have to start with the history of empire? Why was that really so important? Can't we just skip the whole part about the history of empire and jump to the part that we want to read, which is about Hitler and Stalin, the Nazis and the Soviets? And indeed there are abbreviated editions of this book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, which only have the totalitarianism part and which drop the imperialism part. And admittedly they're much shorter. And that was the version that I was assigned in college.

But for Arendt, it was impossible to understand the Nazis and the Soviets without the prior history of imperialism. She regarded totalitarianism and imperialism as integrally connected in ways that I'm going to talk about in a moment. But before I do that, I just want to note that the point that Arendt was making was made in a different way by African and African-American critics of colonialism who said about Nazi Germany: well, yes, the Nazis did these things in Europe. And when they do these things in Europe, they draw a certain kind of attention.

They draw legal attention. They generate new legal terms like genocide, or they draw memorial attention. They become recognized as historical events worthy of being remembered. The victims are worthy of being remembered if they're Europeans who are killed by other Europeans. But, says Aimé Césaire and other critics of colonialism, this whole thing has been happening around the world for the past 300 or so years. It's only European wars, though, that generate this kind of conceptual and moral vocabulary. And that's because of a certain kind of recognition of Europeans by other Europeans.

And so Arendt makes the point neutrally. She says historically that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany have something to do with a larger world history of empire. And she is, so to speak, unusual in being a non-African or non-African-American person to make that point. The point is made, however, in a different way by Aimé Césaire, who says that what we're seeing here, as we remember and recognize and categorize the Second World War and its atrocities, what we're seeing is also the absence of the recognition and categorization and conceptualization of other imperial crimes.

Okay. So, which brings me to totalitarianism and Hannah Arendt's characterization of totalitarianism and the relationship between the history of empire and the history of the Nazis and the history of the Soviets. And this is of course a major question of this class or a major issue inside this class. If we're asking about Hitler, Stalin, and the present, or Hitler, Stalin, and us, are we asking specifically about the Nazis or specifically about the Soviets?

No doubt there are things that can be learned and points that can be made by studying the Soviets and the Nazis, and I will insist on that. But are we also talking about a larger history of imperialism of which the Soviets and the Nazis are just specific and very important examples, and it's from that larger history of imperialism that one must also draw lessons.

Okay. So Hannah Arendt made three or four very critical points about the relationship between the history of empire and the history of the Nazis and the Soviets. So her first point — and they flow from some of these other definitions as well. In fact, Arendt, I mean, the reason why the book Origins of Totalitarianism is so important is that it captures a number of these larger issues. So one of her points, like Fanon, one of her points had to do with recognizing the other. She talked about this in terms of thinking.

So, Arendt was a political thinker who was trained by a philosopher. The philosopher was Martin Heidegger, but that's another really long story which I can't quite get into. You'll have to take another class to get into that stuff. But so, so Arendt characterized this as the lack of thinking. What she said is that in order to think, you have to think with other people. Insofar as you are only inside your own mind, you are not in fact thinking. Thinking requires the recognition of the thinking of other people. In order to be a thinker yourself, you have to recognize that other people are thinking. Right?

So if I'm just up here standing and saying what happens to be on my mind, I'm not really thinking. If I'm talking about texts which you could read and I could read, and I'm trying seriously to imagine where you might be coming from, then I might be doing thinking right now, right? I appreciate the nods that I might be doing thinking. That's good. I might be doing — because it's in my contract — I might be doing thinking from time to time. So, but you see what I'm saying, right? Like if you're just musing, if you're just fantasizing. But Arendt says in order to think, you have to recognize the thinking capacity of other people. And if you don't do that, you end up not really being a thinker.

And she famously makes this point in a smaller book which is called Eichmann in Jerusalem. But it's a point she makes throughout her work that imperialism has to do with the luxury the imperialist has of not recognizing other people as thinking people, which leads the imperialist to a certain way of doing things.

Okay, so that's one point. She also makes the point about the law, which she makes in terms of statelessness. For Arendt, it's very important that everyone be recognized as a member of a state. Not because states are perfect. They're very often imperfect. In fact, they're always imperfect. It's always just a question of degree. But what Arendt says is that the way things truly break down, the way that people suffer in large numbers or are killed in large numbers, is when they have no access to the state.

So she talks about statelessness as a crucial category of the 20th century experience of imperialism and of Nazism and the Soviet Union, because her point is that insofar as you have a connection to a state, you have the possibility to have rights. She refers to the right to having rights, and you can't have the right to have rights unless you're connected to some institution which at least theoretically can recognize you and give you rights.

And the way that imperialism works, as we already discussed, is that one state comes in and doesn't recognize another state and therefore doesn't recognize the right to have rights of anyone involved. A famous example, or a notable example in our class, is 1939, when the Nazis invade Poland and the Soviets invade Poland, and both say there isn't really a state here. So we're not really invading a state, and therefore no one here has any rights. This is not an occupation in the traditional sense. We're just kind of taking over territory with indigenous people on the territory. That's all we're doing. There's a folk here. There are tribes. There are clans.

That's a famous example from our class because it's the Nazis and the Soviets encountering one another. But Arendt is making the larger point that this applies to the whole world and to the history of imperialism itself.

Okay. So recognition and the state. And a third very important point that she makes is the school of character point, which I ask you to bear in mind throughout this lecture and in general. Arendt says that the only — or maybe she says no, the only — she says the only school of character for modern politics is empire. And that phrase of hers, school of character, is very helpful, very pregnant. I think what she's saying is that it's the experience of being involved in empire which people carry with them even back into domestic politics.

And what she has in mind very specifically is the European contest for Africa in the 1880s, 1890s, first decade of the 20th century. She has that in mind very specifically. But her point is a much broader one: that if the experience that you have is one of cognitive inequality or political inequality, and that experience is beyond your own country, beyond the metropole, even when you're in the metropole, those are the ways that you're going to tend to see the world. And one doesn't have to push this point too far in order to see the applicability of it. And we'll return to the applicability of it a little bit later on.

So there's also this school of character, and within school of character, related to school of character, related to legal recognition and related to cognitive recognition, is the category of race, which is very important for Arendt. So race is a way of denying that someone is capable of thinking the way that you think. Race is a way of denying that someone else's state is a state in the same way that your state is a state. And racism is also, says Arendt, part of this school of character.

So for Arendt, race very specifically is the way that political systems become destructive or become imperial. She has very expansive language on this. For example, she refers to race as the way that humanity could come to an end. The unnatural end of humanity is one way she discusses race.

Okay. And then finally there's a definition which is just structural, which I ask that you keep in mind, and that is the nature that in an empire there's a center and there's a periphery, and that there are various kinds of — so putting aside how you get there and what it means — that when you look at an empire structurally, you see a center, a metropole, and you see a periphery, and the relations of inequality tend to obtain less in the center and more in relation between the center and the periphery.

Okay, so this brings me to what has to be a brief history of the United States and a partial history of the United States, because naturally for our purposes we're focusing on the question of empire. And so when we define what the United States is, I think it's very important not to say, well, deep down it's only an empire, right? There are imperial qualities of it, but it's also a republic and it also has democratic or semi-democratic ways of choosing legal authority.

So there are a couple of points here that I want to make clear. The first is that when you're talking about empire, it's very important not to just kind of sweep everything else away and say, 'Aha, this is just imperialism.' Right? Because yeah, there's a lot of imperialism going on in the world. But when you sweep away all the detail and you say it's just imperialism, you find yourself with a kind of empty category, because what is it if it's just imperialism? How is it connected to other things? And that's the second point I want to make.

It's historically the case that you can have a republic and an empire at the same time. And the way that this works — and you can have a democracy and an empire at the same time. This goes all the way back to the Greeks. It's just a question of who the demos is. So for the ancient Greeks, for the Athenians, as a citizen of the state, one of the rights you had was the right to colonize.

So the normal critique of the Greeks is that not everybody was a citizen. And of course that's true. Women weren't citizens. Slaves weren't citizens. But one also has to notice that part of being a citizen was the right to colonize, right? And so in this way having a democracy or having a republic can be directly connected to imperialism. And this is a feature, of course, of the early United States as well, where there were citizens, and one of the rights that citizens had — although it wasn't spelled out this way as it was in Greece — but one of the rights that citizens had was to colonize, whereas slaves did not have that right. And of course people that were encountered along the way did not have that right.

Now it's a very specific — it's a very specific, but it becomes general. It's a very specific element of the American experience that the Americans were colonies themselves. So the Revolutionary War in the United States, which begins in 1776, was and very self-consciously was defined as a war of colonies, right? 13 colonies, 13 British colonies against the king. And it was a war about what the rights of the colonists were, on the logic that the colonists were themselves British subjects, and if they weren't granted the rights of British subjects, then they had the right to rebel against the king. That's the American Declaration of Independence.

And so there's a kind of — there's a dialectic built into this from the beginning, which is that from the beginning the Americans — you probably know this, that they won the Revolutionary War. So I won't, like, I won't go into the details of that, consequences for Canada too. But there's a dialectic built into this from the beginning, which is that the Americans defined their war as a war of liberation against a distant empire, which of course it was — it was many things, but one of the things that it was was a war of liberation against a distant empire.

And I note this because, not to point out the hypocrisy of it — we can get to that later — but to point out that this is going to be a feature of anti-imperial wars henceforth. That sure, you may be fighting, you may be fighting and you may win an anti-imperial war against a distant imperial power, but that does not mean that the next thing you do yourself won't be imperial. And this is not just a point about the Americans, it's a generic point. So the fact that a struggle is anti-imperial does not mean that the next step will not be imperial.

And this applies to Africa and Asia. This applies to human beings in general. So there's no innocence in fighting against an empire. And the people who win when they fight against empires very often then establish empires, but on a smaller scale. Now what's a little bit special about the Americans is they then go on to establish an empire on a much bigger scale, right? Which is where we're now moving.

But I want you to catch that, right? Because whether we're in Indonesia or wherever we are, a successful anti-imperial struggle can very often lead to essentially the repetition of imperial patterns of rule, just on a different scale. Right? So another way of saying this is that history doesn't end. So there are various tempting notions of how history can end. One of them is that history ends when communism and fascism end. That's what people said in 1989.

But another tempting idea is that history ends when the nation achieves liberation. Because of course, the nation is good and the nation is innocent, and all of the nation's problems always came from the foreign empire. If it weren't for them, we would be wonderful people who would live in harmony with each other. It's all their fault. And no matter how terrible imperial oppression is, that is never true. Right? History doesn't end when the nation achieves sovereignty, it goes on. And the people inside the nation are just as capable of oppression as the people beyond the nation. Okay. Score a point for history. It goes on.

So, all right. So with the Americans, the elimination of the British Empire had a couple of important consequences that I'm sure will be familiar to many of you. One is that it meant that native populations of that part of what we now call North America, native populations no longer had a backer. This is especially true after the War of 1812, which again I'm sure Canadians are familiar with. That's the one where you got to burn the White House, you know, right, something like that. Okay.

So especially after the War of 1812 and the withdrawal of British power from this part of North America, local populations, Indians, Native Americans didn't have a backer against the emerging American state. And the departure of British power meant that the original 13 colonies, which have established themselves as a state under their constitution, are now capable of colonizing, where the only opposition is going to be the native populations.

Now, of course, this could not have been — and this is a feature of empire generally — it could not have been understood as simply a colonization process, because the people who were doing it thought of themselves as having just liberated themselves, right? So, if we defeated the British, of course we have the right to take this territory, as it were, from the British, but the British weren't the people. They weren't the population.

And so I make this point because again, something that happens in the history of the United States is also very typical of the history of empire in general, where one imperial power can encounter another imperial power and it can defeat that imperial power, right? But the people who are mostly concerned are not the ones who are the subjects of either imperial power.

So when the Americans — when the British withdraw, because the Americans don't really beat them in the War of 1812 — when the British withdraw in the War of 1812, the result is that native populations are exposed to American power. And the larger point is that from this point forward there are going to be a number of wars between increasingly global, between global empires, in which one has to think, okay, but the main consequence of this has to do with other people.

And just to look forward a little bit: when the Americans defeat the Mexicans in the 1840s or the Spanish in the 1890s — Mexico isn't an empire, it's a republic, but the people that Mexico is ruling are often the native populations of what is now the southwest of the United States, right? And so they're shifting from Mexico to the US, but it's not as though the people concerned were necessarily that well represented in Mexico either.

And when the Americans defeat the Spanish in 1898, it's one empire shifting to another. But one then has to ask, okay, but what about the people living on the island of Puerto Rico or the people living in the Philippines? These are the people most concerned. Okay, so I'm sure you've grasped that point. It's pretty elemental.

Now, in this American shift from being part of an empire to being an independent country, one of the things which is already present is slavery. So the 13 colonies of the

United States were very much bound up, all of them to one degree or another. The northern ones may be less so, the southern ones may be more so, but all of them were bound up in a worldwide slave trade, which by the 19th century was heavily focused on sub-Saharan Africa. There's a larger history of slavery. By the way, as we've referred to very briefly, the history of slavery is as old as history, probably older, but the slave trade by the 19th century was largely a transatlantic business involving people from sub-Saharan Africa.

When the United States was established, slavery was already taking place, right? So one shouldn't imagine that, oh, the Americans in 1776 invented slavery, right? It was there as a very intrinsic and central part of the colonization of what we call the Western Hemisphere, and it had to do with—and this is the capitalist point—it had to do with the appetites and desires of the politically dominant people in Europe.

So when one thinks of why there is slavery in Hispaniola—well, that's what's now Haiti and the Dominican Republic, that island—it has to do with sugarcane and appetite, right? It has to do with things that people don't really need. You don't—I know I've made this point to you before and I'm not moralizing, especially if you got to lecture on time after having your, you know, pan au chocolat and coffee—but like, coffee and chocolate are not actually things that anyone needs. They are desires. They can be very strong desires, but they're desires that people only develop after having been exposed to the thing itself. And in both of those cases, the thing itself came from the Western Hemisphere, and Europeans developed appetites for it. And that's one of the big reasons why there is slavery—is appetite.

Of course, there's also profit, as in the American South with cotton. Cotton for a while was very profitably harvested by way of slave labor, and clothing is not an appetite, right? Clothing is much more of a necessity. But either way, the point is that by the time the United States come into existence, the territories of what are the eastern seaboard states were already deeply involved in a world slave trade.

What is a bit special about the US is that as the empires in the 19th century move away from slavery, as the main mother empire of the United States moves away from slavery, the United States continues to practice slavery until the time of the Civil War of 1861 to 1865, which is a war between slave states and non-slave states. And during the course of the war, slavery becomes a central issue. The politics of the Civil War have to do with will there be more slave states or will there be more non-slave states. Slavery as an issue becomes central, and the abolition of slavery only becomes possible in the middle of the war.

And it's the middle of the war which leads to Abraham Lincoln's famous definition of the country as being of, by, and for the people, which can plausibly mean at this point perhaps all of the people. It's a redefinition of who the people might be in the future. However, there's a famous saying about the revolution of 1848 which you may have heard—that it's a turning point where history failed to turn—which is not really true. It's too clever. Things did change in Europe after 1848. For example, serfdom was abolished.

But in some way the Civil War was a turning point in which American history failed to turn, or at least it didn't turn all the way. So after the northern victory in what we call strangely the Civil War, after the northern victory, the Constitution was amended such that African Americans became full citizens with the right to vote. However, the Reconstruction—the process by which this legal change was to become a political change—essentially failed.

The Union Army, the army of the northern states, was present—a southern point of view would say occupied—the southern states for about a dozen years and then withdrew essentially to continue to fight wars in the West, to which we'll return. But the Reconstruction process only lasts so long as the Union Army is present in a political sense. After the Union Army is gone, southern states find ways to exclude African Americans from voting, which then leads to very different political outcomes and ends up establishing rules of quasi-legal or legal discrimination, cultural, quasi-legal, legal discrimination against African Americans, which are known collectively as Jim Crow, which involve not only the de facto absence of the right to vote, which goes on for almost a century, but also practices such as segregation in schools, segregation in transport, segregation in public life in general.

And so this is, if you like, Hannah Arendt's school of character, because of course slavery was an imperial reality. It was there before America was there. It schooled people in a certain way, so much so that American states were willing to fight a horribly bloody war in defense of it. But also so much so that after the end of the Civil War, it still seemed natural to many people that blacks should not vote. It seemed natural to many people that blacks should be segregated. It seemed natural to many people that blacks should be framed, should be set up, convicted, lynched for crimes that they did not in fact commit.

Okay, so that's one aspect of the school of character point. Another aspect of the school of character point is American western expansion—that the Civil War is essentially an interruption in the larger historical process of American expansion to the West. The turning points—there are many turning points—but the turning points here are the Mexican-American War of 1846 to 1848, which is essentially an American offensive war against Mexico, which after victory leads to the inclusion of California and Texas and what is now the Southwest of the United States.

But it also includes a series of smaller wars against native populations over the course of the entire 19th and into the beginning of the 20th century. The creation of reservations. The mass movement of peoples. So Native Americans in the United States generally now don't live where they lived before because they were, as we would now say, ethnically cleansed from one part of North America to another part of North America. So there are a few exceptions, but in general native populations were put on reservations in places which were not actually native to them.

So there was a process—and I wish I didn't have to be so brief about it—of military defeat, depopulation, and then ethnic cleansing and forced containment within reservations, which is an essential element of American frontier colonization. So frontier colonization is an important term because it involves—or it's also called settlement colonialism. It involves taking over territory but also replacing the population with your own people, right?

So it seems natural if you're—I mean, this is a vexed question of whether you as a Canadian—if you're a Canadian, you know, go on trips to the United States, but it may seem natural if you go to Utah that you will find people of European origin. They haven't been there for that long, right? Just as is the case in, you know, in Alberta or, you know, it's the same in Saskatchewan, right? Europeans haven't been there. It may seem natural, but these people have replaced native populations.

Okay, and then the third element of American—the third imperial angle, or the third most important—I think it's in this order—would be Latin America. So the United States, as it became a larger power, and its power was based on the combination of fertile soil, as Hitler noticed, large-scale agriculture, the application of technology to agriculture, the combination of agriculture and industry—the United States was simultaneously in control of some of the most fertile agricultural territory in the world, and alongside the Germans, it was a pioneer of industry.

Okay, so the third angle, before we get into the 20th century, or as we get into the 20th century, of American imperial energy would be Latin America. And the turning point here was a quick war that was won against Spain in 1898. And so I'm just going to repeat the point: many of the wars that we now will see are one empire against another empire. So was Spanish rule in Puerto Rico better or worse than American rule in Puerto Rico? They were both forms of imperial rule. It was a Spanish colony. Now Puerto Rico is an American colony, right? It's still an American colony.

So we have another name for it, which isn't coming to mind immediately, but it's de facto an American colony, right? And so from an American point of view, you can say—and I'm just noting this generic feature of it—from an American point of view, a war against another empire can be described as a war of liberation, even though you then just establish your own empire instead.

So in the war with the Spanish, the territories concerned were Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and a few others. This war brought America into a maritime colonial position which it hadn't been in before. It is that you can conveniently date it as the beginning of a series of American interventions in Central and South America, which, as you might have noticed, continue.

But in the early 20th century, these were well explained by the capitalist explanation of imperialism. These had to do with American business interests, which were better served from an American point of view by some kinds of governments rather than other kinds of governments. And it's fair to say that over the course of the 20th century, both before and after the Cold War, the Americans tended to favor governments which would suppress popular movements and in particular suppress labor unions, because labor unions got in the way of American businesses making profits.

So the Marxist explanation of imperialism doesn't always work that well, but in some cases it works fairly well. And the US and Latin America is a pretty good example of where it does work well. Okay, so this brings us to the first half of the 20th century and the two world wars. And here I just want to make a point about how the Americans fare in the two world wars.

And this is a point which would be very familiar if we were teaching the class from an East European point of view, but from a North American point of view, it may not be so obvious. The Americans come in late, they suffer relatively few casualties, and they end up in a much stronger position after both wars. So the Americans come in very late in the First World War, are on the victorious side, and have a big say in how things are arranged afterwards.

In the Second World War, the Americans don't come in quite so late. They come in in 1941, and they do take meaningful losses, meaningful casualties in the Pacific theater, and then meaningful casualties later in Europe, but not on the scale of the Soviet Union and not on the scale of some of their allies. But as after the First World War, after the Second World War, the Americans emerged with their own economy not only intact but growing at a rapid rate.

So in both world wars—I'm painting with a very broad brush here—but in both world wars, other imperial powers suffer more and the Americans suffer less, and the Americans end up relatively stronger than others at the end of each world war. Okay, this brings us to the third thing that we want to accomplish today, which is to describe, again in a very broad arc, the experience of decolonization from the European empires.

Okay, so how best to start this? I think the best way to start this is to think about this Second World War and to think about Russia and the Soviet Union as powers that win, so to speak, in this local clash of empires. So we've gone over this before. It's familiar. It's in the reading. But in the 1930s and 1940s, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany are in their own different ways trying to recapitulate the history of world empire.

The Nazi ideology is: empire is normal. Empire is a clash of races. It's just the way the world should be. We probably have a superior race. Therefore, we're going to fight a war against the Soviet Union, kill the Jews, open up natural racial competition, probably will win. Note the 'probably,' by the way. It's a very specific feature of fascism that it believes in the test, right? And so at the end of the war, Hitler didn't make excuses—I mean, I'm not trying to make Hitler sound virtuous—but at the end of the war, Hitler didn't say, 'Well, we would have won except for this.' What Hitler said was, 'Okay, the Slavs turned out to be less inferior than I thought,' right?

So Hitler accepted, he accepted so to speak history's verdict. That he said the Russians—like at the beginning it was all Stalin and the Jews, and as the war went on it was more the young strong Russian people—was how Hitler talked about it. So anyway, but from Hitler's point of view, the larger point is it's a world of empire. We should have our own empire. We're going to have an empire which starts in Central Europe and goes across into the Urals, will be an empire like the British and the Americans.

From the point of view of London and Stalin, all of their rhetoric is anti-imperial. But similarly, they're trying to create a big state which can defend itself against or have its way with the British and the Americans. So broadly, it's very similar, right? Both Hitler and Stalin see the world as a world of British empire in the past and a world of American empire in the future. And they're trying to build systems which can survive, sustain themselves, maybe even triumph in that imperial world in which the category of empire is taken for granted.

In the Second World War, which in Europe is largely a clash between the Soviet Union—with American economic power behind it—but the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union wins. And as the Soviet Union wins, it is able to establish what is pretty clearly imperial domination over a good deal of Eastern Europe. And you heard about some of this in the last lecture. I want to make a couple of points though.

One is that we don't want to lose track of the Russian Empire as a frontier empire. So I've just given you the long American story. Not—it wasn't that long. It was 10 minutes or so. But I've just given you the American story of frontier empire. One has to remember that contemporaneous with this, although beginning a bit earlier, there's a very similar story happening in Asia, where Muscovy is conquering Asia step by step by step, North Asia, step by step by step, in the 15th, 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, meeting the British and then the Americans in Alaska. Russian colonial power goes all the way down into California. At one point there are vestiges of Russian imperial power pretty much all the way down that part of the coast of the Pacific.

So the Russians, like the Americans, are a frontier empire that annexes territory, which exploits local people, which exploits resources, which brings with it the notion of European superiority, which brings with it European technologies, which brings with it the denial of sovereignty of local political organizations, and which makes its way over the course of centuries—not just like, but not so differently from the Americans—to the Pacific Ocean.

That is a long history of empire which has to be remembered, because otherwise one can take Russia for granted just as one could take the United States for granted. But in fact, these are relatively new entities which conquered a lot of territory during the age of empire. And this form of empire, this land-based form of empire, proves to be so far somewhat more stable than the maritime empires. But both the United States and the Russian Empire were also products of an age of empire. It's just that most of their imperial success was across large contiguous land territories rather than across the ocean, where empire proved harder to sustain.

So I'm pausing there because the Soviet Union, among many other things, is the preservation of most of the territory of the Russian Empire. Had there not been a Russian Empire, there couldn't have been a Soviet Union. Right? The Soviet Union in terms of territory was basically the Russian Empire minus Finland, minus Poland.

So after the Second World War, the Soviet Union expands territorially to the west. Again, we've gone over this already a bit before, but the Soviet Union takes a bit of Finland, it takes a bit of Czechoslovakia, it takes a bit of Romania, but it annexes three entire countries: the Baltic states—Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia. Three sovereign states are completely annexed.

And then there's a slightly more interesting, complicated story of the relationship between the Soviet Union and Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, which it does not annex, but upon which it imposes, by a mixture of the presence of its own armies and other kinds of political pressure, replica regimes. So this Leninist system, which we've described in previous lectures and which you know from the reading, is imposed in a kind of copycat way across the region, regardless of previous politics, regardless of what side people were on in the war—none of that matters.

So Romania and Hungary were basically German allies; they get the same treatment as Poland and Czechoslovakia, which were not German allies. It has nothing to do with historical justice. It also has nothing to do with how ripe the countries were for revolution. Czechoslovakia had a big working class. Romania had a tiny working class. None of this matters. The same system is imposed everywhere across the region.

So this is an interesting kind of imperialism because what it says is: look, these are sovereign states, right? They're sovereign states, but in fact they are sovereign states at least notionally, but because they're ruled by the party—and the Communist Party of Poland is dominated by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the Communist Party of Hungary dominated by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union—in fact, they are imperial dependencies of the USSR.

There's an even more interesting question and a more complicated one about the success of the Soviet model in general, and I have to remark upon this, although I don't think technically you'd want to say this was imperialism. The formula that Lenin creates after the First World War, or during the First World War, has huge success around the world after the Second World War. And interestingly, the circumstances which make it successful in Russia largely repeat themselves in China.

So it's a country which is not really industrialized. It's a country which suffers a horrifying occupation and civil war. This is China during the Second World War. The occupier is of course Japan, right? It suffers a horrifying occupation and civil war. And then the notion of Marxism as being a liberation from imperialism, Marxism as involving an alliance between workers and a much larger class of peasants, right? And all of this enables the victory of the Chinese Communist Party.

And again, this isn't our main subject, but it would be, I think, improper not to mention it. The Chinese Communist Party then follows the Stalinist model of modernization all the way through, which means that just as there had to be, so to speak, famine in Ukraine, there also had to be famine in China. And China, as a much larger country, a much more populous country, has famine on a scale which is 10 times larger in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The largest man-made disaster of the 20th century, except perhaps for the world wars, was the artificial famine in China of the Great Leap Forward. And then it also follows the Soviet pattern of having a terror against intellectuals and others, which is of course the Cultural Revolution of the 1970s, which very much influences how China functions today. And of course, China is still Leninist in this system, and China has proven that you can have Leninism and capitalism at the same time, right? Which is—okay, I'm going to leave it there because there may be other countries which are moving in that direction at the moment, but I'm just going to pause there.

So the Soviet model, as an anti-imperial alliance of workers and peasants and a program for modernization, is politically quite successful. It appears in China. It appears in Vietnam. It appears in Cambodia. It appears in part of Korea. And various elements of it appear elsewhere in the world, including of course in Cuba.

And Vietnam, by the way, is one of the places—Korea is another—but Vietnam is one of the places where the Soviet model then encounters the growing power of the American state. And in Vietnam, you have a new version of these wars where from each side you present the other side as being imperial, right? So the Americans present the Soviets as being imperial, and the Soviets present the Americans as being imperial. Each side has a point.

But it's a very curious war in the development of American power, just to mention this, because the Americans kill something like a million people, using horrifying methods, and nevertheless manage to present themselves—and still do—as the victims in the conflict, and as the conflict as a traumatic experience primarily for themselves. And again, I refer you back to some of the early definitions of empire, right? Not recognizing the subjectivity of the other. For example, whatever the experience is, the experience is chiefly your own.

Okay, but my point here was the period from 1945 to, let's say, the 1960s is one where it seems that the Soviet model of empire, whether direct or whether by imitation, seems to be doing very well. And no matter what one thinks the definition of empire is, some of this is certainly imperial, even as of course it defines itself as anti-imperial, right? The Soviet Union never ceases to define itself as anti-imperial.

Okay, so good. So we've gotten through a bit of the second part, which is the Soviets. Now let's think about the Europeans. If you look at the history of the 20th century from the 40s, 50s, and 60s, it looks like the Soviets are consolidating, their model is doing well, and the Europeans are retreating from their control of the world. If you look at it from the point of the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s of the last century, it looks a bit different. It looks like, oh, both the Soviets and the Europeans are losing control over their parts of the world.

So it's a bit of a question of perspective. Like if you grew up as I did in the 1970s and 80s, it certainly appeared that the Soviets were still holding on, whereas European colonization was essentially done for. But if you look at it from the point of view of when you grew up a bit later, it can look more like, okay, well, the Soviet imperialism has also failed, and maybe that was one more example of European imperialism that failed. I leave it to you to think about.

But so now we need to move on though to the larger European decolonization process. So the European decolonization process has one major cause, and this cause goes back to the thing that I presented perhaps in a slightly hostile way as the civilizational view of what makes empire possible—that there are higher and lower civilizations. Okay, if we state that in a less moralizing way.

One of the things which did enable empire—and I think this is pretty much incontestable—one of the things which did enable empire were differences in technology, especially military technology. It just makes a huge difference whether you have the machine gun or not. For example, a lot of American success in the West, a lot of British success in India can simply be explained—I mean, it's a first-order explanation, but it goes a long way—can simply be explained by the presence of superior firepower.

So, and a lot of the success of empire can also be explained by non-human actors, that is to say, contagious diseases. And the contagious disease aspect has a way of burning itself out, right? Within decades, or at least within a low number of centuries, you can bring diseases to a new environment and that can help you control that environment, but only for a while, right? I mean, it may mean that, as in North America and South America, you end up killing a very significant part of the local population, but the advantage wears itself out, and it applies more in some places than in others.

So, for example, when the Germans invade the Soviet Union, they have no advantage in infectious diseases. On the contrary, they're afraid of infectious diseases. The Europeans in Africa had much less of an advantage in infectious disease—really none—than they did in North America. But my point is that one of the larger sources of imperial success was infectious disease, and that has a way of canceling itself out over time.

The other one which canceled itself out over time is technological advantage. So the advantages in military technology which the Europeans enjoyed had largely canceled themselves out by the second half of the 20th century, and the world war was part of that. But it's really more of a marker than anything else.

Now there's a very special instance of all of this, which is Japan. So from the point of view of Europeans—or many Europeans anyway—Japan was an Asian country and therefore to be lumped in with the other Asian countries and the other African countries as inferior. Japan, however, managed in the late 19th century and the early 20th century to essentially do a copycat European modernization, which included the development of military technology, such that the Japanese managed to defeat the Russian Empire famously in 1905.

Which was a tremendous—that was a huge turning point because it was—I mean, it's of course a weird approximation to call the Russian Empire European. But the Russo-Japanese War and the defeat of the Russian Empire was nevertheless shocking because it demonstrated that a formerly colonized territory could defeat a colonizing territory. A non-European entity could defeat what was seen as a European entity.

And then the Japanese went on from there to carry out quite successful imperial expansion of their own, largely in continental Asia, in China. The Second World War begins in Asia with Japanese invasions of China, right? It's a completely different timeline. The war starts early in the 1930s rather than in the late 1930s.

But so the point that I'm making here, though, with respect to the history of European empire, is that Japan succeeds in the first part of the Second World War in taking over Dutch and British possessions in Asia, right? They essentially romp their way through the British and the Dutch possessions in Asia. And this is relevant because it not only does it have a demonstration effect—like when the British have to withdraw from Singapore, for example, this is a shock.

Not only does it have a demonstration effect, it means that if the British, or for that matter the Dutch or the French, if they want to come back, they have to come back, right? Because they've been defeated. They've been driven out. And when you've been driven out, that means that you have to come back in different conditions, where the level of military technology is no longer so unequal, but also you have to come back in different moral conditions.

So if empire is partly based on the notion that—okay, not that I'm superior, that you're superior and I might have internalized it, right? What does it mean when you're defeated in a war, right? What does it mean for—and defeated by Asians? So the British and the Dutch are defeated by Asians. So what does that mean for other Asians? It means quite a lot actually. And so the British have to come back. So they have to come back. They have to come back in different conditions. And those conditions include, so to speak, moral or psychological conditions which are different.

So the end of European empire in Asia and to some extent in Africa has to do, in a very broad sense, with exhaustion in the war, right? The Americans do a very good job in the Second World War, as they do in the First, of making sure the Europeans come out of it weaker economically. But it very specifically has to do with defeat by Japan and then the need to come back, which the Europeans—and I've already foreshadowed this—but which the Europeans then failed to do.

So from the point of view of—now let's look at it from the point of view of the European powers. And this is an important point: there really weren't that many European nation states. So the Europeans now have a story about themselves which is about nation states. You might have noticed, right, that when they assemble their soccer teams or, you know, when they assemble whatever they assemble, it's like France calls itself l'Hexagone, right? Like there's this notion that we have these discrete territories.

They're in Europe. Belgium, you know, the Netherlands, right? The Netherlands was for about 300 years a small European base of a vast global trade empire. And if you go to its museums, the story is told there. Belgium in the 19th century rampaged through Africa, exploited the Congo as few territories have ever been exploited. And again, if you go to its museums, this story is present, although it's not actually told.

Great Britain, right? Great Britain's a little island. Except that for about 300 years, it managed to control a great deal of the world, and so on and so on, right? There isn't really a national history of these places. They've gone to a lot of trouble in the last 70 years to make one up, but there isn't really a national history of these places. These places were always already empires.

When the French—like the story of the French Revolution, it's a story that happens in Paris, right? Like there's a Bastille and there are guillotines. But before the French Revolution and after the French Revolution, it was an empire. Like this is the trick of French history: like they tell you, okay, there was a republic, there was an empire, there was a republic, there was an empire, there was a republic, there was an empire, there was a republic, there was an empire. And this is actually a bit of a distraction from the fact that it was always an empire, right? Until the early 1960s, it was always an empire. It was always an empire, right?

And so where am I going with this? Where I'm going with this is that when we talk about Europe, we're dealing in the 2020s with a retrospect, right, with false national histories that have been internalized. Most of these places were never nation states. They were forced to become nation states because they lost imperial wars. And that's a recent experience from 1945 onward. After 1945, they lost imperial wars.

The Dutch try to go back to Indonesia in 1948 and they lose. Oh, and by this is the point I was trying to make from a European point of view. Okay, if you're the Dutch, you lost the war to the Germans. You suffered occupation. In 1944, people are literally starving in the Netherlands. It is a terrible experience of the war. And what you're thinking is—that I think it's fair to say this is a predominant way of thinking—what you're thinking is, well, when the war is over, we're going

to get the colonies back, and that's going to change everything for the better. And that's what the Dutch try to do. They literally go back to Indonesia, and they lose, but they go back to Indonesia. The French is a much more—it's a much more serious story, right? The French lose control in Vietnam, and they try to keep it, and they fight and they fight and they fight in Vietnam until 1954, when the Americans won't pay for it anymore, and then they stop. And who are the French soldiers in the Vietnam War? They are largely Africans, right? So it's a colonial war in a double sense. The French are fighting to maintain a colony, and they're doing it with an army which is largely colonial in its origin. And then, if you want, there's a triple sense, which is that the Americans are paying for it, and when the Americans no longer pay for it, the French have to pull out, and then the Americans take up the war in Vietnam themselves, which they then, in various ways, fight for almost another 20 years before losing decisively and being forced to pull out.

Okay. Now, the French lose in Vietnam, and just as they lose in Vietnam, rebellion breaks out in Algeria. They lose in Algeria in 1962. And I realize there's a longer, more complicated story one could say besides they lose, but that they lose is really the crucial thing. There's a long process here which goes from the 1940s to the 1970s, in which, in general, the Europeans lose imperial wars, and as they lose imperial wars, they reconstitute themselves in a different form. And this is where things start to get a bit interesting. A key moment could be 1956. So in 1956, a whole bunch of different things happen at the same time. One of the things that happens in 1956 is a turning point in the attractiveness of the Soviet project. As you might remember, Stalin dies in 1953. Everyone—this is one of the truisms of history—is that everybody dies. They all die eventually. They all die, right? I mean, you know, too soon, too late, anybody's call, but they all do. They all do die, including the ones who don't think they're going to. So Stalin dies in 1953. There's an ideological, moral, psychological crisis inside the Soviet Union. The Soviet satellite states begin certain kinds of experiments. And this culminates in the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, which is pretty much a straight-up war of imperial control, which the Soviets are able to win.

Meanwhile, there's another imperial adventure going on at the same time, right at the same time, which is important. And that has to do with Egypt. So there's a canal in Egypt, the Suez Canal, built by humans. It was built by the British. They could have access to India. Control of the Suez Canal was very important. The new Egyptian state asserted control of the Suez Canal, and the British and the French, together with the Israelis, made a secret deal that they would all attack Egypt at the same time and regain control of the Suez Canal. This has a couple of consequences. One is that it becomes a bit harder to criticize the Soviets for invading Hungary because it's happening at the same time. Another, though, is that it reveals, as did the French withdrawal from Vietnam, the dominant power of the Americans, because the reason why the Suez Canal adventure doesn't go forward is that the Americans oppose it, and they tell the British to stop, and so it doesn't happen, right? And so those things happened in 1956.

And then also in 1956, the Belgian foreign minister, a man called Paul-Henri Spaak, makes an interesting speech in which he says the thing which I'm trying to convey to you, but he says it openly and directly. He says, 'The Europeans once survived and thrived by way of maritime empire. We are losing this, and we find ourselves confronted by other powers, the Americans, and therefore we have to do something new.' And the thing that they do which is new is called the Treaty of Rome in 1957. The Treaty of Rome. It brings together the Benelux countries—Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg—together with France and West Germany. And it is the kernel, the beginning of a larger European integration project. It's the kernel of what becomes then called the European Communities, which is very tedious. Since 1992, it's been called the European Union. But for our purposes here, the crucial thing to notice is that the European Union is a post-imperial entity.

Okay? Now, that's not how it talks about itself. So, if you're an empire, you may not always talk about yourself as an empire. And if you used to be an empire, that may not be the point that you make about yourself. That may not be the first point you make about yourself. You may say something else, or you may ignore the fact completely, sweep it under the rug. What the European integration project creates is a new economic and then political space for post-imperial powers that are losing their colonies. And as they lose their colonies, they preserve certain things. So, one of the features about the 21st century economy that you may have heard of is offshore banking and dark money. The origins of offshore banking and dark money have to do with the end of European colonialism, as people and institutions tried to find ways to preserve wealth and to siphon it off. That set of institutions, which was created after the Second World War, then has a second life for oligarchs and other people in the 21st century. Okay, just to note. So it's not as though the Europeans, when they departed, lost everything necessarily, right? But they did depart, and what they created was a substitute for empire, which is not an empire. It's something completely different. The Germans don't—the big countries don't dominate the small countries particularly. People have free movement. You can't say that there's a metropole inside the European Union. You know, Berlin matters, Paris matters, but Brussels also matters. Lots of places matter. But for our purposes, the crucial thing about this is that it's a post-imperial entity. And as empires lose their imperial possessions, they join. And again, this is a historical point. It's not what people said, right? So you'll hardly find a European leader who says, 'Okay, I just lost a war, and now I'm going to...' But that's how it happened. They found nicer ways to talk about it.

So de Gaulle, for example, who was a master of rhetoric—such a master of rhetoric that to this day practically nobody in France knows that more French people fought on the German side than on the Allied side during the Second World War. But now you know. Now that knowledge is safe with you forever. But what de Gaulle talked about was the choice for Europe. Nice phrase, that the choice for Europe was made for him when they lost in Algeria. So 1962 is the moment when the French decisively move towards Europe. And yes, it was a choice, but it was a choice which was highly conditioned by the loss of empire. And the same was true for the British when they tried to join in the late 60s and early 70s. An interesting thing about Brexit—I don't know, do you guys remember Brexit? Okay, so sorry. So the interesting thing about Brexit is that Brexit involved the British forgetting why they joined the European project in the first place. Because in the late 60s and early 70s, they didn't say it directly, they didn't say it out loud, but it was clear that what was going on was, 'Okay, we're losing empire. We don't want to do this thing with the French because it involves the French. We don't want to do this thing with the French, but we have to do this thing with the French because we've lost empire.' It was all common sense. It was all pragmatic, right? And it worked. It worked. It sustained Britain.

But by 2016, it had become, 'Oh wait, the European Union is this foreign thing with like this incredible ideology, and why are we here in the first place?' The reason you were there in the first place was because you lost India. That's why you're there, and you lost everything else. That's why you're in the European Union. But by the time the British got to 2016, the whole imperial rhetoric had flipped around. So it wasn't, 'Okay, we have to do Europe because we lost empire.' It had become, 'Oh look, the European Union is an incredible imperial power which has been oppressing us the whole time, right? And so now we have to liberate ourselves by leaving.' Okay. So, like a lot of things, like a lot of perhaps undesirable things that happen, Brexit had a lot to do with forgetting elementary history of your own country. And I don't mean to be unfair about this, because this is true about everybody. It's certainly true about Americans. But imperial history is often the part of your history which is easiest to forget, and you might forget it even when it's useful for you to remember it, as was, I think, the case for the British, and especially, I should say, the English, really, because the Scots voted to stay. But it's something that the British tended to forget in 2016. Okay, I think we're doing all right.

So the British in the early 70s, there's a major enlargement in 1973 in which the British join, the Danes join, and Ireland joins. And then the process continues in the 1970s and 1980s when the Spanish and the Portuguese lose their overseas possessions, democratize, and then join the European Union. And those things tend to go hand in hand: losing empire, democratizing, and joining—sorry, I shouldn't have said the European Union, but they joined the European integration process in the 1980s. And it's at that point, if you want, that this history then starts to join with the decolonization of Eastern Europe. So again, like I said before, a lot depends on your point of view. If you're looking at it in the 50s and 60s, you'll say the Europeans are losing everything, the Soviets are going strong. But if you look at it in the 90s or in the early 21st century, you might say, well, what's happening is one long decolonization process of which Eastern Europe eventually joins. So some turning points in this decolonization process would be 1968. So 1968 is the moment in which the Soviet rationale—for let me put it this way—the non-imperial rationale is given up by the imperial power. So if you're an imperial power and you carry out a war, you usually, at least by the late 20th century, you have some rationale for why you're doing it besides that it's an imperial war.

I mean, admittedly, like the Americans in 2026 have gone back to like not having a rationale and just saying, actually, we admit it's about the oil. But what happens in 1968 is that the Soviets invade Czechoslovakia. They do it with their Warsaw Pact allies, but of course it's mainly a Soviet action. But they don't do it in the name of anything. They admit that it's just about power. They don't care about Marxism. And this is why 1968 is a very painful moment for those who cared about Marxism or thought it had a liberatory potential, because the people who were in charge of Czechoslovakia in 1968 very much believed in Marxism. The people in charge of Czechoslovakia in 1968 were talking about socialism with a human face. The people in charge of Czechoslovakia thought, well, we can combine—it's not clear they could have, but this is what they thought—we can combine the lean role of the party with free speech and elections. We can kind of make it all fit together somehow.

And the Soviets put an end to this in August of 1968 by invading. But it's not so much the invasion, but the kind of soullessness of the invasion. When Brezhnev, who is then the head of the Soviet Union, when Brezhnev invades, he gives no rationale for what he's doing except that we just have to control the empire. You know, there's a kind of lazy reference to this being a counterrevolution or so on. But it's clear that this is just about preserving empire. And in Eastern Europe, this is basically the death of Marxism, because it's clear that the Soviets don't care about it. And it's clear that if you care about Marxism, you'll get invaded for it, right? And so it's at that point where the Soviet Union loses—where Marxism loses its appeal in Eastern Europe. But it's also at that point that the Soviet Union loses much of its appeal around the world, at least as a creative project. And after 1968, it's rather the Chinese, or sometimes the Cubans, or later the Nicaraguans. But after 1968, insofar as Marxism has an appeal as a liberatory project, it's usually radiating out from somewhere besides the Soviet Union. I'm not saying that it made sense or it didn't make sense. I'm just stating the fact that if you were like a young French Marxist in the early 70s, more likely you were not celebrating Brezhnev, you were celebrating Mao, and then later Castro, Che Guevara, you know, and then maybe the Sandinistas. But the Soviet Union lost its worldwide attraction at that point.

Next turning point, if we look at this as decolonization, would be the Solidarity movement in Poland in 1980 and 1981, which in some significant measure had to do with the Soviet Union failing as an empire, because in 1979 the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan, which is famously a place where you go to lose wars and lose your empire, Afghanistan. But again, like often, you forget the things that you need to know. Okay, that was an American reference. It's okay. So the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979 and were losing, which is directly relevant to what happens in Poland, because in Poland you have a couple of—several things happening at the same time. The first is you have the limits of the Soviet project, the Soviet model of modernization. And this goes back to one of the reasons why the Soviet project seems successful. Okay, the Soviet project seemed successful because it seemed to offer a way to catch up to capitalist modernity. And this is one of the reasons why it was attractive in China or Vietnam or Korea or in Latin America, right? Because from the point of view of those places, you could say, well, imperialism one held power because of its modernity. We don't want that kind of modernity. It's clearly oppressive. It oppressed us. But what if there's another form of modernity which is powerful, but which is just? And what if that kind of modernity can be achieved quickly? And that's what Stalinism and the Five-Year Plan seemed to offer—that you could rapidly catch up with the capitalists but not be the capitalists.

Okay. So, and you know, we've gone over the disasters associated with this. We've talked about the famine in Ukraine. I've mentioned the famine in China a couple of times. I'm not trying to say that this was not without flaws. I'm just trying to explain its appeal in a world of empire. So the appeal in a world of empire is that you say, well, the British, the Dutch, the French, whoever it was, could dominate us because they came with their modernity. We want a different modernity, one which is also strong, but which won't be their modernity. And that's what the Soviet Union seems to offer. But part of the reason that offering is attractive is because it works economically. It seems—and it does work for a while in a certain way. It has enormous costs. I'm repeating myself, but it does lead to economic growth. If you consume your peasants, if you exploit them, if you dig huge mines, if you rapidly industrialize, you will get economic growth for 10, 15, 20 years, right? It will happen. You will get that big burst. But then the question is what to do next, right? Like after you have, so to speak, caught up, after you have exploited the peasants, squeezed everything you can out of them, after you've built the big factories, what do you do? What comes next? And this is the economic drama for a Soviet-style economy.

Okay, so again, I'm just going to open a window to China for a moment. The Chinese have an answer to this problem, which is that you do capitalism, right? But the Soviets, now going back to Europe, the Soviets don't. And this is one of the things which is happening in Poland. This process has run out in 1979, 1980. The Polish economy, as it is, is at negative rates of economic growth. Okay, so the project, the anti-colonial economy, has worn itself out. It's not working. That's one thing. Another thing which is happening in Poland is that a series of revolts or revolutionary actions have culminated in 1980 in a labor union. So the labor union is called Solidarity, and this is of course directly related to the first point, because there's an economic trigger for this, which is lack of economic growth, therefore lack of supply of things that people want, therefore frozen wages. But there's also a social reality, which is a labor union. The labor union is called Solidarity. And this is interesting, right? Because the thing which actually brings down communism from within more than any other thing is a labor union. A labor union. Okay, so that's Solidarity. And then this brings us to—which eventually has 10 million. It's a longer story. It has 10 million members. It brings together people of different ideological orientations. It's a very interesting movement. But then what the Soviets can't do is invade, as they had done in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, because they were already busy invading Afghanistan. They were already caught up in another failing imperial adventure. And so what ends up happening is that the Polish government invades itself. They carry out a regime of martial law beginning in December 1981. But that doesn't work economically. It doesn't advance the position of the ideological attraction of communism in any way. Quite on the contrary.

And we'll talk about this more in the next lecture. It'll be part of our subject. But it's the Solidarity movement which then becomes the source of the political opposition which leads Poland and then Eastern Europe out of communism itself in the 1980s. Okay. Late 1980s. All right. So now, in the afterward, I want to talk in these last 10 or 15 minutes or so specifically about the question of enchantment and disenchantment with communism and how this process looked in general, but also in particular from the point of view of a relatively local population from where we are now, which is African Americans in the United States. So in general, the process of disenchantment with communism has some stages, right? And the stages can only really be understood if we recapitulate for a moment what the attractions of communism were. The attractions of communism were, first, it seemed to offer a vision of how the world would be better, and it seemed to offer a version of how the world would be better that necessarily had to happen. Meanwhile, while we were waiting for that, we could take part in a revolutionary style of politics, because in many places at many times, communism was illegal. Whether it was Nazi Germany in the 1930s, or whether it was the McCarthyist United States in the 1950s—or I mean, not that those two places are exactly the same, don't get me wrong—or whether it was a Latin American dictatorship in the 1960s or 70s, or whether it was, you know, Suharto's Indonesia, there were a lot of places where communism was illegal, or whether, you know, the Bolsheviks were illegal in the Russian Empire. And so what the Communist Party offered was this experience of doing something which was against the grain, but with other people, because the Communist Party—whatever else one wants to say about the Communist Party—the Communist Party was organized. They had ways of operating underground, and that meant not only that they were effective, it meant that they created, incidentally, a sense of social solidarity, because you were with other people, right? Social solidarity tinged with paranoia. But social solidarity in the sense that you were with other people taking risks for what seemed like a great cause. So those are some of the psychological sources.

And then the political sources of enchantment with communism are that it seemed to be a way to rescue the world from the Great Depression, as we've talked about. Communism, with Stalin and his Five-Year Plan, seemed to be growing the Soviet economy at a time when everyone else's economy was collapsing. And then later there was the notion of anti-fascism—that the Soviets had defended the world from the Nazi threat or from the fascist threat. Okay. Now, of course, with both of those political sources of attraction, you know what the provisos are—that Soviet-style modernization involved huge human costs. And that's an impersonal way of talking about it that I probably shouldn't use. Killed millions of people who didn't have to be killed. And the Soviet victory over fascism is a very qualified victory, because if the Soviets hadn't—well, there were a couple of mistakes that Stalin made. One was in Germany. He thought that the social democrats were the real problem and not the Nazis. And if Stalin hadn't thought that, it's unlikely the Nazis would have come to power. And then there's the awkward little fact that in 1939 the Soviets and the Nazis were de facto allies. If it hadn't been for that, it's unclear how the Germans would have started the Second World War in Europe. So the myth of the Soviets as the anti-fascists is a myth which is based on 1941 and the German invasion of the Soviet Union. And awkwardly, the Soviets only win that war because of American economic support, which everyone afterwards is always happy to forget. Okay, those are the provisos. But the political sources of attraction are nevertheless important. There's an alternative way to do economics which can raise you out of depression and modernize you, and which is just supposedly. And these are the people who defeated the fascists. We're the ones who defeated the fascists.

In the second half of the 20th century, the things that start to break down are the ideology itself, when the Soviets invade other countries—Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan—with increasingly less reference to any kind of ideological justification. And the second thing that happens, I talked about, is that the economic model exhausts itself, and then where do you go when the economic model is no longer attractive? This is a big reason why the Cold War went the way that it went in the end in the 1980s, was that the American model seemed superior. But much more to the point, the local West European model seemed superior. The West European model, which was based upon the post-imperial project of European economic integration, which created a very large economic space combined with a welfare state, which ironically was supported by the Americans after the Second World War. The Americans supported a lot of things after the Second World War which they didn't actually ever have themselves. The welfare state was one of those things. So the West European model—the comparison of West Germany with East Germany, or the experience that Polish migrant laborers had in France in the 1980s—those things told very much in the Cold War that capitalism, or at least the immediate European version of capitalism, was in fact performing much better than the Soviet-style alternative. Right? So that's another reason why it was harder and harder to be enchanted with the Soviet Union.

And then the third thing, and this is the one which is hardest to put in words, but which is important, is the lack of vitality of the system. And I'm going to be euphemistic about this and then not. The euphemistic way to talk about the lack of vitality is to point out that Brezhnev was old. I mean, not old by today's standards. Old like—not old like Donald Trump old, or you know, like not old like that. But you know, because people back then, people died. They didn't live until that, you know, they didn't—so okay. So okay, but the euphemistic way to say it is that Brezhnev was old, the Soviet Politburo was old. Right, who was no spring chicken himself famously complained that the Soviet leaders kept dying on him before he could, you know, establish a relationship. But that's the euphemistic way of talking about it. Here's the non-euphemistic way of talking about it. One of the reasons why people liked the Soviet Union was the violence. One of the reasons why people are attracted to revolutionary movements is the violence. Okay? So, if you're a nice liberal, you know, if you believe in human rights or something like that, you probably are against killing large numbers of people, and you might be shocked or pretend to be shocked at the notion that it could be attractive to kill large numbers of people. But one of the reasons why revolutions and revolutionary movements are attractive is because they kill large numbers of people. And the Soviet Union killed large numbers of people. And that was one of the reasons why it was attractive. And when it stopped killing large numbers of people, it became less attractive, because it seemed less revolutionary. Okay, so that's the non-euphemistic way of making the point.

Or to put it a different way, Brezhnev could keep ruling forever because the Soviets gave up on killing their own leaders and their own cadres, right? And that was after Stalin, the Soviet system took a turn whereby the communists agreed, we are no longer going to kill ourselves. And that has the consequence that they no longer kill themselves. But it also has the consequence that if you're benevolent, the Soviet system became clogged, right? There wasn't mobility from the—there wasn't mobility upwards. The young people had a hard time getting anywhere because there was no longer political mobility fueled by terror. And from the outside, because terror has the consequence of freeing up—I mean, I'm not saying that you should run the world this way. I'm just pointing out that terror has the consequence that it frees up the jobs that are at the top. Right? Okay. Don't rush the stage now. That's not what I'm—but as a matter of fact, that's one of the ways terror works, is that it clears out the jobs that are at the top, and so younger people can make their way up quickly. Right? So the Soviet Union looks older. It looks less vital. Its revolution is more than a half a century in the past, and the people who are running it don't look like they are really revolutionaries. That's the third and final reason why the system loses its appeal.

These are general reasons, but I wanted to talk about this very specific—and I'm talking about this because it brings together some of these themes—the very specific attraction that the Soviet Union had for an important population on this continent, which is African Americans. And so the Soviet message of being anti-imperial was, of course, in some measure sincere, in some measure cynical. But there are reasons why Soviet communism was attractive to many intelligent and politically active African Americans. And those reasons have to do with precisely the experience of internal colonialism inside the United States. If your experience of politics in the dawn of the 20th century is you excluded in much of the country from the right to vote, many of the southern states are essentially run as small right-wing authoritarian regimes. Your children go to segregated schools. In public, you are forced to humiliate yourself in much of the country in one way or another. People are lynched on a regular basis, which is not just a matter of an individual death, but also a matter of a general threat. African American soldiers who came back from the First World War were subjected to pogroms all around the country. The largest, maybe most notorious, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. African Americans were—as in Scottsboro, Alabama, in 1931—African Americans were regularly framed for crimes that they did not commit and subjected to the death penalty or life in prison. In that environment, it's not surprising that the Soviet experience seemed promising. That from that perspective, it's not surprising that revolutionary politics might seem like the only way to break through. And so through the middle of the 20th century, many articulate African Americans used anti-colonial arguments against the United States. And some of the most interesting African American thinkers, like W. E. B. Du Bois, were able to see the anti-colonial trend that was the subject of much of this lecture as something which should apply to the United States, and that arguments from self-determination should apply to African Americans inside the United States, or that post-World War terminology such as genocide can be applied to the experience of African Americans inside the United States.

So from this point of view, the disenchantment with communism, or the removal of communism as an alternative, looks a bit different. Quite a number of the African Americans and the allies of African Americans in the first half of the 20th century into the 1950s, 1960s, who were in favor of some form of liberation, including civil rights, had contact with communism one way or another. And in the 1960s, the victory of the civil rights movement seemed to make all of this unnecessary, because it seemed that from that point forward, African Americans would have equal political representation. They would be able to vote. And that, of course, coincides with the disenchantment with communism generally and the loss of communism as some kind of credible political alternative. But the turning point in the 1960s is less of a turning point than it might seem, because although African Americans are granted civil rights around the country, the civil right to a vote is still stifled by gerrymandering and voter suppression, but also because in the 1970s and the 1980s, civil rights is challenged by the emergence of an American system of mass incarceration, which overwhelmingly targets African Americans, and also in the 1980s and the 1990s, specifically by a notion of American freedom which implies that African Americans are the internal enemy.

And I just want to bring this to a close here because it'll help us to open the next lecture. In the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan is president of the United States, there is a very specific notion of how capitalism is an alternative to communism. That communism has come to an end, that capitalism is going to be the source of freedom. And this notion of capitalism, from Reagan's point of view, involves making the American state very small, doing away with things like the welfare state. And partly we have to do away with those things, says Reagan and says the ideologists around him, because they are somehow like communism. But there's also something very specific going on here, which is that Reagan says the real problem with the welfare state is that black people use it. Black people abuse it. Therefore we can't have it. Right? And so in a very specific sense, the ideological version of American capitalism, which then seems to be victorious in 1989—and we'll return to all of this in the next lecture—has in the middle of it already what Hannah Arendt called that school of character, right? The school of character—the experience of imperialism is there the whole time. Okay, we'll continue with this next time. Thank you very much.