The Transformation of the World (178 page)

Civilization, in the normative sense of socially determined refinement, is thus a universal concept not limited to the modern age. Frequently it is associated with the idea that civilized people have a task, or even a duty, to propagate their
cultural values and way of life: whether in order to pacify barbarians living in the surrounding world, to spread the one true doctrine, or simply to do what is good. Such varied motives fuel all kinds of “civilizing mission” that cover more than just the dissemination of a religious faith. It involves a self-given assignment to transmit one's norms and institutions to others, sometimes by exerting pressure of varying degrees of intensity. This presupposes a firm belief in the superiority of one's own way of life.

Contradictions of the Civilizing Mission

Civilizing missions may be found in the relationship of ancient Chinese high culture to various barbarians living nearby, as well as in European antiquity and in all expansive religions. Never was the idea as powerful as it was in the nineteenth century. In the case of early modern Europe, the Protestant Reformation may be interpreted as a huge movement to civilize a corrupt culture, and the Counter-Reformation, its mirror image, as a defensive impulse designed to regain the initiative for civilizing work in the reverse. Cultural monuments such as the Luther Bible or the great Baroque churches may be understood as instruments of a civilizing mission. But the missionary dynamic of the early modern period should not be overestimated, especially in the context of European overseas expansion. The early modern empires were seldom driven by the idea of a mission, and outside the Spanish monarchy no one dreamed of fostering a homogeneous imperial culture.
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For the Dutch and English,
imperium
meant a commercial undertaking that required little moral regulation; missionary zeal was not supposed to get in the way of business or to disturb the unstable fiction of imperial harmony. Protestant governments therefore did not usually allow missionaries to operate in their colonial territories until the end of the eighteenth century, and the Catholic mission in the Iberian empires lost much of its support from the state during the second half of the eighteenth century. The idea that European law should apply to the “natives” was rarely entertained and almost never practiced.

The early modern period still lacked a conviction that European civilization was the sole standard for the rest of the world. Normative globalization, as it followed in the long nineteenth century, presupposed an end to older military, economic, and cultural equilibria between Europe and other continents (especially Asia). We should note a paradox. On the one hand, the civilizing mission of Europeans was an ideological instrument of imperial world conquest; on the other, it could not easily be spread by means of gunboats and expeditionary corps. The success of the civilizing mission in the nineteenth century rested on two further premises: (a) a conviction among European power elites and the most diverse private agencies of globalization that the world would be a better place if as many non-Europeans as possible took in the achievements of an allegedly higher civilization; and (b) the emergence, in numerous “peripheries,” of social groups that shared this point of view. The original ideal of the civilizing
mission was strictly Eurocentric, and in its claim to absoluteness it was directed against any kind of cultural relativism. It was therefore inclusive: Europeans did not want to keep their higher civilization for themselves; others should also have a share in it. It was also politically polymorphous, in that the civilizing work was supposed to unfold both inside and outside colonial systems. It could precede European territorial conquest, be independent of it, or serve as its a posteriori justification. The rhetoric of civilization could also accompany processes of state building and political consolidation in which Europe played no part. Founded on an optimistic vision of progress and growing rapprochement among the cultures of the world, it also justified and provided propagandistic cover for all manner of “projects” that claimed to be serving the cause of progress. Thus, it was perfectly possible to “civilize” not only barbarians and different faith groups but also flora, fauna, and landscapes. The land-clearing settler, big-game hunter, and river tamer were emblematic figures of this drive to civilize the whole planet. The great opponents that had to be defeated were chaos, nature, tradition, and the ghosts and phantoms of any kind of superstition.

The theory and practice of the civilizing mission have a history. It began in the late eighteenth century, shortly after the term “civilization” became a central category used by European societies to describe themselves, first of all in France and Britain. The prestige of European civilization reached its peak outside Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century, before the emphasis on a civilizing mission, came to be seen as increasingly hypocritical in the decades around 1900, in view of the massive use of force in pursuit of imperialist aims. The First World War then severely damaged the white man's aura, although it by no means buried his civilizing urge.
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After 1918, all the colonial powers sooner or later switched to a “developmental” style and rhetoric of colonial rule, more in tune with the times. It would be continued in the postcolonial policies that national governments and international organizations adopted after the winning of sovereignty.

The transformative period around 1800 was when civilizing missions began to be practiced in grand style. Two developments in the history of ideas lay behind this: (a) the confidence of late Enlightenment thinkers in pedagogy, that is, a belief that truths, once recognized as such, had only to be learned and applied; and (b) the formulation of universal models of progress in which humanity passed through various stages from humble beginnings to the full blossoming of a civil society based on legality and diligence. Various options now opened up. Those who trusted in the automatic working of the evolutionary process were less inclined to intervene actively than those who felt an urge to combat barbarism in the world.

The “civilizing” concept was also applied closer to home in the nineteenth century. Influential intellectuals—such as the future Argentine president Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, in his groundbreaking
Facundo: Civilización y barbarie
(1845)—constructed whole national histories out of the opposition between civilization and barbarism.
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Internal peripheries in old as well as newly
emerging nation-states were regarded as culturally remote areas left behind from earlier stages of development. Remnants of archaic clan structures in the Scottish Highlands, for example, turned into folklore for tourists from the South, so that a region discovered as a kind of Africa of the North in the 1770s became an open air museum of social history in the age of the Crystal Palace Exhibition (1851). Harsher and less forgiving than the English gaze toward the North was the attitude of northern Italians, when it came to Sardinia, Sicily, or the Mezzogiorno. The more that national unification led to disappointment over the difficulties of integrating peripheral regions, the more the language in the North came to resemble the racist rhetoric used about Africa.
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The underclasses in the big industrial cities also appeared as alien tribes, in whom state and market, private charity, and religious persuasion had to inculcate a minimum of civilized, in other words, bourgeois behavior.

National Variants: Bavarian, French, British

Civilizing missions also had national peculiarities. Until 1884 the Germans had no overseas colonial empire in which they could carry out “cultural work” (as it was called in those days). The German idea of education in the Classical and Romantic periods was a program of personal self-cultivation, not without a strong dose of political utopianism. For lack of barbarians in the flesh, the civilizing process turned reflexively inward at an individual level. But once Germans had the chance to take part in a grand civilizing project, they did so with particular relish. In 1832 the Great Powers placed the newly founded country of Greece under Bavarian custodianship: it acquired a Bavarian prince as king, a Bavarian bureaucracy, and a Bavarian ideology of “elevating” reforms. There was a contradiction, however: every German high school student dreamed of reviving classical Hellas after the end of Turkish “despotism,” but it seemed beyond doubt that the Greeks actually living there were completely useless for that sublime task.

The Bavarian regency council later withdrew, and the Greeks eventually deposed their unloved King Otto and left him to withdraw into exile in Franconia.
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It is an irony of history that soon afterward they hit upon their own variant of the civilizing mission—the “big idea” (
megali idea
) that they directed against the Turks with the aim of wresting from them as much as possible of the ancient Hellenic and Byzantine lands. In 1919 they suffered a crushing defeat when, spurred on by Britain and their own inflated estimate of their strength, they made the error of attacking the Turkish army. The collapse of Greek expansionist ambitions after the First World War was one of the most spectacular reverses for the civilizing mission.

Previously, Napoleon's project of spreading civilization on horseback, beginning with early campaigns in Italy and Egypt that his propaganda presented as one great liberation, had had mixed results. In Egypt, as later in Spain and the French Caribbean, the mission had ended in failure. Slaves who were already emancipated in the West Indies found themselves reduced to slavery again in
1802. On the other hand, the French regime in the German Confederation of the Rhine did generally have a civilizing and modernizing impact; it introduced French laws and institutions of a bourgeois hue and swept away traditions that had lingered beyond their time. Indirect French influence worked in the same direction in Prussia and, less powerfully, in the Ottoman Empire. The French civilizing style was distinctive. In occupied areas of Europe, especially where popular traditions had been shaped by Catholicism, French officers and functionaries behaved with extreme arrogance and condescension toward local people they considered to be backward. The occupation regimes were highly efficient and rational, but also utterly remote. In Italy, for instance, French rule seldom managed to create any link with the indigenous population beyond a small circle of trusted collaborators.
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Napoleonic France was the first specimen of an authoritarian civilizing state in Europe. The state became the instrument for a planned transformation of elements of the ancien régime, both inside the country and farther afield. The reformers' aim was no longer, as in the early modern period (or anyway, before Joseph II's energetic initiatives in the Habsburg lands), to remove particular grievances but rather to bring a completely new order into being. This technocratic reshaping of society from above was also found in various forms in the colonial world. Lord Cromer, for example, who concentrated nearly all power in his hands after the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, cut a “Napoleonic” figure with his fondness for cold administrative rationality—though with the difference that the idea of “liberating” the indigenous population never entered his thoughts. In 1798 Bonaparte had wanted to take the torch of Enlightenment to Egypt, whereas after 1882 Lord Cromer's only aim was to ensure that all remained quiet (and fiscally sound) at a major bridge between Asia and Africa—an improved application of the techniques used to rule post-Mutiny India. Detached from the mass of the Egyptian population, the “civilizing” work served only the interests of the occupying power and made no claim whatsoever to be transforming the society.
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At the same time, it has to be said that later French colonial policy had nothing Napoleonic about it either. At most, in western Africa, it came a step closer to the establishment of a rational state that concerns itself with the education of the population. But even there the state had to strike compromises that made the idea of perfect direct rule illusory—compromises not with settlers (as in Algeria) but with indigenous power holders.

In contrast to the interventionism of the Napoleonic state, which was hostile to organized religion, the early British civilizing mission was driven by strong religious impulses. Its first weighty advocate, Charles Grant—a high-ranking official in the East India Company and author of the influential
Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain
(1792)—was representative of evangelical revivalism in the age of the French Revolution. The Protestant call of duty to “better” the Indians was a distinctively British type of colonial romanticism, compounded by an English form of late Enlightenment
thinking (Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism) which, in its pursuit of rationalization and its authoritarian tendencies, was not all that far from the Napoleonic conception of the state.
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In India, this singular alliance of pious evangelicals with utilitarians who were mostly indifferent to religion succeeded in eradicating such practices as the burning alive of widows (
sati
) in 1829—after seventy years in which the British authorities in Bengal had tolerated this cruel custom and its annual toll of hundreds of victims.
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Attempts to civilize India in a Western sense reached their peak in the 1830s and ended in 1857 with the shock of the Great Rebellion.

Many other spheres for missionary activity were discovered around this time. After the middle of the century, the British-style civilizing mission developed less as an unconditional blueprint than as a set of attitudes, strongly shaped by a Protestant ethical sense that the famous explorer, missionary, and martyr David Livingstone expressed most clearly. The spread of secular cultural values was also largely the work of missionaries. The state and Christian missionary societies were here much less close to each other than in the French colonial empire, where Napoleon III used Catholic missions directly as a policy instrument, and even the Third Republic did not shrink from collaborating with them. In the British Empire, missionaries aimed at fundamental changes in the everyday life of their charges and converts even if the colonial state was much more reticent.
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Not all of the numerous Protestant missionary societies thought it their task to change anything other than religious beliefs, but most of them did not draw a radical distinction between religion and other spheres of life.