If we look back to the 19th century, when the keys to our current world were being developed, we will witness the appearance of the so-called
imperialist
liberalism , an unstoppable European expansionist movement towards Asia and Africa, led by Great Britain.
England had seized Canada from France, settled in Australia and India, invaded Afghanistan, intervened in the Middle East, the Crimea and China... France and Great Britain would continue to dispute hegemony in the East and Africa until, between 1884 and 1885, the conference of Berlin legalized the division of territories.
Alexis de Tocqueville supported European expansionism and is a paradigmatic example of the alleged ambiguity of liberal thought in those years.
A champion of American democracy, a tireless fighter for the abolition of slavery, an implacable critic of racial inequality and the extermination of the North American Indians, he was at the same time a Eurocentric nationalist, defender of colonialism, imperialism and the
war
of Algeria —with its raids against the civilian population and the death by suffocation of men, women, and children in the infamous
smokers—
.
If in the last century his good side
was praised
, today the other side of him predominates, which is giving wings to decolonialists to include him in the list of thinkers who deserve to go to the dustbin of history.
But when Tocqueville is accused that his liberalism does not square with his colonialism and
imperialism
, and that he betrayed liberal principles, we are looking at him in an ahistorical way from our perspective as citizens of the 21st century.
The contradiction can only be cleared up by framing it in its time and in the European geopolitical framework between 1830, when France began the conquest of Algeria, and the 1860s (now Tocqueville died), when Europe practically culminated its expansion in Asia and expanded its domains in Africa.
In relation to colonialism, Tocqueville adopted the same position as before democracy: they were irrepressible movements that announced the future and that had to be channeled.
He feared that the democratic society par excellence, the American one, would not accept the inclusion of blacks and Indians.
His political destiny depended on it.
But the integration of peoples of different cultures was not only the main problem of the North American nation, but a transcendental challenge facing democracy in the world.
What would happen in Algeria, in India and in the other countries that the European expansionist movement would reach sooner rather than later?
In Tocqueville's eyes, colonialism was beneficial to both the natives and the Europeans.
They were ideas of the time inherited from the previous generation, which he shared with the majority of European liberals, Saint-Simonians, Fourierists and left-wing republicans, convinced of the pre-eminence of Western culture and the duty of developed peoples to contribute the lights up the most backward, get them out of their economic and cultural prostration, and lead them to freedom.
In France, plans to colonize Africa began in the mid-18th century, sponsored by sectors of the political and economic elites (physiocrats, Girondins, "friends of the blacks"), mostly abolitionists and supporters of a new colonial policy consistent with their Enlightenment ideals. .
In 1830, when the conquest and colonization of Algeria began, the philanthropic objectives of the previous generation (the “civilizing mission” and the desire to free the African country from Turkish despotism) were added to commercial, political and strategic interests (stopping the threatening British expansionism).
Alexis de Tocqueville and Louis Blanc compared colonial politics to the Crusades.
Tocqueville neither spoke out nor shared the colonialist fervor of public opinion.
Only when the French presence in Algeria was a fait accompli did he warn that the occupation would be meaningless if France failed to develop and modernize the country.
Although colonialism had always had detractors, in the mid-nineteenth century (and even before) the hopes placed on it began to crumble due to the revolts of the colonized and the increase in violence to suppress them.
Tocqueville ended up being aware, contrary to other liberals such as John Stuart Mill, that the differences between the conquering and the dominated people were insurmountable and that the clash between the two peoples aroused feelings of hatred and nationalist impulses that were very difficult to channel among those subjected.
He did not believe that a supposedly superior civilization would
necessarily
advance a more backward one when the two came into contact.
In Algeria, colonialism foundered because of the mistakes made by the French, but also because of the rejection it aroused among the Arabs and which gave rise to Abdelkader's Muslim nationalism.
The colonial nations generated power relations and oppressed the dominated peoples even in the name of freedom and enlightenment.
Tocqueville predicted very soon, in 1847, the probable failure of the European imperialist policy, which in the 20th century would generate the wars of national liberation and the emergence of new nations.
Because not only the "perverse" imperialism supposedly embodied by Great Britain (according to Louis Blanc), which exploited the populations and depleted their raw materials, brought out rejection and hatred, but also the "altruistic" and "humanitarian" one, symbolized by France , which sought to propagate modernity and progress.
What to say now about the collusion between liberalism and imperialism?
Specialists offer two readings.
Either liberalism would have always had an imperialist dimension due to its idea of progress, its civilizing mission and its consciousness of superiority, or its most relevant spokesmen (such as John Stuart Mill or Alexis de Tocqueville), by supporting imperialism, betrayed the liberal values.
But liberal thought cannot be blamed for a contradiction that resides in imperialism itself.
Louis Blanc pointed out that French colonialism (synonymous with imperialism) aspired to save the world, not to enslave it, and that Karl Marx and Gandhi once supported the British Empire.
Later, the need for imperialism to resort more and more to violence in the face of the rejection of the colonized cornered the universalist project and the civilizing mission that had justified it.
Imperialism thus moved away from the ethical goals it shared with liberal theory.
So it would be preferable not to speak of an imperialist liberalism, but of a liberal imperialism, which ended up denying the liberal postulates that one day it had made its own.
María José Villaverde Rico
is a professor at the UCM and author of
Tocqueville and the dark side of liberalism.
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