I maintain that colonial Europe is dishonest in legitimating colonialism a posteriori by the evident material progress which has been realized in certain domains under
colonial rule; . . . that nobody knows at what stage of material development these
same countries would have been without European intervention; that the technical equipment,
the administrative reorganisation, in a word: the “Europeanization” of Africa or Asia
was in no way linked to a European occupation—as is proved by the example of Japan;
that the Europeanization of the non-European continents could have been achieved in
other ways than under the Europan boot.[17]
Social Darwinism: The Primacy of Naked Power
Theories of the white man’s burden reflected the growing feelings of moral uneasiness
with imperialist policies amongst the enlightened metropolitan elites. However, in
the last quarter of the nineteenth century we can witness in Western Europe a rude
and cynical reaction against this new moral criticism with the emergence of legitimation
theories based on social Darwinism. As the term indicates, these theories were inspired by Charles Darwin, especially
by his theories of “natural selection” and the “survival of the fittest,” which he
had developed in The Origin of Species (1859). Darwin’s theory was biology. It was not sociology or political science. However,
already Darwin himself had given his theory a wider interpretation when he applied
it to the human world in his book The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). In this work he spoke of the “lower races,” a term that he not only used to
refer to colonized peoples outside Europe, but also to some peoples inside Europe.
For instance, he quoted uncritically an author who compared the Scots, supposed to
be “frugal, foreseeing, self-respecting, [and] ambitious,” with the Irish, who were
considered to represent an “inferior and less favored race.”[18] Many of Darwin’s contemporaries were eager to grant his theory of the survival
of the fittest, including its implicit conclusions of racial superiority and inferiority,
an almost universal validity. It was a theory, considered not only useful to explain
the biological world, but also human society, and even international relations.
