Of Fear and Strangers, page 7
TABLE 1: NATIONAL PHOBIAS
One of the most influential thinkers to contemplate such risks was none other than the same Ernest Renan. In 1882 at the Sorbonne, he delivered a widely circulated lecture entitled “What is a Nation?” While some equated the nation with one’s bloodline and race, Renan—despite his own bigotry—rejected this as absurd. What race made up France? Celtic, Iberic, and Germanic, and more. No, the most noble nations were of mixed heritage and “mixed blood.” Purity of religion, ethnicity, and language defined no nation. Large, successful nations glued together multitudes. Diverse populations—Goths, Normands, Franks, Lombards, Catalans, and others—were fused into one, the French.
Across the Atlantic, the African American orator extraordinaire, Frederick Douglass, had made a similar case for a “composite nation,” one whose citizenry included Chinese immigrants, with “the negro, mulatto and Latin races,” offering all full citizenship and benefiting as a result. However, in such a composite, what was the glue that held everyone together? If states had geographic borders, what boundaries defined a nation? Nations, Renan declared, were not racial or hereditary, but man-made. A national community bonded over a set of remembrances, but perhaps more importantly, shared amnesias. Everyone would thereby inhabit the same memory-scape. They could recount the glorious and heroic legacy of their forebearers, and stare blankly ahead, when mention was made of episodes better left forgotten. Nations were forged by willful acts of communal imagination. Resting on such a foundation, nationalism fostered common goals for the future and encouraged anger and mourning for well-selected grievances and traumas. Of these two forces, Renan admitted, “griefs are of more value than triumphs, for they impose duties and require a common effort.”
Omelettes, as the proverb goes, can only be made by cracking eggs. For Renan, making a nation required a violent relation to one’s past. Continuities must be broken, failures erased, and false connections inserted so as to serve the nation, this dreamed-up creation. Citizens were emboldened by accounts that claimed “so-called” victims of their nation’s actions never existed or deserved what they got. For Renan, that also meant that shifting the boundaries of memory could be political dynamite. Prior members of the nation might suddenly seem like outsiders. Forgotten actions might bring to light injustice or illegitimate acts. In a flash, brothers might seem like foreigners, allies like enemies, and supposed enemies not so at all.
Tottering nations were often characterized by unresolved, competing narratives that sowed division and failed to resolve questions of identity. The “Turkish system,” Renan argued, which maintained an “absolute distinction” between religious groups, meant they would forever struggle to unite as one nation. What then might a nation do if it suffered from such instability? The Frenchman didn’t develop this point, but a few years later, a Parisian journalist in Le Figaro pointed to one outcome. Flanked by the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, Romania had recently liberated itself from Ottoman rule. On the edge of Europe, this newborn nation was home to Hungarians, Germans, Jews, Russians, and more. As it sought unity, it witnessed intense anti-Jewish attacks and seemed to stoke a broader anger toward surrounding nations. In 1895, this fervor had ramped up into a “xenophobia,” that “exaggeration” of patriotism that turned a virtue into a vice. The Romanians seemed to hate everybody, it was said, so as to more clearly and ardently know themselves.
TABLE 2: XENOPHOBIA, CIRCA 1890
XENOPHOBIA AS A PSYCHIATRIC ILLNESS
a pathological fear of strangers
XENOPHOBIC NATIONALISM
an irrational political animus toward foreign nations
The first usages of xenophobia never caught on. As a medical diagnosis, xenophobia was a flop, perhaps due to the proliferation of phobias that brought many others into disrepute; years later, the same irrational fear of strangers would resurface as “social phobia.” In journalistic and political circles xenophobia receded, for it always carried the whiff of exaggeration. After all, who actually feared and hated all other nations? And if drumming up hatred against a targeted enemy was a dangerous form of patriotism, what use was this general hatred, in which the enemy remained unnamed? When Rodolfo Lanciani used this term in 1909 to decry attacks on the Frenchman Gauckler, he was already being a bit precious. His choice was worthy of the italics he provided, and in line with the professor’s preference for innuendo and archaism. For by then, his concept of a nationalistic xenophobia was fast receding as another meaning took center stage.
CHAPTER 4
The Boxer Uprising
ON APRIL 14, 1900, the Exposition Universelle in Paris threw open its doors to adoring crowds. Sparkling hopes for the new century were heightened by this celebration, which showcased an electrical palace, films from the Lumière brothers, a Ferris wheel, a diesel engine, and other wonders. A staggering fifty million people streamed forth to take in these miracles of the modern world. Among many marvels, visitors toured ethnological villages and human zoos stocked with members of far-off tribes like the Malagasy from Madagascar and the Dahomean from West Africa. A poster for the event depicted Arabs and Asians at the foot of a heavenly, white goddess. Thanks to Western technology and industrial wealth, the entire world was coming together.
Alongside these festive reports, French newspapers also featured a more disturbing story, one of things falling apart. On July 17, 1900, in Le Constitutionnel, a venerable paper famed for serializing the fictions of Honoré de Balzac, a short, unsigned dispatch appeared. This report from Shanghai told of a new “xénophobe” movement in northern China. Three days later, Georges Clemenceau’s left-wing paper, La Justice, picked up the story and that term. Next, it showed up in L’Univers. Then, on August 31, one of the most literary papers, Le Journal, published a piece by a Chinese “mandarin” who denounced his country’s outlaws and their xenophobia. As fall arrived, La Presse featured a headline warning of China’s xenophobia, and by October, Le Figaro and Le Matin assumed readers knew exactly what was meant when they denounced Chinese “xénophobes.” In less than a year, xénophobe and xénophobie had become part of the French vocabulary.
Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1900
Parisians learned that the trouble with “les xénophobes” had commenced in a corner of northern China during the winter of 1899. These xénophobes were not engaged in specific national rivalries, but rather were focused on broader divisions, ones that greatly mattered due to the unprecedented expansion of Western powers abroad. Having watched their crumbling empire be infiltrated by not only one nation but by Germans, British, French, Russians, and the Japanese, a group of impoverished youth staged an uprising. Thanks to their reliance on martial arts, they came to be known in the West as the “Boxers.” While some of their goals remained inchoate, their motto made one explicit. “Support the Qing,” it declared, “destroy the foreigners.”
The Boxers’ revolt against all colonial powers followed decades of furious globalization. Like the sixteenth-century rush to grab land in the New World, during the nineteenth century, a second major wave of Western expansion had been sparked by new technologies. Hordes of European settlers moved into once forbidding places, as travel was increasingly facilitated by machines that powered not just people, but also ideas and products across seas, mountains, and deserts. In a crackle and whir, isolated tribes now communicated, traded, and intermingled. Bands of humans—long segregated and curiously distinguished by their pet notions of God and nature, the sacred and profane, ethics, politics, and individuality—found themselves in astonishing proximity. Much like the meeting of the Spanish and Nahuas people, these long-lost cousins had little knowledge of each other and could not help but consider many of their newfound kin quite strange in their looks, habits, and customs.
Demographics helped push globalization forward. After 1850, prosperity led to increased population densities within industrialized Western countries, and an unprecedented exodus of hundreds of thousands searching for opportunity in other lands. British, French, Germans, and Russians left home, aided by the telegraph, the emergence of a functional worldwide postal service, and the transformative power of steamships and locomotives. While once only the most desperate or foolish would traverse oceans or trek mountain ranges, increasingly such risks might be taken just for fun. Armed with Cook, Baedeker, or Michelin travel guides, fin de siècle pleasure-seekers came to be known as “globe-trotters.”
This grand reunion of humanity encouraged some to welcome the dawn of a universal age. As the inhabitants of the technologically advanced nations spread out, dignitaries spoke of the need for universal laws or even a world government. Conventions in Geneva, Paris, Berne, London, and the Hague brought together lawyers, pacifists, and diplomats who pressed for international bodies that would govern warfare, trade, patents, and copyrights. Optimists proposed a “World Federation” or a “United States of the World.” Globalists like the German Walther Schücking contemplated a future in which nations and their distinct illness, nationalism, were recognized as failed experiments. Schücking and his allies were citizens of the world, who echoed the words of Terence, that North African slave turned Roman dramatist, who wrote: “I am a man: I consider nothing pertaining to man foreign to myself.”
Beneath the grandeur of such proclamations, however, quite another reality lurked. These reunions between long-segregated tribes were not always so brotherly. International interdependence commenced at the end of a long gun. Between 1870 and 1914, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Belgium—thanks to industrial strength and sea power, repeating rifles and explosives—conquered weaker lands in a veritable stampede for new markets, cheap resources, and forced labor. This unprecedented conquest spread out over nearly all of Africa, as well as many parts of Asia and South America. At the same time, the Chinese and Ottoman empires were collapsing, offering more opportunity for land grabs.
While Japan, Russia, and the United States were eager to participate in these orgies, this was mostly Europe’s party. The European imperial powers rushed to divvy up immense vistas, in what one disgusted observer called “the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human consciousness.” For the colonists, this feeding frenzy raised two distinct risks: the lesser one involved trouble from the poorly armed, indigenous peoples. Comforted by a stark asymmetry in power and the belief in their own beneficence, this concern could be assuaged. The graver peril was that competing invaders, in their intoxicated rush, might stumble into war with one another. Pan-European coordination was deemed critical.
In 1885, the Berlin Congo Conference brought together thirteen European powers, as well as the United States. To avoid inadvertent conflict, they sliced up the African continent, giving each imperial power their share. Yet, despite such treaties, what ensued was not a United States of the World, but scattered skirmishes and tangled alliances that foreshadowed another possible outcome of globalization: world war.
The world was shrinking. Armed with breech-loading rifles, stocked up on quinine to prevent malaria, and powered by steam to go upriver, Europeans strode into once impenetrable domains. These uninvited guests insisted on staying; they created trading companies, which then morphed into plantations. As for the natives, they were not enslaved; the Berlin Congress, like Queen Isabella of Spain before them, outlawed that indignity. Rather, they were “employed” as indentured laborers. Foreign commercial outposts gradually transformed into national protectorates and then colonies, possessions of the home country. In a relatively short period, a smattering of intrepid traders became colonial masters, whose rule was backed by European gunboats and troops.
A thick web of narratives justified these actions. At the Congo conference, the expansion of European culture eastward was celebrated, thanks to what the French called its “civilizing mission.” Like the Spanish in the New World, the British Anglo-Saxon, the German Teutonic, the French Catholic, and the Russian pan-Slavic expansionists were encouraged to imagine themselves as philanthropists. These liberators brought a mix of Christianity, science, and justice. They came, it was said, not just for wealth, land, and power, but as peacekeepers, liberators, and educators. In exchange for their property, their culture, and, in essence, their freedom, these savages would be saved from superstition, cannibalism, cruelty, and poverty.
Missionaries, schoolteachers, and functionaries carried the flags of freedom forward. They rubbed up against fortune hunters, ex-criminals, libertines, slave traders, and pirates. So confident were they in their righteousness, the good of their God, the supremacy of their lineage, and the superiority of their culture that the reaction of their hosts begat some confusion. Western travelers noted that in foreign lands, they would be met by accommodation and servile assistance, then suddenly rage and violence. Within the stories the colonists told themselves, it made little sense. And so, when a whirling group of rebels in China announced their mission to attack and destroy foreigners, a rarely used term for irrational fear, plucked from Greek, seemed appropriate.
THE DRAMA UNFOLDING in China was especially captivating for the French. After their humiliating defeat in 1871, they had followed Ernest Renan’s prescription for avoiding civil unrest at home by vigorously embracing overseas expansion. Renan had little patience for those with ethical qualms about such enterprises. “The conquest of a country of racial inferiors by a superior race, established there to govern them,” he declared, “has nothing shocking about it.” In 1879, the author of Les Misérables, Victor Hugo, also lustily urged on his compatriots. “God,” he proclaimed at a public ceremony, “has offered Africa to Europe. Take it!” The crowd broke into hearty applause.
The Third Republic embraced this strategy, and its imperium grew at breakneck speed. By 1895, colonial inhabitants living under French rule had multiplied from five million to fifty million. By 1913, France controlled thirteen million kilometers of foreign land. Soon France was second only to Great Britain in overseas holdings. In 1889, an École coloniale was established to train functionaries in anthropology, colonial sociology, and mass psychology. To serve their sudden empire, French newspapers fed readers a steady diet of events from China, the Ottoman Empire, regions of Africa, South America, the Baltic states, Japan, Russia, and India. Seemingly minor events—the arrival of a diplomat, a colonel being sent home on unnamed charges, or tension in the Upper Nile—were newsworthy. When an uprising took place in an obscure, northern region of China, dozens of French newspapers grabbed on to the story.
Discord in China was itself no shock. In 1873, an anonymous Catholic French missionary had delivered a prophetic warning. He applauded Pope Pius IX’s aggressive effort to expand missionary work in China, but mentioned the possible reaction, a “xénophobie” in the Far East. Japan and China, the unnamed priest advised, remained deeply unwelcoming to foreigners. A French proconsul similarly wrote of the risk of such anti-stranger reactions in “Oriental” countries that had been “hermetically sealed” for centuries.
These descriptions could not be waved away as simple Western bias. In fact, the Japanese had a long history of hostility toward “Yabanjin” or barbarians. These foreigners included the northern people of Hokkaido as well as all Westerners. When the Portuguese landed on Japan’s shores in 1542, they were described by the amused inhabitants as “long-nosed goblins.” In the following years, Western missionaries settled on Japanese soil, winning over some local lords and building a community of approximately 300,000 Christians. Ultimately, this led to a fierce reaction and an edict of expulsion against the Christians in 1587. From then on, the Japanese shoguns kept a lock on entry into their country, restricting foreign trade to one port, Nagasaki, and one nation of traders, the Dutch. Japan remained quite closed until American gunboats, captained by Commodore Matthew Perry, forcibly demanded entry in 1853. Even after the 1868 Meiji Restoration, a program of modernization that made the Japanese more open to the West, their political elite remained deeply suspicious of foreigners, especially as they noted what was happening across the sea in China.
For while the French proconsul and missionary had a point about Japan, the notion of a “hermetically sealed” China was absurd. True, China with its Great Wall embodied such insularity; once, it too allowed sea traffic through only one port, Canton. However, after the Second Opium War ended in a crushing defeat, the great Qing dynasty had been falling apart. As victors, the British, French, and Russians made their way into the country, where freedom of religion and opium use now had been conceded. Peace came only when Tianjin was opened as a port, British ships were given the right to haul indentured Chinese to the Americas, land was surrendered to Russia, and more. Over the next decades, this weakened empire under the rule of the Dowager Empress Cixi had been increasingly infiltrated by Western missionaries and traders. Chinese loyalists bitterly noted that their desire for autonomy had been grossly violated, as this once regal empire lost control of its own borders.
Then, in 1897, a match was lit. In the southern Shandong Province, two German Catholic missionaries, Richard Henle and Franz Nies, were murdered. The killing was carried out by the Big Swords, a secret society. The crime provided Kaiser Wilhelm with a long-awaited pretext for invasion. German troops took control of land inhabited by 60,000 Chinese. Observing how easily the Kaiser had waltzed in, other foreign armies deployed their forces into the tottering nation. By 1900, Russia had taken Manchuria, only to have it snatched away by Japan. Great Britain spread out their holdings in Hong Kong and grabbed for Tibet. France fattened its Indochinese empire. Portugal grabbed Macao.
