A while ago Lindsey Hilsum wrote an article (in the NS, natch) in which she described the Iraq war as 'colonialist'. As I said below, LH is one of the smarter and fairer lefty hacks, which just makes it all the worse that she shows no consideration for the words she uses. Nowadays the words 'colonial' and 'imperial' are used more or less interchangeably. In fact they refer to distinct phenomena.
'Colonia' was the Latin word for a settlement, 'imperium' referred to rule or domination. The Greeks had a word roughly equivalent to imperium , arche. The later European empires did a bit of both. Large-scale colonisation took place in the Americas and Australasia, mostly under British auspices. There was also a lot of colonisation in Africa, particularly in Algeria and South Africa, but this was less successful, in that the colonists remained a minority. A lot of places, however, never experienced colonialism as such: most of Africa and Asia never saw any large-scale European settlement, and some areas escaped direct European rule entirely.
Plainly the Iraq war is not colonial in this sense, because we are not going to see any mass movement of Americans to settle in Mesopotamia on confiscated land.
Perhaps some excuse for the current abuse of language is possible, since the imperialists themselves started it: under the British Empire countries like Australia were referred to as Dominions, while Trinidad (for instance) was a Crown Colony. It would have been more faithful to the original meaning of the words if those titles had been the other way round.
But consideration of the different levels of imperial activity leads one on to a curious phenomenon. If we sort the countries of the world by their imperial experience we can see five levels, not that these have strict boundaries:
1 - full colonisation (America, Australia);
2 - partial colonisation (South Africa, Algeria);
3 - prolonged imperial rule (over a century, say) without settlement (India, Phillipines, Sri Lanka, Indonesia);
4 - brief imperial rule (a few decades only) without settlement (Nigeria, Egypt, Burma);
5 - no European rule (Saudi Arabia, Iran, China, Thailand).
The correlation between present-day democracy and the level of colonial/ imperial experience is striking. Countries in category 1 are overwhelmingly free. Categories 2 and 3 are mostly free. Algeria is arguably the first major Arab country to hold a meaningful election: it was also the only Arab country to experience prolonged European rule, being run by France from 1830 to 1962, and the only one to experience large-scale European settlement - when the French army pulled out 800,000 civilians went with them. Category 4 is struggling towards freedom and category 5 is the least free of all.
I've chosen this sample rather crudely, of course, and one could easily find countries that don't fit. Zimbabwe, for example, is rather a special case - a short period of rule but with substantial colonisation. Likewise Japan and Korea are peculiar, since both owe their democracy to American military occupation. But most states do fit the model roughly, and the sample covers most of the world's larger nations. A rough fit is the best anyone can ever hope for in these grand historical models.
So what's going on? The best answer I can come up with is to invoke Max Weber, who said that there are three broad types of authority: traditional (obey me - your ancestors did), charismatic (obey me, I'm great) and rational-legal (obey me - I can run things fairly and well).
Democratic countries require the rational-legal or bureaucratic mentality. Tribal and clan loyalties, on the other hand, are the default setting of human organisation, historically: even the ancient Greeks and Romans, thought of as hyper-rational and urban, identified themselves that way (the name 'Julius' in Julius Caesar refers to the Julian clan, etc.). Colonisation, and imperial rule to a lesser extent, destroy the traditional authority of tribes and clans, by a variety of means, for instance by killing or discrediting tribal leaders and promoting urbanisation and academic education. Colonialism is more destructive - it's a form of sociological slash-and-burn - because the level of intrusiveness is inevitably greater.
That means that when the guys in solar topees go home newly independent countries have to choose between charismatic and bureaucratic rule. Being only human, they tend to be suckered by whatever bighead has the loudest voice or the biggest militia: over time they learn the disadvantages that come from the Holy People's Will, and start to reflect that 'appen a bit of bureaucracy wouldn't be so bad.
But pity the countries in category 5.
PS: it's only human to wonder if democracy is worth it, considering the terrible human effects of colonialism. But it's an idle reflection: we are where we are, the victims of colonialism are (mostly) in their graves, and it will do them no good now for their descendants not to move to freedom.
PPS: this has some implications for Iraq. Zeyad's recent posts on his country's tribal structure and history were very useful, making me think that the new Iraq will be a democracy where party loyalties will be largely determined by clan and tribal loyalties. Sectarian parties will have some cross-tribal appeal, and so will the Communists, but Iraq will not have Westminster-style politics, with rival secular parties distinguished chiefly by economic idelogy. Secular liberals will get a fair share of the vote in the big cities, but will be outnumbered. All this is because there's no way the Allies could ever perform the kind of sociological slash-and-burn that would be necessary to undermine tribal loyalties.
Let me add immediately that such an outcome is vastly better than Saddamism, and well worth a war. It offers prospects for the medium to long term that another decade or three of Baathist state terror could not have offered.
Furthermore it is possible to have a liberal state without liberals. Post-war Italy is a good example, where the Catholics and Communists balanced each other so finely that the secular centrists were able to exert disproportionate influence. This analogy has limited usefulness to Iraq, where there are not two large balancing parties, but it shows that the absence of the Liberal Democratic Party from Mosul and Samawah is not necessarily fatal.
