60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

156 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness
and that they are historically, discursively and politically continuous
(1992: 44). 2
In a direct but unacknowledged quote from the ‘Imperialism’ part of
Arendt’s Totalitarianism book, the export-import business in matters
of political structures and practices is described by Foucault in terms
of a ‘boomerang eff ect’:
…while colonization, with its techniques and its political and juridical
weapons, obviously transported European models to other
continents, it also had a considerable boomerang eff ect on the
mechanisms of power in the West, and on the apparatuses, institutions,
and techniques of power. A whole series of colonial models
was brought back to the West, and the result was that the West
could practice something resembling colonization, or an internal
colonialism, on itself. (Foucault [1976] 2003: 103)
With or without direct reference to Arendt or Foucault, Arendt’s
three-pronged account of totalitarianism has gained something of a
cult status, as it has become a reference point for analysing the political
forms of modern society in the 20th century and beyond. It is
ironic to note, however, that variations on this theme are proliferating
and are gaining in persuasiveness almost in inverse proportion
to their cogency. Foucault abandoned the project of a bio-politics
of colonialism and anti-semitism after his lectures at the beginning
of 1976. And long before that, Arendt had abandoned her attempt at
weaving together the strands of national socialism, imperialism, and
2 Substantiation for this multi-levelled connection is variously sought in ‘infl uences’,
discursive structures, parallels in social engineering and policy, and deployment of
the same colonial-administrative-military personnel to diff erent sites of the colonial
enterprise, and to high offi ce in the Nazi social and political administration.
The view of the colonies as laboratory for the bio-political casting of the relation to ‘the
enemy’ at home, is fl awed on a number of counts:
- It cannot politically, historically or ideologically account for the diff erent lineages of
racism that have informed colonial racism and anti-semitism, respectively.
- It cannot account for the specifi cities and the paradoxes of colonial power, in
particular the bifurcation of the colonial state, and the ethnic fragmentation
frequently characteristic of indirect rule.
- It does not consider the fact that hegemony was never achieved in the colonial
state.
- It does not consider the fact that colonial states did not have the status of ‘nations’
before the mobilisation of anti-colonial movements and decolonisation (if at all).
- Correspondingly, there was no bio-political notion of an ‘internal enemy’.
- In colonial contexts, there arguably was no historical and logical continuity between
bio-power and bio-politics.
-
Colonial racism could therefore not institute normalisation processes.