io.

Decolonisation is a just effort. It did come with a lot of strings attached. Colonialism got the extremely negative reputation it has now specifically because of its racist overtones, but we forget that it was part of a grand design of imperial expansion. The argument that follows is precisely about this hypocrisy: we can’t blindly focus our outrage at colonialism and ignore equal or worse struggles that are results of nation-building and expansion. There has hardly been any expansion without blood, and yet only colonialism seems to gather particular attention. We have the maturity to start looking at the world in a different way.

Before we can even reflect on what colonialism is or isn’t, we should think a bit about how people interact with one another and how they rule one another.

Empires

By far the most common way that groups of people rule on others is with some form of dynastic kingdom wielding absolute power. In certain cases different dynasties kill each other but the state stays as-is (e.g. the Roman Empire, have you thought about it this week?). In others, for one reason or another, changes in power are seen as ideological, cultural or religious fractures. Sometimes we talk about continuity, for nationalist reasons (Iran, Russia). Sometimes we refuse to do so and we draw lines before and after their demise (Byzantium, or even the Holy Roman Empire).

Whoever rules decides to impose something on the subjects, in exchange for some sort of protection. Rights and duties vary wildly, as does the amount of extraction, which could be arbitrarily damaging - which is why few people really compare Timur’s troops with the Genoese, or even the Crusader states.

The needs of the ruling class are also very diverse, as are their priorities. The Mongols for example, as violent as they might have been - very! -, cared very little about religion, language or culture in general of the places they annexed¹, while most muslim kingdoms imposed at least some sort of religious authority, regulated² or not.

Regardless of culture and religion, empires need stuff, stuff being land, or things that can be extracted from the land. The ego that comes with it can be a good incentive, but nobody wants to be big and poor. Empires, in particular, want to be rich, but they also want to be Great. This is also why the Romans didn’t care about modern-day “made in Rome” labels for their food. Conquering Egypt and the grain that came with it was much attractive.

Nations

Empires rule over people, and in certain cases the people get confused with the ruling dynasty. This happens regardless of whether the two concepts are the same, or this distinction is even important. Sometimes though, even though one can clearly distinguish several nations within an empire, and the ruling dynasty belongs to one of them, said nation gets no preferential treatment.

The Roman Empire is one example where ethnicity mattered very little and career progression in the state apparatus was just a matter of education within the system. Roman culture was somehow not very homogeneous – even religions and burials were fairly diverse – and yet they did leave, in the west, a clear linguistic area.

The Ottoman Empire on the other hand lasted until the birth of modern nationalism and nation states. It was a muslim empire ruled by a single, muslim dynasty, but it always stayed multicultural until the bitter end, when its modernising rulers decided to exterminate non-muslims. Ironically, the perpetrators were the ones who wanted to democratise and secularise the State. Equally ironically, perhaps, apart from the legal separation between muslims and non-muslims, the “turkic” component of the empire did not get any benefits from a supposed cultural proximity to its rulers. Turks were not better off than muslim Arabs or Bosniaks.

Colonies

The Romans have a lot of literature on the weirdos that inhabited the areas outside their borders. Even in the middle ages, Eastern Roman (or Chinese) accounts about the nomads occasionally raiding their own territories can be quite colourful. But neighbours were not always nomads and weirdos. Culture and technology travel very well by land, and often Empires found similar neighbours, or became similar to them, or the opposite. Europe is the best example of this process, as everyone in Europe copied their neighbour’s taste in art and fashion, religion, philosophy, food, and plenty of other things, but Persianate and Sinitic³ states are also places where this happened.

But at some point the technology was mature enough to go far, far away, and empires started becoming a lot more pragmatic and a lot less interested in the weirdos they were expropriating. As years passed overwhelming technological superiority towards most of the world mattered a lot more to, say, Spain, than expanding “a little bit more to the north”. After all, who cares about taking a few thousand acres in France when somewhere else there’s an area five times the size of France which is, to Spain’s standards then, barely defended, and full of wood?

Colonisation then became a popular form of expansion, with a stronger emphasis on decentralisation compared to the usual, mainly because the colonies were quite far. The Spanish crown couldn’t rule over Mexico the same way that the Ottomans ruled over Bosnia. But even within colonial empires there was a huge difference in how locals were dealt with depending on the development of their own societies. Their fate varied from relative welfare (e.g. the British Raj), through mixing and extraction (Mexico), to complete extermination (Tasmania).

Even though it was definitely better than Timurid rule pretty much everywhere, very few think of British rule in India as “generally positive”. Likewise, the aboriginals of Tasmania got exterminated by the same colonial forces, but many other nations got subjugated and exterminated, even in more recent times, by forces of states that we don’t call colonial.

Guilt

The industrial revolution and the overwhelming technological superiority it gave Western Europe was a determining factor in the events that happened when humanity (sorry, Western Europe itself) decided that extremely violent expansions of a State’s borders (and whatever happened within said borders) were legitimate, while colonial rule wasn’t.

And after all, it was the same Western Powers’ admission of its own guilt that gave colonial rule a bad reputation. The Italians in Ethiopia gratuitously massacred far more civilians than the people that got sent to concentration camps from Italy⁴. But the recent Tigray War (2020-2022) had a comparable death toll⁵. At the time of this writing, the political perpetrators of said atrocities are still alive and in power, and none of them have admitted to any guilt.

As the Armenians and the Jews know, extermination is not just a tool of colonial expansion. But if there is no admission of guilt from the perpetrating state, the atrocities matter a lot less. We can compare the reactions of an average German and an average Turk to a reference to their nations’ respective genocides. But it’s enough to see that admitting one’s guilt causes the German political establishment to have a bizarre obsession about the protection of Zionism as an ideology, while the Turkish President’s remarks about “throwing Greeks to the sea” get largely ignored.

The Holocaust is more important than the Christian genocide in Asia Minor (or the Circassian genocide, for that matter) not just because of its extent, but also because the perpetrators admitted their own guilt.

Borders

The ruling class of post-colonial states has learned this sort of rhetoric very well. Admission of guilt isn’t just weak, it’s actually counter-productive, as negative publicity has no deadline. The rise of Russian influence in the Sahel is mostly utilitarian, but the general anti-west rhetoric in the region⁶, banging the drum of colonialism, shows that even between evil European invading powers, there are good ones and bad ones.

But even ignoring very recent events, one can’t help but notice something. A lot of the colonial borders have been ridiculed as arbitrary lines in the sand. And yet, they have hardly changed since then. When they have, it was always as a result of civil wars, and rather than “reunifications”, they were always separations⁷. The reason why these borders haven’t changed is that for many of the current regimes colonialism is a comfortable alibi. Imperial powers or not, nobody wants to shrink or cede land or influence, unless they’re forced to. This was true for European kingdoms, it’s definitely true for Latin American or African states.

As the latest cases of Ethiopia and Sudan show, with colonial influence long gone, humanity doesn’t need alibis to commit atrocities. But unfortunately guilt works in reverse too. Just how the victims of colonialism know that their sorrow has been acknowledged by the perpetrator’s admission of guilt, modern day defenders of the rule of law in Ethiopia aren’t exactly generous with apologies.

We must not do whataboutism about colonial rule. But one can’t help but notice the irony of certain events: the Nobel prize awarded to Frederik Willem de Klerk⁸ was a recognition for the end of the apartheid regime. 26 years later, Abiy Ahmed got the same prize. One year before the massacres in Tigray by his own army.