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Updated: June 7, 2025
Bismarck himself took little interest in colonial questions, except in so far as they could be used as a means of alienating the other powers from one another, and so securing the European supremacy of Germany. He therefore at first made no attempt to use the dominant position of Germany as a means of acquiring extra-European dominions.
Denmark and Sweden have played a more modest part, in extra-European as in European affairs. Germany and Italy only began to conceive imperial ambitions after their tardy unification in the nineteenth century. Austria, which has never been a nation-state, never became a colonising power.
Again, all moderately warm extra-European countries are mixed up with the tropics in general estimation, and a vague idea is formed that whatever is preeminently beautiful must come from the hottest parts of the earth. But the fact is quite the contrary.
It was spread round the whole globe; it included almost every variety of soil, products, and climate; it was inhabited by peoples of the most varying types; it presented an infinite variety of political and racial problems. In 1825 this empire was the only extra-European empire of importance still controlled by any of the historic imperial powers of Western Europe.
Nevertheless, as I say, the justification of any extra-European aid goes deeper than by any such details. It rests upon the fact that even other civilizations, even much lower civilizations, even remote and repulsive civilizations, depend as much as our own on this primary principle on which the supermorality of Potsdam declares open war.
Again, did the demand for world-power mean no more than that Germany must have extra-European territories, like Britain or France? She already possessed such territories, though on a smaller scale than her rivals. Such an aim could only be obtained if she could succeed in overthrowing all her rivals, at once or in succession.
It will be convenient to begin the recital of extra-European events by considering the expansion of Russia and Great Britain in Central Asia. There, it is true, the commercial motive is less prominent than that of political rivalry; and the foregoing remarks apply rather to the recent history of Africa than to that of Central Asia.
What the effect of this would be upon the extra-European dominions of powers which would be drained of their manhood and loaded with the burden of the past war and the burden of preparation for the coming war, it is beyond our power to imagine.
The belief of the European in his own Kultur tends to be fanatical and ruthless, and for this reason, as much as for any other, the independence of extra-European civilization is of real importance to the world, for it is not by a dead uniformity that the world as a whole is most enriched.
The unity of sentiment and aim which was thus expressed had, however, been steadily growing throughout the period of European rivalry; and doubtless in the colonies, as in Britain, the new value attached to the imperial tie was due in a large degree to the very fact of the eagerness of the other European powers for extra-European possessions.
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