Border colonization

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Border colonization is the oldest known form of colonization originating from settlement colonies . In contrast to overseas land reclamation and colonies separated from the country of origin, it takes place in connection with already existing "more developed" civilization areas. In modern times , the opening up of the Australian continent, the displacement of the Indians from the Argentine pampas and the Chilean south, the conquest of western North America by the USA and Siberia by Russia are some examples of border colonization or border colonialism , because historical is "colonization without colonialism probably only rarely been possible! "

But border colonization is also the predominant form in which the expansion of Europe took place in the High Middle Ages . Since the 19th century, German imperial theorists in competition with the existing European colonial powers, even before the establishment of the first German nation-state, propagated it as a model worth emulating for acquiring German colonial territory, with its orientation towards Eastern and Southeastern Europe.

term

“Border colonization” is a term that was coined in the first German nation-state in the 1890s. That happened at the moment when the Germans wanted to assert their right to have a say in the imperialist-colonialist division of the world among the countries of Western Europe, which had already been formed into national states. The term can be proven in the context of the Pan-German Association founded in 1891 , which among other things stands for the “care and support of German-national endeavors in all countries where members of our people struggle to maintain their individuality, and the summary of all Germans der Erde for these goals ”and the“ promotion of an active German interest policy in Europe and at sea, especially the continuation of the German colonial movement to practical results ”. A first use is shown in the book “Greater Germany and Central Europe around 1950” by the chairman of the “Pan-German Association” Ernst Hasse , which appeared in the second edition in 1895. Hasse was a professor of statistics and colonial policy in Leipzig and a member of the Reichstag. He wrote in the book that the German people would plant their border posts to the east and south-east with “border colonization” because there “no natural limits were set for the development of Germanness”. The term found an important and most consequential use by the geographer Friedrich Ratzel , who was also “Pan-German” , in his “Political Geography” from 1897. Also for the politician and publicist Ottomar Schuchardt (1856–1939), friend, estate administrator and Constantin Frantz's first biographer , “border colonization” was the “imperatively required form of settlement” in Germany.
The required border colonization corresponded to the Pan-Germans' propaganda formula that “the old urge to go east had to be revived”.

history

The settlement colony for reclaiming the earth can be seen as the original type of the colony. Wolfgang Reinhard states that in the European tradition, colonization was "regarded as the epitome of history". This was done based on Genesis 1:28: "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it!" However, it was overlooked that the areas envisaged for settlement were nowhere deserted, but that hunters, gatherers and nomads lived there, who had to give way to agriculture and the forms of property associated with it. The reclamation of the earth should therefore usually be described as a process of violence, because it went hand in hand with the displacement and destruction of previous forms of life. Reinhard sees modern examples of this in the "new settlements from America to Australia to Palestine".

Medieval colonialism

The Arabic al Andalus around 910

The English historian Robert Bartlett described the medieval history of Europe in 1993 under the heading The Making of Europe. Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950-1350 (German 1996: The birth of Europe from the spirit of violence. Conquest, colonization and cultural change from 950-1350 ). He assumes that with the English colonialism in the Celtic world ( Wales , Ireland , Scotland ), the expansion of the 'German' settlement area to Eastern Europe (see Ostsiedlung ), the reconquest of Spain (see Reconquista ) and the undertakings of the crusaders in Eastern Mediterranean (see Outremer , Crusader States) created new states - Castile, Portugal, Bohemia, Jerusalem, Cyprus, Sicily and Thessalonica - and distant stretches of land on the periphery of the continent were settled.

Scene from the Sachsenspiegel shows the German settlement around 1300

While in the 12th and 13th centuries the German settlement area and the political sphere of influence almost doubled through conquest and colonization without the support of royal and imperial rule, in the 10th century the Ottonians were decisive for the expansion into the east. In the process, Europe was unified because "codifiable and transferable legal templates made it possible to spread new forms of social organization throughout Europe". Examples of this are the “German” city law, which is exemplary for many cities in Eastern Europe, the transplantation of Norman customs to Wales and the fueros (settlement law) of Christian Spain for the Reconquista cities.

Important for the late medieval experience of colonization is the xenophobia that has emerged in the Eastern European border areas as well as in Ireland and Spain since the 14th century, the legal codification in the form of marriage rules, guild membership or the Limpieza de sangre (“purity of the Blood ”) against Jews and Moors . This contempt for foreigners was preceded by their enslavement, which was particularly evident in Saxony , where “slave hunts” took place from the 10th to the 12th centuries, during which the Saxons attacked, plundered , and sold into slavery the neighboring Slavs .

Overall, the European Christians in the 15th and 16th centuries had all the prerequisites to initiate "one of the greatest processes of conquest, colonization and cultural transformation in the world" when they set out to colonize overseas.

Russia

The Russian expansion in the tsarist empire from the 16th to the 20th century shows, according to Wolfgang Reinhard, a "direct geographical and historical connection with the medieval Eastern colonization of Europe", whereby he describes the occupation of Siberia "literally as the establishment of a New Europe".

Topographic overview of Siberia, plus most of European Russia

The Stroganov merchant family, commissioned by the tsar as early as the 16th century, made a considerable contribution to this. Since the Cossacks, as traditional champions of the border wars, had weapons (firearms) that were often superior to the Tatars and Siberian peoples, the colonization “in no way differed from the Spanish Conquista in terms of brutality and ruthless exploitation of the natives ” (see also Jermak Timofejewitsch ). Between 1943 and May 1944 the Soviet secret police also had entire ethnic groups , e.g. B. Kalmyks , Tatars, Chechens , Ingush and Balkars , deported in cattle wagons over thousands of kilometers to Siberia . Due to immigration, however, Siberia is now "the most 'Russian' part of the population not only of the former Soviet Union , but also of Russia in the narrower sense - a typical finding for a New Europe". According to Wolfgang Reinhard, the emergence of worldwide “New Europe” usually prevented their decolonization in the 20th century . For parts of Russia it looks different now. Since 1990 an ethnic-national process of disintegration has taken place there, which can be described as decolonization. Areas in the Caucasus and Central Asia , which have been subjected to Russian rule in a "quite colonialist manner", are particularly affected . Nothing else happened there than in the independence struggles of Vietnam , Algeria or Tanganyika . Avi Primor wrote in the Frankfurter Rundschau on September 3, 2008 :

“Today Moscow's language is reminiscent of the dark ages of absolute nationalism. One speaks of lost territories, of 80 million Russians who have to live outside of Russian borders. So should those 80 million people also belong to Russia? In reality, Russia has not lost any territories, but had to grant independence to the peoples it ruled, just as the Western colonial powers had to give up their colonies. Also outside of Russia there are not necessarily 80 million Russians to be found. Around 17 million Russian-speaking people live in the former Soviet republics to the south and north-west of Russia, and not all of them necessarily want to be Russian. Many in South Ossetia and Abkhazia take Russian passports for political reasons without being Russian-speaking. "

China

Wall depicting the 56 peoples of China in Beijing

The Han Chinese give the example of the border colonization process that has lasted the longest in history, in that their culture , which has been documented at the lower Yellow River since the second millennium BC , spread with long interruptions but continuously. Han Chinese define themselves as an ethnic group above all as “the group demarcated by identification with the dominant forms of Chinese culture” (Thomas Höllmann), “that is, they can always assimilate new groups that are ready or forced to cultural submission”. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the expansion of the Han Chinese arable farming zone "at the expense of the shepherd economy of Central Asia" reached its peak. With the occupation of Tibet , “the most radical form of communism also turned out to be the most radical form of colonialism and sinocentrism ”.
In July 2009 there were serious clashes between the Han Chinese and another ethnic minority, namely the Uyghurs , which shows another conflict typical of border colonialism.
China's strong investment activity brought hundreds of thousands of Han Chinese settlers to Xinjiang . You dominate the modern economic sector. For Uyghurs as well as Kazakhs and Kyrgyz in the region there are no opportunities for advancement. Many thousands therefore hired themselves as workers in low-wage sectors of the heartland. The Uighur language was also strongly suppressed in educational institutions. Mosques are under tight scrutiny after a period of relative liberality. Among other things, adolescents under the age of 18 were prohibited from practicing religion. Traditional settlements and cultural centers such as the city of Kashgar have been "modernized" through the radical destruction of the old buildings.

Overseas "New Europe"

Algeria

French warships bombarded Algiers on July 3, 1830

After the French conquest of Algiers in 1830, the prerequisites were created to set up colonies of settlements in Algeria in a geographical neighborhood only separated by the Mediterranean Sea and to ensure that 'superior' forms of agriculture were perceived as compared to the 'indigenous' and degrading foreign stereotypes Enforce arable farmers. Because of the insecure domestic political situation in France, a targeted settlement policy did not begin until the 1840s, motivated by the defeat in the Seven Years' War inflicted on the French by the British Empire and the shame of having lost large colonial possessions to England. The colonization of Algeria was intended to compensate for this in order to reconnect with the English in a first step.

The colonization debate also showed the important function of colonization to calm the inner social crisis mood and at the same time the demographic aspect of preventing emigration overseas, especially to America and Canada, where it would enrich foreign economies (cf. “ Habitat ”). Rather, people willing to emigrate should also be recruited from other European countries to colonize Algeria, so that half of the French settlers were made up of Italians and Spaniards, but remained connected exclusively to mainland France. Since 1871 these settlers were joined by the Alsatians and Lorraine , who after the German victory in the Franco-Prussian War did not want to belong to Germany but to France. The number of colonists rose to 500,000 by the end of the 19th century, while the number of Algerians fell from over 3 million inhabitants to around 2,125,000 between 1830 and 1872. The dead were mainly Algerian civilians, who fell victim not only to disease, but above all to the Armée d'Afrique, which was set up especially for Algeria , especially since the French were interested in land acquisition, which required the expulsion of the local population, which had also been after 1881 the Code de l'indigénat ("law for the natives", according to Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison "a legal monstrosity") could be used at any time for forced labor . Le Cour Grandmaison sums up the action of the “Armée d'Afrique” as follows: “Massacre civilians and disarmed prisoners, whose bodies are commonly mutilated by the French soldiers and whose heads and ears they display like trophies for which they are from their superiors are often rewarded; lay the villages and towns in rubble and ashes, destroy the arable land and plantations, and finally terrorize the survivors ”. Comment by Guy de Maupassant in his report on his trip to Algeria in 1884 (“Au soleil”): “It is certain that the original population will gradually disappear; undoubtedly also that this disappearance will be very useful for Algeria, but it is outrageous in which way it takes place. ”Of the 7 million hectares of usable area, after 100 years of struggle, 2.9 million most fertile areas belonged to the French settlers.

The Algerian War from 1954 to 1962 led to the independence of the area, which has been part of France since 1848. For Wolfgang Reinhard the first event that a colony with a large proportion of settlers was decolonized .

America

Map of the territories in America claimed by major European powers in 1750.

After the European conquest of America and Australia, “the untamed law of the thumb” was in force in North and South America, partly in Australia. In the permanent battle against the ' savages ', settlers and paramilitary killer squads (such as the Brazilian Bandeirantes ) up to genocide were all right, "whereby the structurally most violent form of border colonization was the" New England type "in the USA. Decolonization is no longer an option for this “New Europe” because border colonization has not allowed any indigenous peoples to survive to whom the land should be returned.

Argentina

In the South American Cono Sur (southern cone) so-called desert campaigns ( Campaña del Desierto ) to exterminate the Indians took place since the 1820s , which were continued by the later President of Argentina Julio Argentino Roca in 1878 and completed until 1884, due to their incomplete success To ensure "progress of civilization". As early as 1845, the later President Domingo Faustino Sarmiento had said that the Argentine people, like no other American people, were called to "immediately take in the population of Europe, which overflows like a full glass". Roca declared before the National Congress in 1879: “The most brilliant success has just crowned this expedition and in this way has freed these vast territories from the rule of the Indians forever. Now they are spreading out as brilliant promises before immigrants and foreign capital. ”With that, the territory was“ cleared ”and“ the ' frontier ' no longer existed ”. In the center of Buenos Aires a monument in the shape of Roca still commemorates this heroic act of genocide, which was integrated into national tradition. One of the largest cities in Patagonia bears the name “ General Roca ” as a reminder . For the Argentinian writer Osvaldo Bayer, it is like having erected a memorial to Hitler in Auschwitz . In Buenos Aires, however, there is a “ Holocaust ” museum, as Jews have been part of European immigration since the 19th century. So it was, for example, after the Jews had immigrated since 1846, under the presidency of Julio A. Roca agents in Europe, the Jews especially in Russia , where they repeatedly pogroms , enlisted as emigrants were shipped.

Uruguay

In Uruguay , where the last major Indian group was destroyed in 1831, a memorial in Montevideo has been in memory since 1938 of a “ Charrúa ” Indian family who survived the massacre, were enslaved and sold to France. Since the year 2000 the memory of the Indian past and the genocide committed against the Indians has been given a new status in the national memory, so that in 2004 a memorial to the nation of the Charrúa was erected inland. Until then, the following was and still applies in some cases: “In a superficial way, the so-called extermination of the natives in Salsipuedes (1831) established the myth of European and white Uruguay, which the leading classes have always nurtured, all the more so than transatlantic immigration in fact laid the foundations of Uruguay's demographic growth ”(Hugo Varela Brown, April 11, 2008). - Since 1994 there has been a remarkable “Holocaust” monument in a prominent location in Montevideo on the Río de la Plata, the only one of its kind in Latin America, because Jews have been part of the European immigrant society since the 19th century, as in Argentina.

Remarks

  1. ↑ Jürgen Osterhammel: Colonialism. History, forms, consequences . 5th updated edition. CH Beck, Munich 2006, p. 10 f.
  2. ↑ Wolfgang Reinhard: Brief history of colonialism. Stuttgart 1996, p. 3.
  3. ^ Meyer's Large Conversational Lexicon. Volume 1, Leipzig 1905, pp. 342-343.
  4. ↑ Quoted from Klaus Thörner: The whole southeast is our hinterland. P. 179.
  5. ↑ Ottomar Schuchardt: The German policy of the future . Volume 2, Celle 1900, p. 64. - On Schuchardt's concept of colonization in Eastern Europe cf. Bert Riehle: A new order of the world: Federal theories of peace in the German-speaking area between 1892 and 1932. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2009, ISBN 978-3-89971-558-3 , pp. 125–129.
  6. ↑ Wolfgang Reinhard (1996), p. 2 f.
  7. ↑ On the criticism of Bartlett cf. Michael Borgolte ( Memento of the original from January 14, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. - On the other hand, praised by Nikolas Jaspert (Bochum) as an “outstanding synthesis” of comparative medieval research in: Klaus Herbers u. Nikolas Jaspert (ed.): Europe in the Middle Ages, treatises and contributions to historical comparative literature. Volume 7: Border areas and border crossings in comparison. The east and west of medieval Latin Europe. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-05-004155-1 , p. 54. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.geschichte.hu-berlin.de
  8. ^ Robert Bartlett (1996), p. 13.
  9. ^ Robert Bartlett (1996), p. 370.
  10. ^ Robert Bartlett (1996), p. 371.
  11. ↑ Robert Bartlett (1996), pp. 287-294.
  12. ^ Robert Bartlett (1996), p. 366.
  13. ^ Robert Bartlett (1996), p. 376.
  14. ↑ Wolfgang Reinhard (1996), p. 161 f.
  15. ↑ Wolfgang Sofsky: Times of Terror. Amok, terror, war. S. Fischer, Frankfurt a. M. 2002, p. 89.
  16. ↑ Wolfgang Reinhard (1996), p. 165.
  17. ↑ Wolfgang Reinhard (1996), p. 331.
  18. ↑ It should be emphasized, however, that the loss of territories by the former colonial powers was about areas overseas that were separate from the motherland, whereas the Russian expansion took place as a continental border colonization in the sense of advancing the "frontier" as in the USA.
  19. ↑ Wolfgang Reinhard (1996), p. 170.
  20. ↑ Jürgen Osterhammel (2006), p. 10.
  21. ↑ Wolfgang Reinhard (1996), p. 176.
  22. ↑ Bloody unrest in Xinjiang ( Memento of the original from July 10, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.rp-online.de
  23. ↑ See Kristin Shi-Kupfer: China - Xinjiang (December 17, 2017). [1]
  24. ↑ Wolfgang Reinhard (1996), p. 3.
  25. ↑ Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison: Coloniser. Exterminers. Sur la guerre et l'État colonial. Fayard, Paris 2005, pp. 29-94.
  26. ↑ Wolfgang Reinhard (1996), p. 236.
  27. ↑ Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison (2005), p. 72.
  28. ↑ Wolfgang Reinhard (1996), p. 237.
  29. ↑ Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison (2005), p. 188.
  30. ↑ This lets O. Le Cour Grandmaison speak of a total war that was fought in Algeria and which flared up again and again because of the Algerian resistance (2005, pp. 173–199).
  31. ^ O. Le Cour Grandmaison (2005), p. 138.
  32. ↑ Wolfgang Reinhard (1996), p. 320.
  33. ↑ Jürgen Osterhammel (2006), p. 48.
  34. ^ Domingo Faustino Sarmiento: Barbarism and Civilization. The life of Facundo Quiroga. Frankfurt am Main, Eichborn, 2007, ISBN 978-3-8218-4580-7 , p. 16.
  35. ↑ Quoted in “La guerra del desierto” ( Memento of the original from June 23, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (Spanish).  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.elortiba.org
  36. ↑ Michael Riekenberg : Small history of Argentina. CH Beck, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-406-58516-6 , pp. 104-105.
  37. ↑ Cf. Rosa Amelia Plumelle-Uribe : Traite des Blancs, traite des Noirs. Aspects méconnus et conséquences actuelles , L'Harmattan: Paris 2008, ISBN 978-2-296-06443-0 , p. 96 f. - The decisive factor, however, is that, unlike Hitler, Roca went down in history as the victor.
  38. ^ Holocaust Museum in Buenos Aires
  39. ^ Chronology of Jewish immigration
  40. ↑ Immigration of Jews
  41. ↑ Charrúas
  42. ^ Charrúa Memorial (Spanish).
  43. ↑ Holocaust memorial
  44. ↑ See Waltraud Kokot, Hauke ​​Dorsch (ed.): Diaspora: Transnational Relations and Identities (= Periplus - Yearbook for Non-European History. Volume 14). Lit Verlag, Berlin / Münster / Vienna / Zurich / London 2004, ISBN 3-8258-7820-1 , pp. 15-30.

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