The Conditions of ‘Savages’? nation-states that produce a massive amount of people who do not ‘belong’ to the nation of the nation-state in which they live. According to Arendt, the Roman Empire could integrate the peoples it conquered by making them legal subjects under a law that was universal rather than an expression of a Roman ‘nation’. 19 Arendt develops this argument further in a section on ‘The Question of War’ in her unfinished Introduction into Politics, which she started in 1955. 20 In that text, Arendt argues that Rome’s political principle was one of ‘making treaties and forming alliances’, 21 so that ‘for the Romans, politics began as foreign policy, that is, as the very thing the Greek mind had completely excluded from politics’. 22 Idealising Roman expansion in a way that historian A Dirk Moses sees as a continuation of the reception of Marcus Tullius Cicero by Renaissance thinkers such as Niccolò Machiavelli and James Harrington, 23 Arendt argues that the Romans aimed not for an ‘Imperium Romanum’ but for a ‘societas Romana, an infinitely expandable system of alliances initiated by Rome’. 24 By contrast, Arendt argues in ‘Imperialism’, when nation-states expanded into empires, the legal integration of conquered peoples was structurally impossible, because: ‘The nation … conceived of its law as an outgrowth of a unique national substance which was not valid beyond its own people and the boundaries of its own territory’. 25 Therefore, European imperialists ruled over their colonies through violence, bureaucratic decrees and racism, not law, treating their colonial subjects as labour power to be exploited and populations to be managed, and reducing government to a police force securing the business interests of the imperialist bourgeoisie. Arendt’s argument is that this imperialist expansion of the nation-state destroyed politics and law not only in the colonies, but also in Europe. Just as Aimé Césaire, in his 1950 Discourse on Colonialism, considered Nazism to be a ‘choc en retour’, a shock in reverse, of racist dehumanisation pioneered in the colonies, 26 Arendt, writing around the same time, saw Nazism as the culmination of the destruction of politics and law that has its origins in the principle of the nation-state, but only fully manifests itself under imperialism: African colonial possessions became the most fertile soil for the flowering of what later was to become the Nazi elite. Here they had seen with their own eyes how peoples could be converted into races and how, simply by taking the initiative in the process, one might push one’s own people into the position of the master race.27 Arendt’s argument about ‘the boomerang effect of imperialism upon the homeland’ 28 draws inspiration from Edmund Burke’s warning about the 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 See Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (n 1) ch 9. A draft of this text was published in Jerome Kohn (ed), ‘Introduction into Politics’ in Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, ed Jerome Kohn (Schocken 2005) 93, 153–191 (emphasis in original). ibid 185. ibid 183. A Dirk Moses, ‘Das römische Gespräch in a New Key: Hannah Arendt, Genocide, and the Defense of Republican Civilization’ (2013) 85(4) The Journal of Modern History 867, 886. Kohn (n 20) 186. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (n 1) 127. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, tr Joan Pinkham (Monthly Review Press 2000). For a sophisticated comparison with Arendt’s ‘Imperialism’, see Rothberg (n 4). Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (n 1) 206. ibid 155. 199