benefits of progress to the peoples of the world was also, up to a point,
genuine. The moral ambiguity of colonialism appeared clearly in the
1919 League of Nations Mandate system, which treated “peoples
not yet able to stand by themselves” as “a sacred trust of civilization,”
but also opened the door to equality and self-determination.^83
This ambiguity is best understood in light of the divergent readings
the right and the left gave of imperialism, even at the peak of the
colonial enterprise. On the right, the great powers seemed bound to
dominate the world, because peoples were just too unequal. Why,
asked French economist Paul Leroy-Beaulieu in 1874, should “the
civilized people of the West...leave perhaps half the world to small
groups of ignorant men, who are powerless, who are truly retarded
children dispersed over boundless territories, or else to decrepit
populations without energy and without direction, truly old men
incapable of any effort, of any organized and far-seeing action?”^84
The economic expansion of Europe, combined with what was inter-
preted as scientific evidence in favor of racism – such as the idea of the
“survival of the fittest” derived from Charles Darwin’s theory of
evolution – tended to reinforce the right’s notion of a fundamentally
unequal world.^85 Typically, on the left, inequality was understood less
as a natural condition than as an injustice, bound to be challenged in
due time. Karl Marx, for instance, viewed England as an “unconscious
tool of history,” which was driven “by the vilest interests” and
inflicted misery. But for him, colonialism also brought closer the day
when a new Indian society would emerge, either when “in Great
Britain itself the now ruling classes shall have been supplanted by the
industrial proletariat, or [when] the Hindoos themselves shall have
grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether.”^86
It was this vision of human equality that inspired the fight against
colonialism, which lasted for a good part of the twentieth century
and was primarily led by the left. In the South, the decolonization
(^83) Covenant of the League of Nations, quoted in Crawford,Argument and
84 Change in World Politics, p. 261.
85 Leroy-Beaulieu, quoted in Beaud,A History of Capitalism, p. 140.
86 Pitts,A Turn to Empire, pp. 19–20.
Karl Marx, “The British Rule in India,”New-York Daily Tribune, June 25,
1853; and “The Future Results of British Rule in India,”New-York Daily
Tribune, August 8, 1853 (www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/06/25.
htm and http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/07/22.htm)..)
104 Left and Right in Global Politics