Congressional and journalistic debates are littered with confident assertions

that their expansion was the work of a superior race, with superior
ideas and a better civilization and of the excellent white race . . . whose
power and privilege it is, wherever they may go, and wherever they may
be, to Christianize and to civilize, to command to be obeyed, to conquer
and to reign.47
I should admit that not all Europeans were enamoured with this thesis
about the desirability of civilization, or about the tendency to limit the
process to non-European peoples alone. Assertions of both the moral
and material value of civilization were largely restricted to the Englishspeakingworld,
and particularly among German scholars, civilizationwas
seen as largely material, and was negatively counterposed to the moral
value of Kultur.48 Moreover, even among British and American thinkers
there was a significant constituency that regarded civilization as something
that was still applicable to European peoples as well. Many of these
arguments took the formof early theses about increasing interdependence
that anticipate current analyses of globalization in the degree to which
they recognize that the further development of economic and technological
progress might involve closer integration to the detriment of the
independent territorial sovereignty of states.49 Even Lorimer, that vigorous
advocate of the civilization of non-European peoples believed that
it is obvious that, at the stage which intercommunication has reached,
Europe is no more independent of the other continents of the globe than
the separate States of Europe are independent of each other. Europe has
burst her bounds in all directions, and in becoming the centre of cosmopolitan
life, she has ceased to be self-sufficing.50 And Kidd, one of
the principal international relations theorists to expound racial theories of
social evolution and their relevance to the civilizing mission of European
powers outside Europe, realized that the further advance of civilization
would have massive consequences for the West as well, leading to the
Cited in Johannsen, The Meaning of Manifest Destiny, p. 15, and John Belohlavek,
Race, Progress and Destiny: Caleb Cushing and the Quest for American Empire, in
Haynes and Morris (eds.), Manifest Destiny, p. 25.
48 For a classic analysis, see Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic
Investigations, trans. Edmund Jephcott, revised edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000),
ch. 1, and for a fascinating recent discussion of the evolution of the German critique of
Zivilisation, see Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History (New York: Free
Press, 1997), especially chs. 3, 7 and pp. 1948.
49 This might seem odd, but the concept of interdependence is as old as the idea of the
states-system itself. So far as I am aware, the first statement of the idea that interdependence
will lead to closer cooperation among states, and hence more peaceful international
relations, can be found in John Campbell, The Present State of Europe, Explaining
the Interests, Connections, Political and Commercial Views of its Several Powers, 3rd edn
(London: Longman, 1752), p. 24.
50 Lorimer, Institutes of the Law of Nations, vol. II, p. 288.
47