Colonialism comes up repeatedly in cultural as well as socio-political and economic discussions. We consider it a bad thing, but we rarely ask ourselves what it really means. In fact, there are different kinds of colonialism, and their effects vary considerably. Today, we may even find it where we least suspect.
Literally, colonialism is the practice of settling people from one country in another, in the form of communities known as colonies. It is bound up, however, with imperialism, that is, the construction of empires.
Colonialism can be divided into several types.
There is sea-based colonialism such as that of Britain, an island nation that founded vast colonies in and beyond the Mediterranean, Indian, Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Spain, too, established an overseas empire; its smaller neighbor, Portugal, may have saved itself from Spanish encroachments by doing likewise. In the early modern period, these empires expanded through trade. The Dutch and Portuguese were more interested in setting up trading posts with docks and warehouses than settling vast inland territories.
Then there is land-based colonialism such as that of Russia, which expanded to Siberia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, Ukraine and part of Eastern Europe. Russia moved sizeable populations into these areas, imposing its own forms of government and social organization.
There is controversy on whether colonialism can be benign. Many British leaders, for example, believed they were bringing a higher civilization to lower ones. After all, it was the British who brought modern medicine, sanitation, education, the rule of law, self-government, and the very concepts of human rights and nationalism to the peoples of Asia and Africa. Those peoples then used these tools against the British themselves. Mohandas K. Gandhi, trained in British law and influenced by Christian teaching, contrasted the spiritual and cultural wealth of India with the merely material benefits of Western civilization. Leftist thinkers like Frantz Fanon and Ho Chi Minh used European Marxism against the Europeans. It seems that one of colonialism’s gifts was to sow the seeds of its own destruction.
At the same time, the detrimental effects of colonialism were felt not only by the subject countries, but by the colonizers themselves. These effects included not only economic exploitation and distortion, but psychological demoralization. Today, the influx of immigrants from Asia and Africa to Europe, itself a new type of colonization, is sometimes seen as the revenge of the colonized.
The United States of America, which arose from a confederation of British colonies, itself colonized lands to its west. Emulating European successes, at the end of the 19th century we undertook our own brand of imperialism and colonialism, seizing Guam, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Cuba from the dying Spanish empire. Under the banners of free trade and democracy, we subverted and then annexed the archaic Kingdom of Hawai‘i.
For Ukraine, historical colonialism has meant the Russian or Polish kind. Both Poles and Western Ukrainians who experienced the Soviet occupation of 1939-1941 used to tell stories about the “culture-bearing” Russians, who prided themselves on introducing public steam baths and Marxism-Leninism to the unenlightened Leopolitans, but wore nightgowns to the opera and washed their hair in bidets. While imperial Russia did provide talented Ukrainians with career opportunities (Prokopovych, Yavorsky, Bortniansky, Hohol), and erected some fine buildings in its own peculiar style, it lowered the educational level of the masses and stunted Ukrainian culture.
Polish colonialism presents a more ambiguous face. We have grown up with the image of the rapacious Polish landowners who for six centuries robbed our peasants of their labor. While this is true, gentry Poland also brought concepts of law and representative government, as well as no mean accomplishments in art and architecture, literature, mathematics, music, philosophy and science. We are loath to acknowledge it, but to a striking degree, Ukrainian nationalism borrowed Polish forms.
Today, we speak of post-colonialism. Mykola Riabchuk, probably the most astute Ukrainian political commentator, has published a collection of essays on the “post-colonial syndrome.” One manifestation of this is self-colonization. This is the psycho-cultural phenomenon by which a subject people internalizes colonialism and, long after the colonizers have left, perpetuates its subordinate status by “colonizing itself.” The Cantonese-Canadian scholar Justin Tse has detected this phenomenon among both his own people and ours. Self-colonization is characterized by self-loathing, an inordinate admiration for (and imitation of) the colonizing culture (e.g., Russophilism) and a denigration of one’s own (for example, presuming that everything Ukrainian is inferior, or reducing our folk culture to hopaks and pierogies). In the religious sphere, self-colonization can take the form of an exaggerated reverence for Russian theology. As Dr. Tse (a Ukrainian Greco-Catholic) has noted, it is also manifest in “uniatism,” characterized by the unreflective insertion of forms, practices and spirituality from the Latin tradition into Greco-Catholic church life, even when there are Byzantine-rite analogues that would serve the same purposes. This, in fact, offends Roman as well as Byzantine sacred aesthetics.
Have we also become victims of new types of colonization – a neo-colonialism of which we are not even aware? Can there, for example, be forms of cultural colonization that do not depend on territorial conquest? Defenders of ethnic or indigenous cultures might agree, pointing out that cultural power follows economic power. True, whether commercially borne cultural influence is an imposition or a contribution is a matter of dispute. Today, the Ukrainian language is being “enriched” by terms like “brending,” “mesedzh,” and “feik.” International media conglomerates thrust American films and television series into millions of Ukrainian homes. In this way, American values and sensibilities – including individualism as well as a penchant for violence and vulgarity – penetrate the minds and souls of Ukrainians. Of course, Russia has been using the media in the same way for decades, and in the occupied Donbas it has no competition.
One may speak, indeed, of “ideological colonization” – and self-colonization. Is Russian-style conservatism colonizing the American Right? Is American-style liberalism colonizing Eastern Europe? Are we the colonizers, the colonized – or both?