Clarissa's Blog

People bring up imperialism and colonialism to me like they are convinced I should consider both to be bad. But I don’t. It would be bizarre of me to do so, given that I’m only able to make a living the way I make my living, thanks to the existence of the Spanish Empire.

Or take the Roman Empire. Without it, there would be no Western civilization. Who can possibly argue that the great civilizing mission of the Roman Empire was historically a bad thing? Okay, I’m sure some woke loser can, but I’m talking among reasonable people.

This doesn’t mean that all imperialism is good. Of course it isn’t. It’s a complicated phenomenon that can be good, bad, or anything in between.

Both imperialism and colonialism, however, are concepts that belong to the past. We have sacrificed them to the idea of the nation-state. We have to stop trying to fit today’s reality into these outdated concepts. I understand, for example, the desire to view the EU as an imperial project. For instance, the desire to impose a uniform worldview on the indigenous populations to which this worldview is alien is, in fact, similar to what the Spanish Empire did in its Latin American colonies. But that similarity isn’t enough to make them the same thing. A goose and an airplane both have wings and fly, but that doesn’t turn an airplane into a type of bird.

What exists today is not the nation-state and what came before it, but the nation-state and what comes after it.