Wilhelmine imperialism, overseas resistance and German domestic politics: The case of the Center Party, 1897--1906.

摘要

Noting the impact since 1945 of anti-imperialist resistance movements upon political constellations in the metropolitan powers, this study addresses the question whether before 1914 the resistance of populations subject to imperialism generated consequences of sufficient significance to influence domestic politics in Germany. More specifically, it explores the extent to which such resistance in the years from 1897 to 1906 affected the relationship between the Reich government and the Catholic Center party, the swing bloc of votes in the Reichstag during the period in question. Hans-Ulrich Wehler's model of “social imperialism” as a governmental sociopolitical diversionary strategy is accordingly tested against the colonial- and pseudocolonial-political developments of the mid-Wilhelmme period. The study concludes that from 1897 to 1906 anti-imperialist resistance movements in Africa, Asia, the South Seas and the Caribbean frequently and at times decisively influenced Wilhelmine domestic politics, but not in a uniform manner. In those pseudocolonial or foreign colonial venues where German national and Roman Catholic interests were generally closely aligned, as in China, Cuba, the Philippines and Samoa, resistance movements usually redounded to the benefit of the Reich's ruling elite by providing opportunities to gratify the Center's constituency cheaply without domestic concessions. On the other hand, resistance movements in German-occupied Africa arose in contexts where church-state interests clashed or where the Center's fiscal concerns predominated on the question of the costs of colonial uprisings. In these latter circumstances anti-imperialist resistance overseas seriously undermined and ultimately destroyed the government-Center partnership. The extensive evidence for the predominantly African roots of the Reichstag dissolution of December 1906 deals a blow to the applicability to that moment in history of the thesis of social-imperialist manipulation from above. The period from 1897 to 1901 is a more promising field of exploration for the social-imperialist rubric, but even here the Reich practiced only an impromptu form of that strategy.