Exceptionalism

Lars Jensen, Kristín Loftsdóttir

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367535209
• eBook ISBN: 9781000440980
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume crucially provides an analytical and comparative approach, investigating the meaning and uses of the concept of exceptionalism, while demonstrating the ways in which it manifests itself in different historical and geographical settings. Exceptionalism offers comparative case studies from different parts of the world, showcasing the way in which exceptionalism has come to occupy an important narrative position in relation to different nation-states, including the United States, the United Kingdom, the Nordic countries, various European nations and countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia. An introduction to and overview of a term that has come to define the past and present identity of many nations, this book will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology, geography, cultural studies and politics.

1

FROM COLONIAL TO POSTCOLONIAL EXCEPTIONALISM

DOI: 10.4324/9781003082330-1

This chapter discusses four cases from the Netherlands, Portugal, Belgium and Spain, all representing forms of colonial and postcolonial exceptionalism. The cases illustrate the ways distinct conceptualizations of colonial and postcolonial exceptionalism lend themselves to comparisons elsewhere in Europe. The choice of northern and southern European cases is not coincidental. Within Europe itself, hierarchical notions of “proper” Europeans and “marginal” Europeans come with a broadly acknowledged long history (Loftsdóttir 2019; Jensen 2020), but have almost exclusively been understood as a result of internal European power dynamics (Dainotto 2007). They were, however, also the product of globalized power hierarchies during the long era of European colonial rule. Before we embark on an analysis of the four cases, however, we establish what we mean by colonial and postcolonial exceptionalism.

Historically, European nation-empires were all premised on notions and narratives of exceptionalism (Cardão 2015; Foray 2019).¹ Colonial rule was understood as deriving from an innate European ability and incontestable will to exercise control over colonial territories. While exceptionalism was promoted as a national-imperial quality, it was a common thread in all European imperial narratives, and in all cases, imperial benevolence and civilizing mission were seen as the building blocks of colonial rule (Jensen 2020: 109–11). Thus, to speak of colonial exceptionalism is to speak of European nationhood giving particular shape and identity to colonial rule and colonial states but framed by the same overall desire – to rule over, control and exploit the colonial world. In recent decades, critical European scholarship has begun to question the defence of individual colonial formations, but what is yet to be developed further is the question how colonial rule reflected back upon and influenced societal developments in European metropolitan cultures. Thus, colonial exceptionalism has two prominent features: To defend one's own empire with reference to colonial benevolence and the civilizing mission against the wider condemnation of colonialism as exploitation, and to assert that colonies had no impact on the national culture in metropolitan Europe.

Possessing colonies lent an air of global significance and boosted the national self-confidence domestically and internationally. Places where this historical fact survives include France's arc of former Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean colonies over which it continues to exercise its sovereignty (Jensen 2020), and Denmark's continued sovereignty over Greenland and the Faroe Islands (Jensen 2018). Such continuities illustrate the ambiguities surrounding colonialism as a historical era replaced by decolonization and independence. These ambiguities led to the adaptation of the term postcolonial to better capture colonialism as an unfinished project and its lingering effects in the former colonies and European metropolitan cultures (Hall 1996).

Postcolonial exceptionalism, as postcolonialism itself, may be described as a terrain characterized by extension, break from and transgression of colonial exceptionalism. Thus, postcolonial exceptionalism operates as an extension when a self-privileging, racializing with impunity, white European imagined superior self exists in continuous discourses surrounding European encounters with former colonial subjects in their now independent nations – and vis-à-vis postcolonial subjects from the former colonies now settled in the former European metropolitan culture. Postcolonial exceptionalism represents a break from colonial exceptionalism when structures erected to protect European colonial rule are disrupted by independence and by larger shifts in the global order. One example of the intricacies of postcolonialism is Portuguese employees working for the extremely rich Angolan elite, and the Angolan elite's considerable power wielding in the Portuguese telecommunication infrastructure (Waldorff 2017; Åkesson 2018), while a Portuguese elite also has considerable interests in Angola. Similarly, postcolonial exceptionalism represents a break in the very presence of postcolonial subjects in postcolonial Europe (Jabri 2013), even if their arrival and living conditions in Europe often reveal a continued underprivileged position. Colonialism was premised on the notion that while European imperial citizens travelled, and were at times encouraged to settle in colonial states, colonial subjects were meant almost exclusively² to remain in the colony and work directly or indirectly for the upkeep of the colonial administration and more broadly as the extractivist base of the empire.³ Finally, postcolonial exceptionalism is a transgression of colonial exceptionalism as it produces the encounter between postcolonial and postimperial subjects as a highly ambiguous space, defined by retrospection, postmemory, current configurations of power and future-oriented projections of shared spaces and identities.

All nine major overseas European nation-empires – Belgium, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Italy, Britain and France – manifest the kinds of colonial and postcolonial exceptionalism outlined earlier. As such they all provide ample material for case studies that would illustrate exceptionalism as a form of colonial and postcolonial narrative of imperial and postimperial selfhood. The four cases selected from four different former nation-empires have been chosen to identify broader common patterns across the colonial and postcolonial European terrain, rather than as illustrations of unique nation-imperial formations. In the discussion of exceptionalism across the colonial and postcolonial terrain, it is crucial to remember that unpacking exceptionalism requires establishing the unexceptional nature of each case without losing sight of the fact that conditions in each case have particularities of their own. Colonial and postcolonial exceptionalism thus represents a critique of how nations construct benevolent and civilizing narratives of selfhood against a backdrop of colonial violence and skewed postcolonial power relations. But colonial and postcolonial exceptionalism also simply refer to the construction and unequivocal endorsement of such narratives. Turning the gaze to Portugal, Belgium, the Netherlands and Spain needs to begin with the observation that colonial and postcolonial exceptionalism manifest themselves in a myriad of different ways, once the premise is accepted that colonialism's global reach shaped national identities and continue to do so. The cases we have selected cannot cover the broader national-imperial colonial-postcolonial domain of exceptionalism, but they do exemplify central aspects of colonial and postcolonial exceptionalism.

A brief outline of the four cases

Portugal

In Portugal, recent discussions tapping into the discourse of exceptionalism include what the massive waterfront monument to the Portuguese discoverers in the Lisbon suburb of Belém actually commemorates (Sieber 2001; Jensen 2020), the (re)discovery of the extended history of “Black” subjects in Lisbon (Gschwend and Lowe 2015; Smith 2018) and the plans to build a monument to the enslavement of Africans in Portugal that predates the trafficking of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic (Ames 2018). But there is also the broader question of continued postcolonial relations between Portugal and its former empire that take a variety of different forms, from the question of migration waves from Portugal to Brazil, Angola (Åkesson 2018) and Mozambique and the immigration from “Lusophone” Africa and Brazil to Portugal. The former is connected to Portugal as a major emigrant nation since the mid-nineteenth century, and both are connected to the rise and lulls in notions of a linguistic-cultural community connecting Portugal and its former empire in ways co-existing with but often transcending its affiliation with ideas of a shared continental European identity (Brugioni 2017).

The Portuguese case discusses the exceptionalism surrounding the idea of Lusophony and its relationship to the colonial exceptionalism narrative of Lusotropicalism. The case illustrates how language is both the vehicle of exceptionalism and the tool for undermining it. Lusophony belongs to an emerging family of terms encapsulating the singularity of the various nation-empires and their subscriptions to notions of national-imperial idealized selfhood, and also the silencing and negligence of colonial and postcolonial subjects' critique of European conceptualizations of the colonial project as benevolent and guided by a civilizing mission. More comparatively, Lusophony and the postcolonial revisiting and restaging of the singularity of nation-imperial exceptionalism may be equally well discussed in the Dutchophone, Belgiophone, Francophone, Italophone, Danophone, Germanophone, Hispanophone and Anglophone domains (Jensen 2020).

Belgium

The sprawl of Portuguese affiliations with its historical overseas possessions over hundreds of years is in stark contrast to the Belgian experience. Belgium was established in 1830 as a small nation-state that soon materialized into a short-lived empire (by Portuguese standards) built around King Leopold's Congo project (Monaville 2015). Leopold's “colonial estate” was inherited by the Belgian state and ended in subsequently amnesiized violence against colonial subjects (Goddeeris 2015; Buettner 2016), similarly to the collapse of the Portuguese African Empire just over a decade later. Thus, to explore Belgian colonial and postcolonial exceptionalism is here primarily to examine the rise and demise of Belgian Congo that in recent times have been expressed through the lingering ambiguities surrounding what to do with the Africa Museum, originally built as a tribute to the Belgian civilizing mission in Congo (Aydemir 2008). Ambiguities are also manifested in relation to the presence of an African diaspora living in the Matongé neighbourhood of Brussels taking its name from a neighbourhood in Kinshasa (Hoenig 2014) and the Belgian complicity in the murder of Patrice Lumumba, Congo's first prime minister (Verbeeck 2020).

The Belgian case examines the fallout from the relaunched Africa Museum and the contradictory attempt to change the museum's narrative of Belgium's historical and postindependence relationship with the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The refurbishment of the Africa Museum was meant to offset Congolese criticism of the museum as a monstrous colonialist endorsement, while avoiding a Belgian public backlash against a museum detailing Belgian colonial violence. The Belgian case bears resemblance to other debates over what to do with monuments, public space names originally inaugurated to celebrate colonialist figures representative of colonialism's structural violence. Such figures include Van Heutsz (the Netherlands), da Gama and Henry the Navigator (Portugal) and Columbus and Cortés (Spain).⁴

The Netherlands

Dutch colonialism can be positioned between the Belgian “one colony empire”⁵ and the temporally and spatially extended sprawl of Portuguese colonialism. The Netherlands, however, held one major colony, Indonesia, that in profound ways was seen as the Dutch “Jewel in the Crown” (Buettner 2016: 4). Indonesia's transition to independence preoccupied the Dutch during the period itself and left a contentious legacy eventually raising profound questions about how to deal with colonialist commemoration. The end of the colonial era left behind colonialist monuments and colonialist names assigned to public spaces that eventually led to embarrassing questions regarding how to deal with them in postcolonial times when colonialism's structural violence could no longer be silenced or ignored (Scherpen 2011; Bijl 2012; Middelkoop and Pesko n.d.). The need to critically revisit colonial history has been accompanied by the continued renewal of Dutch-Indonesian relations and the resettling of Indisch⁶ in the Netherlands. The Dutch here faced a similar situation to the Belgians and the Portuguese who returned or were forced into repatriation after the Congolese and Portuguese African independence (Buettner 2016).

The Dutch case focuses on the belated “discovery” of the violence accompanying the Dutch retreat from Indonesia. The long Dutch silence on late colonial violence bears resemblance to the silencing and amnesia surrounding the Belgian and Portuguese violent retreats from their African colonies, and the Spanish colonial intervention in Morocco discussed later. Exceptionalism in the Dutch case becomes interwoven with narratives of colonial “betrayal”, defending national interests and “preserving” the excep...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 From colonial to postcolonial exceptionalism
• 2 Welfare state exceptionalism in the Nordic countries and Britain
• 3 Nation-building and nation branding
• 4 Altered states of exceptions: Africa-Europe/US-Latin America
• 5 Exceptionalism in times of crisis and pandemics
• Index