From 1894 to 1914, a new form of nationalism led to imperialistic ambitions on the part of European powers. This new form of nationalism was inspired by Social Darwinism; Darwin's theory of evolution supported the idea that certain races were superior to that of others. In appropriating the doctrine of the survival of the fittest for their nefarious aims, European powers such as England, Italy, France, and Germany acted to subjugate whole populations.
In essence, these new ideas about race and nation created tension between European imperialists and civilizations in the cross-hairs of these imperialistic initiatives. While England fought South Africans in the Boer War for territorial control and for access to gold mining operations, other European powers entertained similar ideas. In France, the anthropologist Georges Vacher de Lapouge developed the idea of separating the races into subgroups. In 1899, he wrote The Aryan: His Social Role. Lapouge hypothesized that all subgroups could be categorized by skull shape. The long-headed or dolichocephalic Aryan races were superior to the round-headed or brachycephalic races.
Lepouge's Homo Europaeus corresponded to members of the Anglo-Saxon race, with the characteristic blond hair and blue eye features so prized among nationalists (Adolph Hitler also espoused similar beliefs in the superiority of the Aryan race). Lapouge went on to characterize the darker-skinned peoples like the Jews as Homo Contractus. The Homo Contractus was characterized as an under-developed and backward species of man, whose only conceivable purpose was to serve as slave labor for the superior Anglo-Saxon races.
Meanwhile, Joseph Arthur, Comte de Gobineau, a French aristocrat and writer, developed the theory of the Aryan race. He regarded the mixing of the races as miscegenation and a crime against humanity. Gobineau saw the white races as the true proponents of human progress; therefore any sort of inter-marriage between the races was anathema. He saw the white, black, and yellow races embroiled in a cosmic conflict for relevance and supremacy in world affairs. Both Gobineau and Lapouge believed that France was sullied by the presence of inferior races. The tension occasioned by these misguided beliefs cannot be underestimated. Gobineau's Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races was published in German in 1897; it was later to influence the German dictator, Adolph Hitler.
Adolph Hitler adopted the racial theories of Gobineau and Lepouge to realize his nationalistic and imperialistic goals; he believed that it was the German state's prerogative to annihilate the inferior races in Germany and in the world. He saw imperialism as a war for the survival of the fittest on the global stage. Germany's relevance had to be secured through a catastrophic human holocaust; the master race was to be saved at all costs. To meet his goals, he roused the nationalistic sentiments of the German people to a fevered pitch.
In 1907, Friedrich von Bernhardi, a German general, argued that 'War is a biological necessity of the first importance, a regulative element in the life of mankind which cannot be dispensed with, since without it an unhealthy development will follow, which excludes every advancement of the race, and therefore all real civilization...' His beliefs echoed those of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an English-born German citizen, who published his Foundations of the Nineteenth Century in 1899, where he hypothesized that Germany needed to fight to annihilate the inferior races, as the continued viability of mankind hinged on the preservation of the European master race. These new ideas about race and nation created such tension on the global stage that they became responsible for the atrocities and millions of deaths incurred in World Wars One and Two.
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