The Myth of the Pro-Colonialist SPD: A Short Genealogy

Given both Hans-Ulrich Wehler's influence on the historiography of the German Empire and David Blackbourn's and Geoff Eley's importance, how can we explain the widespread silence on the SPD's anticolonialist sentiments in pre-WWI Germany, or, even more curiously, the continuous assertion that the Social Democrats were in fact, at least after 1907, basically a pro-colonialist party? To be sure, outspokenly negative evaluations of (as opposed to mere inattention to) the Social Democrats’ role in Imperial German politics, whether in respect to colonialism or other issues, have a very long tradition, and are basically as old as the party itself. The roots of current assumptions of the SPD's alleged pro-colonialism after 1907 can be traced back to the 1950s, however. They are briefly indicated in Hermann Heidegger's Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie und der nationale Staat (1956), which explains (and criticizes) the West German SPD's critique of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's Westanbindung (i.e., the FRG's CDU government's orientation toward the United States, Great Britain, and France), by interpreting it as an overcompensation of the Social Democrats’ “historical failure to use unfettered, searching, and disoriented feelings of German nationalism for the stabilization of the Weimar Republic after 1918,” a lesson the party should have learned, according to Heidegger, after its defeat in the 1907 “Hottentot elections.” More importantly (because referenced more often), Carl Schorske's German Social Democracy 1905–1907 (1955) puts significant blame for Weimar's failure on the shoulders of the SPD. According to Schorske, the party's 1917 split prevented both socialist parties, the more left-wing USPD and the moderate MSPD, from adequately dealing with the challenges of the immediate postwar period. Thus, after “having helped to rescue the principal elements of the old order—bureaucracy, army, and capitalism itself—from the social revolutionary threat, the old Social Democratic Party was soon deprived of its position of primacy in the affairs of the republic.”Footnote ⁷

Schorske's book traces the party's split back to the years 1905–1907, a period shaped by, in his view, the rise of revisionism, the ultimate triumph of which came during the Second International in Stuttgart in 1907 when the party “revealed itself as the leader of the conservative forces in the International.” According to Schorske, this revelation was symbolized by a “really significant change in policy,” namely the party's “fuller acceptance of colonialism.” Schorske's highlighting of the SPD's alleged colonialist turn was morally charged: after all, he viewed the year 1907 as the time when the 1917 split of the party began to manifest itself, which in turn indicated that Weimar's failure and the Nazis’ success could at least indirectly be traced back to this moment. Schorske thus wrote the reasons for the first German democracy's downfall into the history of the only pre-1914 party that wanted Germany to become a democracy. His attempt to discern long-term trajectories that eventually made possible the rise of the Nazis led Schorske to ignore the fact that the SPD delegation at the Stuttgart conference did not actually vote against the conference's radically anticolonialist resolution but for it.Footnote ⁸

Schorske (like Heidegger) understood the ultimate success of the Nazis in 1933 as at least partially resulting from the mistakes their Social Democratic opponents had made in 1918 and 1919—a powerful teleological notion that echoed the left-democratic criticism of the SPD during the 1920s by Carl von Ossietzky, Kurt Tucholsky, and later also Sebastian Haffner, and stained the party's image in the eyes of left-leaning liberal democrats even after 1945. Hans-Ulrich Wehler's repudiation of this perspective (referenced at the beginning of this article) and his view of the SPD as a major democratic disturbance within the autocratic political structure of the German Empire can, at least in part, be interpreted as an attempt to reaffirm and strengthen the SPD's anti-autocratic pedigree in 1960s West Germany. According to historian Theodor Mommsen, the first cohort of West German historians, of whom Wehler is arguably the most prominent representative, had “little doubt that historiography had a definite political function to fill, and that the option of taking refuge in objective historical scholarship that was aloof from present-day politics was not open to them.” Wehler's largely positive interpretation of the SPD's role in Imperial German politics can thus be understood to have been a political reaction to the conservative Christian Democrats’ dominance of West German politics until 1962, which had allowed erstwhile Nazis such as Hans Globke and Theodor Oberländer to occupy high-ranking governmental positions in the young Federal Republic.Footnote ⁹

Both perspectives of the SPD live on, although Schorske's remains the more popular one. Wehler's interpretation of the pre-1914 SPD began to receive less and less attention during the 1980s, maybe an unintentional consequence of Blackbourn's and Eley's criticism of his Sonderweg thesis during a decade which, coincidentally, saw the CDU return to political dominance in West Germany. In 1986, Markku Hyrkkänen's Sozialistische Kolonialpolitik moved Schorske's view of the Social Democrats’ 1907 colonialist turn from playing a supporting role in a drama about the SPD's 1917 split to center stage. This work argued for the importance of pro-colonialist positions within the pre-1914 SPD, and its analysis culminated in the statement that “although the history of German colonialism was relatively short, it was nevertheless long enough to create the feeling among Social Democrats that the German colonies belonged to them as well.” Based on this interpretation, Sebastian Conrad in his Globalisierung und Nation, one of the most important publications of the new wave of transnational histories of the German Empire, argues that the colonialist attitudes of the SPD as a whole, “not just of its revisionist wing, was evidence of how the entire political spectrum of the Kaiserreich had internalized the model of European civilization.”Footnote ¹⁰

The SPD and Colonialism before 1907

Because so many scholars who have addressed the SPD's relationship with colonialism have focused their attention on the year 1907, the following analysis does so as well. It scrutinizes the image the SPD projected after its defeat in the January elections, looks at the arguments made by SPD deputies during the highly contentious “miscegenation debates” in the German Reichstag, the German parliament, in April and May 1912, and covers the last budgetary hearings before the outbreak of World War I in spring 1914—years during which, according to Schorske, Hyrkkänen, Heckart, H. W. Smith, El Fayeb, Sobich, Conrad, and others, the party had already come around to a supportive stance on colonialism. As we will see, this was not the case. In fact, the existing literature on the subject grossly exaggerates the impact of the SPD's defeat in the “Hottentot elections” on the party's public and programmatic stance on colonialism. Moreover, despite the fact that the SPD had prominent pro-colonialist members, even after 1907 it consciously cultivated its image as a consistently anticolonialist party. Most importantly, before 1914 the SPD was also perceived as such by both its political opponents and the German public at large.Footnote ¹¹

In the Reichstag, the SPD unfailingly criticized Germany's colonialist ventures and policies, from the 1890s all the way to 1914. This holds true, as is well known (and will therefore only be referenced in passing), for the debates during the brutal war of German forces against the Herero and Nama in present-day Namibia between 1904 and 1907. Yet going back even further, the SPD's role in the scandal surrounding Carl Peters needs to be mentioned as well. In his 1896 Reichstag speeches, the party's chairman August Bebel's j'accuse-style attacks on Germany's only “colonial hero” and “founder” of German East Africa (Tanzania) not only spelled the end of Peters's hopes of becoming governor of East Africa but also damaged the German colonial project as a whole, in particular the reputation of the Colonial Office in Berlin and its director Paul Kayser, a protector of Peters. The relative stability of the party's anticolonialist position in the Reichstag before the outbreak of World War I was once again exemplified by the 1912 “Rassenmischehen” debates. Only two years before the outbreak of the Great War, and five years after the party's alleged “turn” toward a pro-colonialist stance, SPD delegates harshly attacked colonial secretary Wilhelm Solf and his liberal and conservative supporters, contesting not only colonial mixed-race marriage prohibitions but also the German colonial project as a whole. Moreover in 1914, only months before the outbreak of World War I, the party again censured German colonialism wholesale during the March and April budgetary hearings. Shortly before the outbreak of World War I, these debates left no doubt in the minds of foreign journalists that the SPD was an anticolonialist party, and the files of the German Colonial Office show that the colonial administration in Berlin agreed.Footnote ¹²

The acerbic display of anticolonialist sentiment by SPD Reichstag representatives did not, of course, mean that all SPD members shared these views. By 1914, prominent revisionists such as Joseph Bloch (the editor of the Sozialistische Monatshefte), Eduard Bernstein, and the socialist economist Max Schippel had long abandoned their opposition to Germany's colonial ventures. These men had done so before the so-called “Hottentot elections” in 1907, however. Leading party intellectuals, at least, had been divided over the question of colonialism for a long time, both before and after 1907: Bernstein, Bloch, and Schippel approved of overseas expansion; others, for example the pragmatist Gustav Noske, moved toward accepting the German colonial empire; while men such as Alfred Henke, Georg Ledebour, and Karl Kautsky, or women such as Rosa Luxemburg not only stuck to their criticism of colonialism, but also proclaimed it publicly and to great effect. At the Second Socialist International's Stuttgart conference, the loudly cheered public appearances of the party's sharpest critics of colonialism showed that the party faithful leaned much more toward their position than toward Bernstein's.Footnote ¹³

Before the SPD's 1917 split, the opinions of leading SPD intellectuals diverged on a broad range of both ideological and very concrete political questions, with Bernstein's and Kautsky's debate over the SPD's overall strategy and belief system being the best known, and colonialism being another prominent area of disagreement. But there were other issues as well: in the early years of the twentieth century, a deep rift between the party's labor union faction and its leaders emerged on the issue of how, when, or even whether to accept a general strike as a valid course of political action. While the party leadership prevented a split of the SPD over this question, the issue and the divisions it created never went away, at least not until after the party's 1917 breakup into the moderate MSPD and the more radically left-wing and antiwar USPD.Footnote ¹⁴

Regarding overseas expansion, the division between the party's right and its revisionist wing first surfaced not in 1907, but at least seven years earlier, during the annual SPD party convention in Mainz. Because of Germany's participation in the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion, the convention discussed the German Empire's colonialist Weltpolitik at length. One thing became clear very quickly: most delegates in attendance, among them Rosa Luxemburg and Georg Ledebour, opposed western imperialism and colonialism in general; twelve years later Ledebour would also be one of the sharpest critics of German colonial miscegenation provisions. Yet these socialists, who stayed true to this position as long as they lived, also commented that imperialism, because of its aura of individualist prowess and strength, was attractive even to some members of the SPD. Luxemburg and Ledebour thus attacked not only Eduard Bernstein, but also other prominent Social Democrats and Bloch's Sozialistische Monatshefte: “We had to witness that in a newspaper that has been distributed here [at this convention], the Sozialistische Monatshefte, comrade Bernstein has supported this imperialist colonial policy [imperialistische Kolonialpolitik]. [Laughter] You laugh, comrades! I don't think it's a laughing matter that we are forced to combat semi-supporters of such imperialism in our own ranks.”Footnote ¹⁵

The SPD after the “Hottentot Elections” of 1907

The lines that were drawn in 1900 did not change much during the next fourteen years. Bebel and Ledebour attacked Germany's brutal war in GSWA between 1904 and 1906, and subsequently the party lost almost half of its seats in parliament in the “Hottentot elections.” Yet SPD strategists knew full well that this outcome did not in fact reflect the end of the party's still increasing popularity: in 1907, the SPD actually received around 250,000 more votes than in the 1903 elections. Instead, the “Hottentot Elections” showcased the fundamental unfairness of the distribution of electoral districts in the German Empire. Because of the first-past-the-post system and the fact that Germany's electoral districts had not been changed since 1871 and therefore did not reflect the country's subsequent demographic development, the SPD lost almost half of its parliamentary seats despite the party's increased support among voters: the party won 29 percent of all ballots cast and yet received only forty-three seats. In comparison, the moderate Catholic Center Party gained only 19.4 percent of the public vote and received 105 seats. The disparity between popular vote and Reichstag representation was even more glaring for the conservative parties.Footnote ¹⁶

After the 1907 elections the main question for the SPD was therefore not how to regain its popularity, as it had not lost it in the first place. Karl Kautsky presented the results in a very optimistic light: “By gaining new proletarian followers we have more than offset the loss of sympathizers from the intermediate classes. We cannot quite enumerate this loss; maybe a couple of hundred thousand votes. Nevertheless we were able [. . .] to gain around 200,000 votes overall [it turned out to be 250,000] [. . .], surely a remarkable achievement.” Adolph Hoffmann, one of the SPD's most outspoken anticlerical and left-wing politicians, went even further than Kautsky and explicitly rejected the notion that “our ‘wrong tactics,’ our ‘negative viewpoints,’ or our ‘mistakes in colonial politics’” were responsible for the party's loss of seats. To these allegations Hoffmann replied, “In my view, they are completely wrong.” Instead, Hoffmann pointed out that “the other side” had learned how to use modern propaganda techniques and had misinformed the German public. For the next elections, Hoffmann thus advocated even more stringent and expansive propaganda efforts than the party had undertaken before 1907. Franz Mehring, a historian and representative of the (academic) party left, argued along similar lines. His analysis of the elections was in fact an exercise in optimism. He conceded that the great mass of the party faithful would of course “draw their lessons from the results of the last election [. . .] yet even if they consider a cleanup to be necessary, they have no intention of hanging out their laundry to dry on the fences of their enemy.” In Mehring's view, programmatic changes were unnecessary. Instead, “the ideal of a socialist future” needed to be presented even more forcefully than before.Footnote ¹⁷

Mehring's statements could, of course, be interpreted as being driven by the SPD's need to raise morale after the recent electoral defeat. Much more nuanced regional reports and analyses of the SPD's showing at the polls, however, confirmed Kautsky's and Mehring's overall optimistic evaluation of the events of January 25, 1907. What is most striking about these regional reports is that they paid relatively little attention to the issue of colonialism. A report on the elections in Bavaria compiled by Adolf Braun did not even mention it as an issue. Like Mehring, Braun blamed the good results of the liberal parties and the Center Party on, among other factors, the fact that they had finally learned how to organize a modern election campaign. Just like the left-wingers Mehring and Hoffmann, the less ideologically minded Braun concluded his analysis by calling not for programmatic changes but for increased propaganda efforts. In his view, there was “no need to grieve and no need to reproach ourselves; yet at the same time we should not underestimate our enemy; we have to sharpen our weapons and carry them into the most remote parts of the country.”Footnote ¹⁸

Otto Braun (who during the Weimar years would become minister president of Prussia and run unsuccessfully for president), presented an equally nuanced assessment of the elections in his home state of Prussia. Like his Bavarian party comrade Adolf Braun, Otto Braun did not belong to the SPD's left wing. Nevertheless, his analysis of the election results in Prussia by no means called for a programmatic reorientation of the party because of, for example, its previous rejection of German imperialism. Braun admitted that the pro-colonialist agitation of nationalist, conservative, and liberal parties had left its mark on the elections and probably convinced some members of the “politically backward rural population in East Prussia” to cast their vote for the aforementioned parties. Yet in Braun's view the main reason for these parties’ strong showing was not the issue of colonialism but rather the de facto abolition of the secret ballot in the East Prussian electoral districts. According to Braun, in the small East-Elbian electoral districts, which in almost 200 out of 214 cases counted no more than 150 eligible voters, it was common practice to collect the ballots in open boxes. In addition, the ballots were stacked according to the time of arrival of the individual voter at the polling station, and names were then recorded to remove them from the list of eligible voters. During the final count, the individual ballots were matched with the voters’ names. Whether Braun was correct in assuming that this procedure was the main reason for the strong showing of the so-called “national” parties is not as important as the fact that even a party moderate such as Braun did not believe that it was the SPD's stance on colonialism that had resulted in the party's defeat.Footnote ¹⁹

In turn, for representatives of the party left such as Kautsky, Hoffmann, and Mehring, it was not a big problem that in a number of runoff elections in 1907 bourgeois voters had not cast their ballots for the Social Democrats (as they had done in the previous elections), a development that in thirty-five districts resulted in the defeat of the SPD candidate. In fact, it boosted their confidence in the party's core electorate. According to Kautsky, what mattered was the overall popularity gain of the party among working-class voters, a demographic that was strongly anticolonialist. Kautsky, Mehring, and Hoffmann acknowledged that, yes, the SPD's 1907 gain was low compared to the 1903 result: roughly 250,000 votes. In the end, however, it was not much lower than the increase of votes between the 1893 and 1898 elections (roughly 320,000). The massive jump from 2.1 million votes in 1898 to almost 3.1 million in 1903 simply could not be repeated in every election. As a result, strategic changes were unnecessary, despite the SPD's diminished position in the Reichstag. While Bernstein and others may have disagreed, just seven months after the “Hottentot elections,” during the Second Socialist International in Stuttgart, the audience's reaction showed that left-wingers and anticolonialists such as Kautsky inspired regular party members much more than revisionists such as Bernstein.Footnote ²⁰

The results of the 1907 elections have often been interpreted as a “shock” for the SPD. Yet party activities during 1907 in no way indicate that the SPD as a whole was engaging in an overhaul of its position on colonialism to position itself better for the next national elections. To be sure, after the elections individual moderate to right-leaning party members tested the waters for a renovation of the party's stances on the German military and colonialism; among the most prominent was the young Gustav Noske (who at that point was August Bebel's protégé, though Bebel would eventually lose faith in Noske because of the latter's nationalist tendencies). Yet vis-à-vis Kautsky, Mehring, Otto and Adolf Braun, Adolph Hoffmann, and many others, these voices were in a clear minority position; and while the rift in respect to colonialism between Bernstein on the one hand and Kautsky, Ledebour, and Luxemburg on the other surfaced again during the Second Socialist International's Stuttgart conference, it merely highlighted older differences. If anything, the Stuttgart conference demonstrated both how little sway right-leaning comrades such as Noske and Bernstein held within the SPD, and how much of an uneasy fit the SPD was for German Imperial society—in respect to colonialism as well as in regard to the party's general image.Footnote ²¹

The Second Socialist International in Stuttgart

The Second International was inaugurated with an impressive public display of internationalism. On August 18, 1907, 60,000 Stuttgart workers and their families assembled on the Cannstatter Wasen, a festival area on the banks of the Neckar River. This imposing crowd greeted the delegates, who, in turn, gave short speeches, either in German or in their native tongue (then translated by prominent SPD members). Paul Singer, one of the chairmen of the SPD, welcomed delegates from all over the world and introduced the famous French socialist Jean Jaurès with a clear confirmation of the German Social Democrats’ dedication to internationalism: “Today, the Stuttgart comrades are called upon, as representatives of German Social Democracy, to reach out their hands to their international brothers [stormy applause].” The crowd also cheered “stormily” when Jaurès (whose speech was translated by Kautsky) appeared on the podium. In addition, chants of “Vive Jaurès” were heard all over the festival area.Footnote ²²

The appreciation of Jean Jaurès expressed by this large crowd was not just a celebration of socialist internationalism. It was also a clear rejection of the “furor teutonicus” that had been fanned by liberal, conservative, and nationalist parties during the election campaign earlier that year. To be sure, as the Stuttgart conference showed, international socialism was at times divided along national lines, yet other differences (for example, within delegations from individual countries) surfaced as well. Moreover, despite its cracks and divisions, the public display of internationalism by not only the delegates from all over the world but also the 60,000 Stuttgarters who greeted them could not contrast more sharply with the exclusionary nationalism embraced by most official representatives of the German Empire. As a result, nonsocialist observers of this event were not at all under the impression that the SPD was beginning to embrace and accept the German Empire. Instead, the Stuttgart conference confirmed the SPD's Vaterlandslosigkeit (lack of a fatherland). The conservative Kreuzzeitung thus attacked the so-called “Red International” and also “condemned the Stuttgart and Württemberg authorities for allowing the congress to take place on German soil.” Reports on the conference in the equally conservative Deutsche Tageszeitung were rife with antisemitic invective directed at the SPD's chairman Paul Singer. In addition, the paper called the German working class “backward” because of its public embrace of internationalist sentiments. In the eyes of German conservatives and nationalists, even after the 1907 elections the SPD's image of being “without a fatherland” had not changed. In fact, it had been reinforced: the German Social Democrats had prepared the Stuttgart conference in August 1907 for a maximum of propaganda effectiveness. Their public display of socialist internationalism represented a proud and conscious rejection of the bourgeois nationalism that had permeated German debates before the “Hottentot” elections in January. The Second Socialist International in Stuttgart was an opportunity for the SPD to show that despite the loss of around half of its seats in the Reichstag, the party's actual power was based “in the streets.” Therefore the SPD did not need to change its message and platform either in respect to its internationalism or its position on colonialism.Footnote ²³

There can be no question that the SPD succeeded in showing its strength during the Stuttgart convention. By August 1907, much of the bourgeois-liberal and conservative-nationalist gloating over the SPD's loss of Reichstag seats in January had vanished. Instead, the SPD's massive demonstration of its popularity and ability to organize an unprecedented mass event left nonsocialist observers worried. From their point of view, the Stuttgart conference had shown how dangerous the SPD really was. This was not a party perceived to be docile or supportive of government policies, whether in respect to colonialism (as Germany's famous colonialist Carl Peters observed with regret) or other issues; on the contrary. For the conservative daily Berliner Politische Nachrichten the Stuttgart conference thus easily overshadowed the January elections. In August 1907 the paper identified the SPD as becoming increasingly radical rather than more supportive of the German Empire's political structure: “It is not mistaken to assume that these intentions [the SPD's objective of undermining the German Empire's stability, especially that of the German army] have been strongly fueled and boosted by the Stuttgart negotiations. This should be a strong warning to both our government and the bourgeois parties.”Footnote ²⁴

The Berliner Politische Nachrichten had good cause, from its perspective, to publish such a strong indictment of the Stuttgart conference and to “warn” the German government and all nonsocialist parties not to underestimate the disruptive potential of international socialism in general and the SPD in particular. Specifically in respect to colonialism, the Stuttgart conference had in fact not only confirmed the Socialist International's traditional rejection of western colonialism, but had done so in greater detail than seven years earlier, during the first conference of the Second International in Paris. While the 1900 resolution was only thirty lines long, the 1907 resolution was much more comprehensive and also included clear guidelines for socialist parliamentarians on how to approach colonialist questions in their respective parliaments, namely to be “unforgiving” in their fight against the “pitiless exploitation and slavery” in the colonies. In 1900, the Second International's resolution against colonialism had indicted “bourgeois colonialism” and “the colonialism of the bourgeoisie.” This terminology (which was also used in 1907, except that “bourgeois” was replaced with “capitalist”) may have allowed revisionists such as Bernstein and other pro-colonialist socialists not to feel completely excluded (as the respective resolutions, both in 1900 and in 1907, did not explicitly state that a “proletarian” or “socialist” colonialism was unacceptable as well). The prefix “capitalist” in the 1907 resolution has been taken to mean that after the “Hottentot elections” a (in fact undefined) “socialist” colonialism had become acceptable to Social Democrats. Yet the terminology used in 1907 scarcely differed from the language socialists all over Europe and the world had used to condemn colonialism before the Stuttgart conference. Moreover, for committed anticolonialists such as Kautsky, Ledebour, and many non-German delegates (who had contributed much to the resolution passed in Stuttgart and very much approved of it), overtly rejecting “socialist colonialism” was simply unnecessary. For them it was obvious that only capitalist nations colonized. Kautsky thus unambiguously stated that “socialist colonialism” was a “complete logical contradiction.”Footnote ²⁵

While Eduard Bernstein, the Dutch socialist Henri van Kol, and British Labour Party politician (and later prime minister) Ramsay Macdonald may have disagreed with this assessment, there was never any question in Stuttgart in 1907 about which position was embraced by most members of the plenum. Whereas Bernstein's speech ended with some applause along with audible, disapproving hissing, Kautsky was the only speaker on colonial matters whom the audience both greeted and sent off with “stormy” and “buoyant” applause. In the end, the “great majority” of German delegates, a fact explicitly mentioned in the official proceedings, voted for the congress's final resolution that sharply censured “Kolonialpolitik” worldwide and called on socialists everywhere to work toward the suppressed peoples’ independence. It was a big deal that most German delegates supported this resolution: after all, SPD delegates represented the largest national contingent at the congress; there were more than twice as many German delegates as British deputies, with Great Britain sending the second biggest delegation (289 and 123, respectively). In the older literature it is often wrongly maintained that the SPD delegates rejected the conference's anticolonialist resolution. Yet while the SPD delegation had voted against the insertion of a more radically anticolonialist preamble into the original proposal, ultimately the German delegates voted for the final version, unlike, for example, the Dutch delegation, and this version in fact included the initially rejected radically anticolonialist changes that had been proposed by Kautsky and others. Indeed, a scuffle almost erupted between the pro-colonialist Eduard David and the majority of the German delegates who “vociferously protested” against David's attempt to falsify the result of the delegation's final vote. The German delegation voted again and reaffirmed (with said “great majority”) their approval of the radically anticolonialist final version. Most importantly, later in the same year this resolution was confirmed by the delegates of the SPD's annual party congress in Essen, an endorsement that once again demonstrated how weak the party's pro-colonialists really were.Footnote ²⁶

Nonsocialist newspapers commented in fairly uniform fashion on the victory of the “radicals” at the Stuttgart conference, especially in regard to colonialism. The nationalist and right-wing Deutsche Zeitung observed sardonically that “the revisionists cried and folded like pocketknives.” In its final evaluation of the Stuttgart conference, the moderately conservative Kölnische Zeitung harshly criticized Social Democrats for their continuous embrace of anticolonialist sentiments: “In its ferociousness the resolution against colonialism is so foolish that we do not even have to bother refuting it.” Specifically targeting the German delegation's position on the “colonial question,” the Kölnische Zeitung commented “that the radicals under Ledebour were victorious” and then scathingly concluded that “we like the men of the three-million-party this way. We pity the poor workers who are doomed to follow such great leaders.” Later that year, regarding the SPD's take on colonialism, the German imperialist Carl Peters resignedly stated that “everything has remained the same.”Footnote ²⁷

Thus neither the Social Democrats nor their opponents perceived 1907 as a year in which the party's position on colonialism was radically altered. True, between 1907 and 1912 the party did not object to all colonial measures, but it had not done so before 1907, either. Policies that could potentially, from the SPD's Eurocentric perspective, affect the indigenous populations of the German colonies in a positive way were seriously considered by the SPD Reichstag faction. This was no national peculiarity of the SPD, but was in keeping with all anticolonialist resolutions passed by the Second International between 1900 and 1907. Neither the Second International nor the SPD viewed a case-by-case approach to specific colonial measures to be even a tacit acceptance of colonialism. For example, before World War I the SPD usually approved of scientific ventures and earnestly pondered colonial infrastructure projects. Nevertheless, in spring 1914 the SPD's Reichstag faction opposed a railway project in East Africa, because in the parliamentarians’ view the project had the potential to harm the indigenous population. When it came to the colonies’ native peoples, Social Democrats consistently opposed even a left-liberal government representative such as the colonial state secretary Wilhelm Solf, as the 1912 miscegenation debates demonstrate.Footnote ²⁸

“And that's why we reject and combat it”: The SPD and Colonialism before 1914Footnote ²⁹

The 1912 miscegenation debates made one thing very clear: Social Democrats were willing to call things as they saw them, and they were certainly not under the impression that their views on colonialism were shared by the liberal, conservative, and nationalist parties. Following colonial secretary Solf's opening statements about the need for mixed-race marriage bans in the German colonies (he had personally introduced such measures in Samoa, but they also existed in German South-West Africa, and, at least unofficially, in East Africa), Social Democratic deputies criticized both these particular measures and German colonialism in general. On this occasion, even Gustav Noske reminded the Reichstag that under the command of Lothar von Trotha, German troops had committed nothing less than mass murder in South-West Africa six years earlier. Noske recapped that there was “good reason to point out that because of Trotha's extermination strategy [sic] the Hereros have been reduced from 80,000 to 20,000 [. . .] Today, there is no doubt that nothing could be more condemnable than Trotha's tactics.”Footnote ³⁰

The SPD Reichstag faction did not usually allow pro-colonialist Social Democrats to speak on colonial matters, and Noske therefore made sure not to defy the party's anticolonialist stance openly. Eduard Bernstein on the other hand, the party's best-known pro-colonialist, did not address colonialism once between his election in 1912 and the outbreak of World War I. Since the late 1890s, Bernstein had maneuvered himself into a highly volatile and problematic position within the SPD as his views contradicted the party's official stance on colonialism. As the reactions to Bernstein's speech at the Stuttgart conference showed, the party did not take kindly to open defiance of its fundamentals. Noske was more of a tactician than Bernstein and was therefore careful not to open himself to attacks from within the party. He heeded a number of daunting examples: in 1912, Gerhard Hildebrand, who had worked for the Sozialistische Monatshefte, was kicked out of the SPD because of his openly colonialist views. In 1909, one of the party's most prominent writers on economic matters, Richard Calwer, only narrowly avoided official exclusion from the party because of his embrace of colonialism (the exclusion procedure was stopped because of formal errors). Calwer then decided to leave the party on his own accord. By the time he left, he had been in trouble for two years, ever since he had been one of the few prominent SPD members publicly to blame the party's defeat in 1907 on its anticolonialism. Because of these views, in August 1907 the party conference responsible for the electoral district for which Calwer had been running unanimously decided not to advance him as a Reichstag candidate again. In addition, the pro-colonialist Max Schippel, who had preceded Noske as Reichstag deputy for the city of Chemnitz, had been so sharply criticized for his views that he resigned his office as parliamentary representative, making room for the young Noske.Footnote ³¹

In his Reichstag speeches and publications Noske thus normally toed the party line, although he certainly tried to move the SPD toward a more colonialism-friendly position. Unlike Wilhelm Dittmann, Alfred Henke, and Ledebour, Noske refrained from fundamental rejections of colonialism and focused his criticism on specific, usually economic (but at times also moral), aspects of German colonial policies. As one of four SPD speakers on colonialism after 1912, Noske's influence on the public perception of the SPD in respect to its relationship to German imperialism remained limited. Moreover, because he knew full well that his position was a dangerous one, he felt the need to “spice” his constructive criticism of German colonialism with references to the party's official position on this issue. During the 1912 miscegenation debates he thus reiterated that “at a number of party conferences the SPD has made clear that it is on principle against capitalist colonialism,” only to then add that the “economic development” of unprogressive countries was another matter. In 1913, he felt it necessary to distance himself from the revisionist and pro-colonialist Sozialistische Monatshefte and ridiculed colonial secretary Solf for confusing the SPD's official political stances with statements made in this journal, which “was not an official mouthpiece of the SPD.” The ultimate “validation” of Noske's pre-1914 unwillingness to express his pro-colonialist leanings too openly and his decision to conceal them instead with fierce anticolonialist rhetoric occurred in 1918–19. After the war, the victorious allies drew on Noske's pre-1914 Reichstag speeches to justify their seizure of the German colonies: his parliamentary addresses provided plenty of evidence for Germany's inhumane treatment of the native populations in its colonies. Ironically, at the same time British and French politicians cited Noske's old speeches as proof of Germany's inability to be a “good” colonizing power and “civilizing” influence in the world, he was demanding the return of Germany's colonies.Footnote ³²

Even Noske's pre-1914 speeches portrayed the Herero as fellow human beings who had justifiably fought an oppressive regime and lost. In the Reichstag, Noske also sharply rejected racialized views that argued for the inherent inferiority of the native population in German South-West Africa. Other SPD representatives shared this sentiment and went much further. Poking fun at the former settlement commissar for GSWA Paul Rohrbach, SPD deputy Alfred Henke equated the situation of SPD members in Germany with that of the mixed-race population in South-West Africa: “It is unbelievable that recently people of mixed race in, for example, South-West Africa have been treated the same way Social Democrats are treated in Germany. It is telling that this is the case. We read in Paul Rohrbach's little book The Colony [. . .] that now, half- and three-quarter-white children are barred from going to kindergartens that had accepted them initially. White men who cohabit with a black woman are refused membership in veterans’ clubs [laughter among Social Democrats], shooting clubs, and similar associations [laughter among Social Democrats].” Henke did not shy away from equating the harassment Social Democrats had to suffer in the German Empire with the problems natives (and whites sympathetic to their cause) faced in the German colonies.Footnote ³³

Henke did not stop there and went on to ridicule the antisemitic views held by one conservative representative: “Mr. Arendt, you have heckled me a couple of times, you of course are definitely of the opinion that mixed-race populations should be given no quarter [amusement among Social Democrats]. This makes a lot of sense: you also reject Israelites. You are merely being consistent. But we see things differently. [. . .] Yes, it is completely accurate that we [. . .] believe in the equality of all human beings, regardless of their skin color. This is why we are unequivocally committed to giving blacks and the mixed-race population the rights that are their due.” In 1912, the SPD deputy Alfred Henke thus, in one fell swoop, attacked both racial segregation in the German colonies and the pronounced antisemitism of a number of Reichstag representatives in the metropole.Footnote ³⁴

To be sure, a number of statements made by Social Democrats in 1912 drew on the tenets of scientific racism. Given the Social Democrats’ veneration for the sciences and the fact that feelings of white superiority were all-pervasive in both Europe and the United States, it is unsurprising that even German socialists (like their counterparts elsewhere in Europe) believed that white Europeans and Germans were more “advanced” than nonwhite peoples. Moreover, one will search in vain for cultural relativism among German Social Democrats before 1914. Following Marx, who in turn had been heavily influenced by the materialist interpretation of history of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers such as Adam Smith and David Hume, German and European socialists were convinced that human history would lead to a culturally and economically uniform final historical stage. European and German socialists believed that Europeans had progressed further toward this phase than Africans or Samoans, and could and should therefore “educate” the latter in how to reach more highly developed cultural levels.

How did these sentiments, which partially overlapped with liberal colonialist beliefs, function within the framework of Social Democratic arguments about German colonialism? Did Social Democrats really “share,” as argued by Helmut Walser Smith, the same racialized views held by liberals, conservatives, and nationalists? The answer to this question has to be a qualified no. First and foremost, the adoption of a certain racialized outlook by, for example, Georg Ledebour (consistently one of the SPD's sharpest critics of any form of imperialism and colonialism) was of little consequence for his position on colonial policies. In no way did Ledebour's racialized views prompt him or other Social Democrats to accept either the colonial status quo (including the existence of race codes in German South-West and East Africa, and genocidal actions undertaken by German troops in the colonies) or, for example, arguments for the necessity of racial segregation in Samoa. For liberals, conservatives, and (at least during the Herero revolt in 1904–1907) also the Center Party deputy Matthias Erzberger, however, the opposite was true: their arguments in favor of curtailing rights of the native populations (including, at times, their right to exist) were inseparably connected to their racist beliefs.Footnote ³⁵

SPD deputy Henke thus argued that “these [racial] differences are hardly as great as presented by race theoreticians.” Like Ledebour, Henke did not let this shallow acknowledgment of a vaguely defined white superiority affect his take on colonial matters: “Most importantly, they [racial differences] don't justify whites treating blacks so inhumanly, worse than animals.” Henke argued that the Reichstag was “obligated to guarantee” the protection of natives, although this demand did not imply that he accepted German colonialism, something Henke made quite clear: “if nobody else does it, we Social Democrats will do so with pride. We are convinced that this, too, is our task, and we will therefore continue to criticize German colonial policy [deutsche Kolonialpolitik] for which, as already stated, we cannot feel any enthusiasm.”Footnote ³⁶

Maybe Henke believed that racial differences were real, yet he was nevertheless also convinced that they could not serve as justification for either German colonialism or for the exploitative treatment of native populations. Georg Ledebour, too, felt no need to see his racialized viewpoints translated into colonial mixed-race marriage prohibitions; quite the contrary:

The 1912 miscegenation debates show that the SPD's take on the general legitimacy of Germany's overseas empire was more than ambivalent. SPD deputies by no means limited their attacks to the specifics of measures such as Solf's mixed-marriage prohibition. Social Democrats clearly declared their sympathy for the natives’ endeavors to win freedom and questioned the overall validity of arguments used by government representatives to justify German colonial rule. In addition, and thereby in fact contradicting his earlier acknowledgment of racial differences, Henke argued in good socialist manner that the issue of racial purity was merely a smoke screen employed by Solf to conceal the real reason behind his mixed-race marriage prohibition: the desire of the German colonizers to strengthen and maintain their rule. “In reality, there are fears of mixed-race populations, because there's concern over who holds the power in the colonies when they grow larger and larger.” Ledebour agreed with his colleague: “This will extinguish the last spark of idealistic glimmer with which the proponents of capitalist colonialism currently garnish their politics when they give their phony speeches. This demonstrates that the pursuit of capitalist goals by European colonizers everywhere leads to the denigration and oppression of the native races. In reality these goals are pursued against the backdrop of the need to establish the whites there as a master race separate from the natives, so that the former can dominate the latter.”Footnote ³⁸

From a contemporaneous perspective, the SPD's indictment of the German Empire's colonialism could hardly have been stronger. During the mixed-race marriage debates in April and May 1912, Social Democratic deputies attacked colonial rule on a fundamental level: they recalled its brutal past (the genocidal oppression of the Herero and Nama uprising), severely censured its racist present, and attacked the sociopolitical order in the colonies as a thinly veiled disguise of a race-based and cruel system of economic exploitation. Moreover, the SPD parliamentary group made sure that its speakers on colonial matters toed the party line, which was determined by the Second Socialist International's various anticolonialist resolutions and their subsequent national affirmation by the annual SPD party conventions. When it came to colonial matters, therefore, open pro-colonialists such as Bernstein did not represent the party in the Reichstag. The SPD's consciously constructed image as a determinedly anticolonialist party held firm all the way to the outbreak of World War I. Just four months before the beginning of the war, the party thus launched another fundamental challenge to German colonialism during the 1914 budgetary hearings in the Reichstag.

This attack, presented by SPD deputy Wilhelm Dittmann, was so devastating that a British journalist interpreted it as evidence for the absence of any kind of consensus in respect to colonialism within Germany. In turn, the SPD's criticism (and its echo abroad) exposed the touchiness of Germany's colonial administrators at the Colonial Office in Berlin. Dittmann's criticism led to complaints within the department that the international press was paying “disproportionate attention” to the SPD's view that the colonies “were a burden,” while the pro-colonialist positions “of the national parties” were barely noticed. In spring 1914, the Colonial Office was thus under the impression that the Social Democrats’ position on colonialism was highly problematic and people within the department worried that the German Empire's image was negatively affected by the SPD's attacks on the German colonial enterprise. Much to the Colonial Office's dismay, the SPD's position appeared to interest the international press more than the National Liberals’ praise for Germany's colonies.Footnote ³⁹

Dittmann's speech was indeed noteworthy for its clear and detailed dismantling of everything the German colonial administration in Berlin sought to sell as successful. In 1907, after the devastating colonial wars in both German South-West Africa and East Africa, a centralized colonial department had been created, the Reichskolonialamt (Colonial Office). Apart from Friedrich von Lindequist's brief one-year interlude in 1910–11, only left-liberal politicians were in charge of this office, first Bernhard Dernburg, and then Wilhelm Solf. Especially Dernburg had been credited with bringing about a “turn” in German colonialism by putting the German colonial enterprise on modern, efficient, scientific, and politically liberal footing. In 1914, colonial secretary Solf boasted of the successes of these new policies in the Reichstag, yet SPD deputy Dittmann would have none of it: “Maybe I will be told that since the ‘Dernburg era’ a number of things have changed for the better in respect to the administration of our colonies. And we Social Democrats are the last ones to deny this. In fact, we believe that our relentless criticism has substantially contributed to this improvement. Yet we also know that [. . .] the root of all the evil of the current colonial regime, namely its capitalist, exploitative character, cannot be changed. As a result, we completely reject it.”Footnote ⁴⁰

This passage repeated the SPD's official stance on German colonialism, which was in keeping with the resolution passed by the Second Socialist International in Stuttgart in 1907: “capitalist” colonialism, which for most socialists outside Germany and for most Social Democrats within Germany (though not for Bernstein, Schippel, or the excluded Hildebrand and Calwer) encompassed any kind of direct territorial rule over noncontiguous, previously inhabited territory anywhere in the world, was fundamentally rejected. At the same time, because the colonies were obviously a fact of life, a case-by-case evaluation of individual colonial measures (and their subsequent approval or rejection) was possible and even required, yet only, as the 1907 resolution explicitly stated, to “bring about reforms that improve the natives’ lot.”Footnote ⁴¹

Dittmann's fundamental rejection of colonialism merely marked the beginning of his speech. After all, Dittmann knew that among government representatives and members of the liberal and nationalist parties nobody would be shocked by a Social Democratic denunciation of colonialism. To make his speech sting he needed to include specific points that also demonstrated the socioeconomic futility of the German colonial project. Dittmann therefore not only stated that colonialism was morally wrong but also showed that it was completely unnecessary. Based on government statistics, Dittmann demonstrated that Germany itself had become a destination for immigrants. Rather than sending its “surplus” population abroad, Germany's population growth was completely absorbed by its growing economy. In addition, Dittmann pointed out that even though the reforms of the “Dernburg era” had increased the exports and imports of the German colonies, their overall share of the German gross domestic product (no more than 0.8 percent) had remained the same or (depending on the individual colony) had even shrunk since 1908. In the end, the Dernburg reforms had thus failed: in terms of the colonies’ overall share of Germany's gross domestic product, they had neither increased the colonies’ economic productivity nor made them less dependent on subsidies from the metropole. As the SPD was the only anticolonialist party in the Reichstag, these remarks were ultimately a much harsher indictment of German colonialism than the mere reiteration of the Social Democrats’ moral objections, which nobody shared.Footnote ⁴²

Dittmann's focus on the colonial economy did not mean that he neglected to speak about the situation of the native population. In fact, his indictment of German colonialism regarding its impact on the indigenous populations in Germany's colonies was harsh. Despite the absence of colonial wars since 1907, he accused German colonialism of continuing, albeit in more gradual ways, the depopulation that had begun with the genocidal measures undertaken by General von Trotha during the war in South-West Africa: “Even without mass exterminations à la Herero war and even without atrocities à la Peters, Leist, and Arenberg and whatever the names of all of those Negro violators and culture desecrators are, the indigenous population of our colonies is slowly dying out.” Dittmann was not referring to actual extermination measures but rather to the harsh working conditions on plantations and the existence of forced-labor measures, which either killed off the indigenous populations or drove them to leave the German colonies. Dittmann thus used the backdrop of colonial atrocities and mass extermination for his fundamental criticism of “capitalist colonialism.” Referencing a report by a “representative from the right with ties to the Evangelical missions,” which made the matter even more embarrassing for the colonial administration in Berlin, he exclaimed, “Gentlemen, in our colonies the natives are forced from their home regions with cunning and violence and are then coerced to toil away at the plantations of the whites, where they subsequently perish en masse. This is especially true for East Africa and Cameroon [‘Hear, hear!’ among Social Democrats].”Footnote ⁴³

Dittmann's denunciation of German colonialism could hardly be more fundamental. Not only did he (as Noske had done in 1912) again reference the Herero and Nama massacre as the most terrible (and embarrassing) example of German colonial failures, but he also used the terminology of mass murder (or, in today's terms, genocide) to censure the ongoing economic exploitation of the German colonies. Near the end of his speech, Dittmann denounced German colonialism as “mad,” a remark that led to an interruption of the debate, his being called to order by the Reichstag president, and shouts of objection “from the right.” To be sure, one looks in vain for present-day cultural relativist sentiments in Dittmann's speech. Dittmann called the indigenous population in Germany's colonies primitive and argued that, step by step, western education would enable them to join “our cultural circles.” Yet calling for educational and development aid for non-Europeans was as far as Dittmann was willing to go in respect to sketching out what a “peaceful” and Social Democratic colonial policy would look like. No assumptions of white physical superiority, no direct imperialist control of foreign territories, no flow of capital from the “underdeveloped” regions to the metropole, only the establishment of schools and centers for economic development: this vision had much more in common with post-1945 and post-decolonization foreign aid programs (with their own sets of problems and assumptions of western cultural superiority) than with pre-1914 colonialism. Most importantly, at the time this idea amounted to nothing less than a fundamental criticism and rejection of German (and European) imperialism. Unsurprisingly, it was also recognized as such. After he had finished, Center Party representative Matthias Erzberger stepped onto the podium and summarized Dittmann's speech in a few brief words: “Gentlemen, my political friends approach colonialism from a fundamentally different vantage point than the previous speaker. The Social Democratic deputy Dittmann has just rejected any kind of colonialism in general, categorically, and on principle.” Erzberger clearly felt the need to use a sequence of three adverbial constructs to illustrate how fundamental Dittmann's opposition to colonialism actually was (and how much the Center Party's position differed from that of the SPD), and then went on to brush off Dittmann's foreign-aid suggestions as “destined to fail.” Like Erzberger, the correspondent of The Times in Berlin took note of the SPD's “searching criticism of the German administration” and further reported that Social Democrats “regard the colonies as a burden and say that they are useless.” In turn, Dittmann's speech and the press coverage it received enraged a staff member of the Colonial Office in Berlin, prompting him, in the margins of his report on the latest Reichstag debates, to opine about the “disproportionate attention” foreign press representatives paid to the SPD's position on colonialism.Footnote ⁴⁴

Postscript

One of the anonymous reviewers of this article asked me in her or his comments whether I thought that the notion of the SPD's defeat in the 1907 “Hottentot Elections” and the party's subsequent alleged colonialist turn was similar in structure and function to the myth of the “Puttkamer purge” (i.e., the alleged expulsion of liberals from the Prussian bureaucracy by Robert von Puttkamer, the Prussian minister of the Interior, in 1878). While referenced by many scholars throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the concept of a “Puttkamer purge” in fact rested, as historians Margaret L. Anderson and Kenneth Barkin pointed out in their seminal 1982 article, on a single (and faulty) secondary source and thus turned out to be a construct.Footnote ⁵⁰

My response to the reviewer's important question is twofold: yes and no. It is certainly a myth that the pre-1914 Social Democrats came around to colonialism after 1907. Nevertheless, the SPD had a small number of distinguished pro-colonialist comrades. It may be the latter phenomenon that helps to explain why the notion of a pro-colonialist SPD, integrated into the sociocultural structure of the German Empire before 1914 and without capacity to challenge the system, is still so widespread: after all, one of the most frequently used sources regarding the SPD's alleged colonialist turn is Gustav Noske's Erlebtes aus Aufstieg und Niedergang einer Demokratie (1947). In addition, Eduard David's recollections have also been referenced to explain the fact, inexplicable from the pro-colonialist David's perspective, that the great majority of German delegates at Stuttgart in 1907 voted for a radically anticolonialist resolution. Post-factum analyses of the year 1907 have thus often been shaped by the memories and recollections of those few who (unsuccessfully) tried to push the SPD toward a pro-colonialist turn and who had to resort to extreme measures to do so, in David's case attempting to falsify the German delegation's vote. Despite these attempts, the national and the international press remained convinced that the SPD was an anticolonialist party between 1907 and 1914.Footnote ⁵¹

But the popularity of views of the pre-1914 SPD as pro-colonialist in recent years may also highlight a deeper, methodological phenomenon. New transnational histories of the German Empire are often undergirded by a gradualist understanding of historical progress, which holds that during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries nation-states did not merely (and maybe not even primarily) act upon domestic impulses and motivations, but corresponded to and were shaped by worldwide developments and trends. Usually (and justifiably so), these new perspectives focus on a limited number of privileged individuals or groups and their activities: on (national) liberal-bourgeois imperialists and state administrators’ commitments to imperialism; on the transnational genesis of notions such as Weltpolitik among Prussian aristocrats such as Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz; on the global economic backdrop of the famous union of “iron and rye” and the German Empire's protective tariffs; or on the global affirmation of Germany's nascent nationalism among elite groups of Prussian officers and scientists. Cultural and intellectual developments before 1914 are thus viewed to have occurred in a discursive field shaped and determined at least as much by transnational as by domestic factors. While this approach has shed new light on many developments—especially German colonialism—that were uneasy fits for the framework of an older, nation-state-centered historiography, it has, often unintentionally, helped to obscure the fact that socialist internationalists such as the German Social Democrats were with a few exceptions not only aware of the transnational framework in which many of Imperial Germany's influential political actors moved, but also contested and condemned it.Footnote ⁵²

Historians Frederick Cooper and Anne Laura Stoler have famously proposed “to treat metropole and colony in a single analytic field.” This proposition was not meant to indicate that this field was without massive tensions, rifts, and gaps, however. In the end, more than one “transnationalism” and more than one “globalism” existed. Liberal-imperialist arguments of the need for colonial expansion and social uplift of the natives thus faced off with socialist concepts of internationalist solidarity of European workers with the colonized, and in respect to economic and political developments, historian Andrew Zimmerman has suggested that the second half of the nineteenth century should be viewed as a period of massive transatlantic dialectic tensions, a time of transnational revolutions and counterrevolutions: from the 1848 revolutions in Europe to the Civil War in the United States to the socioeconomic and cultural counterrevolutions in the segregated and sharecropping New South and the newly colonized areas of Africa. In both the U.S. and Africa, economies of independent local producers (or at least the possibility thereof as in the immediate postwar U.S. South) were forcibly replaced by economic regimes that compelled locals to produce cash crops for the global market.Footnote ⁵³

This proposition provides the previous analysis with a stimulating longue-durée backdrop and indicates that Kautsky, Ledebour, Dittmann, and most other Social Democrats reacted specifically to the colonialist counterrevolutions of the late nineteenth century. These socialists believed that their political creed invariably resulted in an unyielding anticolonialist stance. In Kautsky's Socialism and Colonial Policy (1907), he thus attacked “the right of peoples of higher culture to ‘exercise tutelage’ over peoples of lower culture,” because, in his view, “the defense of the prerogative of the higher culture is capitalism's ethical grand delusion [. . .]. Domestically, this ethics manifests itself as the assertion of the higher law of the haves over the have-nots. Vis-à-vis other nations that are supposed to be oppressed, in essence it proclaims nothing but the capitalist nations’ right to rule all of humanity.” Socialist anticolonialism was thus completely aware of its transnational (“internationalist”) nature, which makes it doubly ironic that this fact has been so consistently ignored. In Kautsky's view, national borders could not divorce the struggle of European workers from the struggle of the colonized in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere, as it was the same struggle against the same oppressors. Within the SPD, anti-imperialism existed in conscious dialectical tension to the pro-colonialism promoted by, for example, the German colonial secretaries Bernhard Dernburg and Wilhelm Solf. There was simply no way this gap could be bridged, a fact that explains Bernstein's and Noske's volatile position within the prewar SPD, the party's public commitment to the Second International's clearly elaborated anti-imperialist stance, and, ultimately, Center Party deputy Matthias Erzberger's angry characterization of the Social Democrats as “in general, categorically, and on principle” opposed to colonialism just months before the outbreak of World War I.Footnote ⁵⁴