It has been almost fifty years since Hannah Arendt made her bold statement, in Origins of Totalitarianism, that imperialism was one of the chief factors leading to totalitarianism and to its “final solutions.” She argued that imperialism was basically the idea and practice of limitless expansion for its own sake. Originally an economic notion akin to capitalism, imperialism in practice kicked itself loose from the limits imposed by profit and apotheosized violence as a conscious aim in itself. “Violence administered for power's (and not for law's) sake turns into a destructive principle that will not stop until there is nothing left to violate.” In the colonies, vague, insubstantial race thinking mutated into racism, the justification for the horrors perpetrated by whites against nonwhites in the situation of limitless violence.

Arendt's hypothesis is most obviously convincing on the level of ideology. It is no accident that the most radical proponents of imperialism were also the first to cement into a single world view modern racism, antisemitism, ruthless Social Darwinism, the dream of total domination, the militarization of society, and the worship of war as the best means (even goal) of politics. In Germany the Pan-Germans, who began institutional life in 1890 as one of several procolonial agitation groups, brought the destructive principles of imperialism home to Europe, to be applied to Europeans in a future German continental imperium. When Arendt wrote, the Pan-Germans were thought to have been the insignificant lunatic fringe of German politics.