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Daniel Brückenhaus. Policing Transnational Protest: Liberal Imperialism and the Surveillance of Anticolonialists in Europe, 1905–1945.

2018; Oxford University Press; Volume: 123; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ahr/rhy371

1937-5239

Susan Pedersen,

Communism, Protests, Social Movements

In Policing Transnational Protest, Daniel Brückenhaus tracks how Britain and France constructed transnational policing practices and institutions in the first half of the twentieth century in order to monitor and combat anti-imperial movements that were, themselves, increasingly international. Indian and Indochinese activists had discovered even before World War I that anticolonial organizing might be less harshly repressed in the imperial metropole than in the colonies from which they came—and, further, that if those imperial metropoles became too hot, they might take refuge in another European state. Brückenhaus tells his story chronologically, showing how the imperial powers first sent agents abroad to monitor those mobile colonial subjects, how they established more lasting and collaborative surveillance systems during and after World War I, and how the Versailles settlement—and especially German hostility to that settlement—created new opportunities for anticolonialists and new challenges for imperial authorities during the 1920s and 1930s. Two key arguments emerge. First, in a manner reminiscent of work showing the mutually constitutive character of imperialism and nationalism, Brückenhaus insists on the deeply symbiotic character of global anticolonialism and international policing. Anticolonialists crossed borders and set up organizations in Brussels or Berlin in order to evade surveillance and publish or proselytize more freely, but by doing so they drove imperial authorities toward transnational collaboration as well. The conflict between anticolonialists and police authorities is thus best seen, Brückenhaus concludes, as “a feedback cycle in which both sides caused each other to become more transnational in the scope of their networks and in their ideologies” (4). In a series of compelling vignettes, we see that dynamic at work: the Indian nationalist Vinayak Damodar Savarkar’s move to Paris to print anti-British literature before 1914 spurs British officials to follow him; the Lebanese Chekib Arslan’s cultivation of German support for his protests against French rule in Syria elicits powerful French efforts in Geneva aimed at discrediting him. The Berlin-based League Against Imperialism, to which Brückenhaus devotes a chapter, is perhaps the most impressive expression of that transnational anticolonialism, but the group’s close ties to the Comintern similarly produced a more uniformly hostile governmental response, with not only French and British imperial authorities, but by the early 1930s the usually more lenient Weimar authorities as well, going to some trouble to harass and repress it.