Continental and overseas imperialism achieved opposite successes and failures

Evidence

THE STRIKING and fateful difference between continental and overseas imperialism has been that their initial successes and failures were in exact opposition. While continental imperialism, even in its beginnings, succeeded in realizing the imperialist hostility against the nation-state by organizing large strata of people outside the party system, and always failed to get results in tangible expansion, overseas imperialism, in its mad and successful rushes to annex more and more far-flung territories, was never very successful when it attempted to change the home countries’ political structure. The nation-state system’s ruin, having been prepared by its own overseas imperialism, was eventually carried out by those movements which had originated outside its own realm. And when it came to pass that movements began successfully to compete with the nation-state’s party system, it was also seen that they could undermine only countries with a multiparty system, that mere imperialist tradition was not sufficient to give them mass appeal, and that Great Britain, the classic country of two-party rule, did not produce a movement of either Fascist or Communist orientation of any consequence outside her party system. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 632

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to readings on the nation-state’s fragility and how movements exploit multiparty systems — relevant to the Islamophobia field’s interest in how mass movements organize outside party politics. — connects to: Industrial revolution enabled Britain’s full capitalist imperialism where Spain’s failed — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 221; Continental Eastern empire mattered more than overseas colonies to German identity — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 176
• QUESTION: Why does two-party rule (Britain) resist fascist/communist mass movements while multiparty systems crumble? Worth chasing the mechanism.