Governments tolerated imperialism because their politics were internally collapsing.
Evidence
The solution of the riddle was imperialism. The answer to the fateful question: why did the European comity of nations allow this evil to spread until everything was destroyed, the good as well as the bad, is that all governments knew very well that their countries were secretly disintegrating, that the body politic was being destroyed from within, and that they lived on borrowed time. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 405
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: Key mechanism for connecting imperialism to the later analysis of racialized exclusion — instability at home projected abroad.