Respect for foreign peoples served only to restrain, not transform, imperial rule

Evidence

The actual motivation for this separation was a curious mixture of arrogance and respect: the new arrogance of the administrators abroad who faced “backward populations” or “lower breeds” found its correlative in the respect of old-fashioned statesmen at home who felt that no nation had the right to impose its law upon a foreign people. It was in the very nature of things that the arrogance turned out to be a device for rule, while the respect, which remained entirely negative, did not produce a new way for peoples to live together, but managed only to keep the ruthless imperialist rule by decree within bounds. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 357

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Gives a mechanism for how ‘respect’ functioned as negative containment — parallels the later construction of the Other in Orientalism, where liberal respect still enables domination.