The Politics of Humiliation in the Age of Imperialism

As recent examples show, humiliation is still a powerful mechanism of international politics. It dons various guises, e.g., derogatory comments, dismissive gestures, and more or less sophisticated methods of exclusion. It reflects the intentions of those who inflict shame as well as the sensibilities of the humiliated. Such sensibilities, it will be argued, have changed over history. During the long nineteenth century the distinctly emotional language of honor proved to be a convenient means to calibrate relations among European states. Taken beyond Europe in the age of imperialism, the language was deliberately used as a destructive weapon that helped to assert European hegemony and debase the non-European counterparts. The talk focuses on the history of European attempts to change the ceremony of receiving foreign ambassadors to the Chinese court. Starting in the (late) eighteenth century, European envoys increasingly refused to perform certain ceremonial gestures, especially prostration, because they considered them humiliating. The talk will investigate how the feeling of humiliation was fueled by notions of equality, autonomy, sovereignty, and manliness, which had become enshrined in certain bodily postures. It will then demonstrate how such notions clashed with Chinese concepts of foreign relations and imperial rule. Furthermore it will trace the diplomatic pressures (backed by military power) on the Chinese government to comply with European sensibilities. Zooming in on the infamous “kowtow comedy” that unfolded in the German capital in 1901, it will highlight how European politics of humiliation occasionally backfired and humiliated those who attempted to inflict shame, provoking the ridicule of a global audience.