Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk on H. Loehnis’s Die europäischen Colonien (1883)

Böhm-Bawerk’s short review examines Loehnis’s proposal to redirect German emigration from overseas colonies toward a continental “hinterland”: Russia, Austria-Hungary, and the Balkans. He characterizes the book as more political than economic. Its compressed history of European colonial possessions supports an argument that continental settlement would preserve emigrants’ German nationality and attachment to their homeland; Böhm-Bawerk also detects a discreet expectation that settlement might prepare Germany’s territorial expansion.

The review moves from exposition to qualified endorsement and then to two objections. Böhm-Bawerk welcomes German immigration into eastern Europe as beneficial both to civilization and to the receiving countries. This judgment shares the book’s nationalist cultural hierarchy, yet does not entail acceptance of its political programme. His first objection concerns feasibility: prevailing anti-German currents in Magyar and Slavic territories would discourage the very settlers Loehnis hoped to attract.

His second objection separates cultural affiliation from political allegiance. Emigrants cannot simply be assumed to serve as outposts of a future Greater Germany:

Sie würden es nicht wollen, weil Auswanderer sich überhaupt selten durch ein starkes Vaterlandsgefühl auszeichnen, und, wie die Geschichte vielfältig zeigt, viel häufiger geneigt sind, politische Bande, die sie anfänglich noch mit dem Mutterlande zusammenhielten, zu zerreissen, als aus der Fremde her neue Bande zu knüpfen.

English translation: They would not want to, because emigrants are in general seldom distinguished by a strong feeling for the fatherland and, as history shows in manifold ways, are far more often inclined to tear apart the political bonds which initially still held them together with the mother country than to forge new bonds from abroad.

Here emigration becomes a potential loosening of national ties, not an instrument that the homeland can reliably direct. Böhm-Bawerk then adds a normative limit to this argument about motivation:

Sie würden es aber auch nicht dürfen, weil sie hier nicht wie jenseits des Oceans als Occupanten herrenloser Gebiete, sondern als neue Glieder festgefügte Staatswesen auftreten müssten, an die sie alsbald ein Pflichtenverband knüpfte.

English translation: But neither would they be permitted to, because here they would have to appear not, as on the other side of the ocean, as occupants of ownerless territories, but as new members of firmly established polities, to which a bond of duties would at once tie them.

Membership in established receiving states creates obligations incompatible with treating settlers as agents of foreign expansion. The contrast also exposes the review’s colonial assumptions: overseas territory is presented as available for occupation, while European settlement is constrained by existing statehood.

Böhm-Bawerk closes with regret that Loehnis’s proposals have little prospect of realization under present conditions. The review’s distinctive move is to distinguish the cultural benefits he attributes to German migration from its supposed geopolitical uses. His skepticism rests on emigrants’ likely choices and their duties to receiving states, rather than on a rejection of continental migration itself.