Acronyms that contain the term civilizing mission 

Civilizing mission

The civilizing mission (Spanish: misión civilizadora; Portuguese: Missão civilizadora; French: Mission civilisatrice) is a political rationale for military intervention and for colonization purporting to facilitate the modernization and the Westernization of indigenous peoples, especially in the period from the 15th to the 20th centuries. As a principle of European culture, the term was most prominently used in justifying French colonialism in the late-15th to mid-20th centuries. The civilizing mission was the cultural justification for the colonial exploitation of French Algeria, French West Africa, French Indochina, Portuguese Angola and Portuguese Guinea, Portuguese Mozambique and Portuguese Timor, among other colonies. The civilizing mission also was a popular justification for the British, German, and U.S. colonialism. In the Russian Empire, it was also associated with the Russian conquest of Central Asia and the Russification of that region. The western European colonial powers claimed that, as Christian nations, they were duty-bound to disseminate Western civilization to what Europeans perceived as the heathen and primitive cultures of the Eastern world. In addition to economic exploitation and imposition of imperialist government, the ideology of the civilizing mission required the cultural assimilation of "primitive peoples", as the nonwhite Other, into the colonial subaltern of eastern Europe.

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