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SUMMARY:
Свой комментарий о проблемах понимания современного мира и артикуляции империи как аналитической категории Ричард Чу начинает с объяснения собственной позиции и опыта в колониальном контексте отношений между Филиппинами и США и в постколониальном контексте филиппинского общества. Автор отмечает практическую необходимость артикуляции концепции империи и защищает постколониальную теорию. По его мнению, важной функцией социальных наук остается критика господствующих дискурсов, которые составляют часть политического и экономического господства могущественных держав над бывшей или нынешней колониальной периферией (как в случае с Филиппинами). Автор также высказывается за большее внимание к историческому и современному политическому контексту, за учет специфической позиции третьего мира по отношению к Европе (куда он включает Россию). С этой точки зрения вопрос об исчерпании легитимности национального государства является неправомерным, так как в третьем мире еще не достигнута задача создания суверенного и национального государства.
Примечания
[1]Political processes of national self-determination and nation-building coincided with the active phase in the development of nationalism theories. Within this theorizing, the nation was seen not as an ontological entity and a political and social reality, but as a system of practices determining its perception (R. Brubaker. Nationalism Reframed. Cambridge, 1996; J. Hutchinson and A. Smith (Eds.). Nationalism. Critical Concepts in Political Science. Vols. 1-5. Routledge, 2000). At the same time, one cannot tie constructivist approaches to the phenomenon of nationhood with the politically inspired doubts in the irresistible force of the principle of nationality and nation-state for the discursive nature of modern nationalist practices does not necessarily mean that nations lack “real” influence on the world of social and political relations. (The classic summary of this thesis was offered by Benedict Anderson in B. Anderson. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London, 1983; A. Semyonov. Interview with Benedict Anderson: “We Study Empires as We Do Dinosaurs,” Nations, Nationalism, and Empire in a Critical Perspective // Ab Imperio. 2003. No. 3. Pp. 57-73). This is why a radically oriented and politically relevant research into the possibility of the nation-state’s adjustment to the realities of the “post-national” world appears perfectly compatible with a constructivist approach to theories of nationalism. Will Kymlicka. Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford, 1995.
[2]See, for example, Mabel Berezin and Martin Schain (Eds.). Europe without Borders: Remapping Territory, Citizenship, and Identity in a Transnational Age. Baltimore, MD, 2003; T.V. Paul, G. John Ikenberry, and John A. Hall (Eds.). The Nation-state in Question. Princeton, N.J., 2003. On humanitarian intervention and national sovereignty, see works by the British philosopher Mary Kaldor. New and Old Wars: Organised Violence in a Global Era. Cambridge, 1999.
[3]Such a view of empire was offered in Dominic Lieven. Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals. London, 2000. In a similar vein, researchers address the category of empire when working on histories of multiethnic and spatial polities or when contemporizing “global” or “world” history as a “historical precedent” of contemporary globalization. William McNeill. A Defense of World History // Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. 1982. Vol. 5. No. 32. Pp. 75-89; Michael Geyer and Charles Bright. World History in a Global Age // American Historical Review. 1995. Vol. 100. No. 4. Pp. 1034-1060; Anthony Pagden. Peoples and Empires: A Short History of European Migration, Exploration, and Conquest, from Greece to the Present. London, 2001; J. Muldoon. Empire and Order: The Concept of Empire. 800-1800. New York, 1999. A separate place in the literature belongs to the work of Michael Doyle, who offered the first post-Cold War version of a sociologically comparative theory of empire, thus furthering the intellectual tradition of Samuel Eisenstadt. M. Doyle. Empires. Ithaca, London, 1986; S. M. Eisenstadt. The Political Systems of Empires. London, 1992.
3.
Such a view of empire was offered in Dominic Lieven. Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals. London, 2000. In a similar vein, researchers address the category of empire when working on histories of multiethnic and spatial polities or when contemporizing “global” or “world” history as a “historical precedent” of contemporary globalization. William McNeill. A Defense of World History // Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. 1982. Vol. 5. No. 32. Pp. 75-89; Michael Geyer and Charles Bright. World History in a Global Age // American Historical Review. 1995. Vol. 100. No. 4. Pp. 1034-1060; Anthony Pagden. Peoples and Empires: A Short History of European Migration, Exploration, and Conquest, from Greece to the Present. London, 2001; J. Muldoon. Empire and Order: The Concept of Empire. 800-1800. New York, 1999. A separate place in the literature belongs to the work of Michael Doyle, who offered the first post-Cold War version of a sociologically comparative theory of empire, thus furthering the intellectual tradition of Samuel Eisenstadt. M. Doyle. Empires. Ithaca, London, 1986; S. M. Eisenstadt. The Political Systems of Empires. London, 1992.
4.More and more often we see attempts to conceptualize the contemporary United States or European Union as empires: Niall Ferguson. Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power. New York, 2003; N. Ferguson. Colossus: the Price of America's Empire. New York, 2004; Jim Garrison. America as Empire: Global Leader or Rogue Power? San Francisco, 2004; Andrew J. Bacevich (Ed.). The Imperial Tense: Prospects and Problems of American Empire. Chicago, 2003; A. Bacevich. American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of US Diplomacy. Cambridge, MA, 2003; Paul A. Passavant and Jodi Dean (Eds.). Empire's New Clothes: Reading Hardt and Negri. New York, London, 2004; Michael Mann. Incoherent Empire. London, New York, 2003; József Böröcz and Melinda Kovács (Eds.). Empire's New Clothes: Unveiling EU Enlargement. Central European Review (Electronic Book). Budapest, 2001.↩
5.It is possible that the American president was referring to the popular film series Star Wars, the imperial semantics of which has been reflected upon in scholarly works focusing on empires: R. Suny. The Empire Strikes Out: Imperial Russia, “National” Identity, and Theories of Empire // T. Martin, R. Suny (Eds.). Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin. Oxford, 2002; Dominic Lieven pointed out that the movie reflected the popular myth of empire as opposed to the free world. D. Lieven. Empire: the Russian Empire and its Rivals. P. 6-7 .↩
6.Imperialism as a phenomenon has provoked significant scholarly output. At the source of this literature is the work: J. A. Hobson. Imperialism. A Study. London, 1902. The field of imperialism studies underwent essential evolution under the impact of the work of Lenin and the Marxist branch of social sciences in general. Due to these works, the initial focus on the expansion of European states outside the boundaries of the national state has been expanded. Imperialist expansion came to be viewed as a factor in determining the transformation of the social and economic regime of capitalist societies themselves. At the same time, scholars of imperialism did not reflect upon the problem of boundaries between the subject of imperialism and the subjugated space. As Antonio Negri points out, the contemporary relevance of the category of empire is related to the fact that it fixes the type of political and social space in which not only one imperialist hegemon replaces the other, but also the very key foundation of modern imperialism, sovereignty, is transformed. Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard, 2000. P. vii, 31, 232.↩
7.R. McKitterick and R. Quinault (Eds.). Edward Gibbon and Empire. Cambridge, 1997. The metaphor of decline, downfall, and disintegration was attached to empire to a large extent due to efforts by Enlightenment thinkers. Despite the fact that Voltaire, who believed in absolutism as an instrument for the rational ordering of the world, wrote a celebratory history of Peter the Great, and the ideologues of Napoleonic France saw in the First Empire a means to spread Enlightenment, it was the nation-state, which combined rationalism and universalism of the Enlightenment with the Romantic belief in the people’s spirit, that became the main “proto-element” of our perceptions of the teleological and normative social and political order of the world.↩
8.In the peculiar world of classical republican political discourse, the key problem of political theory consisted of the stability of the political regime and its relation to the system of moral relations within a given political community. Many believed that stability could be guaranteed by the preservation of civic virtues through participation in the political life of the community based on a mixed constitution. Such a community would contain mutually balancing elements of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. Machiavelli’s image of empire acquired two opposed meanings, both drawn from the Roman Empire, the archetypical empire experience for Western Europe. On the one hand, empire emerges as a field for the exercise of civic virtues. It is created by the citizen-warrior and thus secures participation of citizens in the administration of the republic, preventing civic apathy. On the other hand, the expansion of the republic leads to moral degradation due to the replacement of civic virtues by the emperors’ desire to enrich themselves through conquest and usurpation of political action. (J. G. A. Pocock. The Machiavellian Moment. Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton, 1975, See also Q. Skinner. Liberty Before Liberalism. Cambridge, 1997; G. Bock, Q. Skinner, M. Viroli (Eds.). Machiavelli and Republicanism. Cambridge, 1990). In order to understand the methodological foundations for such an interpretation of Machiavelli, one has to take into account the turn towards the historicization of political philosophy under the impact of works by Pocock and Skinner, and the so-called Cambridge School of intellectual history. J. Tully and Q. Skinner. (Eds.). Meanings and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics. Princeton, 1988; Q. Skinner. Visions of Politics. Vol. 1. Cambridge, 2002; M. Richter. The History of Social and Political Concepts: A Critical Introduction. Oxford, 1995.↩
9.J. G. A. Pocock. Virtue, Commerce, and History. Cambridge, 1985; Idem. Civic Humanism and Its Role In Anglo-American Thought // Idem. Politics, Language, and Time. New York, 1971; R. Tuck. Philosophy and Government, 1572-1651. Cambridge, 1993.↩
10.J. G. A. Pocock. Virtue, Commerce, and History; St. Pincus. Neither Machiavellian Moment nor Possessive Individualism: Commercial Society and the Defenders of the English Republic // American Historical Review. 1998. Vol. 103. No. 3. Pp. 705-736.↩
11.J. G. A. Pocock. Empire, Revolution, and an End of Early Modernity // Pocock (Ed.). The Varieties of British Political Thought. Cambridge, 1994; T. Ball, J. G. A. Pocock (Eds.). Conceptual Change and the Constitution. Lawrence, KS, 1988.↩
12.Ch. L. Montesquieu. De l’Esprit des lois. Paris, 1962; Idem. The Persian Letters. London, 1897. Judith Shklar. Montesquieu. Oxford, 1987. On the “orientalist” view of non-European periphery by the Enlightenment, see L. Wolff. Inventing Eastern Europe: the Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford, Calif., 1994.↩
13.On the special relationship between the transcendental conception of imperial sovereignty and the pre-modern perception of historical time flow see R. Koselleck. Modernity and the Planes of Historicity // Idem. Future’s Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time. Cambridge, MA, 1985. Some scholars view the Holy Roman Empire as a forerunner of German federalism: Joachim Whaley. Federal Habits: the Holy Roman Empire and the Continuity of German Federalism // Maiken Umbach (Ed.). German Federalism: Past, Present, Future. New York, 2002. Pp. 15-41; see also the work that connects the crisis of the Empire with the crisis of the Church: C. Scott Dixon. The Reformation in Germany. Oxford, 2002. On constitutional history of the Holy Roman Empire in early modern Europe see in John G. Gagliardo. Reich and Nation: the Holy Roman Empire as Idea and Reality, 1763-1806. Bloomington, Ind., 1980; Bernd Roeck. Reichssystem und Reichsherkommen: die Diskussion über die Staatlichkeit des Reiches in der politischen Publizistik des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts. Wiesbaden, 1984.↩
14.One of the results of the crisis of the Holy Roman Empire was the redefining of the concept of “sovereignty” through national and territorial principles. If the power of the emperor was conditioned by the Christian tradition in the Holy Roman Empire, in post-Westphalian Europe religious principles became subject to political ones as reflected in the formula cuius regio ius religio. Heinz Duchhardt (Hrsg.). Der Westfälische Friede: Diplomatie, politische Zäsur, kulturelles Umfeld, Rezeptionsgeschichte. München, 1998; see also the long duree history of sovereignty from the peace of Westphalia to the end of the British empire in Daniel Philpott. Revolutions in Sovereignty: How Ideas Shaped Modern International Relations. Princeton, NJ, 2001. On the birth of the modern concept of the political, see Quentin Skinner. The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. 2 Vols. Cambridge, 1975. An attempt at a “frontal” description of the evolution of basic political concepts of modernity in accordance, to a greater or lesser degree, with R. Koselleck’s vision of intellectual history and conception of modern semantic transformation can be found in: Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland. Stuttgart, 1972-1997.↩
15.See, in particular, Renée Waldinger, Philip Dawson, and Isser Woloch (Ed.). The French Revolution and the Meaning of Citizenship. Westport, CT, 1984. See also the study of the evolution of the regime of citizenship and naturalization in pre- and post-revolutionary France in Peter Sahlins. Unnaturally French: Foreign Citizens in the Old Regime and After. Ithaca, NY, 2004. Sahlins critically treats the thesis of the civic character of French nation-building based on his research into policies towards foreigners.↩
16.Obviously, it is hard to speak of Romantisicm as a single and homogeneous movement in European thought. Some scholars prefer to use the term in the plural. Arthur Lovejoy. On the Discrimination of Romanticisms // A. Lovejoy. Essays in the History of Ideas. Westport, CT, 1948. Pp. 228-253. In application to the study of nationalism, see the classic H. Kohn. The Idea of Nationalism. New York, 1944. Studies of Russian and East European branches of Romanticism are presented in Nicholas Riasanovsky. Russia and the West in the Teaching of the Slavophiles. A Study of Romantic Ideology. Cambridge, MA, 1952; A. Walicki. Philosophy of Romantic Nationalism: The Case of Poland. Oxford, 1982; Idem. The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-Century Russian Thought. Oxford, 1975.↩
18.To John Stuart Mill, a patriarch of liberalism and founder of the modern theory of society, a multinational state appeared as nonsense, despite the fact that in his time, as well as throughout much of human history, the overwhelming majority of human beings lived in such polities. J. S. Mill. On Representative Government // Idem. On Liberty and Other Essays. Oxford, 1998. G. W. F. Hegel further discredited empire. Hegel appeared to take philosophical and political positions diametrically opposed to that of Mill. He saw Napoleon’s empire as the end of history, for it was the first empire that most fully realized the civic and universal ideal, thus transcending modernity understood as the specific perception of the unstoppable flow of historical time from the past to the future. In that sense, empire and the end of history brought about by it remained anti-modern categories, even when moved from the archaic past to the utopian future. The quick defeat of the Napoleonic empire and its disintegration led to a modification of the Hegelian tradition, with its dialectics and teleology of the historical process coupled with the Romantic national spirit, which became one of the foundations of the modern national discourse.↩
19.On the connection between the conceptual apparatus of modern social sciences and humanities with the historical experiences of modern Europe, see R. Koselleck. Future’s Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time; especially in R. Koselleck. Concepts of Historical Time and Social History // Idem. The Practice of Conceptual History. Timing History, Spacing Concepts. Stanford, 2002; P. Ricoeur. History and Narrative. Vol. 1 // Idem. Time and Narrative. 3 Vols. Chicago, 1984. An example of a study more focused on the problem of influences exercised by the discursive regime of nationalism on the social sciences and humanities, see C. Crossley. French Historians and Romanticism: Thierry, Guizot, the Saint-Simonians, Quinet, Michelet. London, 1993; I. Wallerstein. Does India Exist? // Idem. Unthinking Social Science: the Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms. Cambridge, MA, 1991. See also works by Pierre Bourdieu, which question the categorical apparatus of social sciences in relation to mental cartography and historiography: Pierre Bourdieu. L'identité et la représentation. Éléments pour une réflexion critique sur l'idée de région // Actes de la Recherche en sciences sociales. 1980. T. 35. P. 64-72; Idem. Ce que parler veut dire. Paris, 1982.↩
20.See Kiesling's Open Letter to the US State Secretary Colin Powell published in The New York Times. 2003. February 27 (http://www.alternatives.ca/article447.html. Last visit 10 November 2003).↩
21.See the collection of relevant articles by Antoinette Burton (Ed.). After the Imperial Turn: Thinking With and Through the Nation. Durham, NC, 2003, which essentially proclaims a return to the nation due to the inadequacy of the conceptual apparatus of post-colonial studies.↩
22.Empire penetrates every locus of social life as a non-institutional function of Western modernity. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Eds.). Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Berkeley, CA, 1997.↩
23.Partly it can be explained by the fact that post-colonial studies attempt to deconstruct dominant narratives of the past that were imposed upon the colonized by the colonizers. Hence, the main thrust of post-colonial studies is aimed at deciphering cultural meanings and at revealing the in-built mechanisms of power. See, for example, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography // Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Eds.). Selected Subaltern Studies. Dehli, 1988. Pp. 3-34.↩
24.Pondering the problem of the post-structuralist paradigm of social sciences and humanities, some authors have noted the dialectical phenomenon when the conceptual framework of the dominant discourse is reproduced despite the fact that it was against this very discourse that the conceptual change and deconstruction was directed. (H. A. Veeser. The New Historicism // Idem. (Ed.). The New Historicism Reader. New York, London, 1994). The leading theorists of post-colonial studies partly admitted to this: Partha Chatterjee. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse. Minneapolis, 1986. Thus, post-colonial studies have clearly reproduced demarcations (including racial ones) between the center and the periphery. This boundary certainly prevents proper reflection upon the empire as a zone of interaction. The need to overcome this impasse is well postulated in A. Stoler, F. Cooper. Between Metropol and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda // Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Eds.). Tensions of Empire. The influence of the imperial context upon the processes of nation-building in Western Europe was treated by Tom Nairn using the Scottish example: Tom Nairn. The Break-up of Britain. London, 1977. See also research into this problem in Linda Colley. Britons: Forging A Nation, 1707-1837. New Haven, CT, 1992. A different approach to the problem of imperial contexts in Western Europe was offered by J. G. A. Pocock (Pocock was born in New Zealand and his attempt to alter the national format of writing British history is a result of both intellectual propositions and personal biography). J. G. A. Pocock. British History: A Plea for a New Subject // Journal of Modern History. 1975. Vol. 47. No. 4. Pp. 601-621. Instead of a post-colonial vision of the metropol as a homogeneous subject of colonialism, Pocock puts forward an idea of a complex and composite nucleus of the British empire, which allows him to include into this de-centralized space of the imperial center “white” colonies. These colonies, according to Pocock, cannot be written into the exclusionist narrative of English history due to the presence of the Scottish, Irish, and English elements and a new culture formed by the immigrants in the their contacts with each other. See a discussion of this approach in the special issue on “Britishness and Europeanness” of the Journal of British Studies. 1992. Vol. 31. No. 4. See also Kathleen Wilson (Ed.). A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660-1840. Cambridge, 2004.↩
25.In particular, this is one reproach for Edward Said’s concept of “orientalism”, which opposes a homogenous “West” to a diverse “East”. E. Said. Orientalism. New York, 1978. On the concept of “orientalism”, see the forum “Orientalism: 20 Years On” // American Historical Review. 2000. Vol. 105. N. 4. Pp. 1204-1249. See also methodologically important work on the creation of the image of the “Balkans”: Maria Todorova. Imagining the Balkans. New York, 1997; Milica Bakic-Hayden and Robert Hayden. Orientalist Variations on the Theme “Balkans” in Symbolic Geography in Recent Yugoslav Cultural Politics // Slavic Review. 1992. Vol. 51. Pp. 1-15. For a study of the symbolic geography of Central and Eastern Europe in an era of change, see in Sorin Antohi. Habits of the Mind: Europe's Post-1989 Symbolic Geographies // S. Antohi (Ed.). Between Past and Future: The Revolutions of 1989 and Their Aftermath. Budapest, 2000. Pp. 61-79. For a discussion of the applicability of “orientalism” to Russian history, see Adeeb Khalid. Russian History and the Debate over Orientalism; and Nathaniel Knight. On Russian Orientalism: A Response to Adeeb Khalid // Kritika. 2000. Vol. 1. N. 4. Pp.701-715. There is a subsequent discussion that takes into account a problematic relationship between European modernity and the Russian historical experience (with the participation of D. Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, I. Gerasimov, A. Etkind, N. Knight, E. Vorobieva, S. Velychenko) in Ab Imperio. 2002. Vol. 3. N. 1. Pp. 239-367. An interesting perspective that does not deny Said’s contribution to the study of the cultural mechanisms of domination and subjugation, and yet attempts to overcome the ontologized boundary between “East” and “West” on the example of Ottoman history U. Makdisi. Ottoman Orientalism // American Historical Review. 2002. Vol. 107. No. 3. Pp. 768-796.↩
26.For example, the erosion of classical sovereignty and the boundaries of national and social cultures in Europe illustrated by the development of the European Union is paralleled by the emergence of new nationalism, which re-formatted the legacy of 19th century nationalism and put forward new priorities, such as issues of migration, distribution of social welfare, and intercultural/inter-confessional dialogue. See, for example, Rogers Brubaker. Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe. New York, 1996.↩
28.For example, Georg von Rauch, the author of one of the first western studies of Russian imperial history, reiterated the specific views of the Baltic Germans. See G. von Rauch. Rußland: staatliche Einheit und nationale Vielfalt; föderalistische Kräfte und Ideen in der russischen Geschichte. München, 1953; Idem. Geschichte der baltischen Staaten. Stuttgart, 1970; Idem. Geschichte der Sowjetunion. Stuttgart, 1990; Idem. Zarenreich und Sowjetstaat im Spiegel der Geschichte: Aufsätze und Vorträge // M. Garleff (Hrsg.). Göttingen, 1980. Another pioneer of Russian imperial history, Leonid Strakhovsky, analyzed the status of non-Russian peoples of empire from the point of view of their legal status. Nevertheless, he perceived Russia as a national state, which, moreover, “tolerantly” handled its “minorities. Leonid Strakhovsky. Constitutional Aspects of the Imperial Russian Government’s Policy Toward National Minorities // The Journal of Modern History. 1941. Vol. 4. N. 13. Pp. 467-492.↩
29.G. Simon. Nationalismus und Nationalitätenpolitk in der Sowjetunion. Baden-Baden, 1986; Idem. Verfall und Untergang des sowjetischen Imperiums. München, 1993.↩
30.Andreas Kappeler. Russland als Vielvölkerreich: Entstehung, Geschichte, Zerfall. München, 1993.↩
31.See A. Kapeller. Mazepintsy, malorossy, khokhly: ukraintsy v etnicheskoi ierarkhii Rossiiskoi imperii // Rossiia – Ukraina: istoriia vzaimootnoshenii / Ed. by A. Miller, V. Reprintsev, B. Floria. Moscow, 1997. Pp. 125-144.↩
32.See also Kapeller’s discussion of the reception of his work in the post-Soviet world: A. Kapeller. Rossiia – mnogonatsional’naia imperiia. Nekotorye razmyshleniia vosem’ let spustia posle publikatsii // Ab Imperio. 2000. No. 1. Pp. 9-22.↩
33.See bibliographies in I. Gerasimov, S. Glebov, A. Kaplunovskii, M. Mogilner, A. Semyonov (Eds.). Novaia imperskaia istoriia postsovetskogo prostranstva. Kazan, 2004. Pp. 575-628.↩
34.J. D. Klier. Russia Gathers Her Jews. The Origins of the “Jewish Question” in Russia 1772-1825. DeKalb, 1985. Idem. Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 1855-1881. Cambridge, 1995; Idem and Shlomo Lambroza (Eds.). Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Jewish History. Cambridge, 1991; J. Frankel. Prophesy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism and the Russian Jews, 1862-1917. Cambridge, 1981; Eli Lederhendler. The Road to Modern Jewish Politics: Political Tradition and Political Reconsruction in the Jewish Community of Tsarist Russia. Oxford, 1989; S. J. Zipperstein. The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History, 1794-1881. Stanford, 1985; Idem. Ahad Ha’am and the Origins of Zionism. Halban, 1993; Michael Stanislawski. Zionism and the Fin de Siecle. Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky. Berkeley, 2001 and others. A more detailed discussion is to be found in an issue of Ab Imperio dedicated to this topic. “The Limits of Marginality: Jews as Inorodtsy of Continental Empires.” Ab Imperio. 2003. Vol. 4.↩
35.See a more detailed discussion in the Ukrainian historiographic forum (N. Iakovenko, Ia. Hrytsak, G. Kasianov, Th. Prymak, A. Zayarnyuk) of Ab Imperio. 2003. Vol. 2. Pp. 376-519.↩
36.Andreas Kappeler. Russland als Vielvölkerreich : Entstehung, Geschichte, Zerfall. München, 1993.↩
37.These processes have been reflected upon in the permanent rubric of Ab Imperio, which is dedicated to the emergence of new national historiographies in relation to the politics of identity and the new academic markets. So far, the journal has hosted debates on Baltic, Moldovan, Ukrainian, Tatar, Kazakh, and Cossack histories.↩
38.I. Gerasimov, S. Glebov, A. Kaplunovski, M. Mogilner, A. Semyonov (Eds.). Novaia Imperskaia istoriia postsovetskogo prostranstva. Kazan, 2004.↩
39.It is interesting that in the peculiar post-Soviet situation—perceived as a liberation from the “prison of peoples”—national histories are identified with “history from below”, which is in direct opposition to the West European understanding of national history as the dominant discourse of violence, exclusion, and suppression. It would suffice to recall Pierre Nora’s project of lieux de memoir, the revisionist pathos of which was directed at the historicization of memory and the unraveling of historiography’s role as an agent in memory construction. However, even in the West European context, national history gives rise to a meta-narrative that maintains overtly rigid and exclusive boundaries. This meta-narrative represses the heterogeneity of the past by creating a progressive map of the nation’s development.↩
40.Novaia imperskaia istoriia postsovetskogo prostranstva / Ed. by Ilya Gerasimov, Serguei Glebov, Alexander Kaplunovski, Marina Mogilner, Alexander Semyonov. Kazan, 2004.↩
41.In that sense the concept of “imperialist historiography” loses its analytical meaning because both the “scheme of Russian history” (as distinct from the earlier historiographic experiments with Russian [rossiiskaia] history by I. Georgi and even N. M. Karamzin) and the ethno-populist historical canons of Russian (regionalists in Siberia) and non-Russian (proto)national movements are constructed on a common Romantic and positivist interpretation of history as an evolution of a single national body. We can detect today a scholarly interest in those directions of Russian history that did not follow the nation-centered narrative of Russia’s past. For example, A. Kapeller looks at the pre-national discourse of Russia as a multiethnic state (I. G. Georgi. Opisanie vsekh v Rossiiskom gosudarstve obitaiushchikh narodov, a takzhe ikh zhiteiskikh obriadov, ver, obyknovenii, zhilishch, odezhd, I prochikh dostoprimechatel’nostei. 3 Vols. Sankt-Peterburg, 1776-1777). Interesting ideas on pre-national conceptualizations of Russia’s history were put forward by Paul Bushkovich. The Formation of a National Consciousness in Early Modern Russia // Harvard Ukrainian Studies. 1986. No. 10. Pp. 355-376. Mark von Hagen pays special attention to the problem of the “federalist tradition” in Russian political thought. According to von Hagen, it contains a range of alternatives to the nation-centered historical narrative. M. von Hagen. Writing History of Russia as Empire: The Perspective of Federalism // Kazan, Moskva, Peterburg: Rossiiskaia imperiia vzgliadom iz raznykh uglov / Ed. by B. Gasparov, C. Evtuhov, A. Ospovat, M. Von Hagen. Moscow, 1997. Pp. 393-410. At the same time, it is clear that we lack works that treat the intellectual genealogy and consolidation of the national narrative of Russian history in the same way such exploration were conducted on West European material. See, for example, C. Crossley. French Historians and Romanticism: Thierry, Guizot, the Saint-Simonians, Quinet, Michelet. London, 1993. The existing literature either follows the established tradition of discussing major schools of Russian historiography or simply makes no distinction between imperial and national characteristics of historiographic canons. T. Emmons. On the Problem of Russia’s “Separate Path” in Late Imperial Historiography // Th. Sanders. (Ed.). Historiography of Imperial Russia: The Profession and Writing of History in a Multinational State. Armonk, 1999. Pp. 163-187 and other articles in this collection focusing on Russian historiography. See also M. Bassin. Turner, Solov’ev, and the “Frontier Hypothesis”: The Nationalist Signification of Open Spaces // The Journal of Modern History. 1993. Vol. 65. No. 3. Pp. 473-511. A notable exception is the works by S. Becker, which explore political and cultural functions of the nation centered narrative of Russian history. S. Becker. Contributing to a Nationalist Ideology: Histories of Russia in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century // Russian History. 1986. Vol. 13. No. 4. Pp. 331-353.↩
42.Rossiiskaiia imperiia v sravnitel’noi perspective. Sbornik statei / Ed. by A. Miller. Moscow, 2004. This collection was a result of the conference “History of Empires. Comparative Methods of Studying and Teaching” held in Moscow on June 7-9, 2003. This conference, in turn reflecting the thematic and methodological orientation of the “imperial” project, was supported by The Open Society Institute. A “structuralist” reading of comparative studies of empire, see in A. Miller. Between Local and Inter-Imperial: Russian Imperial History in Search of Scope and Paradigm // Kritika. 2004. No. 1. Pp. 7-26. A parallel project is being realized in Vienna by the Austrian Academy of Sciences, which held a conference in March 2004 on “Power and Subjects in Comparative History of Continental Empires, 1700-1920”. See http://www.oeaw.ac.at/shared/news/2004/pdf/historische_einladung.pdf. Last visited July 15, 2004.↩
43.Both Sultan Mukhammed II and Empress Catherine II annexed bordering territories, and yet just comparing the expansionist foreign policy and regimes of governing annexed lands in the Ottoman and the Russian empires does not reveal any imperial “specifics.” Outside of the concrete and unique circumstances, we can only compare technologies, which are determined by the level of development of material and spiritual culture.↩
44.It was this approach that inspired the organizers of yet another “imperial” conference which took place in Warsaw in September 2004 on “Problem Imperium Rosyjskiego w Historii Rosji, Polski, Litwy i Ukrainy (XVIII-początek XXI w.)” The main sponsor of the conference was the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences.↩
45.These aspects of the history of the Russian empire and USSR were discussed in the four issues of Ab Imperio published in 2002 within the framework of the annual theme of “Russian Empire/USSR and the Paradoxes of Modernization”.↩
46.Another reading of Foucault can be found in A. Miller’s introduction to his “Ukrainskii vopros” v politike vlastei I russkom obshchestvennom mnenii. Vtoria polovina XIX veka. Petersburg, 2000. Miller accepts a Foucauldian understanding of discourse as the normative version of modernity. In application to the topic treated by the author, such a discourse divides the modern world along national lines. The task of new imperial history formulated on the basis of the critical part of Foucault’s legacy, at the center of which is the deconstruction of normative versions of modernity through historicization of the emergence of modern practices and norms of social life. On ignoring the critical component of the post-structuralist theory in post-Soviet humanities see S. Glebov, M. Mogilner, A. Semenov. “The Story of Us:” Proshloe I perspektivy modernizatsii gumanitarnogo znania glazami istorikov // Novoe Literaturmoe Obozrenie. 2003. № 59. Pp. 190-210.↩
[4]More and more often we see attempts to conceptualize the contemporary United States or European Union as empires: Niall Ferguson. Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power. New York, 2003; N. Ferguson. Colossus: the Price of America's Empire. New York, 2004; Jim Garrison. America as Empire: Global Leader or Rogue Power? San Francisco, 2004; Andrew J. Bacevich (Ed.). The Imperial Tense: Prospects and Problems of American Empire. Chicago, 2003; A. Bacevich. American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of US Diplomacy. Cambridge, MA, 2003; Paul A. Passavant and Jodi Dean (Eds.). Empire's New Clothes: Reading Hardt and Negri. New York, London, 2004; Michael Mann. Incoherent Empire. London, New York, 2003; József Böröcz and Melinda Kovács (Eds.). Empire's New Clothes: Unveiling EU Enlargement. Central European Review (Electronic Book). Budapest, 2001.
[5]It is possible that the American president was referring to the popular film series Star Wars, the imperial semantics of which has been reflected upon in scholarly works focusing on empires: R. Suny. The Empire Strikes Out: Imperial Russia, “National” Identity, and Theories of Empire // T. Martin, R. Suny (Eds.). Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin. Oxford, 2002; Dominic Lieven pointed out that the movie reflected the popular myth of empire as opposed to the free world. D. Lieven. Empire: the Russian Empire and its Rivals. P. 6-7 .
[6]Imperialism as a phenomenon has provoked significant scholarly output. At the source of this literature is the work: J. A. Hobson. Imperialism. A Study. London, 1902. The field of imperialism studies underwent essential evolution under the impact of the work of Lenin and the Marxist branch of social sciences in general. Due to these works, the initial focus on the expansion of European states outside the boundaries of the national state has been expanded. Imperialist expansion came to be viewed as a factor in determining the transformation of the social and economic regime of capitalist societies themselves. At the same time, scholars of imperialism did not reflect upon the problem of boundaries between the subject of imperialism and the subjugated space. As Antonio Negri points out, the contemporary relevance of the category of empire is related to the fact that it fixes the type of political and social space in which not only one imperialist hegemon replaces the other, but also the very key foundation of modern imperialism, sovereignty, is transformed. Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard, 2000. P. vii, 31, 232.
[7]R. McKitterick and R. Quinault (Eds.). Edward Gibbon and Empire. Cambridge, 1997. The metaphor of decline, downfall, and disintegration was attached to empire to a large extent due to efforts by Enlightenment thinkers. Despite the fact that Voltaire, who believed in absolutism as an instrument for the rational ordering of the world, wrote a celebratory history of Peter the Great, and the ideologues of Napoleonic France saw in the First Empire a means to spread Enlightenment, it was the nation-state, which combined rationalism and universalism of the Enlightenment with the Romantic belief in the people’s spirit, that became the main “proto-element” of our perceptions of the teleological and normative social and political order of the world.
[8]In the peculiar world of classical republican political discourse, the key problem of political theory consisted of the stability of the political regime and its relation to the system of moral relations within a given political community. Many believed that stability could be guaranteed by the preservation of civic virtues through participation in the political life of the community based on a mixed constitution. Such a community would contain mutually balancing elements of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. Machiavelli’s image of empire acquired two opposed meanings, both drawn from the Roman Empire, the archetypical empire experience for Western Europe. On the one hand, empire emerges as a field for the exercise of civic virtues. It is created by the citizen-warrior and thus secures participation of citizens in the administration of the republic, preventing civic apathy. On the other hand, the expansion of the republic leads to moral degradation due to the replacement of civic virtues by the emperors’ desire to enrich themselves through conquest and usurpation of political action. (J. G. A. Pocock. The Machiavellian Moment. Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton, 1975, See also Q. Skinner. Liberty Before Liberalism. Cambridge, 1997; G. Bock, Q. Skinner, M. Viroli (Eds.). Machiavelli and Republicanism. Cambridge, 1990). In order to understand the methodological foundations for such an interpretation of Machiavelli, one has to take into account the turn towards the historicization of political philosophy under the impact of works by Pocock and Skinner, and the so-called Cambridge School of intellectual history. J. Tully and Q. Skinner. (Eds.). Meanings and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics. Princeton, 1988; Q. Skinner. Visions of Politics. Vol. 1. Cambridge, 2002; M. Richter. The History of Social and Political Concepts: A Critical Introduction. Oxford, 1995.
[9]J. G. A. Pocock. Virtue, Commerce, and History. Cambridge, 1985; Idem. Civic Humanism and Its Role In Anglo-American Thought // Idem. Politics, Language, and Time. New York, 1971; R. Tuck. Philosophy and Government, 1572-1651. Cambridge, 1993.
[10]J. G. A. Pocock. Virtue, Commerce, and History; St. Pincus. Neither Machiavellian Moment nor Possessive Individualism: Commercial Society and the Defenders of the English Republic // American Historical Review. 1998. Vol. 103. No. 3. Pp. 705-736.
[11]J. G. A. Pocock. Empire, Revolution, and an End of Early Modernity // Pocock (Ed.). The Varieties of British Political Thought. Cambridge, 1994; T. Ball, J. G. A. Pocock (Eds.). Conceptual Change and the Constitution. Lawrence, KS, 1988.
[12]Ch. L. Montesquieu. De l’Esprit des lois. Paris, 1962; Idem. The Persian Letters. London, 1897. Judith Shklar. Montesquieu. Oxford, 1987. On the “orientalist” view of non-European periphery by the Enlightenment, see L. Wolff. Inventing Eastern Europe: the Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford, Calif., 1994.
[13]On the special relationship between the transcendental conception of imperial sovereignty and the pre-modern perception of historical time flow see R. Koselleck. Modernity and the Planes of Historicity // Idem. Future’s Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time. Cambridge, MA, 1985. Some scholars view the Holy Roman Empire as a forerunner of German federalism: Joachim Whaley. Federal Habits: the Holy Roman Empire and the Continuity of German Federalism // Maiken Umbach (Ed.). German Federalism: Past, Present, Future. New York, 2002. Pp. 15-41; see also the work that connects the crisis of the Empire with the crisis of the Church: C. Scott Dixon. The Reformation in Germany. Oxford, 2002. On constitutional history of the Holy Roman Empire in early modern Europe see in John G. Gagliardo. Reich and Nation: the Holy Roman Empire as Idea and Reality, 1763-1806. Bloomington, Ind., 1980; Bernd Roeck. Reichssystem und Reichsherkommen: die Diskussion über die Staatlichkeit des Reiches in der politischen Publizistik des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts. Wiesbaden, 1984.
[14]One of the results of the crisis of the Holy Roman Empire was the redefining of the concept of “sovereignty” through national and territorial principles. If the power of the emperor was conditioned by the Christian tradition in the Holy Roman Empire, in post-Westphalian Europe religious principles became subject to political ones as reflected in the formula cuius regio ius religio. Heinz Duchhardt (Hrsg.). Der Westfälische Friede: Diplomatie, politische Zäsur, kulturelles Umfeld, Rezeptionsgeschichte. München, 1998; see also the long duree history of sovereignty from the peace of Westphalia to the end of the British empire in Daniel Philpott. Revolutions in Sovereignty: How Ideas Shaped Modern International Relations. Princeton, NJ, 2001. On the birth of the modern concept of the political, see Quentin Skinner. The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. 2 Vols. Cambridge, 1975. An attempt at a “frontal” description of the evolution of basic political concepts of modernity in accordance, to a greater or lesser degree, with R. Koselleck’s vision of intellectual history and conception of modern semantic transformation can be found in: Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland. Stuttgart, 1972-1997.
[15]See, in particular, Renée Waldinger, Philip Dawson, and Isser Woloch (Ed.). The French Revolution and the Meaning of Citizenship. Westport, CT, 1984. See also the study of the evolution of the regime of citizenship and naturalization in pre- and post-revolutionary France in Peter Sahlins. Unnaturally French: Foreign Citizens in the Old Regime and After. Ithaca, NY, 2004. Sahlins critically treats the thesis of the civic character of French nation-building based on his research into policies towards foreigners.
[16]Obviously, it is hard to speak of Romantisicm as a single and homogeneous movement in European thought. Some scholars prefer to use the term in the plural. Arthur Lovejoy. On the Discrimination of Romanticisms // A. Lovejoy. Essays in the History of Ideas. Westport, CT, 1948. Pp. 228-253. In application to the study of nationalism, see the classic H. Kohn. The Idea of Nationalism. New York, 1944. Studies of Russian and East European branches of Romanticism are presented in Nicholas Riasanovsky. Russia and the West in the Teaching of the Slavophiles. A Study of Romantic Ideology. Cambridge, MA, 1952; A. Walicki. Philosophy of Romantic Nationalism: The Case of Poland. Oxford, 1982; Idem. The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-Century Russian Thought. Oxford, 1975.
[18]To John Stuart Mill, a patriarch of liberalism and founder of the modern theory of society, a multinational state appeared as nonsense, despite the fact that in his time, as well as throughout much of human history, the overwhelming majority of human beings lived in such polities. J. S. Mill. On Representative Government // Idem. On Liberty and Other Essays. Oxford, 1998. G. W. F. Hegel further discredited empire. Hegel appeared to take philosophical and political positions diametrically opposed to that of Mill. He saw Napoleon’s empire as the end of history, for it was the first empire that most fully realized the civic and universal ideal, thus transcending modernity understood as the specific perception of the unstoppable flow of historical time from the past to the future. In that sense, empire and the end of history brought about by it remained anti-modern categories, even when moved from the archaic past to the utopian future. The quick defeat of the Napoleonic empire and its disintegration led to a modification of the Hegelian tradition, with its dialectics and teleology of the historical process coupled with the Romantic national spirit, which became one of the foundations of the modern national discourse.
[19]On the connection between the conceptual apparatus of modern social sciences and humanities with the historical experiences of modern Europe, see R. Koselleck. Future’s Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time; especially in R. Koselleck. Concepts of Historical Time and Social History // Idem. The Practice of Conceptual History. Timing History, Spacing Concepts. Stanford, 2002; P. Ricoeur. History and Narrative. Vol. 1 // Idem. Time and Narrative. 3 Vols. Chicago, 1984. An example of a study more focused on the problem of influences exercised by the discursive regime of nationalism on the social sciences and humanities, see C. Crossley. French Historians and Romanticism: Thierry, Guizot, the Saint-Simonians, Quinet, Michelet. London, 1993; I. Wallerstein. Does India Exist? // Idem. Unthinking Social Science: the Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms. Cambridge, MA, 1991. See also works by Pierre Bourdieu, which question the categorical apparatus of social sciences in relation to mental cartography and historiography: Pierre Bourdieu. L'identité et la représentation. Éléments pour une réflexion critique sur l'idée de région // Actes de la Recherche en sciences sociales. 1980. T. 35. P. 64-72; Idem. Ce que parler veut dire. Paris, 1982.
[20]See Kiesling's Open Letter to the US State Secretary Colin Powell published in The New York Times. 2003. February 27 (http://www.alternatives.ca/article447.html. Last visit 10 November 2003).
[21]See the collection of relevant articles by Antoinette Burton (Ed.). After the Imperial Turn: Thinking With and Through the Nation. Durham, NC, 2003, which essentially proclaims a return to the nation due to the inadequacy of the conceptual apparatus of post-colonial studies.
[22]Empire penetrates every locus of social life as a non-institutional function of Western modernity. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Eds.). Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Berkeley, CA, 1997.
[23]Partly it can be explained by the fact that post-colonial studies attempt to deconstruct dominant narratives of the past that were imposed upon the colonized by the colonizers. Hence, the main thrust of post-colonial studies is aimed at deciphering cultural meanings and at revealing the in-built mechanisms of power. See, for example, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography // Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Eds.). Selected Subaltern Studies. Dehli, 1988. Pp. 3-34.
[24]Pondering the problem of the post-structuralist paradigm of social sciences and humanities, some authors have noted the dialectical phenomenon when the conceptual framework of the dominant discourse is reproduced despite the fact that it was against this very discourse that the conceptual change and deconstruction was directed. (H. A. Veeser. The New Historicism // Idem. (Ed.). The New Historicism Reader. New York, London, 1994). The leading theorists of post-colonial studies partly admitted to this: Partha Chatterjee. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse. Minneapolis, 1986. Thus, post-colonial studies have clearly reproduced demarcations (including racial ones) between the center and the periphery. This boundary certainly prevents proper reflection upon the empire as a zone of interaction. The need to overcome this impasse is well postulated in A. Stoler, F. Cooper. Between Metropol and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda // Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Eds.). Tensions of Empire. The influence of the imperial context upon the processes of nation-building in Western Europe was treated by Tom Nairn using the Scottish example: Tom Nairn. The Break-up of Britain. London, 1977. See also research into this problem in Linda Colley. Britons: Forging A Nation, 1707-1837. New Haven, CT, 1992. A different approach to the problem of imperial contexts in Western Europe was offered by J. G. A. Pocock (Pocock was born in New Zealand and his attempt to alter the national format of writing British history is a result of both intellectual propositions and personal biography). J. G. A. Pocock. British History: A Plea for a New Subject // Journal of Modern History. 1975. Vol. 47. No. 4. Pp. 601-621. Instead of a post-colonial vision of the metropol as a homogeneous subject of colonialism, Pocock puts forward an idea of a complex and composite nucleus of the British empire, which allows him to include into this de-centralized space of the imperial center “white” colonies. These colonies, according to Pocock, cannot be written into the exclusionist narrative of English history due to the presence of the Scottish, Irish, and English elements and a new culture formed by the immigrants in the their contacts with each other. See a discussion of this approach in the special issue on “Britishness and Europeanness” of the Journal of British Studies. 1992. Vol. 31. No. 4. See also Kathleen Wilson (Ed.). A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660-1840. Cambridge, 2004.
[25]In particular, this is one reproach for Edward Said’s concept of “orientalism”, which opposes a homogenous “West” to a diverse “East”. E. Said. Orientalism. New York, 1978. On the concept of “orientalism”, see the forum “Orientalism: 20 Years On” // American Historical Review. 2000. Vol. 105. N. 4. Pp. 1204-1249. See also methodologically important work on the creation of the image of the “Balkans”: Maria Todorova. Imagining the Balkans. New York, 1997; Milica Bakic-Hayden and Robert Hayden. Orientalist Variations on the Theme “Balkans” in Symbolic Geography in Recent Yugoslav Cultural Politics // Slavic Review. 1992. Vol. 51. Pp. 1-15. For a study of the symbolic geography of Central and Eastern Europe in an era of change, see in Sorin Antohi. Habits of the Mind: Europe's Post-1989 Symbolic Geographies // S. Antohi (Ed.). Between Past and Future: The Revolutions of 1989 and Their Aftermath. Budapest, 2000. Pp. 61-79. For a discussion of the applicability of “orientalism” to Russian history, see Adeeb Khalid. Russian History and the Debate over Orientalism; and Nathaniel Knight. On Russian Orientalism: A Response to Adeeb Khalid // Kritika. 2000. Vol. 1. N. 4. Pp.701-715. There is a subsequent discussion that takes into account a problematic relationship between European modernity and the Russian historical experience (with the participation of D. Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, I. Gerasimov, A. Etkind, N. Knight, E. Vorobieva, S. Velychenko) in Ab Imperio. 2002. Vol. 3. N. 1. Pp. 239-367. An interesting perspective that does not deny Said’s contribution to the study of the cultural mechanisms of domination and subjugation, and yet attempts to overcome the ontologized boundary between “East” and “West” on the example of Ottoman history U. Makdisi. Ottoman Orientalism // American Historical Review. 2002. Vol. 107. No. 3. Pp. 768-796.
[26]For example, the erosion of classical sovereignty and the boundaries of national and social cultures in Europe illustrated by the development of the European Union is paralleled by the emergence of new nationalism, which re-formatted the legacy of 19th century nationalism and put forward new priorities, such as issues of migration, distribution of social welfare, and intercultural/inter-confessional dialogue. See, for example, Rogers Brubaker. Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe. New York, 1996.
[28]For example, Georg von Rauch, the author of one of the first western studies of Russian imperial history, reiterated the specific views of the Baltic Germans. See G. von Rauch. Rußland: staatliche Einheit und nationale Vielfalt; föderalistische Kräfte und Ideen in der russischen Geschichte. München, 1953; Idem. Geschichte der baltischen Staaten. Stuttgart, 1970; Idem. Geschichte der Sowjetunion. Stuttgart, 1990; Idem. Zarenreich und Sowjetstaat im Spiegel der Geschichte: Aufsätze und Vorträge // M. Garleff (Hrsg.). Göttingen, 1980. Another pioneer of Russian imperial history, Leonid Strakhovsky, analyzed the status of non-Russian peoples of empire from the point of view of their legal status. Nevertheless, he perceived Russia as a national state, which, moreover, “tolerantly” handled its “minorities. Leonid Strakhovsky. Constitutional Aspects of the Imperial Russian Government’s Policy Toward National Minorities // The Journal of Modern History. 1941. Vol. 4. N. 13. Pp. 467-492.
[29]G. Simon. Nationalismus und Nationalitätenpolitk in der Sowjetunion. Baden-Baden, 1986; Idem. Verfall und Untergang des sowjetischen Imperiums. München, 1993.
[30]Andreas Kappeler. Russland als Vielvölkerreich: Entstehung, Geschichte, Zerfall. München, 1993.
[31]See A. Kapeller. Mazepintsy, malorossy, khokhly: ukraintsy v etnicheskoi ierarkhii Rossiiskoi imperii // Rossiia – Ukraina: istoriia vzaimootnoshenii / Ed. by A. Miller, V. Reprintsev, B. Floria. Moscow, 1997. Pp. 125-144.
[32]See also Kapeller’s discussion of the reception of his work in the post-Soviet world: A. Kapeller. Rossiia – mnogonatsional’naia imperiia. Nekotorye razmyshleniia vosem’ let spustia posle publikatsii // Ab Imperio. 2000. No. 1. Pp. 9-22.
[33]See bibliographies in I. Gerasimov, S. Glebov, A. Kaplunovskii, M. Mogilner, A. Semyonov (Eds.). Novaia imperskaia istoriia postsovetskogo prostranstva. Kazan, 2004. Pp. 575-628.
[34]J. D. Klier. Russia Gathers Her Jews. The Origins of the “Jewish Question” in Russia 1772-1825. DeKalb, 1985. Idem. Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 1855-1881. Cambridge, 1995; Idem and Shlomo Lambroza (Eds.). Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Jewish History. Cambridge, 1991; J. Frankel. Prophesy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism and the Russian Jews, 1862-1917. Cambridge, 1981; Eli Lederhendler. The Road to Modern Jewish Politics: Political Tradition and Political Reconsruction in the Jewish Community of Tsarist Russia. Oxford, 1989; S. J. Zipperstein. The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History, 1794-1881. Stanford, 1985; Idem. Ahad Ha’am and the Origins of Zionism. Halban, 1993; Michael Stanislawski. Zionism and the Fin de Siecle. Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky. Berkeley, 2001 and others. A more detailed discussion is to be found in an issue of Ab Imperio dedicated to this topic. “The Limits of Marginality: Jews as Inorodtsy of Continental Empires.” Ab Imperio. 2003. Vol. 4.
[35]See a more detailed discussion in the Ukrainian historiographic forum (N. Iakovenko, Ia. Hrytsak, G. Kasianov, Th. Prymak, A. Zayarnyuk) of Ab Imperio. 2003. Vol. 2. Pp. 376-519.
[36]Andreas Kappeler. Russland als Vielvölkerreich : Entstehung, Geschichte, Zerfall. München, 1993.
[37]These processes have been reflected upon in the permanent rubric of Ab Imperio, which is dedicated to the emergence of new national historiographies in relation to the politics of identity and the new academic markets. So far, the journal has hosted debates on Baltic, Moldovan, Ukrainian, Tatar, Kazakh, and Cossack histories.
[38]I. Gerasimov, S. Glebov, A. Kaplunovski, M. Mogilner, A. Semyonov (Eds.). Novaia Imperskaia istoriia postsovetskogo prostranstva. Kazan, 2004.
[39]It is interesting that in the peculiar post-Soviet situation—perceived as a liberation from the “prison of peoples”—national histories are identified with “history from below”, which is in direct opposition to the West European understanding of national history as the dominant discourse of violence, exclusion, and suppression. It would suffice to recall Pierre Nora’s project of lieux de memoir, the revisionist pathos of which was directed at the historicization of memory and the unraveling of historiography’s role as an agent in memory construction. However, even in the West European context, national history gives rise to a meta-narrative that maintains overtly rigid and exclusive boundaries. This meta-narrative represses the heterogeneity of the past by creating a progressive map of the nation’s development.
[40]Novaia imperskaia istoriia postsovetskogo prostranstva / Ed. by Ilya Gerasimov, Serguei Glebov, Alexander Kaplunovski, Marina Mogilner, Alexander Semyonov. Kazan, 2004.
[41]In that sense the concept of “imperialist historiography” loses its analytical meaning because both the “scheme of Russian history” (as distinct from the earlier historiographic experiments with Russian [rossiiskaia] history by I. Georgi and even N. M. Karamzin) and the ethno-populist historical canons of Russian (regionalists in Siberia) and non-Russian (proto)national movements are constructed on a common Romantic and positivist interpretation of history as an evolution of a single national body. We can detect today a scholarly interest in those directions of Russian history that did not follow the nation-centered narrative of Russia’s past. For example, A. Kapeller looks at the pre-national discourse of Russia as a multiethnic state (I. G. Georgi. Opisanie vsekh v Rossiiskom gosudarstve obitaiushchikh narodov, a takzhe ikh zhiteiskikh obriadov, ver, obyknovenii, zhilishch, odezhd, I prochikh dostoprimechatel’nostei. 3 Vols. Sankt-Peterburg, 1776-1777). Interesting ideas on pre-national conceptualizations of Russia’s history were put forward by Paul Bushkovich. The Formation of a National Consciousness in Early Modern Russia // Harvard Ukrainian Studies. 1986. No. 10. Pp. 355-376. Mark von Hagen pays special attention to the problem of the “federalist tradition” in Russian political thought. According to von Hagen, it contains a range of alternatives to the nation-centered historical narrative. M. von Hagen. Writing History of Russia as Empire: The Perspective of Federalism // Kazan, Moskva, Peterburg: Rossiiskaia imperiia vzgliadom iz raznykh uglov / Ed. by B. Gasparov, C. Evtuhov, A. Ospovat, M. Von Hagen. Moscow, 1997. Pp. 393-410. At the same time, it is clear that we lack works that treat the intellectual genealogy and consolidation of the national narrative of Russian history in the same way such exploration were conducted on West European material. See, for example, C. Crossley. French Historians and Romanticism: Thierry, Guizot, the Saint-Simonians, Quinet, Michelet. London, 1993. The existing literature either follows the established tradition of discussing major schools of Russian historiography or simply makes no distinction between imperial and national characteristics of historiographic canons. T. Emmons. On the Problem of Russia’s “Separate Path” in Late Imperial Historiography // Th. Sanders. (Ed.). Historiography of Imperial Russia: The Profession and Writing of History in a Multinational State. Armonk, 1999. Pp. 163-187 and other articles in this collection focusing on Russian historiography. See also M. Bassin. Turner, Solov’ev, and the “Frontier Hypothesis”: The Nationalist Signification of Open Spaces // The Journal of Modern History. 1993. Vol. 65. No. 3. Pp. 473-511. A notable exception is the works by S. Becker, which explore political and cultural functions of the nation centered narrative of Russian history. S. Becker. Contributing to a Nationalist Ideology: Histories of Russia in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century // Russian History. 1986. Vol. 13. No. 4. Pp. 331-353.
[42]Rossiiskaiia imperiia v sravnitel’noi perspective. Sbornik statei / Ed. by A. Miller. Moscow, 2004. This collection was a result of the conference “History of Empires. Comparative Methods of Studying and Teaching” held in Moscow on June 7-9, 2003. This conference, in turn reflecting the thematic and methodological orientation of the “imperial” project, was supported by The Open Society Institute. A “structuralist” reading of comparative studies of empire, see in A. Miller. Between Local and Inter-Imperial: Russian Imperial History in Search of Scope and Paradigm // Kritika. 2004. No. 1. Pp. 7-26. A parallel project is being realized in Vienna by the Austrian Academy of Sciences, which held a conference in March 2004 on “Power and Subjects in Comparative History of Continental Empires, 1700-1920”. See http://www.oeaw.ac.at/shared/news/2004/pdf/historische_einladung.pdf. Last visited July 15, 2004.
[43]Both Sultan Mukhammed II and Empress Catherine II annexed bordering territories, and yet just comparing the expansionist foreign policy and regimes of governing annexed lands in the Ottoman and the Russian empires does not reveal any imperial “specifics.” Outside of the concrete and unique circumstances, we can only compare technologies, which are determined by the level of development of material and spiritual culture.
[44]It was this approach that inspired the organizers of yet another “imperial” conference which took place in Warsaw in September 2004 on “Problem Imperium Rosyjskiego w Historii Rosji, Polski, Litwy i Ukrainy (XVIII-początek XXI w.)” The main sponsor of the conference was the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
[45]These aspects of the history of the Russian empire and USSR were discussed in the four issues of Ab Imperio published in 2002 within the framework of the annual theme of “Russian Empire/USSR and the Paradoxes of Modernization”.
[46]Another reading of Foucault can be found in A. Miller’s introduction to his “Ukrainskii vopros” v politike vlastei I russkom obshchestvennom mnenii. Vtoria polovina XIX veka. Petersburg, 2000. Miller accepts a Foucauldian understanding of discourse as the normative version of modernity. In application to the topic treated by the author, such a discourse divides the modern world along national lines. The task of new imperial history formulated on the basis of the critical part of Foucault’s legacy, at the center of which is the deconstruction of normative versions of modernity through historicization of the emergence of modern practices and norms of social life. On ignoring the critical component of the post-structuralist theory in post-Soviet humanities see S. Glebov, M. Mogilner, A. Semenov. “The Story of Us:” Proshloe I perspektivy modernizatsii gumanitarnogo znania glazami istorikov // Novoe Literaturmoe Obozrenie. 2003. № 59. Pp. 190-210.