In his article published in the methodological section of the present issue, Mark Beissinger points out that empire has two aspects equally important from the point of view of self-representation: the claim of the status of empire is no less important than the institutional outcome. Moreover, in certain historical periods such claims may have brought about profound consequences quite independently of the reality of the outcomes.

“Empire today is a claim specific to a particular historical era – the era of nationalism. And it is primarily a subversive vocabulary that seeks to challenge the power of the large multinational state from within on the basis of its violation of norms of self-determination, or the power of global or regional hegemon from without by invoking norms of state sovereignty.”

According to Beissinger, languages of imperial self-description – and languages (correct or fictitious) for describing a polity as “empire” from the outside – have key significance. They allow us to discover changes in the disposition of political forces in the domestic arena and to observe how languages of (self-)representation of past empires have influenced the construction of the image and the policies of a later state. Finally, to study languages of imperial self-description is to discover that the boundary between empire and other forms of statehood is not as rigid as is often assumed by structuralist thinkers.
According to Beissinger, the development of a complex language of nationalism within empire (as well as the recognition of a polity as “empire” in the age of the nation-state) spells out empire’s inevitable collapse. In essence, Miroslav Hroch arrives at a similar conclusion in the first essay of this issue. Although Hroch’s perspective seems diametrically opposed to that of Beissinger – Hroch approaches the relationship between empire and nation through the prism of a national movement and not of an imperial situation – he nevertheless also takes the struggle over language to be the essence of the struggle for national sovereignty.

“In the circumstances of particular social relations an emergent national movement has no alternative to language demands, which, of course, cannot be treated as a single bloc. From the social and socio-psychological points of view language performed an important extra-linguistic function in the processes of modern nation-building.”

Paraphrasing the articles by Hroch and Beissinger, the nation passes a terminal and irreversible “resolution” on the issue of imperial “claims,” which in turn abruptly lose their modernity, legitimacy, and vitality. Although Hroch essentializes the nation and Beissinger’s approach is closer to the constructivist view, both authors assume the existence of a “national language” (in narrowly linguistic and broadly semiotic senses) that is separate and different from “imperial” language. The thesis that at a certain moment a “national language” emerges in a society is a self-evident fact and the point of departure for both authors in our methodological section. At the same time, this thesis underscores the main problem in this issue of Ab Imperio. For our annual theme “Languages of Self-Description of Empire and Nation,” the editors of Ab Imperio invited our authors and readers to reflect upon how languages of empire and languages of nation become differentiated, and how this differentiation precedes and accompanies social and political differentiation of the heterogeneous imperial space. At which particular moment did the German language of the ruling class of the Habsburg empire become a national language? In what way does imperial patriotism become a language for mobilizing an imagined cultural community, while a modest interest in local affairs turns into a politically engaged instrument? Can we speak about separate “imperial” and “national” languages as a matter of principle? How can we trace the border between the stately “Russianness” of Rossiia and the national “Russianness” of Rus’? How can we discover the boundary between the meaning of nation as belonging to a state and the meaning of nation as the foundation of a state? How can we explain the coexistence of different images and descriptions of “Russianness” and what is the cause of the process by which some meanings of this category are lost, while others get fixated?
One of the earliest signs of this process of differentiation between languages of empire and nation are to be found in the least reflected upon language of images and symbols. Our historical section opens with an article by Elena Vishlenkova that explores the search for a visual language to describe and understand “Russianness” from the late 18th to the early 19th century. In our own day the undetermined and ambiguous cultural situation following the dissolution of the USSR and the crisis of habitual means of self-identification again has turned visual language into one of the most adequate instruments for self-expression and social description. Elena Grigor’eva’s article in the section “Newest Mythologies” explores exactly this problem by turning to the newest medium, namely, the Internet.
The politics of homogenization and the unification of heterogeneous social space is one of the symptoms of the opposition between national and imperial modes of social description. The “national” approach to this politics presupposes the formalization and standardization of social categories and the extension of equal rights and obligations with respect to recognized analogous social groups. The imperial approach is mostly concerned with preserving external control over self-organizing communities, and thus is reflected in the development of a complex system of mutual “translations” of norms and statuses between parallel social hierarchies. Such a conclusion can at least be drawn from the articles by Alexander Kaplunovski, Michael Kemper, and Simon Rabinovich.
Individual biographies offer a third venue for exploring the processes of differentiation between imperial and national languages of self-description, whereby biography is understood as both an object and research instrument of anthropocentric historical experience. How does a specific personality recognize the break between the eras of “empire” and “nation,” the gap between the imperial and national modes of perceiving social reality? The individual biographies explored by Laurie Cohen, Sergey Glebov and Willard Sunderland in our historical section and the archival publication Alla Zeide illustrating the multiplicity of loyalties and markers of identity of the Jewish/Russian йmigrй lawyer and public activist Aleksei A. Goldenweizer clearly demonstrate that in reality the differentiation between “national” and “imperial” is contingent and conventional. In a certain sense this argument is pursued in the article by Elena Gapova (section “Political Science and Sociology”), which describes contemporary processes of the “nationalization” and “de-nationalization” of the Belarusian intellectual (and political in a Bourdieuan sense) community through the prism of linguistic debates.
As the articles and publications of this issue demonstrate, the widespread assumption of the existence of an “imperial” language abruptly, deus ex machina, replaced by a “national” one is in need of correction. It would be more exact to speak of the coexistence of imperial and national modes and registers of language use, the gradual evolution of the semantics of social and political categories, the specificity of which is revealed only in the situation of increasing intensification of interaction between historic actors in the heterogeneous context. We should also take into account the gradual evolution of the semantics of social and political categories that describe reality both in “imperial” and “national” perspectives. This new understanding of the problem of languages of self-description of empire and multinational space is reflected in the annual program of the journal for 2006.
It is already self-evident that the study of empire is very much in vogue. The 7th Congress of the International Council for Central and East European Studies in Berlin in July 2005 showed that we are witnessing an “imperial turn” in Russian and Slavic studies. Some reflections on the Congress by participants published in our section “ABC of Empire and Nationalism Studies” discuss this paradigm shift in Russian history. The initial explosion of interest in “multi-nationality” and heterogeneity has been replaced by work on specific research programs: borders and borderlands, imperial elites, and the comparative history of empires. At the same time we have seen the semantic inflation of the concept of “empire,” and the critical analysis of the content of this term in different research contexts is highly warranted.
We hope that this issue follows in the critical vein of the new imperial history of the post-Soviet space, uncovering an important aspect of the dichotomy between “empire” and “nation.” This dichotomy is both a historical phenomenon and an analytical construct. The study of languages of self-description illustrates the fruitfulness of the dialogue between studies of empires and studies of nationalism, when the focus of discussion is upon the moment of evolution of historical empires and upon the transformation of the semantics of the concept of “empire” under the impact of modern nationalism. This problem logically brings us to the theme of the last issue of the journal in 2005, that will focus on the final stage of the collision between “empire” and “nation,” or, to put it differently, on the life of empire “after empire”: in the form of the “imagined” past and actualized tropes of past languages of self-description.

Editors of Ab Imperio:
I. Gerasimov
S. Glebov
A. Kaplunovski
M. Mogilner
A. Semyonov