SUMMARY:

Mark Beissinger poses in this his article the question of how does the collapse of the Soviet Union alter or confirm existing theories about empires. He argues that the most important element of the Soviet collapse for theories of empires was the very fact that the Soviet Union was labeled an empire in the first place. The author examines the ways in which contemporary empires differ from empires of the past and demonstrates that the boundaries between multinational states and multinational empires, between regional or global hegemons and informal empires are more fluid and contested than most theories of empire admit, that claims to nationhood and national self-assertion are central to the process by which contemporary states become empires, and that the structure of nonconsensual control that theories of empire have traditionally emphasized is not a given but rather emerges through an interaction between political practice and oppositional politics. Beissinger illustrates this thesis with the examples of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, drawing as well on a number of other cases.