Language is both reflective and constitutive of social relationships (usually defined as an association between two or more persons). If we change significantly the meaning of the words describing a relationship, we change fundamentally the nature of the relationship. Therefore, if we take seriously Michael Doyle’s statement that empire is a particular form of political relationship (specifically, “a relationship, formal or informal, in which one state controls the effective political sovereignty of another political society”),^[1] then the language that those involved in imperial relationships use to describe themselves and their linkages to power is of obvious importance for understanding that which we call “empire.”
It is precisely here that the editors of Ab Imperio raise in their essay extremely important issues for the study of empire.^[2] Many of their ideas parallel my own thinking and writings on the subject. The main thrust of their argument is to show how the meaning of empire has shifted over time, with its most widespread contemporary meaning (as an illegitimate form of domination over a state or collectivity of people) emerging as a result of the rise of global norms of state sovereignty and national self-determination and the triumph of anti-colonial struggles in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As they note, for most people today empire and imperialism are unambiguous pejoratives, part of a globalized vocabulary of resistance to particular forms of state power and control. Empire today is widely understood as an illegitimate, immoral, and properly resisted form of control that stands outside of prevailing civilizational norms. Use of the word implies an analogy with forms of rule that no longer formally exist and that, according to international law, are no longer supposed to exist,^[3] conjuring up images of wrongful power and generating a sense of the inevitable decline of any rule widely construed as imperial. Thus, no state today would willingly describe itself as an empire. Rather, empire today is a claim made by those resisting particular forms of state control.
This widespread pejorative understanding of empire today stands in sharp contrast to the situation at the end of the nineteenth century, when empire was rather a claim made by rulers to legitimate control and was widely represented as an essential and inevitable attribute of a modern nation-state. Wolfgang Mommsen described the reigning atmosphere at the time: “[T]he world of the future would be dominated by great empires, and any nation state which did not join their ranks was condemned to inferior status.”^[4] As the editors of Ab Imperio observe, this enormous transformation from a world of empires to a world of nation-states – from a world in which empires were considered the epitome of modernity and the essence of the nation-state system to a world in which empires are understood as the nation-state’s alter ego and the significant other against which nations struggle – renders any discussion of empire in general meaningless and begs us to situate every specific relationship of empire in its historical and interpretive context.
For scholars of Russia and of the Soviet Union, of course, these issues have particular import. Empire has been at the center of the collapse of two of Russia’s political systems over the course of the twentieth century, and the charge of empire continues to hang over the Russian Federation today in its relations with its own minorities and with those states that once were part of the Soviet sphere of control. These three political systems differed from one another radically: a dynastic monarchy that traced itself back to the seventeenth century and that self-consciously portrayed empire as a rightful and pious cause; a communist multinational federation and global superpower that championed a universal ideology and defined itself in opposition to the European colonial system; and a semi-democratic federation that struggles to hold itself together and to maintain its role as a regional power. It is obvious that if “empire” is to apply to all three of these polities in some fashion, it does so on the basis of sharply disparate meanings and quite different types of relationships. Indeed, in contrast to the Russian Empire, there is nothing inherent at all about the imperial status of the Soviet Union or contemporary Russia. The term is as much a claim as it is a reflection of the particular political practices engaged in by these regimes that evoke analogy with political systems that no longer formally exist.
The need to situate empire in its historical and interpretive context is not merely a Eurasian problematic; it is a necessity for reasonable comparative analysis of empire more generally. In medieval Europe, for instance, “empire” was frequently used to signify a claim to power over kings that was largely deterritorialized, a concept imbued with divine authority. Yet, by the early modern era the notion that every prince wielded the same legal authority within their kingdoms as an emperor became the basis for the earliest notions of state sovereignty and the development of the modern state system, and eventually for the rise of secular monarchies over the claims over a universal church.^[5] Much like the transformation of the meaning of empire in the twentieth century from a claim made by rulers to legitimate control into a claim made by those opposing a particular rule about the illegitimacy of control, the changing discourse in early modern Europe about “empire” – from signifying a deterritorialized and divinely inspired suzerainty over kings to including as well the notion of a territorialized and secular sovereignty – reflected a fundamental shift in the nature of political organization, as well as in the nature of empire. Whether as a claim to legitimate control or a claim about the illegitimacy of control, the meaning and usage of the label “empire” have always resided at the center of contention.
Thus, the language of empire is of critical significance for situating analysis of empires for at least four reasons. First and most importantly, empire is in part a claim. It is not solely a claim, for claims of empire without effective practices of control to back them up are not convincing performances. But empire nevertheless always involves a significant dimension of claims-making. Indeed, this is true not only in a world in which empire is understood as a pejorative. In the pre-modern world the politics of empire involved staking a claim to dominance – a claim that was not always recognized by those subject to imperial dominance or by third-party observers.^[6] Some may feel uncomfortable with treating empire in part as claim. Yet, political scientists routinely treat the modern nation-state, “empire’s nemesis,”^[7] as involving a significant dimension of claims-making, both in its claim to represent a distinct and legitimate political community and in its claim to the exclusive right to rule over a bounded territory (sovereignty) – each of these involving important third-party dimensions in the recognition of these claims by others. Much as there is a strong “reputational” aspect to claims of national self-determination and sovereignty (the latter gaining juridical effect only when recognized by others), empire as a claim has also required recognition for it to achieve potency: recognition of empire’s prestige and predominance in a world in which empires were accustomed modes of representing rule; and recognition of empire’s stigma and its lack of authority in a world in which empires are widely taken to be anathema. In either context both those subject to control and third-party observers have played an important part in confirming or denying the validity of these claims. Thus, like sovereignty, empire has never been solely a matter of control. It has also involved multiple audiences to which claims about control and its acceptability have been addressed.
Second, the language of empire signals to us the shifting field of actors involved in the politics of empire at any particular moment in time and the assumptions that these actors bring with them into this relationship. For example, before the last two hundred years, most people throughout the globe thought of themselves largely in religious, local, class, tribal, and clan terms, not as members of national communities. But to speak about empire today is not only to make a claim about the illegitimate nature of authority; it is also to make a claim about the nature of the community subject to illegitimate control: that it is a nation deserving of self-determination and sovereignty. In contrast with the pre-national world, a conception of the national is almost always assumed and embedded in the contemporary understanding of empire. Most structuralist theories of empire assume the existence of such a community. They do not problematize the “national” within the “imperial,” at least as this “imperial” is understood in a world inhabited by nationalism. In this sense, a purely structuralist theory of empire shares certain assumptions with primordialist conceptions of nationalism. Yet, as scholars of nationalism well know, nations are not forms of community that exist a priori. Rather, nationhood emerged in the modern era in significant part through the actions of nationalist entrepreneurs seeking to awaken the consciousness of the nation as a political community, with empire being the most significant target against which would-be nations mobilized. Moreover, in the era of nationalism states have proffered their own nation-building projects as a means for cementing their ties with their citizens, so that alternative visions of the nation vie for the allegiances of populations. Thus, as the authors of “In Search of New Imperial History” assert, it is important that the enterprise of scholarship on empire distinguish itself from the teleology of the nation that inhabits national narratives about empire and that are an inherent component of empire’s antithesis. These narratives may reflect the practices of control that evoke the designation of a contemporary polity as an empire in the first place. However, they also must be recognized as part of the political contention that defines empire as an illegitimate relationship of control over self-conscious communities – not merely reflective of relationships, but constitutive of them as well. When the editors of Ab Imperio refer to the need for an “‘archeology of knowledge’ about empire,” they are really calling upon us to situate properly the “national” within the “imperial,” that is, to recognize the role played by nationalism in the politics of empire over the last two hundred years, and to adjust our understanding of empire accordingly.
Third, discourse about empire matters because empires are not entirely independent phenomena across time. Rather, those who have directed imperial enterprises have always looked to the successes and failures of the past to inform their ways of structuring power. Much as the example of the glory of Rome (as the editors of Ab Imperio observe) inspired subsequent models for imitation in medieval and early modern Europe, so too has the collapse of European empires colored the ways in which contemporary states go about the process of structuring large-scale control. For example, Terry Martin has noted how the failed examples of the Habsburg, Tsarist, and Ottoman empires strongly affected the way in which the Bolsheviks went about fashioning their nationality policies and ultimately how Soviet control came to be instituted.^[8] Similarly, contemporary Russia is haunted today by the desire to avoid a Soviet-type collapse, while many minorities within Russia and groups formerly subject to Soviet rule continue to view Russian intentions through the prism of the past. The meaning of the past is rarely self-evident. It manifests itself through debate and dialogue, and its lessons are inferred and often equivocal. Accordingly, the language of empire matters, for it is through the interpretation of the past that the enterprise of empire comes to be situated by actors in the context of prior experience.
Finally, attention to the language of empire matters because it suggests a more fluid and open boundary between empire and other forms of rule than is usually contemplated in purely structuralist approaches to the subject. As the editors of Ab Imperio make clear, when viewed from the vantage point of a world of nation-states, the understanding of empires as large, compound, and powerful states based on conquest is problematic, most significantly because these same criteria – size, complexity, power, and history of conquest – also describe well most multinational states. Today, the vast majority of states in the world are multinational in character – some quite large in size, and most created by force out of the remnants or fragments of colonial empires. Nor is the mere fact of control over a multinational population or the exercise of power beyond one’s borders sufficient criteria today for invoking the imperial label. Rather, in a post-imperial world of nation-states, resistance constitutes a critical measure by which we gauge the imperial quality of a state, and empire is something that states become rather than something that they are in some essential manner. Accordingly, the so-called inevitability of imperial decline is teleological, for we recognize polities today as empires largely because they have collapsed. A teleological perspective on empire divorces us from an understanding of the alternative possibilities for development that confront any polity and obfuscates the specific actions taken by states and oppositions that bring about consolidation or degeneration. Thus, the editors of Ab Imperio rightly call upon scholars to turn their attentions away from timeless classifications or definitions of empire and to focus instead on empire as “a research context rather than a structure, a problem rather than a diagnosis.”
Of course, to think about empire in this fashion is radically unsettling. It forces us away from comfortable assumptions and provokes us to think about the complex of factors that lie at the basis of the exercise of legitimate power, in whatever context power manifests itself. It summons us to think about empires as relationships – as sets of claims, practices, and reputations – rather than as essences or things. It provides us with a basis for a new historiography of past empires and opens up the possibility for thinking about new forms of imperial relationships that might materialize that are markedly different from those of the past. To say that a particular state today is or is not an empire suddenly appears less important than understanding the dynamic processes and practices that cause recognition of a state’s imperial quality or that effectuate the diminution of such recognition. Much as scholarship on nationalism has moved in recent years away from viewing the nation as a timeless, substantive reality and has come to focus more on the process by which nationalist ways of thinking and behaving come into being and multiply, scholarship on empires (the nation’s antithesis) needs to move away from thinking about empire as a uniform structure of control across time and to focus more on the politics by which claims about empire gain meaning and resonate widely or lose their effect. Only in this way can we truly address the “relational” dimension of empire and to come to grips with the enormous variation in the meaning and practice of empire across the vast expanse of human history.