The mid-1990s saw the publication of two groundbreaking collections on the short-term implications and long-term legacies of imperial states and their disintegration.^[1] Although the two collections differed in structure, content, and approach (the volume edited by L. Carl Brown focused exclusively on the Ottoman case, while the book by Karen Barkey and Mark von Hagen compared the Ottoman, Habsburg, and Russian empires and the Soviet Union), both made their mark on Ottoman and Russian/Soviet imperial studies. For the last issue of 2005 (dedicated to exploring “imperial legacy” as an element of languages of self-description of imperial and national communities), Ab Imperio asked the editors of the two collections to reflect upon the genesis, carrying out, and impact of their projects.
One particular issue stands out: historians’ reflections on the field. How does the language of historiography adapt itself to the internal logic of the historian’s self-reflection? How do new developments force historians to review and re-think their own assumptions – perhaps decades old and shaped in a different social and scholarly context? We address these general questions –formulated in connection with a concrete historical problem – to our colleagues who almost a decade ago published books that offered new ways of exploring modern continental empires.

I.
Interview with L. Carl Brown

AI: What provided the immediate impetus for the launch of your edited volume almost ten years ago? How do you evaluate the role of different factors in defining the focus of the collection: a perception that a certain stage in the development of historiography had been reached, the logic of your own research project and interests, or impressions of societal and political developments in your own and in studied countries?

L. Carl BROWN: I cannot recall any single “immediate impetus” motivating me to recruit scholars to write on the Ottoman imperial legacy, but it surely emerged from an idea that had long been germinating in my mind about the most effective way to write the history of the modern Middle East. Essentially, I have long felt that what might be dubbed the “Ottoman factor” in modern Middle Eastern history has been slighted. The Ottoman Empire was, after the Roman Empire, the most extensive imperial system ever to grow up around the Mediterranean, and it lasted even longer than the Roman Empire. Moreover, even though historians can trace surviving influences on the modern Middle East of these earlier Mediterranean based empires (e.g. Abbasid or Byzantine in addition to the Roman), they are all buried in long past centuries. The Ottoman Empire, by contrast, lasted until early in the third decade of the 20th century. The long span of time from 1516-17 (the Ottoman conquest of Syria and Egypt) until the end of the First World War offers a basically uninterrupted four-century era of Ottoman rule and Ottoman political culture in the Arabo-Turkish core of the Middle East. It stands to reason that the Ottoman Empire, the most recent example of socio-political organization in the Middle East, would offer both institutional and ideological survivals on into the following post-Ottoman period.
All this seems straightforward enough, but the historiography of the late Ottoman period and also the post-Ottoman times right down to the present has tended to discount the importance of Ottoman institutions and ideas. There is, for example, a strong tendency in the formerly Ottoman lands of the Balkans and among the Arabs to see the break from Ottoman political control (occurring at different times) as a liberation, a decolonization, with the corollary disposition to discount the survival of Ottoman institutions and ideas. I will say no more about this regarding the Balkans except to add that Maria Todorova’s chapter in my book deftly addresses this very subject.^[2]
The classic statement of the Arab “up from Ottomanism” syndrome was The Arab Awakening (1938) by George Antonius.^[3] Although the distortions of that book have now been corrected (e.g., the works of Zeine Zeine,^[4] C. Ernest Dawn,^[5] plus the recent collected work The Origins of Arab Nationalism (1991)^[6]), there remains a disposition to bifurcate “Arab” and “Turkish” history, and in the process to discount Ottoman influence.
The Ottoman legacy is more effectively reviewed by historians, not surprisingly, as regards the Republic of Turkey. Indeed, it is almost as if Turkey is the only successor state to the Ottoman Empire, a fair enough statement juridically but surely to be questioned in terms of overall “legacy.” Note the basic text by Stanford J. and Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey^[7] (not “History of the Ottoman Empire and its Several Successor States”) or the classic study by Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey.^[8] Or, another classic, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, by Niyazi Berkes, which treats quite rightly the evolving Ottoman experience prior to the end of the Ottoman Empire in fully two-thirds of the book.^[9] Most historical studies of Arab successor states pay limited attention to that state’s Ottoman past (which, of course, varied appreciably in time and intensity).
Another factor diverting historians from adequate attention to the overall Ottoman political culture and its possible survival into the post-Ottoman world is the continuing Eastern Question historiography – the diplomacy of the European state system dismantling the Ottoman Empire from the late 18th century onward. This long-lived diplomatic issue is certainly a major organizing theme for modern Middle Eastern history, perhaps even the most useful single organizing theme, far be it for me to distance myself from my earlier International Politics and the Middle East: Old Rules, Dangerous Game (1984).^[10] Even so, the tendency to emphasize the role of the intervening outsider does run the risk of discounting the role of the indigenous (ongoing and necessarily evolving especially in reaction to that outside intervention) political institutions and culture.
Stated differently, taking measure of the long-lived Ottoman state and the political culture it spawned, and writing the modern history of the area with greater attention to the long-lived Ottoman polity and political culture might serve to avoid the mistake attributed to many modernization studies of viewing the outside other as the dominant variable and the indigenous as, much too simply, a residual category.

AI: If you were to assemble a collection of articles reflecting on the dissolution of respective empires now, would it differ structurally or thematically from the book that appeared a decade ago?

L.C.B.: Imperial Legacy was not, in fact, a collection of articles reflecting comparatively on the dissolution of different empires. It really stuck to the single subject of the Ottoman case. I find the tripartite comparison in the volume After Empire edited by Karen Barkey and Mark von Hagen most interesting and would like to see more such comparative ventures. I still remember being impressed more than fifty years ago by a few insightful pages in Toynbee’s A Study of History comparing 19th century Russian and Ottoman history. We need more such boundary hopping, most of all in Middle Eastern studies, which has largely avoided the comparative approach. Possible comparisons: building on the idea presented many years ago by Marshall Hodgson (Venture of Islam) of the three great Muslim “gunpowder empires” – Ottoman, Safavid and Moghul.^[11]
Niall Ferguson has reopened the scholarly study of empire by insisting that the British Empire was a “good thing” (Empire: The Rise and Decline of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power).^[12] Perhaps this will lead to a renewed interest in comparing the modern European colonial empires. Comparing British and Russian (later Soviet) imperial expansion and, for that matter, the subsequent “decolonization” would be of interest. One could get beyond the “great game” motif of the leviathan vs. the behemoth to study comparatively the modalities of integrating the newly acquired territories into the imperial polity and then review, also comparatively, the process of imperial disintegration.

AI: How did you define “empire” for yourself back then and how has your understanding of this phenomenon changed by now?

L.C.B.: I must admit that those of us writing Imperial Legacy did not really much concern ourselves with defining empire. Implicitly, I believe we had in mind a lowest common denominator definition such as a centralized bureaucratic state ruling over diverse territories and peoples. Defined in terms of what it was not, it was not a tribe writ large, not a loosely constructed “feudal” system, not a horde on the move (the Mongols), and not a nation-state.

AI: What remains after empire: chaos, nations liberated from repression, “imperial legacies,” or new empires? How well reflected is the concept “historical legacy” and what is the specific situation of the legacy of continental empires? To what extent did your personal experience contribute to the focus on the “post-imperial” state of things?

L.C.B.: What remains after empire? In the Ottoman case all of those mentioned except for a new empire. One can see abortive efforts at a new empire in pan-Arabism, but here the basic “Eastern Question” syndrome looms large. The Middle Eastern and North African territories of the once mighty Ottoman Empire were too much contested by the outside world (classic Eastern Question with one after another Afro-Asian Ottoman territories being colonized by one or another Western power, formal decolonization, and the Cold War period…) to permit either a new empire from within the region or an empire ruled from outside the region.
As for the specific situation of the legacy of continental empires, presumably as opposed to sea borne empires (Spanish, Dutch, British), I would refer to my earlier suggestion about comparing the trajectories of the British and Russian empires. Factoring into the issue is the very basic demographic issue. To what extent did this or that portion of an “empire” become a settlement colony accepting population from the “home” country? Duration of colonial rule and intensity of settler colonization surely contribute mightily to the extent of legacy or, indeed, to complete absorption into the “home country.” It is interesting to note that the “old” European colonialism and its numerically significant settlement colonization (as a proportion of the total population of the receiving country) created new states and cultures in the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand. The European colonization into Afro-Asia, by contrast, impacted on but did not change the overall politico-cultural orientation. What if the French settlement in Algeria (peaking for a short time at some 17%) had been significantly more? What if Russia had managed to send many more settlers into the different –stans?

AI: Historical empires left a certain trace in the political traditions, spatial imaginations, economic mapping, and social structuring of successor societies. Still, does the very phenomenon of “imperial legacy” exist? If so, how is it preserved, translated, and revealed?

L.C.B.: I must give a very banal empirical answer to this question. Imperial legacy is nothing more than a historical factor, or better a cluster of factors, to be uncovered by a careful study of the earlier roots of the ideas and institutions now manifest among the peoples emerging from an earlier imperial structure.

AI: The last decade in historiography has been marked by an increased interest in “imperial” problems. Did this change in scholarly climate and your own evolution affect your research program, and in general upon your perception of a promising field?

L.C.B.: I see the shift to “imperial” problems in Middle Eastern historiography largely in terms of the neo-conservative notion of informal empire, of the US as being rightly poised to world leadership (plus the thesis advanced by Ferguson and those following his lead). Most of this is policy relevant and highly normative (arguing for what states should do).
As one who opposes this American imperial muscle-flexing but who feels very strongly that the historian’s task is to faithfully describe the past, not reconstruct it for present purposes, I personally feel the need to walk a very narrow path in addressing this increased interest in empire. I must try to uncover the links of the past leading to the present without using the past to justify or condemn present policies.

AI: Can we suggest that in the light of recent developments the concepts of empire and of imperial legacy will gain currency? In your opinion, is there a danger that such historical analogies are excessively applied?

L.C.B.: The danger of misleading historical analogies is ever-present, all the more so when they are invoked to address immediately pressing political issues. That said, the historical study of the changing idea of empire or the nostalgic hankering for lost empire is in itself a fertile field of historical study. Thus, the very idea of an American empire as being a fine and proper calling, so radically breaking from the older image of the US as anti-imperialist. Or one might note the Usama bin Ladin reference to the very date that the Ottoman Empire and the caliphate died in his polemic against the West.

II.
Interview with Mark von HAGEN

Let me start with the last question and work my way through several of the others. From my observation, the concepts of empire – and to a lesser degree imperial legacy – are certainly gaining new currency and with them the danger that they will be excessively applied, much as the boom in nationalism literature led to a pendulum swing for a couple decades to the domination of much social science literature by these concerns to the exclusion of much prior scholarship and reality. In two countries that I hold dear, the United States and Russia, there are disturbing trends of revival of imperialist thinking and practice. With five years of the Bush regime in Washington, America has embarked on a new stage of imperial occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, with less newsworthy outposts in several other parts of the world. This newly militarized expansion of American influence, with important roots in the Cold War, has been accompanied by a deterioration in American democracy, from attacks on the media and civil society that have narrowed the space for public debates to a cult of secrecy and oligarchical dealmaking that have rendered officials much less accountable and open to abuses of authority. Similarly, the Russian state under Putin has refused to accept the consequences of the end of its Soviet predecessor and is trying desperately to reassert its influence and authority in the post-Soviet space; the most glaring examples of the misguided policies are the murderous war in Chechnya, the ongoing support for authoritarian regimes from Belarus to Uzbekistan, and the recent interventions in Ukraine (during the highly contested elections at the end of last year and the recent gas conflict in the first weeks of 2006). Also similar to the American case, the Kremlin has turned back many if not most of the promising developments of the early 1990s in a series of campaigns to limit the independent press, civil society, the judiciary, and regional governors, while resurrecting the prestige and practices of the KGB and the late Soviet state more generally. In a third country I have come to hold dear, Ukraine, the political elites and to some degree the broader population are trying to sort out the costs of their version of imperial legacies, from the traditional ones of Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Poland, to the new ones of the European Union and the United States. So, for better or worse, I think the concepts of empire and legacies are here for a while.
Karen Barkey and I have been accused of rehabilitating empire or at least indulging in some nostalgia for these state formations. It is true we were both raised with grandparents whose experience of interwar Europe and since gave their childhood memories of the empires they saw destroyed after World War I (in my grandmother’s case it was a peculiar fondness for Kaiser Franz-Josef, though with the usual dose of Viennese irony and Weltschmerz). But I have also felt the “legacy” of my German ancestry (if complicated by my father’s American origins and my mother’s Austrian ones) in my intellectual engagement as a historian with Nazi Germany in its imperial occupation of eastern Europe and its destruction of so many of its inhabitants. And I confess to a fondness for federalist and autonomist thinkers in the Russian Empire and after, most of whom were dedicated to holding onto the territory of the empire while jettisoning its old regime and replacing it with democratic institutions and practices. Perhaps part of my affection for these thinkers, especially the Siberian and Ukrainian ones among them, is that they lost out in the bloodbath of revolution and civil war. Their “legacy” partly survived in the early Soviet constitution’s recognition of a form of federalism without any genuine sovereignty in a dictatorship of one party and helped to bring down the Soviet Union and its empire in the early 1990s. That subject, by the way, is one I address in a volume about empire and regions I am co-editing with Jane Burbank and Anatolii Remnev and currently accepted for publication by Indiana University Press.
If anything, though, my research and teaching since After Empire came out have forced me to continually rethink the relations between empire, nationalism, and democracy. I am currently in the advanced stages of a monograph about the rise and fall of Ukraine in the circumstances of World War I and the Eastern Front. I have returned also to 1917 and the dynamics of politics between Petrograd and Kyiv. Among other themes in this work is the reaction of Russian liberals and socialists to the Ukrainian movement that spread quickly throughout the southwest provinces of the Empire after the abdication of Nicholas II. It has been striking for me how quickly the liberals and socialists, who were so recently in the opposition to the old regime, took on the mantle of revolutionary defensism and the defense of empire. This induced in them a kind of blindness on the national question, in the words of the Georgian (!) Menshevik Irakli Tseretelli, briefly a minister in the Provisional Government. We might also think of this as liberal and socialist imperialism. Once well-meaning self-identified Ukrainophiles among the progressive Russian citizens of Kiev (and other Ukrainian cities) joined their counterparts in the capitals and beyond in condemning the Ukrainian movement’s calls for the introduction of some forms of autonomy immediately, instead of being content to wait until the convening of the Constituent Assembly, as they were advised by their Russian brothers and comrades. For the Kadets this was somewhat understandable, since they had opposed autonomy based on national-territorial criteria almost from the start. But the socialists, both the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries, had adopted platforms in favor of such autonomy in the name of combating Russian chauvinism, anti-Semitism and other forms of ethnic hatred. This seemingly irreconcilable conflict played itself out during 1917 and contributed to the bloodletting of the Civil War that followed in its wake. The conflict was not just about the legacy of the Old Regime and autocracy in particular, but it was also about empire and its legacy, including the resistance movements that empire helped shape. On that note, let me also acknowledge the helpful criticism our volume received for failing to distinguish carefully enough between the legacies of autocracy and those of empire. And yet, there is some sense in which these are inextricably intertwined, just as the contemporary American and Russian versions of empire are accompanied by an attack on democratic institutions.
Is there such a thing as “healthy” nationalism? This is a concept that is advanced today to explain the differences between Ukraine or Poland, for example, and Russia, with the former occupying something closer to “healthy” civic nationalisms, and the latter moving toward a sort of fascistic, Fuhrerist version. Though this stark contrast has the imprecision and perhaps inaccuracy characteristic of ideal types, there is something that needs to be addressed. Russia has had greater difficulty casting off its Soviet and imperial legacies because Russia was at once the greatest beneficiary and still a victim of those empires; Ukraine’s intellectuals and historians, and even more so Poland’s, have been able to combine a critique of dictatorship with one of empire as ways of reasserting their national sovereignty against Russia’s claims. As in the past, Ukraine, and even more so Poland, are able to assert these claims and interests in part because they have the benign patronage of another set of “empires,” the EU and United States. At least this time around, there is no major world war being waged on the territory of Europe, so there might be some longer-term hope of peaceful evolution – so far. In important senses, Europe (and the relevant outside powers) is still working out the problems that were introduced by the dismantling of the major Central and East European empires and their replacement with a variety of doomed nation-states and some supra-national state formations like the Soviet Union. In the case of the latter, the new Soviet state proclaimed itself the leader of the anti-imperialist world coalition (and for some time tried something radically different in the non-Russian regions on its territory and even after World War II), but it discovered its own imperial mission with the start of World War II, if not in the roots of the Civil War itself. Much of this thinking reflects reading the new scholarship that has been published since After Empire and which has been grappling with many of the issues we raised there.
World War I and comparative empires are both recognized sub-fields in history and related social science disciplines; the popularity of postcolonial histories has spread far beyond the movement’s South Asian homeland to the past of most of the rest of the world, including those of Europe and America. I tried to describe key aspects of the recent literature in an essay in The American Historical Review on “empires, borderlands, and diasporas.”^[13] I also recently wrote another essay looking back ten years on the publication of my historiographical survey, “Does Ukraine Have a History?”^[14] The new essay seeks to apply some of the “new thinking” to Ukraine’s history as a test case and possible model. In short, I have not stopped trying to understand the forces that produced the end of the empires we brought together in our volume; I hope I have learned from the criticisms and my subsequent research. Thank you for this opportunity to reflect on these topics.

III.
Interview with Karen BARKEY

Looking back, it seems that with After Empire we were more or less at the beginning of a fast rising curve of books on empire that started initially after the fall of the Soviet Union and also the breakup of Yugoslavia. These events spurred scholars toward serious inquiries on the question of empire, nation-states, the legacy of empire, especially in the forms of ethnic or civic nationalisms and/or forms of democratic transition. Though not all written in the last decade, Amazon lists nearly 16,000 books with the word empire in the title! This certainly attests to the fact that even if empire is not the most common political formation in the world today, it remains one of the most studied topics of our day. No doubt the political developments in the United States, September 11, the invasion of Afghanistan, and then the war in Iraq have only increased the interest in empire among scholars, political pundits, journalists, and policymakers. In this context the discussion seems to turn around the question of whether America is an empire. Though many assert that it is an empire, they rarely ask the question of whether it was an empire before September 11 and how it became an empire in a way overnight. Empire has become the key metaphor in understanding the politics of the Bush administration. Similarly, as Mark von Hagen rightly emphasizes, the politics of Russia and the Putin administration, in its major political trends, raises similar questions about empire. Though the linkage between politics and the study of empire is no doubt healthy and important, sometimes it has led to not more than fashionable statements. Regarding the question of what has happened to the study of empire, I am fascinated by not only the proliferation of writings on empire, but the different directions such writings have followed.
First, from the policy circles to the scholarship of many historians, we have a realist type of writing. That is, in their historical and in their policy analyses, these scholars see empire as a political form, a combination of materialist and ideological conditions that make for the behavior of political actors. They further see empire in traditional ways as in its basic form of a traditional core and many linked peripheries dependent and ruled by the core. On the conservative side, authors like Niall Ferguson see the United States as a benevolent empire, with liberal institutions and a global agenda—as he likens it to the British Empire—and demands for more empire.^[15] On the other end of political spectrum, authors such as Rashid Khalidi, Michael Mann, and others see empire as evil in its actions and its consequences.^[16] Not to mention the heap of policy studies where empire has just become a convenient trope for all kinds of analyses. Yet, the structural and cultural characteristics of empire are inappropriate for a world divided into political communities that define themselves as nations and democracies. Empires were different at least by their geographical scope, their autocratic rule over vast diverse and often illiterate populations, and their imperial rule and legitimacy.
Second, especially in academic circles, and as a result of the rise in cultural studies perspectives, a series of scholars have produced more postmodern texts on empire. Among the most prominent example we have Hardt and Negri’s Empire, which is an excursus into the evils of globalization and capitalism in its latest forms—which they call “Empire” with a capital E.^[17] In this rendering empire is boundless, it is everywhere, and it is difficult to separate core from periphery or to define its structural frames. Not only was this rendering of empire successful in the cultural studies milieux, but it reinforced a re-conceptualization of empire in fuzzy, unclear, and less and less realist and formalistic ways.
In between such sweeping attempts at grand rethinking of empire, I have also seen and contributed to some volumes that strive to a more balanced middle-ground, where the study of macro-historical conditions of empire and their transformation remained crucial. Such enterprises remain part of a long-standing intellectual project intent on providing grounded explanation for important outcomes. They remain interested in causal analysis, and they employ systematic and contextualized comparisons towards this goal. My own work has proceeded more squarely in this category since After Empire. This was partly because both strands mentioned above presented flaws that I have thought better addressed by macro-historical comparative work. In both policy circles and in cultural studies, it seemed that empire was loosing its analytic purchase, being used too loosely, especially to explain and understand variation in imperial legacies. Whether in the discourse of the United States as empire or in the acceptance of everything under globalization as empire, I found the concept of empire diluted, rendered fashionable, and defined in multiple ways to mean very different things. This affected our study of the legacies of empire as well. If we are not clear about what empire was or is, how can we understand what comes after empire? How do we understand the institutions and the structures (material and ideational) that are impacted by empire?
In this vein, I contributed to a volume that is coming out soon, entitled Empire to Nation, edited by Joseph W. Esherick and Hasan Kayali, where we show that the end of empire and its legacies, rather than being part of an inevitable process, took a variety of forms in the Middle East, Latin America, China, and the Soviet Union. Drawing on multiple historical examples of empires, the book traces the trajectory of transformations from empire to nation, highlighting both the varieties of routes and their impact on the unfolding of nationalisms in these regions. Another volume, Hegemonic Declines: Past and Present edited by Jonathan Friedman and Christopher Chase-Dunn, has dealt with facile comparisons by giving much more analytic purchase to the concept of hegemony and therefore made possible a wider range of comparisons.^[18] More recently I have been engaged in a comparative study of Turkey, Japan, and China, a collaboration with Eiko Ikegami and Bin Wong, where we attempt to trace the continuities and critical path dependencies between empire and nation in the transformation that the three countries experienced after their attempted westernization. Here, the Ottoman collapse, the Meiji restoration, and Chinese self-strengthening and reform were not simply the result of the “western impact” as understood in the literature but the reworkings of imperial forms and legacies, of previous historical developments. In each of these projects the idea of institutional and cultural legacies is taken very seriously, and analyzed in the continuities and discontinuities between empire and its successors. But further work is necessary to demonstrate the manner in which such legacies get shaped by the international and national contexts and interests in the period of transition.
In many ways that are similar to the use of empire, imperial legacy has also been a key concept. The theme of what remains after empire, chaos, liberated nations, or new empire has been studied in many contexts and has been seen as historical legacies. After all, post-colonial histories and studies have become an industry of study of resistance movements and colonial legacies. Such studies have had a tremendous impact on our understanding of European colonial domination and its impact upon subaltern groups. Though its impact has spilled into the realm of traditional empires that we studied in our book, we have to be careful about understanding the differences between the types of empire and the nature of the post-colonial conflict. Here the difference between European maritime empires and the postcolonial perspectives differ from the more land-based traditional empires in important ways. The relations between European nations and post-colonial nations has been different from the imperial legacies of the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Russian/Soviet cases. Not only did the nature of rule vary, the degree of diversity and mixing of populations, but also the end of these empires (colonial and traditional land-based) has been different. Also, much of the struggles of the legacy of empire for these three cases has played itself out right in their backyards. The breakup of Yugoslavia, the Kurdish struggle in the Turkish case, and the unfolding of the Chechen conflict have all been produced within the immediate geographical realm of these countries. The European post-colonial conflicts are much removed and play themselves out in the colonies with less impact on the erstwhile colonial metropoles.
After Empire, though successful at the discussion of the immediate imperial transition and legacies, did not deal with the long term conflicts that could emerge and did come to play an important role in international and national politics. It remained focused on the immediate consequences of dismantling empire without thinking of the longer-term outcomes. In its focus on the immediate unmixing of populations and in the construction of early national states, it did not follow through as much into the consequences of empire in terms of forms of nationalism. Though much of the post-imperial national states struggled with ethnic and exclusionary forms of nationalism, our book did not make those outcomes the central theme. And such questions still loom today in the post-Soviet realm as well as around the world. In that sense, this volume would need to be updated to focus more intently on the emergence and continuation of post-imperial conflicts and the nationalisms analytically differentiating between the types of conflict and their origins in comparative studies.
I appreciate the opportunity to briefly comment on what continues to be a remarkable subject of inquiry and debate.