THE RETURN OF EMPIRE: TRADITIONALISM VS. TRANSITIONALISM

What is the relevance of the concept of empire for the study of contemporary developments in Russian politics? After the decline of the enthusiasm of the 1990s about Russia following the liberal-democratic model of transition, there is an evident need for alternative conceptual frameworks for understanding postcommunist politics in Russia. The simplest solution in interpreting the failure of the liberal transition is of course to return to the more traditional concepts and theories, particularly those whose scepticism about Russia’s democratic transformation presently appears to be vindicated. Yet, there remains a question of the utility of applying such categories as empire in the current constellation of global politics, marked by the demise of the very tradition in which we might want to ground Russia’s contemporary policy. What does it mean to be an empire in the post-imperial world? Does the deployment of this and other concepts from the political discourse of the recent past help us in understanding postcommunist Russia’s search for orientation in the condition of globalization, or does it merely serve to perpetuate Russia’s exclusion from contemporary global politics and its stigmatization as being “stuck in the past”? Finally, what does being stuck in the past mean, if the past in question no longer exists and cannot provide us with meaningful points of orientation in the contemporary world? Mark Beissinger’s address is an important contribution to this discussion, insofar as it raises the problem of Empire as a “persistent practical category of politics” in the Eurasian region. Rather than proclaiming in a facile manner that the “Russian empire is back” (as do some of the authors he cites), Beissinger inquires into the paradox of the persistence of the category of empire in the world, in which empires formally no longer exist and empire has become a concept with highly negative connotations. In what follows we shall continue this line of inquiry, addressing the problems of Russia’s reconstitution as a postcommunist polity in the contemporary global-political context, which is indeed marked by the delegitimation of imperial (and, as we shall see, not only imperial) modes of political organization.
Let us begin with locating Beissinger’s diagnosis of the “persistence of empire” in the continuum that structures the theoretical discourse on Russian postcommunism. In a number of previous studies we have analyzed this discourse as unfolding within the continuum between transitionalist and traditionalist orientations.^[1] This dichotomy, whose extreme poles were constituted in the early 1990s by the highly influential works of Francis Fukuyama (1992) and Samuel Huntington (1993), displaces the focus on the present in its valorization of either the future (liberal-teleological transitionalism) or the past (cultural-civilizational traditionalism). In this manner, the understanding of political change in postcommunist Russia is distorted from the outset. The traditionalist discourse constructs a body of “tradition,” “mentality” and “culture,” and reifies these conceptual abstractions by assigning them an empirical function of attenuating change, discontinuity and disruption in the domain of praxis. Thus, political events in the present are rendered epiphenomenal to the intellectual construct of the historical tradition, with the paradoxical consequence of all change being dependent on a fundamental continuity, which, moreover, is not an empirical phenomenon, but necessarily a theory-laden observation. We observe such a traditionalist disposition in Beissinger’s affirmation of the persistence of empire throughout Russian history despite his own acknowledgement that this “persistence” was nonetheless marked by “discontinuities, ruptures and breaks”^[2] that presumably entail that what persists throughout history is not at all the same phenomenon: “Soviet empire was a distinct phenomenon from Tsarist empire, just as post-Soviet Russia’s recent reassertions of power do not represent any more replication of Soviet imperialism.”^[3] A characteristic feature of traditionalism is precisely its reduction of these distinct, discrete and discontinuous events to the status of the epiphenomena of the persistence of something more fundamental and, perhaps for this very reason, inherently evanescent.
In contrast, transitionalist discourse operates with a concept of change, whose direction is teleologically predetermined by liberal doctrine (in the case of Fukuyama, a liberal reading of Hegel’s philosophy of history) to the extent that the event of change vanishes in a monotonous and continuous advance, whereby the rich facticity of contingent events is cast in terms of a mere deviation to be remedied by a more steadfast adherence to the model of transition. In this account, especially in its Hegelian versions, the persistence of the past is only conceivable either in the negated form of memory or concept, or in a sublated (Aufgehoben) form of the Absolute at the end of history.^[4] Indeed, it is only on the basis of history having already come to an end elsewhere that one can infer the model of transition, universally applicable for those still captured within the historical process.
The difference between the two approaches in relation to time is replicated in their account of the spatial differences between Self and Other. Within liberal-transitionalist discourse Russia has been expected to unilaterally internalize, with possible deviations, the norms and practices operative in Western democracies; while the absence of such internalization has been viewed in terms of the “failure of transition” and the resurgence of authoritarian tendencies. In this narrative, the political divergences between Russia and the West are merely indicative of the failure of Russia to adopt a model of universal validity and its retreat into particularism, of which the current resurgence of “empire” discussed by Beissinger is a possible variant. It is evident that transitionalist discourse does not merely attempt to explain the occurrence of divisions between Russia and the West, but is directly complicit in their articulation. By deploying a universal model of transition and delegitimizing alternative pathways of development, liberal transitionalism readily produces new conflictual dispositions, as the evident decline of liberal democracy in contemporary Russia is condemned as a failure to adhere to the pathway that is in principle open to and appropriate for everyone.
In traditionalist discourse Russia is a priori posited as the cultural “Other” of Europe or the West more generally, which leads to the accentuation and foregrounding of difference in concrete analyses. Any divergence or conflict between Russia and the West is immediately cast as derivative from the more fundamental “cultural” if not “civilizational” divergence, which deprives the analysis of the more dynamic tools of grasping the rapidly evolving nature of conflicts and their dependence on a multitude of contingent political events. Any concrete, spatiotemporally circumscribed conflict between Russia and the West is viewed as a manifestation of a deeper “meta-conflict” of insurmountable mutual otherness. In such a discourse mutual exclusionary measures are prescribed from the outset, and the attitude of suspicion and distrust is easily justified by the assumption of the inherent incommensurability between the parties, which makes communication between them always incomplete and inadequate. Moreover, the traditionalist outlook makes it possible for the analyst to “adjudicate” these conflicts with very little empirical knowledge of the subject-matter at hand. Abstract intellectual constructs, many of them resembling ignominious stigmas, function as ready-made substitutes for the detailed analysis of actual practices; with concepts like “eternal Russia,” “mysterious Russian soul,” “authoritarian personality,” and “absence of work ethic” one can easily circumvent the minute contingencies of political life in reconstructing them in terms of the never-ending recurrence of a fundamental meta-conflict. These “pseudo-concepts,” whose purpose is frequently to compensate for the ignorance of the observer, function in the a priori modality that deproblematizes concrete political events as variations on the ever-present theme of essential cultural difference. In his address, Beissinger mentions, without himself endorsing, many such traditionalist pseudo-concepts as “Russia’s imperial impulses and reflexes,”^[5] “historical stigma of empire,”^[6] “historical mission of Russia,”^[7] etc.
Despite the evident differences between the two approaches, it is possible to argue that they have tended to function in tandem in the studies of Russian postcommunism in accordance with a simple algorithm: if not transitionalism, then traditionalism. On the aggregate level, the content of these discourses is exhausted by the following narrative: initial expectations of Russia following the Fukuyama-esque “post-historical” logic of the emulation of the liberal-democratic standard end in an almost universal disappointment and disillusionment, leading to the relapse into cultural or civilizational explanations that emphasize Russia’s essential otherness to the West, which requires a dispensation with illusions of political and socioeconomic convergence. We may therefore suggest that for all their difference, traditionalism is the last resort of a disappointed liberal transitionalist.

EMPIRE AS A PROPER NAME

It is precisely this sense of disappointment that is the prime emotive tonality of Beissinger’s address. It also helps us understand the otherwise perplexing oscillations of the author between the traditionalist position he does not fully endorse and the transitionalist position that has become difficult if not impossible to maintain. As we have noted above, Beissinger does not subscribe to the facile argument about Russia as an, as it were, “eternal empire,” maintaining its fundamental identity despite superficial appearances of discontinuity and historical breaks. Nonetheless, as the transitionalist optimism about Russia abandoning its Imperial (Tsarist) and Soviet past (whose belonging to the imperial tradition is best treated as no more than a heuristic metaphor) has all but evaporated, and it is difficult to apply a liberal teleological model to contemporary Russia, there is a need to regain some kind of ground of one’s discourse, if not in the future then in the past. At the same time, the affirmation of discontinuities in Russian history, which is an assumption alien to a more orthodox traditionalism, entails that the return to the category of empire must not be taken all too literally, but should rather involve an element of critical distance on the part of the analyst. This is arguably the function of empire as a “practical category of politics” in Beissinger’s argument, which treats it not as a static concept but rather as a “rapidly moving target over the twentieth century.”^[8] Beissinger’s conceptualization of empire in Wittgenstein’s terms of family resemblance similarly attempts to re-found the analysis of Russian politics in a post-transitionalist manner while evading the essentialist underpinnings of traditionalism.
This combination of the traditionalist affirmation of the persistence of empire and the reflexive detachment of the observer from this concept is particularly evident in the manner of Beissinger’s tendency to deploy the concept of empire primarily in the register of “second-order observation” in Luhmannian terms. Rather than simply approach contemporary Russia as an empire, Beissinger analyzes the way Russia is approached in this manner by others, be they politicians or academics. This emphasis on the “‘stickiness’ of imperial reputation as a form of bad reputation”^[9] yields interesting and important results, yet these results tell us much less about Russia’s actual status as a resurgent empire than about the perception of Russia in the political, academic or mass media discourse. Beissinger’s discussion of his case study of Russia’s “imperialism” demonstrates that “accusations of empire with respect to contemporary Russia are rooted as much in the fear of a revival of Russian domination as much as in anything Russia has concretely done.”^[10] Moreover, the sources that Beissinger has studied clearly approach Russian imperialism as a “revival of something ‘old’” that is today accessible only in terms of “ambitions, pretensions and aspirations.”^[11] This is of course a necessary consequence of a traditionalist approach, which operates with the quasi-Kantian distinction between the real and the apparent, in which the ontological immutability of the former may only be derived from the rather more precarious and fragmented moments in the latter. Russian imperialism is a thing of the past that some fear will become the future, and it is precisely fear that animates the discourse Beissinger analyzes. This fear produces a paradoxical logic, whereby the spectre of Russian imperialism is conjured in the present so that it does not become real.
The spectral – or at least highly evanescent character of this imperialism – is well-illustrated by some of the examples Beissinger and his sources provide, whose function of demonstrating the resurgence of imperialism in Russia is at least debatable. For example, the 2006-2007 conflicts with Ukraine or Belarus regarding energy prices and gas deliveries seem to indicate a turn not towards imperialism, but rather its very opposite, i.e., nationalism in its statist form; whereby Russia abandoned its past policy of subsidizing former Soviet republics in exchange for superficial and vacuous displays of loyalty, and began treating the post-Soviet states as any other participant in the energy market. Indeed, it is precisely the policy of energy subsidies for the CIS states that prevailed in the 1990s that could be construed as an indicator of a half-hearted and almost benign imperialism – by which Russia attempted to deal with the trauma of the dissolution of the Soviet Union by asserting, at a considerable material price, its symbolic leadership in the CIS, which could then be presented, admittedly at quite a stretch of imagination, as the indicator of the survival of the Russian empire in the post-Soviet conditions. In contrast to this policy of self-deception, the shift to market rationality in dealing with the CIS states may be seen, despite its possibly dire effects on the economies of the states concerned, as a healthy sign of getting over the imperial past and a commitment to the principles of market economy that transitionalist approaches so insistently impose on postcommunist Russia. It is therefore difficult to see how the conflicts ensuing from this policy shift could be interpreted as a resurgence of the imperial past, unless of course the concept of empire begins to be applied to denote whatever the speaker happens not to like.
This suspicion is supported by Beissinger’s contextualization of the problem of empire in the global political constellation of the late twentieth–early twenty-first century, which is evidently marked by a denigration of empire, and which is almost never deployed as a concept with positive connotations: “empire has been transformed into a form of illegitimate power and a form of bad reputation – a status that states seek to avoid but are sometimes, nonetheless, stuck with.”^[12] This unequivocally negative connotation of the concept of empire in the contemporary global-political context directs our attention towards the politics of the use of this term in order to produce, rather than merely describe, the “sticking” effect of “bad reputation.” When, as Beissinger argues, empire begins to appear as a “political pathology,”^[13] which no state would admit to being, it becomes increasingly difficult to isolate any positive semantic content to the concept of empire.
Beissinger makes a similar point when addressing the way the meaning of the term has changed during the twentieth century. As large-scale territorial conquest practically disappeared from international relations and the principle of sovereignty became universalized in the process of decolonization, today imperialism no longer refers to territorial expansion, but rather to the manner of the exercise of power within a territory or in its relations with its neighbors. “[I]n contrast to the past, empire today is defined in part by the national resistance that it encounters – reflective of the fact that empire as a category of practice has become as much a claim as a structure. In the Soviet case it was precisely the presence of strong nationalist opposition that gave Soviet power its imperial reputation. Without this opposition, the Soviet Union would not have been an empire but simply a powerful multinational state.”^[14] This redefinition of Empire as a strictly negative concept, defined in terms of resistance by others to the exercise of power by the Self, and ultimately serves to strip the concept of any stable semantic content. “Empire became a negative status ascribed to states by others rather than a positive reputation that states themselves consciously sought to foster.”^[15]
Thus, empire is no longer a predicate at work in one’s self-description, even though Beissinger does note the tendency in Russian conservative circles to refer to empire in positive terms,^[16] but rather a predicate of second-order observation: simply put, empire is what others say the self is, and their saying it is legitimized by the sheer fact of their resistance to it. In this case, it would not be far-fetched to suggest that empire has ceased being a concept and has become a proper name, telling us nothing about what something is but rather what something is called. We need not restrict ourselves to the case of Russia to observe this tendency. As the critics of Hardt and Negri’s theory,^[17] the most influential treatment of the category of empire in recent political theory, have argued, their usage of the concept of Empire (capitalized to emphasize its dissociation from nineteenth–twentieth century imperialism) is so idiosyncratic as to render the term void of any recognizable meaning.^[18] The decentralized network structure of biopower Hardt and Negri describe might as well have been called the System, the Law, the Kingdom or the Matrix with no gains or losses in semantic substance, as it is nothing other than a (bad) name that the situation or actor is called.
From this perspective, we may finally approach the contemporary empire as a simulacrum in the strict sense of the word, as something that is given in appearance while lacking being. In terms of Giorgio Agamben’s linguistic ontology, the sole being of empire is its “being-called,”^[19] a purely linguistic property that does not yield any identitarian predicate. Empire clearly exists as a phenomenon, an object of discourse that is relentlessly invoked in political and academic debates, but its phenomenology does not provide any access to its ontological status, which is void. This does not mean that the activities of the Self that is being called “empire” are less than reprehensible or somehow not “real.” It is rather that we no longer have a way of knowing what empire is outside of the second-order discourse of others, who utilize it as a proper name that yields a bad reputation for its carrier. While during the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century the semantic content of empire could be derived from the self-description of the actor and the term could be used unproblematically with either positive or negative connotations, the universalization of the principle of sovereignty in the post-colonial era and the consequent delegitimization of imperialism have reduced the semantic content of the concept of empire to a proper name, deployed by others to delegitimize the actions of the self.
From this perspective, the use of the term “empire” in a positive self-description in some quarters of the Russian conservative discourse is an exception that proves the rule: it is not at all clear whether this assumption of a “bad name” by the self has any other purpose than to demonstrate one’s daringness in challenging the conventions of contemporary political discourse. Just as the representatives of ethnic or sexual minorities frequently assume the derogatory or offensive names assigned to them and in this manner seek to defuse their potential to offend, the positive resignification of empire in the statements of Alexander Dugin and others attempts to intervene in the contemporary discursive conventions and disturb the present regime of “politically correct” speech. Yet, this resignification adds nothing to the content of the concept, but simply marks its positive connotations in one’s own discursive practices. Empire is thus “our” appropriation of the bad name given to us by others and, given the bad reputation of these others in “our” discourse, the name itself receives positive connotations – there is nothing wrong with being called a bad name by “bad guys.” However successful this resignification is, it does not increase our understanding of empire in the avowedly post-imperial age.
We may thus conclude that the puzzle of the persistence of empire in Eurasia, addressed by Beissinger, is a puzzle that is strictly internal to the discourse of Slavic or Russian studies, in which empire functions as a simulacrum, its being contained in its use as a proper name. This conclusion leads the inquiry into the persistence of empire away from the essentialist postulates of traditionalism to the study of political rhetoric and academic discourse – the only sites where empire may be said to exist today and where its persistence might one day cease, not as a result of global political transformation, which has already taken place, but rather as a shift in the rules of discursive formation or the conventions of language use. The persistence of empire in the post-imperial age is thus a function of the continuities in political discourse rather than political praxis.

RUSSIA AFTER THE “BANKRUPTCY OF PEOPLES”

The same line of reasoning may be fruitfully pursued with respect to the phenomenon that was in many ways the historical successor of empire, i.e., the nation-state. In Beissinger’s analysis, it is nationalism that has first delegitimized and then destroyed empires and imperialism. When empire has been redefined in terms of resistance to it, this resistance was manifested precisely by nationalist movements with claims to sovereignty. Since the focus of Beissinger’s address is empire, he does not address the question of the status of the nation-state in the current post-imperial world. However, it is increasingly evident that in the contemporary condition of globalization the nation-state is rapidly following empire in becoming a “negative” proper name. This is not the place to discuss the numerous challenges to the nation-state from rival modes of political organization on either the super- and sub-national level, or from economic or religious rationalities that could not be contained by national boundaries. What matters is not these challenges per se, which have accompanied the state since its very emergence, but rather the assessment of the state’s capacity to meet them in the contemporary political discourse.^[20] What is at stake here is the growing awareness in different quarters of political theory that the nation-state is no longer capable of fulfilling the historical tasks it set for itself and, moreover, that these tasks themselves have all but disappeared. The same awareness also increasingly characterizes political praxis, as is evidenced by the process of European integration, whose objective from the post-World War II period onwards has been the transcendence of the Westphalian fragmentation of Europe into a plurality of sovereign nation-states, regularly engaged in evermore violent warfare.^[21] Extending the logic of the European project to the global level, Alexander Wendt has argued for the inevitability of the retreat of the nation-state into the past and the emergence of the world state, defined by the Weberian centralized monopoly on violence and the attainment of the Hegelian universal reciprocal recognition.^[22] While these and other theoretical and political movements beyond the nation-state may be frequently characterized by internal contradictions or an excessive utopianism, it is undeniable that the nation-state is undergoing the same negative transformation in the political discourse as empire did over the course of the twentieth century. Giorgio Agamben has argued that “[t]oday it is clear for anyone who is not in absolutely bad faith that there are no longer historical tasks that can be taken on by, or even simply assigned to, men. It was in some ways evident starting with the end of the First World War that the European nation-states were no longer capable of taking on historical tasks and that peoples themselves were bound to disappear.”^[23]
While it might be difficult to envision at this point what the disappearance of peoples might look like in practice, Agamben has also concretized his sweeping (post-)historical diagnosis by a fruitful metaphor that connects with the state of disrepute of empire discussed by Beissinger. Rather than propose anti-statist anarchism as yet another historical project, Agamben’s political philosophy seeks to illuminate the inherent vacuity of existing nation-states and thereby render inoperative the “machine” of sovereign statehood that has for over a century been running on empty. The nation-state is not to be destroyed or taken over by a revolutionary force, which, as history teaches us, would only leave it intact, but rather revealed in its utmost bankruptcy:

“[O]ne of the few things that can be declared with certainty is that all the peoples of Europe (and, perhaps, all the peoples of the Earth) have gone bankrupt. We live after the failure of peoples, just as Apollinaire would say of himself: “I lived in the time when kings would die.” Every people has had its own way of going bankrupt, and certainly it does make a difference that for the Germans it meant Hitler and Auschwitz, for the Spanish it meant a civil war, for the French it meant Vichy, for other people instead it meant the quiet and atrocious 1950s, and for the Serbs it meant the rapes of Omarska; in the end, what is crucial for us is only the new task that such a failure has bequeathed us. Perhaps, it is not even accurate to define it as a task, because there is no longer a people to undertake it. As the Alexandrian poet [C. P. Cavafy] might say today with a smile: “now, at last, we can understand each other, because you too have gone bankrupt.”^[24]

The survival of the nation-state in a bankrupt form is analogous to the reduction of empire to a proper name with solely negative connotations, yet it also adds an interesting twist to it. While the “persistence” of the discourse on empire in the present is conditioned by the recession of actual empires into the past, the discourse of the bankruptcy of peoples evidently refers to our present existence. It is crucial to note that the bankruptcy of the nation-state does not entail its dismantlement or destruction: the state remains, yet it remains bankrupt, lacking any legitimate historical project or any other raison d’кtre. Indeed, the very term “bankruptcy” as well as Agamben’s usage of the present perfect tense indicate that what is at stake here is not merely something that took place in the past that we would not want to be repeated in the present. On the contrary, “having gone bankrupt” clearly describes an action that, having begun in the past, continues into the present. While particular actions or events that have led to this bankruptcy (from Auschwitz to Omarska) have indeed been consigned to the past and survive only in the collective memory, the fact of bankruptcy arising from these events relates squarely to our present existence, indicating the manner in which the past survives in and haunts our present.
Moreover, Agamben’s ethical injunction is that this bankruptcy must by no means be negated into the past as something that contemporary Europe or the world at large has “overcome.” This refusal to conceal one’s bankruptcy by means of a complacent claim to self-transcendence is what separates Agamben’s standpoint from the tendencies in contemporary politics, whereby vacuous gestures of apology and contrived invocations of shame and repentance in relation to the past coexist perfectly with the very same practices they denounce. What is at stake is not overcoming the bankruptcy of nations with a new political project on a global scale, but rather assuming this bankruptcy as a characteristic of our present political existence. While, as Beissinger’s analysis demonstrates, today’s politics of the use of the name “empire” endows with a bad reputation the entity on which it is imposed, the entity the repetition of whose past we may fear, the politics of the use of the name “nation” or “people” that may be associated with Agamben’s philosophy consists in ourselves assuming the name reduced to denoting the utter bankruptcy of its erstwhile carrier. In this manner, the nation-state may, as a proper name, survive the decline of the entity it once referred to.
What are the implications of this diagnosis for contemporary Russia? Beissinger’s analysis demonstrates that as a result of the continuing operation of the “historical stigma of empire,” Russia “is in some ways held to a higher standard than otherwise might be the case,”^[25] having to prove to others that it no longer harbors the intentions connoted by the concept of empire. This is evidently a difficult if not a hopeless enterprise, insofar as the very meaning of the concept is reduced to one’s negative image in the discourse of the others. However, this enterprise is made even more difficult by the ongoing delegitimation of the nation-state as a mode of political identification that is conventionally held to be an alternative to empire. The abandonment of imperialism in favor of the construction of the modern nation-state – which, for instance, is observable in the changing patterns of Russia’s relations with the CIS states – may hardly be expected to succeed in freeing Russia from being stigmatized by its past, not only because as a negative proper name empire may well be applied to entities furthest away from previous definitions of empire, but also because the nation-state itself is rapidly becoming yet another of such names. The alternative “empire or nation-state,” which has preoccupied conservative discourse in Russia,^[26] is thus clearly a false choice, a choice between two ways of maintaining “bad reputation” by affirming the categories whose content has been reduced to negative identification.
This false choice demonstrates most starkly the openness and indeterminacy of the postcommunist condition in the wider context of globalization. While the postcommunist states of Central and Eastern Europe arguably succeeded in managing this indeterminacy by folding their liberated nationhood within the process of European integration, and the states of Central Asia retreated from this indeterminacy into an almost pre-modern traditionalism, Russia faces a double problem of self-reconstitution in the context that is both post-imperial and post-national. As current political tendencies demonstrate, Russia’s response to this problem so far consists in the foreclosure of this context through a hyperbolic valorization of sovereignty that dismisses the question of Russia’s orientation in the contemporary world by a purely rhetorical declaration of independence from the outside world. Any step beyond this narcissistic self-absorption must traverse the stage of coming to terms with the bankruptcy of both empires and nation-states.