Antiglobalists, just as neoliberal proponents of globalization, debate globalization as a distinct reality (whether abhorrent or highly desirable). Perhaps, on some level of abstract social theorizing, this is a legitimate assumption, but the logic of historical thinking makes this realist imaginary seem analytically unproductive. “Historical” does not necessarily mean “genealogical” (or worse, teleological). Unlike purely theoretical models that can treat a phenomenon as a “simple thing” – equal to itself and with clear boundaries – historical analysis of the imperial situation is all about context. Historical context is anything but a side dish to the main course: it is the syncretic (seamless and unstopping) continuum of reality, even though it is often represented by eyewitnesses as ruptured and disjointed, from which scholars carve out chunks of “facts,” “processes,” and “structures.” Any two historians have different ideas about the configuration of the “main course” they prepare in their studies, even when they call it the same. In this logic, a discussion of “globalization” is meaningful only inasmuch as a particular aspect of the broad historical context is analyzed: a specific type of interactions that transcend physical or social boundaries, or a situation of contact or an imagination that consciously aims to transcend the immediate horizon. Of course, this immediately brings up the main historical problem: who identifies these boundaries and the criteria of localism and how, and by what means is the temptation avoided to treat some boundaries (individual and local) as more authentic and others (collective and transterritorial) as artificial. Thus, the most interesting and truly productive questions about the global condition are not “Who is a beneficiary of globalization?” or “Has globalization gone too far?” but “When does it make sense to speak about globalization?” and, most important, “How does local become a global?”
These questions are central for the 2017 annual theme of Ab Imperio, “The Global Condition: Local Names for Universalism,” which is inaugurated with issue 1/2017 “When Local Becomes Global: Agencies and Subjectivities in Imperial Context.” The “Methodology and Theory” section of this issue of Ab Imperio features an interview conducted by Alexander Semyonov with Sebastian Conrad, author of the book What Is Global History? published by Princeton University Press in 2016. The interview continues the Ab Imperio series Conversations with Authors in which the journal presents new relevant books for the development of new imperial history and the theory and history of understanding nationalism, empire, and diversity. Quite pertinently, Conrad warns against the common mistake of equating the global with the all-embracing. He also offers an overview of the rapidly evolving field of Global History as an approach aimed at restoring the broad context of historical process. The cognitive or constructivist turn in Global History announced by Conrad allows for meaningful comparisons between the logic of his field’s evolution and the development of new imperial history.
From the latter vantage point, the seemingly clear juxtaposition of “local” to “global” seems an utterly mechanical approximation of a dynamic dialectical process, wherein local communities and pockets of local knowledge become integrated into global structures, which, in turn, manifest themselves only through the coherent interplay of particularist social groups. This formula may sound too abstract, but this is how historical empires are depicted in the thematic forum “Subjecthood and Belonging to the Polity in the Russian and Ottoman Empires” in the “History” section of this issue. Put together by Dina Rizk Khoury and Sergey Glebov, the forum focuses on the secret of imperial cohesion that seemed to be forsaken by the rapidly nationalizing Ottoman and Russian regimes by the turn of the twentieth century. The truly global structures of the two empires were formed and sustained as irregular (although quite rationally designed) agglomerations of local communities defined as such according to several taxonomies: of regions and social statuses, confessions and economic specializations.
One can think of the emerging mode of imagining the polity as a homogeneous community of conationals or citizens with equal rights as an instance of the local becoming global. Specifically, the new notions of political community emerging from the time of the French Revolution became a yardstick for the modernity and development of the two empires. But the global impact of the new ideas of nationality, whether in the form of Napoleonic influences on the Ottoman millet system, or the federalist debates of Russian Muslims, was always mediated through the intricacies and complexities of the interplay of highly local circumstances and claims that were often indiscernible to the external observer. At the same time, the global march of new ideas of citizenship and nationality, incomplete as they were, still relegated the two imperial formations to the dustbin of “despotism” or “autocracy.” The dynamics of the impact of these new ideas of citizenship and nationality presented a novel challenge to old imperial mechanisms for sustaining the balance of power and diversity.
One example of such a mechanism was the Ottoman millet system. It was one efficient instrument for integrating exterritorial local communities of faith into a global imperial polity, making them analogous – not equal – in their specificity. Aylin Koçunyan shows in her article how this older version of globalization was undermined by a new understanding of the local that was imported into the Ottoman Empire from Western Europe in the mid-nineteenth century (within the context of a different plane of globalization). Ottoman millets of Jews and Armenians included confessional groups that were institutionalized differently in postrevolutionary France and in the Russian Empire. Borrowing elements of French institutions for these local communities eventually affected the whole millet system as the foundation of Ottoman subjecthood. This is how the dialectics of the local and the global worked in the Ottoman imperial situation.
At the same time, the social universe of the Russian Empire seemed to run into a local crisis when it faced the presence of the Chinese population within its borders following the annexation of the Amur and Ussuri region from the Qing Empire – the topic of Sergey Glebov’s article. Multiple factors accounted for the decision to exclude the Chinese altogether from Russian subjecthood and to treat them as foreigners, but what becomes visible in this history is the moment of the breakdown in the old imperial mode. No longer capable of incorporating a different ethnic group, the empire followed what seemed to be the modern logic of homogenization and exclusion. And yet, in a powerful challenge to the emerging nation-centered (universalizing and totalizing) social and political thinking, local conditions still demanded the acceptance of difference by relying on the imperial model of particular status groups. Even if a specific legal estate for the Chinese in the Russian Far East was never formally established, in practice local officials still treated them as one.
The story of the local and the global in the forum takes a new dimension in the article by Elizabeth Bospflug. She explores the Congress of Russian Muslims that took place in May 1917, which debated how Muslims could become citizens of the new democratic Russia. In this case, the newly acquired subjectivity and ability to voice political claims hinged on the ability of the delegates to imagine a global Muslim nation that would cross the boundaries of particular ethnic and linguistic groups. Hence, the debate focused on whether Muslims should become citizens of the new Muslim nation within Russia, or establish their own, ethnic republics. The global in this case (the new universal plane of citizenship) came into conflict with the task of articulation of an equally universalist unified Muslim cultural and political sphere.
As Michelle U. Campos demonstrates in her afterword to the forum, the problem of local unity and global universalisms was visible in the Ottoman Empire’s oscillation between the ideas of the Ottoman nation and what she calls “hyphenated Ottomans,” that is, a composite citizenship recognizing political loyalty to the center yet combining it with local ethnic, linguistic, or confessional concerns. As all articles in the forum illustrate, the arrival of the new global in the form of hegemonic European ideas of citizenship did not cancel out the fundamental diversity of the imperial domains. Rather, this arrival created new challenges and sometimes possibilities, and new instances of violence and oppression as the old heterogeneous communities of people were remapped into homogeneous groups of “majorities” and “minorities.”
Zooming in on global historical processes, we discover not some anonymous forces at work but coordinated realignments of individual loyalties, new parameters of self-identification as a group, and changed modes of the social imaginary (whether the legal culture, political values, or moral economy). Eventually, it all comes to personal values and the choices made on their basis, thus restoring the primary focus of history-writing on individual lives. The theme of historical subjectivity at work in the process of integrating diverse “locals” into a coordinated globalized social milieu is central to the “Archive” section. Ilya Gerasimov introduces the publication of a historical source that, in his opinion, documents the phenomenon of “Soviet plebeian subjectivity.” This primary source is a transcript of oral recollections by Mark Miller (1916–1999), tape-recorded by his daughters in the mid-1990s. Gerasimov interprets the biography of Miller, his narrative, and the very way it was recorded (from oral recollections) as evidence of the existence of a distinctive type of Soviet subjectivity disentangled from Bolshevik indoctrination and the alleged hegemony of the new Bolshevik-speak in the formation of Soviet subjectivity. The plebeian Soviet subjectivity, according to Gerasimov, revealed itself in conscious attempts to navigate the stormy waters of high Stalinism, steering clear of the two extremes – collaboration with the regime and passive victimhood (all the while largely avoiding the language of postcolonial victimhood described by Serguei Oushakine). Rather than a politically subversive act, this attitude was a result of the nondiscursive and nontextual nature of plebeian society, whose members processed information and communicated differently from the educated elite who exchanged abstract ideas in the public sphere. The plebeian society dominated Russian urban centers from the turn of the twentieth century and predetermined the formation of the specific Soviet form of modern society after 1917 as “plebeian modernity” that persisted well into the 1950s. Numerous nonnormative Soviets, just as members of the urban plebeian society in late imperial Russia, were characterized by strategic opportunism, propensity to territorial mobility and changing places of employments, intensive intercommunal contacts, and indifference to ideological indoctrination (religious or political). Collectively, they produced a particular version of globalization on much of the territory of Northern Eurasia: a common socioeconomic and political sphere that, nevertheless, incorporated imperial-like diversity. As in historical empires, different Soviets were analogous – not equal – in their specificity.
The dialectics of the global condition and local subjectivities worked both ways. Gradually, all modern “plebeians” came to embrace discursive categories and mental mapping imposed by the educated elites as a necessary condition to secure a place in globalized society under these new rules. A good example of this mechanism is presented in Aleksei Mikhalev’s article in the “Newest Mythologies” section. According to Mikhalev, different categories of migrants of diverse ethnoconfessional background who, in several waves, had moved to Mongolia from the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, eventually began thinking of themselves as a single “ethnic” community of “local Russians” (mestnorusskie). When, since the 1960s, the ever-increasing numbers of Soviet specialists began arriving in Mongolia, these “Soviet Russians” perceived “local Russians” as a different people. They went as far as stressing the racial difference of “local Russians,” even though what set apart the local communities of Russian migrants that were lumped together under this rubric were their disenfranchised legal status and political alienation from the Soviet regime. Thus, Russian Old Believers and transborder traders, Cossacks and former GULAG prisoners managed to forge an all-inclusive community, which the hegemonic nation-centered social mental mapping of the second half of the twentieth century reinterpreted in terms of a distinct common ethnicity.
Mikhalev describes this heterogeneous group, which also demonstrated a large number of intermarriages with Mongols and representatives of the Chinese diaspora, as a “mestizo community.” In less ethnicized terms, we can characterize it as a hybrid one, that incorporated diverse social, cultural, political (and yes, biological) populations. It is hybridity that was the universal (“global”) characteristic of the social sphere formed by “local Russians” in the process of their self-organization, under the pressure of political and social circumstances. However, the globally dominating mental mapping did not provide an adequate language for capturing this process. Instead, it offered only a limited number of essentialized labels of formal status, of which “ethnicity” seemed to be the most suitable (e.g., compared to the political label of “Semyonovtsy”/counterrevolutionaries).
A similar situation is discussed in the article by Robert Pyrah in the “Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science” section. He studies a community of self-defined Poles in Lviv. Once a dominant majority, after all the population cleansings of the mid-twentieth century, today they represent a tiny minority of the city’s inhabitants. Just as Mikhalev, Pyrah encounters a self-aware group that characterizes itself in ethnic terms (as Poles), even though what all these people actually share is not ethnicity but consciously upheld cultural practices and a regional identity (“narratives of place”). Whereas Mikhalev speaks of “local Russians” as “mestizos,” Pyrah characterizes the Polish community of Lviv as a “subculture,” but in both cases we discover a state of complex diversity that cannot be reduced to any single criterion of difference (whether it is ethnicity or culture). Each community emerged as a fundamentally hybrid common social sphere without renouncing the original heterogeneity of its founding members, but eventually accepted the essentializing one-dimensional – ethnic – characteristic of groupness.
Once again, we see that the global condition – the universality and commonality of the emerging social sphere – was sustained by the hybrid nature of participating local actors. Their distinct confessional, cultural, or even political identities did not prevent them from joining a common social space, as long as they recognized its hybridity, where everyone was more or less foreign. Ottoman millets or early Soviet cities were parts of the systematically composite social milieu, and the very drive toward its homogenization compromised the mechanisms that sustained the unstable balance of the global condition of universal diversity.