Any historical conception draws on present-day concerns as well as a historiographic tradition and its logic. Ab Imperio’s 2020 annual thematic program, “When Postimperial Meets Postnational: Envisioning New Forms of Groupness in Historical Perspective,”^[1] commences in this issue 1/2020 at a particular historical moment. Today academics, politicians, political activists, and all who consciously follow the unfolding of the global pandemic crisis are returning to basic questions about human solidarity, cooperation, the interactions of citizens with the state, and relations between the states themselves, sovereignty, globalization, borders, and lines of division. The global crisis and the localized responses to the pandemic render even more visible the fractures of the modern world and the tensions between national frameworks and supranational realities. In this context, the suggested framework of postimperial meeting with postnational acquires new and more immediate significance.
It is our present world that is postimperial due to a new resurgence of isolationism, authoritarianism, and nationalism, all of which began as reactions to the neoliberal coordinated world order and intensified to an unprecedented degree by the extraordinary crisis of our time. As with the empires of the past, which became conspicuously “visible” at moments of crises (e.g., the rise of mass politics in the late nineteenth century), the pandemic appears as an “imperial” event that renders visible the unevenness of today’s social and political worlds. The pandemic has amplified competition between existing “imperial” centers (the United States, China, the European Union) and relegated world peripheries to an even farther place on the map of global concerns. At the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic has made particularly obvious the globality of our economy, infrastructure, and social and cultural networks. On the other hand, we are living through a postnational situation, marked by a growing realization that no real or imagined separate entity (state, nation, or any community of solidarity) is indeed one-dimensional, bounded, isolated, and able to have a safe individual future. Ambivalent as is any imperial situation, the global epidemiological crisis simultaneously makes the nation-state obsolete and requires and sharpens our focus on the issue of the making and unmaking of complex societies and those blocks from which they are built.
Of course, the problem is not singularly that of the current moment. This issue of the journal also marks the twentieth anniversary of Ab Imperio, whose very first issue was sent to the printers in May 2000. Over these two decades, almost 1,200 scholars from about 40 countries have published their work in 78 issues of Ab Imperio. Taking stock of that history, we can see that the journal has covered considerable ground. In scholarship, a mature discourse on a problem is manifested primarily in the ability to pose simple questions. In the pages of Ab Imperio and elsewhere, in edited collections and individual publications by the editors, scholars have mapped out the field of new imperial history that we could only have anticipated back in 2000. The very need to elaborate a new analytical language and formulate a conceptual model describing the functioning of the complex society of multidimensional and irregular diversity informed the rather complicated argument of those earlier texts. Now, we can turn to a seemingly basic question. How are such complex social arrangements that barely sustain the delicate equilibrium brought into being by a combination of apparently simple and even crude elements?
Drawing on the urgency of the present moment and the twenty-year-long study of empires, the theme of this opening issue, “‘In a Fit of Absence of Mind’: The Mechanism of Empire-Building,” offers a reflection on postimperial, postcolonial, and postnational “empire-building” as a way to problematize the complexity and interconnectedness of human societies and polities in the past and in the present. This approach to empire as an analytical category that embraces uneven social and political complexity has been promoted by the project of new imperial history and this journal since their early stages, and this framework now seems more useful and productive than ever.
Issue 1/2020 inaugurates the annual volume by looking into the initial stage of forging a new complex social entity from simpler units. The nineteenth-century British historian Sir John Robert Seeley famously concluded that Great Britain had “conquered and peopled half of the world in a fit of absence of mind” (and hence no rational model of empire-building can adequately explain this process).^[2] We deconstruct this “absentmindedness” as a metaphor concealing a complex reality of various coexisting factors: possibly conflicting multiple intentionalities and imaginaries of potential arrangements, hierarchical or not, exploitative or defined in terms of freedom and exchange, and so on. As the new imperial history maintains, “empire” and “nation” are meaningful concepts not as denotations of real political forms or even ideal types of society. Rather, they are analytically productive as characteristics of the social imaginary (epistemological regimes) that can be identified in various political formations (sovereign nation-state may be internally “imperialist” and externally formal empires).
The articles published in the “History” section of this issue are very suggestive in this respect. Konstantin Ivanov offers an unusual take on Russia’s imperial expansion in Central Asia in the nineteenth century. The role of the spatial imaginary and geographic knowledge in the pursuit of Russia’s elusive “natural borders” in the southeast has long been acknowledged in modern historiography. Ivanov reconstructs a social history of this knowledge production by military topographers. Created in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, the Russian Corps of Topographical Engineers was staffed mostly by representatives of the lower social strata, who were more eager to serve in this most nonprestigious branch of the army, which did not allow one to demonstrate prowess and embrace the scenario of aristocratic masculinity or even to make a spectacular career in the capital. Often the sons of serfs, Russian military topographers spent all their time in the wilderness armed with astronomical instruments, and the scientific knowledge they produced was their only power. High productivity in surveying uncharted landscapes offered them a chance for promotion in the service and hence for a radical change in their social status. The more they surveyed the hitherto unexplored territories, the broader and more detailed became the mental maps of imperial political and academic elites. Once formed, these mental maps ascribed the characteristics of physical reality to the abstraction of topographic charts, for instance treating contour lines as “natural boundaries” that were to be secured by the military. Thus, a combination of social and epistemological factors resulted in escalating the mechanism of imperial territorial expansion, both mental and political. While there is probably little exaggeration in concluding that the Russian Empire had conquered Central Asia “in a fit of absence of mind,” a closer look reveals the significant, even if unintentional, role of scientific knowledge in the process.
Jolita Mulevičiūtė tackles another paradox: at the turn of the twentieth century, in the Northwestern Region of the Russian Empire, where anti-imperial discontent and nationalist movements were on the rise, portraits of Nicholas II and members of his family seemed to be popular with the local population. Lithuanians and Belarusians, Poles and Russians were buying cheap lithographs and more expensive manually produced images of the emperor to decorate their private quarters. We are aware of this fact, although it is obscured in national historical narratives, because it was recorded in police and court files dealing with assaults on these images. Numerous diligently prosecuted incidents of lèse-majesté in the Russian Empire have been traditionally interpreted by historians as evidence of popular (revolutionary, nationalist) discontent. Mulevičiūtė raises a more fundamental question: since we know that some portraits were physically or verbally attacked, it must be that many more of them were voluntarily purchased and placed in the home by ordinary people, but why? The author identifies several explanations, among which the showcasing of political loyalty is not the main one. It seems that people were more often using the image of the supreme ruler to secure the traditional social order within their own households, or as a symbolic representation of state authority meant to restrain the aggressive behavior of strangers. In any case, even if superficial, this demonstrative monarchism served the goal of maintaining political cohesion and sustaining the imperial regime even if unintentionally (“in a fit of absence of mind”). The collapse of the Russian Empire in the very near future only confirmed people’s fundamental longing for more efficient state protection. It also attested to the irrelevance of the person depicted in the portraits (and the portraits themselves as a symbol of state power) to the actual civic feelings that people were striving to express.
This dialectics of resistance and accommodation as a factor that unwittingly reproduced the hierarchical complexity of imperial society is revealed in Norihiro Naganawa’s article. Naganawa studies published accounts by several Tatar intellectuals and clerics – veterans of the Russo-Turkish and Russo-Japanese Wars and keen observers of the First Balkan War. Their frustration over the need to fight coreligionists in 1877–78, anguish over betrayal by incompetent commanders in 1904, or abhorrence of the prospect of the Turks’ extermination by their more nationally conscious neighbors in 1913 was translated into both a criticism of imperialist wars and enhanced self-perception as historical subjects. Naganawa argues that this ideological complex greatly influenced the mindset of Tatar political workers in the Red Army during the Russian Civil War. Anxious to fight any form of colonial oppression, they were simultaneously confident about their mission to impose new, progressive, and just social norms by force of arms. Thus, the imperial situation that maintained political authority by exploiting the uncoordinated multidimensional diversity persisted into the early Soviet period: “Volga-Ural Muslims” attained full citizenship rights in revolutionary Russia, rationalized their collective status as Tatar and Bashkir nations, and endorsed the emancipatory politics of the Bolshevik regime. This rationalization and normalization of hitherto semi-isolated social spaces came at the cost of building new political and cultural hierarchies and marginalizing other social groups, particularly when the First Tatar Brigade participated in reinstalling the authority of the Russian government over Central Asia.
Fast-forward to the late Stalin period, Timothy K. Blauvelt’s article examines an attempt by the Georgian SSR leadership to close Abkhazian schools and substitute Georgian for Abkhaz as the language of school instruction in the Abkhazian Autonomous Republic, from 1945 to the mid-1950s. Among other historical factors at work, this article demonstrates the elusiveness of the notions of “nationalism” and “imperialism” as self-contained political motives. The attempt by the Soviet regime to rationalize and structure ethnoconfessional diversity through the hierarchical system of territorial nationalities was both nationalizing and imperialist in its effect. Within this system, granting more rights to national republics meant giving their “titular nationalities” free rein in suppressing smaller national groups as minorities. To the contrary, it was easy to blame Moscow for “imperialism” when the central authorities offered protection to minorities organized in autonomous national republics and regions, thus limiting the freedom of the national republican elites in their own republics.^[3]
These complex dynamics produced by multiple centers of unequal authority cannot be adequately described by simple unequivocal labels. As we have seen, even seemingly spontaneous social arrangements relied on a novel politics of knowledge (whether this was the geographical expertise of Russian military topographers or reflections on wartime experience by Tatar educated elites). To account for the complexity of these and other imperial situations, one has to deconstruct the process of meaning production by the various historical actors involved. To this end, the “Methodology and Theory” section of this issue is reserved for a forum that scrutinizes the phenomenon of knowledge production as an instrument of both making sense of social reality and developing scenarios of its transformation. Following the introduction by Sergey Glebov and Marina Mogilner, the contributions of Benjamin Balthaser, Igor Kuznetsov, and Dmitry V. Arzyutov tell the story of transatlanic intellectual cooperation and mutual misunderstandings during the first global postimperial moment brought about by World War I, the collapse of the continental empires (the Ottoman, Habsburg, and Russian), the introduction of the nation-state principle into international law, and the Soviet Union’s successful promotion of an anticolonial agenda. The renowned American anthropologist Franz Boas and the “ethno-trio” of Russian political exiles turned scholars and founders of Soviet ethnography, Waldemar Bogoras, Lev Shternberg, and Waldemar Jochelson, had conducted joint research on northern peoples and exchanged ideas since the late 1890s. In an attempt to secure cooperation between Soviet and American ethnographers of the younger generation, in the late 1920s Bogoras and Boas decided to exchange graduate students. Julia Averkieva from Leningrad took a one-year course in anthropology with Boas in New York, whereas Boas’s student Archie Phinney, a prominent Native American scholar and activist, spent five years in Leningrad in 1932–1937, so his story becomes the main focus of the forum.
The authors reconstruct a curious cycle of mutual projections and recursion because Boas expected Phinney to learn in Leningrad the early Soviet practices of modernizing and integrating national minorities in order to use them in reforming U.S. policy toward Native Americans, whereas the concepts that informed these Soviet policies had been borrowed by the Russian “ethno-trio” from Boas in particular and the North American experience in general several decades earlier. Still, the situation was more complex than the usual model of “intellectual transfers” would suggest, as Phinney, a Nez Percé Native American, was far from being a pawn in the hands of European white intellectuals (no matter how much their attitudes toward Phinney betrayed their sense of European superiority). Phinney had his own practical considerations and priorities, and his Soviet experience in Leningrad in the mid-1930s dramatically differed from Boas’s expectations and projections. On his return to the United States, Phinney worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, where he implemented in practice the new policy of the Roosevelt administration in the wake of the Indian Reorganization Act. As the forum demonstrates, Phinney’s ideas cannot be understood without the long prehistory of his Soviet sojourn, and the practice of the founders of Soviet ethnography and approaches of Soviet experts involved in nation-building cannot be understood without the genealogy of their engagement with Boasian cultural anthropology and their view of North America as a paradigmatic case for both modernity and the treatment of indigenous peoples. The now standard conclusion about the decisive role of ethnographers in shaping the early Soviet nationalities policy should not be read literally, as if the Bolshevik regime were implementing some ready master plan. As the story of mutual misunderstandings and confusion reconstructed in the forum suggests, those social scientists, notwithstanding their deep knowledge and theoretical sophistication, were offering their expertise “in a fit of absence of mind” of sorts, no less so than some adventurist empire-builders in the colonies. As was often the case, the imperial situation was reproduced in the postimperial moment because the challenges of conceptualizing uneven diversity did not disappear with the fall of polities formally known as “empires.”
Historians have the last word in making sense of the events of the past, and by the same token they play a central role in shaping a new society by structuring the social imagination of its creators. At the same time, any history production is greatly affected by historians’ life experiences under old social arrangements, so the emerging new society is shaped by the “lessons of the past” drawn from a vantage point that is simultaneously contemporary and old. This chronological confusion and conflation of several time horizons is one example of how rational thinking can be superficially abbreviated as an “absence of mind” due to the unpredictable nature of its effect. The forum published in the “Historiography” section neatly reconstructs the entire sequence of the production of historical knowledge: from the role of a historian’s biography in choosing one’s topic of study, to the institutionalization of scholarship, to its dissemination in the public sphere, and its influence on nation-building. Frank Sysyn, Marko Robert Stech, and Yaroslav Hrytsak tell the life stories intertwined with the professional trajectories of three students of Ukrainian history and culture born in Galicia in 1919: Omeljan Pritsak, George Luckyj, and Ivan Lysiak Rudnytsky. They played a decisive role in shaping modern Ukrainian studies in North America and translating their achievements, along with a particular type of social imagination, to newly independent Ukraine in the early 1990s. The forum is structured with a focus on the common generational experience of the protagonists rather than the usual narrative of national perseverance and self-cognition. The authors thus succeed in analytically deconstructing the complex process of forming and transmitting a historical judgment. The version of Ukraine’s past and the vision of its normative future that Ukrainian society inherited from the “generation of 1919” historians in the 1990s was implicitly informed by their fascination with the short-lived Western Ukrainian National Republic; by their lives under the nationalizing Polish Second Republic; by the traumas of World War II–era genocides ravaging Eastern Galicia; by socialization in American academe during the rise of the civil rights movement; and by the reassessment of Soviet Ukraine’s record of nation-building during the détente period. This multilayered and multifaceted genealogy underlying perfectly scholarly historical studies both ensures cultural continuity and effectively constrains the social imaginary of the people participating in the process of transmission of knowledge and social imaginary.
To facilitate further inquiry into the mechanisms of social imagination directed from the past and present into the future and to invite reflection on a striking discrepancy that may exist between the proclaimed goals, the implemented measures, and the values revealed by decision making, the editors of Ab Imperio invited colleagues – professional historians and social scientists – to use their professional expertise in outlining certain aspects of the ideal future society. This exercise demonstrates the actual difficulty of the task and the degree to which attempts at rational social engineering are conditioned and restricted by one’s personal background and research experience. The section “The ABCs of Social Imagination” features several essays written in response to our invitation. Together, they reveal a fragment of a mental map of the modern, most advanced social imagination and its structural limitations.
Thus, this issue of Ab Imperio comes full circle in its exploration of the paradoxical mechanism of forging a new complex society. From deconstructing empire-building to explicating the ambivalent role of knowledge production to modeling a future society, an abstract theoretical model is historically contextualized and even experimentally tested.