Over the past twenty-four years, as part of Ab Imperio’s academic network, hundreds of scholars from dozens of countries have been developing the field of new imperial history. As a coordinator of this collective research effort, the journal has decisively placed explorations of Northern Eurasia’s past and present in conversation with scholars of supranational formations and composite states, imperial societies, nation-building projects, and colonialism, as well as postimperial imaginations and global encounters. Its title literally meaning “from empire,” Ab Imperio began a concerted effort toward epistemological decolonization long before “decolonization” became a political fad. The journal’s 2023 annual program – “Toward a Postnational History of Eurasia: Deconstructing Empires, Denationalizing Groupness” – invites contributors and readers to take a step forward from the deconstruction of nation-centered narratives to the articulation of coherent new postnational ones. This can be done by applying the new knowledge and conceptual vision acquired over these years to revisit historical problems and theoretical concepts that have habitually been framed by the teleological and binary dualisms of empire and nation, hybridity and authenticity, archaism and modernity.
How can we resist the logic of our own analytical language determined by normative visions of social and political space bound by the nation? What can we achieve analytically going past the colonial paradigm and problematizing irregular imperial diversity beyond the postcolonial binaries and national optics? How can we mobilize the immensely rich research material offered by the study of imperial pasts to develop a scholarly language beyond the national limits? It is in this research context that new imperial history acquires exceptional relevance. While it studies societies of the past – often archaic and reactionary – new imperial history, nevertheless, offers a unique opportunity to identify and explore anational or paranational social mechanisms at work. The critical analysis of these mechanisms is the only resource for developing truly modern and progressive forms of postnational imagery as a precondition for a more inclusive and just society.
Specifically, the 2023 thematic program focuses on the social mechanisms that enable and sustain universalism, diversity, and plural agencies; on the nature of groupness and the epistemological ambiguity of posthumanism; and on the constraints of temporal and spatial imaginations that continue to reproduce the binary oppositions of empire and nations. These broad themes run through the studies of historical empires, postimperial formations and imaginations. They also increasingly play a central role in modern politics.
Issue 1/2023 presents an introduction to this complex problem zone. Its “Methodology and Theory” section features the discussion forum “Conceptualizing Society after the Modern Territorial State and Nation.” Taking a cue from Arjun Appadurai’s call thirty years ago to find “a language … to capture complex, nonterritorial, postnational forms of allegiance,” the editors have solicited contributions from scholars who have experimented with finding such a language in their studies or have at least given thought to this problem.^[1] Accordingly, the forum consists of two blocs: “Mental Mapping” and “Case Studies.”
The first bloc contain essays that raise general questions or outline conceptual frameworks that can be applied to subsequent empirical studies. Marlene Laruelle agrees with the need for the decolonization of “Eurasia” as a political space and a research field, along with the deconstruction of Russia’s “imperialness.” By outlining the main tropes of the ongoing discussion, she points to the ambiguity of the key categories that frame it and hence to the tensions among the various meanings of those unclarified categories. She identifies the main tension between the proclaimed emancipatory goals, both political and epistemological, of the decolonization debate and the fundamental nation-centrism of the prevailing mode of social critique.
Satoshi Mizutani conceptualizes transimperial history as an alternative to the prevailing nation-centrism of social analysis and politics, which he characterizes as an ethnonationalistic majoritarian claim to exclusive sovereignty. By contrast, a transimperial approach transcends the borders of individual polities and discards the claims of their hegemonic groups to power by promoting the cross-colonial solidarity of various subjugated communities. It is not formal status or ethnocultural markers that secure one’s belonging to the global network of cross-colonial solidarity but an active anti-colonialist stance. Mizutani refers to the processual and situational groupness of solidarity in resistance that brings together people across the globe who cannot be described in the nation-centered categories.
Tamar Shirinian offers a different approach to postnational politics and social theory by exploring the potential of their queering. Specifically, she contrasts the nation-state, characterized by rigid social boundaries and a claim to control over the population, with the ideal of a “queer diaspora.” Moreover, she asserts diasporic existence as an existential and epistemological condition, rather than the marginal “leftovers” of the nation-state as the normative principle of societal organization. Shirinian shows that an insistence on rigid identities, even if subversive in certain cultural and political contexts, can be repressive in other contexts, thus sustaining nationalist and colonial structures of hegemony. Therefore, a truly emancipatory path leads toward the postnational rejection of static identities and territorial allegiances.
Finally, Marco Puleri offers a new look at the actually existing, rather than hypothetically anticipated, form of postnational collective belonging in the post-Soviet space: the “archipelago” of Russian-speaking communities in different countries. This choice might seem counterintuitive, given the acute threat to national cultures and statehood coming from the ideological and political program of the “Russian world” promoted by the Russian Federation, which claims sovereignty over everything russkii. Puleri argues that the only means to neutralize this threat without assuming an anti-Russian but equally repressive and nationalist stance is to develop a new epistemic approach to Russian language and culture. He notes that Russophone communities in post-Soviet societies have proved their political loyalty to their countries and that the Russian language is a double-edged strategic linguistic weapon. Using Ukrainian Russian-language literature as an example, Puleri demonstrates the possibility of disconnecting the Russian language from Russia or even the Russian way of life and completely reorienting it to local cultural scenarios. The hybridization and “diasporization” of Russian language and culture open the way to its reconceptualization as World Russians – similar to World Englishes. This perspective necessitates the transformation of Russian studies into a transnational discipline – Russophone studies, limited neither to Russia nor to ethnic Russians.
The forum’s second bloc, “Case Studies,” opens with Bogdan Pavlish’s exposé on the early modern entanglement of polities and cultural worlds that rendered human experience ultimately incommensurable with national narratives. Constantly on the move and regularly finding themselves in contact zones, people of the era, according to Pavlish, need to be studied using an equally itinerant kind of history. Based on his research, Pavlish elaborates a mode of history writing that combines several spatial perspectives and constantly switches from one to another. Metaphorically, he characterizes such a history as nomad science, in contrast to stationary national territorial history. Instead of construing teleological narratives of fixed groups, itinerant history is structured by analytical problems and new questions that alone determine the spatial limits and unique selection of facts and circumstances for each case study.
Riccardo Nicolosi contributes an essay about the Balkan literature of the 1990s, which has remained unpublished for many years, yet surprisingly resonates with the current debates in the field formerly known as Russian studies. Nicolosi focuses on Bosnian writers who belong to different generations – Muhamed Filipović, Rusmir Mahmutćehajić, and Dževad Karahasan. In the wake of the devastating Balkan wars, they reflect on the discourse of the Bosnian nation. Responding to Serbian nationalism as the main existential threat, Bosnian intellectuals insisted on the principally different nature of their national community. They characterized the Bosnian nation as multicultural and predicated more on religion than on any other factor. Bosnian specificity was explained by the Ottoman historical legacy and illustrated by somewhat idealized examples of early modern Ottomanism. This cultural repertoire allowed Bosnian intellectuals to criticize exclusive nationalism, embrace cultural tolerance, and advance a more humane version of nationalism. At the same time, this vision was wrought by the fundamental tension between religion and ethnicity as well as between Islamic universalism and Bosnian national separateness. It was also unclear how early modern political forms could be used at the turn of the twenty-first century. Thus, the Ottoman historical repertoire could be used to critique modern exclusive nationalism, but a whole new conceptual language needed to be elaborated to implement an alternative social order.
Svetlana Suveica presents the main takeaways from her book Post-imperial Encounters: Transnational Designs of Bessarabia in Paris and Elsewhere, 1917–1922 (De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2023). The book opens a unique window on the postimperial transition that Suveica characterizes as “in-betweenness” – in-between the crumbled Russian Empire and the yet nonexistent nation-state. She focuses on the old imperial and postrevolutionary Bessarabian elites, who were concerned that the new world order, increasingly dominated by nation-states, would obliterate Bessarabia’s particularity. The old elites were particularly prone to identifying this particularity with the Russian imperial regime and, therefore, they cherished plans for the restoration of the empire, siding with Russian monarchist émigrés. This was a major miscalculation, since the Russian Whites entertained a nationalist vision of Russia and had little concern for old imperial particularism. Thus, Bessarabian elites found themselves between the two nationalizing projects, Romanian and Russian, and became discontented with their competing claims for assimilating Bessarabia.
Andrii Portnov’s book Dnipro: An Entangled History of a European City (Academic Studies Press, 2022) was published in late 2022, several months before the publication of Suveica’s book. In his contribution to the forum, Portnov proposes another way of overcoming nation-centered teleological history by underscoring the incompleteness of one’s object of study. To Portnov, Dnipro is important as an example of an “unfinished city” that is open to interpretation, depending on a scholar’s research question. It should be added that Portnov’s book won the 2022 Ab Imperio Award for the best study in new imperial history and the history of diversity in Northern Eurasia up to the late twentieth century. The “Historiography” section of this issue features Mikhail Gaukhman’s review essay discussing the book and placing it in broader historiographic context.
The forum concludes with Ilya Gerasimov’s essay that uses the case of the 1998 Russian financial crisis to introduce the modern sociological model of the nation-state’s systemic demise. Known in Russian primarily as “the default” – a shorthand for “sovereign debt default” – the 1998 financial crisis was first and foremost a crisis of trust in the government and its economic policy. Economics experts have traced the roots of the default all the way to 1991 and the origins of the sovereign Russian Federation. Gerasimov suggests that the 1998 crisis was the first stage in the Russian national project’s fundamental default on its promise to build a “normal” democratic state, so that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was only the culmination of that systemic failure. From the very beginning, the problem was not the project’s Russianness but its normative “normalness.” Gerasimov refers to current sociological literatures that expose the crisis of the modern nation-state due to the failure of nation to mobilize and control the country’s population in the same way that was common in the mid-twentieth century. These conclusions – reached by scholars studying developed western societies over the past two to three decades – reveal that the postnational condition is already a reality undermining the legitimacy and hence efficiency of the modern state. Gerasimov argues that this diagnosis is even more true of post-Soviet societies that discarded many of the existing Soviet-style modern state institutions after 1991, while being unable to replace them with new statehood institutions because, in the 1990s, globalization and the triumph of human rights had set the scene for the postnational condition. This condition does not mean that national solidarity became void, only that it lost its monopoly and ability to forge mutual trust and hence social cohesion on the scale of the entire society. In modern societies, national mobilization involves only a fraction of the population and grows increasingly aggressive and reactionary in response to the majority’s indifference. According to Gerasimov, Putin’s regime has tried different scenarios of national mobilization as a sine qua non for the functional state – one no longer vulnerable to defaulting on its promise to investors and citizens. The last resort of any national mobilization is literal mobilization for war, and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was prompted by domestic concerns over a failing state that was not backed by a mobilized nation. The spectacular failure of the long-planned aggression testifies to the failure of Russian statehood and nationhood – which should serve as a warning to any modern society. Based on his analysis, Gerasimov elaborates the principles of a possible postnational state and offers several examples of its institutional configuration.
The “Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science” section presents an example of a full-scale postnational or at least post-groupist social study. Ekaterina Melnikova conceptualizes the late Soviet intelligentsia as an “event,” rather than a stable and structurally defined community. Specifically, she focuses on the multifaceted preservationist initiative aimed at restoring the Valaam archipelago in Lake Ladoga, the site of a fourteenth-century Orthodox monastery. Participation in this initiative forged the cohesiveness of the intelligentsia as an emotional community and a collective social agent. Once the mission was over, or rather taken over by the Russian Orthodox Church in the 1990s, the situational community of intelligentsia disintegrated, its former members overcome by resentment and disillusionment.
From methodology to middle-range theory to a case study, the issue’s arc reaches the problem of how to practically apply critical knowledge in classroom teaching. In the “ABC” section, Oksana Dudko and Vladyslava Moskalets share their experience of teaching Ukrainian history in North American universities during Russia’s aggression. Both authors note the fundamental difference between students in Ukraine and students in America, who take a class in Ukrainian history having little to no prior knowledge about the country. So, whereas in Ukraine, critically thinking university lecturers concentrate on deconstructing the simplified national historical narrative that has been interiorized by students in secondary school, in American classrooms professors have to offer a coherent historical narrative that includes advanced methodological considerations. It should be added that, in this regard, teaching Ukrainian history is hardly different from teaching Russian history or, for that matter, any other non-American history. However, the second challenge noted by Dudko and Moskalets is more specific to Ukrainian classes – namely, the dearth of reading materials. The available collections of primary sources translated into English are Russo-centric both in terms of document selection and the translation of key terms and concepts. Moskalets identifies the task of translating Ukrainian primary sources into English as part of “syllabus decolonization” and offers a sample selection of primary sources for the teaching module on the history of migrations at the turn of the twentieth century. Dudko stresses the importance of contemporary artistic sources, including visual ones, for expanding students’ understanding of Ukraine. She also emphasizes the advantage of Ukraine’s stateless status throughout much of its history and its fluctuating territorial boundaries for teaching modern postnational and post-state history, unconstrained by the traditional narrative of the nation-state.
Wartime is objectively the least suitable moment for deconstructing the grand narrative of the state and nation. However, the prospects for postwar order depend on the ability to conceive of a different, truly novel societal arrangement. The fact that this difficult methodological conversation is possible more than one year into the brutal war unleashed by the failing Russian nation-state against Ukraine should be a source of cautious optimism about a better future.