Modern social scientists tend to conceptualize a society following the model that Jürgen Habermas dubbed “the historical symbiosis of republicanism and nationalism.” It is commonly believed that

“the phenomena of the territorial state, the nation, and a popular economy constituted within national borders formed a historical constellation in which the democratic process assumed a more or less convincing institutional form. … Democratic self-determination can only come about if the population of a state is transformed into a nation of citizens who take their political destiny into their own hands.”^[1]

This grand arc not only constitutes a normative historical narrative but also informs the meaning of the terms used. Indeed, it seems inappropriate and meaningless to apply the category of “citizenship” to a nondemocratic political system and, in general, to a polity that cannot be called a “political nation.” By the same token, the economic sphere is perceived as a single, homogeneous “economy” that is congruent with a single, homogeneous nation of citizens – one for the whole country.
Paradoxically, in this nation-centered perspective, the category of citizenship appears largely redundant, since it simply denotes belonging to a political nation, which, by definition, possesses collective political and legal subjectivity. Besides, even as an ideal model, “the symbiosis of republicanism and nationalism” characterizes a recent, very short historical period of 100 to 250 years. No formal citizenship had existed before this period. But does the notion of “subjecthood” that we usually apply in this context exhaust the whole spectrum of individual or collective political subjectivities? Even within the recent historical phenomenon of the democratic nation-state, does citizenship – as a formal legal status or as political subjectivity and volition for civic self-determination – necessarily identify with the formally recognized nation and aim at its reproduction? Contemplating citizenship as a practice determined both by people’s belonging to a political community and by their manifestation of political subjectivity, individual or experienced as a group, opens up new research perspectives. Specifically, it becomes possible to elaborate an analytical model of citizenship that would be equally applicable to national and imperial society.
This issue of Ab Imperio discusses the topic “Citizenship and Participation in Imperial and National Polities” within the 2023 annual program dedicated to the practical testing of non-nation-centric narratives – even when telling the stories of groups and periods conventionally recognized as “national.” The materials published in the issue enable a perspective on citizenship beyond the symbiosis of republicanism and nationalism as the normative framework, allowing for civic consciousness in political systems that do not recognize civiс equality. By registering sustained manifestations of civic consciousness, it becomes possible to reconstruct the implied vision of the ideal community of political solidarity and belonging, which does not necessarily coincide with the officially recognized nation. Thus, the standard causal logic that deduces citizenship in a given society from the normative version of the nation is reversed, prompting the “denationalization” of groupness.
The productivity of reversing the usual logic of the narrative is demonstrated in the “Methodology and Theory” section, which features an interview by Alexander Semyonov with Stuart Ward, a historian of the British Empire and decolonization. Ward’s book Untied Kingdom: A Global History of the End of Britain has recently been published.^[2] The traditional narrative of British history – passing through the stages of formation, heyday, crisis, and decline – is substituted in Ward’s book by the history of the permanent, almost from the outset, crisis of this composite polity. Like Zeno’s paradoxes, in which Achilles never catches up with the tortoise, and the flying arrow is stationary at any given moment, Britain at each stage of this history is only temporarily – through reorganization – kept from inevitable disintegration. Moreover, the threat of collapse acquires a new character each time, and so does the response to it – whether it is the empire’s formalization or its transformation into a commonwealth, the instrumentalization of “white race” solidarity or decolonization. Such a teleology – a deliberate recognition of Britain’s doom to decay, instead of the usual narrative of constant progress – allows Ward to deconstruct Britishness as a stable entity that has evolved over time and to focus instead on the temporary solutions that have delayed the inevitable collapse. It is these solutions, offered by different subjects and characterized by different political orientations, that appear as the main pillars of the United Kingdom project, keeping it afloat in a changing world. Thus, while still focusing on a specific political object in a long historical perspective, Ward avoids the trap of essentializing it and attributing collective subjectivity to Britain as a complex, dynamic phenomenon. Without dismissing the functional opposition of the metropolis and the overseas territories, he shows that political subjectivity was not equated to administrative power and therefore was not the metropole’s monopoly. At different times, Canada, Australia, and even New Zealand may have had a decisive influence on London.
Eventually, Britain is no longer seen as a clear-cut entity, enduring throughout its history, or as a mechanical arrangement of national blocs that are expected to return to their original state after the collapse of the empire or commonwealth. Concentrating on the mechanisms for maintaining Britishness, rather than on Britain’s “essence,” Ward views the country as a strategically indeterminate, transterritorial polity. Similarly, while recognizing the distinction between the categories of citizenship and subjecthood and reminding readers that in the British context, subjecthood played a central role until the mid-twentieth century, Ward revises the meaning of these categories. His story of the “Untied Kingdom” is first and foremost the story of “the slow disintegration of British sensibilities worldwide.” Considering Britishness as an affective community, Ward relativizes the formal distinction between citizenship and subjecthood, since the political community of solidarity appears to be the product of emotionally charged civic attachment to an abstract idea – and not the other way around. Regardless of one’s legal status and location, attachment to the idea of Britain manifests the individual’s civic self-determination and, ultimately, ensures the existence of the United Kingdom. By allowing the historical narrative to avoid the essentialization of empire and nation, Ward’s approach renders citizenship a situational and dynamic phenomenon, more dependent on people’s self-awareness than on their formal legal status.
The articles published in the “History” section continue to problematize the category of “citizenship” outside the normative national framework and the formal opposition to “subjecthood.” If Ward chose the emotional register as a metalanguage for discussing Britishness, then these articles problematize the categories of citizenship and subjecthood through territoriality, including symbolic space and legal property relations.
Stephanie Ziehaus traces the evolution of subjecthood’s semantics in Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century using the example of the so-called Manchurian Wedge in the Amur region. The Treaty of Aigun, signed in 1858, very generally outlined the new border between the Russian and Qing Empires along the Amur River. To the west of the Ussuri’s confluence with the Amur, Russia annexed mostly the far periphery of the Qing frontier, with only nascent colonization by Qing subjects. However, in the area where the Zeya River merges with the Amur near Blagoveshchensk, Russia acquired a long-established agglomeration consisting of “the sixty-four villages,” which was part of the Manchu Eight Banner military-civilian organization. The Manchus, who were legal holders of the banner land, and the Han tenants who often cultivated it retained their Qing subjecthood and remained under the jurisdiction of the Qing authorities. Back in 1858, the Russian side was quite satisfied with the traditional imperial – multilevel, contextual, and mosaic – sovereignty in the region. The land was recognized as state property – except for the territory of “the sixty-four villages.” Thus, the Russian subjects-colonists cultivated the lands of the Russian state, and the Qing subjects used the Manchu banner lands. These relationships were reversible: it was the territory occupied by Russian settlers that belonged to the Russian Empire, and the territories occupied by the Manchu peasants belonged to the Qing Empire. This intertwining of territory, property, and subjecthood set processes in motion that led to the substitution of imperial subjecthood for de facto national citizenship, which allowed no special arrangements or exceptions.
Russian colonists received state land for communal use, and the boundaries of the spacious communal landholdings were marked very sketchily, just as the limits of the Manchu village lands were. In addition, in this sparsely populated region, temporary use of nominally “no-man’s land” was practiced, for example, for grazing horses or haymaking. Having no obvious traces of cultivation, such as tillage, these lands played an important role in the economy and were perceived as part of communal holdings. The old-timers – Manchus and Cossacks – were usually aware of these practices of using unassigned territories and they recognized occasional usage as the basis for claiming rights on such lands. The newly arrived Russian colonists had no idea about these informal arrangements, and the Manchus had a vague idea about the new settler villages’ boundaries. This led to frequent land conflicts that took on an international character since they had to be settled through negotiations between the local Russian and Qing authorities. Systematic mapping of the Manchurian Wedge in the 1870s–1880s and the growing trend among the Russian colonists toward the registration of land in private ownership with detailed cadastral maps of individual plots stimulated Russian settlers’ subjectivity. Now they were defending their private homesteads and coveting the Manchurian land in their own interests while continuing to act as representatives of the Russian state. They found themselves in the role of citizens representing an ethnoconfessional nation and determining state policy in the region, as well as colonialists interested in expelling the local noncitizen population – simply put, they turned into settler colonialists. This transformation culminated in the Blagoveshchensk massacre of 1900, when, amid moral panic over the Boxer Rebellion in Manchuria, Russian settlers carried out a brutal ethnic cleansing of the Manchurian Wedge. They killed or expelled the inhabitants of the sixty-four villages and seized their land.
Vitalij Fastovskij considers another case of informal acquisition of civic subjectivity in the Russian Empire. At the beginning of the twentieth century, one of the self-organization projects run by the Russian educated public (obshchestvennost’) involved the management of organized international tours for schoolteachers, which were affordable even to those employed by elementary schools. This initiative was coordinated by the Educational Tours Commission at the Educational Department of Society for the Dissemination of Technical Knowledge. Beginning in 1909, every summer, dozens of groups of teachers-excursionists set off along several standard itineraries on trips that each lasted from one to two months. The tour programs included mandatory visits to local municipalities and parliaments – including in Istanbul – as well as to modern educational institutions and enterprises in addition to museums and art galleries. Over the five full years of this program, from 1909 to 1913, it sent 4,426 teachers abroad.^[3] Fastovskij draws attention to the “Eastern” route, which cost about 140 rubles (two months’ salary even for a better-paid gymnasium teacher) and lasted 41 days. On a steamboat departing from Odessa, through Constantinople, the excursionists traveled to Egypt, where they spent about two weeks, and then toured Greece for another week.
Typically for such obshchestvennost’ initiatives, project participants were required to write reports on their experience at the end of the trip, some of which were published in the organization’s yearbooks. Several visitors to Egypt revealed a position in their reports that did not correspond to the typical European Orientalism of the time. While clearly differentiating themselves from Egypt as the “East,” at the same time they spoke critically about the looting of Egyptian archaeological artifacts by Europeans. Fastovskij shows how, on the one hand, the Russian tradition of academic oriental studies had formed a critical attitude toward Orientalism in the Saidian sense, and on the other hand, the teachers-tourists reproduced the discourse of their Egyptian contacts – tour guides and just chance acquaintances-intellectuals. These European-educated Egyptians shared with Russians the conceptual language of modernity, which they used to formulate their anti-colonial agenda. It can be added that by synthesizing “Western” modernism with early anti-colonial discourse, Russian teachers developed a particular subjectivity. They acted not just as “citizens of the world” but as citizens of a certain – albeit not formalized – community of global progressivism, uniting “Western” culture and science with a criticism of equally “Western” colonialism and capitalism.^[4]
The final article in the section, by Stephan Rindlisbacher and Alun Thomas, deals with the Soviet period. Using the example of the national delimitation in Central Asia, the authors problematize the widespread idea of homogeneous Soviet citizenship. The very prospect of a national group obtaining one or another territorial and political status – a national region, an autonomous or union republic – hierarchically ranked nominally equal Soviet citizens. However, Rindlisbacher and Thomas focus not on normative groupness, but on citizenship as a collective subjectivity of the Soviets underlying an unofficial community of solidarity (nation). Recognizing that delimitation was primarily an initiative of local actors, the authors draw attention to the fact that these actors were far from being unanimous. They were driven by different interests, which opened possibilities for alternative scenarios of national delimitation. An important difference, which historians rarely pay attention to, was the divergent perspectives of nomadic and sedentary communities. Nomads – Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Turkmens, Karakalpaks, and so on – existed in an economic symbiosis with the settled population and could themselves spend considerable time in the same place. Therefore, a clear territorial delimitation of settled and nomadic nations – for example, Uzbeks and Kyrgyz – did not suit them. The concept of a territorial nation with clear republican borders generally contradicted the traditional economic and social practices of nomads who moved between summer and winter, highland and steppe pastures. Recognizing in principle the Soviet project and the idea of national delimitation, the nomads supported the idea of a Central Asian Federation that would unite the national republics and, as the highest authority, would relativize the significance of their administrative borders. Thus, the nomads formulated their own version of Soviet citizenship – officially unrecognized, but no less real for that. Unfortunately, the delimitation scenario that prevailed completely ignored the interests of nomadic communities and turned them into second-class citizens who were particularly hard hit by the genocidal famine of the early 1930s.
The reality of an autonomous grassroots formation of Soviet citizenship and the absence of an effective or at least consolidated state policy “from above” in the 1920s is elucidated in the “Archive” section. Pavel Golubev publishes archival documents pertaining to the organization of the Russian Art Exhibition of 1924–1926 in the United States and reconstructs its history in the introductory article. Golubev interprets the exhibition as an episode of early Soviet cultural diplomacy. Despite the supposed ideological mission of the exhibition, its organization from the very beginning was determined by the interaction of private and group interests of Russian artists, Bolshevik functionaries, American cultural entrepreneurs, and émigrés of various political persuasions – such as Igor Grabar, Olga Kameneva, Ivan Sytin, Charles Crane, and Christian Brinton.
Golubev’s publication offers a new perspective on the differentiation between citizenship and the official nation, and between nationalism and republicanism as the basis of the modern state. In the story of the Russian Art Exhibition, no consolidated “Soviet state” can be discerned apart from a conglomerate of bodies exercising physical control of the population. Tasked with promoting Sovietness abroad was an exhibition of art objects, most of which were not even aesthetically revolutionary – on the contrary, by the standards of the 1920s, they looked rather conservative. The Soviet citizens who participated in the exhibition pursued exclusively commercial interests, and the only conscious allies of the Bolshevik leadership were New York Russian emigrants, who were Social Democrats in the past. The “Russian” exhibition included works by artists who considered each other compatriots and, in this sense, fellow citizens. However, judging by their expression of subjectivity, it would be more accurate to characterize them as representatives of “old Russia,” which did not prevent them from remaining loyal Soviet subjects while in the USSR.
The deconstruction of the normative concepts of subjecthood and citizenship recovers “nation” as a productive category of analysis capable of identifying a particular form of groupness regardless of its formal status. National history takes the nation as a given and therefore as a category of practice that pays attention only to those facts and groups that contemporaries perceived as related to that nation. Postnational history, including new imperial history, makes it possible to describe national groups more adequately and complexly precisely because it chooses a research framework of a different scale. The focus on nomadic society makes it possible to describe the Kyrgyz or Kazakhs in a more nuanced way, and the history of “British affection” sheds light on otherwise obscured “Englishness.” The coordinate system cannot coincide with the object of study if the goal is to analyze it, and not reproduce the image recorded in the historical sources. It is this common methodological error that postnational history seeks to overcome.