In September 2000, Princeton University Press published Provincializing Europe by Dipesh Chakrabarty.^[1] This book embodied the culmination of a powerful strand within postcolonial theory but also indicated its reaching an ultimate dead end.
In less than two decades, what was perceived as a line of inquiry originating within a second-tier intellectual tradition in a Third World country – a rather conventional version of Marxism in India – had acquired the status of a globally hegemonic social theory. The story of Indian postcolonial thought, and especially of the Subaltern Studies Group, has vividly demonstrated the futility of the West’s self-proclaimed superiority and the very notion of identifying intellectual advancement with a territory. In real time, one could observe the mechanism of producing worldwide cultural hegemony: it was done in the process of intercultural dialogue. First, foreign ideas were creatively appropriated and adjusted to fit local realities. Next, this domesticated foreign intellectual tradition helped to develop a new mutually comprehensible language to communicate some unique local experiences, thereby opening new horizons for people of other cultures. Based on the realities of English industrial capitalism, original Marxism was never meant to be applied directly to the Indian agrarian society, and neither were the French poststructuralist theories of language and discourse developed in the 1970s for the monocultural society of universal high school literacy. However, educated in elite Western universities, Indian thinkers blended these seemingly alien components with local intellectual traditions and produced a new methodology that registered new forms of hegemony and social experiences of the hitherto “silent” groups that could be found in any society, at different periods. This real-life experiment vividly proved what historians of ideas had known all along: since the early medieval borrowings from Islamic culture, the secret to Europe’s growing intellectual preponderance was its openness to foreign knowledge and the ability to accommodate it institutionally and intellectually, by reframing it in familiar cultural idioms. It was not so much a place but a specific cultural process, and any society that mastered this process became identified as “European” or, if located too far away, “Western” – which is an even more meaningless geographical designation.
In other words, by their very success, the Indian postcolonial scholars “provincialized Europe” in the sense of relativizing any identification of advanced culture and knowledge with a place or a people. Modernity – a universal culture and practices serving the mass society of general literacy – is always “Western” not because some elusive West has a monopoly on it but because the very notions of Europe and the West were coined, for lack of better terms at the time, to designate societies of modernity. Anyone can become modern, and anyone can become the paragon of modernity, as long as the process of intercultural communication, learning, and creative reinterpretation is at work.
Instead of registering this empirical fact, which is verifiable by the personal life experience of his cohort, Dipesh Chakrabarty produced a phantom of Europe as a fixed place and a stable culture – essentially, a civilization. With this rigid ahistorical entity, he identified the dynamic and open-ended cultural process of mutual learning, and modernity as a form of gradual accommodation of all social groups in a common cultural-political compound of mass society. As a result of this proverbial “hyperrealism,” Chakrabarty’s call to provincialize Europe amounted to the rejection of the very cultural mechanisms that made his intellectual achievement possible and globally relevant. By rejecting universalism and modernity as compromised by Europe’s real or alleged ambitions toward world hegemony, Chakrabarty embraced a profoundly pessimistic stance that made history of the “non-Europe” impossible for the lack of a common analytical language and coordinate system. Ironically, his model of Europe was practically indistinguishable from the most chauvinist versions of Eurocentrism and the Victorian myth of the White European Genius that has been academically obsolete for many decades. The only difference was that Chakrabarty vehemently rejected this mythological image instead of celebrating it: a political rather than an analytical deconstruction.
This was an attempt – the most articulated one at that – to provincialize Europe ideologically and for political purposes. This effort made any further inquiry along these lines impossible, at least until the zombie or nuclear apocalypse, because the hyperreal eternal Europe as a synonym of modern mass society is destined to persist in its hegemony for the duration of this society – in Albania and Japan, Australia and Argentina, and other places deemed “Europe” by Chakrabarty’s analysis. The only alternative to this pervasively elusive Europe is another Victorian fantasy – the truly authentic traditional society, insulated from external influences and relying entirely on its local knowledge.^[2] The problem is not the need to choose one over the other, but the completely unreal nature of both options. With that, the postcolonial critique that aligns with Chakrabarty’s approach loses its relevance by becoming out of touch with reality.
This issue of Ab Imperio features materials discussing some other precedents for provincializing Europe. In the “History” section, the article by Qingyun Zhao tackles the fairly well-studied topic of the Russian diaspora in China between the two world wars. The employees of the Chinese Eastern Railway and other subjects of the Russian Empire, who found employment and business opportunities in Manchuria, particularly in Harbin, were joined after 1917 by refugees from the Russian Revolution and the remnants of Siberian White forces. Various aspects of the history of this diverse community of Russian expats have been addressed in historiography, including their interaction with different strata of the Chinese society. Zhao’s article does something very different: it explores the evolving attitudes of Chinese intellectuals toward Russian émigrés during the Republic of China era, focusing on the period between the 1920s and 1940s. This reverse perspective has remained absent in the studies of Russians in Harbin and Shanghai.
As it turns out, the Chinese elite public discourse as registered in newspapers and other published sources dealt not so much with actual Russian immigrants but with the cultural and ideological tropes identified with them. According to Zhao, the explicit condemnation of Russian imperialism and colonialism in the Far East was absent in the public discourse of the Republican era: the imposition of the Treaties of Aigun (1858) and Beijing (1860) on the Qing Empire, Russia’s intervention in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion and the Blagoveshchensk Massacre (1900), and the establishment of Russian colonies in Manchuria with the center in Harbin and on the Liaodong Peninsula. Instead, Russian immigrants in China were discussed and criticized as proxies of European imperialism and colonialism, for which condemnation Chinese authors spared no words. Stateless and destitute, Russian refugees were a numerically insignificant minority posing no practical threat or even economic competition to the Chinese. And yet, judging by the sources quoted in the article, these Russians were discussed both in a dismissive tone using explicitly racialized characteristics of an inferior group and as a real menace. If they were used as symbols of European colonialism, as Zhao convincingly argues, one can see a discursive provincialization of Europe (and the West in general) at work here. Europe was provincialized in the sense of its parochializing. Russians as Europeans were poor, weak, and unorganized, thus underscoring Chinese superiority over former colonizers. In contrast to Chakrabarty’s analysis, however, this provincialization of Europe celebrated not the primordial authenticity of local knowledge, but the success of the Chinese themselves by the standards of global modernity. Albeit in different proportions, both communists and nationalists combined Chinese nationalism and modern social theories to achieve the triumph of China in the international arena as a homogeneous nation-state.
The second article in the section, by Sergei A. Kan, addresses the opposite approach to provincializing Europe. Kan examines the attitudes of the famous American anthropologist Franz Boas toward the Russian Empire and the early Soviet Union by studying his contacts with his Russian colleagues, his participation in collective initiatives that concerned the USSR, and his public statements. While rather indifferent to the Russian Empire, Boas’s stance changed with the advent of the Soviet Union. He saw the Soviet project as a scientific experiment and positively assessed Soviet policies, especially indigenization. This led him to initiate institutional collaborations, including advocating for student exchange programs and proposing joint expeditions involving Soviet scholars. Despite growing evidence of political repression and ideological control within Soviet anthropology, Boas maintained a selectively positive outlook toward the USSR. He downplayed negative reports, rationalized the suppression of dissenting views, and refrained from public criticism, even as his Soviet colleagues faced persecution. He contrasted the perceived social progress and anti-racism of the USSR with the shortcomings of Western democracies. By the late 1930s, Boas’s loyalty to the Stalinist political course had escalated to such a degree that he embraced the infamous Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and harshly criticized any anti-Nazi actions by the US government and support of Britain in World War II. Only the outbreak of the Soviet–German war in June 1941 caused Boas to radically change his position.
Boas’s increasing adherence to socialist ideals during the interwar period alone cannot explain support of the Stalinist USSR by a social scientist, such as Boas, with regular access to firsthand information from the region. Many of his less informed, idealistic colleagues, including members of the American Communist Party, found the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact unacceptable, but not Boas. Besides, Boas was born to a Jewish family in Germany, and the plight of European Jews could not be just an abstract concern to him. It seems that this wholesale public support of Stalinism by a former European liberal turned American radical progressive was meant to provincialize Europe as a failed champion of modernity. Boas provincialized Europe – meaning, as is usually the case, “Western Europe” – by glorifying the USSR, or rather the aspects of the Soviet experiment that he identified as part of the European legacy of progress and modernity. Insisting on keeping America aloof from European affairs, Boas might hope to give modernity, compromised by totalitarian regimes and bourgeois petty egoisms in the Old World, a second chance in the New World. He was ready to sacrifice the countries of real Europe – not some imagined intellectual projection – as long as there was a hope of realizing modernity elsewhere. He certainly would not have minded seeing the rise of a new Europe in India or Africa if he were ready to recognize his social ideal in the Stalinist Soviet Union, which, for one thing, he never perceived as a European country in the normative geopolitical sense.
A third and more recent case of provincializing Europe is presented in “A Little Memoir” by the British historian of the Russian Empire, Dominic Lieven, published in the “ABC” section of this issue and the follow-up interview with him. The international profession that is usually shorthanded as “Russianists” is quite democratic in terms of its social composition, and until the 1990s there were very few faculty of Russian descent in British universities. Joining British academe in the 1970s, Lieven was an exception on both counts: his ancestors on the paternal side were the Baltic barons Lieven, elevated to princes of the Russian Empire by Nicholas I. Never missing an ironic remark about his aristocratic lineage nor an opportunity to mention it, Lieven made a name for himself as a historian of the Old Regime: the emperors, the imperial ruling elite, and the imperial wars and diplomacy. Contrary to the prevalent historical narratives of the day, Lieven depicted a polity that was no more archaic or decaying than its European counterparts, including such epitomes of modernity as Napoleonic France and Great Britain.
This historical approach and the selection of topics are fully legitimate choices for a historian interested in covering startingly understudied aspects of the past. Yet, within the peculiar context of British Russian studies of the 1970s and 1980s, fully explicated by Lieven in his ego-histoire, one could not but notice a political statement on his behalf. Back in 2003, in an interview with Ab Imperio, Benedict Anderson admitted that in his classic book Imagined Communities (1983) he called British nationality policies “Russification” as a calculated blow to the Conservative English sensibilities, as an Irishman joining the battle on the side of “Tom Nairn’s ‘Scottish nationalist’ book, The Breakup of Britain.”^[3] Namely, everyone understood that equating the British with the Russians was slander. In this intellectual climate, when Lieven presented the Russian ruling aristocracy as a dynamic and resilient social group, tightly integrated with other European ruling elites and on a par with them, he not only challenged the prevailing historiographic wisdom of the decay of Russian nobility during the postreform period.^[4] By normalizing Russian aristocracy and diplomacy and by underscoring the decisive role of the Russian army in the defeat of Napoleon and the implications of the military success in 1813–1814 for the assessment of Russia’s modernity (“Europeanness”), Lieven also provincialized Europe – for those who defined normative Europeanness by “inventing Eastern Europe” and Orientalizing “Asia.”^[5]
This time, the intended – or unintentional – aim was to call a spade a spade. Lieven’s “Russia” is neither a caricature nor an idealized version of Europe and modernity. The dark and low aspects of Europeanness, usually projected outward to various “barbaric” and “backward” societies, become reintegrated with Europe by recognizing imperial Russia’s belonging to Europe, at least in what concerns its elites and the state machine. This intellectual procedure greatly increased the symbolic value of one’s belonging to a Russian aristocratic family, but what is more important, it brought the discussion of Russia’s Europeanness outside the shadow play of ideological projections. Insisting on Russia’s Europeanness does not have to be a code word for colonialism (Zhao) or progress (Kan), it could be just an invitation to explore Russia’s multiple historical entanglements, of which Europe was an important element.
Of course, historical normalization carries a danger of political relativization: the fact that “everyone was doing this” may invite an uncritical acknowledgment of “this” – be it social inequality, militarism, or colonialism – as an acceptable norm. Modern commentators must always balance their recognition of the past as quite unextraordinary with a parallel distancing from it as undesirable.
Thus, by the year 2000, Europe had lost all its “civilizational” exclusivity, pace some postcolonial orthodoxies arguing otherwise. Various scenarios of the provincialization or rather disenchantment of Europe (in the Weberian sense) throughout the twentieth century, pursuing various goals, finally resulted in forming a broad academic consensus about “Europe” being just an intellectual construct rather than a place or a single culture. Ironically, it was at this point that the modern version of European history had formed: prompted by the political reality of the recently “united Europe” with the establishment of the European Union in the mid-1990s but destined to have a contested intellectual construct as its object of study. In the “Methodology and Theory” section of this issue, Sonja Levsen and Jörg Requate discuss the present and future of European history as a field of research. Summarizing the results of the collaborative research project EuropeDebate, they analyze how the rise of global history has further challenged Eurocentric perspectives, thus revealing the limitations of national-centric narratives and highlighting the global entanglements of European nations and regions.
It seems that the critical deconstruction of the “hyperreal Europe” still misses one last element. A history of polities and people that, at various times, used to be identified with variously understood “Europe” will be emancipated from the normative myth of true Europeanness when all the components of this myth have been provincialized – that is, recognized as mundane qualities accessible to anyone. Like the mission civilisatrice, grand imperial formations, progressive social policies, and scientific achievements, the nation should be demystified. Over the past three decades, at least in the context of Russian history, it has been firmly established that the old distinction of Hans Kohn between Western (civic) and Eastern (ethnic) nationalisms and nations is ephemeral. Nation and nationalism were Europe’s secret weapons in modern history, aimed outward but even more devastatingly inward. As happened with all weapons, it had proliferated globally long ago. Recognizing the role of nation and nationalism in societal mobilization in the past and their increasingly dismal positive effects today that no longer offset the high human costs, it is time to contemplate new forms of social groupness – both postimperial and postnational. There is no doubt that wherever this hypothetical new model emerges, it will be immediately identified as “truly European,” meaning at the vanguard and globally appealing.