Global Power after Empire?

The trajectories of empires have shaped not just former colonies, protectorates, or imperial provinces, but today's most powerful states. Thirty years ago, it was possible to read Chinese history in a linear fashion, as a story of an outdated form of empire, its power waning over the nineteenth century as European powers and Japan nibbled at its borders, leading to the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911, followed by periods of internal conflict, Japanese invasion, and communist dictatorship, during which China was part of the “underdeveloped” world.

Now, these periods appear as an interlude, no longer and no more important than other interregna in China's history. China is once again running a huge trade balance with the West, supplying it with the goods it desires—now including an array of manufactured products as well as the silks and porcelains of old—and supplying credit to the United States and Europe. China's twentieth-century elites—whether republican, communist, or today's state-centered capitalists—have taken for granted the borders established by the Qing.^[2939] Today's rulers face the problem that bedeviled earlier incarnations: restive non-Han populations along the frontiers, especially in Tibet and Xinjiang. They can draw on Chinese elites' experience of ruling—and respect for the training and loyalty of officeholders—over this vast space established by successive imperial dynasties.^[2940]

When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, a brief flurry of books and articles deployed the word “empire” as if it were the most damning epithet that could be applied to American actions. A few ideologues on the other side argued that the United States should assume the mantle of the British Empire and frankly accept its role of making the world safe for democracy and capitalism.^[2941] But the United States soon found that it was straining its political, financial, and military limits by occupying one country, let alone colonizing half the world.

A more revealing narrative puts the United States at the center of a particular imperial trajectory: from Jefferson's “Empire of Liberty” toward a Roman politics of difference, incorporating and organizing territory on the basis of equal rights and private property for people considered citizens and the exclusion of Native Americans and slaves. The challenge of governing different parts of the country differently—the conflict between slave and “free” states—was nearly fatal, but the Union emerged from the Civil War with a more national sense of itself, and new forms of conflict over the terms under which ex-slaves and Native Americans would be excluded or integrated into the national project. The United States joined other powerful states in overseas imperial ventures at the end of the nineteenth century, but its diffidence about incorporating non-white populations, even as inferiors, kept it from frankly embracing a stance as colonizer. Continental empire gave American leaders the strength to choose the time and terms of their interventions in the rest of the world; the United States continues to exercise a distinct repertoire of power at a distance.^[2942] It is doing so with military bases scattered around the world, an economic engine of considerable size although of questionable efficiency, and large debts held, among others, by another imperial power—China.^[2943]

The Soviet Union, in much of the post-World War II half-century, was in conflict with both the United States and China. Few imagined before the late 1980s that it would disappear and force a major reconfiguration of world politics. The formation and breakup of the USSR and the subsequent development of the Russian Federation all reflect an imperial trajectory.^[2944] The Soviet Union's strategy of fostering national republics—led by intermediaries from the majority ethnic group in each republic who had come up through the Communist Party—provided a roadmap for disaggregation as well as a common language for negotiating new sovereignties.

The Soviet strategy allowed it and its successor states to find a middle ground between domination by Moscow and autonomy for the former republics, whether inside the Russian federation or subject to its influence.^[2945] The largest of the successor states, the Russian Federation, is explicitly multiethnic. Its first president, Boris Yeltsin, told the Federation's component parts, “Take as much sovereignty as you can swallow.”^[2946] Vladimir Putin later took much of it back, reviving the traditions of patrimonial empire. As he and his proteges reconnect magnates to the state, punish magnates who go their own way, tighten control over religious institutions, repress dissent, transform electoral process into a “sovereign democracy” supported by a single party, compel loyalty from the federation's governors, flirt with nationalism in Russian areas, keep a close eye on Russia's borderlands, and wield Russia's prime weapon—energy—in the international arena, Russian empire has reappeared in yet another transmutation on its Eurasian space. What the post-Soviet part of the world is not, is liberal and democratic, despite the illusions that some observers had in 1989 or 1991—parallel to the illusions many had in the 1960s about the democratic and progressive future of the ex-colonial world.

Then there is the European Union, where the possibilities of complex sovereignty go beyond the boundedness of the nation-state. Some of the most important functions of the sovereign state—control of borders and currency—have been ceded by national states to a European confederation, and the divisibility of such functions is underscored by the fact that the European Union, the Schengen (open border), and euro zones have overlapping but not identical memberships. The European Union represents as much a discontinuity with empire in Europe as a variant on the layering characteristic of imperial systems. After 1,500 years of competition for dominance over western Eurasia, the imperial ambitions of the most powerful states were so badly shattered in World War II that it became possible for them both to imagine themselves as polities on a national scale and to reimagine the possibilities of cooperation and common governance.^[2947] Here is a trajectory out of inter-empire competition.

The history of making Europe is complicated by another imperial alternative, largely forgotten. At the same time—the late 1940s to the late 1950s—as France was considering the possibilities of a European union along confederal lines, it was also considering turning its former empire into a federal or confederal structure.^[2948] If France joined a European economic or political union without its overseas territories, it would be dismembering itself, but if it joined with them, African leaders would insist on having a full voice in its affairs, and France's European partners would have to assume some of the burden of bringing impoverished territories into a confederation that aspired to equality. After trying to have confederation both ways—an aspiration that became known as Eurafrica—France conceded that its overseas territories would be associates rather than an integral part of the European Economic Community that came into being under the Treaty of Rome of 1957.^[2949]

From the starting point of unwinding of the French empire, the space of sovereignty contracted to a more national focus, but in another way expanded by the sharing of sovereign functions on a European scale. From an African vantage point, a partial opening—obtaining under the 1946 Constitution the rights of the French citizen, including that of “free circulation” within the French Union—was reconfigured by independence into a series of national sovereignties. The children of people that France once tried to keep in the empire, now find themselves on the other side of a wall that surrounds Europe as a whole.

The European Union has yet to demonstrate that it can capture the political imagination of people who live in its member states or overcome exclusionary sentiments of national sovereignty (hence Brexit), that it can respond coherently to crises like the refugee influx of 2015 or the pandemic of 2020, or that it can ameliorate economic inequalities as great as that between Germany and Greece.

Europe's uncertain transit from conflicting empire- building efforts to national states shorn of colonies to a confederation of nations underlines the complexity and variability of sovereignty regimes. When the Organization of African Unity changed its name to African Union in 2001, it was suggesting the possibility of following Europe's path toward closer integration on a continental scale. Such a promise remains largely unfulfilled, but regional groupings like the Economic Community of West African States have undertaken peacekeeping missions as well as attempts at economic cooperation. Regional groupings in Latin America and Southeast Asia do not compromise national power in the same way as the European Union, but suggest a need to look beyond bounded sovereignties. At a world level, economic regulation and supra-national legal jurisdictions provoke controversies over both the need for institutions that correspond to the current level of long-distance interconnections and concern over whose interests would be protected by such bodies.

That we no longer live in a world of empires, in the conventional sense, does not mean that we have mastered the consequences of empire, of empire's demise, or of the possibilities of turning empire into new forms of political organization. It is too early to tell.

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Source: Bang Peter F., Bayly C.A., Scheidel Walter (eds.). The Oxford World History of Empire. Volume Two: The History of Empires. Oxford University Press,2020. — 1352 p.. 2020

Global Power after Empire?

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