The News: Empires, Nations and Sovereignty

Wednesday's Child Is Full of Woe

I keep running into essays in public culture that try to argue that the United States is not and never has been an empire. It generally seems to me that the authors are taking aim at left-leaning slogans and invective, as if they’re having a terminological argument with people carrying placards at protests, as opposed to digging deep into what the word means. They’re certainly not contending with a deep body of scholarly and popular thinking about the concept, much of it quite accessible.

A great starting place for anyone who wants to think a bit more about the subject is Charles S. Maier’s Among Empires, which reviews the definition of empire and asks whether the United States counts. Maier’s answer is “sort of?”, in a useful and not temporizing way. He points out two things in particular: first, the point that has been covered comprehensively in the historiography of the United States over the last twenty years, which is that the expansion of the U.S. westward was markedly imperial. You can’t call it “internal expansion” during the process of that expansion, because the territories annexed and acquired by the United States weren’t part of it before that happened (even if some people who originated from the territory of the U.S. arrived there before territorial acquisition). Calling westward expansion “internal” is quintessentially ideological, an endorsement of Manifest Destiny. Settlers and empire are not at all contradictory: there have been many empires whose territorial acquisitions have been secured by the movement of settlers from the imperial core into its newly gained periphery.

Second, that the post-1945 U.S. did not formally annex its client states into an empire per se but that it reacted to political and economic events in its client states in a manner very reminscent of empires challenged at their periphery or frontier. It’s not at all common for polities that everyone agrees were empires to also have client states or polities beyond their formally claimed dominion—sometimes with considerable geographic distances between that dominion and the client—and the status quo of those clients is a frequent trigger for crisis in the imperial core.

What I’ve come to think as we head into the third decade of the 21st Century—and I’m not alone in this thought; Maier and many other scholars have considered it—is that nations are really just a special case of empires, and that as time wears on, we’re seeing that much of what supposedly made nations something completely typologically different was a consequence of the power of nationalism as an ideology, that the typological distinction of nations from empires is much less than it seems.

Note that I am not saying here that all political-territorial structures are empires. Contiguous communities where everyone lives within some relative local proximity to one another and are all generally tied to a distinctive political economy linked to the materiality of the community aren’t empires. Communities sharing some distinctive culture (language, everyday practices, social institutions) that ties them together without a territorial-political infrastructure are not an empire. Sometimes communities share a culture and have a shared political infrastructure where almost every community has a strong, unchallenged sense of belonging to the polity. Those aren’t empires.

That is what we think nations are, at least the blood-and-soil kind, but there isn’t a nation on the planet that claims a blood-and-soil vision of belonging where that is even remotely an accurate representation of the history of the territory within the borders of that nation over the last three centuries. The borders of 21st Century nations derive from one of several things: European empires setting borders during the 19th Century (Africa, South Asia, the Middle East); the fracturing of empires into smaller components due to revolutions and following large-scale wars (Latin America, the Balkans, post-Soviet eastern and central Europe); processes of territorial acquisition and integration, including through warfare (Canada, the U.S., Russia, China but also a smattering of post-1960 cases like Tanganyika’s annexation of Zanzibar into independent Tanzania); and a small number of successful secessions from national territories or redrawings of national boundaries (South Sudan, East Timor, Eritrea, Czechslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia).

Virtually none of the nations made through those processes has that deeply felt, nearly homogenously distributed sense of individual and collective belonging that I think really does exist at more local or regional scales in both the past and the present. Almost all nations have within them populations and regions that are poorly integrated into that belonging, that retain a sense of some other political and social affinity or belonging. Sometimes that’s coming from those communities: it’s a structure of feeling and connection that they’re actively maintaining against the nation. Sometimes it’s coming from the nation: it’s a structure of exclusion and marginalization. Sometimes it’s both.

Empires, defined broadly across human history, all have some degree of distinction between a core and a periphery and then beyond that, a hazy frontier where the empire makes no claims of sovereignty or authority but nevertheless often perceives interests at stake, especially if those frontiers overlap the hazy boundaries of another empire. In most of human history, there were then areas so far beyond an imperial core that they were effectively unknown to or unimportant to the empire. That’s no longer necessarily the case in a truly globalized system: modern polities, whatever we classify them as, may consider any place on the planet potentially within their frontiers or relevant to their interests, including Antarctica, the deep seas and ocean floor, outer space and the Moon.

But different empires in history have approached core-periphery-frontier relationships quite differently. Many have practiced tight political integration and heavy administrative oversight within the core while leaving peripheral communities to largely manage their own affairs, transacting with them primarily in terms of revenues demanded from the periphery in return for some security guarantees and privileged access to the political economy of the core. Some have exercised strong military control over most of their periphery and emphasized its subject or dependent status. Some have made little distinction between core and peripheral populations in terms of rights, identities, cultural prerogatives, and have allowed their cores to become cosmopolitan and pluralistic. Others have practiced rigorous hierarchical privileging of the core on racial, religious, cultural, linguistic or other grounds. Some have claimed to be doing one thing while actually doing the other. Some empires freely acknowledge the outer bounds of their influence; others notionally maintain an infinite right to assert authority wherever and whenever they please. Some embrace relationships with populations in their frontiers while claiming no formal power over them, others see their frontiers as arbitrary zones of imperial exclusion, exploitation and exemplary violence.

You can probably see where I’m going with this thought. Modern nations are special-case empires marked by their conceptual approach to territorial sovereignty. They claim to integrate their peripheries into the sovereignty and erase the distinction between core and periphery. It’s all core, all the way down. In a very few cases of existing nations, you can make a reasonable case that the few exceptions to that process are really small fractions of a substantially homogenous all-core polity (though not unimportant!): Ainu and Okiniwanan populations plus long-term resident Korean and other non-citizen workers in Japan, for example. In most cases, you can see that not only are those processes of integration incomplete but that they are never going to be complete.

Many nations have territories that aren’t continguous: islands hundreds or thousands of miles away, landmasses separated or nearly so by an intervening nation. Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Alaska, American Samoa for the U.S.; northeastern India connected to the rest of India by a thin territorial ribbon looping north of Bangladesh; Senegal nearly bisected by Gambia; Spain and the Canary Islands, and so on.

Many nations have territories they control under variant sovereignties that theoretically or concretely confer different legal rights and belonging to the residents than to the core populations of the national sovereignty involved: Svalbard, Greenland, Cyprus, the Andaman Islands, the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, and so on.

Many nations have territories which are effectively barred to assertions of authority or control by the ostensible national sovereigns, whether administrative or military authority. Some of those situations are formally acknowledged, often classed as civil wars or through referencing insurgencies, some of them are not admitted to by international bodies or official sovereignties but are well understood by everyone actually living there.

Most nations have groups and communities which are palpably not integrated into the sovereignty in some fashion, often in territories that were added at a different time than the rest of the nation or that were at one time under the control of a neighboring sovereignty. The desire to separate—or less often, the impulse to expel—has flared up in many places nearly continuously since the concept of nations and nationalism first appeared. In other places, it can remain dormant, a seemingly dead and resolved question only to erupt quickly if the national core slides into misrule or weakness. Expert observers of West Africa used to laud Cote d’Ivoire for its stability, for the extent to which national integration had supposedly banished north-south divisions, only to see that divide erupt into sustained conflict. Crete’s nationalists fought ardently to join Greece, but I don’t think it’s unimaginable that someday Cretans could sharply flip to wanting autonomy. Quebec’s citizens seem settled in Canada for now, but the distinctions remain. I don’t find it impossible to think of Britanny or Normandy suddenly demanding more autonomy, much as militant Catalan separatism seemed to surprise many who saw that as a settled matter.

And most nations contain within their borders populations who are resident, often over multiple generations, perhaps even as citizens with ostensibly full rights, who can be and often have been suddenly redefined by a core population relabeling some other group as peripheral or non-national. South Asian-descended populations in East Africa were expelled or held under threat of expulsion; it is not impossible to imagine a future South Africa whose rulers discard the pluralism and inclusion of its present constitution and expel citizens whose ancestors came from Europe and South Asia, or even those who come from nations elsewhere in the region. Most of the EU hovers uncomfortably over the question of whether citizens and residents who don’t fit into a narrow blood-and-soil fiction will ever be allowed to see themselves as fully belonging to and of the nation. The United States is going through another major wave of ethnonationalist struggle intended to reanoint the descendants of white Europeans as the only true ‘core’ of an immigrant nation.

The idea that nations were not just a variant approach to imperial administration rested primarily on the idea that national integration was an ongoing process that continuously trended towards greater and greater belonging, that territories and populations who resisted integration or were kept apart would become fewer and fewer over time.

The reason I raise this whole topic under the heading of “news” is that I think the world of 2023 is suggesting something quite different: that nations are as variable in this respect as other kinds of empires, and that the major source of friction in the world-system of the 21st Century is the degree to which some nations are trying to manage territorial sovereignty via increasingly assertive integrations of their populations, whether that is legally sanctioning separate ethnolinguistic identities and communities in the same fashion as many European states in the late 19th and early 20th Century or even more aggressively as in the case of China and Uighur populations. In other cases, nations are intensifying their exclusion or expulsion of populations from territories that the core wants to integrate into its national belonging—Israel with parts of the West Bank and Jerusalem, Rohyinga Muslims in Myanamar, and many other cases. Some nations are trying to annex or extend their sovereignty in a markedly ‘imperial’ way, most notably in the case of Russia and Ukraine.

If you accept that nations are a permanent ongoing improvement of and alternative to empires in any form, then you are locked into regarding these crises as growing pains or as aberrations, as exceptions to a norm that you take to be firmly established. If you understand nations as a variant form of empire, on the other hand, then continuous centrifugal pressures on nations are something that you expect will never go away.

I’m increasingly inclined to the latter expectation—or perhaps to think that the only nations that will really achieve the common idea of belonging we associate with nations are small ones with relatively connected political economies and a sense of connection with landscape, environment and people that is concretely material as well as intersubjective. Perhaps the census, the map, the newspaper made nations, but I feel as if that was a kind of rough stitch that has turned out to be easily unraveled.

This doesn’t mean, by the way, that ‘empires’ are always bad, if it turns out that nations turn back towards a wider variety of ways to connect larger territories in meaningful fashion. There have been empires that have been cosmopolitan and associative, relatively unaggressive towards their peripheries and frontiers, unperturbed by linguistic and cultural variation within their spheres of influence. They’re not the empires that modernity has experienced, but there are other possibilities out there. We may be in an age where those possibilities become necessary alternatives to the unsustainability of the national idea.