Abstract
This chapter explores the uses and abuses of imperial nostalgia. It proposes two categories: “civilizationalist nationalism” and “post-national pluralism.” The former is defined as a form of cultural nationalism which cites an imagined, imperial golden age of religious and racial purity. This mode of remembering empire informs right-wing nationalist and violent extremist platforms in both the West and the Islamicate world. Post-national pluralism, on the other hand, invokes imperial cosmopolitanism as inspiration for managing diversity today. Less egregious than civilizationalist nationalism, it nonetheless can take hyperbolic forms which gloss over the shortcomings of Habsburg and Ottoman multiculturalism, violent patterns of transition from empire to nation-state, and their traumatic legacies. Offering a synthetic overview of this volume’s contributions as a corrective to these reductionist modes of remembrance, the chapter concludes with a plea for embrace of our complexity, past and present alike.
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Notes
- 1.
For an insightful discussion of overlapping Habsburg and Ottoman, but also Byzantine and Levantine traditions as constitutive of the region and “European” complexity more broadly, see Heilo and Nilsson (2017).
- 2.
This generalized definition differs from the specific application of the concept to Russian exceptionalism as a “civilizational state” by Verkhovskii and Pain (2012) while drawing on Brubaker’s (2017) fruitful exploration of the space between “nationalism” and “civilizationalism ” vis-à-vis the new, northern European populisms.
- 3.
In the language of international relations, the West’s eclipse entails relative loss of power vis-à-vis the rise of actors like China , even as the US-led Western block retains primacy in absolute terms. For a comparative methodology with which to analyze the “family resemblances” across Eurasia’s former empires’ and their anti-Western revisionism see Fisher-Onar (2020).
- 4.
Indeed, a distinctive feature of these socially conservative strands of populism in Russia , eastern Europe, Turkey , and the United States is their attack on gender diversity in general and feminism in particular, not least in the form of neo-natalist policies.
- 5.
Trump’s words were: “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. We must work together to counter forces, whether they come from inside or out, from the south or the east, that threaten over time to undermine [our] values and to erase the bonds of culture, faith and tradition that make us who we are…” (cited in Davies et al. 2017).
- 6.
For a critical survey of such narratives see Heilo and Nilsson (2017).
- 7.
- 8.
Similarly, some blamed the Byzantine empire and Orthodox Christianity for the region’s developmental woes (Heilo and Nilsson 2017)
- 9.
An antecedent of the attempts in the 1990s and 2000s to frame the EU as a peace project may be found in the work of Austrian-Japanese philosopher Richard Nikolaus Coudenhove-Kalergi , author of the 1923 book Pan-Europa, who was a founding figure of the pan-Europe movement. See Chovanec’s and Spreicer’s contributions in this volume for post-imperial narratives of pluralism.
- 10.
Butler quoted in Chovanec’s contribution in this volume.
- 11.
For more on the features of and problems with “cosmopolitanist nostalgia” see İlay Örs (2018).
- 12.
For a framework with which to assess the causal interplay of ideational, agential, and structural forces in shaping complex outcomes see Fisher-Onar (2021).
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Fisher-Onar, N. (2021). Remembering Empires: Between Civilisational Nationalism and Post-National Pluralism. In: Chovanec, J., Heilo, O. (eds) Narrated Empires. Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55199-5_17
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