Imperial Nation
On March 13, 2014, Ronald Suny, Professor of Social and Political History at the University of Michigan and Emeritus Professor of Political Science and History at the University of Chicago, delivered a public lecture at the HSE Saint Petersburg.
On March 13, 2014, Ronald Suny, Professor of Social and Political History at the University of Michigan and Emeritus Professor of Political Science and History at the University of Chicago, delivered a public lecture at the HSE Saint Petersburg. His area of research interests includes the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, nationalism and ethnical conflicts, the South Caucasus region, and Russian and Soviet historiography.
The lecture, Legacies of Empire in Russian History, was organized as part of the project The Network of Empire and Nationalism Studies. Professor Suny spoke during the joint seminar ‘Boundaries of History’, sponsored by the Faculty of History, the Center for Historical Research, and the HSE Saint Petersburg Laboratory for Comparative Social Research.
During his lecture, Professor Suny posed the key question: why did the Russian Empire endure given the fact that one cannot survive for long on subordination and inequality alone. Suny believes that imperial Russia’s elites actively drew into their ruling circle elite members of the nation’s minorities. And the resulting feeling of order and justice created by the empire was that value that held the different parts of it together.
The formula suggested by Suny is that Russian authoritarianism exists with the consent of the nation’s subordinates. The government’s methods are undemocratic, but at the same time no one opposes them.
Combining nationalist ideas with traditional imperial foundations results in a new kind of empire, but it is one that is still characterized by tremendous territorial, cultural, and ethnic diversity. The cult of a supreme leader, who is the embodiment of the empire itself, continued into the 20th century and even into the 21st century.
Nationalist winds in the ideology of liberalism are giving rise to what Suny calls an ‘imperial nation’. This is a new approach to the problem — an approach that has never before appeared in scientific literature. An ‘imperial nation’ is a nation that combines the characteristics of an empire with the characteristics of a nationalist state. France during the reign of Napoleon is an example of an imperial nation — France covered most of Europe and the French people were in the driver’s seat. Hitler tried to build a similar empire, one that would include all of Europe and where Aryan Germans would play a leading role.
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