One of the ironies of the extensive literature on empire is that empires attracted relatively little scholarly attention when they actually existed. At present, when no sovereign state admits to actually having one, historians now argue over whether empires were a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ thing, with the general consensus, apart from a rearguard defence by a doughty faction of apologists, being that they were bad. Consequently, empire has now largely become a metaphor for any hegemonic or unequal relationship. Jane Burbank's and Frederick Cooper's Post-Imperial Possibilities is a refreshing step beyond these debates, one that reminds us that the formal empires of the twentieth century did in fact come to an end. The book is essentially a thought exercise that explores potential alternative outcomes to the seeming inevitability of the post-imperial world made up of the western liberal democracies and the eastern bloc. More than a study of decolonization or the transfer of power, Post-Imperial Possibilities is a meditation on potential alternatives to the nation state and the global order which it anchors. Put another way, Burbank and Cooper argue that nation states were not the inevitable end point of empires.
Post-Imperial Possibilities focuses on three specific trans-continental alternative post-imperial projects: Eurasia, Eurafrica and Afroasia. Rejecting European universalism after the demise of the Tsarist Empire, the Eurasianists of the 1920s drew inspiration from Chinggis Khan to envision a multi-ethnic polity linking Russia with Central Asia that fused Turkic, Mongol and Slavic heritages. The heyday of Eurafrica came after the Second World War when both Leopold Senghor and imperially minded French intellectuals discussed the possibility of turning the French Union into a partnership between the former colonizers and the colonized. Linking metropolitan France with its African colonies, this ‘layered sovereignty’, which was to be based on ‘cultural complementarity’, would promote development and serve as a counter-weight to the Soviet and American blocs. Afroasia, which was the organizing philosophy of the Bandung conference, envisioned an alliance of former colonies turned sovereign non-western nation states that would achieve the economies of scale of the former empires without racist subjecthood and exploitation. The book concludes by revisiting Eurasianism in the twenty-first century as a foundational ideology for Vladimir Putin's expansionist post-Soviet Russian Federation. Framing the updated version of Eurasia as a challenge to arrogant western assumptions about the inevitability of liberal democracy, Putin's Eurasianists aim to rebuild Russia into a global power by uniting the diverse peoples of the region on the basis of a supposedly inclusive and glorious multi-cultural past. For Burbank and Cooper, the common thread connecting all three post-imperial projects was that they looked beyond the nation state in rejecting Eurocentric politics and culture.
Works of comparative history like Post-Imperial Possibilities inevitably invite readers to propose alternatives to the examples chosen for comparison. Anticipating such critiques, Burbank and Cooper do not claim that Eurasia, Eurafrica and Afroasia were the only, or even the most important, post-imperial projects. They acknowledge the other forms of horizontal and vertical sovereignty that might have served as alternatives or successors to the western empires. These included Esperanto, the British Commonwealth, post-colonial federations, ‘pan’ movements (Arabism, Islamicism, Africanism, Slavism, etc.) and various attempts at Latin American integration. Burbank and Cooper have chosen Eurafrica, Afroasia and two versions of Eurasia as the focus for comparison largely because these are the possibilities that they know best. One of the great pleasures in reading Post-Imperial Possibilities is that we are in the hands of two accomplished scholars who are putting their primary areas of expertise in conversation with each other. Readers of this journal will probably be familiar with the Afroasianist Bandung Conference. Scholars of Anglophone Africa might be surprised that some post-WWII French intellectuals, in negotiations with African politicians like Leopold Senghor, actually considered a Eurafrican alternative to the French nation state and the European Union. It is a pity that Post-Imperial Possibilities does not spend much time on the British Commonwealth, for it would be interesting to know if there were any British intellectuals who felt the same way. At first, the discussion of Eurasian alternatives to Tsarist Russia in the 1920s may seem obscure, perhaps even trivial, to non-specialist readers, but these impressions fade once it becomes clear that Vladimir Putin's vision for the expansionist Russian Federation both affirms and complicates Eurasian ideals.
Burbank and Cooper duly acknowledge that none of their post-imperial possibilities came to pass, particularly as they were elite projects that did not engage ordinary people. Warning against assuming that the present world was inevitable, they also insist that it would be a mistake to assume that these sorts of endeavours were doomed from the start. Empire continues to sell books, but we live in world of nation states. This world order, however, has proven unstable and unable to address persistent poverty and inequality. Burbank and Cooper productively remind us that it was never preordained that empires would break into homogenous ethnically bounded political spaces. In 1959, just as it was becoming clear that the era of western imperial rule in Africa was over, the American anthropologist George Murdock published a ‘tribal map of Africa’. Later generations of social scientists have overlaid it with an outline of African political borders to suggest that ignoring supposedly ‘natural’ tribal boundaries in drawing the national map of Africa has left post-colonial successor states unstable and perhaps illegitimate. Post-Imperial Possibilities helpfully counters this sort of teleological thinking by reminding us that there was nothing inevitable or natural about the nation state. The world we have today was just one of many post-imperial possibilities.
