Post-Imperial Possibilities is a bold book. It opens with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and Kenya’s rebuttal of the assault at the United Nations (UN), foregrounding ideas of sovereignty, independence, colonial histories, post-colonial affinities, and borders. The authors then pivot to political visions of transcontinental solidarity, as evident in the post-imperial projects of Eurasia, Eurafrica, and Afroasia. All three transcended national states as solutions to the end of empire and proposed inventive political reconfigurations combining national, federal, and confederate elements. Eurasia first emerged in post-1917 Russian émigré circles that lamented the end of the Russian empire and reappeared after 1991 as one solution to post-Soviet uncertainties. Eurafrica and Afroasia similarly had interwar roots, yet gained political traction in the 1950s by seeking alternative solutions for the political and economic dilemmas of post-colonial states. In an extensive introduction, Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper outline a number of theoretical frames on imperial reconfiguration, sovereignty, political imagination, human rights, vertical and horizontal solidarities, cultural and social affinities, creative thinking about political institutions, and the constraints of a state-based world order. The two middle chapters deal with Eurafrica and Afroasia, while Eurasia is split between Chs. 1 and 4, an intriguing choice. The reader inevitably imagines a separation of labor between the coauthors, both in terms of geography and the emphasis on intellectual versus institutional developments in the chapters. Having ended with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the book concludes with reflections on the contemporary moment of conflict between national and imperial claims. This ambitious project, admirably executed in 282 crisp pages, highlights historical alternatives to national states and capitalist development in the twentieth century as well as current dilemmas regarding the limits of national sovereignty for small- and medium-sized states.
Eurasian thought emerged among post-1917 émigrés taking stock of the demise of the Russian empire, as seen in Ch. 1. In 1920, Nikolai Trubetskoi offered critique of European universalism as an expression of “Romano-Germanic chauvinism” and articulated the need for a “revolution in consciousness” against Eurocentrism (53). Petr Savitski emphasized the importance of geography, portrayed Russia as different from both Europe and Asia, and proposed the concept of “Russian-Eurasian spirit” (56) as the basis of a new political formation. In 1921, the volume Exodus to the East became the de facto manifesto of Eurasianism by outlining the “affinity of souls” (59) and economic interest as key elements of Eurasian solidarity. Trubetskoi, in his attempt to bring together elites and the people, offered that cultural formations consisted of “the top” and “the bottom” (63). Later, he emphasized the importance of a great leader, shared morality, and belief in a God-given order. Trubetskoi also published on the workings of multiethnic states, including the juxtaposition between “Great Russian” and “Little Russian” (Ukrainian) culture (82). In a 1927 article, he identified Ukraine as a “problem”: even if the Russian “top floor” was open to “all Russian tribes,” Trubetskoi opposed the presence of “tendentious” and “imitative” Ukrainian culture at the top; Ukrainians belonged to the bottom floor (83). Quite a handful of ideas articulated by “a few argumentative individuals” (68), as the authors put it. However, the notion of Eurasia, sketched in significant detail here, is not a post-imperial possibility in any obvious sense. Rather, it reads as the eccentric writings of out-of-touch mega-elites in exile. The question emerges, in the 1920s and 30s, did these post-imperial musings matter or resonate? The Soviet secret police successfully squashed them in the 1930s, but the actual role of Eurasianism among interwar Russian émigrés is left for the reader to guess.
The book next moves to other parts of the world. Ch. 2 describes how in the 1950s African leaders sought their place in a newly reimagined Eurafrica, similarly with interwar roots. This idea originates with Léopold Sédar Senghor, born in Senegal in 1906, educated in France, and serving in the French Assembly after 1945. Senghor believed in the complementarity of European and African civilizations. An influential contribution is his theory of “horizontal and vertical solidarities” (98), the former present when people shared space and culture, the latter the result of hierarchical historical linkages, as evident in colonization. Ideas of layered sovereignty—national, federal, confederate—also informed his thinking. For Senghor, having won French citizenship in 1946, the newly declared “Overseas Territories” of the French Union in Africa could come together as Africans, rather than as members of separate nations, and gradually expand their rights within a post-imperial federal France based on multiculturalism and egalitarianism. Over time, Africans would gain full access to voting rights and welfare. The latter would place the burden of Africa’s economic development on Europe, mitigating historical inequalities. Unsurprisingly, French metropolitan politicians were not fully on board with such post-imperial visions; in addition to the financial cost, they reckoned with the place of Africa in ongoing negotiations regarding European integration. Senghor proposed the synchronization between the French Union and a future European Union in a federation—from a French project, Eurafrica would become a European project, bringing vertical and horizontal solidarities together on a transcontinental scale. Yet, the other five partners in the European Economic Community (EEC) were skeptical. In the 1957, France secured place for Algeria in the EEC, but compromised with “associate” membership for other African territories. In the pointed words of Diawadou Barry of Guinea, the Treaty of Rome led to “the replacement of French colonization by a European neo-colonialism” (132). Eurafrica as a post-imperial opportunity came to an end, though the question remains if it was ever a viable option.
Matters played out differently with Afroasia, the topic of Ch. 3. From the Bandung conference of 1954 to the Nonaligned Movement of 1961 to the UN General Assembly as a forum for newly independent states to the proclamation of the New International Economic Order (NIEO) in 1974, leaders in Africa and Asia (and eventually Latin America) rallied against a world based on political and economic hierarchies. Initially, embracing the common experience of imperialism and advocating for self-determination bridged the differences between the disparate countries of what became known as the Third World. For Senghor, Bandung constituted a “moral victory for the coloured peoples of the world” (177). The range of collaborative activities on a transcontinental scale in the 1960s and 70s was impressive—per Burbank and Cooper, this was “Afroasianism of people and movements, not just Afroasianism of states” (189). The thorny question of how to build political institutions and political alliances within the growing number of postcolonial states, however, undercut the movement’s momentum. Demonstrating the pitfalls of sovereignty, new elites sought to consolidate their power bases at home rather than pursue solidarities abroad. The fierce opposition of the wealthy states was also unbending—they rejected “horizontal politics … whose goal was to reshape vertical economic relations” (214). After the second oil embargo in 1979, increasing levels of debt and structural adjustment agreements with international borrowers strangled Afroasian solidarity; by 1989, the Third World political project was dead.
Soon after Afroasia disappeared from the international scene, Eurasia reappeared, as narrated in Ch. 4. The objectives of “Eurasia Redux” in the 1990s were to challenge the west and create a sense of belonging for resentful Russian elites and ordinary people who sought the revival of a strong, multinational state. Lev Gumilev, the son of poet Anna Akhmatova and survivor of Soviet repression, became a prominent voice in 1989: he centered ethnic diversity as a virtue, in contrast to western homogeneity, and elevated the analysis of Russia’s history to a cosmic level. Other publications on Eurasian affinities proliferated, while Nursultan Nazarbaev of Kazakhstan proposed a Eurasian Union in 1994. Then came Aleksandr Dugin and Vladimir Putin—the intellectual who sharpened the ideological edge of Eurasianist thinking and the politician who weaponized Eurasian uniqueness for neo-imperial purposes. Dugin’s Foundations of Geopolitics (1997) was written as “a handbook” of how to establish Russian power in “big-space” politics. Russians were “people of Empire” and had to build a “New Empire” (240–41). He redefined Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations as a clash between two world orders, the Atlantic project versus the Eurasian project. Putin embraced Eurasian multiethnicity as a key element of his political platform. Becoming a president in 2000, he established the Eurasian Economic Community. He borrowed other Eurasianist ideas: “our genetic code,” “our spirit,” and “our civilizational model” color his speeches to the present (254). Dugin, for his part, pronounced Putin a “man of fate” (252). In 2014, the annexation of Crimea turned into a project of imperial enlargement, embracing the dual notions of superethnos and multiethnic cultural unity.
Many a historian would have stopped here and evaluated the transformation of intellectual ideas into a political ideology, but Burbank and Cooper continue to the present. In 2021, Putin merged homeland (rodina) and multiethnicity to justify conquest. A year later, he invaded Ukraine. Back to Trubetskoi, Ukraine was a “problem” because of its support for democracy and Europe. Beginning as a pandemic project, the book ultimately seeks to address a current crisis in the global order. Its dedication is eloquent: “To the people of Ukraine.” However, this framing raises some structural and theoretical questions. If it were not for the Ukraine war, would two chapters on Eurasia be necessary? Interwar Eurasia appears outlandish and parochial compared to interwar Eurafrica and Afroasia to warrant its own chapter. But also, is Russia a different type of empire, compared to France, Britain, and the US? And is there a distinction between post-imperial and post-colonial frameworks for political alternatives?
Given these burning questions, one wishes for actual conclusions, rather than reflections at the book’s end. What are the pros and cons of thinking about “possibilities”? Historians are well attuned to exploring paths not taken, but how do we conceptualize them as agents (or not) of historical change? Aspirations and hopes become viable political ideologies and projects only under certain conditions. Translating the “imagined futures” of intellectual and “opportunities” before political elites into actionable reality takes the building of mass movements and the realization of political goals. But also, when do “alternatives” become failures, a characterization avoided here? In this book, two transcontinental projects became frustrated—Eurafrica never came to fruition and Afroasia had a short span—while the third one, Eurasia, resulted into a neo-imperial war. What does this tell us about the limitations, pitfalls, and dangers of post-imperial possibilities?
The book’s second-to-last section, “Trajectories” (271), offers some partial answers. We learn, for example, that the layered sovereignty of Senghor’s Eurafrica shaped the institutional framework of the European Union while Putin’s Eurasia functioned as the EU’s antithesis. Alas, certain possibilities are better than others. But also, for all the talk of alternatives in the current historiography, their outcomes are often nebulous. As evident here, capitalism dealt with post-imperial situations as “manageable, even exploitable” (279). National states, especially the big ones, remained adaptable and resilient, while the triumph of sovereignty as an international norm “did not put an end to asymmetrical power relations” (280). This smart and rich book disabuses the optimist: the evidence suggests that political reconfigurations based on vertical solidarities are illusory. Perhaps this conclusion is inevitable in the post-2022 moment. Kudos to Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper for exploring these hard questions.
