Empire and After

Empire and After: Toward a Framework for
Comparing Empires and Their

Consequences in the Post-Imperial Middle
East and Central Asia
SALLY CUMMINGS AND RAYMOND HINNEBUSCH*
Abstract This article compares and contrasts the variations in paths from empire
to sovereignty in the Middle East and Central Asia. We identify differences in empires
and their impact; examine the drivers of transition from empire to sovereignty, the
international system and nationalist mobilization; assess the consequences of impe-
rial transmissions for state formation and nation-building; and link these factors to
the degree of rupture with empire in the post-imperial period.
*****
The end of empire marked one of the main twentieth-century
transformations in international politics. In the conventional nar-
rative, it completed the universalization of the Westphalian state
system. In the West, the most competitive form of political organi-
zation, the national state, had driven out smaller and larger forms
city-states and empires (Colas 2007: 1922). In parallel, Western
empires had exported states systems to the periphery, which, with
decolonization, became sovereign (Bull and Watson 1984). As sov-
ereign, in principle, the new states enjoyed a monopoly of legal
jurisdiction and actual control over their territories, independent
decision-making and recognition by other states. In the parlance
of neo-realism, imperial hierarchy gave way to an anarchy of
juridically equal sovereign states.
This narrative of a sharp break between empire and sovereignty
is an increasingly criticized caricature. In the real world the dis-
tinction is blurred, with many cases combining features of both
empire and state and one able to evolve into the other (Buzan 2004:
626; Colas 2007: 1821). In the age of globalization larger empire-
like entities and smaller unitse.g. world citieshave become more
viable while the sovereignty of nation-states is under siege (Colomer
2007). Old empires have survived by transforming themselves into
multi-national states (India, China) and new forms of informal
* Sally Cummings is Professor of International Relations at the University
of St Andrews and may be contacted at snc@st-andrews.ac.uk; Raymond
Hinnebusch is Professor of International Relations at the University of St.
Andrews and may be contacted at rh10@st-andrews.ac.uk.
Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 27 No. 1 March 2014
DOI: 10.1111/johs.12022
2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
empire or hegemony, particularly that of the US over the post-
colonial world, have emerged (Colas 2007: 15891). Moreover,
rather than states possessing sovereignty or not, there are degrees
of sovereignty; the sovereignty of weak states is often violated by
great powers (Krasner (1999) and state-builders in the periphery
struggle to such an extent to actualize sovereignty (Ayoob 1995)
that, for Jackson (1993), many enjoy only quasi-sovereignty. This
article follows this critical tradition in rejecting both a sharp break
between empire and sovereignty and a sharp dichotomy between
hierarchy and anarchy in the international system which, rather,
has elements of both (Hobson and Sharman, 2005, 6398).
But what explains the considerable variations in the interna-
tional system, ranging from empires that survive in new forms to
post-imperial states enjoying only semi-sovereignty? This paper
argues that differences in empires and the transition to post-imperial
statehood are crucial starting points for explaining this variation.
To grasp this dynamic, we adopt historical sociologys approach
that the domestic and international are historically mutually
co-constitutive (Hobden and Hobson 2002: 359). In concrete
terms, we extend Tillys (1990) argument that in the European
core, war made the state (and the state made war) by showing that
in the periphery, the core states made empires and these empires
(and the collaboration or resistance of local agents) made the post-
colonial states. As such, variations in empires and resistance to
them should have major consequences for variation in post-
imperial states and state systems. It is this relationship between
empire and post-imperial statehood that we seek to explore.
Approach
There is, however, very little literature about and no existing theo-
retical framework for systematically comparing the impact of
empire on post-imperial statehood. This article proposes such a
framework, building from a comparison of the Middle East/North
Africa (MENA) with Central Asia (CA).
1
We draw on the limited
literature on comparative empire and on the histories of empire in
our two regions to identify some of the main features of empire in
the regions. There is very little work comparing post-imperial state-
hood in our two regions, except for the pioneering work by Cole and
Kandiyoti (2002) and, as such, we bring together separate litera-
tures on them. We build on the very limited literature that attempts
to comparatively study the post-imperial consequences of empires,
particularly trying to carry forward the problematic raised in
Barkey and Hagen (1997); however, there is no previously
attempted systematic comparison of the effects of differences in
104 Sally Cummings and Raymond Hinnebusch
empires on post-imperial sovereignty in two regions; we aim to start
lling that gap as regards our two regions. Toward this end, we start
by systematically extracting and summarizing empirical generali-
ties from the separate literatures on empires and post-imperial
statehood in the two regions; we also draw on a set of specially
commissioned case studies that explicitly problematize the effect of
empire on statehood in the two regions.
2
Crucially, the article comes with several important qualications.
First, although we seek to identify key relations between empire and
sovereignty we do not seek to prove or test them, something that
must be left to later work. Nor do we try to isolate the weight of
empire compared to other factors that may also affect post-imperial
realities; we do, however, take especial account of one such factor,
namely that differences in the aftermath of empires in 1918 and
1991 could be attributed to the changed nature of the global order
rather than the features of the ex-empires (Lieven 2003: 344).
Second, although we believe our ndings will have relevance for a
more general comparative study of the impact of empire on post-
imperial sovereignty, our focus is on specic empires and, far from
assuming that any of themare typical of empires we even acknowl-
edge, for example, that the Soviet Union was an empire with a
difference. Third, we are not examining the total impacts of the
empires studied, which vary signicantly in different parts of the
same empire, but rather their impacts in the two regions selected;
had we studied the impact of the British empire in India or the
Russian empire in the Caucasus or Balkans the assessment of their
comparative impact would necessarily have been different. Such an
enormous undertaking is beyond the scope of this study, although
the framework we propose could in principle be used to facilitate it
and we still expect that overall differences in kind of empire will
likely matter for such experiences. Fourth, because empire ended in
MENA more than a half century ago and the ve stans came into
being only in 1991, we recognize that some of the developments
experienced in MENA could yet be replicated in CA. Fifth, our
macro-level cross-regional comparison of a long historical time
frame will necessarily be fairly broad-brush in nature, with much
contestable interpretation of historic specicity; the article is there-
fore only intended as a rst cut that would hopefully be useful as
a guide or foil for further comparative research on empires impact,
especially in our two regions.
Toward the construction of our framework we rstly identify the
features and varieties of empire in the regions. Next we identify the
drivers propelling the transition from empire to sovereignty, inter-
vening variables between the former and the latter. Finally, we
compare empires impacts on post-imperial orders both imperial
Empire and After 105
transmissions and reactive ruptures with empire. Our main aim is
to identify how far and how similarities in empire in the two regions
explain similarities in statehood and imperial differences explain
variations in the states systems.
The rationale for the comparison of MENA and CA is that they
share enough key similarities to enable us to more effectively
compare and explain differences: a) in both cases, earlier empires
forged an continuous civilizational area shaped by Islamic culture,
but an intervening period of Westernizing successor empires,
albeit of a quite different character (Britain and France in the
Middle East case; Tsarist Russia and USSR in the Central Asian
case), gave way to Westphalian-like systems of successor states;
hence the problematic between Islam and Western modernity is
faced in both regions; b) in both cases the empire was fragmented
by the imposition of the Westphalian successor states, hence
trans-state identity/ies inherited from earlier imperial experiences,
albeit weaker in the Central Asian case, cut across the successor
state system; c) in both cases, elites fostered under empire inher-
ited power under sovereign statehood and in both they faced similar
imperial legacies that had to be overcome to actualize sovereignty,
such as generating identities that match borders and diluting
dependencies on the ex-empire; and, d) in both cases, thus, the
individual states were formed from a mix of outside forces, namely
the impact of empire, and of internal actors, either by their
co-optation into empire or through the impact of their resistance to
it.
The outcome, however, has proved to be both similar and differ-
ent. Similar patterns of imperial-sponsored state creation seem
associated with similar kinds of authoritarian patrimonial states
after empire. Yet these similarities in statehood appear not to have
resulted in similar post-imperial states systems: while the Middle
East emerged from a peace to end all peace (Fromkin 1989) and
was born ghting (Buzan and Waever 2003: 188) emerging
amidst the 1948 Arab-Israeli war its CA counterpart was born
peaceful, with subsequently much lesser levels of war, irredentism,
and anti-imperialism. In this article we make a rst start at explor-
ing to what extent and via what mechanisms, the apparent simi-
larities in post-imperial statehood and differences in regional
stability in MENA and CA are an outcome of similarities and
differences in the impacts of the empires that shaped them.
Conceptualizing Empire and its Varieties
The most widely acknowledged features of empire include: 1) a
polity whose raison dtre being expansion, has no xed boundaries
until it is checked by countervailing power and is hence of very
large size (by contrast, a sovereign state has recognized xed
boundaries); 2) absorbing pre-existing polities, an empire is a
multi-communal polity composed of diverse groups and territorial
units; 3) a dominant core, a ruling class or ethnic group, governs
through a combination of authoritarian coercion, co-optation of
local intermediaries, to whom considerable power is often del-
egated, techniques of divide and rule, and provision of collective
goods such as a common law, a lingua franca, a common currency,
and communications links; 4) empires exhibit quite varying degrees
of inclusion of the periphery in terms of elite recruitment or assimi-
lation into a universal religion or higher civilization; as such, the
extent to which the empire is seen as alien in the periphery is
likely to similarly vary and should not be part of the denition of
empire (Colomer 2007; Doyle 1986; Lieven 2003: 38; Colas 2007:
111; Motyl 2001).
Variations in empire: Empires vary widely, but the two most
important types in modern times are the land-based bureaucratic
empires and the maritime commercial empires, with the former but
not the latter constituting a territorial unity. Eisenstadt (1969),
captured the typical features of bureaucratic empires: traditional in
that most people were passive subjects and rule was legitimized by
a universalistic religion; but pre-guring modern states inthat rulers
pursued ambitious goals through centralized differentiated bureau-
cracies, recruited partly on the basis of political loyalty and merit
(rather than ascription) which were able to extract resources and
subordinate such powerful forces as tribal elites and landed nobili-
ties. These empires varied in the degree to which they were assimi-
lative, with some pre-guring modern nations, like the Han Chinese
on the one hand which created a relatively homogeneous cultural
space in which coercion receded, and on the other the Roman which
eventually accorded citizenship to subject peoples. These empires
were pre- or non-capitalist in that, while their large size often
facilitated trade and economic growth and they sought to control
trade routes, the economy was subordinated to socio-political goals
including the extraction of taxes to support the ruling class and
imperial expansion (Colas 2007: 1922, 71, 11617).
The maritime commercial empires, and particularly the capitalist
empires of Britain and France, through which the West incorpo-
rated most of the non-Western world were artefacts, as Wallerstein
(1979) showed, of the emergence and expansion of a global market
differentiated, to an extent, from political rule. Their initial ratio-
nale was trade and plunder, with prot and war-making combined
by chartered companies seeking trading monopolies. In its early
stage Britains maritime empire was essential to the capital accu-
mulation that drove its industrialization. Empire often started as
an informal empire of free trade in which the metropole was
content to let indigenous governments bear the burdens of protect-
ing investment and political control was typically only assumed
when it was required to establish the conditions of capitalism in the
periphery (order, property rights, contract enforcement, commer-
cialization of agriculture). In their most mature stage of nance
capitalism, rival European empires incorporated the non-Western
world into a global division of labour in which the latter provided
lower value-added primary products and markets for the industries
of the imperial core and absorbed its excess capital accumulation.
Also in this stage, commercial competition morphed into geo-
political rivalry over prestige and the strategic advantage needed for
the protection of previously acquired assets or the competition for
new ones, with imperial possessions often proving their strategic
value in wartime. However, given their substantially commercial
rationale and lack of territorial contiguity with the metropole, mari-
time empires lacked an impulse to territorially incorporate con-
quered areas into a single polity comparable to that of land
empires. While the difference is one of degree, the priority in mari-
time capitalist empires was commerce and territorial expansion
was the means and outcome while in the pre-capitalist land
empires territory was one principal (though not the only) objective
and economic resources a means and result (Lieven 2003: 89127;
Colas, 226, 71115; Callinicos, 2009; Amin, 1978; Rosenberg,
1994, 91122, 15973; Halliday, 1994: 4773; Brewer, 1990, 124,
4256, 5872, 161224.
Modernization of empire: To survive in the age of nationalism
empires have to modernize (Lieven 2003: 4050) or risk breaking
up or becoming the victims of those that do. Imperial rivalry was
identied by Lenin and Hobson as a main driver of war in which
empires were made and broken; indeed the main victims of the two
World Wars and the Cold war were empires either destroyed in war
or fatally weakened by the costs of war and war preparation. But if
empires modernize, their large size may give them the competitive
advantage of greater power/security and large resources/markets,
and, if they break up, as Barkey (1997) observes, the imperial
cores, where modernization was normally more advanced, were
better equipped for modern sovereignty than their less modernized
peripheries.
An empire can modernize in one sense but fail or lag in another:
land empires have an advantage in political modernization and
maritime ones in economic modernization. Political modernization
means increased inclusion, that is, transformation into a multina-
tional state in which a supra-national identity embraces smaller
national (and sub-national) identities through a common citizen-
ship and the periphery is accorded representation at the centre and
some autonomy, typically under federal arrangements, with assimi-
lative impulses in the pre-modern period making it easier to devolve
power from the centre without risking breakup. Modernization in
land empires is typically sparked by military reverses at the hands
of nation-state-led empires which convince the formers elites that
military competitiveness requires the accoutrements of the latter,
such as efcient bureaucratic and taxation capacities, mass edu-
cation and nationalism, industrialization and the capitalist market,
thus driving their evolution toward a multi-national state. In mari-
time empires, political modernization is obstructed by the lack of
territorial contiguity and an assimilative impulse, and, while they
may, under pressure of imperial competition and war, concede
some self-government in order to retain the loyalty of the colonies,
they typically do not develop inclusive institutions or common
citizenship (Dawisha and Parrott 1997: 1011).
Economic modernization means substituting accumulation and
investment within for plunder through territorial expansion,
requiring, at a minimum, a sufcient differentiation of the economy
from the polity to allow capital accumulation. Obstacles to this in
bureaucratic empires are that property ownership may be precari-
ous, the capitalist classes stied and accumulation diverted to
political ends such as military competition and consumption. Land
empires may therefore economically stagnate (particularly once
territorial expansion ends), making them vulnerable to outside
conquest or internal disintegration; indeed, arguably this was the
case in the Soviet Union, a bureaucratic empire that actually
destroyed the capitalist class (Weber 1947; Lieven 2003:2740;
Colas 2007: 24). As for maritime empires, since they originate in
the main global centres of nance capital and spread the market
and private property, incorporation into such empires stimulates
some economic modernization in the imperial periphery, if often in
a dependent form. While maritime empires do not typically become
multi-national states, they can survive informally if nominally inde-
pendent states remain as economic peripheries of the ex-imperial
core. In this case, formal empire is replaced by modern forms of
hierarchy that, in conceding formal sovereignty, are more compat-
ible with the age of nationalism and dominate largely through the
economic instruments typical of the deepening age of globalization.
Imperial Formations in MENA and CA
The experience of the ME and CA is not one of simple transition
from empire to sovereignty since there were several empires in each
area and it is their cumulative impact and relation to each other
that matters. The early modern period (14001800) saw the rise of
the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East, which by 1800 was
engaged in defensive modernization, threatened by the similar
Russian empire that gradually wrested the Caucasus and the
Balkans from it. At the beginning of the 20
th
century, World War I
ushered in the fall of the Ottoman Empire, allowing the completion
of the British and French empires in the Middle East, while the fall
of the Russian empire opened the door to its revolutionary-
modernizing Soviet successor. We compare the combined imperial
experience of Ottoman followed by British-French imperial rule in
MENA with the Soviet (and prior Russian) experience in CA. What
follows is a brief comparison of the empires as experienced in our
two regions.
MENA: From Ottoman to Western Commercial Empires
Because Western empires imposed themselves at the expense of the
existing Islamic empire of the Ottomans, populations would have
seen the former in the light of the legitimacy or lack thereof of the
latter. The Ottoman Empire was ruled by a multinational elite
through a partly-merit bureaucracy, with no aristocracy, hence a
protected peasantry, considerable state-owned property and, in
Islam, a relatively egalitarian religious legitimation (Gerber 1987;
Barkey 2008). According to Lieven (2003: 12838), the empire
neither exploited its periphery, nor privileged an imperial race
(Turks) although co-optation into the elite did require assimilation
into the Ottoman Turkish language and culture and at its height
provided a high standard of governance fostering a high civilization.
Once the West captured the trade routes from it and opportunities
for plunder through expansion were exhausted, however, patrimo-
nialization undermined bureaucratic efciency, disorder set in,
privilege started to become hereditary, and tax farming led to the
exploitation of the peasantry and starving of the treasury (Lieven
2003: 13448; Colas 2007: 4853). However, under early 19
th
century defensive modernization, subjects became, in principle,
equal citizens embraced by a common Ottoman identity, a stronger
more centralized state with representative bodies emerged and it
seemed the empire might be transformed into a multi-national
state (Keydar 1997: 3044). In World War I it proved remarkably
robust, the vast majority of its Muslim citizens remaining loyal,
with the Arab revolt actually a British-manipulated sideshow.
Many scholars agree that the empires end was not the result of any
inexorable internal disease but an outcome of being on the losing
side in the war (Yapp 1987: 349; Barkey 2008: 26496). What is
crucial for the aftermath is that the Ottomans transmitted the
political culture and civilizational remnants of centuries of previous
Islamic empires, including universalistic identities that retained
the loyalty of people long after the empire had vanished.
Western penetration of MENA followed a typical pattern: treaties
forcing open markets and encouraging commercialization of agri-
culture were followed by export of nance capital in the form of
loans to rulers, then default on loans and a European takeover of
local nances, with resulting capital drain. Indigenous resistance to
this precipitated military intervention or occupation of outlying
areas like Egypt and North Africa. The process was crowned by the
breakup of the Ottoman Empire and Western occupation of the
remaining Arab provinces in WWI. Britain and France, in dividing
up nearly the whole of the Arabic speaking world between them-
selves, violated regional identity. Where the areas conquered had
been centres of high civilizations and extensive empires (Cairo,
Damascus, Baghdad) of which the mass of the population had
historical memories, resistance, reinforced by the emerging ideol-
ogy of Arab nationalism, was signicant and enduring. This was
especially so since arbitrary imperial boundary drawing fragmented
this former civilizational area into a multitude of mini-states, a
deformation seen as part of a divide-and-rule strategy.
Western Empires in MENA were established and maintained
through some combination of coercion and co-optation (Khalidi
2004: 136; Clancy-Smith 2004: 12529). In Algeria and the
mashreq, it took the defeat of indigenous armies and civilian insur-
gencies using artillery and aerial bombardment of cities, villages
and tribes, to impose Western rule. To give local elites a stake in the
imperial order, the metropoles encouraged their private appropria-
tion of the collective patrimonyland, oil thus, turning tribal elites
into great landlords or rich rentiers and tribesman and peasants
into agricultural proletariats. There was little large-scale non-
indigenous settlement in the region but where it did take place, in
Palestine and Algeria, the indigenous population was dispossessed.
The incorporation of the MENA into a global division of labour
was completed with the breakup of the large emergent Ottoman
market that had been developing under the tanzimat, snapping
regional interdependencies and reorienting economic links west-
ward. The colonies supplied raw materials to Western industries
and served as markets for Western manufactures. De-industri-
alization was only reversed during wartime rupture with the core or
after colonies acquired authority to put up tariff protection. The
colonies were all expected to pay their own way, taxed to support
the occupying armies and to pay off debts incurred before Western
conquest; as such, there was limited investment in education or
development, except for the modernization of agriculture and the
infrastructure that tied the region to global markets, which pro-
duced mono-crop export economies.
In reinforcing established elites, imperialism froze the social
structure at the top; while educated salaried classes employed at
the lower levels of the colonial state and new mercantile elements
were fostered, the dominance of property by imperial-aligned oli-
garchs and the frequent control of import-export commerce by
European or minority elements limited the economic opportunities
of the new indigenous strata. They therefore provided the natural
cadres of nationalist movements but the more prolonged the
nationalist struggle, the more property-less lower strata were also
mobilized and the more social revolutionary the content of nation-
alism. Simmering resistance, never denitively subdued, developed
into mass independence movements and attempted revolt when
Western control seemed to falter, e.g. in WWII when France and
Britain faced defeat by Germany.
The Western empires accorded some measure of self-governance
to the colonies, but imperial governors always had, at a minimum,
veto power. Europeans, believing colonial peoples unt for self-
governance, afrmed by the international jurisprudence of the time
(Burgis 2010), refused to apply to the colonies the egalitarian
values increasingly applied at home. Since the colonies were not
contiguous with the metropole and because metropolitan popula-
tions would never accept to be swamped by according citizenship to
vast numbers of colonial subjects (as in Rome), almost no political
integration took place. Rather, basic distinctions between core and
periphery were institutionalized in constitutional law and an ide-
ology of racial or civilizational superiority that largely obstructed
elite recruitment from and inclusion of the indigenous periphery in
central institutions. The rst generation of moderate indigenous
modernizers who had wanted inclusion was succeeded by nation-
alists demanding complete independence. Because co-opted elites
were not accorded a say in the running of the empire, if they had
ever identied with it, they ceased to do so. Thus, the break-up of
Western empires does appear inevitable (Colas 2007: 6270, 116
37; Lieven 2003: 123, 31314).
3
Central Asia: From Russian Territorial Empire to Soviet
Multinational State?
The Russian empire, based on an alliance of autocrat and aristoc-
racy, was an efcient apparatus for territorial expansion and soon
incorporated non-Russian Muslim peoples. However, according to
Lieven, while it enjoyed aspects of proto-nationhood, it lacked a
clear distinction between an imperial core/people and the non-
Russian periphery and in the early modern period even incorpo-
rated Tatar elites into its landed aristocracy while restricting
Russian settlement in order to protect indigenous communities in
the periphery. Nevertheless, the notion that Russia was an inclu-
sive empire has to be qualied. The Central Asian territories were
never regarded as being truly possible to assimilate. Nor were the
Russians innocent of the colonizing mentality. Imperial myth held
that Russia actually liberated small holding peasant communities
in Central Asia from tenancies in what Fieldhouse (1966: 33441)
called a social revolution, but others argue that their property
rights were already well protected under Islamic law (Morrison
2008). The Russians had always viewed nomadism as backward
and in the 19
th
century began to actively encourage settlement of
Russian agriculturalists in a bid to increase their access to land
and modernize agriculture. This led to a Kazakh uprising in which
200,000 were killed, a tragedy in this nations history. Yet the
Kazakhs herds thereafter increased and by contrast to the con-
temporaneous French empire in Algeria (Lieven 2003: 20130), the
Kazakhs were not marginalized in their own country. According to
Khalid (2009: 35), Russian conquest continued to bring Central
Asia into the modern world, although the process had already
begun in the early modern period through contacts with South Asia
or the Ottoman Empire. The Bukharan ulama, after their failed
declared jihad against Russia in 1866, became largely reconciled to
Russian rule (Babajanov 2004) and Russia, even if largely for fear
of further revolt, tolerated Islam.
While the Soviet Union carried on Russias tradition of centralized
autocracy, its project was born in Marxist-Leninist revolution and
its practice highly interventionist, with a high human price. On the
one hand, its elimination of the aristocracy, its state ownership of
property and the professed egalitarian ideology of communism bore
some similarities to the Ottoman Empire; on the other, it differed in
its mobilizational party and industrializing thrust. While Western
empires in the Middle East, ruling through traditional leaders,
aimed to keep people un-mobilized, Soviet power was spread by a
revolutionary overthrowing of old hierarchies and the mobilization
of workers, peasants and women. By contrast to the Tsarist tolera-
tion of Islam, the Soviets sought to marginalize it and their inter-
vention in realms of law and family were perceived as alien and
resisted by Muslim movements, bringing severe repression at the
height of Stalinism.
Still, the communists, conceiving of the USSR as a single
country, tried to create a common identity and equal citizenship
and under the 1918 federal Constitution the larger non-Russian
nationalities were accorded union republics with considerable
cultural and administrative autonomy, with a (until 1991 only
theoretical) right of secession, and central representative bodies
incorporated all nationalities. As in the Ottoman case, the top elite
was multi-national, and while the majority Russians dominated,
political mobility into elite positions, including the supreme polit-
buro, even if atypical, was possible for non-Russians. Although the
Russian language was prioritized as a lingua franca and in World
War II Stalin came to rely on Russian nationalism, Lieven (2003:
31819) still judged that a Russian nation was not fostered and
Russians did not, as an ethnic group, dominate the empire as the
British did theirs. Indeed, this is one reason that Russian nation-
alists (e.g. Yeltsin) did little to preserve the empire.
The effect on Central Asia was ambiguous. The early Bolsheviks
actually encouraged indigenous languages and allied with the
emerging intelligentsia around an egalitarian modernization
project. However, in order to centralize control for industrialization
and collectivization, Stalin purged Central Asian indigenous elites
and collectivization killed at a minimum a third of the Kazakh
population. Persecution of Islam was intensied. Khrushchevs
Virgin Lands scheme sponsored the settlement by 1.5 million Slavs
in Kazakhstan, requiring another purge of the local elite and
making the Kazakhs by 1991 a minority in their own country.
Under Brezhnev, however, indigenous elites again dominated their
regions and political leadership in the union republics and
although Russians often commanded the army and secret police,
many of these went native and indigenous regional leaders
achieved autonomy by building clientele networks controlling the
ow of information to Moscow and buying off gures in the central
elite (Lieven 2003: 290). The economy was still centrally run, the
plan and budgets controlled from Moscow, with key industries
controlled by all-union ministries that gave little care to the local
environment. For example, the cotton mono-crop exported to
Russian factories and sold back to the periphery resembled Egypt
under Britain (Atkins 2010), even if local leader Sharaf Rashidov
managed to successfully cream off more prots than his Egyptian
counterpart. Yet there was less straightforward exploitation of the
region and by some calculations, the centre may have subsidized
the CA periphery, the reverse of the normal Western imperial prac-
tice in MENA; Bunce (1999), for example, argues that the social
contract instituted, notably under Brezhnev, between Moscow and
the populace and regions, turned the USSR, inadvertently, into a
redistributive empire in which the centre ceased to extract from
the periphery. Industrial investment in the region was signicant
and if Russians provided the majority of skilled workers, engineers
and managers, natives had priority for local government jobs,
although if they wanted social mobility they had to be Russian-
uent. The core-periphery education gap was narrower than in
Western empires. However the direction of the subsidy ow is
viewed, economically CA under the Soviet Union nonetheless bore
many of the hallmarks of a traditional type of empire: as breadbas-
ket and raw materials supplier to the core and as economically
dependent to it.
The unusual features of economic modernization and citizenship
accompanying the Soviet Union have led some to dispute the label
of empire altogether, calling it instead a modernizing multinational
state or something between the two (Suny 1995; Beissinger 2006).
Terry Martin (2001: 19) describes the USSR as a new form of
empire that used concessions to national self-determination to
appease culturally distinct populations, thereby blurring the line
between state and empire. Certainly, the USSR was an empire with
a difference that should make for differences in post-imperial
outcomes.
Comparing Historical Experiences of Empire
While differences in empire matter, it is the particular experience of
specic areas of the periphery, which may differ in different parts of
the same empire, which shapes the effect of empire on post-
imperial sovereignty. Traditionally the legitimacy of empires rested
chiey on their ability to establish order but in the modern period,
much more came to be expected of them. The sparse literature that
has addressed the issue suggests that empire was differentially
experienced depending on whether it frustrated or accommodated
pre-existing identity, accorded some political incorporation and
fostered economic modernization and social mobility (Parrott 1997;
Tsygankov 2000). MENA and CA do appear to have experienced
empire quite differently. 1) In MENA there was a strong prior
identity that was violated by imperial incorporation, with forced
fragmentation, coming after centuries of unity under Islamic
empires, bound to be experienced as a deep mutilation of the polity;
by contrast in CA a shared supra-national Soviet identity was
paralleled by the creation of the union republics which constituted
proto-national identities, overshadowing rather than frustrating
previous Islamic and Pan-Turkic identities. 2) In the Western
empires, the sharp metropole-colony distinction meant political
inclusion was never on the agenda; by contrast in the Soviet Union,
like the Ottoman Empire, the elite was multinational, with regional
elites assimilated into the Soviet political culture and represented
in central bodies that governed the empire, albeit via authoritarian
practices. Thus, non-Russians were offered the possibility of
becoming Soviet but the Middle Easts indigenous people could
never be British or French (and the French experiment of granting
Algeria representation in parliament failed precisely because it
incorporated settlers, not the indigenous population). 3) In socio-
economic terms, the Ottoman, Soviet and even Russian empires
were relatively egalitarian in their impacts, with the Soviet radically
demolishing old social hierarchies, compared to the fostering of
class inequalities under Western capitalist empires. Settler colo-
nialism also was somewhat less damaging in CA where settler Slavs
either left or were accorded citizenship with indigenous peoples
under post-imperial rule; by contrast, settler colonialism in Algeria
was only reversed with massive violence and in Palestine it resulted
in permanent displacement of the indigenous people. 4) Economi-
cally, the incorporation of the Middle East into a colonial division of
labour fostered some modernization but was perceived in MENA as
designed to foster the development of underdevelopment. Despite
similar practices in the Soviet empire, the Soviets invested more in
the non-Russian periphery than Western empires did in their colo-
nies, and spread mass literacy, urbanization and industrialization
which eroded rather than accentuated core-periphery differences.
Transition from Empire: Drivers of Sovereignty
De-colonization was driven by both external forces (the interna-
tional system) and internal forces (nationalist mobilization), which
together shaped the particular direction it took.
International System: Power Balance, Hegemonic Norms
The international system, argues Doyle (1986:23256), is an inter-
vening variable in the creation of empires; equally so, pathways out
of empire were shaped both by the international power balance and
the hegemonic norms at the time of the transition to sovereignty.
There were both similarities and differences in these at the time
MENA and CA were making their transitions.
In the international power struggles of the early twentieth century,
when MENA was making its transition, rival great powers used
egalitarian norms to appeal for wider support. Thus, during WWI,
the Western allies used the norm of national self-determination to
legitimize their ght against multi-ethnic empires (Austrian,
Ottoman), in the process undermining the legitimacy of their own
empires; as a result, the Versailles settlement that imposed Western
empires on MENA peoples was widely seen, as it was in Europe, as
a victors dictat by its victims, at odds with self-determination. The
mandate system was an effort to make empire more acceptable but
ultimately it legitimated the demand for independence if peoples
could show that they were prepared for it (Louis 1984). Still, it took
the emergence of bi-polarity to fully empower the new norm of
self-determination: the anti-imperialist policy of the two post WWII
superpowers, combined with the economic exhaustion of the old
imperial powers, which nevertheless still fought tenaciously (Suez,
Algeria) to keep their empires.
Also important, at the time of transition to sovereignty in MENA,
socialism, promoted by the Soviet counter-empire, was mounting a
strong challenge to capitalism and, in promising a more egalitarian
road to development free of dependence on the West, was widely
embraced in MENA, in various mixtures with nationalism. Eco-
nomic nationalism viewed global market integration as reproducing
dependency and advocated a diversication of economic relations
and a turn from primary product exportation to import substitute
industrialization, both of which were facilitated by Communist bloc
aid and markets. Socialism also de-legitimized the appropriation of
land and oil by Western-fostered oligarchies and once their imperial
protectors departed, they were widely overthrown and their assets
redistributed in revolutions.
In CA, in the period preceding the fall of the Soviet Union, the
discourse on sovereignty denoted decentralization and confedera-
tion, short of full independence. The 1991 New Union Treaty nego-
tiated with the leaders of the union republics carved out a middle
ground between full sovereignty and full subordination to Moscow,
with republics allowed to opt in, and, had it been actualized,
sovereignty within the Soviet Union might have taken on a new
and unique meaning in the international system of states (McFaul
2006). But the Moscow coup of 19 August 1991 pre-empted its
adoption, with the emerging Russian leader, Boris Yeltsin, declaring
Russia to be a sovereign state, with considerable popular support;
this precipitated the break-up of the union, with the right to seces-
sion enshrined in the Soviet constitution legitimizing the transition
to sovereignty in CA. Traditional understandings of sovereignty in
the international system endowed the union republics with it but
not smaller units or larger constructions, such as the Common-
wealth of Independent States (CIS), whose function was reduced
to presiding over a civilised divorce (Suyarkulova 2010). Being
congruent with shared understandings of sovereignty, the 1991
settlement enjoyed legitimation that Versailles never had, a factor
in the greater immediate stability of CA.
The market-centric norms of globalization dominant at the time
of CAs transition to sovereignty were very different from the egali-
tarianism at the time of MENAs independence. This was reective
of the triumph of Western neo-liberalism accompanying Soviet
collapse, itself attributed by Lieven to a loss of faith in the socialist
ideology that cemented the empire owing to economic failure under
the stress of military competition with the US. Neo-liberal norms
legitimized CA elites private appropriation of public assets, gener-
ating enormous new inequalities, in contrast to MENA where a
revolutionary wave had reversed appropriations under Western
imperialism in many states.
In both cases, international society conrmed the sovereignty of
the new states by extending recognition, with its assumptions of
non-interference, membership in international organizations, the
right to exploit their own natural resources and, in principle, to
adopt their own development paths. The norm of sovereignty was
embraced by the state elites that inherited power after empire as a
protection against stronger neighbours and interference by the
ex-empire, although initially with reluctance in CA and with
ambivalence in MENA insofar as sovereignty sanctied articial
boundaries at the expense of Pan-Arab identity in the latter. Both
MENA and CA elites used their new sovereignty to diversify their
economic relations in order to reduce dependence on the ex-empire.
Nationalist Mobilization
The pathway to sovereignty was also shaped by nationalist mobi-
lization against the imperial power; the more damaging the imperial
experience and the more extended the nationalist struggle, the
greater the social depth of popular mobilization and the more
radical the variant of nationalism. National mobilization also aimed
at creation of a national identity among the often-diverse peoples
inherited by new states from empire (Doyle 1986: 36972).
Levels of nationalist mobilization were much higher in the Middle
East than CA, although it was by no means uniform: it was most
intense and radical in countries such as Algeria and Palestine
where colonial settlement drove indigenous people off the land; in
Iraq and Syria which suffered from the forced fragmentation of the
Mashreq and the imperial consolidation of big landed classes at the
expense of peasants and tribesmen; and in Egypt and Iran which
endured long periods of foreign control, direct and indirect. British
sponsored Zionist settlement in Palestine intensied region-wide
nationalist mobilization from the 1930s.
Nationalist mobilization in MENA was also shaped by the par-
ticular context of imperial rule in different states. In the more
nationally mobilized states Western empires promised or conceded
greater, if still limited, self-government, typically to avoid the costs
of higher repression in periods of weakness; this temporarily
absorbed discontent but also widened space for nationalist elites to
develop organized mass followings. Yet, because foreign and secu-
rity affairs remained under imperial high commissioners and the
empire could intervene forcefully from military bases inside the
country if its sway was challenged, this tended to discredit elites
that chose to accept co-optation under the terms of such limited
self-government and hence empowered more radical lower-middle
class nationalists (Louis 1984; Yapp 1987: 30151).
By contrast, in less developed tribal societies of the Gulf emirates,
where a lighter-touch imperialism imposed political advisors but
not occupation, per se, and client elites acquired a share of the
growing oil wealth, independence was accorded for British eco-
nomic reasons and without a struggle, indeed, accepted with reluc-
tance in view of the threats these weak but super-rich mini-states
faced from their neighbours. The consequent lack of nationalist
mobilization in the Gulf meant minimal rupture after empire and,
indeed, economic ties the recycling of petrodollars to the core
deepened after independence.
Similarly, mobilization in CA was limited because sovereignty was
devolved without a struggle once the core no longer found it prot-
able to maintain the empire. Grievances against the centre had
certainly existed inCAand these largely took the formof demands for
cultural or environmental rights within the union, sometimes
acquiring national resonance as was the case with the Nevada-
Semipalatinsk movement under its leader Olzhas Sulemeinov; but
even if Central Asian cultural and social movements wanted to wrest
greater autonomy from the centre they did not demand full-blown
independence. Even though embracing ideas of greater autonomy
CA publics did not support full independence. They voted to main-
tain the union just before its break-up and the Central Asian
republics were excluded from the dissolution negotiations and their
leaders disappointed by the outcome (Lieven 2003: 289). Sovereignty
largely preceded the development of nationalism which was elite-
driven and pragmatic; e.g. in Uzbekistan, it was stimulated by
Gorbachevs crackdown on corruption in the regional party appara-
tus and in Kazakhstan by the ex-communist Kazakh elites deter-
mination to appropriate the countrys energy resources and not let
themfall to Russians or Russia. Far fromhaving fought for it, Central
Asian leaders viewed the prospect of independence with consider-
able unease, not least because of their economic dependence on
Russia, the strong Russian presence, and their lack of any experi-
ence in foreign policy-making. The weakness of nationalist indepen-
dence mobilization in CA means that the legitimacy bestowed to
leaders who come to power on the back of a struggle for indepen-
dence was lacking there.
Imperial Transmissions
The imperial transmissions most important for sovereignty are: 1)
the extent of state formation; 2) whether post-imperial states ter-
ritories are congruent with national identity or not.
State Formation inheritances: The successive empires in both
regions provided key requisites of statehood (boundaries, state
apparatuses) that have endured almost without exception. Empires
also transmitted political legacies used in post-imperial state-
building, notably the overdevelopment of autocratic, bureaucratic
and patrimonial practices at the expense of political institutions.
Although there were similarities in outcome, it was not uniform.
According to Barkey, the ex-imperial core inherits the strongest
institutions while the periphery turns to anti-imperialist national-
ism as a substitute for institutions (Barkey 1997: 99114: Fortna
2010). The emergence of MENAs strongest post-Ottoman state in
Turkey and its ability to move beyond patrimonialism is plausibly
traced to its inheritance of the core institutions of the empire
(Fortna 2010). In the Arab lands (Fawcett 2010, McDougal 2010),
the main Ottoman inheritance was the notable clientelist style of
politics that was combined with the power apparatuses transmitted
by Western empires. Elites gained some preparation for governing
in periods of semi-sovereignty under which representative institu-
tions had been conceded by the Western colonizers. However, the
latter could not be consolidated because of their domination by
imperial-fostered landlords and tribal chiefs, whose clientele net-
works kept the middle classes excluded and the masses unmobi-
lized. Under European rule, the Arab militaries had been recruited
from pre-nationalist Turkic, tribal or minority elements and
shunned by the dominant Sunni Arab notables, but as emerging
new states gained greater control over their militaries, the ofcer
corps came increasingly to be recruited from the nationalist-
minded rural lower-middle classes; as a result, the new ofcer
corps and the old politicians of the urban oligarchy came to repre-
sent difference social classes, and their conict unleashed insta-
bility after independence until a new generation of elites found a
formula for constructing durable regimes.
Initially, in reaction against the inegalitarian heritage of Western
rule, a wave of revolutions gave birth to populist authoritarian
republics in the more developed Arab lands. Populism, a restora-
tion of egalitarian Islamic norms, was combined with the authori-
tarian inclinations of the military elites trained under Western
imperialism that almost everywhere assumed power. Their rule was
modernized via diluted versions of bureaucratic centralization,
single party systems and etatism borrowed from the Soviet Union.
These states could not, however, be consolidated until the new
elites learned to draw on the patrimonial practices of past nomadic-
constructed Islamic empires, notably elite cohesion through pri-
mordial asabiyya (solidarity) and clientelism, thereby producing
neo-patrimonial republics. The exception was the Arab Gulf where
British imperialism engineered an anomaly in the modern world,
ruling monarchy: tribalism, combined with growing oil resources,
energized an effective clientelism deterring revolution.
In CA, the transition to sovereign statehood was smoother than in
MENA because the Soviet union republics were sovereign states in
embryo with more accepted borders and higher levels of institu-
tionalization. Also, because there were no inherited colonial armies
or independence wars to generate indigenous ones, the military was
weak and subordinate to civilian leadership, allowing CA to avoid
the revolutionary coups typical of early Middle Eastern statehood.
In late Soviet times, corruption and clientelism mediated the
relation with Moscow; with the collapse of the communist party
ideology and organization that had been the motor of the state,
such patrimonial practices lled the post-Soviet vacuum. Neo-
patrimonial regimes mixing bureaucratic structures with rent-
lubricated clientelism emerged, very similar to those in the Middle
East. Under such regimes, state capacity contracted after indepen-
dence, resulting in falls in education and health levels; rentierism
loomed larger, associated with de-diversication of economies and
de-mobilization of a population dependent on patron-states (even if,
for example, the Kazakhstani leadership, itself neo-patrimonial,
has simultaneously tried to state- and capacity-build with substan-
tial investments in the education sector). The exception to the
peaceful transfer to sovereignty was Tajikistan where a civil war
of anti-communist, Islamic and regional forces against the
ex-communist elite ended in a stalemate and power-sharing. State-
hood in oil-poor Kyrgyzstan has also proved less robust (Ostrowski
2010, Lewis 2010; Lieven 2003: 39095; Olcott, 2010).
Economically, both regions remained largely primary product
exporters locked into various economic dependencies on their
ex-imperial core/s and still magnets for Western energy companies
or great power intervention. The main liability of both post-imperial
regimes was that the inherited insufcient differentiation between
political and economic realms typical of their shared state-led
modernization made their economies vulnerable to exploitation
for distributional, patrimonial and military ends which retarded
capital accumulation and buttressed authoritarian rule. Addition-
ally, military over-investment in the Soviet Union prior to CA inde-
pendence, spurred by Cold War competition, had retarded growth;
this was paralleled in the Middle East by capital-dissipating mili-
tarization spurred by intense regional conicts (Arab-Israel, Iran-
Iraq). Post-colonial regimes in both regions had soon to nd ways
of re-stimulating capitalist development. Where regimes enjoyed
hydrocarbon resources, rentier states emerged more responsive to
their global protectors and markets than their own populations, but
still often able to provide patronage and some welfare; where such
resources were absent, regimes tried to stimulate capital accumu-
lation through inegalitarian neo-liberal practices, with resulting
legitimacy decits necessitating increased repression.
Identity: frustration or satisfaction: By contrast to the cosmopolitan
mixing of unpoliticized ethnicities under empires, the modern
counter-normof nation-state congruence legitimates the creation of
homogeneous nations, resulting in post-imperial ethnic un-mixing,
sometimes through violent conict (Brubaker 1997). In Turkey,
Ataturk fought off imperialismand was able to establish boundaries
congruent with an emerging Turkish nation, but this was accompa-
nied by population transfers (paralleled by a longer history of
in-migration of Turkic peoples from the Balkans and Caucasus); in
the process, he acquired the legitimacy to reconstruct the core of the
empire as a Turkish nation-state and to eschewirredentismover the
loss of former Ottoman possessions. Nationalist legitimacy also
allowed Turkey to democratize, hence further strengthen the legiti-
macy of the post-imperial state.
Elsewhere in the region, it was different. It is no accident that the
two peoples denied statehood in the Versailles settlement, the
Kurds and Palestinians, would become centres of enduring conict.
Assimilationist nation-building projects in Turkey, Iraq and Iran
denied demands for Kurdish self-determination. In Palestine,
empire-sponsored settler colonialism ended in the expulsion of
Palestinians from their land, with fraught consequences for
regional stability. Also, where imperialism had created articial
communally-divided states, as in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, there
was a strong tendency, once the mediating imperial power
departed, for one communal group to seize the state, retarding
nation-building (Lieven 2003: 369).
What made the Arab worlds experience unique, however, was the
poor t between territory and supra-state (Pan-Arab, Islamic) iden-
tity resulting from the imposition of a Western style states system
on the cultural space of ex-Islamic empire. Post-colonial Arab
states have had to compete for the loyalties of their populations
against supra-state identities that may be used by opposition
movements to contest their legitimacy. Legitimacy depends, to an
extent not seen elsewhere, on regimes being seen to act in the
interest of the larger supra-state (Arab-Islamic) community against
what are widely seen as threats from Israel and the West. Unlike in
the West, where the rise of nationalism was combined with the
consolidation of territorial sovereignty (notably in republican
France), endowing the resultant nation-states with a legitimacy
bonus, in the Arab world, the incongruence of territorial sover-
eignty and national identity produced legitimacy decits (Hudson
1977; Valbjrn 2010; Lawson 2006).
In CA the story was different. The Soviet Union was the largest
multi-ethnic polity to systematically base its political units on
ethnicity (Suny 1993). Between 1924 and 1936 a process known
as the Soviet Territorial National Delimitation (natsionalno-
gosudarstvennoe razmezhevanie) was brought to its completion and
the ve Soviet Socialist Republics (SSRs) bearing the name of the
titular nationality were formed. The internationally-minded Bol-
sheviks (Haugen 2003), whose ideological platform was predicated
on the withering away of the nation-state in the march to a socialist
future, thereby built into the system a fundamental tension
between national and Soviet-wide identities that Adrienne Lynn
Edgar (2004) rightly observes changed over time but never disap-
peared. The Soviet state, furthermore, made nationality a decisive
criterion in the distribution of goods and resources such as jobs,
education and positions in bureaucracy and used ethnicity as the
cornerstone of socio-political transformation, becoming something
of an afrmative action empire (Martin 2001).
The Western empires drew MENA borders for strategic conve-
nience, and a similar explanation of divide-and-rule motives behind
border drawing was a main one held by Sovietologists before Soviet
collapse. Unlike the MENA project, however, Soviet ethnographers
were actively involved in border drawing, and the resultant empha-
sis on nationhood led to chronic ethnophilia (Slezkine 1994). This
approach partly reected a belief in the necessity of creating
nations to hurry up their eventual demise and the march to social-
ism, with authors such as Haugen (2003) also suggesting that the
territorial borders do reect territorialized national identities. The
granting of nations was also a tactical concession to win round
dissenters and oppressed colonial peoples from abroad by framing
the new state as an anti-colonial regime; an active, prophylactic
strategy of promoting non-Russian nation-building to prevent the
growth of nationalism (Martin 2001: 8). Borders were also the
outcome of participation from local elites, with some compelling
evidence on this line of argument also provided by Edgar (2004) in
her study of the Turkmen elite.
The titular majorities were thus themselves partly Soviet con-
structions, especially in the case of the Uzbeks and Tajiks, as were
ethnic ssures from the existence of minorities, with tensions
among, say, Ferghanis, Khwarazmis and Samarqandis in the Uzbek
case, or mountain and lowland Tajiks remaining to this day. These
constructions have proven impressively hardy. First, an instrumen-
tality of identity resulted whereby many came to realize the advan-
tages of calling themselves Uzbek over, say, Sart or Tajik (Bergne
2007). Second, irredentist claims have been the exception rather
than the rule. This may be partly because of the above-explained
attempted congruity of titular majority and republican borders. But
even in the case where this was spectacularly not achieved, e.g. in
the Tajik case, elites have chosen to honour present borders rather
than contest them. The mismatch of ethnic and political bound-
aries in the Ferghana Valley, as a further example, has not led to
interventionist behaviour with the Uzbel leadership priding itself on
its non-interference, e.g. over the violence between the Kyrgyz and
Uzbeks in Kyrgyz Republics Osh in June 2010, eschewing any
irredentist ambition to create a Greater Uzbekistan (Fumagalli
2010).
Degrees of Rupture
Empire leaves behind durable legacies but can also provoke reac-
tions leading to rupture with the imperial past, both internally and
in external relations where anti-imperialism can poison relations
with the ex-empire. The main difference between the two regions is
the greater attempted rupture in MENA, largely owing to the more
damaging experience of empire and the consequently higher levels
of nationalist mobilization. While the Arab provinces only reluc-
tantly accepted the break-up of the Ottoman Empire and the CA
republics only reluctantly separated from the Soviet Union, many
Arabs fought to end the Western empires and after independence
sought to efface their remnants, notably in the waves of revolutions
against the inequalities established under Western imperialism.
Post-independence association with the ex-imperial core never
enjoyed legitimacy, from the time of the failed Baghdad Pact.
Repeatedly, counter-hegemonic movements and revisionist states
sought, in the name of supra-state identities, Pan-Arabism (Nass-
ers Egypt, Saddams Iraq) or Pan-Islam (Khomeinis Iran), to break
links to the ex-imperial core but were frustrated by external inter-
vention and imperial residues such as borders and client elites. As
a result, the Middle East, as Brown (1984) argues, remains the
most penetrated Third world region and as Buzan (1991) notes, the
one classical civilization that has not recovered its historical great-
ness after (Western) empire.
To be sure, the exceptional continued durability of anti-
imperialism in MENA is owing to the way a unique combination of
factors oil and Israel acts as magnets of continuing post-
imperial external intervention. But these are themselves conse-
quences of empire: without the British imperial takeover of the
region, Israel would not have been established and this is widely
understood in the region. It is also widely understood that oil was
a motive for Western empire in the region and explained the tenac-
ity with which the West has sought to sustain its penetration of the
region after empire. Of course, Britain and France have shed their
formal empires but the US, having assumed protection of the
status quo they left behind, became their informal imperial suc-
cessor and was so perceived in the region. Indeed, especially after
two US wars against Iraq, in which the factors of oil and Israel were
intimately implicated (Hinnebusch 2007), US hegemony appeared
rmly established over the region, a new level of hierarchy that
qualies the sovereignty of regional states. This explains why anti-
imperialism, obsolete in much of the post-colonial world, remained
alive in MENA, keeping resistance to external penetration costly
and the region unstable. The exception is Turkey, which, having
successfully fought off imperialism, could engage with the West on
a more self-condent basis.
This can be compared to CA where nationhood was a product of
imperial rule and modernization suffered reversals after imperial
break-up, resulting in more benign perceptions of the imperial era.
In striking contrast to MENA, CA leaders Soviet identity initially
give them legitimacy and the idea of a Commonwealth (CIS) joining
the ex-empire and ex-colonies was accepted even if of only symbolic
importance. As in MENA, there is a gap between the more state-
centric identities of elites and popular attachment to supra-state
identities; yet the anti-imperial thrust of Pan-Arab and Islamic
identities in MENA contrasts with the pro-imperial (pro-Russian)
thrust in CA, manifest in nostalgia for the Soviet era, emigration to
Russia, and a backlash against the inequalities fostered by
Western-promoted neo-liberalism (Adams 2010; Lewis 2010). The
geographic proximity of the ex-imperial (Russian) core might have
been seen as a threat to post-colonial autonomy in CA, but the
interdependencies of population, energy pipelines, security etc.
made too much rupture between Russia and CA states too mutu-
ally damaging. Yet, Russias lack of surplus capital to export to the
CA periphery made it harder for it to reconstruct a post-imperial
informal hegemony. Moreover, the geographical contiguity of
Russian and Chinese power, balanced by the recently arrived US
presence, meant Central Asian states were able to negotiate
between multiple competing hegemons, easing dependency on any
one of them (Deyermond 2009), with consequently less experience
of Russian neo-imperialism that would de-legitimize continued
association with the ex-empire.
Conclusions
The evidence here presented supports the hypothesis with which
the study began: that empire matters for what comes after and
although other factors, not least the agency of post-imperial state-
builders, also matter, even these actors cannot escape the impact of
the imperial legacy. The similarity in the imperial creation of the
new states in MENA and CA that achieved independence during
de-colonization does seem to explain similarities in the kinds of
states that resulted. In both regions, the imperial powers consti-
tuted the boundaries of what would become the new states, passed
on bureaucratic governing apparatuses, and conceded them sov-
ereignty in the de-colonization process, but it was up to indigenous
state builders to make their states work; in some places where
there were pre-existing state traditions, as in Egypt and Morocco or
as in Turkey and CA where indigenous forces had a greater hand in
the state creation process, the outcome had more legitimacy than
in the Levant where states were seen as articial imperial creations.
But, indicative of the difculty of the task everywhere, was the
widespread resort in both regions to neo-patrimonial practices
inherited from earlier layers of empire. Such practices were most
tenacious and successful when clienteles could be modernized and
lubricated by hydrocarbon rent, itself passed on by empire; indeed,
variations in both regions in states access to rent explains differ-
ences in the stability of post-imperial neo-patrimonialism, evident,
for example, in the greater instability of the Kyrgyz Republic and of
republics such as Egypt and Syria compared to the hydrocarbon
rich Gulf monarchies and in CA notably Turkmenistan. The result-
ing states typically combined personalistic leadership (monarchies
and presidential monarchies) and clientelism with limited institu-
tional development and partly incorporated oppositions. They have
limited infrastructural power and few mechanisms of public
accountability, hence insufcient legitimacy to relieve them of
domestic insecurity. But in both regions enough post-imperial state
building took place to endow states with something more than
quasi-sovereignty.
Differences in imperial heritages also help explain the greater
instability of the MENA states system and the lesser legitimacy of
informal ex-imperial hegemony over that region compared to CA. In
MENA, Western imperialism, born amidst a peace to end all
peace, was much more damaging, leaving behind intractable
regional conicts and driving radical but failed attempts at rupture,
thereby sustaining the de-legitimation of association with the
Western ex-empire and making the region the epicentre of contem-
porary global struggles. By contrast, empire in CA left behind no
intractable conict and inspired no comparable revolutionary or
anti-imperial movements or civilizational clash.
However, what both regions share is that despite sovereignty
and in MENA half a century of it neither have managed to move
up in the global hierarchy and remain under persistent, if informal,
residues of empires. This continuation of hierarchy is another part
of how the narrative of movement from empire to sovereignty has to
be qualied in our regions. How far this is due to the immediate
effects of empire, such as the fragmentation, at least in MENA, of
the large territorial space that had once made MENA Islamic
empires global powers (and in contrast to China and India, which
escaped fragmentation and have improved their global status) and
to what extent it is due to patrimonial governance in post-imperial
states is debatable but both factors are arguably in good part a
consequence of empire.
In conclusion, and keeping in mind the purposes and qualica-
tions noted at the outset, we set out to provoke further thinking on
how the different ways in which empire-builders made empire also
inuenced the making of the post-imperial successor states. In
doing so, we have qualied conventional narratives about a sharp
break between the ages of empire and of the sovereign nation-state,
with our more complex story in line with the traditions of historical
sociology. Finally, while as comparativists we have sought to iden-
tify commonalities and regularities, as area specialists we also
embrace the many exceptions to the broad generalizations we have
put forward since the heritages of empire are, as Catherine Lutz
(2006) put it, in the details.
Notes
1
We take Central Asia (CA) to mean the ve post-Soviet republics of
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. MENA
includes the Mashreq (Levant), Egypt and North Africa and the Arabian
Peninsula.
2
These commissioned papers were later published in Sally Cummings
and Raymond Hinnebusch, Sovereignty After Empire: Comparing the Middle
East and Central Asia (Edinburgh University Press, 2011).
3
On the consequences of Western empires in the Middle East, see
Adelson 1995; Ayubi 1995: 87, 99; Amin, 1978; Bridge and Bullen, 2005:
18892; Bromley, 1994, 4685; Owen, 1981, 39, 92; Issawi 1982: 138
155; Yapp, 1987: 135; Sayf 2004, 5574; Fromkin, 1989; Fieldhouse,
2006.
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