The Russian Federation is trying to implement a new imperial project. This conclusion, based on historical and economic analysis, is made by Rutgers University political science researcher and professor Alexander Motyl in Foreign Policy. Motyl is an American historian and political scientist, an expert on Ukraine, Russia and the Soviet Union.
The author gives an example of the greatest imperial formations of human civilization. He also gives a recent example of European countries that were deprived of their own imperial heritage. “All the European colonial powers shared the imperial ideology during their active expansion. But they had to abandon it when they faced their own military and economic weakness after two world wars, national liberation struggles and the growing condemnation of the community international!”, notes the publication. “All these processes were not painless, but all empires went through them and did not try to restore their imperial ambitions afterwards.
Russia’s armed forces are mediocre, and the economy of the “empire” is the same size as that of the American state of Texas or European Italy. In addition, the ineffective and unstable management of the territories becomes an obstacle to the new imperial project. “The elites are beginning to struggle for power in the post-independence era, which they believe is fast approaching,” the author writes.
Building a successful empire requires not only a strong military or economy, but also a unifying, imperial ideology. If ideology is on the march, then there are problems with the economy or an effective military.
“What will happen to the future revived empire if the three necessary conditions are not met – even if there are favorable factors and an imperial ideology. If expansion is attempted without a strong enough military and an economy capable of supporting military power, the result will be an overload of the empire’s forces and its collapse”, the historian believes.
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Russia’s stagnation may cause an even bigger crisis, but no other development can be expected
The expert believes that an even worse situation may await Russia in the near future if the existing regime “continues to be guided by the whims of a single autocrat and continues to hinder technological innovation and economic growth.”
The future of Russia as an empire could hardly be better than it is today. The temptation to build a new empire out of the country would probably be irresistible.
The prognosis for the restoration of power and the new general imperial project is negative. The researcher believes that the West should not simply observe the situation. Since the “new empire” is doomed, the West has only two ways – to accelerate the ridding of the world from an aggressive empire, or to continue stagnation, which will bring even more casualties and destruction.
Russia was and remains the main colonial power, writes the Wall Street Journal. From the Caucasus to the Crimea, from the Arctic to the Amur, from the Volga to the Pacific Ocean – Russian colonial campaigns conquered many peoples, destroying local cultures, sovereignties and committing genocide. The Soviet Union, which Vladimir Lenin defined as anti-imperialist, behaved in the same way. From the organization of mass ethnic cleansing to destroy the colonized peoples to the creation of artificial famine against Ukrainians and Kazakhs and the creation of maps with supposedly autonomous republics in which the local population was deprived of power – Soviet experiments in many ways simply continued colonial policy of the Russian Empire. And this is without mentioning how the USSR during the Cold War supported despotic regimes in the countries of Africa and Latin America.
While post-Soviet republics such as Kazakhstan and the Republic of Moldova managed to gain independence after the fall of the USSR, colonized peoples on Russia’s borders, such as Chechnya and Tatarstan, were once again oppressed by the Kremlin’s dictatorship. They have been turned into a source of cannon fodder for Moscow’s imperialism, the WSJ points out.
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Tags: Russia superpower result overload empires forces collapse
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