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| photo by Helen Izbor |
Two
centuries ago, no more than a dozen of European governments practically owned
the entire globe. In 1648, the Thirty Years' War ended with the Peace of
Westphalia, a benchmark juncture that heralded the genesis of a state-centric
international system. The imperialist rule that continued to dictate the global
political configuration throughout the second millennium started to fade away
in the face of national sovereignty. Eventually, a metamorphosis from the
archaic feudal attributes of imperialism was construed as a normative
conversion under conditions of progressive historical development.
Nation-states and empires came to be seen as polarities of political regimes,
with one of them inherently doomed to come off stage.
Nonetheless, when the sun finally set on the
last empire with a collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, an insinuation of a
post-imperial syndrome, or trauma, was triggered. The phenomenon of such
phantom pains was experienced by most absolutist hegemonies, including the UK
and France, but their adjustment to a new position in the world order was
delicate and subtle. Nonetheless, some countries never bounced back from an
attack on their imperial mentality, cultivating a philosophy of ressentiment
and nostalgia over a vanished regal magnificence. In this analysis, I will
address Russia and Turkey as primary contemporary examples of an unsettled
inferiority complex that stems from a former status as metropoles, followed by
an unwillingness to forsake this role. For these societies, an inability to
restore the erstwhile might is misconstrued as a national tragedy, which serves
as a useful populist tool for political actors in achieving their objectives.
In
his postulate On the Genealogy of Morality, Friedrich
Nietzsche describes how
master morality is turned upside down by an uprising of the suppressed.
Replacing strong and authoritative with abused and helpless in the system of
coordinates, slave morality is aimed at the denigration of the oppressors.
Philosophy of the weak is ingrained in the notion of ressentiment: a sublimation in an attempt to escape vengeful
feelings of feebleness and frustration. However, for such persons who are
incapable of actual responsive action, they reward themselves with a fantasy of
revenge. Construction of an enemy image, whom a subject considers being the
cause of his failures and thus feels hostile to, is a key factor: “the 'foul
fiend, ‘the Evil one,’ as his fundamental concept, proceeding from which he now
conceives also a complementary image and counterpart, a ‘Good one’ himself!” (Nietzsche, 1987, 39)
Over time, ressentiment derives a political connotation in
the light of unprecedented violence in the conflicts of the twentieth century,
with its most extreme example — the Weimar Republic at the end of WWI. The
former empire never accepted neither its defeat nor its justification and
historical inevitability, accumulating to massive revanchist demand and the
rise of Hitler (Miller, 1997, 355).
Since
the 1990s, a diagnosis of the “Weimar Syndrome” is almost invariably given only
to Russian Federation. In the twentieth century, a bygone hegemon lost its
empire twice: in 1917 and in 1991. The country’s suffering from a setback in
the Cold War, followed by an inflicted influence of the West in the form of G-8,
is compared to a “softer version of the Treaty of Versailles” that was forced
on defeated Germany (Cohen, 2014). The stain of resemblance with a Nazi regime
stems from the exhibition of ressentiment in both of these cases. To
substantiate this claim, let us recall the words of George Kennan, the author
of the containment doctrine. In his Long Telegram, he contended that Soviet
aggressiveness was induced by powerless envy producing paralytic rancor:
“At the bottom of Kremlin's neurotic view of world
affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity… as Russia
came into contact with economically advanced West, fear of more competent, more
powerful, more highly organized societies.” (Kennan, 1946)
photo of Lenin's statue by Helen Izbor
Here,
it is important to take a moment to reiterate the role that emotions play in
the formation and maintenance of national identities. Rooted in the sense of a
shared collective, national identity is the product of imagination that exists
in people’s hearts and minds. To illustrate, Anderson regards nations as
imagined communities, socially constructed bodies, members of which retain
a mental image of their communion without direct contact or even knowledge of
each other’s existence (Anderson, 1983, 22). Given the weight of
affections in a national identity construct, exploitation of a post-imperial
syndrome is an effective means of gaining political support. Vehemently
articulating victimhood and humiliation claims, populist politicians engraft
otherwise abstract notions of enmity into a stylized narrative, with an acute
emphasis on past national excellence (Homolar and Löfflman, 2021, 1-8). Consequently, the blame for loss of
mythologized greatness is projected onto “the
other,” which coincides with assumptions of ressentiment. Needless to
say, taken together, passionate, emotional appeals of such kind perform as
excellent agitation tools.
Without
a doubt, Vladimir Putin’s political machine excels in the appropriation of
these strategies as means of manipulating the masses. The accession of the ex-KGB agent to power marked catalysis in
the usage of post-imperial rhetoric. The Kremlin leader is tenacious in his
quotations of Russia’s glorious past — legacy dating back to the Czarist Empire
and into the period of Soviet rule. For example, in his 2005 address to the
Federal Assembly—the state’s legislative body—the president referred to the
dissolution of the USSR as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the
century” (Sinyakov, 2005). The demise of the Soviet gory regime is portrayed as
a great tragedy when Russia was "forced to its knees.” On top of that, a
short period of relative freedom and fragile democratization in 1991-1999 under
the presidency of Boris Yeltsin also represents a time of profound humiliation
for Mr. Putin, especially Yeltsin’s attempts to forge Russian-American prolonged adversarial
relationship and build an alliance with Bill Clinton’s administration under a shared goal
of preventing revanche in Moscow’s security state. Vladimir Putin’s vision of this flourishing
partnership was highly negative, with a perception that the former superpower
had now become a client state to Western subjection (Crowley, 2016).
To
understand what Putin means, it is imperative to revise the Western account of
Soviet heritage as an “evil
empire” (Ronald Reagan’s
branding). This perspective is radically different from the one appropriated
domestically. The Bolsheviks who seized power in 1917 devised a monstrous and
cynical experiment, intending to extend their delusional ideas to the whole
world. Flooding the country with blood, they managed to turn the majority of
the population into slaves, dexterously manipulating idiosyncratic national
features, mainly aversion to individualism. Under the humanist ideological
wrapping of a struggle for freedom of the oppressed, red communist tumors
crawled across borders. Absorbing other states but kept reserved, communism was
doomed to perish at a deadlock of capitalist alternative.
Subsequently,
Russia’s downfall from the leading status internationally is painted as a
persecutory event that brought humiliation on the nation. This chosen trauma
incites fictions of external oppression and injustice, allowing for
victimization rhetoric to emerge on the part of the establishment. Invocation
of chosen traumas is a potent populist apparatus: “It sparks entitlement
ideologies of restoration and revenge, weaponizes the emotion of nostalgia, and
aggravates postcolonial melancholia” (Homolar and Löfflman, 2021, 5). With implantation
of such dogma in the national identity construct, the mere apperception of an
empire as an undemocratic but omnipotent government that dominates over other
peoples is a product that is easy to sell. And what is a primary ambition of
any empire if not the acquisition of territory and influence? Illuminating the postcolonial
energy, the premise of Russian foreign policy in the twenty-first century is an
expansion of external domination, camouflaged under the banner of pacifism. The
authorities have nothing to offer the population, except for involvement in the
myth of greatness, testing it on the bridgeheads of Syria, Georgia, Chechnya.
Finally,
Russia’s unclosed imperial gestalt exploded with the invasion of Ukraine in
2014, the independence of which was perceived as a misunderstanding for all of
its 23-year-old history. Kyiv dared to disobey its older brother in the 2004
Orange Revolution: it tried to get out of the paternalistic paradigm and set on
the path of the bourgeois-democratic revolution and European development. For
Putin, Ukrainian aspirations to break free were threats to both his authority
and perseverance of his pet project, the Russian World: “Moscow viewed Ukraine
not only as a key element of its former empire but also as the historical and
ethnic heart of modern Russia, inseparable from the body of the country as a
whole” (Plokhy and Sarotte, 2020). The return to armed historical revisionism
demonstrated during the annexation of Crimea is an expression of ressentiment
in its purest form. First, the authorities cannot change Russia’s role in the
international arena with the help of soft power. Next, the overwhelming
majority of the population remains locked up within the class system restored
by Putin, unable to go beyond the boundaries of state paternalism and social
parasitism, the syndrome of learned helplessness. Symbolic compensation was the
creation of a fictitious enemy in the face of Ukraine and fictitious victories
— annexation of Crimea and creation of pirate republics in Donetsk and
Lugansk.
photo of Turkey's coast by Svetlana Kurekhina
When
formulated as a political doctrine and capturing the masses,
ressentiment
constitutes a threat to free societies simply because freedom implies taking
responsibility for oneself and does not allow for reversal of guilt for own
failures onto an imaginary enemy. Clearly, a post-imperial resentment is not
only a Russian problem. Many European countries have gone through it, building
a nation-state. And this is also true of Turkey, whose president rejects a
century-long history of building a secular republic and is trying to restore a semblance
of the Ottoman Empire. Critics of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s political career accuse him of
adopting populist victimhood-centric rhetoric and aspirations to create a hybrid of the
Ottoman Empire and the Great Turan. Even so, the ideological apparatus employed
by the Turkish leader resembles sentiments of his voter constituency, paving a
route to political success (Tokdogan, 2020, 393). Obtainment of the emotional
attachment of the populace is a compounding ingredient in triumphs of populist
narratives founded on national trauma claims. Despite the political
entrepreneurs’ ability to twist underlying collective experiences as they please,
evoking palettes of communal affections that translate into voter support,
“their mass appeal in the long term depends on their resonance with
individuals” (Lerner, 2020, 69). In a Turkish scenario, victimhood discourse
assigns blame to Western influence and imposed modernization, which the
conservative state never truly wished for. There is the bureaucratic center and
the Islamist periphery at the center of confrontation, emanating as "the
struggle between Kemalist power and Islamist opposition" (Yilmas, 2017,
488).
The people of Turkey owe the fact that the
country followed the European path of development and did not remain a medieval
sultan to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. The revolutionist steered the Turkish
Nationalist Movement in the wake of WWI and the annihilation of the Ottoman
Empire. As the founder and first president of the Turkish Republic of 1923,
Atatürk embarked the state on a series of modernizing reforms. Known as
Kemalism, his doctrine became the official ideology of the state, incorporated
in the 1937 Constitution by the Republican People’s Party, or CHP. Its
cornerstones—enumerated as Six Arrows—represented the republic’s break
from the imperial shadow. With the abolition of religious laws of sultanate and
caliphate, Turkey was set for a radical transition towards an all-encompassing
Westernization. Kemalism persisted as the principal trajectory of Turkish
development at least until the AKP consolidated its power substantially under
Erdogan.
Within
a contemporary populist dialogue, political actors make a solid distinction
between “us” vs. “them.” Thus, a highly romanticized group of “true people” is
antagonized with “corrupt elites” who prioritize outside interests and betray
their fellow citizens (Homolar and Löfflman, 2021, 3). Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has a tendency to
invoke the idea of the millet — the authentic Turkish people who built
the country in the first place (Koru, 2018). The idealization of the voter
population serves a more significant pursuit than simply exceeding a threshold
value or gaining a majority. It fosters a national identity image by
introducing a vision of an outside enemy through appeals to the “other.” The
West, correspondingly, is contagious and dangerous: “It may contaminate the
naive and pure essence of the nation, or has already done so (Tokdogan, 2020,
397). Moreover, Erdogan’s rhetoric illustrates Westernization as “symbolic
castration” in the minds of those who opposed it (Tokdogan, 2020, 395). Blame
attribution claims are assigned to the Western world starting with the
initiation of Turkish modernization in the Tanzimat era that attacked Muslim
minorities and ultimately caused a loss of imperial status. Perhaps one of the
reasons of cultivated victimhood rhetoric in regards to this period could be
explained by Necip Fazıl Kısakürek’s—whom Erdogan appraises—books that are centered around the
topic of Muslim marginalization: “He reversed the official ideology and
transformed the republican struggle for progress in the face of religious
reaction into a righteous struggle against secular authoritarianism” (Yilmaz,
2017, 487). Resultantly, it is possible to draw a conclusion that Turkish
ressentiment is vented in subjects related to Westernization and
modernization, during which the state lost its imperial
splendor and endured
suppression of its Muslim population.
photo of Turkey's countryside by Elizaveta Sazonova
If
the Turkish state considers the aforementioned factors as the main roots of its
decline in power and public humiliation, its modern political machinery is
targeting the sources of its imperial traumas at full speed. The current
geopolitical program of
the country’s ruling party—the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, that came
to power in 2002—is often referred to as Neo-Ottomanism. In aggregate, it is an
unofficial foreign policy doctrine geared to expand the Turkish sphere of
influence to adjacent territories through "soft power”: by means of
economy, humanitarian influence, and supranational spirit (Rahimova, 2018, 15).
The approach implies an extricable link between modern Turkey and the historical
heritage of the Ottoman Empire. Furthermore, there is a growing discussion of
its inclination toward the return of the Ottoman past. Neo-Ottomanism is
targeted as an imperial mentality of the modern type promoting moderate Islam, Turkish
Eurasianism, Pan-Turkism, and Pan-Islamism (Rahimova, 2018, 15). As the AKP
secured its control of the government, it started rewriting legislature to suit
own needs.
A
notion of civilization is at the core of the Justice and Development Party’s
ideology. In the first years after taking control of the government, the AKP
pursued the democratization of Turkey through the process of obtaining a status
of the EU membership, as well as advertised “Western
integration as an alliance of civilizations” (Duran, 2013, 93). However, the
party never intended to take up the role of charting a course of politics that
would install bonds between Western and Islamic worlds. Thanks to the ambiguity
of the civilizational approach, it allowed the establishment to fulfill its
dubious ambitions. Incorporating such language as “civilizational
consciousness” and alluding to the Ottoman past, Erdogan builds an image of
Turkey as a great nation and affiliates the Kurds together with the Turks
(Duran, 2013, 94). To add to the AKP's flexibility in conforming to popular
sentiment, Erdogan himself has a history of putting on different masks when he
has to. For example, the politician has a criminal record in the form of
incitement to violence and religious or racial hatred that prevented him from
taking a parliamentary seat. But when the legislation was amended to remove his
disqualification, Erdogan “disavowed the hardline Islamic views
of his past and was trying to recast himself as a pro-Western conservative”
(BBC, 2002). It took years for the Turkish ruler to start playing the Islamic
card, betting on it in much the same way that Mustafa Kemal bet on nationalism,
secularism, and Westernization. The final departure from Kemalism was
formalized by the 2014 transition from a parliamentary republic to a
presidential system, after which Erdogan began to be called a sultan of the
twenty-first century.
A
delay in the emergence of post-imperial rhetoric on the part of Turkey’s
official actors sheds light on the nature of ressentiment. The
experience of humiliation and insecurity will inevitably produce a fountain of
various anti-sentiments, no matter how long it is kept inside by the
establishment or the masses. Simultaneously, let us note that post-imperial
trauma can originate instantly, as it happened in post-Soviet Russia. In spite
of these timely distributions of suppressed anger and envy, I would still
attribute ressentiment’s symbolic compensation to the charismatic
leaders who employ it in their rhetoric (Ershov, 2019; Karapetyan, 2018). Both
Erdogan and Putin display personal aspirations to go down in history.
Therefore, is the rise of a post-imperial narrative and behavior the result of
the personal characteristics of these presidents, along with undemocratic
features of their regimes? The psychological chain of inferiority-resentment-hatred-aggression-concession
to a force can temporarily lead to a relaxation of tension. But, in the end, it
only enhances the emotion of resentment. Ressentiment is internalized
for the time being, but at any moment, it can break out with even more powerful
aggression. Accordingly, it is almost impossible to return the subject of ressentiment to normal. The choice of policy in
such cases is between the lesser of evils: appeasement, which only encourages
aggression, or endless coercive containment. There is no third. The first
option was applied by the West to Hitler and led to war. The second approach
was used in the case of the USSR and ended with the collapse of the latter.
author Helen Izbor
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