Viewing Russia and Turkey through the Lens of Post-Imperial Trauma by Helen Izbor

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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