Imperial analogies for the new European geopolitical environment

The bimonthly history magazine from Die Zeit just published a new issue on imperialism, using the topic to help frame the new situation in Europe in which the US has more-or-less declared European security as something Trump 2.0 doesn’t care about.

The cover features a grumpy Trump, a smirking Putin, and a confidently grinning Xi Jinping standing over a globe with Putin pointing to Europe. Ranged behind them are ghostly images of Kaiser Bill (Germany’s Wilhelm II), Napoleon, and the mythical Britannica. (Britannica was the Roman name for their British province.) The issue’s subtitle is The Return of Power Politics: Struggle Over the World from 1800 Until Today..

The German political scientist Herfried Münkler discusses the general topic of empires in an interview.

Analytically, large imperial areas are one model of world order, and state systems are the other. The central problem of state systems - such as the ancient Greek poleis or the European nation states - is that they often wage war among themselves. In contrast, empires can claim to be relatively stable orders of prosperity and peace. It is no coincidence that longer periods of peace such as the Pax Romana, the Pax Americana, the Pax Britannica or even the Pax Mongolica are named after empires. (1)

There were empires in the ancient world, like the Macedonian Empire of Alexander the Great and, of course, the Roman Empire. Later there would be the Mongol Empire, the Sassanian Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, and various other. These were political agglomerations ruled by an emperor, with various levels of royalty and nobility forming part of a hierarchy of rule.

The period we now call the Age of Imperialism is used for a more restricted timeframe:

Imperialism has been present and prominent since the beginning of history, and its most intensive phase occurred in the Axial Age [1st Millennium BCE]. But the concept of the Age of Imperialism refers to the period pre-dating World War I. While the end of the period is commonly fixed in 1914, the date of the beginning varies between 1760 and 1870. According to Historians Daniel Hedinger and Nadin Heé, the widespread use of the term "Age of Empire" for this specific period reflects a Eurocentric bias in terms of time. (2)

European colonialism was obviously a huge part of the history of empires – colonies being the “periphery” of the imperial “metropole.” Anja Fries dates the European version from 1415 “with the capture of the Moroccan coastal city of Ceuta by Portugal.” (3) There are very few formal colonies left in today’s world. (Seventeen, to be exact.) The UN’s list of “non-self-governing territories” (euphemism for colonies) include places like the Malvinas/Falkland Islands which rightly belong to Argentina, Gibraltar which rightly belongs to Spain, and American Samoa. (4)

The symbolism is a bit garbled, but the theme is that the world is now becoming multipolar, which is also known as “the end of America’s unipolar moment.” But it doesn’t hurt to know about the history of imperialism for the last 225 years or so. As long as we don’t have to listen to a lot of nonsensical comparisons to the Roman Empire. Münkler says in polite language that those comparisons aren’t much more than literary flourishes.

There has been a lot of intensive tea-leaf-reading over Russian intentions during the last decade. And there promises to be more of it for the indefinite future. How the rest of Europe deals with Russia – which itself has both European and Asian parts – has been an obsession for several centuries.

Münkler has this to say about in relation to the Russian problem:

We are witnessing the return of an imperial policy that was no longer thought possible after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989/90. At that time, political scientists and historians were almost unanimously of the opinion that the era of the large empires was over. In fact, however, empires have never lost their appeal.

This is a cautionary example. Since 1989, the US has been involved in the First Gulf War, the Kosovo War, the Afghanistan War that began in 2001 and which became America’s longest war, the Iraq War, and various interventions in places like Libya and Syria. In fact, the “unipolar moment” of 1989-2022 became one in which the US was more free to make various kinds of military interventions than prior to that. What constitutes “imperialism” has evolved since the days of Alexander the Great. So historical analogies always need to be treated with caution.

I plan to do some additional posts drawing on this Imperialismus issue of ZEITGeschichte.

Notes:

(1) Münkler, Herfried (2025); »Bis Russland resigniert« (Interview). ZEITGeschichte 4-2025, 114-119. My translation to English.

(2) Imperialism. Wikipedia 07/15/2025. <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Imperialism&oldid=1300640449> (Accessed: 2025-22-07).

(3) Fries, Anja (2019): Subjugation of the WORLD. In: Der Kolonialismus. Die Welt im Griff Europas (GeoEpoche 97), 24. My translation to English.

(4) Non-Self-Governing Territories. United Nations, 05/09/2024. <https://www.un.org/dppa/decolonization/en/nsgt> (Accessed: 2025-22-07).