Its descendent, the National Rally, is led by Marine Le Pen, who recently received 42 percent of the vote for the French presidency. Although de Gaulle proved able to outmaneuver them, many disgruntled French military veterans and staunch imperialists flocked to a new, far-right political party. In 1961, when General Charles de Gaulle, installed in office thanks to the coup, negotiated a peace agreement, French military leaders, horrified, again revolted. Meanwhile, French military officers, convinced that their own government would fail to subdue the Algerian rebels, seized power, toppled the Fourth Republic, and stepped up France’s counterinsurgency war. In 1958, when the people of Guinea voted, instead, for independence, the embittered French government turned to sabotaging the ungrateful new nation by destroying government records, flooding the country with fake banknotes, diverting shipments of food and medicine, and even removing the lightbulbs from government buildings. Desperate to fend off imperial collapse, French officials proposed retaining their colonial relationships through a French Union. The French government, too, grew increasingly dismayed in the postwar era as the Algerians revolted, the Vietnamese routed France’s armed forces, and the French Empire disintegrated. The problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge any more.” In 2002, Boris Johnson―currently Britain’s prime minister― wrote contemptuously that Africa “may be a blot, but it is not a blot upon our conscience. Even so, the fact that Britannia no longer ruled the waves continued to sting. governments, British officials were deeply humiliated and, thereafter, largely settled for a junior partnership with the United States in global operations. Blocked in their reassertion of imperial power by the Soviet and U.S. In 1956, Prime Minister Anthony Eden, angered by the policies of Egypt’s revolutionary leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, launched a British invasion, along with France and Israel, to retake control of the Suez Canal. In the aftermath of World War II, as decolonization gathered momentum throughout the far-flung British Empire, the guardians of the Old Order worked to suppress independence struggles and bitterly lamented the decline of imperial grandeur. Nor did it seem to trouble Putin that, in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, the Russian government had formally pledged to respect the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine.ĭisconsolate Russian officials have their counterparts in Britain. A Ukrainian nation, with its own language and culture, had existed for many centuries, had been ruled by a variety of nations during that period, and, in 1991, had held a referendum in which 92 percent of the electorate voted for independence from the Soviet Union. This lament for a lost imperium, shared by many Russian leaders, not only showed little regard for people trapped under the yoke of empire, but for their actual history. During a televised address on February 21, 2022, in which he recognized the two secessionist Donbas regions, Putin again invoked the past, claiming that Ukraine was “historically Russian land.” As early as 2005, he told the Russian parliament that the collapse of the Soviet empire was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century” and “a genuine tragedy” for “the Russian people.” In July 2021, he published a long historical article ( “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”) contending that there had never been a Ukraine independent of Russia. This February, Putin launched a full-scale military invasion of Ukraine, with horrendous consequences.Īlong the way, imperial nostalgia has pervaded Putin’s thinking. Ultimately, under the leadership of Vladimir Putin, they decided on the latter, employing Russian military power to attack neighboring Georgia, win a civil war in Syria, annex Crimea, and instigate a separatist revolt in Ukraine’s Donbas region. But the implosion of the empire in 1991 left Russian leaders adrift, uncertain whether to steer their nation toward a more modest role in the world or to revive what they considered their country’s past imperial glory. Traditionally referred to as the “ prison of nations,” Russia, in its Czarist and Soviet phases, controlled a vast Eurasian land mass of subject peoples. The Russian empire provides a striking illustration of this phenomenon. Accompanied by slogan "The Whole World Will be Ours"Īlthough great empires rank among the most powerful engines of world history, they are also among the most dangerous, especially as they brood over their decline.
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