Three Zombie Empires
The 21st Century is heading for a rearrangement of global hegemonies that promises to put the brakes on globalization as we’ve known it.
By Rafael Rojas (Confidencial)
HAVANA TIMES – The memes of Donald Trump, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin cutting slices of the world as if dividing up an enormous watermelon exaggerate a little, but touch on a fundamental truth. The twenty-first century is heading towards a reshuffling of global hegemonies, which will put the brakes on globalization as we know it. At the same time, it will threaten regionalization processes like the ones we’ve seen in Europe, North America, South America or Southeast Asia.
For years, the three great powers have been undergoing changes in their domestic and international policies that point in that direction. Xi’s reelection policy and the increases in China’s military expenses are changes that may respond to the Asian power’s adaptation to a world of autocratic reproduction, and to a turn towards wars that are no longer regional, but planetary.
All in all, in the face of the greatest change in the orientation of the three powers – the one currently headed by Donald Trump in the United States – China continues to be the power that remains most closely tied to the agenda for economic globalization and commercial integration that expanded since the fall of the Berlin Wall. There’s no other way to understand China’s strong ties with the European Union and Mercosur [South American Common Market], two blocs created in the last wave of globalization.
But one thing that is effectively similar in all three powers is their condition as “zombie empires,” an expression coined by Mira Milosevich, a historian from Madrid’s Complutense University to describe Putin’s Russia.
Milosevich first wrote a book about the Russian Revolution, in which she concludes that the reinvention of empire is a constant in Russian history. That’s an old thesis advanced previously by other authors, for example Jean Meyer in his work Rusia y sus Imperios 1894 – 1991 [“Russia and its Empires”] (FCE 1999). However, Milosevich, who writes in a context farther removed from the democratic transitions of the end of the twentieth century, sees greater continuity in the imperial phases of that history. For example, the academic uses the labels of “revolutionary” or “revisionist” to define Putin’s strategy for dealing with the international system, in the same way that such terms can be attributed to the Bolshevik project.
What’s certain, as Putin himself has clarified, is that the Kremlin’s foreign policy takes its inspiration from an extremely negative reading of Lenin, Trotsky, and the Bolshevik project, all of whom he blames for the resurgence of Ukrainian nationalism, among other things. Imperial autocrats don’t get along well with the idea of federal pacts, nor the nationalist sentiments of their underling neighbors.
In her second book, Milosevich proposes interpreting Russia’s latest imperial turn – especially since 2014 – as a corpse’s struggle to return to life. During the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Kremlin remained on good terms with the international order. The friendship between Putin and the younger George Bush has been well documented. The new turn towards empire classifies as a zombie empire – a power that, sensing its decline, seeks some way of recovering its strength and domination.
Thus viewed, it’s a phenomenon that’s not exclusive to Russia. The United States in the Trump era also has the features of a zombie empire. There’s no other way to interpret the return to Trump’s expansionist rhetoric towards Panama, Canada and Greenland, or his nostalgic look back to the times of William McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt, when the United States definitively displaced Europe and went on to control Latin America and the Caribbean.
The power that’s most difficult to characterize as a zombie empire is China, since in no way can it be seen as an empire in decline. China is a hegemonic power that’s been in ascent since the end of the twentieth century. However, certain features of its legitimization apparatus, such as the moral reserve of the Confucian tradition, or the presentation of its project for trade as a “new silk road,” recurs to the vintage images advanced by the zombie empires.
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This article was originally published in “La Razon de Mexico.”
Published in Spanish by Confidencial and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.