The Persistence of Empire

The last one hundred years have seen particularly intense conflict as nation states have either been either been the target or initiator of empire building. 

Once again, empires may be taking the place of nation states as boundaries largely put in place by the Western powers are fast proving not only permeable, but potentially completely erasable by forces hostile to and contemptuous of national boundaries.  The nation state is in danger of becoming an historic anomaly because of global empire building that threatens to envelop individual nations. 

The Middle East

In the Middle East, the long-desired return to a caliphate has created resurgence against the national constructs in place at the end of WWI and maintained by American power during and after WWII. But with the present weakening of Western hegemony, impelled by a sense of an historic and inalienable right to expand once again to the boundaries once attained at the height of the Moslem and Ottoman Empires, Islamists are intent on re-establishing hegemony in the Middle East.

Russia

Under Vladimir Putin, the desire to rebuild empire has been revived. Putin doubtless sees the rightful inheritance of Russia as including the territories that were under Russian control in 1866, the height of Russian expansion. As is usual with those who want to reconstitute empires, Putin takes the height of Russia’s expansion as normative, seeing as Russia’s destiny the return of all entities that once were dominated by his country. Therefore, it is not just the Crimea or even the Ukraine that are endangered. The smaller nations that were devoured by Stalin after WWII are also inevitably a target of a Russia led by the desire to regain “lost” territory.  

Russian expansionism, if not halted, means that countries like Poland and Bulgaria are once again endangered. In fact, most of Eastern Europe may be threatened by Russian expansionism as evidenced by the seizure of Crimea. Leaders of Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia are deeply concerned.

For now, it appears that Russia is ignoring the Far East, though it is quite possible that Mongolia will become a flashpoint between China and Russian. Mongolia is a sheep between two wolves. It is not too farfetched to see a tradeoff between China and Russia, one in which China turns a blind eye to Russia’s ambitions in Europe alone while Russia concedes Chinese hegemony in Mongolia.  Both empires would get what they want — increased territory.

China

Presently, the Chinese appear intent on making The South China Sea a Chinese lake. China claims much of the South China Sea under its “nine dash-line” map (now morphing into a ten dash line map), first published in 1949 by the communist regime. The line takes in some of the world’s busiest shipping lanes and affects the entirety of Southeast Asia, including Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines, and the Paracel and Spratly Islands. The dotted line threatens to isolate Japan and Taiwan. Even Australia is potentially affected.

The extension of Chinese hegemony into the whole of the South China Sea is as serious an issue as Germany’s claims over Czechoslovakian, Polish, and French territory before WWII. The building of empires involves dominance of seas, as history shows when Japan turned most of the Pacific into a Japanese lake during and after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. To have control of sea lanes means the potential strangulation of any given nation’s economy, if not worse.

The above is to say nothing of what some see as China’s colonization of Africa. As Andrew Malone reported in MailOnline in 2008, the vacuum left by the exit of European countries from former colonies is rapidly being filled by the Chinese, who are tightening a vice-like grip on a continent China deems crucial to her survival.

What’s at stake for the West?