From the Editors: Politics of Language and Politics of Meaning

16 From the Editors, Politics of Language and Politics of Meaning From the EDITORS As part of the intellectual project “New Imperial History,” the editors of Ab Imperio decided to address the problem of the conceptual apparatus that the empires’ contemporaries and historians of empire had at their disposal. We entitled this annual program “Languages of Self-Description in Empire and Multiethnic State.” Our “linguistic turn” is founded upon an increasing understanding that empires, while indeed pre-modern forms of political, social, and economic organization, were nevertheless engaged in the processes of modernization. Scholars of modern Europe have emphasized the concept of “nation” as a key block in the construction of political and social space. Modern humanities and social sciences, as we know today, emerged and matured within this normative framework. Empires, in contrast, left virtually no rationalizing and complex self-description that we can compare with the discourse of modern nationalism, that is, no self-description profoundly different from the “nationalizing” mode of modern social thought. In order to understand to what extent nation-centered historical analysis influences our perceptions of “empire,” we invited the contributors to this issue of Ab Imperio to reconstruct the possible languages of imperial selfdescription in scholarship, art, geopolitics, law, dynastic myth, religion, etc. We are also interested in the evolution of these languages under the impact of the encounter between pre-modern concepts (e.g., “dynasty” or “estate”) and modern ones (“state” or “class”). Among other directions POLITICS OF LANGUAGE AND POLITICS OF MEANING 17 Ab Imperio, 2/2005 in New Imperial History, our search is for signs of collusion between the autochthonous realities of empires and the ideas and practices borrowed from the modern nation-state. For this issue of Ab Imperio, we have decided to focus on the problem of political language and language policies in the multiethnic and culturally heterogeneous continental empires. Realpolitik, as a sequence of documented and rationally founded actions , is among the most obvious subjects for a narrative of imperial self-description. On the other hand, the internal dynamics of the imperial space are revealed through the functioning of languages of those ethnic and confessional groups that were incorporated into empires (that is, “language” in the direct sense of the word). In this case, scholars have focused either on the specific situation of language contacts in imperial settings or on the dominance of the “imperial nation” and regional cultural centers, while language policies in the empire have been viewed as the authentic language of self-description of empire as a polity. The main problem with the study of politics as an imperial metalanguage (of which language policies constitute a part) is stipulated by the fact that in the past decades research on the phenomenon of the political and of language developed along colliding trajectories. Such developments of the late 20th century as the anthropological and linguistic “turns,” postcolonial studies, and new political history ensured that “language” and “politics” came to be defined and studied interdependently and even tautologically: language contacts are ever more theorized in terms of political conflict, whereas political acts are analyzed in linguistic categories (such as “grammar” or “syntax”). The introduction of such a binary model as “language-politics” into imperial studies can lead to confusion due to the many subjects of politics and the polyglossy of imperial space. Hence we see the task of this issue as de-coupling the traditional formula “language-politics” and as searching for ways to overcome the tautological analyses of these two key phenomena. First, in our methodological section, we address the experience of nuanced studies of language and politics in imperial contexts. The rubric opens with an article by Andrew Thompson, who explores the semantics of “empire” in British political discourse at the turn of the 20th century. Despite widely held opinions about the fundamental difference between overseas-modern empires and continental-archaic ones, Thompson’s method of analysis and his conclusions appear extremely relevant to the study of the Russian Empire. Thompson demonstrates the heterogeneity 18 From the Editors, Politics of Language and Politics of Meaning and many meanings of British political language and shows that the interests and intellectual horizons of political actors defined it...