Is Eurasian State Building Reducible to Cultural Politics?

Alfred Rieber’s The Struggle for the Eurasian Borderlands is a world history that distances itself from two Eurocentric forms of historical bifurcation. First, Rieber rejects the division of history into two irreconcilable trajectories, European and non-European, whereby Europe represents the Mecca of modern transformation and the reference point for non-Europe, including most of Eurasia. Second, Rieber’s history is distanced from the temporal bifurcation of world history into premodern and modern, whereby premodernity is considered to be the “time” of non-European regions, and modernity is assumed to belong to the West. Rieber is not concerned with Western modernity. Nor is he interested in capitalist development or the question of why it happened in the West and not in the East—a question that is often (in the Weberian tradition) answered with reference to political or religious culture.

Instead, Rieber’s history is a comparative study of imperial state building in Eurasia that geographically cuts across East–West demarcations. He includes “Western” imperial units, such as the Habsburgs and (arguably) Russia, together with the “Eastern” empires of the Ottomans and the Safavids. Rejecting views of geopolitical exigencies and of messianic destinies—most specifically with respect to Russian history—Rieber analyzes the maintenance of imperial entities with reference primarily to power relations among different states and, within each imperial space, between the imperial core and the subjugated peoples. The latter struggle unfolds primarily on a cultural terrain, with borderlands continually fending off the center’s attempts at linguistic assimilation and religious conversion and seeking to retain their local autonomy and cultural identity. The center’s strategies toward the borderlands ranged from compromise through tolerance to repression. In fact, for Rieber, it is the success of the cultural politics of the imperial core—its ability to accommodate the religious and ethnic communities in the borderlands or the periphery—that largely determines the success of imperial units and their immunity to infiltration by other states. At issue here is Rieber’s characterization of borderlands as “shatter zones” vulnerable to ideological penetration by other states or to movements of autonomy, including nationalist ones.

In Rieber’s analysis, imperial ideologies are central to the making of multicultural states; imperial cultures (secular and religious, often a combination replete with contradictions) were part of the statecraft of multicultural polities and provided them with flexibility in adapting to changing power relations with other states and in accommodating cultural resistance in the borderlands. Rieber traces the trajectories of the multicultural “confessional” states’ disintegration to an erosion of the religious foundations of imperial cultures faced with exposure to Western secularist, rational thinking in the 19th century and the emergence of secular elites. Although, in a sense, this understanding approximates modernization perspectives that assign agency to Western ideas and institutions in the transformation of old empires, Rieber himself appears to view the passing of the imperial with a degree of nostalgia and the coming of the “modern” and the “Western” with a dose of apprehension. The advent of Western secular influence, in turn, pushed the imperial centers into defensive positions whereby they embraced an exclusionary religious ideology, while nationalism, characterized by Rieber as an effective state-building ideology, prevailed in the borderlands. Following the collapse of multicultural states in the early 20th century, state-building ventures in former imperial spaces resulted in the rise of secular, nationalist rulers who pursued policies of forceful homogenization of multiple ethnic and religious groups into a single national mode—Adolf Hitler, Mustafa Kemal, and even communist rulers like Stalin. In this respect, he privileges the Confucian imperial state culture and sees its accommodative capacities as accounting for the resilience and success of the Qing imperial state.¹ As he remarks, “ethnic and religious hostility played no role …, in part because the Confucian ethical system had no place for either prejudice” (32). He views other imperial ideologies as more problematic, since...