From the Editor: The Mechanism of Meaning Production

Any historical conception draws on present-day concerns as well as a historiographic tradition and its logic. Ab Imperio's 2020 annual thematic program, "When Postimperial Meets Postnational: Envisioning New Forms of Groupness in Historical Perspective,"¹ commences in this issue 1/2020 at a particular historical moment. Today academics, politicians, political activists, and all who consciously follow the unfolding of the global pandemic crisis are returning to basic questions about human solidarity, cooperation, the interactions of citizens with the state, and relations between the states themselves, sovereignty, globalization, borders, and lines of division. The global crisis and the localized responses to the pandemic render even more visible the fractures of the modern world and the tensions between national frameworks and supranational realities. In this context, the suggested framework of postimperial meeting with postnational acquires new and more immediate significance.

It is our present world that is postimperial due to a new resurgence of isolationism, authoritarianism, and nationalism, all of which began as reactions to the neoliberal coordinated world order and intensified to an unprecedented degree by the extraordinary crisis of our time. As with the empires of the past, which became conspicuously "visible" at moments of crises (e.g., the rise of mass politics in the late nineteenth century), the pandemic appears as an "imperial" event that renders visible the unevenness of today's social and political worlds. The pandemic has amplified competition between existing "imperial" centers (the United States, China, the European Union) and relegated world peripheries to an even farther place on the map of global concerns. At the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic has made particularly obvious the globality of our economy, infrastructure, and social and cultural networks. On the other hand, we are living through a postnational situation, marked by a growing realization that no real or imagined separate entity (state, nation, or any community of solidarity) is indeed one-dimensional, bounded, isolated, and able to have a safe individual future. Ambivalent as is any imperial situation, the global epidemiological crisis simultaneously makes the nation-state obsolete and requires and sharpens our focus on the issue of the making and unmaking of complex societies and those blocks from which they are built.

Of course, the problem is not singularly that of the current moment. This issue of the journal also marks the twentieth anniversary of Ab Imperio, whose very first issue was sent to the printers in May 2000. Over these two decades, almost 1,200 scholars from about 40 countries have published their work in 78 issues of Ab Imperio. Taking stock of that history, we can see that the journal has covered considerable ground. In scholarship, a mature discourse on a problem is manifested primarily in the ability to pose simple questions. In the pages of Ab Imperio and elsewhere, in edited collections and individual publications by the editors, scholars have mapped out the field of new imperial history that we could only have anticipated back in 2000. The very need to elaborate a new analytical language and formulate a conceptual model describing the functioning of the complex society of multidimensional and irregular diversity informed the rather complicated argument of those earlier texts. Now, we can turn to a seemingly basic question. How are such complex social arrangements that barely sustain the delicate equilibrium brought into being by a combination of apparently simple and even crude elements?

Drawing on the urgency of the present moment and the twenty-year-long study of empires, the theme of this opening issue, "'In a Fit of Absence of Mind': The Mechanism of Empire-Building," offers a reflection on postimperial, postcolonial, and postnational "empire-building" as a way to problematize the complexity and interconnectedness of human societies and polities in the past and in the present. This approach to empire as an analytical category that embraces uneven social and political complexity has been promoted by the project of new imperial history and this journal since their early stages, and this framework now seems more useful and productive than ever.

Issue 1/2020 inaugurates the annual volume by looking into the initial stage...