Russian invasion of Ukraine
The Kremlin’s unjustified full-scale onslaught against peaceful Ukraine commenced in 2022 (and continuing to this day) brought into view Russia’s tightening ties with the communist behemoth of China and the warmongering theocracy of Iran. Despite the Kremlin’s promise, the Russian armies failed to overrun Ukraine and its defences in a week. Instead, the Ukrainian armed forces successfully stopped the invasion in its tracks with, among another weapons, the then inactive fresh usage of air and seaborne drones.
The Russian troops were effectively harassed by fleets of Ukrainian drones and became starved of ammunition. As a result, the Kremlin turned to Tehran for help. Since then the muslim Republic of Iran has supplied Russia with 4,000 Shahed drones, as well as artillery shells, small-arms ammunition, anti-tank rockets, mortar bombs and glide bombs. Russia pays Tehran back with ballistic technology and integrated rocket systems, contributing to the fast expansion of Iran’s military arsenal and capabilities.
Three weeks before attacking Ukraine, the Russian leader met his Chinese counterpart in Beijing during the Winter Olympics, which was held in the capital of the People’s Republic of China. The 2 leaders of the world’s foremost autocracies signed a joint message on the “no-limits partnership” between their countries. China’s authoritative stance on the Russian war of conquest against Ukraine amounts to subdued appeals for peace, the observance of the territorial integrity of UN associate states, and promises to not breach western sanctions on Russia. In reality, with varied degrees of subterfuge, China dynamically props up the teetering Russian war economy. At present, most crucially, Beijing besides supplies Moscow with weapons and allows its de facto maverick vassal of North Korea to openly ship rockets and shells for the Kremlin’s invading armies. Russia reciprocates by selling oil at heavy discounted prices to China. Recently, Beijing must have besides agreed to the deployment of 10,000 North Korean troops as part of the Russian invading armies on the Ukrainian front.
Different or similar?
To outside observers, the coalescing economic, military and political alliance between China, Iran and Russia appears to be hard to understand. At the first glance, the 3 countries have next to nothing in common.
China is simply a totalitarian communist regime, where religion is suppressed in favour of officially espoused atheism. The clergy-led government of authoritarian Iran see their regulation as divinely inspired. Shia Islam is the organizational rule of political and social life in this country. Post-Soviet Russia moved rapidly distant from democracy to oligarchy and then to dictatorship. In the process the ruling elite espoused a Soviet-inflected tsarist matrimony between the throne and the Orthodox Church.
In the Kremlin’s eyes, Russia, as the cultural and demographic core of the erstwhile russian Union, was “robbed” by the West of its superpower position in the wake of the fall of communism. China is the present-day world’s second superpower in economical and military terms after the United States. Iran has vied with Saudi Arabia for the contested position of the hegemon of the mediate East. triumph for Tehran would of course entail the expulsion of western influence from the region.
Irrespective of their ideological and political differences, China, Iran and Russia have excelled at bringing the net under the state’s strict control. On top of that, all 3 regimes became early developers and adopters of cyberwarfare methods for attacking other countries. Hybrid war is how the world’s autocracies updated Sun Tzu’s The Art of War for the realities of the 21st century.
Despite the 3 autocracies’ immense territories and their earlier past of self-designation as “empires”, seldom do commentators see China, Iran and Russia as empires.
Land empires
Western observers, drawing blindly on the colonial experience of their own countries, have in head the image of a maritime empire. In this designation, the colonial metropole in terms of territory is simply a comparatively tiny country ensconced in Europe. On the another hand, its extended colonies are far-flung overseas.
China, Iran and Russia do not conform to this one-dimensional western image of maritime empire. No large bodies of water separate their colonial metropoles from the colonies. Somehow, falling for the anti-colonial rhetoric oft-repeated in many statements issued by Beijing, Moscow and Tehran, western public opinion has gullibly succumbed to this ruse and forgot about the reality of land empires. In the 20th century, processes of decolonization dismantled the West’s maritime empires but not their continent-based counterparts of non-western character. As a result, land empires do persist to this day across the vastness of Eurasia.
Empire is simply a large composite polity made up from an incoherent patchwork of ethnically, legally and economically variegated territories of unequal statuses. These were conquered, arbitrarily lumped together and ruled over from the distant colonial metropole. Likewise, the statuses of the empire’s inhabitants are besides unequal. Typically, those from the metropole (colonizers) have more power and privileges than the others (the colonized).
Unlike in the case of maritime empires, the divide between the metropole and its colonies is not easy discernible in a land empire on a typical physical map of the world. specified maps readily separate between landmasses and water bodies that in the case of a maritime empire service to separate the metropole from the colonies. The physical map offers no aid in identifying the line of division between these 2 types of territories in land empires.
Land empires come in a single chunk of territory, which to the unacquainted eye appears to be just another regular state. It is clear that this is not the case. Instead, 1 needs to fall back on population density maps and maps of ethnic, linguistic and confessional diversity in order to tease out a land empire’s unequal spatial and political structure. In land empires the metropole is frequently separated from its colonies by little populated areas and as a regulation of thumb they disagree starkly in terms of ethnicity, language or religion. This difference justifies the colonizers’ privileged position in the land empire vis-à-vis the colonized, who are openly discriminated against, exploited or disadvantaged in a more nuanced administrative manner.
Eurasia’s land empires today
From among the 3 land empires under discussion, in today’s Russia the government and elites are the least squeamish about referring to their tsarist and russian imperial traditions as a model for emulation. The present-day unacknowledged Russian empire’s metropole, with the bulk of the country’s Orthodox Russophone population, extends from St Petersburg to Moscow and its immense surrounding metropolitan area. North, east and south of this imperial central region the ethnically non-Russian colonies start to appear. The ones to the north (Karelia, Komi) and east (the Volga region) frequently share the same religion of Orthodox Christianity with the metropole. On the another hand, in the south (the Caucasus) most colonies are muslim from the confessional point of view.
Although the Ural Mountains unfold in a long range of alternatively low and indistinctive peaks and hills, in the 18th century Russian imperial geographers chose this mountain scope to service as a boundary between Europe and Asia. The Asian section of Russia accounts for four-fifths of its territory, while it only has two-fifths of its population. In full 30 per cent of Russia’s inhabitants are ethnically non-Russian, amounting to 45 million people. Yet, they predominate as a plurality or majority of the populace, especially across the country’s Asian provinces and in the Caucasus.
The unacknowledged land empire of today’s China is very akin in spatial and demographic structure to that of Russia. In the western half of the country’s territory only six per cent of the inhabitants live, while the vast majority of the population are huddled together on the east seaboard. China’s imperial metropole coincides with the country’s most densely populated core that stretches between Beijing in the north to Shanghai in the south. This innermost imperial area coincides with the population who natively talk the northern Sinic dialect, which acts as the foundation for standard (Mandarin) Chinese.
The south-eastern 4th of China that extends from Shanghai to the border with Vietnam is ethnically Han (Chinese), yet this area’s inhabitants talk many highly distinctive and mutually incomprehensible dialects. These dialects tend to be as different from 1 another and standard Chinese as French from English. In the European position these Chinese dialects appear to be languages in their own right, and thus, indicate that it is the area of China’s old colonies.
In turn, the cultural Chinese (Han) perceive the western half and northern reaches of their country as historically and ethnically non-Chinese. The ethnolinguistically and ethnoconfessionally variegated character of this immense outlying space is acknowledged in the administrative form of the five autonomous regions of Guangxi, interior Mongolia, Ningxia, Tibet and Xinjiang. In total, almost two-thirds of China’s territory is dotted with over 1,300 autonomous territories of a variety of administrative ranks for number populations.
China’s ethnically non-Chinese minorities amount to just a tenth of the full population that nevertheless adds up to 125 million. This is not an insignificant number and equates to the populace of Japan. However, like in the case of Russia’s Siberia and Caucasus, these non-Chinese cultural groups constitute the current or historical majorities and pluralities across China’s western half and in the north. What is more, at least a 3rd of the cultural Chinese – or a staggering 430 million – do not talk standard Chinese natively. They request to get it at school, like the non-Chinese minorities.
In many ways Tehran is like St Petersburg, where the Russian capital was purpose-built in the marshlands of Ingermanland (seized from Sweden) during the early 18th century. The exigencies of the interior politics of Persia after the failure of the empire’s east half (or today’s Afghanistan) in 1709 led to the abandonment of the old Safavid imperial capital of Isfahan for Mashhad, Shiraz and finally, in 1786, for Tehran. At that time, Tehran was a tiny and far-away trading outpost on the northern trading routes leading from Persia to the Caucasus and the Caspian littoral.
Furthermore, again like St Petersburg, Tehran was located in a sparsely populated and inhospitable area, at the feet of Mount Damavand that at over 5,000 metres towers above Iran’s capital. Populated with speakers of another Iranic languages and of the Turkic tongue of Azeri, the region found itself outside the empire’s Persian-speaking core. Initially, Tehran and its vicinity were a Persian colony before the town’s elevation to the rank of Persia’s modern political centre. This is yet another similarity with the past of St Petersburg in the Russian Empire.
The Persian-speaking metropole of today’s Iran extends from Tehran in the north, along the west-central urban corridor to Isfahan and Shiraz in the south. Another branch of this upside-down L stretches from Tehran to Mashhad in the east. The uninhabited deserts occupy the country’s centre. Most Persian-speakers outside Iran, be it in Afghanistan and Tajikistan, developed different cultural identities over the past centuries. The main cleavage between these countries and Iran is religious. In Iran the population overwhelmingly professes Shia Islam, while Sunni Muslims predominate in another Persianophone countries. This fact even prompted Afghanistan and Tajikistan to rename their authoritative languages Dari and Tajik respectively. (Obviously both Dari and Tajik are the same as Persian, apart from a couple differences that do not hinder communication, like in the case of US and British English.)
Ethnically non-Persian-speaking groups predominate in the west and south, namely, on the littoral of the Persian and Oman gulfs, in the north on the Caspian seaboard and across the country’s north-western, north-eastern and south-eastern corners. These areas service as present-day Iran’s colonies. They almost full encircle the imperial metropole, but for the east frontier with Afghanistan. However, in this case, the confessional cleavage between Shia and Sunni Islam separates Persian speakers in Central Asia from their co-ethnics in Iran.
Expansion
The raison d’ętre of empires is expansion, conquest and the control of territory. An empire that falls foul of this legitimizing request either collapses, decolonizes or is transformed into a nation-state of citizens who enjoy equality before the law.
From this perspective, the russian Union was an unabashed – though undeclared – empire. From its inception to the 1991 breakup, Moscow was grabbing whatever territories it could and legitimizing colonization with the conventional ideology of a civilizing mission. This was repackaged as the “export of (communist) revolution”. The Kremlin annexed any areas, while others were made into the communist empire’s vassals, be it Mongolia in Asia or most of Central and east Europe in the form of the russian bloc.
The imperial machinery stalled with Moscow’s failed imperialist intervention in Afghanistan. This debacle, combined with the overbearing burden of the Cold War arms race, bankrupted the russian Union, prefiguring its fast decolonization. The process besides entailed the abandonment of the Kremlin’s nascent colonizing or vassalizing projects in Cuba, Ethiopia or South Yemen.
Post-Soviet Russia’s ruling elite toyed with the thought of overhauling the communist empire’s remainder into a democratic nation-state until the mid-1990s. Yet, even during this period, the Kremlin instigated or meddled in wars in Moldova, Georgia and Tajikistan to wrench out any territories or to vassalize the countries. Afterward, the imperial ideology was reinstated with vengeance in the Russian Federation. The point break was the Kremlin’s imperialist war against the Chechens, who dared to search independency from Russia.
In the first half of the 21st century’s first decade, the Russian leadership developed and espoused an imperial ideology of the Russian world. In a nutshell, this proposes the conquest or vassalization of the countries and areas, first of all, inhabited by Russian speakers, as well as those that utilized to belong to the russian Union and the tsarist empire. In line with this programme, Russia grabbed whatever territories it could from Georgia and Ukraine. In 2022, the Kremlin attacked Ukraine with an eye to annexing the country in its entirety. Meanwhile, Russian troops and state-supported mercenaries have intervened time and again outside the confines of the Russian world, be it in Syria or in sub-Saharan Africa (Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic, Mali).
Prior to and after the collapse of the Chinese Empire in 1912, the country lost many territories, becoming partially decolonized in this process. The 1949 founding of communist China came together with the resurgence of Chinese imperialism. The Soviets had facilitated this improvement in 1946 by passing to the Chinese communists most of Manchukuo (Manchuria), which was earlier seized from defeated Japan. In the same year, erstwhile communist China was established, the People’s Liberation Army brought Xinjiang under Beijing’s control. 2 years later, in 1951, Chinese troops overran Tibet. In the wake of Beijing’s triumph in the 1962 war against India, the communist empire annexed the territory of Aksai Chin. In a specified decade and a half of imperial expansion, the territory of communist China almost doubled, from 5 to 9 million square kilometres.
In 1972, Beijing and Washington accepted the doctrine of “one China”. It proposes that the island of Taiwan is part of the country without specifically determining if the alluded “mother country” is actually communist China. Nowadays, Beijing uses this vaguely formulated policy to threaten a military invasion of Taiwan. To up the ante in the 2010s, apart from voicing claims to almost all of the South China Sea, Beijing began manning and fortifying the area’s uninhabited reefs and rocky outcrops in violation of global maritime law. This came at the expense of Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam.
The theocracy of revolutionary Iran, founded in 1979, formally did not engage in policies of territorial seizure. Yet, Iraq’s 1980 attack on a weakened Iran afforded Tehran an chance to catch or vassalize its western neighbour. The Shia majority of Iraq’s population offered fertile ground for exporting the muslim revolution. The war finished in a stalemate but the subsequent western business of Iraq (2003-2011) destabilized the country and made it susceptible to Iranian influence. During the war in Afghanistan (2001-2021), despite any reservations, Tehran sided with the Taliban spiritual forces that yet won the confrontation with the US-led western intervention forces.
Meanwhile, during the past 4 decades, Tehran has extended its influence across the mediate East through a host of proxy Shia terrorist and military organizations specified as Hezbollah (Arabic for “Party of God”) in Lebanon and Syria or the Houthis in Yemen. Since its inception, Iran’s theocratic government has called for all-Islamic conflict against Israel. In 2021, the Iranian parliament even discussed a bill on the demolition of Israel by 2041. This programme endeared Iran to the overwhelmingly Sunni Palestinians. As a result, the Hamas terrorists in Gaza and the West Bank became yet another of Tehran’s loyal proxies.
All this manoeuvring is part and parcel of a much bigger imperialist game that Iran keeps playing. For a long time Tehran has locked horns with Saudi Arabia in the undeclared struggle for hegemony in the mediate East. In 1 way or another this protracted confrontation involves countries from Egypt in the west to Pakistan in the east. Not only are secular power and resources at stake but besides whether the Muslim Shia number manages to dominate the majority Sunnis and their lands. The eventual goal is simply a renewed muslim caliphate under Shia spiritual and political control.
Axis of Evil or land empires?
At present, in a Cold War fashion, a increasing number of western observers dub China, Iran and Russia a fresh “Axis of Evil”. This perception recognizes that the 3 countries’ expanding cooperation clashes with the norms of global law and relations as established after the Second planet War.
However, this designation’s messianic associations unhelpfully reflect the character of the 3 autocratic countries’ imperial programmes of expansion. In their ideologized propaganda, Beijing, Moscow and Tehran spuriously claim that “historical necessity”, “destiny” or a “deity” endowed them with a “mission” of bringing a collection of territories under their undeclared imperial control. It is, thus, better to focus on the facts at hand without wishing that all the world’s countries must yet adopt democracy and westernization. And equally dangerous to the West’s endurance and its values would be the espousal of the 3 autocratic land empires’ messianic rhetoric.
Although Tehran and Moscow (and to a limited degree, Beijing) express vociferous anti-American sentiment, no of the 3 autocracies is inherently anti-western. They readily adopt technologies and modern social developments achieved in the West. The 3 neo-imperialist states just draw the line at democracy. Or it seems so to western public opinion.
Yet, bearing in head the imperialist character of China, Iran and Russia permits another interpretation. The 3 countries’ ruling elites did not reject democracy. To them it is simply a secondary concern. Above all, Beijing, Moscow and Tehran chose imperialism, meaning the programme of (re-)building, extending and bolstering their land empires. In essence, this geopolitical and governance choice precludes democracy. No empire was, is or can be democratic.
The 3 land empires see the West’s insistence on observing global law and the post-war political order’s norms as an unwelcome curb on their territorial growth and political ambitions. China, Iran or Russia do not necessarily search confrontation with the West. They do not have beef with democracy. The autocracies want to be just left alone to do as they see fit in their respective spheres of influence, coterminous with the spatial degree of their programmes of imperialist expansion.
The problem is that the Kremlin’s imperialist ambition of rebuilding a cross between the russian Union and the tsarist empire straight steps on the toes of the European Union and NATO in Central Europe, the advanced Arctic and possibly in Alaska. Iran’s ambitions in the mediate East endanger the West’s allies in this region. This is first of all seen in Israel but besides in the Gulf petrostates. In turn, Beijing’s expansionism threatens peace and stableness across South-East Asia and Australasia with direct menace to the West in Australia, Japan and Taiwan.
To placate the 3 land empires, the West appears to have even abandoned Africa to them. The tacit knowing is that in return Beijing, Moscow and Tehran should behave more sensibly with respect of the West’s interests in the 3 autocracies’ “imperial backyards”. The policy does not seem to work.
An undesired future for the West
At present, Russia’s war against Ukraine is simply a harsh test. China and Iran came to the Kremlin’s side due to the fact that this war’s result will decide the future of the 3 autocracies’ imperial projects. It will establish whether the West will leave Beijing, Moscow and Tehran alone, so they can proceed with their imperial projects unmolested and unchecked. A fall, partition or vassalization of Ukraine would free China, Iran and Russia from global constraints and obligations that nowadays outlaw imperialism and hamper territorial seizure. In specified a case, neoimperialist Russia would follow with a direct attack against NATO by 2030.
On the margins of these events, sitting on the fence, another imperially minded semi-autocracies wait impatiently for the verdict. A collapse in Ukraine would mean that Ethiopia and Turkey could choose the way of land empires too. Both countries have multi-ethnic populations, whose spatial structure displays a clear-cut division between the imperial metropole and the colonies. In addition, with imperial traditions of long standing under their belt, both Addis Ababa and Ankara are well prepared for implementing specified a scenario.
The result of the Russo-Ukrainian War will show if imperialism can inactive function as a viable ideology and practice of governance and global relations in the 21st century.
What would the fall of Ukraine mean for democracy and the West? The return of imperialism (perhaps, under a variety of concealing and prevaricating names) would make democracy into a number strategy of governance, as it was prior to the large War or during the Cold War. In spatial terms, the West would be reduced to Western Europe and North America, including crucial territorial losses and concessions to the autocracies in the advanced Arctic. This means that Asia, Central and east Europe, Africa and Latin America would be left to the world’s autocratic land empires.
The destiny of the western states in this autocratic and imperialist zone, specified as Australia, Israel, Japan, fresh Zealand or Taiwan, would be uncertain to say the least. The first to succumb to the land empires’ force and conquest could be the West’s allies there, be it Indonesia, Papua fresh Guinea, Pakistan, the Philippines or Taiwan. The stableness of a coalescing neo-imperial order would remainder on the rule of force, entailing that 1 of the land empires would appear as a global hegemon, which would most most likely be China.
A series of local and global conflicts indispensable for shaping the fresh planet order of this neo-imperialist character would devastate immense areas of the globe. In turn, these ravages would increase environmental pressure, shrinking the world’s sustainability and the full yield of agricultural production. As a result, starvation would come back with a vengeance and be primed for weaponization, as in the case of Stalin’s russian empire, Hitler’s Nazi Germany or Mao’s China of the “Great Leap” during the dark 20th century.
Tomasz Kamusella is Reader (Professor Extraordinarius) in Modern Central and east European past at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. His fresh volumes include Politics and the Slavic Languages (Routledge 2021), Eurasian Empires as Blueprints for Ethiopia (Routledge 2021), Languages and Nationalism alternatively of Empires (Routledge 2023) and Politika gjuhësore dhe gjeopolitika (Littera 2023). His mention Words in Space and Time: A Historical Atlas of Language Politics in Modern Central Europe (CEU Press 2021) is available as an open access publication.
Please support New east Europe's crowdfunding campaign. Donate by clicking on the button below.
.png){kind=link}
