The Wide-Angle Lens?: The Centrality of Russia in the Histories of Eurasia, Empires, and Borderlands

Abstract

The Wide-Angle Lens?The Centrality of Russia in the Histories of Eurasia, Empires, and Borderlands Brian P. Farrell (bio) Alfred J. Rieber, The Struggle for the Eurasian Borderlands: From the Rise of Early Modern Empires to the End of the First World War. 652 pp., maps. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. ISBN-13 978-1107043091. $95.00. The title captures the sweep and ambition of Alfred J. Rieber’s grand historical synthesis. Rieber revisits several centuries, ranging across a territorial, political, and historical landscape spanning Vienna to Vladivostok, searching for explanations regarding the evolution, impact, and disappearance of the great imperial states that did so much to shape the connected histories of the European–Asian “heartland.” To produce such a synthesis in any worthwhile form calls for a lifetime of critical reading, ranging across very disparate literatures—and inevitably exposes the author to challenges by specialists more deeply immersed in a particular time, place, or topic. Especially on the biggest canvases, the devil so often seems to be found in the detail. Rieber’s bold effort to explain the rise, experience, and collapse of five great projects of contiguous land-based imperial conquest—the Habsburg, Iranian, Ottoman, Qing, and Russian—deserves, however, more than specialist insularity. Rieber explains his approach and argument in the first paragraph (1). Both focus on three questions: why did nearly all post-1815 conflicts in Europe and Asia begin in “borderlands” that straddled the territories of multinational continental empires—and why did those borderlands become, after 1918, unstable successor states? Why did the five great continental empires, after centuries of chronic conflict and rivalry, all come crashing down between 1911 and 1923? Finally, why did imperial Russia play a central role in both this larger process and in most of these conflicts? The study rests on unpacking three concepts: geocultural as opposed to geopolitical analysis; [End Page 917] shatter zones; and complex frontiers. Rieber presents a thoroughly up-to-date conceptualization of the nature of “borderlands,” seeing them as spaces within which profound forces, from above and below, shaped an unending discourse that defined relationships between center and periphery but in processes driven by multiple agents of change, coming from different directions, reacting in continuous but erratic interplay with one another. Rieber shreds nationalist mythmaking and the historiography of turning complicated local forces and frictions into protonational challenges to imperial hegemony, moving with confidence from Petrine to Leninist responses to social, cultural, and other forces. The sheer weight of the argument does pose problems. The distinction between geocultural and geopolitical often seems very fine in a study that, quite rightly, concentrates heavily on state building, and on the systems and methods of managing relations between states. Shatter zones make more sense empirically than complex frontiers; given that Rieber sees delineating frontiers as automatically complicating all relationships between peoples directly affected by them, “complex” seems oxymoronic. Critics will also wonder whether the challenges of defining and absorbing borderlands and their peoples were really, consistently, the main factor in changing larger trajectories in which volatile profound social and political forces, spatially located well within “heartlands,” seemed at least as often to be the engines driving imperial histories. Identifying conflicts over demarcating imperial territorial spheres of influence as a major agent of history is hardly original, but claiming that these conflicts made everyone’s history is less common. Did the volatile relationships among German, British, and French empires play no significant role in sparking a “world crisis” in the early 20th century? It must also be said that repeated connections that Rieber identifies between developments on the Danube and ramifications along the Ussuri are not always persuasive. Notwithstanding his impressive range of engagement, this Central Europeanist is clearly not as conversant with the Sinic imperial experience and its literature; his treatment of it lacks depth and substance by comparison with his comfort zone. Such asymmetry is often clearly exposed by proceeding thematically through chapters. In this case, however, the thematic approach effectively holds the discussion together across this wide range of time and space. Rieber offers the intelligent general reader some revisionist history which, when seen from at least one major vantage point, deserves closer attention: the...