Imperial Consciousness Research Articles

“War is destructive, but it reconstructs anew…:” Refugee Education and State Consolidation in Imperial Austria during the First World War

Abstract This article explores aspects of the organization of refugee education in imperial Austria during the First World War. Authorities in charge of refugees’ control and their eventual assistance interpreted access to education in two ways. First, it was an avenue of relief through schooling, aimed to counter the effects of uprootedness and, thus, safeguard some continuity in refugee children’s lives. Second, it was a way to ensure the making of productive and loyal citizens. In this context, this article looks at various policies regarding organization of schooling for displaced children. Moreover, it analyzes the ways language entered the realm of the refugee-focused classroom. Officials used schooling in refugee students’ vernacular to relieve the effects of their displacement and to reinforce ethnonational classifications of imperial subjects. At the same time, education through refugee children’s growing exposure to German language courses became a measure of a gradual inculcation of an imperial consciousness. Furthermore, it was a civilizing dimension of displacement management and, in this way, it became an avenue to consolidate a war-feeble state.

The Evolution of the Russian Diaspora in Northeast China (Late 19th – Mid‑20th Centuries)

Based on the fundamental statement that the Russian immigrant community in Northeast China in the late nineteenth – mid-twentieth centuries was a diaspora, this article examines the process of transformation of the nature of the Russian diaspora and the peculiarities of its functioning at certain stages of its existence. The research is based on the conceptual ideas of Imperial and Diaspora Studies. There are four stages of the existence of the Russian diaspora in Manchuria, which differ in the nature of the interaction of Russian immigrants with a foreign cultural environment, due to the sociolegal, economic, and political situation of the diaspora, as well as sociopolitical and sociocultural conditions of the living environment. The Russian immigrant community was formed as an imperial diaspora during the period of Russian domination in Manchuria. Despite the decline of the political and legal status and the marginalization in the early 1920s and later the split into politically antagonistic Soviet and Emigrant colonies, the diaspora retained elements of imperial consciousness and the desire for national and cultural autonomy. In the case of the Soviet colony, this was accompanied by attempts at a new “imperial” expansion in the form of Sovietization of the former alienated zone of the CER. In its turn, focused on the Sinification of the former alienated zone, the policy of the Chinese authorities led to a conflict of interests and hindered the process of integration of Russian immigrants, which was already complicated by the cultural and religious alienation of the living environment. The capture of Manchuria by the Japanese and the creation of the state of Manchukuo, which led to the disappearance of the Soviet colony, actualised the problem of the Russian diaspora’s integration into the multinational community of Manchukuo. Implemented within the framework of the Japanese pan-Asian national policy, the integration led to the strengthening of national defence tendencies and a significant numerical decline of the Russian diaspora. After 1945, the Russian diaspora, which was subjected to political repression, experienced intensive Sovietization and turned into an instrument of Soviet policy in Northeast China. The history of the diaspora ended with mass repatriation and remigration of 1954–1961.

Epilogue: The Postscripts of Vernacular Victoria

“Aajkal Agra ka mausam kaisa hai?” Queen Victoria asks herself, alone in her sumptuous quarters at Osborne House.1 How is the weather in Agra these days? Polite small talk, the loose change of a British monarch's verbal currency, recasts itself in unfamiliar phonemes as the empress of India practices her Hindustani. Soon, Agra will retreat from the imperial consciousness; it will be time to go to the durbar room, or work on her Urdu writing under the munshi's tutelage, perhaps before lunching on chicken curry.2

Maps and Mini-Imperialists

Children no longer reside on the periphery of studies of empire. Over the past two decades, a robust body of scholarship has demonstrated that youngsters—both as symbols and as flesh-and-blood individuals—have been crucial to the project of empire building. This is particularly true when examining the history of the United States, an empire whose central tenet was a denial of its own imperialism. Cultural constructions of childhood innocence and vulnerability bolstered justifications for U.S. political and territorial expansion in the name of uplift. And youngsters’ perceived malleability made them prime targets for efforts to mold imperial citizens and subjects. Youth groups, schools, and children’s material culture, recent scholarship has demonstrated, helped mold young imperialists—even as children themselves challenged or revised the lessons imparted by their elders. For example, Mischa Honeck’s Our Frontier is the World: The Boy Scouts in the Age of American Ascendancy examines how the Boy Scouts helped support American global expansionism across the twentieth century.1 In a similar vein, Brian Rouleau’s Empire’s Nursery: Children’s Literature and the Origins of the American Century explores how children’s books cultivated what Rouleau calls an “imperial consciousness.”2 Mahshid Mayar’s new book Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire adds to this productive conversation. The book focuses on children’s complex relationship with maps and map-making during the 1890s. It examines how U.S. geopolitical power was represented spatially and how the meanings of this power were conveyed to the next generation.

Enjoying Europe, yearning for Russia? Russian travel writing on the Baltic provinces during the 19th century

ABSTRACT After the end of the Napoleonic Wars it became popular in the Russian Empire to investigate one’s own country. Inspired by Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinskii’s bestseller A Journey to Reval (1821), the Russian elite also travelled through the Baltic provinces with their romantic medieval ruins and Hanseatic cities. During the first half of the nineteenth century, Baltic German culture was usually understood as enhancing Russia’s imperial diversity and ‘Europeanising’ the state. From the 1830s onwards, travel accounts concentrated on traces of the empire in the region and imagined the city of Reval/Tallinn as a site of memory for Russia’s first emperor, Peter I. This article argues that Russian travel writing on the Baltic provinces used tourism imaginaries that mirrored a growing imperial consciousness in which the Baltic provinces became more ‘Russian’ in the perceptions of the Russian public. This process has to be seen in the context of the nationalisation of Russian elite perceptions that also affected the general idea of this region as culturally ‘German’. In the end, the better accessibility of the region due to infrastructural modernisation paradoxically contributed to a growing sense of alienation, the romantic attraction of ‘Europeanness’ turned into a source of threat for the empire.

패전 후, 제국 일본여성의 집단기억과 제국의식 - 경성제일고등여학교를 중심으로 -

본 논문은 식민지 조선의 일본인을 위한 고등여학교, 특히 경성제일고등여학교가 일본의 패전과 함께 폐쇄된 후, 전후가 되어 일본에서 어떠한 방식으로 자신들의 학교를 기억하여 계승하였는지 고찰한 것이다.BR 경성제일고등여학교는 1908년 경성에서 가장 먼저 설립된 중등교육기관이다. 역사의 면에서 또 규모 면에서 최고의 명문이었고 학부모의 사회적 지위와 학교에 대한 열성, 어려운 입학 관문은 제일고녀의 사회적 위상을 설명해 주고 있다. 특히 동창생들은 ‘백양회’라는 이름으로 일본인 세력이 미치는 동아시아 각 지역에서 여성으로서, 주부로서 활동하였고, 이를 식민지기 동창회지 『백양회지』에 보고하였다. 그러나 이들 학교와 졸업생을 중심으로 조직된 여성단체 ‘백양회’는 일본의 패전과 더불어 폐쇄된다.BR 전후가 되어 경성제일고등여학교의 졸업생과 재학생은 일본에서 동창회를 재조직하고 다양한 모임을 전개한다. 이들은 먼저 학교 관련 자료를 수집하여 학교의 역사를 복원하고 각종 모임을 통하여 학교의 정신을 계승해 간다. 교가와 같은 과거 학교 의례를 반복하여 식민자로서의 위치를 무의식적으로 재생하는 것이다.BR 또한 1950년부터 매년 동창회지 『백양』을 발간하는데, 여기에는 동창회 행사에 대한 정보와 소개뿐 아니라, 식민지의 학교를 중심으로 하는 기억들이 상호 교류, 교차하며 실렸다. 이들 동창회는 이미 사라진 학교를 집단기억으로 100주년을 기념하고 2008년 종언을 고한다. 이들은 마지막에 이르러 식민지 조선에서 일본인 여성 명문 여학교로서 조선인 여성을 이끌어나갈 존재였던 사실을 상기한다. 이러한 제국의식은 전후 동창회 ‘백양회’와 동창회지 『백양』를 통하여 무자각적으로 무비판적으로 재구축되었다고 할 수 있다.

The Origins and Figurative Embodiment of the Mikhail Lermontov’s Imperial Consciousness

The Origins and Figurative Embodiment of the Mikhail Lermontov’s Imperial Consciousness

The establishment of the society for the restoration of orthodox christianity in the Caucasus and its activities in the education of the abkhazians

The events of the mid-60s of the 19th century became a turning point for the peoples of the Caucasus in many respects. There are fundamental changes in the socio-political and cultural life of the region. All this was due to both the energetic actions of the Russian government and the changes that took place among the Caucasian peoples. With the inclusion of the Caucasus into the Russian Empire, it became necessary to modify the actions of the autocracy in this region. Using various "levers", tsarism purposefully realized its main tasks in the region - the spread of Orthodoxy in the region and the formation of imperial identity and consciousness among the Caucasian peoples. The most important elements of such a civilizing policy in Russia are the secular school and enlightenment. Abkhazia, located in the northwestern part of the Caucasus, occupies an important strategic position. With the inclusion of Abkhazia into the Russian Empire, tsarism throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries sought to attract, first of all, the local elite into the all-Russian cultural space. The tsarist administration sought to create a strong system of government in the region, which would not have been possible without the involvement of competent officials from among the local population who knew the customs, life, familiar with the local living conditions. The government believed that the Society for the Restoration of Orthodox Christianity in the Caucasus, on which great hopes were pinned, could become the most important instrument of tsarist policy in the Caucasus. This article discusses the formation of the Society for the Restoration of Orthodox Christianity in the Caucasus, as well as some aspects of its activities in the field of education in Abkhazia.

A Study on Empire Consciousness in The Plague

The Plague written by Camus tells the story of fighting against the plague. The anti-epidemic organizations gathered around the hero, Dr. Rieux struggle against the plague during the closure of Oran. Throughout the story, whether it’s the process from the occurrence of plague to the real confirmation, or the process of the anti-epidemic teams being organized, the indigenous inhabitants of Oran City—the Arabs are all marginalized objects and silent “others”. In addition, the Arab lands are full of French-style life and management methods, and Spanish-style building. These are the revelation of Camus's deep-rooted imperial consciousness.

Features of the political regime of Russia

The authoritarian political Regime of Russia determines aggressive behavior of this country in the foreign and domestic politics. Because of this the studding of this regime is actual both in theoretical and practical points of views. The main features of this regime in Russian reality stems from its hybrid nature and they are: authoritarian autocratic characteristics; but it is not the traditional authoritarianism the theory and practice of which we know from history. First of all, its specificity follows from the propaganda load of the regime and due to the control over the state media, the government achieves an information dictatorship; which is enough to form public opinion and reduce the need for repression: The second feature is the coexistence of democratic elements (limited pluralism, multi-party system, opposition television) with the totalitarian ones (coalescence of ruling party and the state, secret police, servile political culture). The third feature is the autocratic nature, the Putin-tailored constitution, the legislative acts which in Putin’s view are necessary. To study the Russian regime we use the theory .of cyclic development, according to which authoritarian cycles of political modernization are associated with geopolitical successes, and short term liberalization efforts, which always ended in failures, are associated with unsuccessful domestic and foreign policy. In all these cases initiatives always comes from the political elites and people plays a role of their supporters. Because of this researchers believe that civic society could not acquire subjectivity. In our view, political culture has a decisive influence on the political regime in Russia. The characteristics of Russian political culture are: faith of a powerful state and leader; Great Russian messianic chauvinism, which is the idea of Russian identity and part of the mentality of the people, as well as the ideas of social equality of sovereign democracy, subjective orientations and imperial thinking, which playa dominant role in the public consciousness. Therefore, those researchers and statesman who believe that chauvinism comes only from Putin are wrong. The main reason must be the imperial consciousness of the people. The article confirms the hypothesis that the natural development of Russia is authoritarian. It will take decades (in case of the desire of the authorities) to eradicate from the minds of citizens the elements of authoritarian culture, which for centuries have been fixed in their minds and passed from generation to generation.

НАЦИСТСКАЯ ГЕРМАНИЯ КАК ОБРАЗЕЦ НЕКЛАССИЧЕСКОЙ ИМПЕРИИ: ИНТЕРПРЕТАЦИЯ ЮРИДИЧЕСКИХ ПОНЯТИЙ В ПРАВОВОЙ СИСТЕМЕ ТРЕТЬЕГО РЕЙХА

The article does not pretend to become a detailed research of such complicated and ambiguous concepts as empire, imperial consciousness, and mentality. All of them are applied to Germany of 1933–1945 only to an- swer the next three questions: – if the Third Reich is considered to be an empire, what type of empire is it? – is it possible to define the national consciousness of the German nation in the Third Reich as imperial? – in what way has the imperial national consciousness been reflected in the classification of mentality types develop by the lawyers of the Third Reich? And how do the German lawyers interpret such a classification from the pres- ent day perspective? To answer the first question, the author subjects a number of definitions of empire to a comparative analysis, distinguishing such “imperial” features that could be applied to Germany of 1933–1945 and characterize it as a non- classical type of empire. The answer to the second question requires from the author a sufficiently detailed description of the national German consciousness in the Third Reich and its definition as mass, totalitarian, and archetypical. All listed features re- flect to certain extent the essence of imperial consciousness. However, such fact cannot be considered a reason for defining the national German conscious- ness as imperial, because the Third Reich chose as the main criteria for its state construction a race theory while the concept of empire presupposes a multina- tional and not a racially homogeneous society. Answering the third question the author makes an attempt to charac- terize the national German consciousness through the prism of legal con- cepts used in the classification of mentality developed by the German la wyer K. Schmitt in the 30-s of the 20th century, perfected later by his appren- tice O. Bruner and finally critically reassessed by a modern Israeli historian G. Al’gazi.

Empire of Diamonds: Victorian Gems in Imperial Settings, by Adrienne Munich

Reviewed by: Empire of Diamonds: Victorian Gems in Imperial Settings by Adrienne Munich Stefanie Markovits (bio) Empire of Diamonds: Victorian Gems in Imperial Settings, by Adrienne Munich; pp. xiv + 273. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2020, $29.95. In October 2018, three weeks after the gruesome murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi under the direction of Mohammed bin Salman, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex wore a pair of diamond earrings to a state dinner, ones that had been given to her as a wedding gift by the Saudi Crown Prince. The Duchess, biracial and American, was castigated by the British press for her act. It is an episode that Adrienne Munich might have made much of, crystallizing as it does so many traces of what she describes as the "imperial consciousness" attached to the gemstones in question (9). Adrienne Munich's Empire of Diamonds: Victorian Gems in Imperial Settings tells a tale, alternately sparkling and bloody, of how such gems traversed Victoria's realm, helping to shape its many facets and give form to an Englishness constituted by these fundamentally foreign objects. Vibrantly interdisciplinary, Munich's archive stretches from a Mughalstyle miniature watercolor of a Sikh prince to illustrations in a J. Peterman Catalogue of a reproduction of the "Heart of the Ocean" necklace from the film Titanic (1997), and from Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud to memoirs of mining the South African diamond fields. Along the way, she offers a wide survey of Victorian diamond literature, primarily focused on novels but also considering poems such as Alfred Tennyson's Idylls of the King (1859–85) and stories such as Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Blue Carbuncle" (1892). As Munich shows, it is a rich vein to explore, in which named stones both historical and imaginary assert their presence as forcefully as fictional characters—or as their respective owners and authors. [End Page 594] When faced with so many brilliant diamonds, how best string them together? How construct a setting that lets them shine? Munich's great stroke here was to realize that the shifting geographical associations of the gemstone across the century could help her tell her tale. Beginning in part I with India, the source of many older diamonds, she traces the history of British engagements with the stones as they travel from the East, considering especially how and whether these gems (and their owners) can be "converted" by changing their settings (29): the Koh-i-noor or "Mountain of Light," as it underwent various recuttings and resettings; Duleep Singh, whose family had owned this most famous diamond; and Rudyard Kipling's Kim O'Hara, whom Munich reads as reflecting India's facets. She also explores the various ways Indian stones like Wilkie Collins's Moonstone resist imperial shaping by proving their ability to "strike back at the Empire" (69). Part II moves away from the sacred powers of Indian gems into the heart of the British metropole, to questions of national, racial, and familial hierarchies. Munich describes how the diamonds of Tennyson's Idylls and Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit (1855–57) serve as "talismanic signs of masculinity" (113) or fetishized "trophies," like the women who wear them—proof of status in a culture of new mobility, icons of authenticity and (racial) purity that are nevertheless dangerously transferable and subject to imitation and taint (14). The pleasures of Munich's readings of the more familiar texts lie less in their novelty than in their careful arrangement within her own narrative setting. John Plotz has also shown, for example, how diamonds crystalize the distinction between affective and commercial value, and others have considered links between imperialist crimes and literary gems. But one shining strand in this section (and the next) follows the long association between Jews and this particular jewel. Here, Walter Scott's Ivanhoe (1819) serves as Jamesian germ and original gem, and Munich argues convincingly for the legacy bequeathed by Rebecca of York on British literature, from Anthony Trollope's novels to Daniel Deronda's (1876) Jewish plot and beyond. Beyond takes us to South Africa, which became in the 1870s the locus of a mad "scramble" after the stones, as unprecedented quantities of diamonds...

Visions: “If You See Her Face You Die”: Orientalist Gothic and Colonialism in Bithia Croker’s Indian Ghost Stories.

This paper analyzes Bithia Mary Croker’s ghost stories of the British Raj to argue that Croker in her texts reframes the eighteenth-century Orientalist Gothic writing tradition to critique British imperial presence in India. I specifically discuss two of Croker’s short stories, namely “To Let” (1893) and “If You See Her Face” (1893) published in her anthology of Indian ghost fiction To Let(1893) .The paper traces how Croker uses two distinct characteristics of eighteenth-century colonial Indian society–-the tradition of nautch performances and the architectural space of the dak bungalows–-which continued into early-nineteenth century British India under the vigilance of the Empire to simultaneously attack the imperial consciousness and dislocate the imperial heartland from within the colony. In my critique of the two stories, I take a transhistorical approach wherein my analysis starts with and builds upon the eighteenth century and moves into the late nineteenth century. The paper traces how Croker uses two distinct characteristics of eighteenth-century colonial Indian society–-the tradition of nautch performances and the architectural space of the dak bungalows–-which continued into early-nineteenth century India under the vigilance of the British empire to simultaneously attack the imperial consciousness and dislocate the imperial heartland from within the colony. The short stories build upon and expand the eighteenth-century gothic tradition that threads together the internal and the external, in this case the “others” of the British empire. They use Orientalist gothic elements to reflect the growing contentions in the Indian city of Lucknow against British imperial forces that also compromises the apparently safe and secure domestic space of the colonial dak bungalows. In doing so, Croker uses the figures of racial and gendered others to subvert the politico-cultural hierarchies of race, class, and gender.

НЕОИМПЕРСКИЙ ЛЕЙТМОТИВ В ИСТОРИЧЕСКИХ РОССИЙСКИХ ФИЛЬМАХ 2000–2010-х гг. И ФЕНОМЕН КИНЕМАТОГРАФИЧЕСКОЙ ПРАВОСЛАВНОЙ ПРОПОВЕДИ

During the last two decades, the topic of imperial consciousness and the ideological construction of a neo-imperial approach to contemporary Russian history within the narrative of post-Soviet “neo-imperialism” has been increasingly revived in Russian cinema. It has not much about developing the idea of Great Russia with a highest world mission. There are hardly more Slavophile motives here than Westernisers’ ones. The new historical movies shot mainly by the Russian state or Church request construct a parable about a great supranational historical empire, which unites all ethnic groups, peoples, and religions under the rule of the Russian Tsar / Emperor / Patriarch. For Soviet times, the Communist Party or its leader usually plays the role of the monarch, while the role of civil religion can be played by political ideology. The modern Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church disseminates the idea of imperialism as a basis of the Orthodox media cinematographic preaching. This type of preaching, along with Christian preaching on the Internet, social networks, and video games, has become increasingly used by Orthodox clergymen and church organisations. Here Russian Orthodox Church follows the Roman Catholics and Protestants, who currently use media sermon as an important part of their homiletics. From priests to clergy of the highest rank, such as Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeev) of Volokolamsk or Metropolitan Tikhon (Shevkunov) of Pskov and Porkhovsk, more and more men of cloth begin to attract audience by their performance in offline and online video blogs, by online streams of their sermons in the digital space and finally, by shooting films, both documentaries and feature films. The main components of the neo-imperial narrative in the modern ideologised cinematographic preaching are the following: 1) constructing the parable of the great supranational historical empire (pre-Mongol Rus, Horde, Russian Principality, Russian Tsardom, Russian Empire, finally, the Soviet Union); 2) emphasising the great role of political leader, prince / tsar / emperor / general secretary / president; 3) resorting to preposterous synthesis of incompatible ideals of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union; 4) spreading anti-historicism, anachronism, including linguistic, substituting historical fantasy for the history of the Russian Orthodox Church; 5) elevating the current national ideology to the status of national archetype, with searching and successful finding of “eternal” geopolitical enemies and friends of Russia; 6) re-considering Orthodoxy as a glamour “export product” for the West. The Cinematographic Orthodoxy depicted in imperial propaganda films has little in common with the history of the Russian Orthodox Church and the ideal of Orthodox Christian morality. Under the pen of scriptwriters and film directors who create their mass products by the order of the current Russian state or Patriarchate, Orthodox Christianity becomes a social and media construct that must exists solely for the blessing and support of the state power, as well as for the entertainment of the mass audience. Therefore, we must stress that such a preaching does not achieve its goals, as it does not preach Jesus Christ’s teaching, spirituality and a way for soul salvation and improvement.

Gendered Eyewitness in Narration: Imagining Morocco in British Women Travel-Inspired Narratives in Late Nineteenth Century

The nineteenth century gave unprecedented travel opportunities to Europeans to visit and write about the “Orient”. The growing imperial expansion and subsequent imperial consciousness among British travelers found ample justification in various literary forms and discursive manifestations that enhanced a zealous desire towards empire building and the construction of a British identity that grappled with its otherness in “highly asymmetrical relations of subordination.” This offered many Victorian women travelers the chance to travel beyond borders while subverting the conventional image of domesticity associated with them, just as it enabled them to embrace freedom from the compelling institutions of patriarchy at home. Studying Victorian female travel narratives to the “Orient” provides inexhaustible grounds to rethink the intricate relationship between travel, overt nationalism, gendered constructions of identity and Orientalist ideology. This paper is concerned with the traveling experiences of Amelia Perrier through her A Winter in Morocco (1873), and Frances Macnab’s A Ride in Morocco among Traders and Believers (1902). With a postcolonially-inflected consciousness, it attempts to investigate how these travel narratives reproduce the strategies characteristic of Orientalist discourse in its inscription of self and Other power relations, fueled up by a will to knowledge and control over new territories. I shall argue that late nineteenth century British women travel writers operated not only in the power structures of gender but also within the larger structures of empire, class categorization, and race dynamics.

LITTLE RUSSIA AND GREAT RUSSIA IN SATIRE BY NIKOLAI GOGOL

The article first discusses the problem of the correlation in the work of Nikolai Gogol as satirist or critic of the “Little Russian” and “Great Russian” types of Russian nobility. The influence of Nikolai Gogol’s Ukraine impressions on the creation of a number of his works of an all-Russia nature is emphasised: short story “The Nose”, the comedy “The Inspector General”, and the poem “Dead Souls”. Based on a comprehensive analysis, numerous facts and various testimonies of contemporaries, a conclusion is drawn about the deep imperial consciousness of the writer, who did not distinguish representatives of the Ukraine and Great Russia in his religious, pastoral criticism. The writer always thought of the Ukraine as part of Rus’ – Russia – the Russian Empire. In contrast to the ideologists of a narrow “small-town” “patriotism”, Nikolai Gogol, being a state thinker, considered the inhabitants of Northern and Southern Russia as subjects of a single Russian power and in his convictions of unworthy employees, “malignant” people of miscellaneous ranks and of the nobility was equally strict and demanding to his countrymen as well as to the Great Russians.

THE ORIGIN OF AN IMPERIAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE UNITED STATES

The article examines the origins of Imperial discourse formation in American political culture and geopolitics. At the end of XX - beginning of XXI century it took disguised forms - “nonterritorial Empire”, “informal Empire”, “positive Empire”, “cultural hegemony”. The latency of the US Imperial consciousness is due to a number of reasons. First, the historical fact of the struggle for liberation from the colonial rule of Britain left a deep trace in the “political imaginary” of the American people and gave rise to the belief that the United States itself has never been, is not and cannot be an Empire. The second factor was the semantic evolution that occurred in the American interpretation of power. In fact, America has not passed the historical path that developed the idea of a “monopoly on legitimate violence” in Europe. The idea of “dispersal” of power has rooted in the public consciousness the priority of the power factor, coupled with the admissibility of the use of force at own discretion. Inside, both motives were regarded by the public consciousness as democratic. The third component of imperialism became a powerful Messianic argument, the belief in the special destiny of the American nation to create an ideal society This Faith brought with them in the “terra nullis” (on “no man's land”) immigrants of the New World. This thesis has become fundamental to the public opinion and to all the leaders of America. The justification of the concept of “soft power” and “cultural hegemony” did not detract from the importance of the “power factor”, which gave rise to new forms of imperialism - the deployment of military bases and economic dictatorship. The range of American domination is characterized by great flexibility - from mutually beneficial cooperation in Europe (“Empire by invitation”) to direct military intervention into the “rogue States”.

The World on the Eve of the Second World War: Historiographical Interpretations of the Beginning of the War

The article considers various historiographical approaches to the treatment of the beginning of the Second World War. The author notes that the collapse of the great empires, defeating the imperial consciousness and the emergence of new countries from their remains and a completely new global balance of powers as the immediate consequences of the First World War reconfigured the geopolitical and strategic map of the entire European continent and have created hopes for a new global order of the post-war Europe based on equal national rights and peaceful coexistence among peoples, democratization and humanization of the European society. Unfortunately, many hopes and expectations of millions of people have been left unfulfilled pursuant to imperfections in the Versailles system of the post-war arrangement of Europe. 1918-1919 seemed the start of a new democracy in Europe, but soon the situation has changed to the opposite. In Europe totalitarian regimes were established. Two decades later, during lifetime of participants of the First World War, those very states led the whole world into the Second World War, the most terrible and bloody conflict. The paper indicated that the genesis of the Second World War received significant attention in an enormous corpus of scientific literature, whose scope is growing rapidly. The Soviet and Russian historiography focuses on the Munich Agreement (1938) as a pivotal event which “opened the way to the Second World War – the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century” and “provided justification for the USSR's rapprochement with Germany” as a forced step from J. Stalin. However, the Western historiography asserts that Non-Aggression Pact between Germany and the Soviet Union of 1939 became turning moment which has plunged the world into war and led to the so-called Fourth Partition of Poland, the seizure by Germany of large parts of Europe (Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Belgium, Netherlands, France, Yugoslavia, Greece), the Soviet-Finnish War of 1939-1940 (the Winter War), Soviet occupation of the Baltic states, Bessarabiya and Northern Bukovyna as a logical consequence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The author does not exclude the possibility that the starting date of the Second World War may be revised in the near future. Brutal military campaigns of Japan in Asia (the 1930s) and Italy in Africa (1935-1936), the Japanese-German Anti-Commintern Pact of 1936, to which Italy had acceded in 1937, the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War, the battle of Lake Khasan (1938), the battles of Khalkhyn Gol (1939), the Anschluss Österreichs (1938), the Munich Agreement concluded on 30 September 1938 which has led to accelerating the occupation of Czechoslovakia, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (Non-Aggression Pact between Germany and the Soviet Union of 1939) were a prelude to the Second World War. These tragic and great events not just have paved the way for a new stage of historical development, but also have provided a long-term programme for human history.   Vidnyanskyj, S. (2019). The World on the Eve of the Second World War: Historiographical Interpretations of the Beginning of the War. Mìžnarodnì zv’âzki Ukraïni: naukovì pošuki ì znahìdki – The International relations of Ukraine: scientific searches and findings, 28, 8-26 [in Ukrainian].

Prophetic Imagination and Empire in Asia

The aim of this article is to identify the glimpses of prophetic imagination amongst the Christian communities in Asia, particularly in Korea and Japan, who are engaged in resisting the new round of militarization in the twenty-first century. This resistance denounces the globalist security complex in the region and announces a nonmilitaristic alternative forming a praxis that is necessary for a new theology of peace in East Asia and in Asia broadly. The political reality of the new round of military empire-building will be discussed with a personal narrative and a political analysis after which the theological meaning of prophetic imagination as opposed to imperial consciousness will be analyzed, correlating the personal and political with the theological. The ways in which the resistance to militarization resonates with the prophetic imagination of an alternative consciousness and community will be examined through an analysis of memories and renunciation of war by the churches. Broad implications of these resonances for a peace theology in Asia will be identified.

Maps, Mission, Memory and Mizo Identity

This article will examine the role of imperial maps, Christian mission, shared memories and collective consciousness in the formation of Mizo identity. Arguing that imperial maps, supposedly based upon objective European science, were meant to suit specific purposes and were laden with deeper agendas, this article will maintain that other aspiring maps also depicted conflicting claims to territory and overlooked specific details rather than giving factual descriptions. This article will look at how borders and boundaries thus constructed have actual impacts upon the people, places and spaces they divide and include. It will particularly deal with the aspirations of the Mizo Christians who embraced Christianity during the colonial period, and how they are ‘in India’ but often feel ‘not of India’, and will interrogate the Biblical and historical dimensions of their mental maps.