Edward Dicey, “Mr Gladstone and Our Empire,” September 1877, in Nineteenth Century Opinion: An Anthology of Extracts from the First Fifty Volumes
of The Nineteenth Century 1877–1901, ed. Michael Goodwin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951), 261. Dicey added: “But our conquests
have come to us as the accidents of war, not as the objects of our warfare. I do not
deduce from this that our annexations of territory have been obtained more justly
or more rightfully than those of other powers who have conquered for the sake of conquering.
What I want to point out is that our Empire is the result not so much of any military
spirit as of a certain instinct of development in our race. We have in us the blood
of the Vikings; and the same impulse which sent the Norsemen forth to seek new homes
in strange lands has, for century after century, impelled their descendants to wander
forth in search of wealth, power, or adventure” (Dicey, “Mr Gladstone,” 262).
25.
Quoted in Ivan Krastev and Mark Leonard, “The Spectre of a Multipolar Europe,” Policy
paper (London: European Council on Foreign Relations, 2010), 32.
26.
Claire Mouradian, “Les Russes au Caucase,” in Le livre noir du colonialisme: XVIe–XXIe siècle: de l’extermination à la repentance, ed. Marc Ferro (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2003), 393 (emphasis mine).
27.
John Darwin, Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (London: Penguin, 2013), 399.
28.
Cf. Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1979), 337.
29.
Anderson, Lineages, 346.
30.
Anonymous authors, Proekt Rossiya: Vybor Puti, Vtoraya Kniga (Moscow: Eksmo, 2007), 395.
31.
John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, with a preface by F. A. Hayek, reprint of the original edition of 1861 (Indiana:
Gateway Editions, 1962), 88. This compensatory function of imperialist policies had
also been observed by the sociologist Max Weber: “Weber saw Russia as a typical imperialist
power, its pressure for expansion coming from a combination of elements within Russian
society: from the landhunger of the peasants; from the power interests of the bureaucracy;
from the cultural imperialism of the intelligentsia, who, ‘too weak to secure even
the most elementary demands for a constitutional order and guaranteed freedoms at
home . . . find a support for their damaged self-esteem in the service of a policy
of expansion, concealed under fine-sounding phrases.’” (David Beetham, Max Weber and the Theory of Modern Politics (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1974), 140.)
32.
Peter Sloterdijk, Die Verachtung der Massen: Versuch über Kulturkämpfe in der modernen Gesellschaft
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 33.
33.
Instead of seeking refuge in the ersatz self-esteem, provided by empire, a more authentic
way to reappropriate the self-esteem that has been denied, is described by Axel Honneth
in his book The Struggle for Recognition. “In the context of the emotional response associated with shame,” he wrote, “the experience
of being disrespected can become the motivational impetus for a struggle for recognition.
For it is only by regaining the possibility of active conduct that individuals can
dispel the state of emotional tension into which they are forced as a result of humiliation.”
The praxis thus opened up makes it possible, according to Honneth, “to take the form
of political resistance.” (Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 138.)
34.
