History is a powerful weapon: Just ask Vladimir Putin, who is using it as part of his escalating campaign to undermine an independent Ukraine. And Putin isn’t the only leader who is invoking — and abusing — the past as a means of asserting global influence. Geopolitical authority often begins with historical revisionism, a pattern that is playing out across an unsettled international landscape today.
The past shapes our understanding of what is and, more importantly, what should be. So the links between a country’s history and its foreign policy — or, rather, its preferred understanding of that history — have always been profound. All leaders seek to justify their statecraft through some narrative about the past. All empires use historical mythmaking to legitimize their expansion.
Americans like to believe that they live in a habitually isolationist country that only reluctantly became a global superpower. That self-perception is hard to square with the material acquisitiveness and ideological assertiveness that drove America to compile one of history’s most awesome records of geopolitical aggrandizement, from the conquest of much of North America to the creation of an informal empire spanning much of the world. Now American rivals are invoking the past to challenge the US-led international order.
Putin is an avid amateur historian. And the Russian president’s efforts to restore a Russian empire have involved rehabilitating a fallen one — the Soviet Union.
As early as 2005, Putin declared that the collapse of the Soviet Union, a state responsible for murder and repression on a horrifying scale, was the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” He has since tried to rewrite the history of World War II, arguing that the conflict resulted from Nazi aggression and Western timidity — conveniently eliding the fact that Stalin’s Soviet Union contributed mightily to that catastrophe by partnering with Hitler to carve up Europe between 1939 and 1941.
In mid-2021, Putin authored an essay arguing that Ukraine has historically been inseparable from Russia and can flourish only if it submits to Moscow’s authority. Neglected is the role of brute force and state-sanctioned famine in pulling together the Soviet Union, from which Ukraine’s leaders bolted as soon as they had the chance in 1991. Most recently, Putin’s government shuttered Memorial International, a foundation that had documented the crimes of Stalin’s regime.
Putin understands the power of the past all too well. Rehabilitating a mighty, totalitarian Soviet Union is a way of defending his own repressive governance while sanctifying the extension of Russia’s influence throughout its “near abroad.”
China’s president, Xi Jinping, is also wielding history as a cudgel. Xi has revived much of the political centralization of the Mao Zedong era, by making himself “chairman of everything,” eliminating term limits, enshrining “Xi Jinping Thought” in the constitution and creating his own cult of personality. The predicable counterpart to that agenda has been a campaign against “historical nihilism,” which apparently includes dwelling excessively on the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and other tragedies of Mao’s rule.
At the same time, Xi has articulated a historical rationale for Chinese expansion. In July, he said that bringing Taiwan into the mainland’s grasp is a “historic mission” and a matter of “realizing China’s complete reunification.” The implication is that Taiwan belongs to the People’s Republic by historical right. Chinese officials have argued that Beijing has a similar claim to nearly all of the South China Sea.
Yet as the journalist Bill Hayton points out, it’s not so simple: Taiwan was never really part of the modern Chinese nation that Mao overthrew in the civil war that created the state Xi rules today, and China’s claim to the South China Sea was invented by Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist government in the late 1940s. Rewriting Chinese history is thus part and parcel of Xi’s effort to create a “rejuvenated” nation with vast global power.
Other rulers are engaged in this same type of revisionism. Prime Minister Viktor Orban has minimized Hungary’s complicity in the Holocaust and its decision to ally with Nazi Germany during World War II. To rally nationalist sentiment, he has hinted at the restoration of a “Greater Hungary” based on its pre-World War I kingdom, including large parts of modern Croatia, Serbia, Romania and Slovakia.
Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan is cloaking his drive for autocratic power and regional primacy in nostalgia for the Ottoman Empire; his government has talked of a “post-Ottoman space” as Ankara’s privileged domain. Iran’s clerical regime has used the legacy of the Persian Empire as justification for its efforts at hegemony in the Middle East.
The outcomes of these various projects will be determined by clashes of power and influence. Yet what happens in the realm of ideas affects what happens in the realm of politics. Leaders who want a new global equilibrium are seeking authority and legitimacy from their own preferred versions of history. Grasping what Putin, Xi and other challengers want the world to believe about the past can help us understand how they envision the future.
Bloomberg
