Federalism, Regionalism, and Autonomism as Alternative Political Imaginaries of Post-Imperial Political Order
Moments of historical bifurcations and roads not taken are often described as times of chaos and disintegration. Yet, these particular historical moments and historical imageries they engender contain rich material for complicating our understanding of the past and for elaborating a more nuanced and sensitive analytical language. The proposed conference will explore ways in which contemporaries and historians imagined the post-imperial order and historical transitions in modern imperial formations.
From the late Habsburg empire to the British dominions and from the late Soviet Union to decolonization in Africa, ideas of how the new, post-imperial order might look like proliferated. Some of them included visions of a homogeneous national body and technocratic modernizing state, while others focused on projects of commonwealths, regional and national federations, or confederations and different ways of agency and subjectivity. Some of these projects, such as the Russian tradition of oblastnichestvo, retreated into the past and were practically obliterated by historical development of Soviet ethno-territorial federation and revolutionary state, while others, such as the concept of "pan-Europe," contributed to the emergence of the European union.
This conference will bring together leading scholars from all over the world to discuss topics such as projects of political and territorial rearrangements, contested internal and external political borders, autonomist, federalist, and regionalist ideas, nationalist visions and modernist dreams of political mobilization, self-organization of society and creation of modern subjectivities in the diverse imperial society. The ultimate goal of the conference is to critically examine the historiographic certainty of transitional narrative from empire to nation-state and to explore the varieties of political imaginaries and subjectivities in the period of collapse and remaking of empires.
The organizing committee proposes the following themes for discussion:
- crises of imperial order, legitimacy, and society as openings for post-imperial imaginaries;
- reform and revolution in the context of contested diversity and citizenship;
- intellectual and political genealogies and ideological underpinnings of internationalist, autonomist, and federalist thought in 19th and early 20th century imperial contexts;
- locality and region as idioms of imperial and post-imperial politics;
- race, nationality, indigenous peoples into majorities and minorities of post-imperial space
- constitutionalism and legal pluralism
- · political parties, national movements, and political representation in post-imperial imaginaries
- · post-colonial and post-imperial subjectivities