On the Psychology of States That Have Not Come to Terms with Their Diminishment
Introduction: A Scale That Cannot Be Lost
The trauma of empire is not a memory of loss. It is the inability to accept a new scale.
Not every defeat becomes an imperial trauma. States lose territories, influence, and status. History knows many examples where former great powers diminished, restructured themselves, and found a new place in the world. Loss in itself is not a pathology. It becomes a pathology when it is not acknowledged as a completed fact.
An empire differs from an ordinary state not only in size or military might. It differs in the way it thinks of itself. An empire does not simply exist in the world—it organizes the space around itself. It gets used to being the center, the norm, the point of reference. Its scale becomes not a political characteristic but a part of its identity.
In this sense, loss for an empire is never merely an external event. It is experienced not as a change in circumstances but as a violation of the order of things.
Where an ordinary state asks, “What have we lost?”, an empire poses a different question: “How did it become possible that we no longer define?”
This is the crucial shift. Imperial trauma arises not at the moment of defeat but when the defeat is not accepted as reality. When the reduction in scale is not integrated into a new identity but is rejected as an anomaly, an injustice, or a mistake of history that must be corrected.
Then the past ceases to be the past. It is not simply remembered—it is retained as the only acceptable version of the self. And the present begins to be perceived as a deviation that must be annulled. This gives rise to a specific type of political tension. The empire is no longer what it was, yet it is incapable of becoming something else. It gets stuck between scales—between the memory of greatness and the impossibility of restoring it in its former shape.
This is not merely a historical condition. It is a psychological construct that begins to determine political behavior. For where a new scale has not been accepted, any reality is perceived as humiliation.
Imperial trauma rarely remains passive. It seeks not only an explanation but also an outlet. Not only memory but also action. And very often, this action takes the form of revenge.
1. The Mechanism: How Imperial Trauma is Formed
Imperial trauma does not arise at the moment of defeat. It is formed as a sequence of psychic shifts in which a historical event is transformed into a stable structure of perceiving reality.
To understand its logic, it is essential to break this process down into several phases.
1.1. The Normalization of Greatness
Every empire begins not only with expansion but also with an inner conviction of its own natural centrality.
Dominic Lieven, in his fundamental study Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals (2000), shows that imperial formations are stabilized not only through force but also through the production of a self-image as the necessary order of things. The empire does not merely control space—it interprets this control as the norm.
On a psychological level, this corresponds to what the psychoanalytic tradition after Freud might describe as an expanded “Ego” that does not draw a clear boundary between itself and the external world. The empire tends to think of territories, peripheries, and often other peoples as part of its own structure. In this state, scale ceases to be a variable. It becomes an identity.
The empire does not have influence — it is influence. Its presence in the world is experienced not as one possible position among others but as the natural order.
1.2. Loss as a Rupture of Reality
When disintegration occurs—a military defeat, decolonization, the loss of territories or spheres of influence—the empire is confronted not only with material reduction. It is confronted with a rupture between its self-image and the new reality.
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, in his work The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery (2003), shows that great powers after catastrophes do not immediately integrate the loss. They often experience it as a temporary deviation rather than a new condition.
A first exit is possible at this phase. If the political elite or the cultural environment find a way to acknowledge the loss as a fact—without phantom pain or the sacralization of defeat—the mechanism is cut short. Spain after 1898 lost the remnants of its empire, but instead of revenge, this gave rise to the “Generation of ’98″—a movement of national reflection that channeled the energy of collapse into a rethinking of identity, not into aggression.
The key point is that reality has already changed, but the psychic map has not yet done so. A primary rupture emerges, triggering the traumatic process. The gap between the psychic map and physical borders creates a state of collective disorientation, manifesting in several mechanisms.
Phantom Pain for Territories
Just as a person feels a lost limb, the imperial consciousness continues to generate signals from a periphery that no longer exists. Events in former colonies or provinces are perceived as “internal affairs,” and their independence is seen as an artificial and temporary misunderstanding.
The Transformation of Defeat into Sacred Sacrifice
To close the gap in reality, the culture of defeat begins to idealize the past. Lost greatness becomes not an object of historical analysis but a sacralized core of identity. Defeat is interpreted not as a consequence of one’s own weakness but as the result of betrayal, treachery, or an external conspiracy. This allows a sense of inner invincibility to be preserved even after a factual collapse.
Intellectual Regression
Instead of modernization and adaptation to the new scale, society often chooses archaization. If the new reality is experienced as humiliating, the empire retreats into an imaginary historical space where it is still the center of the world. This is where the ground for revanchism arises: the conviction that reality has broken and must be fixed by force.
The rupture does not close up on its own. Without the acknowledgment of loss and without what Freud called the “work of mourning,” it becomes a source of constant aggression aimed at forcing the external world to once again match the internal imperial map.
1.3. The Impossibility of Symbolic Closure
In ordinary historical dynamics, a defeat sooner or later goes through what Dominick LaCapra, in his work «Writing History, Writing Trauma» (2001), calls “working through.” This means acknowledging the loss, separating the past from the present, and forming a new identity.
But empires often get stuck in a state closer to “acting out”—repetition without awareness. In this state, they become deaf to rational arguments. Economic benefits or human losses cease to be decisive; the main goal becomes the attempt to symbolically annul the very fact of the defeat.
This mechanism was described in detail by Vamık Volkan: trauma is not integrated but preserved and transmitted further as an unfinished affect.
And yet, getting stuck is not guaranteed. Austria after 1918 experienced the collapse of an empire that could have become a source of revanchism—and at a certain stage, it did so through the Anschluss of 1938. But after 1945, with the formation of the Second Republic, the trauma was placed within an institutional framework of neutrality and a new, non-German identity. Acting out is not a sentence. It is a state from which an exit is possible.
In the case of an empire, this means: the loss does not become the past. It remains an open demand upon the world.
1.4. The Transformation of Shame into Aggression
The most dangerous moment in this mechanism is the work with affect.
Imperial defeat is almost always accompanied by shame: the loss of status, control, and symbolic primacy. But this shame can rarely be directly acknowledged. For to acknowledge it means to accept the new scale. Research on affect in psychoanalysis and political psychology shows: unaccepted shame is converted into anger, and anger seeks an external object. This is how the key formula of imperial trauma emerges: we did not diminish — we were humiliated. This shifts responsibility from internal transformation to external conflict.
But the conversion of shame into aggression is not the only possible path. Another exists: sublimation. Shame can be channeled not into a strike outward but into an effort inward—an economic breakthrough, technological primacy, a cultural renaissance. Britain demonstrates precisely this variant. The choice between aggression and sublimation often depends on whether the political culture offers ready-made, non-aggressive forms of scale—or leaves only the language of force as the sole proof of still-living greatness.
1.5. Fixation on the Past as the Only Legitimate Version of the Self
After this, a stable structure forms:
• the past is the only “correct” version of reality;
• the present is a deviation;
• the future is the restoration of the past.
Postcolonial researchers, notably Edward Said, showed that empires not only control space but also produce narratives that consolidate their centrality even after the factual loss of power.
In a traumatized empire, this narrative is radicalized: history ceases to be a field of interpretation and becomes a field of restoration.
1.6. The Political Result: The Impossibility of Stabilization
At this stage, imperial trauma moves from the psychic level to the political one. It begins to determine foreign policy, attitudes toward neighbors, the perception of threats, and the limits of compromise.
A state that has not accepted its own diminishment cannot stabilize itself. For any stabilization means fixing the new scale. And the new scale is unacceptable to it.
Therefore, a constant tension arises between what is and what, in its view, should be.
Interim Conclusion
Imperial trauma is not a consequence of loss as such. It is a consequence of a loss that was not symbolically closed, integrated, and made the basis of a new identity.
In this state, politics ceases to be an adaptation to reality. It becomes an attempt to change reality so that it once again matches the old image of the self.
2. The Dichotomy of Trauma: Narcissism vs. Subjecthood
To understand how imperial trauma transitions into political action, it is necessary to make a fundamental distinction, without which the analysis of modern conflicts remains superficial.
Not all traumas operate the same way.
There is a fundamental difference between the trauma of the victim—that is, the trauma of invasion—and the trauma of the empire, that is, the trauma of losing dominance. Both forms are accompanied by suffering, but their inner logic, affective structure, and political consequences are fundamentally different.
This distinction is partially present in the works of Vamık Volkan, who shows that collective traumas can either consolidate identity or deform it—depending on how they are integrated. In the case of empires, this is compounded by what Frantz Fanon described as the inability to relinquish the position of power without an internal collapse of identity.
In this perspective, trauma diverges in two directions: toward subjecthood or toward narcissism.
2.1. The Vector of Orientation: Security vs. Control
The trauma of the victim arises where borders—territorial, physical, symbolic—have been violated. Its basic affect is fear. This is not an abstract fear but a concrete one: the fear of the repetition of violence, the loss of life, annihilation. Therefore, the main vector of such trauma is directed at restoring wholeness: *”Never again will we allow ourselves to be destroyed.”*
This type of trauma, for all its destructiveness, contains the potential for the formation of subjecthood. It forces the collective to build institutions, an army, a security system, and political will. In other words, it is directed at protecting one’s own existence.
Imperial trauma has a different nature. It arises not from the threat of annihilation but from the loss of position. Its basic affect is shame, which cannot be acknowledged. Therefore, the empire experiences loss not as a weakening but as humiliation. Its vector is directed not at defense but at the restoration of control: *”Never again will we be so weak that we are ignored.”*
The key point here is this: the empire does not fear disappearance. It fears losing the ability to define others.
2.2. Justice: Right vs. Rank
This difference manifests especially clearly in the conception of justice.
For the traumatized victim, justice is a horizontal category. It is linked to law: the recognition of the crime, the punishment of the guilty, guarantees of non-repetition, equality before rules.
Post-World War II international law was built on this logic.
For the empire, justice has a different structure. It is vertical. Imperial and totalitarian systems do not think of politics as a field of equality but as a field of hierarchy. In such a logic, the world is ordered not by rules but by ranks.
Therefore, equality with former subordinates is perceived not as a norm but as a violation of order. What is justice for the victim looks like chaos to the empire.
A compromise that presupposes the equality of parties is often unacceptable to the imperial consciousness: it signifies a renunciation of the very structure of the world to which it has become accustomed.
2.3. The Role of the Other: Separation vs. Absorption
The difference in affect and the conception of justice also determines the attitude toward the Other.
For the victim, the Other is the source of trauma from which they must separate. The healing process presupposes distance, borders, and autonomy. Subjecthood here is built through rupture: *”We are we, and we are no longer a part of you.”* This is the classic process of individuation, which in the Jungian tradition can be described as separation from the dominating structure.
The empire cannot afford such a rupture. Its identity is built not on autonomy but on the inclusion of the other within itself. The former periphery is, for it, not an external object but a lost extension of its own body. Therefore, it strives not for distance but for absorption.
The success, independence, or even stable existence of a former part of the empire creates what can be called phantom pain. As in the case of amputation, the absent part continues to be felt as one’s own. The more successful the former periphery, the more it pains the empire. And this pain is almost impossible to relieve with external tools, for it originates not from reality but from a violated identity.
2.4. The Path to Overcoming: Subjecthood vs. Deconstruction of Greatness
The deepest difference manifests itself in how these two types of trauma can be overcome.
The trauma of the victim, for all its complexity, has an understandable vector of transformation. It can be worked through via the construction of subjecthood: institutions, culture, political autonomy, the capacity for self-defense. This is a painful but constructive process.
Imperial trauma has no such direct outlet. It can be overcome only through what is most difficult for it: the renunciation of the idea of its own exceptionality. This means accepting oneself as one of many, giving up the right to define others, integrating the loss as a completed fact.
In psychoanalytic terms, this means a radical shrinking of the “Ego” to realistic boundaries. That is why this process is so often blocked. Because it is perceived not as healing but as disappearance. And then, instead of working through, there arises revenge, denial, aggressive repetition—what Dominick LaCapra describes as acting out: an endless reenactment of the trauma without awareness.
Interim Conclusion
The difference between these two types of trauma is not moral but structural. The victim mourns the lost life and seeks to protect it.
The empire mourns the lost power and seeks to regain it.
That is why the trauma of the victim often becomes a source of modernization and consolidation, while imperial trauma turns into a brake on development, locking the political system in a cycle of aggressive repetition.
And as long as these two types of trauma are mixed up in analysis, politics errs in the main thing: it does not see where it faces a subject being formed and where it confronts a narcissistic structure incapable of accepting reality.
3. History Knows Different Fates of Imperial Decline
Imperial decline does not have a single, predetermined fate. The loss of scale in itself does not yet define the future of the former center. What is decisive is something else: what the political culture converts this loss into.
In some cases, it is sublimated into new forms of influence; in others, it returns as revenge; in still others, it is preserved in myth; and sometimes it transitions into a longer civilizational duration beyond a direct political form.
Therefore, it is important to analyze imperial trauma not only as a mechanism but also as a branching of historical outcomes.
Model A. Imperial Loss Sublimated into New Forms of Influence — Britain
The British case is important because it shows that imperial loss does not necessarily lead to direct revenge. It can be translated into other forms of historical presence—less territorial, less military, but no less influential.
After the dissolution of the empire, Britain did not cease to be itself. But it was forced to change the mode of its own presence in the world. Its greatness could no longer rest on direct colonial control. It began to shift into other dimensions: language, law, finance, diplomacy, cultural prestige, global networks, and the symbolic capital of London. What previously rested on imperial geography was gradually translated into post-imperial infrastructure of influence.
However, speaking of a “British” post-imperial adaptation as a single process means conflating two fundamentally different lines within Britain itself.
The English line is indeed a mature sublimation. The former imperial center transformed the loss into a language of global communication, a legal tradition, a financial market, and a diplomatic culture that continue to operate far beyond the formal borders of the United Kingdom. This is a path where greatness ceased to be territorial but did not vanish.
Alongside this, another line exists—the Scottish and Irish one. Here, Britain itself acts as the object of imperial memory on the part of those it once absorbed. Scottish and Irish nationalisms are not post-imperial nostalgia but the traumas of victims within the British construct itself. For them, English dominance was not “their own” empire but an external force that for centuries suppressed language, culture, and political autonomy. While England sublimates imperial greatness into global influence, Scotland and Ireland remember the same history as the experience of the colonized.
This internal split in the British post-imperial experience is important for our typology. It shows that even “successful” sublimation is not complete. The imperial center can learn to live after empire, but within it itself, there may remain those who remember it as their own colonizer. The Scottish independence referendum of 2014 and the Irish question after Brexit are not external conflicts but manifestations that the British post-imperial construct is not complete even within itself. The empire left the colonies, but its memory remained inside the former center itself—in the form of unresolved relations between its parts.
This transition was neither instantaneous nor painless. Britain had to pass through a moment of harsh historical self-knowledge: the imperial form could no longer be preserved as a direct political reality. One of the most important symbols of this break was the Suez Crisis of 1956. It became definitively clear there that the former imperial center could no longer act in the world as if its will alone was sufficient grounds for geopolitical intervention. Suez became not just a strategic defeat but a psychological boundary between the empire as a habit and post-imperial Britain as a new form of existence.
In this sense, the British reaction to loss was relatively mature. It did not consist of an attempt to forcibly return the lost periphery. The imperial decline was largely accepted as a completed fact, and political energy was directed not at the restoration of the old order but at the search for a new form of global role. Therefore, Britain is an example not of the complete overcoming of imperial trauma but of its partial sublimation.
The key word here is sublimation. The imperial legacy did not disappear but was reprocessed. It ceased to exist as a demand for direct domination and began to operate as a network of long influence. The English language, legal tradition, diplomatic culture, the financial center of London, the Commonwealth, the special status in the transatlantic world—all these are forms in which the former imperial center preserved historical weight without the literal restoration of the empire.
But this transformation remained incomplete. Britain largely learned to live after empire, yet it did not fully renounce the sense of its own exceptionality. The imperial phantom of distinctiveness did not disappear entirely. It continued to live in political culture as an idea of Britain not merely as one state among others, but as a force having a special right to a separate historical trajectory.
Here, post-imperial adaptation reveals its limit: the empire does not return, but its psychological trace continues to affect the mode of self-perception.
Brexit became the moment when this trace manifested itself especially clearly. Formally, it was about sovereignty, regulations, bureaucracy, and border control. But in a deeper sense, another affect was at work: the unwillingness to definitively agree to the role of an ordinary middle power embedded in someone else’s framework.
This was not an imperial revenge in the classical sense but rather a return of the imperial sense of distinctiveness in a new, politically modern form. Not a desire to literally restore the empire, but an unwillingness to fully accept a world in which the former center must live by rules not set by itself.
The British case is important for this typology precisely because it shows: imperial loss can be worked through without direct aggression, but not necessarily without a remainder. The former center can renounce colonial control and still maintain a deep attachment to its own historical exceptionality. In such a case, the trauma does not transition into revenge, but it also does not disappear entirely. It is sublimated—and in this sublimation finds a new form of duration.
Britain, thus, is an example not of flawless post-imperial healing but of a relatively successful transformation. Its history is important not because it completely freed itself from the imperial past, but because it was largely able to transfer it from the plane of domination to the plane of form.
It lost the empire but did not lose its posture. In this sense, Britain resembles an impoverished aristocrat forced to change his way of life but who did not renounce the inner discipline of rank. He no longer owns the estate but retains the manner of being.
The British post-imperial experience is an experience not of return but of the transference of greatness—from the external to the internal, from territory to style, from control to form.
Britain wants to preserve its manners. Russia wants to regain the palace.
And in this difference between an inner posture and external revenge, the next, considerably darker model of imperial loss begins.
Model B. Imperial Loss Translated into Revenge — Russia
The Russian case is an almost textbook example of how imperial loss can be not integrated but translated into revenge. Here, the main mechanism of imperial trauma is especially clearly visible: the reduction of scale is not acknowledged as a completed fact but is experienced as a historical injustice that must be annulled.
In this sense, the collapse of the USSR was not just a geopolitical event. For a significant part of the Russian political consciousness, it became the experience of the collapse of the accustomed world order. It was not simply about the loss of territories, military positions, or spheres of influence. It was about the loss of the status of a center that was accustomed to thinking of itself not as one of the states, but as the state around which space is organized.
Therefore, Russian trauma after 1991 hurts not as an ordinary weakening but as a humiliation of scale. This constitutes one of the main differences between ordinary great-power nostalgia and genuine imperial trauma: what hurts is not only that the state has become weaker, but that the world no longer confirms its old right to be the measure for others.
In such a state, the new reality is not accepted as a new norm. It is perceived as a deviation that occurred due to a catastrophe, betrayal, weakness, external pressure, or a historical mistake. From this stems the deep inability to accept the sovereignty of the former peripheries as a final fact. If the imperial map continues to live in the collective psyche, then the independence of former colonial or semi-colonial spaces is experienced not as a natural state but as a temporary deviation from the “true” order.
That is why the post-Soviet space in the Russian imagination is so often thought of not as an external environment but as a zone of unresolved history. The Baltic states, the Caucasus, Moldova, Central Asia—all this remains in various ways in the field of imperial memory as a space that no longer belongs to Russia but has not yet been genuinely experienced by it as external.
Ukraine takes on special significance in this logic. For Russia, it is not just a neighboring state and not just a strategic territory. It is a living border on which the empire sees its own diminishment. Where Ukraine insists on a separate history, a separate language, a separate political destiny, Russia is confronted not only with a geopolitical challenge but with a psychological fact that is especially painful for it: the former periphery has not simply separated itself but lays claim to full subjecthood.
Ukraine weighs more than territory. It touches the very center of the Russian historical narrative. For if Ukraine is a separate subject, then what is called into question is not only the imperial space but also the version of its own historical origin familiar to Russia.
At this point, imperial trauma almost inevitably transitions into a revanchist logic. Aggression becomes a way not only to gain control but also to symbolically annul the very fact of the loss. Therefore, the Russian war against Ukraine cannot be fully explained in the language of “security interests.” The security rhetoric only partially conceals a deeper structure: an attempt to force reality to once again correspond to the old image of the self.
This is revenge in its pure form. Not merely a desire to regain influence, but a striving to destroy the new reality that makes imperial diminishment irrefutable. Revanchist policy is always aimed not only at territory but also at the very principle of the other’s separateness. It cannot be satisfied with equilibrium. It requires confirmation that the old center once again has the right to define the boundaries of the permissible for others. Therefore, revenge almost never stops at a “compromise” point. Its inner logic knows no peace, for it feeds not on interest but on an offense that does not recognize the boundary as final.
The Russian case is central to this article. It shows how imperial loss, not translated into a new identity, becomes a source of aggressive repetition. Here, the past is not transformed into memory, is not sublimated into other forms of influence, and does not recede into cultural duration. It is radicalized and returns as a political demand upon the present: to restore the space, restore the rank, restore the right to define others.
In this sense, Russian revenge is not a sign of strength but a symptom of unfinished decline. For where a state had accepted its own new scale, it would have begun to build a different form of presence in the world. But where the new scale is experienced as intolerable, politics inevitably drifts toward aggression. Not because revenge can truly return the past, but because, without it, the imperial psyche is left alone with its own diminishment. Revenge becomes a kind of narcotic of greatness: it does not heal the trauma but allows one to temporarily avoid looking it in the eye.
But here another possibility opens up, which the imperial consciousness almost always sees too late: the great energy of scale does not necessarily have to transition into war. It can be sublimated—into an economic breakthrough, technological primacy, scientific ambition, a space project, or cultural and civilizational influence of a new type. Where the former center can no longer be an empire, it needs another language of greatness.
If a state is incapable of finding it on its own, diplomacy becomes especially important. Its task is not only to contain imperial trauma but also, to the extent possible, to open non-aggressive scenarios of scale for it. The most dangerous empire is the one for which only the language of loss has been left and no language of sublimation remains. In other words, imperial energy must not only be limited but also redirected. Where this does not happen, war begins to seem like the only form of proof of one’s own still-living greatness.
This is precisely what makes Russia an example of imperial loss translated into revenge. Here, defeat did not become the basis for rethinking. It became fuel for war.
Model C. Imperial Loss Returned in a Political Myth — Turkey
The Turkish case is interesting because it does not fit into the simple logic of direct imperial revenge. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Turkey did not take the path of immediately restoring lost greatness. On the contrary, the Kemalist project was an attempt to radically break with the imperial form and create a modern nation-state. In this sense, early republican Turkey did not try to mechanically return the past—it tried to distance itself from it.
But the repressed imperial past did not disappear. It remained in the deeper political psychology—not so much as a clear program of revenge, but as an unfinished sense of historical diminishment. The Ottoman decline meant not just the loss of territories but the loss of centering, scale, and the role of a civilizational axis. And although the republic was built on a rejection of the imperial form, the memory of the former size continued to exist as a shadow of the great past.
The Turkish case appears as an example not of a direct return of the empire but of the return of its phantom. The imperial past enters politics again not as a literal plan for restoration but as a symbolic horizon that lends the present a language of scale, historical depth, and the right to a special role.
The neo-Ottoman motif in contemporary Turkish politics works precisely in this way. It does not necessarily demand annexation or the formal restoration of borders. Its power lies elsewhere: it returns to the former center a self-image as a subject larger than the boundaries of a nation-state. Turkey begins to think of itself not only as a republic but as the bearer of a broader historical mission—in the Balkans, the Middle East, the Muslim world, in the spaces of former Ottoman presence.
In this sense, the imperial loss is not overcome but translated into a myth of political vocation. It is not the kind of myth that openly calls for war to reclaim what was lost. It is a more flexible but no less influential form that allows the state to speak in the language of regional responsibility, civilizational memory, and a special right to act.
The imperial phantom in the Turkish case is not so much an aggressive memory as a source of political imagination. This phantom becomes especially visible where the symbolic horizon is translated into geopolitical language. The clearest example is the “Blue Homeland” (*Mavi Vatan*) doctrine. Formally, it is about maritime strategy. But in a deeper sense, it is an attempt to redraw the space in which Turkey thinks of itself not simply as a coastal state but as the center of a wider historical field. The maritime areas—the Aegean, Mediterranean, and Black Seas—begin to be perceived not only as zones of interest but as a space of special historical right. Through the sea, Turkey tries to regain not the empire as such but the right to once again think of itself as larger than its formal borders.
In this logic, international law is often experienced not as a neutral framework but as the language of foreign limitation. The rules that fix the new scale are perceived as an injustice. This is the source of the emotional intensity of Turkish claims in the Eastern Mediterranean.
It is not just about the shelf, gas, or the distribution of maritime zones. It is about whether the modern order recognizes Turkey as just one of the states—or whether it can still imagine itself as the civilizational axis between Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The maritime border agreement with Libya was such a gesture: not so much a technical document as an attempt to symbolically inscribe a larger space in which Turkey again claims a special role.
The same mechanism operates in broader foreign policy as well. Turkey increasingly behaves not as a state merely defending its perimeter, but as an actor that considers itself responsible for the space of its former historical presence.
The Balkans, the Caucasus, Libya, Qatar, Somalia—all of this is not necessarily a neo-empire in the direct sense, but it is undoubtedly the geography of a phantom scale. The Somali case is especially illustrative: military presence, security tutelage, army training, protection of maritime space, economic and infrastructural engagement. All this is presented not as expansion but as responsibility and historically justified presence.
This is how the imperial myth works in a modern form: it rarely returns in the language of possession but often in the language of guardianship, stabilization, or civilizational duty.
At the global level, this impulse manifests itself as a struggle for rank. Turkey strives to be not just a regional power but a distinct political pole. The slogan that “the world is bigger than five” is symptomatic. Formally, it is a critique of the international system, but deeper down it is a demand for recognition: Turkey does not agree to the place of a secondary player. Here again, the same logic appears—not a literal restoration of the empire, but a refusal to accept a scale that seems too small for its historical self-image.
At the same time, this phantom is not neutral. It creates an oscillation between republican normality and the temptation of a larger scale. Turkey does not literally return the empire, but neither does it completely lock itself within the boundaries of the nation-state. It moves between these poles—between acceptance and the temptation of exceeding.
In this oscillation, the main tension arises: the gap between myth and resource. The imperial phantom prompts it to act as a state of a higher rank than its capabilities can actually support. Hence the constant oscillation between ambition and frustration.
When the resource does not confirm the myth, political nervousness arises: the desire to compensate for the lack of recognition through a demonstration of will, a gesture of force, or a symbolic breakthrough. Politics begins to move not only by the logic of interest but also by the logic of psychological proof.
This is why the Turkish case is important for this typology. It shows that imperial loss does not always transition into revenge. Sometimes it returns as a myth, as a symbolic resource, as a historical style of politics.
In such a case, the decline is not annulled but also not completed. It continues to live in the imagination—as a backdrop against which the state repeatedly tries on a larger scale.
Diplomacy in the case of Turkey must be especially subtle. Here, it is important to make a structural distinction between the Turkish myth and Russian revenge. The key criterion is the attitude toward the sovereignty of the other. Russian revenge demands the annihilation of the subjecthood of the former periphery: Ukraine must disappear as a separate political subject, and any compromise is impossible because it fixes the existence of that whose existence is intolerable to the imperial psyche.
The Turkish myth works differently: it demands not the disappearance of the neighbor but the recognition of Turkey’s special role in the space of former Ottoman presence. This can be tense and conflictual but is, in principle, compatible with the sovereignty of other states—provided that they recognize Ankara not just as one of the states in the region but as a force that cannot be ignored.
Revenge seeks to annul reality; myth seeks to change its interpretation. This does not mean the myth is safe. At moments when the external world refuses Turkey recognition, as in the case of *Mavi Vatan*, the myth can approach the revanchist line. But even then, the Turkish logic remains a logic of recognition, not annihilation. This is precisely what makes it a separate model, not an intermediate form.
Crude containment feeds the myth of humiliation, while appeasement feeds the myth of greatness. The task of diplomacy is not only to limit but also to redirect the energy of scale into legitimate forms of role.
Turkey must be left room for weight but not for an imperial scenario; for a regional function but not for restoration; for mediation, logistics, and security but not for the right to dictate order. For a post-imperial state becomes most dangerous precisely when it is left with only two options: to be small or to play at empire.
Turkey, therefore, is an example of imperial loss returned in a political myth. Here, the past does not dictate a direct restoration, but neither does it recede into a purely historical archive. It continues to act as a symbolic reservoir of greatness—as a phantom preventing the new scale from becoming a definitive reality.
If the Turkish case shows how an empire returns after decline in the form of a political myth, the Chinese one reveals a deeper level of the problem. Here, it is no longer just the loss of scale that hurts but the violation of the very image of an ordered world. Ottoman greatness in modern Turkey lives as a phantom of historical mission. Chinese memory lives as an experience that the center itself was historically displaced. Therefore, the transition from Turkey to China is a transition from the myth of greatness to the metaphysics of order.
Model D. Imperial Memory Fused with the Trauma of Humiliation — China
The Chinese case does not fit into a simple scheme of imperial trauma. Here, we are dealing not only with the pain of diminishment but with the superimposition of two historical affects: the memory of its own civilizational centrality and the memory of external humiliation. For this reason, modern Chinese political psychology does not speak of itself in the language of simple revenge. It far more often speaks in the language of rejuvenation, a return to its proper place, and the completion of historical incompleteness. In the official Chinese narrative, the link between the “century of humiliation” and the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” is one of the main mechanisms of political legitimation.
Here lies one of the main dividing lines between the Chinese and Russian cases. If the Russian imagination gravitates toward the language of lost greatness that must be reclaimed, the Chinese more often gravitates toward the language of a historical norm that must be restored. This is not merely a difference in rhetoric. It is a difference in the very structure of the political experience of loss.
Unlike the classic post-imperial grievance, where the main pain is the loss of the right to define others, the Chinese pain is historically more complex. Imperial China for centuries thought of itself not simply as a state among others but as a civilizational center—a world around which various circles of periphery are arranged. This is why the concept of tianxia —”all under heaven”—is so important in the Chinese tradition: not just a geographical image but an idea of an order in which the center has moral and civilizational weight, and international relations are thought of hierarchically rather than horizontally. In modern interpretations, this concept is used again as a way to imagine a world order not simply as a balance of states but as a wholeness gravitating toward a center.
In the Chinese political imagination, power was long thought of not simply as an instrument but as a confirmation of the orderedness of the world. The center in such logic is not only stronger—it is what gives space its form. And when such a center loses its weight, what is destroyed is not only its geopolitical status but the very symbolic architecture of order.
This memory of the center was brutally ruptured by the experience of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century. The Opium Wars, unequal treaties, foreign zones of influence, Japanese aggression, territorial losses, and a sense of political helplessness created what is called in modern China the “century of humiliation.” In this logic, what hurts is not only the defeat but the very fact that the civilization accustomed to being the center found itself in the role of an object of external coercion. Because of this, the modern Chinese state reads its rise not simply as modernization but as a historical rectification—the return of dignity, strength, and wholeness after an era when the country was forced to live in someone else’s order.
Here, it is important that the “century of humiliation” is not just a historical memory but a disciplining frame for contemporary political thinking. It allows economic surge, military modernization, technological ambition, and a rigid policy of sovereignty to be combined into one morally comprehensible story: we are not expanding; we are reclaiming the right to be ourselves.
In this sense, China is a complicated case. Here, imperial memory did not disappear, but neither was it preserved in a pure form. It passed through a national trauma of humiliation and emerged from it in an altered form. That is why the modern Chinese striving for strength is not presented as an overt nostalgia for an empire. It is presented as the normalization of history, the restoration of a proper place, a return to a condition that is imagined not as an exception but as the norm. It is worth looking at how the rhetoric of the “great rejuvenation” works: it promises not a new world but the return of the world to its correct appearance.
This is one of the subtlest features of the Chinese case: here, imperial memory does not push the state toward a simple restoration of the past. It connects with the conviction that history itself was forcibly taken out of its proper course and must now be corrected. Therefore, the “rejuvenation” is experienced not as a project for a new world but as a morally justified return to the correct state of affairs.
Here lies the philosophical nerve of the Chinese case. In the European political tradition, the state is often thought of as a form that competes with other forms within a shared international field. In the long Chinese historical imagination, the political order was often thought of differently: not as the coexistence of equals but as an ordered wholeness in which the center has not only power but a civilizational mission. For this reason, the humiliation of China is experienced not only as violence against a state but as violence against the very cosmology of order. In this context, the restoration of strength takes on an almost moral meaning: it is not just about influence but about the return of the world to its proper axis.
For the European consciousness, such logic often looks like a confusion of politics and metaphysics. But that is precisely its strength: when the order is thought of not as a contract but as a moral-cosmic configuration, then the displacement of the center is experienced not as a political defeat but as a distortion of the very structure of the world.
This is especially noticeable where modern China speaks of sovereignty and territorial integrity. The questions of Taiwan, Hong Kong, border spaces, or maritime claims acquire such emotional weight not only because they are strategic. They are inscribed into a broader historical drama: everything that reminds of the fragmentedness of space or the incomplete completion of national gathering activates the memory of humiliation. Therefore, these questions are read not as technical disputes but as nodes of historical dignity.
This logic manifests itself not only in the questions of Taiwan or the South China Sea. It extends deep into the continent and beyond its borders. In Central Asia, China is increasingly building not just economic routes but a space of functional dependence, where infrastructure, trade, and security gradually form a new center of gravity. In Xinjiang and Tibet, the same imagination of order takes on an internal form: separateness is read here not simply as a cultural difference but as a threat to the wholeness of the world, which must be assembled around a single center. And in the work with the diaspora, another important feature emerges—the striving to think of Chineseness not only as a civic belonging but as a longer civilizational space. All this together shows that the Chinese “rejuvenation” is not only a project of power but also a project of a new gathering of space around a historically imagined center.
However, it is important here not to oversimplify. China is not a pure example of imperial revenge in the Russian sense. Its political imagination less often speaks in the language of open grievance: “we were deprived of what was ours.” It more often speaks in the language of historical rectitude: “we are returning to what we were meant to be.” This makes the Chinese case especially important for our typology. It shows that imperial loss sometimes leads neither to direct revenge nor to simple sublimation. It can combine with a national memory of humiliation, and this makes the Chinese case one of the most interesting in modern geopolitics.
In Lieu of a Conclusion: Not Every Empire Falls the Same Way
Empires rarely die in a single day. More often, they live long after their own decline—in memory, in language, in the habit of rank, in the way of reading a map, in the inner rejection of a new scale. Imperial trauma is not only a topic of history but also a topic of present-day politics.
The four cases examined show a spectrum of possible trajectories. Britain sublimated the imperial legacy into style, law, language, and form—although even this sublimation proved incomplete, for within the British construct itself there still live those who remember it as their own colonizer. Russia translated the trauma into revenge—a direct negation of the reality in which the former periphery has a right to be. Turkey returned the imperial loss in a political myth—a phantom of greatness compatible with the sovereignty of neighbors, but only on the condition that they recognize Ankara’s special role. And finally, China demonstrates the most complex case: here, imperial memory not only survived but fused with the national trauma of humiliation, creating a special type of great-power psychology—not the psychology of returning an empire, but the psychology of restoring historical normality.
This article proceeds from a simple but fundamental thought: what is decisive is not the fact of loss itself but the manner of its processing. This determines not only the internal psychology of a state but also what its foreign policy will be: integrative, nervous, expansive, or aggressively repetitive.
Because of this, imperial trauma cannot be analyzed merely as a matter of interests. It feeds not only on geopolitics but on shame, the loss of rank, and the gap between the psychic map and the new reality. It operates where defeat has never become the past, and diminishment has never been accepted as the new boundary of the self.
But this does not imply fatalism. Imperial energy is not doomed to automatically become war. It can be sublimated—into economics, science, technology, culture, a new type of civilizational prestige. This is precisely why the main task of politics and diplomacy opens up: not only to contain the dangerous forms of imperial affect but also to recognize where its redirection into non-aggressive forms of scale is still possible.
For where this does not happen, revenge begins to seem like the only language of greatness. And where a state does not know how to survive its own diminishment, it almost inevitably tries to force the world once again to correspond to the old image of itself.
And perhaps, this is where one of the most important boundaries of modern geopolitics runs: between states that have learned to live after empire and states that still perceive the world as a debt before their past.
This text is translated by use of AI.
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