On the Psychology of States That Cannot Accept Reduction
Introduction: A Scale That Cannot Be Lost
The trauma of empire is not the 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 offers many examples of former great powers that diminished, restructured themselves, and found a new place in the world. Loss in itself is not pathological. It becomes pathological when it is not recognized as a completed fact.
An empire differs from an ordinary state not only in size or military power. It differs in the way it imagines itself. An empire does not merely exist within the world — it organizes space around itself. It becomes accustomed to being the center, the norm, the point of reference. Its scale ceases to be merely a political characteristic and becomes part of identity.
In this sense, loss for an empire is never simply an external event. It is experienced not as a change of circumstances, but as a disruption in the order of things.
Where an ordinary state asks, “What have we lost?”, an empire asks a different question: “How did it become possible that we no longer define?”
This is the fundamental shift. Imperial trauma does not emerge at the moment of defeat, but at the moment when defeat is no longer accepted as reality. When the reduction of scale is not integrated into a new identity, but rejected as an anomaly, an injustice, or a historical mistake that must be corrected.
At that point, the past ceases to remain past. It is not merely remembered — it is preserved as the only legitimate version of the self. The present, meanwhile, begins to appear as a deviation that must be undone.
This produces a specific form of political tension. The empire is no longer what it once was, yet it is also incapable of becoming something else. It becomes trapped between scales — between the memory of greatness and the impossibility of restoring it in its former form.
This is not merely a historical condition. It is a psychological structure that gradually begins to shape political behavior.
Where a new scale has not been accepted, reality itself easily begins to appear as humiliation.
Imperial trauma rarely remains passive. It seeks not only explanation, but release; not only memory, but action. And very often, that action takes the form of revenge.
1. Mechanism: How Imperial Trauma Is Formed
Imperial trauma does not arise at the moment of defeat. It develops as a sequence of psychic displacements through which a historical event is transformed into a stable structure of perceiving reality.
To understand its logic, this process must be broken down into several phases.
1.1. The Normalization of Greatness
Every empire begins not only with expansion, but with an internal conviction of its own natural centrality.
In his foundational study Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals (2000), Dominic Lieven demonstrates that imperial formations stabilize themselves not only through force, but through the production of an image of themselves as a necessary order of things. Empire does not merely control space — it interprets that control as normality.
At the psychological level, this can be described through the idea of an expanded self that no longer draws a clear boundary between itself and the outside world. Imperial structures tend to perceive territories, peripheries, and often even other peoples as extensions of their own political body.
In such a condition, scale ceases to be variable. It becomes identity.
An empire does not merely possess influence — it becomes influence itself. Its presence in the world is experienced not as one possible position among others, but as the natural order of reality.
1.2. Loss as a Rupture of Reality
When collapse occurs — military defeat, decolonization, the loss of territories or spheres of influence — the empire encounters more than material reduction. It encounters a rupture between its image of itself and the new reality.
In The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery (2003), Wolfgang Schivelbusch shows that great powers rarely integrate defeat immediately after catastrophe. More often, they experience it as a temporary deviation rather than as a new condition.
At this stage, the first possible exit appears. If political elites or the broader cultural environment find a way to recognize loss as fact — without phantom pain and without sacralizing defeat — the mechanism can be interrupted.
Spain after 1898 lost the remnants of its empire, yet instead of producing revanchism, the collapse gave rise to the “Generation of ’98” — a movement of national reflection that redirected the energy of decline into the reconsideration of identity rather than aggression.
The crucial point is this: reality has already changed, but the psychic map has not.
A primary rupture emerges, setting the traumatic process in motion. The gap between the psychic map and physical borders produces a condition of collective disorientation that manifests itself through several mechanisms.
Phantom pain of territories.
Much like a person continues to feel a lost limb, imperial consciousness continues to generate signals from peripheries that no longer exist. Events in former colonies or provinces are perceived as “internal matters,” while their independence appears artificial and temporary.
The transformation of defeat into sacred sacrifice.
In order to close the rupture in reality, the culture of defeat begins to idealize the past. Lost greatness ceases to be an object of historical analysis and becomes a sacralized core of identity. Defeat is interpreted not as the consequence of internal weakness, but as the result of betrayal, conspiracy, or external sabotage. This preserves the sense of inner invincibility even after factual collapse.
Intellectual regression.
Instead of modernization and adaptation to a new scale, society often turns toward archaism. If the new reality is experienced as humiliating, the empire retreats into an imagined historical space where it still remains the center of the world.
This is where the groundwork for revanchism emerges: the conviction that reality itself has become broken and must be repaired through force.
The rupture does not heal on its own. Without acknowledging loss — and without what Sigmund Freud called the work of mourning — it becomes a permanent source of aggression directed toward forcing the external world to correspond once again to the empire’s internal map.
1.3. The Impossibility of Symbolic Closure
In ordinary historical dynamics, defeat eventually passes through what Dominick LaCapra in Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001) called working through: the recognition of loss, the separation of past from present, and the formation of a new identity.
Imperial political cultures, however, often become trapped in a condition closer to acting out — repetition without awareness.
In such a condition, they become increasingly insensitive to rational argument. Economic costs or human losses cease to be decisive; the primary goal becomes the symbolic cancellation of defeat itself.
This is precisely why revanchist politics so often appears irrational from the perspective of classical interest-based logic.
This mechanism was described in detail by Vamik Volkan: trauma is not integrated, but preserved and transmitted as an unfinished affect. In such cases, the past ceases to function as history and instead becomes an active political emotion.
The collective no longer lives after the loss. It lives inside it.
And yet this condition is not inevitable.
Austria after 1918 experienced the collapse of empire in a way that could have evolved into permanent revanchism — and at one stage partially did so through the Anschluss of 1938. Yet after 1945, with the formation of the Second Republic, the trauma was gradually contained within the institutional framework of neutrality and a new, non-German identity.
Acting out is not destiny. It is a condition from which exit remains possible.
In the imperial case, however, this means one thing above all: loss never truly becomes past. It remains an unresolved demand directed toward the world.
2. The Dichotomy of Trauma: Narcissism vs Subjecthood
To understand how imperial trauma transforms into political action, it is necessary to make a fundamental distinction without which the analysis of modern conflicts remains superficial. Not all traumas function in the same way.
There is a fundamental difference between the trauma of the victim — that is, the trauma of invasion — and the trauma of empire, meaning the trauma of losing dominance. Both forms involve suffering, yet their internal logic, affective structure, and political consequences are profoundly different.
This distinction is partially present in the work of Vamik Volkan, who demonstrates that collective traumas can either consolidate identity or deform it, depending on how they are integrated.
In the case of imperial political cultures, an additional dimension appears: the inability to relinquish a position of power without experiencing symbolic diminishment. For this reason, trauma in such contexts often moves not toward subjecthood, but toward compensation for lost centrality.
2.1. Vector of Orientation: Security vs Control
The trauma of the victim emerges where boundaries — territorial, physical, or symbolic — have been violated. Its primary affect is fear. Not abstract fear, but concrete fear: fear of repeated violence, loss of life, destruction.
The central vector of this trauma is therefore directed toward the restoration of integrity: “Never again will we allow ourselves to be destroyed.”
Despite all its destructiveness, this form of trauma contains the potential for the formation of subjecthood. It compels the collective to build institutions, armed forces, systems of security, and political will. In other words, it is oriented toward the protection of existence itself.
Imperial trauma has a different structure. It emerges not from the threat of annihilation, but from the loss of position. Its central affect is shame that cannot be directly acknowledged.
As a result, loss is experienced not merely as weakening, but as humiliation. The vector of such trauma is directed not toward protection, but toward the restoration of control: “Never again will we be so weak that we can be ignored.”
The key distinction is that empire fears not only the loss of security. It fears the loss of the ability to define others.
2.2. Justice: Law vs Rank
This distinction becomes especially visible in the understanding of justice.
For the traumatized victim, justice is a horizontal category. It is connected to law: recognition of the crime, punishment of the guilty, guarantees against repetition, equality before rules. It was largely upon this logic that international law after the Second World War was constructed.
For imperial consciousness, justice often possesses a different structure. It is imagined not as equality, but as correspondence to rank. In this logic, the world is organized less through rules than through hierarchies.
As a result, equality with former peripheries may be experienced not as normality, but as a violation of the familiar order.
What appears as justice to the victim may appear as chaos to the imperial imagination. A compromise based on equality between parties is often perceived as unacceptable not only politically, but psychologically, because it implies abandoning the very structure of the world to which imperial systems of thought have become accustomed.
2.3. The Role of the Other: Separation vs Incorporation
Differences in affect and in the understanding of justice also determine attitudes toward the Other.
For the victim, the Other is the source of trauma from which separation becomes necessary. The process of healing presupposes distance, boundaries, and autonomy. Subjecthood here is formed through rupture: “We are ourselves, and we are no longer part of you.”
Imperial logic functions differently. Its identity is often constructed not around autonomy, but around the incorporation of the Other into its own space. The former periphery is experienced not as an external object, but as a lost extension of the imperial structure itself.
For this reason, imperial consciousness seeks not distance, but the restoration of control or symbolic reintegration.
The success, independence, or even stable existence of a former periphery generates what may be described as phantom pain. As in the case of amputation, the absent part continues to be experienced as one’s own.
The more successful the former periphery becomes, the more intensely it activates the traumatic rupture. And this pain can rarely be resolved through external instruments alone, because it originates not merely in geopolitics, but in a disrupted structure of self-identification.
2.4. The Path Toward Resolution: Subjecthood vs the Deconstruction of Greatness
The deepest distinction between these two forms of trauma emerges in the way they may be worked through.
The trauma of the victim, despite all its complexity, possesses a relatively clear vector of transformation. It can be integrated through the construction of subjecthood: institutions, culture, political autonomy, and the capacity for self-defense. This is a painful, yet potentially constructive process.
Imperial trauma offers no such direct exit. It can only be overcome through what is most difficult for it: relinquishing the idea of its own exceptionalism as a historical norm.
This means accepting itself as one actor among many, abandoning the presumed right to define others, and integrating loss as a completed fact rather than as a temporary deviation.
In psychoanalytic terms, this may be described as the contraction of an expanded self back to realistic limits.
This is precisely why the process is so often blocked. It is experienced not as healing, but as disappearance.
Where the new scale is perceived as intolerable, working through is replaced by revenge, denial, and repetition — what Dominick LaCapra described as acting out: the endless reproduction of trauma without its integration.
In this sense, imperial trauma is considerably less stable than the trauma of the victim. It resists becoming completed past because it concerns not only security, but the very structure of historical self-perception.
Interim Conclusion
The distinction between these two forms of trauma is not moral, but structural.
The victim mourns lost life and seeks to protect it. Empire mourns lost rank and seeks to restore it.
This is why the trauma of the victim often becomes a source of modernization, consolidation, and the formation of subjecthood, while imperial trauma can become an obstacle to development, trapping political systems within cycles of aggressive repetition.
As long as these two forms of trauma remain conflated in political analysis, politics risks misunderstanding the essential distinction: the difference between a society attempting to protect its existence and a political culture incapable of accepting the loss of former centrality.
3. History Knows Different Fates of Imperial Decline
Imperial decline does not follow a single predetermined trajectory. The loss of scale, by itself, does not yet determine the future of the former center. What proves decisive is something else: what political culture transforms that loss into.
In some cases, it is sublimated into new forms of influence; in others, it returns as revanchism; in still others, it is preserved in political myth, or shifts into a longer civilizational duration beyond direct imperial form. For this reason, imperial trauma must be analyzed not only as a psychological mechanism, but also as a spectrum of historical consequences.
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 revanchism. It can be translated into other forms of historical presence — less territorial, less military, yet no less influential.
After the dissolution of empire, Britain did not cease to be itself. But it was forced to change the mode of its presence in the world. Its greatness could no longer rest on direct colonial control. It began to move into other dimensions: language, law, finance, diplomacy, cultural prestige, global networks, and the symbolic capital of London. What had previously been sustained by imperial geography was gradually transformed into a post-imperial infrastructure of influence.
Yet to speak of “British” post-imperial adaptation as a single unified process would be an oversimplification. Different historical memories existed within the British construction itself. The English trajectory largely demonstrates a mature form of sublimation: the former imperial center transformed loss into a language of global communication, a legal tradition, a financial system, and a diplomatic culture that continue to operate far beyond the formal borders of the United Kingdom.
Alongside this, however, there is another trajectory — the Scottish and Irish one. Here, Britain itself appears as the object of imperial memory from the perspective of those once integrated into its political space. For parts of Scottish and Irish political culture, English dominance was experienced not as a “shared empire,” but as an external force that limited autonomy, language, and cultural distinctiveness.
This internal fracture within the British post-imperial experience is important for our typology. It shows that even relatively successful sublimation is never complete. An imperial center may learn to live after empire, while communities within it may continue to remember the same history differently. The Scottish referendum of 2014 and the Irish question after Brexit are not external conflicts, but manifestations of the unfinished character of the British post-imperial construction.
This transition was neither rapid nor painless. Britain had to pass through a moment of harsh historical self-recognition. One of the symbolic moments of this rupture was the Suez Crisis of 1956. It was then that it became definitively clear that the former imperial center could no longer act as if its will alone were sufficient grounds for geopolitical intervention. Suez became not only a strategic defeat, but also a psychological boundary between empire as habit and post-imperial Britain as a new form of existence.
In this sense, the British response to loss was relatively mature. It did not consist in an attempt to restore lost peripheries by force. Imperial decline was, to a significant degree, accepted as a completed fact, and political energy was directed not toward the restoration of the old order, but toward the search for a new form of global role.
The key mechanism here was sublimation. The imperial legacy did not disappear, but it was reworked. It ceased to exist as a demand for direct domination and began to function as a network of long-duration influence. The English language, legal tradition, diplomatic culture, the financial center of London, the Commonwealth, and Britain’s special status within the transatlantic world became forms through which the former imperial center preserved historical weight without literally restoring empire.
Yet this transformation remained incomplete. Britain largely learned to live after empire, but it did not fully abandon its sense of exceptionalism. The imperial phantom of distinctiveness continued to exist within political culture as the idea that Britain was not merely one state among others, but a force with a special historical trajectory.
This is why Brexit became a moment when this residue appeared with particular clarity. Formally, the issue concerned sovereignty, bureaucracy, regulations, and border control. But at a deeper level, another affect was at work: the unwillingness to fully accept the role of an ordinary middle-ranking state integrated into an external framework.
This was not imperial revanchism in the classical sense, but rather the return of an imperial sense of exceptionalism 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 established by others.
The British case is important precisely because it shows that imperial loss can be worked through to a significant degree without direct aggression, but not necessarily without residue. Trauma does not become revanchism, yet neither does it disappear completely. It is sublimated — and in that sublimation finds a new form of duration.
Britain, therefore, is not an example of flawless post-imperial healing, but of relatively successful transformation. Its history matters not because it fully rid itself of the imperial past, but because it managed, to a significant extent, to transfer that past from the plane of domination into the plane of form.
It lost the empire, but it did not lose its posture. In this sense, the British post-imperial experience is not an experience of return, but of transferring greatness — from the external to the internal, from territory to style, from control to form.
Model B. Imperial Loss Transformed into Revanchism — Russia
The Russian case is one of the clearest examples of how imperial loss can remain unintegrated and instead be transformed into revanchism. It is here that the basic mechanism of imperial trauma becomes especially visible: the reduction of scale is not recognized as a completed fact, but is experienced as a historical injustice that must be undone.
In this sense, the collapse of the USSR was not merely a geopolitical event. For a significant part of Russian political culture, it became the experience of the destruction of a familiar world order. What was at stake was not only the loss of territories, military positions, or spheres of influence. It was the loss of the status of a center that had long imagined itself not as one state among others, but as the state around which space itself was organized.
This is why post-Soviet trauma in the Russian case is experienced not simply as weakening, but as a humiliation of scale. Here lies the important boundary between great-power nostalgia and a deeper imperial trauma: what hurts is not only that the state became weaker, but that the world no longer confirms its previous status as a center of definition.
In such a condition, the new reality is not perceived as a new norm. It is interpreted as a temporary deviation caused by betrayal, weakness, external pressure, or historical error. This is the source of the structural inability to accept the sovereignty of former peripheries as a final fact. If the old imperial map continues to exist within political imagination, then the independence of formerly subordinate spaces is experienced not as a normal condition, but as something temporary and unnatural.
For this reason, the post-Soviet space in Russian political imagination is often thought not as an external environment, but as a zone of unfinished history. The Baltic states, the Caucasus, Moldova, Central Asia — all of these remain, in different ways, within the field of imperial memory as spaces no longer controlled by Russia, yet not fully perceived as genuinely external.
Within this logic, Ukraine acquires exceptional significance. For Russia, it is not merely a neighboring state and not only a strategic territory. It becomes the boundary at which empire encounters its own reduction. Where Ukraine insists on a separate history, language, political subjecthood, and its own developmental trajectory, Russian imperial imagination confronts not only a geopolitical challenge, but also a painful psychological fact: the former periphery claims full autonomy.
Ukraine matters as more than territory. It touches the very structure of Russian historical self-imagination. If Ukraine is a separate political subject, then what comes into question is not only imperial space, but also one of the central versions of Russian historical origin.
At this point, imperial trauma shifts into revanchist logic. Aggression becomes a way not only to restore control, but also to symbolically cancel the very fact of loss. This is why Russia’s war against Ukraine cannot be fully explained only in the language of “security interests.” Security rhetoric here is only part of a broader construction, at the center of which lies the attempt to force reality to correspond once again to the old image of the self.
Revanchism in this logic is directed not only at territory. It is directed at the very principle of the other’s separateness. Revanchist politics cannot be satisfied with stable equilibrium, because its internal aim is not compromise, but the symbolic restoration of lost rank.
This is why revanchist logic almost never stops at “enough.” It is nourished not by interest as such, but by the affect of unacknowledged loss. If the new reality continues to exist, the trauma does not close. For this reason, revanchism constantly seeks to move further, attempting to diminish the very fact of the autonomous existence of what has become a reminder of imperial reduction.
The Russian case is central to this typology precisely because imperial loss here was not translated into a new form of identity. The past did not become history. It was not sublimated into other forms of influence, nor did it pass into cultural duration. It radicalized and returned as a political demand addressed to the present: restore space, restore rank, restore the right to define others.
In this sense, Russian revanchism is more a symptom of unfinished decline than a sign of confidence. Where a state accepts its new scale, it searches for other forms of historical presence. Where the new scale is experienced as unbearable, politics begins to drift toward aggressive repetition.
Revanchism in this case performs a compensatory function. It does not remove the trauma, but it allows temporary avoidance of direct confrontation with the fact of reduction. This is why imperial revanchism often has a self-reinforcing character: every new confrontation becomes an attempt to confirm that the former center is still capable of imposing its will.
At the same time, imperial energy is not automatically doomed to war. The potential of scale can also be translated into other forms: economic breakthrough, technological modernization, scientific ambition, or a new type of civilizational influence. Where the former center can no longer be an empire in the old sense, it needs another language of greatness.
This is where diplomacy becomes especially important. Its task is not only to contain imperial revanchism, but also to create conditions under which the need for scale can be redirected into non-aggressive forms of realization. The most dangerous situation arises when imperial consciousness sees no way to preserve a sense of historical weight outside the language of force.
Where no alternative form of greatness emerges, war begins to appear as the only proof of still-living grandeur. This is what makes Russia an example of imperial loss transformed into revanchism. Here, defeat did not become the basis for reconsideration. It became fuel for aggressive repetition.
Model C. Imperial Loss Returned as Political Myth — Turkey
The Turkish case is interesting precisely because it does not fit the simple logic of direct imperial revanchism. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Turkey did not immediately choose the path of restoring lost greatness. On the contrary, the Kemalist project became an attempt to distance itself radically from the imperial form and to build a modern nation-state. In this sense, early republican Turkey did not try to mechanically return to the past; it tried to separate itself from it.
Yet the repressed imperial past did not disappear. It remained in the deeper layers of political culture — not so much as a clear program of revenge, but as an unfinished sense of historical reduction. Ottoman decline meant not only the loss of territories, but also the loss of centrality, scale, and the role of a civilizational axis. Although the republic was built on the rejection of the imperial form, the memory of former magnitude continued to exist as a background of historical self-imagination.
This is why the Turkish case is not an example of the direct return of empire, but of the return of its phantom. The imperial past enters modern politics not as a literal plan of restoration, but as a symbolic horizon that gives the present a language of scale, historical depth, and special role.
The neo-Ottoman motif in contemporary Turkish politics works precisely in this logic. It does not necessarily require the formal restoration of imperial borders. Its function is different: to return to the state an image of itself as a subject larger than the limits of an ordinary nation-state. Turkey increasingly imagines itself not only as a republic, but as the bearer of a broader historical mission — in the Balkans, the Black Sea region, the Middle East, the Muslim world, and the spaces of former Ottoman presence.
In this sense, imperial loss has not been overcome, but translated into political myth. This is not an open program of restoration, but a symbolic resource that allows the state to speak in the language of historical weight, regional responsibility, and a special right to an active role.
This mechanism becomes especially visible where the symbolic horizon turns into geopolitical language. A telling example is the doctrine of the “Blue Homeland” (Mavi Vatan). Formally, it is a maritime strategy. But at a deeper level, it is an attempt to redraw the space in which Turkey imagines itself not merely as a coastal state, but as the center of a broader historical field. The Aegean, the Mediterranean, and the Black Sea begin to be perceived not only as zones of interest, but as spaces of special historical right. Through maritime geopolitics, Turkey seeks to recover not the empire literally, but the right to think of itself as larger than its formal borders.
From this perspective, international law is often experienced not as a neutral framework, but as a system of external constraints that fixes an insufficient scale. This is where the emotional intensity of Turkish disputes in the Eastern Mediterranean comes from. The issue is not only the continental shelf, gas, or maritime borders. The issue is whether Turkey is recognized as an ordinary regional state or as an actor with broader civilizational weight. In this sense, the maritime boundary agreement with Libya was not merely a technical document. It performed a symbolic function: to outline a larger space in which Turkey again claims a special role.
A similar mechanism appears in Turkey’s broader foreign policy. Turkey increasingly behaves not only as a state defending its own perimeter, but as an actor that considers itself responsible for the space of former historical presence. The Balkans, the Caucasus, Libya, Qatar, Somalia — none of this necessarily amounts to neo-empire in the direct sense, but it undoubtedly forms a geography of phantom scale. The Somali case is particularly revealing: military presence, army training, security support, economic and infrastructural involvement. All of this is presented not as expansion, but as responsibility and legitimate historical presence.
This is how imperial myth works in its modern form. It rarely returns in the language of direct possession. More often, it returns in the language of guardianship, stabilization, mediation, or civilizational responsibility.
At the global level, this impulse appears as a struggle for rank. Turkey seeks to be not only a regional state, but a distinct political pole. The slogan that “the world is bigger than five” is especially revealing in this context. Formally, it is a critique of the structure of the international system. At a deeper level, however, it is a demand for recognition: Turkey does not accept the place of a secondary player. Here again the key logic of post-imperial myth appears: not the literal restoration of empire, but the refusal to accept a scale that feels too small for historical self-imagination.
At the same time, this phantom is not neutral. It creates a constant oscillation between republican normality and the temptation of a larger scale. Turkey does not literally restore empire, but neither does it fully close itself within the borders of the nation-state. It moves between these poles — between acceptance and excess.
This is where the central tension emerges: the gap between myth and resource. The imperial phantom pushes the state to act as if it possessed a higher rank than its actual resources can consistently support. From this comes the recurring oscillation between ambition and frustration. When material capacity does not confirm symbolic scale, political nervousness arises: the desire to compensate for insufficient recognition through displays of force, will, or symbolic breakthrough. Politics begins to move not only according to the logic of interest, but also according to the logic of psychological confirmation of one’s own weight.
This is why the Turkish case is important for this typology. It shows that imperial loss does not necessarily become direct revanchism. Sometimes it returns as myth, as symbolic resource, or as a historical style of politics. In such a case, decline is not cancelled, but neither is it fully concluded. It continues to exist in the form of political imagination — as a background against which the state again and again tries on a larger scale.
Diplomacy in the Turkish case requires particular precision. Here it is important to draw a structural distinction between Turkish myth and Russian revanchism. The key criterion is the attitude toward the sovereignty of the other. Russian revanchism, in its extreme form, seeks the cancellation of the subjecthood of the former periphery. The Turkish myth works differently: it demands not the disappearance of the neighbor, but recognition of Turkey’s special role in the space of former Ottoman presence. This may be conflictual, asymmetrical, and tense, but in principle it remains compatible with the formal sovereignty of other states — provided they recognize Turkey as a force that must be taken into account.
This is where an important boundary lies: revanchism seeks to cancel reality, while myth seeks to change its interpretation. This does not make myth automatically safe. In moments when the external world refuses Turkey recognition of the desired scale, symbolic myth can move closer to revanchist logic. Yet even in such situations, the Turkish case generally remains a logic of recognition, not a logic of annihilation. This is why the Turkish example constitutes a separate model of post-imperial transformation rather than an intermediate form between sublimation and revenge.
Crude containment can feed the myth of humiliation, while unconditional accommodation can feed the myth of greatness. For this reason, the task of diplomacy is not only to limit, but also to redirect the energy of scale into legitimate forms of role. Turkey needs to be left room for weight, but not for an imperial scenario; for regional function, but not for restoration; for mediation, logistics, and security, but not for the right to define order on behalf of others.
Turkey, therefore, is an example of imperial loss returned in political myth. Here the past does not dictate direct restoration, but neither does it finally retreat into the historical archive. It continues to operate as a symbolic reservoir of greatness — as a phantom that does not allow the new scale to become a fully concluded reality.
Model D. Imperial Memory Fused with the Trauma of Humiliation — China
The Chinese case does not fit neatly into a simple model of imperial trauma. Here, the issue is not only the experience of reduction, but the overlap of two distinct historical affects: the memory of civilizational centrality and the memory of external humiliation. This is why contemporary Chinese political imagination rarely speaks of itself in the language of direct revenge. Instead, it more often uses the language of rejuvenation, return to a rightful place, and the completion of historical incompleteness.
In the official Chinese narrative, the connection between the “century of humiliation” and the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” has become one of the central mechanisms of political legitimation. This matters because it marks a fundamental boundary between the Chinese and Russian cases. If Russian political imagination tends toward the logic of lost greatness that must be restored, the Chinese one much more often works through the logic of a historical norm that must be re-established.
This is not merely a rhetorical difference. It concerns the very structure of how loss is experienced. In classical post-imperial trauma, the central affect is the loss of the right to define others. In the Chinese case, another layer is added: the conviction that a civilization which historically imagined itself as the center of an ordered world was forcibly displaced from its rightful position.
Imperial China long imagined itself not simply as one state among others, but as a civilizational center. This is why the concept of tianxia — “all under heaven” — holds such importance in the Chinese tradition. It is not merely a geographical image, but a model of order in which the center possesses not only power, but moral and civilizational weight. In contemporary interpretations, this concept is again used as a way of imagining world order not simply as a balance of states, but as a whole gravitating toward a center.
In Chinese political imagination, power was long understood not only as an instrument of coercion, but as confirmation of the world’s ordered structure. The center, in this logic, is not merely stronger; it gives space its form. This is why the loss of centrality is experienced not merely as geopolitical weakening, but as a disruption of the symbolic architecture of order itself.
This memory was violently ruptured by the experience of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Opium Wars, unequal treaties, foreign spheres of influence, Japanese aggression, territorial losses, and the sense of political helplessness formed what contemporary China calls the “century of humiliation.”
Within this logic, what hurts is not only defeat as such. What hurts is the fact that a civilization accustomed to being the center found itself in the position of an object of external coercion. This is why China’s contemporary rise is interpreted not merely as modernization, but as historical correction — the restoration of strength, dignity, and integrity after a period in which the country was forced to exist within an order imposed by others.
It is also important that the “century of humiliation” functions not merely as historical memory, but as a disciplining framework for contemporary political thought. It allows economic acceleration, military modernization, technological ambition, and a strict policy of sovereignty to be joined into one morally intelligible story: we are not expanding; we are reclaiming the right to be ourselves.
This is why the Chinese case is more complex than classical post-imperial revanchism. Imperial memory has not disappeared, but neither has it survived in a pure form. It passed through the experience of national humiliation and emerged transformed.
For this reason, China’s contemporary pursuit of power is rarely presented as nostalgia for empire. It is framed as the “normalization of history,” “great rejuvenation,” or a “return to the rightful place.” The structure of this rhetoric is worth noting: it promises not the creation of a new world, but the return of the world to its proper form.
Here, one of the key features of the Chinese case becomes visible. Imperial memory does not push the state toward a literal restoration of the past. It combines with the conviction that history itself was forcibly diverted from its proper course and must now be corrected.
Thus, “rejuvenation” is experienced not as a project of expansion, but as a morally justified return to the proper order of things. This is what gives the Chinese case its deeply civilizational character.
Here an important philosophical nerve also appears. In the European political tradition, states are usually imagined as separate forms coexisting within a shared international field. In the long Chinese historical imagination, order was more often conceived as a hierarchical whole in which the center possesses not only power, but also a civilizational function.
This is why the humiliation of China is experienced not merely as violence against the state, but as a disruption of the very cosmology of order. In such a perspective, the restoration of strength acquires an almost moral significance: the issue is not only influence, but the return of the world to its proper axis.
To European consciousness, this logic often appears as a fusion of politics and metaphysics. But this is precisely where its mobilizing force lies. When order is experienced not as a contract, but as a moral-cosmic configuration, the displacement of the center is perceived not simply as political defeat, but as a distortion of the very structure of the world.
This is especially visible in questions of sovereignty and territorial integrity. Taiwan, Hong Kong, border regions, and maritime claims acquire such emotional weight not only because of their strategic significance. They are embedded in a broader historical drama: everything that recalls the incompleteness of national gathering activates the memory of humiliation.
For this reason, such questions are read not as technical disputes, but as knots of historical dignity. What may appear to an external observer as a pragmatic conflict of interests often takes on, within Chinese political imagination, the meaning of historical completion or incompletion.
This logic appears not only around Taiwan or the South China Sea. It extends both deep into the continent and beyond its borders. In Central Asia, China increasingly forms not merely economic routes, but a space of functional dependence in which infrastructure, trade, and security create a new center of gravity.
In Xinjiang and Tibet, the same imagination of order takes an internal form: distinctiveness is often interpreted not only as cultural difference, but as a risk of fragmentation within a unified space. In the work with the diaspora, another characteristic feature appears — the tendency to imagine Chineseness not only as civic belonging, but as a longer civilizational bond.
Taken together, all this shows that Chinese “rejuvenation” is not only a project of power. It is a project of re-gathering space around a historically imagined center.
At the same time, it is important to avoid simplification. China is not a direct analogue of Russian revanchism. Its political imagination less often operates through the open language of grievance — “we were deprived of what was ours.” Instead, it more often uses the language of historical correction — “we are returning to what we were meant to be.”
This is precisely what makes the Chinese case especially important for this typology. It shows that imperial loss does not always lead either to direct revanchism or to simple sublimation. It may fuse with national memory of humiliation and form a much more complex structure of political self-perception.
The Chinese case demonstrates one of the most complex forms of post-imperial transformation: the fusion of civilizational memory, modernization breakthrough, the trauma of humiliation, and the desire to restore not only power, but historical normality.
Instead of a Conclusion: Not Every Empire Falls in the Same Way
Empires rarely disappear in a single moment. Far more often, they continue to exist after their own decline — in memory, political language, the idea of rank, the way maps are read, and the internal refusal to accept a new scale. This is why imperial trauma is not only a subject of history, but also a subject of contemporary politics.
The cases examined here reveal different trajectories of post-imperial transformation. Britain largely sublimated its imperial legacy into language, law, finance, diplomacy, and a form of global presence — although even this transformation remained incomplete. Within the British structure itself, spaces continue to exist where imperial memory is experienced not as greatness, but as domination.
Russia transformed loss into revanchism. Here, imperial trauma was not integrated into a new political identity and therefore returned as an attempt to cancel the reality in which former peripheries have the right to autonomous existence.
Turkey demonstrates another model. Ottoman loss returns not as direct restoration, but as political myth — a phantom of historical weight that does not necessarily demand the elimination of another’s subjecthood, but seeks recognition of Turkey’s special role within a wider regional space.
China, in turn, reveals an even more complex configuration. Here, imperial memory fused with the national trauma of humiliation, producing a specific type of great-power psychology. The issue is not so much the return of empire as the restoration of historical normality and the return to an imagined rightful place within the world order.
All these cases point to the central argument: what proves decisive is not the fact of loss itself, but the way it is worked through. This determines not only the internal psychological structure of the state, but also the character of its foreign policy — integrative, nervous, expansive, or revanchist.
For this reason, imperial trauma cannot be adequately analyzed only in categories of interest or rational calculation. It is also nourished by affects — shame, loss of rank, and the rupture between the symbolic map of the world and the new political reality. It arises where defeat has not become past, and reduction has not been integrated as a new boundary of the political self.
At the same time, this does not imply fatalism. Imperial energy is not automatically condemned to become war. It may be sublimated — into science, economy, technology, culture, diplomacy, or new forms of civilizational influence. This is why the central task of politics and diplomacy emerges: not only to restrain dangerous forms of imperial affect, but also to recognize where its redirection into non-aggressive forms of scale remains possible.
Where such redirection does not occur, revanchism begins to appear as the only available language of greatness. And where a state is unable to endure its own reduction, it increasingly attempts to force the world to correspond once again to its old image of itself.
Perhaps this is where one of the key boundaries of contemporary geopolitics lies: between states that have learned to live after empire, and states that still perceive the world as indebted to their past.
This text is translated by use of AI.
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