A history of three transnational political projects designed to
overcome the inequities of imperialism After the dissolution of
empires, was the nation-state the only way to unite people
politically, culturally, and economically? In Post-Imperial
Possibilities, historians Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper examine
three large-scale, transcontinental projects aimed at bringing
together peoples of different regions to mitigate imperial legacies of
inequality. Eurasia, Eurafrica, and Afroasia—in theory if not in
practice—offered alternative routes out of empire. The theory of
Eurasianism was developed after the collapse of imperial Russia by
exiled intellectuals alienated by both Western imperialism and
communism. Eurafrica began as a design for collaborative European
exploitation of Africa but was transformed in the 1940s and 1950s into
a project to include France’s African territories in plans for
European integration. The Afroasian movement wanted to replace the
vertical relationship of colonizer and colonized with a horizontal
relationship among former colonial territories that could challenge
both the communist and capitalist worlds. Both Eurafrica and Afroasia
floundered, victims of old and new vested interests. But Eurasia
revived in the 1990s, when Russian intellectuals turned the theory’s
attack on Western hegemony into a recipe for the restoration of
Russian imperial power. While both the system of purportedly sovereign
states and the concentrated might of large economic and political
institutions continue to frustrate projects to overcome inequities in
welfare and power, Burbank and Cooper’s study of political
imagination explores wide-ranging concepts of social affiliation and
obligation that emerged after empire and the reasons for their unlike
destinies.
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Eurasia, Eurafrica, Afroasia
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780691251509
Publisert
2023
Utgiver
Princeton University Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter