Memory of the Empire

Empires may be dead, however imperial memories are alive and well. In almost
every realm of political science and policy analysis, the importance of
imperial memories can be felt. As the literature on globalization and nation
state formation have emphasized in very different ways, memories provide the
organizing principles and basis on which national identities, political
cultures, and ideas are shaped. Historical memories matter because they are
the bedrock from which national identities, political cultures, and ideas
are formed. Imperial memories are a specific and definable snapshot in time
that makes up a crucial part of the overall national identity of a
post-imperial successor state. In this way, historical memories are
systematically researchable and offer a specific context in which states
assess their fundamental objectives and link them to explanations and
narratives of the way their past, present, and future intersect in a manner
distinct from other states.
Japan and Turkey represent two of the most important modern examples of
non-Western collapsed empires that have bequeathed their successor states
with imperial memories that have at various times puzzled and confused
scholars. Despite consistent explanations and refrains from historians and
area scholars that have highlighted the importance of Japan and Turkey’s
imperial memories, this factor has rarely been studied in a systematic way
in these two cases.
This paper argues that memories and history matter for a country’s
overarching strategy of engagement both globally and regionally, and
imperial legacies can serve as both a constraint and as an opportunity for
countries that share a common experience with a recent memory of empire in
their history. By using Turkey and Japan, both their contemporary and
imperial incarnations, as a theory-building case-study, this paper seeks to
develop a better understanding from which to analyze the historical roots of
many of the values, tensions, institutions, and motivations that permeate
these contemporary non-Western imperial successor states today.