Before the pandemic, nostalgia was a major force in global politics. Donald Trump rose to power by promising to “make America great again,” and Brexiteers won their political battle partly by idealising Britain’s imperial past. While Chinese President Xi Jinping called for a “great rejuvenation of the Chinese people,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan pursued neo-Ottoman ambitions, and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán lamented the Kingdom of Hungary’s territorial losses after World War I.
These inclinations were suspended when the pandemic forced everyone to focus on a more immediate crisis. But now that COVID-19 is gradually fading in the rearview mirror, nostalgia has returned with a vengeance. Russian President Vladimir Putin has taken this form of politics to an extreme by justifying his war of aggression against Ukraine on the false grounds that Russia’s neighbour “is an inalienable part of our own history, culture, and spiritual space.”
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As is typical of nostalgia narratives, Putin’s account features a “golden age,” followed by a “great rupture,” leading to a current state of discontent. The golden age was the Russian empire, of which Ukraine was a fully integrated satrapy. The rupture came when Vladimir Lenin created a federation of Soviet national republics out of the ethnic diversity of the former Russian empire. According to Putin, it follows that “modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia or, to be more precise, by Bolshevik, Communist Russia.” Finally, the current discontent is attributed to the persistence of this separation. As Putin stated in March 2014, “Kyiv is the mother of Russian cities. Ancient Rus is our common source and we cannot live without each other.”
In many ways, nostalgic nationalism is the political malaise of our time. The Brexiteers were unwilling to accept Britain’s transformation into an ordinary medium-size country after centuries of imperial glory. And the denouement of American liberal hegemony has created opportunities for post-imperial powers such as China, Russia, Turkey, and even Hungary to reassert their lost status on the world stage, albeit with widely varying degrees of conviction and determination. Trump tried to contain these centrifugal forces with his “America First” agenda, and his spectre still haunts American politics.
Craving a return to bygone times is hardly innocuous. Sentimental, historically biased appeals to a romanticised past are the stock and trade of jingoistic leaders. Nostalgia becomes a tool for manipulating a polity’s perception of the present, setting the stage for radical and often dangerous policy shifts. Reviving moments of past glory can motivate a polity to test boundaries, take risks, and defy the prevailing global order. Nostalgia and nationalism are closely linked, especially in aging societies where a larger share of the population is more inclined to idealise the past.
The Russian-American cultural theorist Svetlana Boym identifies two distinct types of nostalgia: reflective and restorative. Reflective nostalgia is generally benign. It scrutinises the past critically, recognising that while some good things have been lost, much has also been gained along the way. By contrast, restorative nostalgia – the dominant form today – seeks to rebuild what was lost.
For all the obvious differences between Brexit and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, both represent attempts to break from an unpleasant present by turning back the clock. The Brexiteers want to return to the Edwardian age, or at least to the 1970s, before Britain joined the European project; and Putin wants to return to the czarist era.
But the politics of nostalgia varies significantly between democratic and authoritarian settings. Unlike Putin, the Brexiteers had to persuade a majority of voters to support their cause. In democracies, mainstream parties can challenge nostalgic populist movements’ effort to monopolise the country’s history. They can confront restorative nostalgia with reflective nostalgia, pointing out, for example, that the British empire had plenty of blood on its hands. Instead, the Remain camp’s technocratic “now and here” strategy amounted to bringing charts and graphs to a flag fight.
In authoritarian systems, where the opposition – if it exists at all – cannot respond openly to a regime’s historical claims, nostalgia becomes more dangerous, especially when its emotional appeal fuels the leader’s own solipsism. In these cases, one of the only solutions is international engagement with the alienated power to help it alleviate its sense of loss. Such an approach may also be necessary for a re-emerging power like China, which feels that the world is keeping it marginalised and not paying due respect to its long history.
Unlike declining powers, though, an ascendant power can draw spiritual succor from the promise of restoring a lost homeland. That is why Xi often asserts a continuity in Chinese history, linking the ancient imperial past to the People’s Republic. The idea of a great rejuvenation provides a roadmap to a better future without the need for a rupture with the present.
The writer is Senior Fellow at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School. ©Project Syndicate
