 All right, so good afternoon everybody and welcome to this book launch organized by the Center for Ground Strategy of the Department of War Studies. My name is Flavia Gasparri, I'm a lecturer in the Department of War Studies and a member of the Center for Ground Strategy. We are very happy to have here today Dr. Samir Puri, who is presenting his new book, The Great Imperial Hangover, How Empires Are Shaped the World. Dr. Puri is a visiting lecturer in the Department of Studies. He's also adjunct professor in the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a research fellow at Rand Europe. Dr. Puri's career combines academia and public service besides being a lecturer in the Department of War Studies. He also worked for the foreign office in particular on counter-terrorism strategy and policy support to a number of peace processes and he was also assistant head of research at the Ministry of Defense Think Tank, DC-DC Development Concepts and Doctrine Center. Today we have also the great pleasure to have here Professor Patrick Porter as discussed. Professor Porter is Professor of International Security and Strategy at the University of Birmingham, is a senior associate fellow at the Roya United Service Institute in London and a fellow of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His research interests are focused on great power politics, foreign and defense policy in the US and UK. And I want to take this opportunity to also mention Professor Porter's book, which came out last month, The False Promise of Liberal Order, Nostalgia, Delusion and the Rise of Trump. So if you're interested, have a look at his book as well. But now the floor is for Dr. Samir Puri. Just one point before I leave you the floor, Samir, to the public, if you have any questions, please write your questions on the Q&A section at the bottom of your screen. You should have a Q&A button, push it and write your questions there. I will collect the questions and of course we can discuss your questions at the end of the presentation. So Dr. Puri, please. Well, thank you very much. First of all to the Kings College London Centre for Grand Strategies for hosting this event. Thank you to Flavia and to Patrick for joining me on the ride. And to all of you, no doubt, tuning in because this is such a timely topic. And that's really where to start is a present moment because the questions that we have around our identity and our history as we understand them, these questions are exploding into significance in a way that we couldn't possibly have foreseen even in the recent past. We're seeing very bitter divisive debates and arguments both within nations but also between nations as well, depending on where you look in the world. And I think the sum total of that is our need to grapple with a wide variety of perspectives. It's never been greater than it has been at this moment. I think an appropriate place to start with my presentation is to begin with my motivations for writing the book. There's sometimes they are sort of implicit in what an author presents but I've made them really explicit with this book. And what I've said, what I say to you is I can actually empathize quite directly with the humiliation that can cascade down through the generations of there being stories of imperial subjugation back in the distant past. We're not talking about your parents, perhaps not even your grandparents but certainly the stories that set your family's course in life in motion, where you've been living, where you've migrated. At the same time I also have an evident pride in being British and having been born in London, growing up in this country, I've certainly seen the confidence that can infuse a nation when its recent history has involved imperial conquest, successful imperial conquest, and all the good and bad things that have flown from that and the benefits that flowed back to the imperial metropolis. Now I'm not here to take sides in divisive arguments around identity, history and imperial legacies. It's a really important thing to state at the outset. I'm here to convey the importance of understanding a multiplicity of different imperial inheritances, whether that's within your country or as again if you're looking out into the wider world in other countries that you're interested in that you interact with or you feel are impinging upon your country's security, safety, culture, way of life. I'll come back to that theme in a moment as to why it's important to not take sides and what the value is of doing so to empower you, the reader of the book. So the book itself and what it contains, I want to ask quite a I guess counterintuitive question. Most people are accustomed, many people are accustomed to talking about all the bad things that flowed from empires. I want to rephrase that question to talk about the problems and challenges that have thrown up by the absence of empires. And I say that because not that we know this or remind ourselves on a daily basis, we are after all in the first empire-free millennia since ancient times. Empires existed in some shape or form more or less since recorded history began and we are really only just still getting used to the absence of these empires in the world. That also means that the legacies of empires, of the many collapsed empires throughout human history and in different parts of the world, they're shaping 21st century problems in quite profound ways. And this is everywhere, this is happening everywhere, whether your nation is predominantly populated by people whose forebears attempted to build empires, did so successfully for a while, and then perhaps stopped doing so, or whether your nation and the people, the people you come from, actually have a history of quite recent imperial subjugation, or whether they've got a mixture of both, alternatingly over history, different periods of conquest, having been conquered. Now it's very easy to say that the history of empires influences the present day. I think the real trick is in capturing what those influences mean, trying to understand how they're influencing the present day, and I guess to what extent, because I'm not saying that the legacies of empires are the predominant or even the only cause of contemporary problems, but they are an influence on these problems, sometimes quite an important influence. And to go down that route of trying to capture different imperial legacies, to understand them, to pull them apart from where they get mixed up into the swarm life of everyday events, I distinguish between the obvious physical tangible legacies, for example, the outline of your country's borders, the composition of its population, multi-ethnic, homogenous, where the distinctions exist, where immigration influxes might have occurred in the past. I distinguish between these tangible legacies, which are relatively open to the naked eye, from the attitudinal legacies that primarily relate to the mindsets that have developed over generations, from these aforementioned experiences of having had some sort of benefit of successful empire building, versus some sense of humiliation, some sense of loss that comes from invasion, subjugation, occupation, being part of somebody else's empire, and of course, that cocktail of having experienced both at different points in history. There's a third qualification in measuring and understanding the impact of legacies on today, and that relates to our proximity to those particular events in history, whether they're in the distant past, whether it's the Western Roman Empire and its impact on modern Italians is clearly very different to the impact of the British Empire on modern Britons, because 2,000 years versus 60 years incomparable. I'll come back to these issues of physical, attitudinal, and proximity to history as we move on, but I want to just give another justification for this enterprise, which is, well, some of you will be tuning in thinking, well, empires still exist, don't they? Well, the distinction that's well-established in the scholarship of empires is between the formal empires of old and the informal empires that tend to be more predominant today. So when I'm talking about the end of the imperial age, I'm talking about the, more or less, extinction of formal empires. But what are formal empires? In some shape or form, they existed since those names you're familiar with from the Old Testament, the Babylonian Empire, before that the Assyrian Empire, Mesopotamia, the Achaemenid Empire, and Persia. This is ancient history, but it involved some sort of imperial centre through force, through subjugation, conquering, annexing, possibly colonising, neighbouring realms. That style of empire evolved dramatically in the two, three thousand years following those ancient examples I provided, but they lasted in some shape or form through the era of the Byzantine, Ottoman, Mughal, Russian, Tsarist, and so on and so forth, Safavid empires, right until the 20th century, living memory with the collapse of the European maritime colonial empires after World War II, and ultimately with the shattering of the landed Colossus in 1991, the Soviet Union, which despite protesting its imperial nature at the time is generally regarded to be the latest of several iterations of Russian empire. When the Soviet Union ended in 1991, it ended partly because in its Cold War standoff with the United States, the U.S. had stepped away from building the formal empire, the territorial occupation, and I guess built something more informal, which is where this term starts to gain more currency, in terms of informal empire, neo-empire, neo-colonialism, so a lot of scholarship on this as well. But to summarise that particular historical transition, what it means is that the U.S. sought client states, it sought influence, it built bases, but it ostensibly allowed the countries in which it was doing these things their own independence to remain. So the Great Imperial Hangover, it embarks the book embarks on a world tour. What I want to do is with the end of formal empires in mind, I want to examine the different post-imperial experiences of Europe, of America, of Asia, the Middle East, more or less much of the world. Now the next question I'm sure you'll have is how I can do that, and the book as you can see is not too big, it's not a tome that will weigh down your rucksack or take you weeks and weeks on your kindle to sift through. It's a fairly compact three to four hundred words, and what I'm certainly doing with this book is, well I'm being reasonably ambitious in what I can cover, but I'm also giving the readers the respect that I would give somebody picking up a book like this, that you have a working knowledge of many histories of the world, certainly of where you're from, perhaps not of all those regions of the world, but you'll be able to use the book to try to put into some kind of comparative context these different post-imperial story arcs. I also want to avoid something which I think is happening every single day on social media and in public discourse, certainly in the UK and the US, and perhaps in other countries too, and that's to dive into the rabbit hole of debates occurring within one particular set of histories as they're interpreted almost in binary positions around, and I'm not taking a position on these issues, but the persistence of discrimination in the United States in the era after the Civil War, or the persistence of discrimination in the United Kingdom, possibly as a result of a denial around acknowledging legacies of slavery. My book is not a replacement for the single-issue tomes that are going to be produced, presumably in ever larger numbers, investigating these positions, taking polemical positions, empirical positions on those difficult issues. I'm here to do something different. I'm here to not argue that we are entering a new imperial age, to not castigate empires categorically, neither to absolve them or to whitewash their legacies. I'm here to present an argument I can summarize in one or two lines, and that is world order in the 21st century consists of a number of different post-imperial legacies, and that when these different post-imperial visions and legacies and stories collide, this is where we're seeing misunderstandings, friction, schism, violence, unrest, potentially between countries' wars. It's the collision between these different variable histories, and they're variable because we are not habitually brought up with the stories of other people's histories. It takes enormous effort to empathize with someone else's interpretation of history as they understand it, perhaps a second nature, to see the world through other people's eyes. It's actually counterintuitive to remind ourselves that there are multiple, many versions of history, even the dominant versions of history, dozens, hundreds unfolding in the world at the same time. And yes, it's true if they are subscribed to or understood by a relatively powerless or quiet people, whether it's a country or a minority, well, it doesn't really matter. If there is a clash because a democratic system allows for it, or there is a collision, I'll take a totally different example, between the US and China, sorry, where we have two superpowers. The US, I still say, is perhaps the world's disputed heavyweight champion of the world, no longer the world's undisputed heavyweight champion. It has its own post-imperial narratives of freeing itself from the shackles of British colonialism and reinventing what it sees as an empire of liberty across its own continental expanse and then using those sorts of moral justifications for prolonging its presence, Pax Americana, in different parts of the world. Regardless of what you think of that, the rights or wrongs of it, and they certainly have been debated intensively since 2001, but more or less since the end of World War II in some shape or form, that post-imperial vision is now in direct collision with China's own post-imperial identity, which takes two important stories in its own history, one of which is its century of humiliation at the hands of European and Japanese foreign predation, but the much longer history is, of course, its imperial grandeur as the predominant power in East Asia for centuries, going through what it calls not periods of conquest, but periods of unification to tie the Chinese polity together into a coherent stance, and all of its narratives around the Belt and Road Initiative predicate themselves on the notion of win-win economic deals, resources for investment and so on, so forth. Many of you will be familiar with these notions of China's economic tentacle spreading, but the stories China tells itself are, of course, that it is not building empire, that it is in a post-imperial age, and that what it is in fact doing is building an informal empire of influence, so I'm not going to talk for too much longer at the outset, other than just to quickly run through a few of the other areas of the world, just to list them that I cover in the book, so you get a sense of its expanse. I start with the United States and this question of its refashioning of the notion of empire. I move on to the UK and discuss how the UK, in its own international positioning and its domestic debates, is often trapped between the guilt and the grandeur of interpreting its imperial legacies, and that's happening clearly right now, polarizing, or people left not quite sure which side to subscribe to because they feel both the guilt and the grandeur, it's very natural and I think quite understandable response. I examine the European Union as a post-imperial project that clearly does not identify as an empire, but has encountered problems analogous with empires around the balance to be struck between unity and diversity. I examine Russia's re-embracing of its long imperial history, drawing on my own experience working in East Ukraine during the conflicts. China's aforementioned different imperial phases and the lessons it takes from that. India's rise through the Mughal and British histories to its present trajectory as well are going to become the most populous country in the world, but one that is still finding its position in that world, particularly in power political terms, as we've seen with the border clash with the Chinese. I look at the Ottoman Empire and the Safavid Empire's collapses in the Middle East, the impact on Middle Eastern instability, and I end with Africa's continuing scramble beyond colonialism, which incidentally is exactly where my parents grew up, and I have a lot of knowledge and understanding and personal experiences around some of the issues African countries have faced since colonialism ended there. And to round off my opening pitch, why I've done this, not least because it means that you can finish one chapter, leave the book alone, pick up another one, and you're going to get a different perspective on the world as you move through these different stories. I've done this because the stories contradict each other, and when I get to the conclusion, I apologize but then make no apology for the fact that the different interpretations, predominant interpretations in these continents, you can't generalize of course, simply don't match up. And that's because history is live and kicking. History is not just what is taught in universities, what is delivered at podiums, what is delivered by intellectuals to intellectuals. It's also living and breathing in our households as we grow up. It shows itself in the manner and bearing of our parents and grandparents, perhaps, in the stories they have, the stories that they pass down in a sense of privilege or privation that they convey. And I make no presumptions whatsoever that there is a formula behind the individual post-imperial stories that we've grown up with, that we take. But I certainly, and I'm quite unflinching in saying that our inability to understand different post-imperial narratives can only lead to a lack of harmony within nations and between nations. And it is almost always in politics, geopolitics, revolution and war terrorism, it was almost always a useful adjunct to our understanding, but perhaps the key that unlocks the understanding around the nature of that conundrum as we confront it in international affairs. So I'll say thank you for joining me, thank you for listening and I can't wait for the responses from Patrick and from your audience a bit later on. All right, thank you very much, Samir, for this terrific presentation. I'm sorry you can't hear the round of applause that I'm sure everybody is giving you virtually. Yeah, I'm also very looking forward to hearing what Professor Porter has to say about the book. So please, the floor is yours Professor Porter. Well thank you so much, Lavia, Kings College London, to the audience and to Samir for writing a book. I want to congratulate you on this book. It is a real panorama about empire and above all the ghosts of empire and how they haunt our world. And what's unusual about this book is that it's an extensive in-depth study of empire's legacy but without being preachy. This is a wonderfully ambivalent book. Ambivalence is possibly not the right word. There's a very deft touch to this with great restraint. All the more impressive given how the righteousness and the craving for certainty and indeed purity that defines a lot of contemporary debate about this subject, which makes the book much more bearable in the subject matter than it might have been. And it's a question that won't leave us alone as you say. I mean we're living in a very edgy time to put it mildly. Anniversary of Brexit a few days ago or was it yesterday? Lost track of time. Statues being toppled. Rumors of statues being toppled. University curriculums and museums being decolonized. And then abroad powers from Turkey to China demanding deference, demanding subservience, demanding respect on the basis of a past. Either making land grabs or asserting themselves and invoking a past of greatness or restored greatness or even in China's case claiming a past of almost pure victimhood that the greatness of China lies in the fact that it's never been an empire, never been imperial. So the stakes are very high and we may choose not to be interested in empire, but it seems to be very interested in us. And Samir, I think you are almost the ideal author for this because I mean as a very subtle observer of the phenomenon, but also as someone who was a civil servant in the foreign office because there's a morally concerned civil servant who's kind of fighting to get out there as well. Sort of particularly appears around about Ukraine and Crimea and I'll come back to that later. I think your family background with both of us in different ways are hyphenated Brits with mixed heritage, British, Indian, bringing of the capacity to look at this from a number of different angles as it were. There's a touch of tacitus about this in fact, what it's like on either side of the frontier. And I think your main point is very true that the imperial impulse does endure and if we're not aware of it, if we fail to tame it, it could drive us into disaster. And so this book really is an appeal to our consciousness. It's not exactly an attempt to move us into a post-imperial age. It's more about a warning against the danger of imperial amnesia. And this informs a number of very bread and butter questions what we teach children in school, what we teach ourselves, the iconography in our public squares, the foreign policies we select, the assumptions we bring to our interactions with others. And it may be saying too much that by being more aware we'll have a more peaceful world, but at least we'll be less shocked. At least we'll have that. I want to ask a few things. I mean, I think you're absolutely right. And where this book is most fascinating is when you deal with the paradox of empires that claim to be liberators, in particular the Atlantic type empire, the kind of the liberal, if you like, liberal empire, which also has a Roman precedent. And I kept on thinking of Flamininus and his declaration to the Greeks in the Olympic Games in 196 BC. He declares that from now on Greece and the Greek city-states will be free. But of course the nuance there is that, well, first of all, the Romans never leave when they turn up. But secondly, in the context of the Roman tradition, it was more like being a freedman than free. To be manumitted as a former slave meant you had enduring obligations to your former master. You were expected to follow your master Rome's instructions in a patron-client relationship. And just in case that sounds a bit esoteric, I want to read something from January 2020. You'll recall that the Iraqi parliament formally requested the United States to withdraw from Iraq with its garrisons. This is the formal statement of the US State Department, which said, with the title, ominous title, a continued partnership. And it said, America is a force for good in the Middle East. At this time, any delegation sent to Iraq would be dedicated to discussing how best to recommit to our strategic partnership, not to discuss troop withdrawal, let that hang, not to discuss troop withdrawal, let alone even arguing about it. But our right, appropriate force posture in the Middle East, we want to be a friend and partner to a sovereign, prosperous, and stable Iraq. In other words, the whole paradox of setting people free while exercising ultimate control and, if you like, one of the points you make is that empire endures in terms of ruling others, not in the crude formal sense of annexing territories or absorbing territories or claiming they are yours, but in exercising an ultimate veto over the sovereign discretion or policies of another state. In this case, it's the decision that, ultimately, Iraqi sovereignty must be circumscribed by Washington's discretion, Washington's decisions, setting people free to do what you want them to do, and all the problems that that causes, which, of course, then leads to further problems that, if you think that way, you are shocked at others' resistance. You are shocked when others don't share that account of your interests. And this brings me on to Russia, where it's interesting because, I mean, one of the things about this book, one of the motives of this book is severe experience in going as a UNESCO delegate to Ukraine and seeing Russia's handiwork and seeing the brutality of that war. And, if you like, the practice of aggression by biting off a part of a sovereign state under the cover of claiming to be a liberator, not a liberator American or British style, but a liberator of oppressed Russians in a diaspora driven by a sense of imperial entitlement. I think what this misses out, though, is that it underplays something that's very important in Moscow's pathology about empire, which is it sees itself very much historically as on the receiving end of imperialism, on the receiving end of predation, especially coming from the West, that there is a memory of a very brutal logic, which is that you're either running an empire or you're part of one, that rushes sensitivity about the encroachment of potential adversaries onto its borderlands. And as your book sort of makes clear elsewhere, what happens when one side forgets that past? What we saw here was a European Union and a Washington foreign policy establishment that, in a way, had fallen prey to imperial amnesia. When Russia asserts aggressively a sphere of influence on its near abroad, Angela Merkel says, we thought we'd left all that behind. Your EU diplomats said, quote, we don't do geopolitics. John Kerry, Secretary of State, says you can't behave in the 21st century as you would behave in the 19th. Leaving aside the whole question of the fact that the West does practice spheres of influence, ask what would happen if Canada, say, decided voluntarily to invite Chinese military protection or military alliance or how America would react. But the sense that if empire is a thing of the past, why is Russia behaving this way? When, in fact, it's not. Even the very notion that this was just a trading agreement. In fact, the association agreement included the clauses tying Ukraine into Western, quote, security and convergence. In other words, it looked frightened Russian nationalist like the creeping forward of a superpower and its alliance and its apparatus asking to be taken on trust against historical evidence of what great powers are actually like. And of course, this goes back, as you say, to broken treaties about ballistic missiles, regime change wars and the 1996 election interference, etc. And this is what can happen when those who are wandering forward to assert themselves forget what it's like on the other side. A bit more imperial amnesia closer to home. And this is where I agree and disagree with you about Brexit. As you say, Brexit is primarily a problem about people misremembering empire or not thinking enough about empire. As you say, one of the things that drove the push for separation from the European Union was an under-acknowledged and untamed post-imperial feelings. In other words, being imperialist or having imperial ambitions without really knowing it and trafficking off a memory of British greatness in opposition to the European continent. I actually think in a way, and I'm speaking as someone who voted Remain but has a kind of, I would say, an empathy with some of the Brexiteers and the way they, some of them, were misunderstood. I think it's worse than that. I think actually what happened was imperial amnesia of a different kind. Not so much people who are being imperial and not being aware of it, but people who think of themselves as non-imperial, as democratic sovereignists who are taking back control, but forgetting the advantages that the British empire had for British power that Britain would be left without if it left the European Union. In other words, separating great powerness from the imperial structure. So if you look at the memory that a lot of Brexiteers had, have, it's not of the imperial state wading ashore to colonize countries. It's not a kind of longing for the Raj. It is in fact an island state, a very maritime state in that sense, but not thinking much about what it did when it went ashore, not pining for the Raj. And this is actually a confusion in the Remain ranks because some of the same people who accused Brexiteers of being starry-eyed imperial nostalgists who want to bring back the empire are also accusing them of being little Englanders who want to slouch back to the Shires and being too small in their vision. So this whole question about national greatness, imperial power and amnesia I think does play into the debate, but it's more a case I think of forgetting the ways in which the British empire actually contributed to Britain's relative power and thinking about Britain as being a great global state separated from all those things, the Stirling block, the preference system, etc. and Adornment America not dismantling it, all those sort of things. So this brings me finally to a question or a proposition because your book begs a question which is you say we've moved into a post-imperial world in the sense that there's no more formal empires and yet you keep on showing and I keep on agreeing with you that in many ways imperial practice endures. I want to ask you a bit more about this. Is it in fact, in your view, possible to be at all post-imperial? Is the promise of emancipation from empire in fact a delusion? Is it not the case that those who free themselves from empire end up running their own? Is it not the case that in order to actually have a great republic or a great democracy ultimately to secure yourself abroad you are going to start interfering in other sovereign space? In other words, is it not the case that actually whilst yes we need to be more conscious, yes we need to have less amnesia, we are either running empires or we're part of them and the question is just how much we're aware of it. So on that rather light question I'll just say bravo to you and everyone should buy and read this book. Thank you. Thank you very much Patrick and Serena would you please answer the questions and then we have some questions arriving from from the public. Well Patrick I'm bowled over by your comments and also relieved because you're one of the very first people to read it outside of the people involved in the production of the book. I'm really pleased that it struck the note the tone that it did of trying to engage in frankly unbelievably contentious issues without getting people's backs up because then the reader is empowered to form exactly as you're doing their own opinions, their own positions on some of these issues. I think I'll start with the question you ended on which is this awkward juxtaposition as you rightly identify between imperial practices, quasi-imperial practices and the absence of formal empires. It certainly won't be the first time the world has been witnessed to an awkward odd paradoxical juxtaposition but this one in particular requires some reflection because it relates to hierarchies and those of us who study political affairs, who work in political affairs, we know that politics and international politics it's about explicit and implicit hierarchies. Power is exercised in respect of them to create them to exacerbate them to narrow them but hierarchies will never leave us. There's any ordering principle in social affairs it's hierarchy and the ways in which major superpowers have operated to exercise hierarchy, particularly the USA for 70 or so years, has been extremely clever because it's normally on the basis of nearly 200 recognized sovereign states. Imagine all of them with the diplomats at the UN, Geneva and New York equal legal equivalents, nameboard in front of them, in reality the week can be pushed around, maybe influenced, maybe totally domineered by the strong. I've certainly got a lot of sympathy for some of the benefits that flow from an American-ordered global system, perhaps not right in this moment in history, but we would do well to remind ourselves that the absence of America's willingness in blood and treasure, the lives of its young folks who serve in their armed forces, if you take all of that away from post-war worlds, you don't really have a particularly well-ordered post-war world and I think I'm not writing this as an anti-American but I do humorously recount the fact that your Iraq example, the legal mechanism is a status of forces arrangement and that's acronym is SOFA. You sort of joke, well does the American military create a SOFA that's too comfortable to leave when it develops basing options in certain parts of the world, builds its version of the defense of the Pax Americana from those fixed positions and then the case of Okinawa in Japan has stayed there for 75 years, causing some consternation in Japanese politics but now absolutely critical to the American-Chinese-Pacific standoff. So yes, powers are pivoting and contorting themselves around notions of sovereign equivalence in order to exercise some control of hierarchy but in just contrast, for one moment, Chinese views of hierarchy, which I spend some time ruminating on because I find that they do flow from China's imperial experiences in how it unified over, before the common era, into the common era, into the Tang dynasty, the Ming dynasty, the Qing dynasty, ancient history. Chinese scholars, Yang Zutong is one, Zhao Tingyang is another, he's quite sent to write Chinese scholars but their work is translated as out there for us to access. They say this notion of equality in the international system and within countries is absurd because hierarchies are natural and therefore a political order must shape itself and an international political order to reflect those hierarchies. Yang Zutong concludes by saying, well even boxing has got weight categories, you don't just send the featherweight against the heavyweight, you've got to explicitly recognize in fact equality is a nonsense. So some Chinese intellectuals writes and clearly that infuses Chinese statecraft and Chinese domestic politics in ways that are too obvious for me to need to go into right now. So hierarchies still exist. Your point around Russia is an excellent point around not wanting to be on the receiving end of neo-imperial informal empire influence is as pushed by the US, especially since the end of the Cold War, but to when you have the habit of empire, and this also goes for Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey as well, when you've got the habit of empire in your history of statecraft, your history of politics, you do want to dictate the nature of events, you do not want to be dictated to, and you have stories and structures and sometimes techniques and sometimes if in living memory, veterans who remember how not to be dictated to. And certainly in Russia, a generation of presumably Russian cold warriors whose books have been pulled off shelves, whose views have been called in to reach their retirement, because they know how to do this sort of stuff and they know how to update it for the modern age, whether it's active measures using the internet rather than using radio broadcasts and so on and so forth. And I'll round off my comments here on Patrick's point about Brexit. Well, there we've got the, well, I would say it's the biggest bone of contention in British politics, but it's been replaced by the C-word coronavirus and now the statue debate has kicked off. But it's interesting how when a nation faces a series of crises, perhaps disconnected from each other in causality, how they do accumulate momentum and how they do somehow end up cascading down the hill, growing into an even bigger problem. Certainly the statue debate I think is particularly divisive in the UK, because there is an awareness, especially amongst people on the left wing of British politics, that the centre right and the right, especially the far right, have had a field day with some of the symbolism around what Brexit presents, which is this reimagining of, and Patrick, I really like the way you characterize it. It's not about sailing onto the shores of an uninhabited or a inhabited but poorly defended island 200, 300 years ago. It's not about the activation of imperial memory in that direct sense. It's about the feeling of having once been able to run your own affairs in a way that was globally significant, but that didn't have other parts of the world directly impinging back on you. And some of the things that I've highlighted in my summary of the British imperial experience in the book is the way in which the British Empire, in its existence, not in its decline, was able to influence so much that happened in so many parts of the world without necessarily the British Isles being too unduly influenced, especially in the later stages. World War II is still the predominant memory in British collective psyche, hence the deep anger, the bile in people's throats around possibly dawning Churchill statue, or tearing it down, happened about a week ago. But I do think it is because, and again it's not because Britain good guys fought the bad guys and the Nazis and the Japanese, it's because World War II was the British Empire's greatest contribution to the modern world. In terms of the things that contributed, you might say well the English language is a good thing for the parts of the world that have its own so forth, again I'm not here to pick that position. But certainly when people say Britain's finest hour, Britain stood alone, Britain played this fight to rock. It was a British Empire, didn't quite stand alone, and it showed for Britons, and it still shows for Britons, World War II, its empire in action against arguably far less humane, far more inhumane rival empires, the Third Reich, which didn't last for a thousand years, thanks to British efforts and the alliances it catalyzed, and the imperial Japanese order as it saw itself in East Asia. So there is an implicit sense, and I'll last comment Flavio before I hand over to you in the questions, is Patrick you mentioned and you caught the word in the book consciousness, and I really like that because I have a sort of subheading at the end, consciousness is the first step to control, and it really is that sense of well where in our nations are very different nations histories did the imperial experience imbue our peoples with confidence, our statesmen, our dominant narratives, where did they set boundaries that if you start saying certain things you're basically unpatriotic, where did it teach us to look in the world for our kin, more of our our type of people, and I started this book with a quote from George Orwell pinned up over my desk, and I sort of wasn't sure whether to put it in, but it was about how the forces actually govern the world, or racial pride, leader worship, things that liberal intellectuals write off as anachronisms, and I thought that's pretty bold, it's from the 1930s, and I still feel it's true today, the way in which we understand our identities have changed, but the fact that we identify ourselves with some people more than others, that hasn't changed, and our natural sympathies tend to reflect of many things, they tend to reflect our selective history, so I'll hand over Flavia to you there. Well thank you very much for the view, I have a thousands of questions myself, but first of all I want to give space to the public and the questions that we have been receiving on the chat, so first question is from Peter Dixon who asks Samir, how confident are you about the distinction between formal and informal empires, since formal empires depend very much on soft power for the maintenance? Well thanks to Peter for that question, Peter I agree with the premise of your question which is formal empires clearly also in many cases used in formal networks, some more than others, the Russian Czar's formal empire, I mean this was territorial conquest through adjacency, as a result the importance of networks was of a very different nature to a globe-straddling empire like the British or the French or the Dutch, where in some respects this is why proto-globalisation some people located in the way maritime trading routes, movements of people both consensual and against their consent, without their consent, started to stitch the world together across quite grand distances, so certainly Peter you're right that formal empires had informal networks as well, but I'm fairly confident about the distinction because, and this is Patrick's point about when Crimea was annexed in 2014, that's just before I deployed there with the foreign office to work for the OSCE, there was a lot of rhetoric, how can you do this in the 21st century, this is 19th century annexation imperial state park, it's an aberration to directly conquer, to abrogate sovereignty of the territory and to formally take it over, I mean the long may that continue, that's a good thing, but I perhaps can't be too confident simply using the absence of annexation as my test for the absence of formal empire, I think I'd also say that despite the fact some smaller states have only nominal sovereignty, they are dominated or dominated by their neighbours or very dependent on their neighbours, there are still enormous changes in the international system compared to centuries gone by that do safeguard that nominal independence and it's imperfect and then that brings me back to the sort of the pastiche of equality that the Chinese scholars sometimes draw upon which is well you might as well just recognise these, perhaps in their world you might as well just call it an empire, but I would stop short of doing that right now. Okay, second question of course Patrick feel free to join now to make any comments you like on the questions as well, so next question is from Pranav Joshim who asked, congratulations Samir first of all for the book, very looking forward to reading it and then there are two questions, the first one, it is true that the Union Public Service Commission in India has heavily borrowed from the British, so should the decolonisation entail a complete rebuilding of the Union Public Service Commission from scratch and then the second point is about the Supreme Court in India which recently decriminalised homosexuality from a piece of law that considers sex for pleasure as criminal, taking into account that this law had come into being due to the colonial administration how do countries work around these laws enacted by former colonial rulers? Well thank you so much for those two questions, I'll start with the second, back in my PhD studies I did a big case study on Pakistan and the war on terror and I found a lot of colonial era legislation that directly inhibited the Pakistani military and police from engaging in the manhunts the Americans were asking them to engage in in the pursuit of al-Qaeda and bin Laden after regime change had happened in Afghanistan. The analogy to your question is very simply that under extreme pressure the Pakistani government started to jettison some of these colonial era laws, they renamed the North frontier province, funny enough named that by Lord Kersen and his associates because it was the frontier of British power, renaming it Kaiba Bakhtunkhwa to represent the ethnicities of the people who predominantly lived there. With regards to India and the Victorian era laws, I picked up on this in the newspapers and you know honestly shaking my head and sort of wondering I guess the crisis on that will be in India if indeed it does happen a catching up of social norms or a strong enough protest movement or representation movement for a minority community to actually force the Supreme Court to face the outdated nature of the legislation but many post-colonial states in India are certainly one because it's so vast because Gandhi was assassinated so soon after the pendants because the threat of civil war or war with Pakistan was always present there were much more pressing things to do in post-colonial states simply to stay together to hold it together was an accomplishment and so I don't blame any post-colonial states that have arisen from colonial origins for not having a chance to revisit these by the way I also really dislike the term state failure because I've noticed that a lot of Western scholars in particular use this to apply to states which have only existed for five or six or seven decades and I think well what are you sort of writing out the post-imperial origins of some of these states that are apparently failing and forgetting about the really inauspicious origins or origin stories that some of them had and just very quickly on rebuilding from scratch in many points in writing this book I've been reminded of the expression of cutting off your own nose despite your face because there can be a not even a anarchistic tendency but just an honest tendency to say well we can't really reconcile the difficulties of our past we need a fresh start I mean the world just doesn't work that way partly because sometimes people saying that are from younger generations and to do so would be to invalidate the experiences and the assumptions and the beliefs and and and the manias of past generations some of you might still be alive and influential it's one of the reasons why you can have generational comfort but also because an honest and sort of temperate debate separates that which is inhibiting and debilitating from that which needs to be understood recontextualized and perhaps reduced in significance or shunted into a different area of public life significance rather than being fully jettisoned but as far as I know the Indian civil services exams are still extremely well regarded and not more than more than one book about the British Empire in the Raj seems to high especially apologetic ones goes straight to those those those examinations as an inheritance a positive one but maybe they're not maybe they're holding India back and I know with foreign service officer recruitment there is a need to reform it so that they can actually recruit more diplomats and certainly with a a growing number of problems on India's borders in its regions there's going to be there's going to need to be a different emphasis but the Indian civil service certainly looking in its region this yes please yeah this is very interesting as well to look at this from the point of view of as you say of the ruled or of the if not the rule of the presided over because in every case of empire from the most crude and brutal ones that you talked about like for example the Axis empires what Japan called as co-prosperity sphere the Nazi wanted to all the way through to the the less bad ones however we however we want to judge it there are also always influential indigenous groups who actually wish for there to be empire wish to collaborate with it in order to succeed at home and part of the story of empire is the internal struggle of the ruled with one another and that actually goes on I think in quite subtle ways not always in overt ways and just a very small example as you'll recall a few years ago there was a Japanese prime minister who was one of the first to openly challenge America's hold on Okinawa and the Obama administration arranged for him to be isolated because there were plenty of Japanese naturalists who still disagreed with him and actually on balance wanted America to stay I mean that's one of the interesting things about the American hagemony that it has achieved more consent in some of its core areas than other empires have and so he so very quickly he was frozen out and so there's a risk at the moment of telling the stories of empire where it's a case of of predation versus victimhood or resistance but actually collaboration and the very complicated politics is created whereby empires endure by successfully dividing people sometimes against one another and that and that is one of the many dynamics that we're at risk of of overlooking as we retell the story now particularly in our public life about empire simply being a story of oppression and and resistance I think one of the reasons we have empires is that they're they're a bit more a bit more canny than that all right thank you very much we have a question this time from the chat where by the way there is a discussion going on about the second question so to the public if you're interested in following go to the chat but as for the question a question from Montana hunter who asks Samir why there is a growing distaste regarding the concept of empires in the west the opposite seems to be the case in russia where put in state seems to be as much or more inspired by tsarist imperial russia as it is by soviet soviet imperialism do you think is driving that imperial desire in russia and is it a fad or a more last long lasting trend so there is this discrepancy between the rejection the concept of empire in the west and apparently some sort of opposite feeling in russia thank you to montana for the question russia's imperial legacies i mean they exert a gravitational pull on on russian politics it's basically i think inescapable the very constitution of russia as a physical political geography is imperial it's predominantly in asia as we know of course it originated from imperial colonial expansion from its european side and it's one of the experiences i draw on in the book is when i took the transciberian railway as a foreigner it's very hard to understand the change in complexion of russia to you actually try to cover the expanse and it takes weeks to cover across you know several time zones as you know that is a permanent reminder of russia's imperial identity but at the same time more functionally the imperial legacies are about regime survival for putin because the in particular the victory of what was the the next iteration of the russian empire the ussr against the the nascent third rike the nascent nasa german army i mean that really is one of the major ingredients of russian domestic political legitimacy for the putin regime that there is and it's it's one that moves the heart quite often with the imperial stories i've looked at it's not about the rational calculus of is this going to serve me well it's about how people's feelings are moved where they look back in history and see their ancestors their fathers their uncles their grandfathers their grandmothers contributing to national success national survival getting through a difficult patch how those stories are told and of course the ways of selective amnesia that always occur i think that with the russian instance it's as well as patrick pointed out in his initial response to my my opening is is also about the loss of russian power and prestige after the cold war and the fact that the american empire of influence the american informal empire seemed so ascendant that it was able to reshape political destinies in the balkans in the middle east perhaps of the color revolution so the russians thought mastermind and right on russia's doorstep so it's a cocktail of all of these things but i would certainly always bring it back to the very shape and the very nature of what russia is as as a polity and frankly how to foreignize how unbelievable the eastern parts of when you get east of the euro mountains how unbelievable it looks like nothing you could imagine from the books you've read it really does feel like even well-established towns like irkutsk are almost like outposts and i didn't quite make it all the way to vladavostok ended up going down through mongolia to to beijing which is a whole different set of experiences but certainly russia is its imperial history it can't exist in denial of it it is its imperial history and i think and that that exactly and that that links directly to a sense of vulnerability not only in the sense of successfully governing a vast expanse of of different cultures over an unimaginable territory when you've been there i haven't but i think as well that memory of having very vulnerable frontiers without natural defences it's the opposite of being a secure island state vast contiguous territory with other potentially hostile states uh and i mean i remember once having this debate with an academic he said why can't russia achieve a different kind of greatness why can't it be tolstoyan and abandoned military power and try and be a nation of just chess players and poets and mathematicians and i said well maybe on if they were starting with a blank sheet of paper they could try that but the fact is if you go to moscow i'm told that there is in moscow a what's called the avenue of the golden horde which is commemorates the place where annually they the the very threatened weakened version of the state of russia the envoys would have to pay tribute in gold to uh to their mongol overlords uh in other words if you have that memory of your state that if things go wrong you are living at someone else's permission and and are a vassal paying tribute that goes quite a lot of the way to understanding uh the sources of insecurity and then it's not far from that to the sources of aggression so i just i'm just a very pessimistic kind of guy really actually um very quickly patrick uh to response to that that distinction between russia and its vulnerabilities and the maritime empires and america is a wild island perhaps being able to operate as an expeditionary power i was really surprised i found an edward syed uh distinction in culture and imperialism not in orientalism so a much later book my early nineties i think where he explains why he doesn't bother with empires other than the american french and british okay yesterday are personally more impactful to his own story as i think palestinian who then settled in america but he seems to be not that interested in empires of adjacency he actually says and i quote him i think it's in a footnote that i am particularly interested in the uniqueness of the hopping the island's hopping nature of conquest and now how that is a part of his worldview i think is perhaps under acknowledged because people take his critique of empires characterizations or orientalism and say this lightly so patrick i i loved the military orientalism by the way i read that when i was a uh a phd student that's your book i know you've worked on your orientalism perspective as well um it is interesting to remember that syed does not monopolize all characterizations of imperial trajectory imperial interdependency imperial cultural diffusion he was selective in relation to british american and uh and french and there are different series of rules that i think apply to something like russia something like china hey thank you both um we have uh william reynolds from the chat who said to samir terrific insight having taken trans trans iberian through the same rules your points really resonate what you see in person and not just studies in in paper and he can't wait to read the book of course um moving on with the questions we have a question from uh thomas maguire um to what extent samir uh would you characterize the defense and security institutions of former colonial territories as post-colonial and to what extent would you characterize the international relationships between these institutions and the former colonial powers as a neocolonial or post-colonial and this is actually also one of the questions i wanted to ask you how do you deal in your book with the issue of neocolonialism um you you mentioned that at the end your last chapter is about the continuous scramble for african and when we talk about the neocolonialism i'm thinking not just about neocolonialism from the north to the south but also a new form of south south neocolonialism thank you uh thank you sir ross for the question and flavia for for those characterizations i'll actually end with africa because i think that's one of the great uh examples that we can we can reflect on how post-colonial how sort of pseudo imperial our modern defense and security structures of some post-colonial states well let's put it this way for those of you in the audience who've ever visited the wagga border crossing between india and pakistan and have seen the goose-stepping soldiers facing off at uh at dawn in a absolutely mind boggling preservation of some sort of imperial tradition uh that related to that border crossing would be forgiven for thinking they're in a period drama film sets and not at a flashpoint border crossing between two nuclear armed adversaries um complete with the mustaches i mean there is an aesthetic that can be preserved and there's a weapon system pattern that can be preserved because of course weapons were sold by former imperial powers to their protégés when they gave independence establishing those strong commercial links and and dispensing with but even growing up when i was going to kenya as a child seeing black taxi cabs driving around nirobi and wondering where on earth they came from and for geeks out there the soldiers being armed with a self-loading rifle which is the forkland zero rifle the british use these things understood and accepted that they've happened in the world um financial dependencies on the richer parts of the world can also be one reason why that is the case but i would also say this is uh referencing one of patrick's previous points around the debates within independent countries formally collect colonized countries around whether to collaborate sometimes collaboration and i i don't like that word i think effectively submitting to the will and the dictates in the the olive branches of your former colonial power uh was the route to success and i'd be as dramatic as saying that israel uh was able to favorably exploit changing balances of power uh in ways that some of the arab countries simply were not able to and certainly in the history of the arab israeli wars and you can see the positioning around the dominant powers the dominant powers of residual influence could spell the difference between victory and defeat and i'm thinking very specifically about being a loser in the game of accepting your post-colonial faith saudi arabia is not very popular but it totally accepts the fact that the british imperial experience um is the reason that it exists as a state while the house of sound was bankrolled to become the ruling dynasty the iranians took the opposite perspective after 1979 to absolutely reject all neo imperialism denounce that the great satan and the little devil of britain uh and they are internationally isolated as a result i think that shows what i'm trying to convey i'm not saying one is a better or worse path but in power politics you can see the wisdom but just a closing note on africa um there is a lot of and there is always going to be a lot of debate within uh countries that aren't particularly well off financially or have had a difficult difficult start as to the extent to which dependency on former colonial powers is a root to success and i think interestingly the un is one of the post-imperial structures i reflect on a bit at the start of the book because of course the un takes shape as the era of empires ends in the 20th century and sometimes directly when britain for example handed a un mandate sorry a a mandate that it received in after the treaty of their side to the un to then manage that territory you can see a very clear passing of the responsibility to a ostensibly more globally representative body but some of the problems that the un has faced in peacekeeping do actually flow from the fact that it is not representative of the power hierarchies that actually govern the world that the permanent five members of the un long since stopped contributing soldiers to these missions and it's it's done in a very very different way and i suppose you might argue would you get a better outcome if you're looking for stability if you went back to the former imperial power and ask not to recolonize god no just to ask for a direct intervention but the the systems that we have and the rhetoric in our understanding of identity and independence doesn't allow for that sort of that sort of maneuver anymore so i mean neoclonalism neo imperialism take them if take them with a grain of salt as terms i think they're broad brush terms but i spent some time in the book looking at the work of quame nakruma the ganai ganayan statesman uh who prolific in his literary outputs and some of his characterizations of neoclonalism i thought were really worth revisiting because some of them still stands today around those invidious choices of collaboration or refusal for cooperation i think one of the interesting questions as well because there will be people listening here and there will be people engaged in this issue who see themselves very much as anti-imperial or post-imperial and see this as not even a problematic question right empire is oppression empire is very often slavery literally and must be dismantled but then the question has to be a real question from empire to what because the the obvious answer for a long time was to the nation to the nation state right to the the liberated people the we the nation which will then express itself in a territorial state but of course one of the things that a lot of remainders don't like a lot of liberals don't like is modern nationalism at least of recent time that nationalism itself becomes oppressive potentially racist divisive etc so then that poses a further question well if you don't want empire if you don't want the nation state what is the construct for a better life for the species and i think that's a really hard question to answer radicals might say a different a reimagined world around transformation well that may be but it's very hard to avoid some kind of hierarchical power structure there because for a long time it was the soviet union which then as samir pointed out very beautifully becomes unmistakably imperial in eastern europe etc so i mean i personally my view is the debate ought to be what kind of empire how is power politics to be conducted with with no excess evil so with enough evil for there to be protecting the security of of the republic or the state for for liberty but without the kind of gratuitousness of the empires have had before but if you don't agree with that if you're if your outlook is to liberate people from empire and then to liberate people from nationalism what well thank you very much both of you um we still have questions um so uh nigel holmes who asks samir um how do you um if you feel that this great imperial hangover influences british foreign policy and debates around this foreign policy regarding the commonwealth and other former british colonies in the current era thanks nigel for the question i think the influence is is often as ever with britain quite subtle and it's quite subtle because the disconnection from empire was quite a gradual process i'm fully aware of course i i post state that disconnection happened in the 60s 50s um but there was no single moment of imperial collapse there is no equivalent in the british national story of the collapse of the ussr which is a seismic event and it has a key moment with the collapse of the berman wall in 89 and then the unraveling of the whole thing uh by 1991 with the disorder that flowed in moscow there's nothing like that happened in the uk and that is a testament to the skill with which generations of british statesman actually managed imperial decline and end it obviously left enormous range of problems around the world but i'm going to focus just on nigel's question which is the impact on on britain and british foreign policy um clearly the construction of a number of influential networks of commerce of uh of social networks of family networks around around the world has empowered britain enormously in the post imperial age but the biggest imperial legacy in british foreign policy is still the fact that the united states of america and canada originates from uh in in in a large way from british uh settlements from british colonial settlements of course there were other settlements of course they are the french uh but we know the way that that ended and even if it ended in tears from a british perspective it's more cornwallis was marched out from uh from the east coast from new york uh in um at that particular point in the war of independence the fact that there is that linguistic connection meant that when british britain's empire vanished it was able to follow on the coattails of another anglo uh or another english speaking empire the french didn't have that luxury there was no francophone superpower for it to follow on the coattails of um but on the commonwealth and it's very very lucky when i was while i was at kings teaching a terrorism ma uh so double heading in the commonwealth to write the violent extremism strategy and preventing violent extremism strategy at the commonwealth um so i spent four months there and honestly it's not an institution i know a huge new huge amount about before because the commonwealth games have monopolized um i think the public's understanding of it i was really surprised for what is actually much smaller in terms of funding multilateral body its ability to convene networks of lawyers networks of heads ministers of education networks of um you know all sorts of professions from the different commonwealth countries 50 plus countries and to convene them into big events to just to pick up the phone and also to reflect on the fact that there are common legal systems and a certain certain number of assumptions around parliamentary politics that at least mean disputes are comprehensible between these nations uh for frankly quite a fusty and old-fashioned entity the commonwealth is remarkably well networked if you want to talk about networks as being our present way of leveraging power so i think history may well actually come full circle for the commonwealth but and i i do reflect on this in in my book and i'll round off my answer here we're coming to the end of queen lisabeth the second's reign queen victoria's long reign was to reside over the ascension of empire to its greatest expanse queen lisabeth the second's with with great skill with great dignity uh and despite her advancing years is to reside over from 1952 when she walked up the the famous tree i think in treetops in hotel in kenya you know the she's the heir to the throne she descends effectively as as as the regent because her father has died back in england um she will be when she dies um along may she live the point of reflection for members of the commonwealth will i think be seismic it will be well this is bound us to the commonwealth since the commonwealth's inception and now that personification the symbolism matters so much in this world perhaps even more so because of the internet because of memes because of smartphones because of sound bites that will i think force some reflection and it will require a re-maneuvering certainly from the united kingdom and definitely from the commonwealth i think to reassert its its vitality in the current age all right uh thank you very much we have the last 10 minutes so we have time for the last question that we have on the q&a section and then i would kind of i would like to ask you a kind of finish without kind of provocative provocative question from from me so the question the last question from the public is from uh david the beavers who congratulates you for the book of course and asks about um i mean whether we can provide a single narrative for imperial hangovers so uh these imperial hangovers impact groups within society in a different way and mention the example the us colonial legacies feed into everything from white identity to constitutional liberties but for black americans they are far more direct and have a contemporary impact socially and economically as seen in the recent black lives matter movement so is there a single narrative for this imperial engover and finally i would like to ask you because i was very interested uh at the beginning when you said uh you stressed very much how the current events and current world order current shape of the world is very much influenced by these imperial legacies in particular by the um connections the um relations and the clash between among these imperial legacies so um i was thinking in the early 90s the famous uh uh um idea of clash of civilizations from some downtown so i was wondering whether you think that that idea of clash of civilization should be replaced with the concept of clash of imperial legacies instead to describe the post-cold war uh order and international system thank you thanks well i'll have a stab at david's question first thanks for the question um just take the example of the united states of america as you have done and focusing on that national issue of different post-imperial stories um i certainly don't think you can have a single narrative i think there needs to be respect for the different narratives and it's interesting right in this book and sort of inverting some of those sort of slogans you might see at a protest like an anti-racism process you know we're all the same or we all bleed red i mean that's that's fine but from my perspective it's what makes us different uh that actually matters because dealing with differences it really is the key to to unlocking a more harmonious future uh i'm very aware um certainly i lived in america for a while um about a while back of um the fact that america is constituted by some of the old historical outcomes of white settler conquest that's an awfully provocative thing to say but i say that uh is sort of a fair mind to say that well actually some of the demographies around uh the birth rates in different communities in the american population mean that some of those outcomes of white settler conquest are being rebalanced over time by unrelated factors and that is what is provoking a lot of america's unease manifests really starkly in accusing barack obama as trump did of not being american saying well where's your birth certificate you're actually kenyan and muslim it's playing on it's not even dog whistle racism it's just outright it's saying to his base and to his purported base you fear the future because i've i've seen the demography i've seen how your neighbors are changing um how do we how do you accommodate that the understanding of the different uh different post imperial narratives and inheritances as well sometimes material inheritances notions of reparations to african americans after slave that's a live debate again uh and we can understand where that comes from is because of the material disadvantage of being not only on the losing end of the imperial story but effectively so far in the losing end so you have been transported in brutal conditions across the atlantic and to then start from what and even start point no way i mean that's that's going to take a few generations and it's only five or six generations ago that these events actually took place when you actually count it back aflavia your question ah samuel huntington um long long after his demise his legacy certainly remains with us and it will do for a long time uh i never think that clash the clash of civilizations is itself a worthy soundbite because it's not civilizations that clash its empires civilizations don't suddenly animate themselves into a posture of of warlike offence or or or or antagonism they are animated by demagogues they are harnessed into military structures they are directed in certain places whether that's from a in america white supremacist group that's saying the blue boys fight for the defense of the diminution of of white culture your american culture whatever that is or internationally to say we must now expand this is our national destiny um it's not the clash of civilizations it's the clash of the imperial ideas around it and that goes goes as much for bin Laden and the jihadists and certainly daish uh islamic states and and rebuilding an islamic empire that abrogates the sykes pico acts which of course is a outcome of franco- british imperial detente in the middle east i mean this this we know and for that brief moment isis abrogated it their vision of a new 21st century empire had overcome the legacies of the european empires in in the in the former colonial countries of middle east yeah exactly that was my impression that uh you really think that this clash of civilization can be better described with the ideal clash of empires and imperial legacies so um patrick any final thoughts or comments yes uh it's just a pity at the age of covid that we can't all go physically together and arrange another kind of hangover but there we are i'd say um i think building on some of that one of the great dangers politically at the moment is not just that people have it's not that people have different narratives is that we're losing sight of of the possibility that people themselves contain multitudes and people can have all sorts of identities and commitments some of which are intention i'm reminded of a native american uh there was a t-shirt produced by one native american community which uh i think it was iroquois we had a picture of iroquois leaders and said protecting homeland security since 1600 you know that that being on the receiving end of empire but also also really wanting to commit to the security of the new state was also challenging that state that we are kind of pushing people into boxes we have we have trying to we are kind of there is there is i think too much of a drive towards strictly um outlining identities and kind of in a with a sharp pencil and erasing all of the blurry parts i mean in a way that was the great problem with huntington that he wanted to identify thematically sealed separate sharply defined civilizations and there is a great violence in that i don't think he meant that i mean if you actually read huntington's book his whole plea was if we don't respect difference there will be a clash right it wasn't a call to arms but his very project of classifying and sorting separate antagonistic civilizations is something that people who denounce that book can also do in their own way that you are in this tribe and you are in this lane and i think we actually need more of a sense of patriotic messiness around ourselves because that's the only way we can in fact avoid coming to blows and the only way we can actually start to negotiate some of these very difficult the difficult issues so it's not a question of sameness or difference it's a question of multiplicity and the greatness about the united states at its best i think is that it does have multitudes like britain as well that's rather my sort of development of that idea from samir about what we do next i'd also say finally if we want to avoid a future of increased internal antagonism militarized policing racist brutality it might be a good idea to fight a bit less war overseas i think there is a this is for a separate conversation but constant taming of the frontier abroad so called i think does tend to import violence to the homeland and on that note thank you thanks patch can i just with a quick rounding off comment before i hand back to to flavia yeah the connection between the domestic and the foreign is is really critical just reminded of uh one of amartya sends observations that we have multiple layers of identity and at the start i explain some of mine some of the tensions that naturally exist in any one of us we are not simplistic one narrative of entities marty ascent said that different contexts empower different layers of our identity and of course the demagogues job is to find that one layer in enough people identify it activates it clump it together build a movement unfortunately demagogues aren't going to go away the internet is going to empower them also and it will do anything else because it allows for a lot more reach and it is about having that understanding of the of the different the different layers exist within each of us and i suppose to end on a cliche bringing out the better layers for a more productive future but having the consciousness of what's happening in the first place all right thank you very much i think we could go on and on for hours here but unfortunately time is over so i want first of all to thank our speakers for the terrific presentations and discussion thank you patrick and samir i equals patrick's encouragement buying the book great imperial engover i also want to thank of course our participants for the questions and for this very lively discussion just and debate which is going on on the chat at the same time so i'm very happy that this event has sparkled so much interest and and debate and discussion that i'm sure will go on even after the end of the of this webinar so thank you very much and goodbye