The early 20th century brought to a close what the British historian Eric Hobsbawm dubbed the ‘Age of Empire.’ As empires declined, especially after World War I, they fragmented and became nation-states.

These were self-contained domains of populations within a sovereign territory, sharing a history, language and religion. Of course, as frequently demonstrated by historians, the shared bit in this context was often weaved from imagined, exaggerated or even distorted pasts to rationalise the collective citizenry of a people who now came to be understood as nations. 

Nationalism was a European idea, so some of the first nation-states emerged in Europe. It was a modern idea rooted in some of the first rebellions against the main centres of power in the ‘pre-modern’ world: the Church and the monarchy.

Therefore, in theory, nation-states were supposed to be democratic and secular. Many were. However, the void created by the fall of empires was not immediately filled by nation-states. For example, in the 1930s and 1940s, the empires struck back — at least a romanticised memory of them. This memory managed to merge itself with the idea of nationalism when some nation-states faced grave economic and political crises.

In countries such as Italy, Germany and Spain, charismatic demagogues arose to redefine the territorial idea of the nation-state. They posited nationalism as a means to turn imaginations of bygone and lost empires into physical reality. After gathering unprecedented power at home, they went to war to gain new territories, invading and occupying other nation-states, claiming to revive a lost empire.

There can be a perfectly valid ‘geopolitical’ explanation for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But there is also another dimension: President Putin’s fascination with the ancient Russian Empire

Mussolini wanted to recreate the ancient Roman Empire. Hitler wanted to recover the lost supremacy of the Aryan race by gaining territory, and through racial policies that would re-purify the once-pure Nordic peoples.

Such demagogues embraced nationalism. But they stripped away the democratic, secular and civic notions inherent in nationalism. They reduced it to mean supremacy of a ‘chosen’ nation that was to be manifested through military conquest and subjugation of ‘lesser’ nations. 

They understood secularism, democracy and modernity as inorganic constructs, pitched against ‘greater ideologies.’ They often found allies among high profile clergymen who were alarmed by the speed with which secularism was being adopted by nations. Yet, the demagogues themselves were not ‘Christian fundamentalists.’ They were fantasists, driven by delusions of grandeur. Taking a cue from nationalism, they manufactured memories of glorious (but ‘lost’) pasts, and used them to give emotional momentum to their spiels.

The demagogues fell during World War II. But they left behind two legacies. One was used as a warning by the victors. They asked people to remain cautious of fantasists who had used a mutant form of nationalism to inflict genocidal violence and war. The second legacy was embraced by those who were still desperate to stem the tide of liberalism, socialism, secularism and democracy — ideas that were said to have won the great conflict against the revival of ‘magnificent’ pre-modern pasts.

Those hoping for this not only included religious fundamentalists, racial nationalists and admirers of ‘strong men.’ Also included were those who began to feel weary of the dispassionate and impersonal ways of modernity and the post-War order.

A plethora of big-budget films on biblical stories and ancient warriors were released in the US in the 1950s and early 1960s. These were trying to fill a ‘spiritual void’ that the new rational/liberal order had supposedly created. Communism too, that was on the other end of Western liberalism, was seen as being a cold ideology — one that was trying to completely eliminate the idea of the soul.

The size of groups disillusioned by the disenchantment of spirituality in the post-War order steadily grew. The genocidal horrors of demagogues who ‘dared to dream’, before they were vanquished by the amoral machinery and agents of modernity, began to fade.

By the early 2000s, many scholars were commenting on the fragmentation of secularism and the demise of liberalism — some with great relish and rhetorical postmodernist flair. They were mostly lapsed liberals who ended up creating empathy for the marginalised ‘romantics’ whose ‘souls’ were crying out to be filled with spiritual meaning.

New Age gurus and religious revivals emerged to feed the empty souls. And once fed, the souls now wanted a piece of the state. Or all of it. A mob can’t do that. But ‘strong men’ can. Thus returned the fetish for ‘strong’ rulers and empire builders. And then, finally, they began to appear, spitting venom at liberalism, at science, at modernity, and at secularism. Vladimir Putin of Russia was the strongest. But by 2021, the charm of strong men too had begun to fade.

For them, the prime time to manifest their messiah complex and flex their militarist muscle was receding. So, consciously or unconsciously, Putin realised this. Therefore, with one audacious leap, he has plunged Europe into the kind of crisis which is close to the one that triggered World War II.

There can be a perfectly valid ‘geopolitical’ explanation for this. But there is also another dimension: Putin’s fascination with the ancient Russian Empire, which was toppled by the communists in the early 20th century.

It was a classical pre-modern European empire, in which the Church and the monarchy were conjoined. After consolidating his power in Russia, Putin began to openly embrace the Russian Orthodox Church. In July 2018, he was quoted as saying that the adoption of Christianity in ancient Russia marked the starting point for forming the Russian nation itself. 

Here was yet another demagogue formulating a nationalism sans democracy and secularism. He was peddling what is now often referred to as ‘Christian nationalism.’

According to the American journalist Casey Michel, Putin began to finance right-wing Christian groups across Europe and the US. Even when he sent Russian troops to help the Alavis’ Muslim Syrian regime to fight Sunni Islamists, he told the Pope that he was doing so to protect Syria’s Christian population. 

Religious historian Diana Butler Bass has described Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in these words: “The world is witnessing a new version of an old tale — the quest to recreate an imperial Christian state, a neo-mediaeval Holy Empire — uniting political, economic, and spiritual power into an entity to control the earthly and heavenly destiny of European peoples.”

But this new version involves a man with a messiah complex sitting on the heap of a nuclear arsenal.

Published in Dawn, EOS, March 6th, 2022