David Clark wrote in May 2014 regarding Russian President Vladimir Putin's use of the tsarist term for Ukraine: Novorossiya (New Russia). "It suggests that all the territories that were once part of the Russian Empire are now fair game…. Welcome to the new Russian Empire."
Actually, there is not a whole lot that is "new" about it; rather, it is the resurrection of a very old cultural identity, with its roots in Eastern Christianity and the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire.
The idea of a "Third Rome," as a great city at the center of and as the protector of Eastern Christendom, had its genesis in the 14th century as the Byzantine Empire was reduced to little more than the city of Constantinople, the "Second Rome" founded by Constantinius I, the first Christian Roman Emperor. Bulgaria, which several centuries earlier had achieved its independence from the Byzantine Empire and likewise styled itself an empire ruled by a Caesar ("Czar"), began to see itself as the successor of Byzantium, but with the Ottoman conquest of Bulgaria in 1393, 60 years before the capture of Constantinople, the focus for the idea of a "Third Rome" turned to the Grand Duchy of Muscovy, which was further removed from the Muslim menace.
The idea of Muscovy as heir to Rome crystallized with a panegyric letter composed by the Russian monk Philotheus (Filofej) of Pskov in 1510 to Grand Duke Vasili III, son of Ivan III "the Great" and Zoe Palaiologina, niece of the last Eastern Roman emperor. In it, Philotheus declared, "Two Romes have fallen. The third stands. And there will be no fourth. No one shall replace your Christian Tsardom!" In 1547, Vasili's son, Ivan IV "the Terrible" was crowned as "Tsar of all the Russias." In assuming this title, Ivan signaled his intention to extend his rule to the Russias that he did not yet control, among them Kievan Rus, which is the origin of the very name "Russia."
Putin's consolidation of power within Russia since 2000, alternately holding the offices of president, then prime minister, and once again president, together with the his elevation of the Orthodox Church as the de facto established religion and as a lever of his political power, and his covetousness of Ukraine, the modern Kievan Rus, all mark him as a man who sees himself as "Tsar of all the Russias," including all the Russias that have been sovereign nations since the disintegration of the Soviet Union. He is a "divine" leader appointed to enact God's will.
Can there be anything more dangerous than such a man? International law, being the law of mere man, is nothing in the face of God's will, and bargains made with mortals are temporary expedients, ultimately to be broken. He is Caesar.
But Caesar's power does not come out of nowhere. He derives power from the tendency of an empire's population to see other nations not as other nations at all, but just as sociopaths see other people, as soulless objects to be used and discarded as self-interest directs. Russia is the exceptional nation, the "Third Rome," and there is nothing outside the Empire but barbarians.
THE REPUBLIC AND ITS ALLIANCE
Philotheus turned out to be a poor prophet when he predicted that there would never be a fourth Rome. In the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, international relations theorists spent several years grappling with the reality that the 45-year-old bipolar global order of the Cold War was gone, replaced by a "unipolar moment" of uncertain duration in which the United States was the sole superpower. Scholars were stunned by the enormity of the transformation, and they sought historical parallels to guide them in their quest to understand its implications.
In 2004, Thomas Gangale wrote in an essay for the World Affairs Council of Northern California:
It has become fashionable among international relations scholars to draw parallels between America’s current position in the world and imperial Rome’s position in the Mediterranean world. However, the parallels run much deeper than the current distribution of military power in the aftermath of the Cold War. At the time that the United States gained its independence, it was the most extensive republic seen since the Roman Republic. From the first, American political institutions emulated those of republican Rome. We have a Senate, of course. We also have two consuls (the president and vice-president), and our House of Representatives, being the "people’s house," performs many of the same functions as the various comitiae in republican Rome. We have consciously emulated republican Rome in our political symbols; the fasces, the symbol of the Roman magistrates’ authority, adorns the interior of the Capitol, as does Bellona, the goddess of war. Also, the design of American public buildings has traditionally been based on Roman architecture. Yes, certainly, America is a new Rome. It was raised from birth to be that.
But we must be mindful that there have been other Novae Romae in the past, and indeed, one of them may still be still with us. Constantinople was founded as Roma Secunda, and after Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks, imperial Russia, ruled by Caesars (czars), styled itself Roma Tertia. Following the 73-year Soviet interlude, it may be that Russia will gravitate back to its historic identity as Roma Tertia, but this time as a republic, hopefully. So, America is a new Rome, not the new Rome. In a sense we are Roma Quarta, in another sense we are the second Rome of the West, as Russia is the second Rome of the East. Will our romanitas be an element of common ground should Russia, still a country of vast natural resources and a well-educated population, re-emerge as a strong entity?The question is more important today than when Gangale first posed it ten years ago. It in turn leads to other questions of a certain perspective which might be called the imperial perspective. The two objects of analysis are Roma Tertia and Roma Quarta, which are analogous to what Samuel P. Huntington referred to as the Eastern Orthodox and Western Catholic/Protestant "civilizations." The differences between Moscow and Washington go deeper than the religious, and are farther apart than the opposite directions of a compass.
America, like Russia, sees itself as an exceptional nation rather than as a "normal nation," but with a very different vision. First of all, it is the nation that first threw off colonial tyranny. Its first mission was to survive as a "government of the people, by the people, for the people" that would "not perish from the Earth;" this it did imperfectly, maintaining millions of African Americans in chains while despoiling millions of Native Americans of their land. The new nation then took on the mission, in the Monroe Doctrine, of keeping the Western Hemisphere clear of European meddling; of course, as it was increasingly able to, it meddled in the affairs of Caribbean and Central American states. In the one spasm of unabashed imperialism, it stretched across the Pacific to the Philippines and Guam, acquiring Hawaii along the way. It reluctantly took on the role of the offshore balancer in Europe as Britain faded from its traditional role, coming in late in the First World War, then retreating into isolation and in refusing an international role, looking on as the second one began. In the post-Second World War period America was finally ready "to make the world safe for democracy," a role it had walked away from in the interwar period. It became the primus inter pares, the first among equals in a web of alliances in Western Europe and in East Asia to contain the spread of communism.
All the while, America experienced internal evolutions, revolutions, and failed experiments. The long deferred question of slavery was settled. Women won the suffrage. Prohibition came and went. The right to vote and other civil liberties gained the protection of federal law. Corporations became larger and more politically powerful. But through all the twists and turns and occasional blind alleys, the vision, if not perfectly the fact, endured of a res publica, literally, a thing of the public, with "liberty and justice for all." Indeed, this vision, which had its genesis in the 18th century Enlightenment, did far more than simply endure, it was reflected back across the Atlantic to Western Europe. France threw off its absolute monarchy. Britain evolved into the federal empire that would have kept America to her breast had the transformation occurred in time. European empires collapsed and new states emerged from the principle of national self-determination championed by Woodrow Wilson. Fascism's reach for global domination was defeated. From the alliances of the World Wars, and under the threat of the Cold War, America forged the North Atlantic alliance (NATO) with Canada and Europe.
The Europe of today is a community of several dozen laboratories of democracy, not in the mold of the American federation of 50 states, but neither altogether dissimilar. The North Atlantic is not merely a tightly knit military alliance, it is a loose confederation of political ideas, a "liberal pacific union," the fulfillment of the Enlightenment. This state of affairs is not unlike that which existed in Italy during the Punic Wars and a half-century or so thereafter, when Rome was the leading city in an alliance of Italian cities, a time when Rome was obliged to consider the counsel of its allies.
A 21ST CENTURY ROMAN CIVIL WAR
How could the two modern Romes have turned out to be so different? Put simply, they inherited their romanitas from different eras of Roman history that had different values, as well as at different times in world history via different historical processes.
Washington was established as the seat of a new Roman Republic, built on the ideals of the Enlightenment, which was a rejuvenation of and an extension of political ideas from democratic Athens and republican Rome. Much of its public architecture is the legacy of the Greek Revival of the early 19th century, inspired by the Greek struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire. Additionally, the new Roman Republic embraced diversity of faith, forbidding the state's establishment of a religion in the very first amendment to its Constitution. In 1776, the very same year as America's Declaration of Independence, Edward Gibbon wrote with a note of ironic wit mixed with obvious admiration in his masterpiece of Enlightenment scholarship, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:
The policy of the emperors and the senate, as far as it concerned religion, was happily seconded by the reflections of the enlightened, and by the habits of the superstitious, part of their subjects. The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful. And thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord.In contrast, Moscow assumed the mantle of a new Constantinopolis, a new "city of Constantine," ruled with an iron fist by Caesars (czars). By Constantine's era, the fiction of Rome still being a republic under the princeps (first citizen) Augustus had been long ago crushed under the various excesses and reigns of terror of his successors. Constantine was an exceptional autocrat only in that he hit on the idea of establishing Christianity as the official religion of the empire to legitimize his absolute power as being the will of the ONE TRUE GOD. Moscow's and Vladimir Putin's philosophical inheritance is 1,200 years of despotism and theocracy, coupled with the obsessive compulsion for expansion. Neither can escape that history; rather, they appear doomed to repeat it.
The collapse of the Western Roman Empire and the subsequent Dark Ages created an opportunity for Western civilization -- at a terrible cost, to be sure, but think of it as a "cold re-boot" -- to rediscover its ancient past, and to reflect on its merits and defects, as it struggled to re-invent itself. That process of self-reflection and re-invention continues today. Unfortunately, Russia, the direct descendant of the Eastern Roman Empire, has never re-booted itself, has never reflected on itself, has never re-invented itself; it has never experienced either a Reformation or an Enlightenment. Additionally it is the victim of an interpretation of its history as a people who are great… great at being the eternal victim of foreign forces. Soviet-style communism was no more than a virus that infected the ancient operating system for seven decades. The red virus has gone, but the old, corrupted operating system of the tsars remains, as clumsily patched by Putinism. Worse still, Mother Russia is a cracked motherboard.
In the 1960s some evangelical Christians began pointing to the European Community as the rebirth of the Roman Empire, and therefore as a harbinger of the coming Apocalypse. More accurately, what Huntington characterized as the Western Christian "civilization," which includes such entities as the European Union, the United States, and Canada as well as their North Atlantic military alliance, is more or less a reconstituted and restructured Roman Republic; it is a community of democracies, or as Immanuel Kant envisioned, a "liberal pacific union."
In contrast, what Huntington characterized as the Eastern Orthodox "civilization," which has Russia as its dominant component, is the Byzantine Empire migrated to Moscow, replete with all of its intrigue and treachery. Alexander Dugin, at one time a professor at Moscow State University, has been called the intellectual founder of Russia's Eurasian movement. According to a recent BBC story by Dina Newman, the centerpiece of his geopolitical theory is that Russia's mission is to challenge US domination of the world. "This is the struggle between the patriotic, Orthodox, conservative forces -- and the liberal forces…."
This framing of a coming struggle between East and West warrants study by Western political scientists. A "clash of romanitas" appears to be looming, a clash not so much of religions per se, but of opposing philosophies regarding the individual's relationship with power both spiritual and temporal, of the inheritors of the Roman Alliance of the West and the Roman Empire of the East.
Morituri te salutant.
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