The old Western Empires fell to a new Western order – modern liberalism. Now, they are rising from the ashes, threatening liberalism.
The USA may be tempted to become an empire, too, but can it win when its adversaries are better at it? And can modernity survive without liberalism?
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In 1918, three empires – the Holy Roman, Russian and Ottoman, spanning centuries of Mediterranean history and all claiming the legacy of the ancient Roman Empire – came to their ends.
They all asserted a special link with the divine. In Russia and Turkey, the czar and the sultan were also the heads of their faiths; in Austria, the emperor had a special tie with the Pope in Rome.
With their fall, Mediterranean politics definitively shattered an old, worn-out link with God, a system in which political power and the clergy were two distinct entities but had found convergence in the imperial person.
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That strong link had marked Mediterranean history for centuries. In fact, the long process from republic to empire started in Rome over 2,000 years ago.
The Western Imperial rise
The drive for empire started with the end of the Punic Wars (264-146 BCE). Then the Roman republic was without peer challengers in the region, but its territory was far too extensive and it needed a professional standing army.
Marius (157-86 BCE) was the first to push for it. However, a professional army carried the seed of the republic’s destruction.
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Professional soldiers became loyal to their generals, not to the Roman res publica. This, in time, ushered in mighty generals who came to be the supreme military commanders of the Roman world – emperors.
Following the defeat of the Carthaginians, the vast and diverse Roman organization required long-term planning, a complex organizational structure and extensive standing armies that could be easily deployed.
This implied the development of complex logistics, armories, and food supplies. They needed plans whose success or failure could be judged over the years. This, in turn, demanded trust and faith in a long-term leader – hence the emperor.
It was a massive philosophical move from the organization of a rowing boat or the legion, where each man was responsible for his oar or his shield within a unit of equals (see here). Yet the legion continued to exist; in fact, it remained the core of Roman victories.
Boats in the treacherous Mediterranean Sea, with sudden changes of winds or a lack of wind altogether, were still reliant on coordinated rowing. Here, mistakes continued to be immediately visible and had to be immediately corrected.
These opposed elements may have also contributed to historical sedimentation in the imperial transformation of Rome.
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It promoted a new emperor but kept a separation of powers, with the old republican trappings and a religious entity distinct from the political one – a fairly separate religious entity, well fitted to a structure of split yet equal and balanced duties and rights.
In a phalanx or in a boat, all are all equal but each has distinct requirements to fulfill.
Trust in long-term imperial planning transcended the single emperor; it was generational or multi-generational. Its outcome could only be seen in the afterlife, whether one was in hell or paradise.
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Yet daily mistakes and surprises had to be addressed and corrected immediately. There was a double time: one of daily chaos to be managed daily (with the ancient republican trappings) and the imperial time – eternal, like the gods, and to be judged not in this life.
The distinction might have been weaker in Byzantium, Moscow or Istanbul. Still, the Czar or the Sultan had to confront the periodic challenges of a clergy that sometimes called out actual or alleged imperial errors.
The clergy could have been used to run the empire.
Still, bureaucratic structures were never as developed as in China, and the loyalty of the clergy to the emperor or the religious faith was totally overlapping.
Physics and metaphysics were distinct realms in the Abrahamitic religions that conquered the world. By principle, they didn’t coincide. Thus, the emperor’s actions could become questionable and hence challenged by the clergy.
This was the backbone of Mediterranean empires that lasted until 1918.
The End of Emperors
At the time when Western Christianity was winning, it broke down.
The Protestant Reformation, which occurred in the 16th and 17th centuries CE, significantly disrupted the pact between the Pope and the Holy Emperor, which had been the gravitational pull of Europe since Charlemagne.
The long reign of emperors, spanning some 18 centuries, was now waning. The Dutch claimed independence from the Habsburgs and established a Republic.
In the 17th century, the English beheaded their king and gave power to Parliament before remitting it to a dictator, Oliver Cromwell. When the monarchy was re-established, the king was provided by the Dutch Republic.
The century following American independence (proclaimed in 1776) was marked by the country’s efforts to play the French against the English and establish its republic.
In France, in 1789, a republic beheaded the king but then proclaimed Napoleon a dictator and made him an emperor, whom the Pope crowned, like Charlemagne a millennium earlier.
The reign of Emperor Napoleon was short-lived, and the movement against imperial power that accompanied the wealth and power created by modernity and capitalism carried on in the 19th century, engulfing the whole world in its wake.
Dictatorships, from Cromwell to Napoleon, seemed like nostalgia, a muscle memory of the king’s old hieratic power.
In the 19th century, the old European order crumbled, culminating in 1918 with the fall of the three ancient empires: the Holy Roman, the Russian and the Ottoman.
The rest of the world’s empires fell to their knees then or shortly thereafter. Empires were no more; democracy, whether liberal or popular, was the keyword.
It was the end of a world. However, the collapse occurred with the sudden replacement by an emerging power, the United States, which was also a Roman offspring. It was the death of the West as it had been known and the birth of the new one.
It happened over two centuries, starting with the French Revolution, which spread the revolutionary idea that societies could be reshaped and re-engineered. Later, in the 20th century, this idea of rebuilding societies and states continued.
With the French Revolution, Leninism, some democratic Western movements and fascism came the idea of a society that can and should be re-engineered.
In Europe, the Soviet revolution aimed to boost social justice over personal riches, and, consequently, the happiness of the people.
The liberals, conversely, primarily aimed at increasing wealth growth, which in the end boosted the wealth and thus the power of their nations.
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The social project began with the people, not the state, but ultimately, the state would be more prosperous and more powerful, with happy and driven people. The French and Soviet revolutions also applied a different sense of geography.
Every person in the world (not just within one state) should have the same rights and enjoy the same opportunities, governed by the same rules that would collectively govern the whole world.
The abstraction of a unified world, not a singular state, was the general political horizon.
Asia Times / ABC Flash Point News 2025.
We shouldn’t forget that migrations have been the main reason for geopolitical changes in the past. This is not something new as the author suggests. China has been called the “pumping heart of the world”. When China was strong nomadic tribes moved West for getting their “fair” share of the wealth of others. When China was weak, nomadic tribes and peoples moved to the East because China was a much more prosperous target than the Middle East and Europe. Rome in its imperial days hired mercenaries from Germanic tribes, North African lands, Scythians from the steppes in the east. The… Read more »
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