The Geopolitics of Nostalgia: Dante and Xi Jinping

In Francis Oakley’s classic work of medieval political thought The Watershed of Modern Politics, there is one chapter in particular I have always loved: “The Politics of Nostalgia: Empire, Papacy, and Their Twilight Struggle.” In that chapter, Oakley argues that one of the major currents of medieval political thought reflects what he calls “the politics of nostalgia.” According to Oakley, such a politics was basically a vision of rule that looked backward to a glorious past to recover and radically extend that vision into the future. A defining aspect of this politics of nostalgia, Oakley argued, was that it looked to translate the past into a near-future that was utterly inhospitable to it. It was, in other words, about using the past-that-never-was to build a future-that-never-could-be.

Now, as I re-read this chapter for the umpteenth time in preparation for my two classes this upcoming semester—one an introduction to international relations and the other on medieval political thought—I got to wondering if perhaps Oakley’s insights might apply not just to political thought in the later medieval era, but to international thought in the late-modern era too. As my re-reading of Oakley continued, and with a weather eye on the gathering storm in the Indo-Pacific region, I concluded that there were, in fact, parallels between these two historical moments. More than that, I concluded that Dante’s Monarchia and Xi Jinping’s China Dream were two exemplars of the same genre—the “geopolitics of nostalgia.” Both are works that harken back to a half-remembered, half-imagined, and thoroughly romanticized past imperial project, and that then advocate for the reanimation of that project in their own time, but in conditions that make such a project not only anachronistic but unrealistic to the point of absurdity.

Dante’s Pre-Modern Politics of Nostalgia: The Twilight Dream of Empire

In his book Monarchia, which was the culmination of his labors in the field of political thought, Dante attempted to make the case that empire—and, specifically, the Roman Empire—was the best form of government. He premised this grand claim on several assertions, assumptions, and arguments drawn from classical antiquity, Christianity, and the work of earlier generations of medieval political scholars. First, Dante made the fundamental Aristotelian argument that, as man is by nature a social animal who is incapable of attaining by himself “a life of happiness,” human flourishing requires the domestic society of the family, which in turn requires the support of a neighborhood, and which in turn needs the security and sufficiency provided by some larger society.  But where Aristotle thought the city-state or polis was the natural scale of any truly “perfect” or “complete” society and Aquinas thought the kingdom was the optimal scale for such a society, Dante argued that universal empire was the only truly perfect scale for social and political life.

Dante’s reasoning in this connection was that, to avoid the conflicts and wars that inevitably resulted from the pursuit of self-interest even among well-ordered kingdoms, the entire world needed to be subject to the authority of one ruler—the emperor.  For, he reasoned, only in a universal empire could universal peace be imposed and the ever-present threat of war between earthly thrones, dominions, and principalities be extinguished for good. Dante supplemented his argument with appeals to the classical principle of “unity” and the Christian belief that earthly rulership should be in the image of God’s rulership.

Ptolemaeus: Cosmographia (Latin translation of Jacopo Angeli da Scarperia) 1469 Rome

But Dante promoted not only the generic idea of empire but the specific idea of the Roman empire. In the last chapter of this first book of the Monarchia, Dante descended from the empyrean heights of abstract philosophical principle to the more familiar plains of historical reality, identifying the Roman Empire as the universal monarchy that he had in mind. He had suggested as much already in the Convivio and stated it unambiguously in three of the “political” tracts he wrote between 1310 and 1312. In making this move, Dante was wedding the abstract principles of the Hellenistic philosophy of kingship to a way of thinking about rule and rulership that was biblically inspired yet historically grounded. And in so doing, he was led—like St. Luke, the Christian fathers, Paulus Orosius, and others—to embed the history of the Roman Empire within salvation history, to frame it as the culmination of the arc of pre-Parousian political history, and to promote it as the best form of government possible in this vale of tears. 

Sounds perfectly reasonable, doesn’t it? Well it is, or rather would be, except for two inconvenient truths. First, Dante’s image of the Roman empire was, to be charitable, highly romanticized. The congeries of partial truths, mythical truths, and simply untruths he assembled across his oeuvre bore only a passing resemblance to the actually existing Roman Empire. In place of the historical truth, Dante depicted an empire that was the very apotheosis of the classical virtues of good governance. But whatever Eusebian-style theopolitical myths circulating among fourth-century Roman Christians might suggest, Rome was not the ne plus ultra of human political evolution. Even if, as Dante claimed (citing Luke as his proof text), Christ had acknowledged the legitimacy of the empire and its place in salvation history, that did not mean it was the kingdom of God. It was not, to put it in Augustinian terms, the political expression of the Heavenly City. Instead, it was an all-too sinful Earthly City dressed up in resplendent imperial garb.

Second, whatever the Roman Empire’s actual nature at the time of the Incarnation, by the time Dante penned Monarchia in 1312 or 1313, the prospects for its revival, or indeed the creation of any universal empire of the type Dante espoused, were vanishingly small. In fact, they were nil. The window of opportunity for the emperor to assert temporal jurisdiction over all Christendom, let alone the whole world, had long since closed (if it had ever really been open). By the early fourteenth century, the medieval era of universal empire ruled by a Dominus Mundi had passed; the modern time of territorial kingdoms ruled by national monarchs had arrived. 

Monarchia, I would suggest, is geopolitical nostalgia at its best. Well, perhaps only at its second best. While Dante’s political tract bears most of this genre’s hallmarks, it lacks what I would consider its one final, necessary ingredient: It does not harness its romanticized past and Panglossian vision for the future to any concrete power-political project. For that, we need to shift our attention from Monarchia to China Dream. 

Xi’s Late-Modern Geopolitics of Nostalgia: Middle Kingdom Redux

In his book China Dream—simultaneously the source and summit of his strategic thinking— Chinese president Xi Jinping makes the case that a rejuvenated and restored China should take its rightful place at the center of the world order. He premised this grand assertion on a partial and particular reading of Chinese history. He generally asserts that the PRC is the heir to a millennium-old civilization that was at the forefront of culture, science, technology, and administration worldwide right up to the sixteenth century. In his version of history, China—the “Middle Kingdom,” or Zhongguo, as China is still called in Mandarin today—was, during that entire period, at the center of the world. It was the most civilized power on the planet and, within the limits of its reach, the dominant military and diplomatic power, to which all the region’s lesser kingdoms were naturally subordinated. 

This natural order of things collapsed, however, as a result of internal Chinese rebellions, colonial exploitation, state collapse, Japanese occupation, and civil war, all of which not only sundered China but reduced its share of global economic output from 30% in 1820 to barely 5% on the eve of Mao’s revolution. In this narrative, the West’s rise in recent centuries was a historical anomaly, but it was also a significant cause of China’s decline, a decline culminating in the “century of humiliation,” running from roughly 1839 to 1949. The communist revolution of the late-1940s, or so the narrative runs, began to reverse this decline of power and allow China to “get off its knees.” The implementation of Xi’s China Dream, or so Xi seems to believe, will complete this process, driving and shaping a “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” and ultimately returning China to its natural position as the Middle Kingdom, only this time as the center of a truly planetary order.

Like Dante’s Monarchia, Xi’s China Dream is clearly nostalgic. It yearns for the glories of the far-past as projected onto the near-future. And as with Monarchia, its vision of the past is romanticized to the point where it seems only tenuously connected to historical reality. Contrary to the image of the past conjured up in the China Dream, China was never the dominant power on “the world stage”—indeed, it was not even the dominant power within its region. As any unbiased reading of China’s history reveals, the Middle Kingdom was never really at the middle of anything. China was only ever the all-powerful center of some historical hub-and-spoke empire in the fever dreams of the CCP and its apologists in the West. This being the case, there is simply no glorious history that was temporarily interrupted in the nineteenth century and which today’s rising China is resuming. For most of China’s history, it was a geliguojia, a “separated country” deeply averse to the kind of sustained engagement with other polities that is a necessary characteristic of a hegemon.

Also like Monarchia, Xi’s political tract meets my definition of a work of geopolitical nostalgia in that it (mistakenly) assumes that the signs of the times are such that China’s restoration to its natural role as the Middle Kingdom is realistic. Indeed, quite the opposite. In Dante’s time, there was simply no real possibility of reanimating an empire that was long dead and that never really existed anyway, except in the fevered imaginations of some fourth- and fourteenth-century Christians. The same is true for Xi’s time: the Middle Kingdom, such as it was, shuffled off this mortal coil centuries ago—it cannot be revived, no matter China’s economic growth rate, the size of its economy, or its increasingly manic empire-building schemes (the “Belt-and-Road Initiative,” the “Health Silk Road,” the “Ice Silk Road,” etc.). The real challenges China faces—“growing old before growing rich,” its increasingly odious foreign policy and the blowback it is generating, etc.—seem to be short-circuiting China’s bid to rule over “all under Heaven.”

Unlike Monarchia, though, China Dream has been harnessed to an “actually existing” geopolitical power play, one, not coincidentally, tied to the PRC’s domestic power dynamics. On the domestic front, Xi’s vision is about consolidating the CCP’s power within China by appealing to the Chinese people’s material and nationalist appetites. Put bluntly, in the post-Mao era, the legitimacy of CCP rule has come to depend less on Mao’s Little Red Book and more on delivering what the China Dream promises: national wealth and glory. On the international front, China Dream is a vision statement ordered toward consolidating the PRC’s rule first over its neighborhood and then over the entire world. It is about articulating a compelling version of a better—Chinese-led—world order, one that lesser powers will find so appealing that they will enthusiastically embrace in favor of the increasingly ramshackle American-led one.

My conclusion: both Monarchia and China Dream are excellent examples of geopolitical nostalgia. Both imagine a glorious past that can be projected onto the future, and both are utterly delusional in their misreading of the contemporary conditions-of-possibility for empire redux. Ultimately, though, whereas Dante’s work wins maximum points for literary merit, it is Xi’s that wins the gold medal for all-around best work of geopolitical nostalgia. For, unlike Monarchia, China Dream is thoroughly harnessed to the concrete political and geopolitical projects of an actually existing political player. And that, I would suggest, is the decisive political hallmark of a nostalgic work of geopolitics, whether pre-modern or late-modern.

Chinese World Map by Mo Yi Tong 1418/1763