Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door: Russia,Central Asia and the Mediated Expansion of International Society

Introduction

In Hedley Bull and Adam Watson’s ‘The Expansion of International Society’ ² Russia’s position in 19th-century European International Society (henceforth EIS) as a full civilised, western power is uncontested and taken for granted. After Peter the Great’s reforms in the early 18th century, Russia left its position of a barbaric, semi-civilised power at the fringes of Europe to adopt the institutions of sovereignty, balance of power, dynasticism and inter-royal marriages, and international law, and enmeshed itself in the European state-system by taking part in wars, disputes and resolutions of them.

Consequently, its penetration into Central Asia and its modernising presence there is seen in a western light as well. As Watson argues,

The Romanov Empire Westernised, modernised, and settled a vast area of Siberia and Central Asia, comparable only to the contemporary and similar westward expansion of the United States, and parallel to the seaborne expansion of England. ³

While Russia’s rank as a Great Power and its entry process in EIS have been already discussed in the literature, ⁴ its status as a European state has been questioned less, especially when put in relation to the expansion of EIS. Here, it is believed that by looking exclusively at the structural-functional aspect of EIS, much of the nuanced, multi-faceted and complex relation of Russia with Europe is lost, especially if the whole expansion of EIS carried out by Russia is put in a wider historical context.

Therefore, in this paper, the expansion of EIS is used instrumentally to shed light on Russia’s position as a civilised power at that time. Rather than focusing on the export of institutions of EIS to Central Asia per se, I focus more on how such export was used by Russia to provide itself with a full European, civilised identity.

Furthermore, this paper seeks to contribute to the present literature on the expansion of EIS and the standard of civilisation by focusing on what I call ‘the periphery in the centre’. The classical account of the expansion of EIS has already been criticised: Gerrit Gong has showed how in the whole enterprise of expanding western international norms of conducts, a standard of civilisation was implicitly applied, depriving non-European territories of rights and privileges and therefore making them legally inferior and therefore conquerable; ⁵ Yasuaki Onuma has shown how the West used instrumentally international law to justify a false pretension of universalism, ⁶ while Edward Keene and Shogo Suzuki argue that the expansion of EIS and its civilisation was far from being a peaceful encounter of social orders, but it was rather based on imperialism, coercion and power-politics. ⁷

Yet, even these critics miss the fact that the European ‘core’ was actually far from united, or ‘monolithic’. In this paper, I argue that a standard of civilisation was also operating in the core of the expansion, Europe, and that a periphery subject to marginalisation, stigma and ‘othering politics’, Russia, was present also within the core. ⁸

In the light of the above, the framework I advance in this paper is that of ‘mediated expansion’ of EIS. It entails three different meanings, all related to each other:

From a theoretical perspective, as said, one of the cardinal features of Russia’s role in the expansion of EIS was that it framed its own colonial enterprise as a means to conform to EIS’s standard of civilisation, as a knocker for ‘Heaven’s door’. This strategy, based on emulation and mirroring strategies of other powers’ behaviour, relied on three components: adaptation (Russia had to adapt to a competitive international context where ‘status’ was defined also according to imperial and colonial possessions); strategic learning (what to do in order to achieve that status); emulative learning (how to behave to achieve that status). ⁹

These three components are the natural outcome of what the ‘standard of civilisation’ required at that time: the members of EIS had to be seen as a point of reference for proper behaviour, and orientation of actions to conform to the principles of the social group of reference had to be exercised. And colonial expansion, the ‘dark side’ of EIS, was exactly one of those principles.

As a matter of fact, being a ‘civilised’ state meant not only respecting generally accepted international law, but also and more importantly for the argument of this paper, being a civiliser itself. ¹⁰ And this is exactly how Russia perceived its position in Central Asia: the expansion was an attempt to secure international legitimacy as a ‘civilised’ member of EIS, a ‘noblesse oblige’ behaviour, an exercise in ‘mimetic imperialism’. ¹¹

The argument is structured as follows. In the first part, a historical account of the Russian penetration in the region is offered. The second part puts Russia’s conquest of Central Asia in a wider historical context, and shows how the aftermath of the Crimean War and the domestic condition of the Russian empire were key to depicting Russia as a state on the fringes of Europe. The third part constitutes the gist of the paper, and addresses Russian self-reflection on the meaning of the conquest of Central Asia for its European status as well as European evaluations of it in the light of the discourses highlighted in the second part. In the conclusions, I sum up the argument.

The Russian Conquest

In the early 19th century, the city-states of Khiva, Bukhara and Koqand, and the nomadic tribes of the northern steppes and of the littoral coasts on the Caspian Sea formed an ‘inter-unit’ system based on religion, diplomacy, commerce and suzerainty. Borders were poorly institutionalised or even non-existent, being a mere reflection of the extent of the power of the sovereign. Descriptions reported that ‘the Khanate of Bukhara, like the states which are its neighbours, has no fixed boundaries, sanctioned by time [viz. customary], or circumscribed by international treaties. They expand or contract according to the strength or weakness of its rulers’, ¹² and that ‘in that period, borders of states still counted for very little. It can almost be said that these were not yet invented.’ ¹³

Diplomacy retained different features from the modern, European conception of it. ¹⁴ It was not customary in the region to host the representative of a foreign domain permanently. Envoys, often merchants, were usually sent for specific missions and specific purposes, but were not granted the right to stay on the host territory in the same manner as a European embassy. The state of diplomacy in Central Asia could be compared ‘to that of Europe before the sixteenth century, when the custom of having Ambassadors at Foreign Courts was still unknown’. ¹⁵

Sunni Islam, holding together nomadic and sedentary tribes in a single relational framework, regulated and informed all the rules and norms that gave a sense of order in the regional system. The power of the sovereign was expressed by the hutbe, the prayer said in honour of the sovereign, and the sikke, that is, the ability and faculty to produce and circulate money, ¹⁶ while Shari’a itself constituted a primordial, rudimentary form of international law, ¹⁷ governing the resolution of conflicts, the legal intercourse between the several and different political communities in the region, and even slavery.

The first operations of Russia’s expansion took place in the late 18th century, when several tribes of the Kazakh steppe were subjugated and incorporated. Then, between 1822 and 1854, Russian soldiers occupied the steppe effectively, placing its inhabitants for the first time in their history under the rule of a sedentary conqueror. ¹⁸ Proceeding towards the oases, the first khanate to capitulate was Koqand (1868), the second was Bukhara (1868), and then Khiva in 1873. Being defeated, the khanates retained full responsibility for their own internal affairs ‘while relinquishing to Russia de facto control of their foreign relations’. ¹⁹ The last stage of the conquest of the whole area of Central Asia was the subjugation of the Turkmens in 1881 with the battle of Geok-Tepe. Central Asia was thus under Russia’s control, and divided in the Governorate of the Steppe, of Transcaspia, of Turkestan and the protectorates of Khiva and Bukhara.

If the protectorates retained their domestic sovereignty, the steppe and the oases were now to be administered. The Rules for the Siberia Kyrgyz were published already in 1822, and two years later those for the Orenburg Kazakhs were adopted. These two documents brought forward the modernisation of the steppe, abolishing the khan and the horde as political units, and entrenching fixed territorial units where the nomads were supposed to live. In particular, article 171 of these regulations gave the possibility for nomads to get a piece of land to start farming or found a settled homestead. ²⁰

Modernisation of the oases was also brought forward. In March 1867, at the beginning of the conquest of the oases, the district of Turkestan was created, thus imposing a civil-military form of organisation in the region. Almost twenty years later, the Statute on the Administration of Turkestan was compiled (1886), and with these regulations, a form of agricultural capitalism penetrated the region, bringing the tribal political order to an end.

Wider institutional changes occurred. First of all, borders were exogenously imposed. With the creation of oblasts, uezds, volosts, all different and concentric levels of territorial administration imported from imperial Russia, the nomadic and semi-nomadic populations of Central Asia had to adapt to a new political reality made of legally delimited spaces. ²¹

Diplomacy was modernised as well, establishing for the first time in the region a permanent representative of the Russian empire, as foreseen by article 16 of the Bukharan-Russian Friendship Treaty of 1873. The Bukharan khan was granted a representative office (predstavitel’stvo) in Saint Petersburg, while the Russian representative office in Bukhara was opened in 1886. The Khivan khan was granted ‘a sort of representative’ in Petro-Aleksandrovsk, in the northern part of the khanate. ²² The practice of giving gifts was abolished in 1880, and new diplomatic orders were instituted, such as the Order of St Anna, St Andrej and St Stanislav, bestowed on Central Asian diplomats in Khiva and Bukhara. ²³ The Bukharan Khan himself instituted in 1883 the Order of the Rising Star, thus mimicking the European custom. Moreover, slavery was abolished.

International law was also imported in the region, as Russia demanded the observance of peace treaties and provisions. The treaty (dogovor) was introduced in lieu of oaths and promises. ²⁴ Under the impact of legal positivism at the time, in the steppe codification of customary nomadic law was introduced. ²⁵

Domestically, Islam was preserved, as initially it was decided to leave the cultural and social background intact. Conversely, the judicial level introduced in Central Asia was that of mirovoi sud’ia, justice of peace, which was the lowest level at which one could find statutory and written laws applied. Much power, however, was retained by the military personnel of the governorate.

Commercial duties and customs for merchants became regulated, and trade was modernised with tutelage of merchants, provisions, clear duties and conditions of most favourite nation for Russian entrepreneurs in the region. ²⁶ In particular, freedom of navigation of the Amu Darya, ²⁷ opening up for travel in interior parts ²⁸ and setting up of passport and visa regime to regulate the flux of domestic investors gave the region a touch of administrative Europeanness. ²⁹ Furthermore, a Moscow-Tashkent trading society was opened already in 1866.

The incorporation of Central Asia in the wider capitalist market made necessary a rationalisation of market and economic procedures through the convergence of payment system, of currencies, the introduction of balance records, the establishment of a small entrepreneurial class in charge of regulating and enhancing foreign trade. In the economic realm, important was also the founding of branches of the state bank in the cities of Tashkent (1874), Samarkand (1890), Kokand (1893), and Bukhara (1894). The peak of the capitalistic development of the region was visible in the construction of the Trans-Caspian railway (1879–1906) that ended up being a vehicle of capitalistic expansion and economic development. ³⁰ The network of railroads ‘had great strategic, economic and psychological significance, emphasising a structural feasibility of Central Asia’s incorporation in the Russian empire’, ³¹ showing also materially, not just institutionally, the entry of modernity into Central Asia, as well as the entry of Central Asia into modernity.

In sum, the result of Russian administration in Central Asia brought the destruction of khanship and barter economy, fixation of borders and territoriality, diplomatic ‘representativeness’ and etiquette, the dogovor and the gramota (official diplomatic note) as institutionalised instruments of international law, abolition of slavery, the pre-eminence of imperial law, privatisation of land and property and the introduction of market economy. Piety and loyalty were substituted by more modern, rational forms of government.

So, thanks to Russia, EIS expanded to Central Asia as well. But how did Europe react towards this? Did EIS expand via a civilised European power, or via something different? To understand this, we have to focus on Russia’s place in Europe during the conquest.

The Crimean Disclosure of the Asiatic

Despite its long and painful entry into EIS, Russia’s origins were still ‘the Stone Guest’ in Europe. The ‘mnemonic practices’ mentioned by Neumann ³² were not only in the mind of Russian statesmen as an idiosyncratic syndrome of inferiority or diversity, but were present also in the mind of Europeans: an indelible stereotype which, depending on the situation, functioned as a cognitive short-cut to assess Russia’s presence in Europe. This ‘politics of memory’ in Europe became evident in the aftermath of the Crimean War at the Congress of Paris in 1856.

Tra color che son sospesi ⁶² : Central Asia as a Gate to Europe

In the light of the analysis conducted above, let’s go back to the conquest of Central Asia. For Russia, the conquest of Central Asia was a European colonisation of barbarian territories.

The position of Russia in Central Asia is that of all civilised states which come into contact with half-savage, wandering tribes possessing no fixed social organisation. … The United States in America, France in Algiers, Holland in her colonies, England in India – all have inevitably drawn into a course wherein ambition plays a smaller part than imperious necessity. ⁶³

Already in 1826, de Meyendorf clearly described Russia’s mission to Central Asia, linking the Empire, both in empirical and perceptual terms, to continental Europe: ‘Russia is the country whose duty it is to impart to the Khanates of Central Asia a healthy moral impulse and to spread in these countries the benefits of European civilisation’. ⁶⁴ Some years later, Captain Vasilii Perovsky, while moving towards Khiva, claimed that ‘England herself had been for years engaged in the suppression of the slave trade, and it surely was part of the duty of Holy Russia to take her share in the crusade’. ⁶⁵

In 1840, Vasilii Grigor’ev, a famous Russian orientologist, spoke of Central Asia as of ‘Russia’s own Orient’, arguing that Britain was, for Russia, a model to follow. ⁶⁶ Mikhail Pogodin, influential professor at Moscow University and prominent public figure, recalled the civilisational burden shared by Russia with other European powers and, most notably, England: ‘From the point of view of humanity, as Europeans, as Christians, as an educated people, we wish success to England in India’, claiming later that ‘the duty is to do like them’. ⁶⁷

Mikhail Veniukoff, colonel of the Russian Army, was of the same advice: ‘[England and Russia are] workers in the same historical mission – the civilisation of the Far East’. ⁶⁸ In doing so, Russia was putting itself on an equal standing with other European maritime powers, and thus engaged itself in the construction of an Other that could serve to reaffirm its identity as European.

The distance created between Russia and Central Asia was therefore functional to the depiction of itself as higher, better, more civilised, progressive and, most of all, European state. Such a distance is most evident in the words of Captain Nikolai Maev: ‘We found here an exotic way of life, thoughts, social order, and economy … unimaginable from a European point of view’. ⁶⁹ Central Asia meant disorder, marauding, oppression. Russia meant salvation, civilisation, morality:

the histories of these semi-barbarous countries [the khanates], desolated by plunder, despotism and ignorance, cannot excite any particular interest; it would naturally consist of an enumeration of Mussulman names intermixed by murders, treacheries, and other acts of violence and despotism of irresponsible Asiatic tyrants. ⁷⁰

Since it was well perceived that ‘[n]ineteenth-century [EIS] was a society for empires, and imperialism was an inherent component of the Society’, ⁷¹ it was argued that ‘[t]o conquer and civilise Central Asia [was] the most effectual way of clearing Russia from the unjust imputations to which she has been exposed, and of confuting the erroneous interpretations of her policy in the East’. ⁷² At the end of the conquest, Gorchakhov stated solemnly that ‘[the conquest] will also serve [the interest] of civilisation and humanity at large. We have the right to count upon an equitable and loyal appreciation of the policy which we follow’. In sum, ‘Asia was one place where Russians could be the equals of Europeans’. ⁷³

This othering procedure enacted by Russia responded to a very specific need, that of performatively creating an identity as a member of EIS. As David Campbell has convincingly shown, the denigration, the negation of the other is always linked to a definition, an amelioration of the self. Since ‘the constitution of identity is achieved through the inscription of boundaries that serve to demarcate an “inside” from an “outside”, a “self” from an “other”, a “domestic” from a “foreign”’, ⁷⁴ the descriptions of Central Asia reported above played exactly the function of bestowing ontological and identity security onto a civilised Russia against the barbarian at the gates. This ‘strategy of otherness’ towards Central Asia was, in sum, the creation of the very possibility of existence of a Russian civilised empire within EIS: the depiction of the newly conquered populations as ‘barbarians’, ‘savages’ and ‘marauders’ was ‘made possible by and help[ed] constitute a moral space of superior/inferior’. ⁷⁵

Still, the position of Russia vis-a-vis the colonies was a doubtful and unstable one. First, if geography is not destiny, it can be a straight road difficult to exit from. In continental Europe, all states that possessed colonies were maritime Empires. The distance, the remoteness was signalled by the presence of immense waters, of oceans, acting as boundaries between the cradle of civilisation and the ‘out-there’. In Russia, metropole and periphery were not clearly demarcated. Russia’s foreign policy ‘did not include a term to designate a distinct exotic region in a manner corresponding to the French and British “Orient”’, nor a word to indicate the institution of the ‘colony’. ⁷⁶ Interestingly, the expansion eastwards collapsed Russia’s European frontier of the Urals, created in 1725 as part of Peter the Great’s European agenda. ⁷⁷

Secondly, differently from other colonial empires, the Russian government did not have a deputy Ministry for colonial administration. While the Inter-ministerial Asiatic Committee worked only from 1820 to 1847, the Asiatic Department within the Foreign Ministry ceased to have administrative responsibilities for Central Asia already in 1873. ⁷⁸ The jurisdiction was left mainly to the Ministries of Interior and War.

This ambivalence towards the ‘colonies’ was reflected in competing discourses in Russia. For example, the Orientalists felt a cultural, historical and civilisational attraction to the East although based in European Russia. Influential people such as Nikolai Danilevskii suggested not to treat the new territories as colonies in the western way, but as Russian state territory, while Vladimir Lamanskii argued that the conquest of Central Asia made Russia a srednii mir (‘middle world’) between Europe and Asia.

For them, the East from which Russia itself was born was not seen as an Other, but as a pristine self to civilise. ‘The East belongs to us unalterably, naturally, historically, voluntarily’. ⁷⁹ Veniukoff, who considered Russia a European Great Power, nonetheless affirmed that the conquest was ‘the re-establishment of extension of the sway of the Aryan race over countries which for a long period were subject to peoples of Turk and Mongol extraction’. ⁸⁰ Vasilii Grigor’ev echoed him: ‘Which of the European races preserved in itself more of the Asiatic element than the Slavs, who were the last to leave their primeval homeland?’ ⁸¹

The Central Asians, in particular the nomads, were depicted as barbarians and backward, but nonetheless subjected to the same laws of the Empire, in the process of achieving a ‘uniform standardised framework of imperial civil order, or grazhdanstvennost’. ⁸² Vasilii Kliuchevskii, historian and academic, spoke of Russia as ‘colonising itself’.

Yet, for those who were equalling Russia to Europe, as seen above, Central Asia was not a pristine self, but rather an abject. ⁸³ Since an abject is that which is neither ‘subject nor object’ and that ‘threatens the borders of the self’, Central Asia constituted in the narrative of the conquerors ‘a remainder that has to be cut off in order for the self to be kept “pure”’. ⁸⁴ The othering of Central Asia to reinforce Russia’s European identity was a recognition and a negation of the pristine self, of the uncivilised past.

Russia was casting on Central Asia narratives of backwardness and savagery, which were exactly the stigmata of its past as emphasised in continental Europe. Still at the outset of the 20th century, Russian Foreign Minister Count Izvol’sky said that due to its origins, for Russia ‘to become an Asiatic state … would be a major catastrophe’. ⁸⁵ Therefore Central Asia became ‘the improper facet of [Russia’s] impossible own and proper’. ⁸⁶ Not only the reforms failed to convince European states that Russia was fully on track with its developmental project, but the suzerain past that now was coming back under the form of territorial acquisition led Russia to perceive a sense of shame, of stigma, the stigma of being developmentally behind.

The very presence of the multiple voices within Russia described above, some favouring rapprochement with Europe and some arguing for a ‘reappropriation of the East’, well exemplified the ‘existential dilemma’ created by the ‘Asiatic stigma’. If the agent recognises its weakness, it legitimises the presence of the stigma (Westernisers). If, however, the agent becomes defensive of its stigma, then it justifies the way the social group treats it (Orientalists). As Zarakol aptly argues, ‘an actor who has internalized the normative standards of the society he is a member of cannot escape stigmatization even if he isolates himself or rejects those standards as unfair’. ⁸⁷

From Saint Petersburg, ‘to describe the natives [in Central Asia] was to depict Russia, and it was not necessarily a flattering picture’. ⁸⁸ Central Asia was therefore an alter-ego: alter because odiously barbarian, ego because it was part of its own past, a past that was rejected through ‘othering’ descriptions but now incorporated.

Tashkent, Koqand, the steppes and the oases were now part of the empire exactly in the same ways of Moscow, Saint Petersburg and the other cities of Western Russia. The population, once remote, barbarian, savage and unlawful, was now in the lap of the motherland. Central Asia was das Unheimliche, ‘the familiar alien’, Russia’s past in Russia’s present. Thus, the rejection of it in civilisational terms was functional to Russia’s social acceptance in Europe. As Cecilia Sjöholm notes, ‘the desire for recognition defines the emancipatory project of modernity, in which subjectivities are constituted negatively, through excluding what is other to it’. ⁸⁹ It is this mechanism, I argue, that makes it possible to speak of a mediated expansion. Considering Central Asia not only an Other but the Self as viewed by Europeans, Russia could enter Europe and reach civilisational isonomy only via a negation of that Other and, at an unconscious level, of that Self.

Aleksandr Bariatinskii, close friend of Alexander II, diplomat and member of the State Council, was one of the leading advocates of this strategy in Russia. He perceived Russia as constituted both by the reforming West and the autocratic, conservative East, and that Russia might be for Central Asia what Europe had been for Russia two centuries earlier, the source and the bearer of the world’s most advanced civilisation. It was in Central Asia that, according to Bariatinskii, Russia could justify its own existence as a European power. ⁹⁰

Outside state circles, but nonetheless influential, was the thinking of Feodor Dostoevskii. By claiming that ‘in Europe we are hangers on and slaves, but in Asia we are masters’, and that ‘in Europe we are Tatars, but in Asia we too are Europeans’ he sided with Bariatinskii, who argued that only the conquest of other nations could bring Russia into Europe, ⁹¹ and that Russia would bring Europe into Asia ‘in a diluted form’. ⁹² These discourses represent clearly the idea of a mediated expansion of EIS: the will to be on a par with Europe, the recognition of Central Asia as a familiar stranger and the perception of being in an intermediate position between Europe and barbarian Asia are all hallmarks of a complex, elaborated and by no means one-size-fits-all expansion of EIS.

The civilising mission ‘was thus not merely, and not even primarily, the pursuit of an altruistic God-given responsibility, but rather a vital opportunity to realise the Petrine injunction to Europeanise Russia itself’. ⁹³ These very words of Mikhail Petrashevskii, politician and influential intellectual, can fully represent the concept of mediated expansion: ‘[Our expansion Eastwards] is destined to achieve for us a diploma with the title of a truly European nation!’ ⁹⁴ Here, a paradox was in play: Central Asia was the recipient of the expansion of EIS (see Figure 1), but also the door for Russia’s solid entry into EIS (see Figure 2).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

The expansion of EIS in Bull and Watson (1984).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

The mediated expansion of EIS. Dotted lines represent Russia’s attempt to be considered truly European.

By observing the process of colonising backward peoples, Grigor’ev was able to say that ‘the Russians made themselves real Europeans’. ⁹⁵

Yet, to use an expression dear to George Herbert Mead, ⁹⁶ in Russian Central Asia the ‘I’ was different from the ‘me’. Domestically, rampant corruption in the administration was pervasive; social order, often broken by local revolts both in the steppe and in Turkestan, was maintained via violent military rule. Internationally, closeness of borders and of commercial routes cut off the region from international trade, border and commercial treaties with the khans were often not respected, diplomacy was only poorly institutionalised, and slavery was still practised. More importantly, the maintenance of Islam as a factor of stabilisation made the encounter between the colonial authorities and the local population more difficult. ⁹⁷ The expansion of EIS in Central Asia was therefore seen in Europe as mediated by a less civilising force, Russia.

Arminius Vambéry, traveller, academic and influential intellectual at that time, commenting on the conquest of Central Asia, stated that ‘[Russia’s politics there] is Asiatic, aye, wildly Asiatic in tendency’, and that ‘little, in spite of the long struggle after European civilisation, has yet been taken in, to speak comparatively, from what we call European or Western life’. ⁹⁸

The notion of ‘mediated expansion’ was also visible in his words, especially when arguing that ‘Russianising is naturally a step from Asia towards Europe’. ⁹⁹ Russia was thus seen as ‘not wholly qualified to be the propagator of the European spirit of civilisation’. ¹⁰⁰ By looking at the poor condition of the colonies, cut away from foreign markets and merchants, where political and social progress was not observable, he concluded that

we must not lose sight of the fact that it is Russia in particular which, as far as its own culture is concerned, has not by a long way reached that stage of perfection which would enable it to take its stand as the representative of the true, genuine spirit of modern advancement. Russian culture is only half European, and still half Asiatic. ¹⁰¹

Sir Henry Rawlinson, a diplomat in the East India Office, while conceding that the Russian Empire had brought a certain degree of civilisation to the ‘savages’ of Central Asia, claimed that the subjects of the Tsar were ‘a race by themselves, differing in character and descent from all those people who may properly lay claim to come within the limits of Western civilisation’. ¹⁰² Burnaby, travelling through Russian Central Asia, commented that

the rulers defend the despoliation of the inhabitants in Central Asia, and the annexation of their territory, on the ground that it is done for the purpose of Christianity and civilisation. And yet, the government of this civilised nation made as much fuss about my travelling in Central Asia as any mandarin at Pekin, whose permission I might have had to ask for a journey through the Celestial empire. It will take the Russians a long time to shake off from themselves the habits and a way of thought inherited from a barbarous ancestry. ¹⁰³

Moreover, Russia adopted several protectionist measures in the region thus cutting off European merchants from trade with those lands and taming free movement within and across them, contrary to the ‘precepts’ of the standard of civilisation of the time. ¹⁰⁴ Lord Curzon’s words are perhaps the most illustrative ones: recognising that ‘a system backward in Europe is forward in Central Asia’, ¹⁰⁵ he argued that ‘the Russian system may be government, but cannot be called improvement of civilisation’. ¹⁰⁶ Russia, therefore, did not act as a full European civiliser, but rather as a less qualified medium. Overall, the conquest of Central Asia

[was] a conquest of Orientals by Orientals, of cognate character by cognate character. It [was] the fusing of strong with weaker metal, but it [was] not the expulsion of an impure by a purer element. Civilised Europe has not marched forth to vanquish barbarian Asia. This [was] no XIX century crusade of manners or morals; but barbarian Asia, after a sojourn in civilised Europe, return[ed] upon its former footsteps to reclaim its own kith and kin. ¹⁰⁷

At the very end of the Russian conquest of Central Asia, when the region was administratively and politically under full control of Tsarist administration, Lt. Colonel Waters could argue that ‘the Russian nation has only a veneer of civilisation; it is savage at the heart, and likely to remain so. [In Central Asia, a]n unstable edifice of culture has been erected on a groundwork of semi-civilization’. ¹⁰⁸

The symbiosis was therefore complete and, despite the fact that Russians depicted themselves as Europeans, they could not brush off the stigmata of their pristine, atavistic self. Like tra color che son sospesi, Russia had a European ‘I’ with a vivid Asiatic ‘me’, and this had effects on its belonging to EIS, if not from a structural-functional viewpoint, certainly as far as culture and status were concerned. Despite its struggle to reform and progress socially, politically, militarily and economically, Russia was believed to belong to a lower civilisation, until the great humiliation in 1905 against Japan.

Conclusions

A deeper understanding of the wider historical context where Russia operated, particularly in the years immediately after the Crimean War, revealed not that Russia was outside EIS, but certainly that it was situated in a peripheral tie, and was not seen as fully conforming to the European standard of civilisation: ‘European Russia retained its superiority relative to its Asiatic colonies, but rather than standing at one with the West, Russia was seen instead to occupy an intermediary position between the two’. ¹⁰⁹

The paper highlighted three main facts. First, it identified a blind-spot in the common narrative of the expansion of EIS, arguing that a standard of civilisation did not exist only between ‘the West and the rest’, but also within the ‘West’ itself. Also, the analysis above contested the notion of ‘expansion’ of EIS. It has been argued that a deeper analysis of the cultural, civilisational and institutional discourses underlying EIS itself in the 19th century reveals interesting dichotomies, standards and boundaries that perhaps are not clearly perceivable if EIS is studied merely in structural terms.

Secondly, it made a case for reconsidering the place of Russia in 19th-century EIS not just in Great Power terms, but also in civilisational ones. In a century when the standard of civilisation still counted as a true demarcation line between the family of nations and those outside – ‘where you came from’ still mattered, even if you shared the predominant rules and institutions of EIS. ¹¹⁰

Thirdly, it was argued that a point missed by Bull and Watson and more generally by those authors interested in the expansion of EIS has been that of ‘reflexive feedback’, that is, the analysis of what the expansion means for the ‘expander’, and how the expansion is perceived and framed by others.

Far from being ‘modern’ and ‘civilised’, the contribution of Russia to the expansion of EIS was that of favouring an imperfect, mediated expansion of it, where its identity, in search for a confirmation, was conversely destabilised and questioned. To conclude, it may be said that such a conceptualisation of the expansion of EIS makes the analysis of the history of international relations more complex, and perhaps more confusing. Nonetheless, I believe, this is what is gained when from a mere systemic level of analysis we venture into a deeper one, where narratives of identities, cultures and differences play an important part in shaping the practice and the evolution of international politics. And exactly like tra color che son sospesi, it is our duty to find the right balance between the two.