New empires for the 21st century

The weight of the past explains many things, but it does not explain everything and justifies few.

Some, moreover, are authentic inventions.

For example, the founding legends of the imaginary communities that are the millennial old nations.

Thanks to these narratives, Taiwan and Ukraine are territories over which communist China and Putinist Russia have sovereign rights, without regard, of course, to the will of their inhabitants or their political legitimacy.

Both countries being so different, they arouse similar appetites thanks to the resurrection in the forms of the 21st century of the old empires of two fallen dynasties, the Qing that dominated the island of Formosa, current Taiwan, for two centuries until 1895, and the Romanovs, who they did the same with Ukraine between 1654 and 1917. It is by chance that there are two authoritarian regimes heirs to communist and anti-imperialist revolutions, Xi Jinping's and Putin's, who claim the inheritance of two feudal empires.

In both cases, the liberal democracies of Taiwan and Ukraine are a living denunciation of the autocracies that seek to engulf them.

The mere existence of these liberal regimes is a terrible example, an affront and even an aggression for Xi Jinping and Putin.

But it is geopolitics, not legend, that explains the voracity that threatens them.

Both are keys to imperial expansion.

Taiwan, of the seas that surround China and allow the control of the strategic Strait of Malacca.

Ukraine, from hegemony over Central Europe and, therefore, from Russian control over the Eurasian continent.

The liberal empires of the 19th century maintained a double regime of rights, democratic for the metropolises and despotic for the colonies, as Josep Maria Fradera has explained in his book

.

The authoritarian empires that claim to lead the 21st century, on the other hand, although they present themselves as benevolent and even peaceful, have already shown their warmongering claws and openly defend the same regime of oppression for all, in the metropolis and in the periphery.

These are issues that are hard to understand for those who are stuck by ideological dogmas and archaic anti-imperialism.

Incapable of perceiving the nature of the new imperialisms and developing solidarities with those who suffer from them, they do not distinguish the disguises with which today's empires hide imperial desires similar to those of past empires, nor do they perceive the rhetoric inherited from anti-colonialism with which they accompany its colonial, expansive and warmongering policy like that of all previous empires.

In any case, it is surprising that those who were once colonized can submissively buy the false messages of these new postmodern empires, as if communist internationalism and Third Worldism were the perpetual legitimation of the current Chinese and Russian imperialist and supremacist nationalisms.

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