The return of imperial thinking in twenty-first century Europe

Friday 6 February 2026

Imperial thinking is often assumed to be a relic of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: a mode of thought buried alongside gunboat diplomacy, red-lined maps and the language of civilising missions. Yet in twenty-first-century Europe imperial assumptions have not vanished. They have been reworked, sanitised and, in some cases, aggressively revived. They continue to shape how power is imagined, how borders are contested and how states conceive their own legitimacy.

At its core, imperial thinking is not simply about territory. It is about hierarchy. Empires rest on the assumption that some peoples, cultures or political centres possess a natural right to dominate others. That belief may be expressed through military occupation, economic dependency, cultural assimilation or the denial of political agency to those deemed peripheral. In modern Europe, the vocabulary has changed, but the underlying grammar often remains recognisable.

The most overt contemporary example is Russia’s revival of imperial narratives in her foreign policy. The language deployed by the Kremlin repeatedly frames neighbouring states not as sovereign equals but as fragments of a historical whole, temporarily mislaid by accident or conspiracy. Ukraine, Belarus and parts of the Caucasus are described as belonging to a shared civilisational space, with Moscow as its natural centre. This is not merely nostalgia. It is an operational worldview that treats borders as provisional and sovereignty as conditional. War, in this framework, becomes a corrective instrument rather than a crime.

Yet imperial thinking in Europe is not confined to tanks and annexations. It also manifests in subtler, more bureaucratic forms. Within the European Union power is formally shared, but informally stratified. Core states often set norms to which peripheral states are expected to conform, sometimes with limited sensitivity to local political realities. Enlargement is framed as a gift bestowed upon aspirant countries, rather than as a mutual transformation. While the European Union is not an empire in the classical sense, its internal dynamics can echo imperial patterns when economic leverage substitutes for coercion and technocratic authority replaces direct rule.

The United Kingdom’s post-Brexit political discourse offers another variation. Appeals to a revived global role, maritime freedom and sovereign independence frequently draw on imperial memory, even when disavowed. The idea that Britain can effortlessly resume a position of global influence rests, in part, on an unexamined inheritance from an era when power was extracted rather than negotiated. This is imperial thinking turned inward: a refusal to accept the structural limits imposed by a changed world.

Imperial habits of mind also persist in how Europe relates to its neighbours. The Western Balkans, Eastern Partnership states and parts of North Africa are often treated as buffers rather than partners. Stability is prioritised over self-determination; predictability over democracy. This approach reflects an imperial preference for order at the margins, even when that order is brittle or unjust. It is no coincidence that crises erupt where local agency has been most constrained.

What distinguishes twenty-first-century imperial thinking from its predecessors is not its ambition, but its insecurity. Modern empires no longer proclaim universal missions with confidence. Instead they justify dominance through narratives of protection, historical grievance or technocratic necessity. The claim is not that others must be ruled for their own good, but that they cannot be trusted to rule themselves without supervision. This shift makes imperial logic harder to detect and easier to normalise.

The war in Ukraine has forced Europe to confront these assumptions directly. It has exposed the moral bankruptcy of civilisational hierarchies and the fragility of peace built on implicit spheres of influence. It has also challenged European states to examine their own reflexes: whether they see sovereignty as divisible, whether security is negotiable, and whether smaller states are truly regarded as equals.

Imperial thinking survives because it offers psychological comfort. It simplifies a complex world into centres and peripheries, leaders and followers. But in a Europe defined by legal equality of states and the catastrophic memory of conquest, such thinking is profoundly destabilising. The task of the present century is not merely to resist overt imperial aggression, but to dismantle the quieter assumptions that allow it to re-emerge. Only by recognising imperial logic in all its forms can Europe hope finally to outgrow it.