Other powers, such as Germany , Turkey , Spain , Mexico , Australia , Ethiopia , Nigeria , Morocco , Saudi Arabia , Iran , Algeria and Egypt have inherited imperial legacies which are getting a new lease of life from present geostrategic factors, often at the expense of weaker neighbouring states. For instance, Turkey, with a large population, dynamic economy and an assertive foreign policy founded on national pride is extending its influence over smaller nations which it ruled during centuries, from Bulgaria, Bosnia and Albania to Syria, Iraq, the Palestinian territories, the Caspian region and the Central Asian Turkic republics. Likewise Iran benefits from the destruction of Iraq and subjection of its Gulf Arab neighbours to the USA as well as from the disintegration of Afghanistan and eclipse of Pakistan to project its power over the Middle East , West and Central Asia .
There is little doubt that the USA is a not-so-original sort of empire with a global outreach and an increasingly heterogenous population, though it mainly extends to the North and Central American "homeland" and to Latin American where it is however receding. The ethnic plurality of this formerly mainly Anglo-Germanic Imperium enables it to send "proconsuls" and military commanders ancestrally hailing from the areas where they are deployed (such as Indians in South Asia, African Americans in Africa, Chinese and Japanese Americans in the Far East, Slavic Americans in formerly Soviet lands and Latinos in South and Central America) as most Caesarian states (i.e. Ancient Persia, Rome, Russia, Germany and Spain) did in the past.
As for the European Union under German-French leadership, it tends to assume the shape of a post-modern, neo-medieval empire if we are to hear Adrian Pabst in an as yet unpublished 2010 article, with ""overlapping jurisdictions, horizontally diffuse sovereignty and vertically arranged, concentric circles of integration".
Thus those ancient empires are renascent, though in a modern form which Pabst defines as marked by more or less -bureaucratic capitalism and authoritarian plutocracy. The independent or semi- autonomous nations or states which are either outside or within those empires are in turn struggling to enforce their writ, no less centralized and bureaucratic (we can think at random of Croatia, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Serbia, Taiwan, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Paraguay or Honduras) on territories and people which they regard as inalienably theirs.
In both empires and nations there is a strong archaic component which is not on the wane but rather threatens to trigger many long-term or recurrent, low or high intensity wars, of the kind recently or currently seen in Georgia, North Western Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan and Turkish Kurdistan, to name only a few.
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