Regional Legacies: Definition and Scope
Some ideological formations do not operate as live factions in the present contest, yet they continue to shape local memory, rhetoric, and institutional reflexes. We call these regional legacy factions. They are not full actors in the five‑faction model; rather, they are inherited lenses through which nations see contemporary conflict. These legacies colour how Proceduralists, Deconstructionists, Globalists, Restorationists, and Vitalists express themselves in different places.
The British Legacy: Classical Marxism
Rooted in trade unionism, Fabian strategy, and the Labour Party’s formative decades, British Classical Marxism foregrounded material class analysis, suspicion of bourgeois liberalism, and loyalty to organised labour. While the contemporary Left in Britain is now more influenced by managerial Proceduralism and Deconstructionist identity frames, the language of class struggle, public ownership, and anti‑Thatcher sentiment endures as a national reflex. Current factions in the UK still borrow the tone and moral seriousness of this legacy, even when they depart from its economic programme.
The French Legacy: Jacobin Republicanism
France’s revolutionary inheritance persists as a civic faith in popular sovereignty, laïcité, and the indivisible Republic. This legacy is marked by suspicion of clerical authority and a preference for universalist citizenship over particularist identities. In today’s landscape, its imprint appears in debates on veiling, religious symbols in public life, and the defence of republican values. Different factions tap this mythos to justify competing projects, from security policy to culture‑war positioning.
The German Legacy: Romantic Nationalism
Born of nineteenth‑century philosophies of people, land, and culture, Romantic Nationalism emphasised myth, language, and belonging. Though much of its overt political expression is delegitimised by association with the Reich, the aesthetic and ecological sensibilities it shaped still echo in regionalism, heritage conservation, and certain cultural critiques. Its shadow informs how both conservative cultural projects and avant‑garde movements frame identity and nature.
The Russian Legacy: Soviet Centralism and Endurance
From Bolshevism through late Soviet rule, a tradition of centralised authority, resource mobilisation, and suspicion of pluralism left a durable imprint. Post‑Soviet politics retains reflexes of unity, sacrifice, and strategic endurance, now layered with religious revival. Contemporary actors interpret this legacy variously: as a warning against authoritarianism, as a model of state capacity, or as a civilisational idiom distinct from liberal norms.
The American Legacy: Puritan Millenarianism
American political culture carries traces of a moralised mission — a people set apart with a duty to reform the world. This manifests as exceptionalism, revivalist rhetoric, and periodic crusading moods in domestic and foreign policy. Across factions, the legacy supplies a tone of moral urgency and an appetite for totalising narratives, whether in global democracy‑promotion, culture‑war activism, or reformist technocracy.
Other Regional Legacies (Sketches)
Italy: echoes of Catholic corporatism and twentieth‑century statism inform debates on labour, the family, and national style.
Spain & Portugal: Counter‑Reformation monarchic memory and localist traditions colour arguments about unity, autonomy, and faith in public life.
China: a Confucian bureaucratic inheritance blended with Maoist mobilisation continues to shape expectations of order, merit, and campaign‑style politics.
Middle East: Pan‑Arab and Islamist legacies provide idioms of solidarity and resistance that interact variably with state projects and global currents.
Australia: the legacy of Labourism and settler egalitarianism, combining egalitarian state‑labour traditions with exclusionary immigration policies, still shapes national rhetoric around fairness, solidarity, and identity.
Legacies as Local Colour
These regional legacies are not themselves contenders in the present five‑way struggle. They are sedimented memories that prime publics to accept or resist certain arguments, and they supply aesthetic and moral tones to actors across the factions. Attending to them clarifies why the same faction speaks differently in London and Lyon, Munich and Miami — and why metapolitics must be read through history as well as programme.