The Same Fantasy Drives Empire Nostalgia and Corporate Impunity

Jul 26, 2026

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What if the real problem is not decline, but the stories we tell to survive it?

When societies feel weakened, they rarely become more honest. They become more theatrical. They reach for old costumes, old enemies, and old myths that make complexity feel manageable again. In Britain’s Brexit drama, imperial memory did exactly that: it offered a shrinking nation the intoxicating fantasy that it was still vast, sovereign, and exceptional. In the current struggle over corporate accountability, a different but related fantasy appears: that the rules governing transnational power can be softened, delayed, or narrowed enough to preserve business as usual.

These may seem like separate political worlds, one about national identity and the other about supply chains, climate duties, and access to justice. Yet they are connected by a deeper instinct: when power is under pressure, it often tries to preserve itself through selective amnesia. A nation forgets the violence that made its grandeur possible. A corporation forgets the social costs embedded in its balance sheet. In both cases, memory is not neutral. It is an instrument of power.

The deeper question is not simply why people cling to old narratives. It is why those narratives become so politically useful precisely when reality becomes harder to control.

Nostalgia is not memory, it is a strategy

Nostalgia is often treated as a sentimental weakness, a harmless longing for the past. That understates its political function. Nostalgia can be a governing technology. It does not merely recall history; it edits history into a usable script.

In the Brexit moment, imperial imagery worked because it solved an emotional problem. If a country no longer feels economically dominant, geopolitically central, or culturally unified, then the mind looks for a story that restores coherence. Empire becomes that story. World War II becomes that story. The nation is reimagined as a lone heroic actor, brave under siege, morally superior despite temporary setbacks. The point is not accuracy. The point is psychic repair.

This is why nostalgic politics is so resilient. It does not ask people to understand systems. It asks them to feel restored. It offers a simple bargain: surrender ambiguity and receive belonging in return.

Nostalgia works best when it converts historical loss into moral innocence.

That conversion matters. Empire was not just a former geopolitical structure. It was a vast machine of extraction, hierarchy, and racial domination. But in nostalgic form, those realities are softened into “global greatness,” “national character,” or “civilizational confidence.” The violence disappears, while the prestige remains. What is left is a sanitized inheritance, a symbolic capital that can be spent in the present.

The same mechanism shows up elsewhere whenever power feels constrained. Elites do not always defend themselves with force. Often they defend themselves by making their own authority appear natural, inevitable, or historically entitled. When corporate actors resist stronger due diligence rules, climate liability, or access to evidence for victims, the fight is not only technical. It is also narrative. It is a struggle over whether accountability will be framed as basic justice or as dangerous overreach.

Corporate due diligence is the anti fantasy

At first glance, a corporate duty to identify human rights and environmental harms seems bureaucratic. It sounds like compliance language, full of procedures, filings, and deadlines. But beneath that administrative surface lies something radical: due diligence destroys the fantasy that harm is accidental, distant, or someone else’s problem.

That is why it provokes resistance. The CSDDD, even in watered down form, says a large company cannot plausibly benefit from global complexity while disowning global responsibility. If a firm profits from a supplier that exploits labor, pollutes water, or contributes to emissions, then the moral and legal distance between headquarters and harm is no longer sacred. It can be traced, named, and contested.

This is a profound shift in how power is imagined. It replaces the myth of the clean center and dirty periphery with a more accurate picture: modern corporate power is a web, and the web is only as ethical as the points where it touches people and ecosystems.

The most important part is not even the reporting. It is the possibility of access to justice. Once victims can obtain evidence, meet reasonable time limits, and bring claims, the law begins to look less like a ceremonial text and more like a lever. Accountability becomes something more than public relations. It becomes enforceable.

And that is precisely where the political struggle intensifies. If empire nostalgia is a way of preserving national self esteem, then regulatory dilution is a way of preserving corporate self immunity. Both are attempts to keep power intact by controlling the story of responsibility.

Power prefers stories in which consequences are remote, diffuse, and debatable.

The climate dimension makes this even clearer. Climate harm is the ultimate test of whether institutions are willing to confront delayed, distributed violence. The damage is not always immediate, and the perpetrators are often layered through subsidiaries, financiers, contractors, and legal jurisdictions. That makes it easy to pretend nobody is truly at fault. Yet the atmosphere does not care about narrative convenience. Physics is less forgiving than politics.

When climate liability is excluded, the law signals that some forms of destruction remain too systemically embedded to punish. That is not neutrality. It is a political decision to protect the architecture of harm.

The hidden link: both crises reward unreality

Brexit nostalgia and corporate impunity are not identical, but they share a crucial structure: both reward a form of licensed unreality. One says a post imperial nation can recover greatness by reclaiming sovereign myth. The other says a transnational economy can remain legitimate while postponing the consequences of its own externalities.

In both cases, reality becomes inconvenient. For the nationalist, reality means interdependence, demographic complexity, and a reduced global role. For the corporation, reality means supply chain responsibility, ecological limits, and the impossibility of endless extraction without social cost. So the system reaches for abstraction. It turns history into pageantry and liability into paperwork.

This helps explain why both forms of power are so good at mobilizing emotion while avoiding transformation. A populist campaign can speak in the language of pride, betrayal, and rebirth. A corporate lobby can speak in the language of competitiveness, administrative burden, and legal certainty. The rhetoric differs, but the function is similar. It narrows the field of imagination so that genuine change feels reckless.

Consider the analogy of a leaking house. One response is to repaint the walls and rearrange the furniture so the rooms still feel dignified. Another response is to inspect the pipes, replace the damaged sections, and admit that the house needs serious repair. Nostalgic nationalism repaints. Weak corporate regulation repaints. Neither wants to open the walls.

That is why both feel stabilizing in the short term. Repainting is emotionally cheaper than repair. It lets people keep moving through familiar rooms without confronting structural decay. But the longer the repairs are delayed, the more expensive the eventual collapse.

There is also a psychological parallel. Nostalgia and impunity both depend on distance from consequence. The former keeps historical violence at a symbolic remove. The latter keeps material harm at a legal remove. In both systems, the suffering of others becomes background noise.

From empire to enterprise: the politics of selective responsibility

A useful way to understand these dynamics is through the idea of selective responsibility. This is the habit of claiming authority, benefit, and prestige while rejecting the burdens that come with them.

Empire practiced selective responsibility by extracting wealth and legitimacy from colonies while denying the full humanity or political standing of colonized peoples. Contemporary nationalist nostalgia can preserve that asymmetry in symbolic form, even after the empire has formally ended. It says: we still deserve the aura of command, but we no longer owe the history that produced it.

Corporations practice selective responsibility in a different register. They may accept the language of sustainability, human rights, and stakeholder concern, but only to the point where those commitments do not interfere with profits, legal exposure, or financing structures. They want the reputational upside of moral seriousness without the operational consequences.

The parallel is revealing. In both settings, power wants status without accountability. It wants the right to define the game while escaping the rules.

This is why reforms that look merely technical can become transformative. When due diligence requires evidence, timelines, and liability pathways, it alters the moral geometry of the system. It says that damage is not an unfortunate side effect of complexity. It is a foreseeable outcome of decisions made by identifiable institutions. That shift matters because institutions behave differently when harm can no longer be hidden inside complexity.

The same lesson applies to national narratives. A society that stops romanticizing imperial greatness can begin to ask better questions: What were the costs of that greatness? Who paid for it? What habits of domination survived its formal end? These questions are not academic. They determine whether a country can mature politically or remains trapped in compensation fantasies.

The practical lesson: build systems that make denial expensive

If nostalgia and impunity are both forms of managed unreality, then the antidote is not moral lecturing alone. It is institutional design that makes denial harder to sustain.

For nations, that means refusing the shortcut of myth. Education, public memory, museums, media, and political speech all shape whether a society can face its own history without collapsing into shame or self worship. The goal is not self hatred. It is proportional honesty. Mature countries can tell the truth about their achievements without disguising their violence.

For corporations, the equivalent is straightforward in principle, even if difficult in practice: require real traceability, meaningful access to evidence, credible liability, and climate obligations with teeth. If harm is traceable, it is harder to outsource morally. If victims can sue, it is harder to hide behind jurisdiction. If financial actors cannot remain exempt forever, the structure of incentives begins to shift.

There is a deeper design principle here that applies beyond law and politics: any system that allows benefits to be privatized and harms to be externalized will eventually become addicted to unreality. This is true for businesses, states, and even personal lives. We all drift toward stories that make us look innocent. Institutions are simply better at making those stories durable.

The challenge, then, is to create feedback loops that reattach action to consequence. That is what serious regulation does. That is what honest historical reckoning does. Both make it harder to live inside a flattering lie.

Key Takeaways

Nostalgia is often a power strategy, not just a feeling. When reality is unsettling, old myths can restore psychological comfort while blocking political honesty.
Corporate due diligence matters because it turns hidden harm into visible responsibility. It weakens the fantasy that global damage is too diffuse to regulate.
Selective responsibility is the common logic. Empires and corporations both want the prestige of power without the burdens of accountability.
The best reforms make denial expensive. Traceability, access to evidence, and liability change behavior because they collapse the distance between action and consequence.
A mature public culture tells the truth without romanticizing dominance. That applies to national history and to economic systems alike.

Conclusion: the future belongs to institutions that can survive the truth

The real divide is not between optimism and pessimism. It is between systems that need illusions to function and systems that can survive exposure. Britain’s imperial nostalgia and the resistance to strong corporate accountability come from the same human temptation: to protect identity by postponing reckoning.

But postponement is not neutrality. It is a wager that the costs will be borne elsewhere, later, by people with less power. Eventually, those costs arrive anyway, in the form of political fracture, ecological breakdown, legal backlash, or moral exhaustion.

The more useful question is not, “How do we preserve what once made us great?” It is, “What forms of greatness can endure without lying about their own foundations?” That is a harder standard. It is also the only one worth having.

A country, like a corporation, becomes truly strong not when it can endlessly narrate its innocence, but when it can tell the truth about its reach, accept responsibility for its effects, and still choose to act justly. That is not decline. That is adulthood.