It would be wrong to assume that only European imperial pasts are present in the contemporary international system, having left their marks on historical polities that are kept up by today’s polities. The steppe tradition is still alive in parts of Central Asia. It has left a solid legacy in Turkey, as well as remnants in Russia. The difference between these polities and European ones are often observed. The debt they owe to the Eurasian imperial steppe tradition takes us one step closer to accounting for these differences.