Delving into the Past

Having noted the successes of the nation state in our time, it may be interesting to ask the question as to where and when it was launched on its historic career. But first a few words of definition may be useful. I am not entering into the endless learned debate on the nature of the nation. I take as my premise what we can observe every day, i.e. that there are Englishmen and Poles and Italians who are clearly distinct and that others see them as such.

It might, on the contrary, be helpful to spell out what, to my mind, constitutes in our modern eyes a true and recognizable state. It has, to begin with, to occupy a fixed territory and to have a sedentary population (which distinguishes it from the nomadic tribes of the early Middle Ages). It has a permanent central government assisted by a body of trained officials and a regular local administration. It has its own currency and army. There are a treasury and a fiscal organisation, distinct from the private purse of the monarch, who rules but does not own the country and its resources. There is national legislation and in some cases even one common law. There are representative assemblies and a network of law courts capped by a supreme body of professional judges. There is a sense of stability and continuity and identification with the people.

So when and where did the contours of this formation appear on the European stage? Clearly not in the age of the Völkerwanderung, when nomadic tribes from the ‘forests of Germany’ roamed all over Europe. Some were large, such as the Franks, some, such as the Hwicce in England, were no more than an extended family. The blood relation was the essential bond. They were often at war and had leaders who were called kings, but in reality were tribal chiefs parading with the trappings of statehood. Tribal custom was their law, a situation known as the personality, as opposed to the territoriality of the law.

Even the ‘empire’ of Charlemagne was so far removed from modern statehood that when in AD 806 he made a political testament, known to historians as the Divisio Regnorum, he divided his realm between his three sons as if it concerned the family estate (one wonders what the Byzantines thought of this illiterate ‘Roman emperor’ in Aachen). However, the two elder sons died before their father, leaving Louis the Pious as sole heir. He reversed the trend by proclaiming in AD 817 an ordinance known as the Ordinatio Imperii, which stipulated that in future the empire should pass undivided to his oldest son Lothar, who at the same occasion was made associate emperor. Religious considerations had been decisive, as an undivided empire was seen as the best protector of the Church. But reality overtook this sensible plan, for Louis's sons started to quarrel and in AD 843, three years after the pious emperor's death, his lands were nevertheless divided among his sons: the short-lived Carolingian empire had finally unravelled. Such trappings of statehood as had existed were lost and, especially in tenth- and eleventh-century France, a period followed when royal authority became insignificant and power fell into the hands of feudal warlords, the ‘king’ being just one of them, with effective control only of the area around Paris and Orleans. Undisciplined and uncontrolled feudalism reigned supreme and the very notion of law and order was lost to such an extent that the Church decreed the Truce and the Peace of God to give the ordinary folk some respite.

The regional warlords were fighting each other and even their own ‘king’, as when Count Robert of Flanders fought and killed his rival Arnulf at the battle of Cassel in 1071 and put the latter's ally, King Philip of France, ignominiously to flight.Reference Verlinden⁴

The degradation of public life went so far that even within the territorial principalities local lords ruling from their castles over the surrounding lands were in full command.⁵

Everything turned on the personal bond between lord and vassal, created by oath and homage, so that German medievalists used to speak of a Personenverbandstaat as opposed to the later Oberflächenstaat (the term Staat being somewhat of a misnomer for the former category). As both the old blood-connection (the Sippe) and the new feudal bond were of crucial importance, it is not surprising that the conflict between the two allegiances was the theme of some of the epic narratives of the age. One naturally thinks of the twelfth-century dramatic Chanson de Raoul de Cambrai, where the conflicting claims of feudalism and family are in crisis. It is a story of war and revenge caused by King Louis's plan to give Raoul de Cambrai another fief upon his father's death, causing the four sons of Herbert of Vermandois to lose their heritage.⁶ In the end, this extreme fragmentation of power became unbearable, as even the dread of hellfire did not deter overbearing knights, however graphic the description of their torment by enthusiastic devils above the west-portal of some Romanesque churches.

It was under Louis VI that the rebirth of royal power was started in earnest, while the rulers of the territorial principalities were also, each in his own land, building some regular form of administration.

England

Before studying the French situation in more detail, we now turn our attention to England, where we find a very different picture. The English are an ancient nation: already in the eighth century the Venerable Bede wrote a Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum. At that time his people lived in ‘seven kingdoms’, but by the tenth century the English lived in a unified realm, under one king, one witenagemot, one well-structured regional administration and one body of royal legislation, written in the vernacular (an unknown situation on the Continent) and the king's writ ran all over the country.

There was an absolute control of the national coinage, the silver penny showing the king's name and being, from the eighth to the thirteenth century, solid and internationally respected. While the French monarchy was in utter disintegration, the Old English state was flourishing and efficiently run: there was no feudalism of any sort.

This early nation state survived the shock of the Norman onslaught for, although the conquerors introduced fiefs and vassals, and the Norman king was the supreme overlord, it was feudalism of the disciplined and firmly controlled variety. Anglo-Norman feudalism had nothing to do with divisive politics, as the king had a firm grip on his vassals. Military fiefs were important for some time, but in the all important matter of land holding, feudal tenures were the core of the English common law for many centuries.

Norman and Angevin rule was firmly based on the solid foundation of the Old English state. By the time of Henry II, England had a successful administration, a strong central government and a streamlined treasury, which in 1179 produced the Dialogus de Scaccario, a practical treatise on the procedure in the central accounting office. The country also lived under one common law, which in 1187 was carefully described in the Tractatus de legibus et consuetudinibus regni Anglie, known under the name of Glanvill. However, Henry II ruled over a kingdom that contained two nations, the Normans and the English, and his charters opened with the standard greeting to the king's subjects as Francis et Anglicis. We are told that there was already a good deal of intermarriage, which heralded one nationality, a process much hastened by the ‘loss of Normandy’ in 1204, which cut the lifeline between the English and the continental Normans: thirteenth-century England was a true nation state. The Hundred Years War only strengthened this sense of national identity and pride. Thirteenth-century England had one king, one parliament, one common law and one streamlined administration.

France

Let us go back to France where, in the twelfth century, the monarchy at last came to grips with reality and acted to restore law and order and bring the provinces under the control of Paris. Louis VI fought many battles with the robber barons in his direct domain, besieging and destroying their castles. He also intervened further away and in 1127, for example, went to Flanders in an – unsuccessful – attempt to impose his candidate as successor to Count Charles the Good who had died childless.

Around that time there was a timid revival of royal legislation and we notice the appearance of the term ‘crown’, not for the ornamental headgear worn by the king on solemn occasions, but the Crown as the symbol of the authority of the state, the supreme governing power, which was everlasting and transcended the life and deeds of the ruling monarch. The Crown existed independent of the person who happened to sit on the throne (we are still familiar with expressions such as ‘the French Crown’ and ‘a Minister or an Agent of the Crown’). It is surely no coincidence that the term corona regni Francie (as opposed to corona Regis) appears in the charters of King Louis VI⁷ and in the writings of the famous Suger, abbot of St. Denis, subject of King Louis and staunch defender of the monarchy.⁸

Under Philip August the pace quickened. He conquered Normandy and resisted his most powerful vassal, Philip of Alsace, count of Flanders, adding, after the treaty of Boves of 1185, Amiens, Valois and Vermandois to his domain and having already in 1180 brought the southern half of the county of Flanders under royal control. In 1214 he won the battle of Bouvines against a coalition of England, Flanders and Germany, establishing his country as a major European power.

In the course of that century the Crown brought several French principalities under the direct rule of Paris, appointing royal officials to replace the ancient regional dynasties. Around the middle of the century the monarchy founded the Parlement of Paris as the highest law court in the land manned by professional university-trained judges.

The climax came under Philip the Fair, who fought the English and the Flemings, conquered important cities such as Lyon and convoked the Estates General, representing the people of France, in the Notre Dame in Paris in 1302. He won their support in his conflict with Pope Boniface VIII: even the French clergy was on his side. It was an imposing occasion for the French nation and the French state. Philip was surrounded by legists, who had studied the leges of the Romans and found there that quod principi placuit legis habet vigorem, i.e. ‘what pleased the emperor has force of law’. They also had been told by their compatriot, Jean de Blanot, that rex Franciae in regno suo princeps est, i.e. the king of France is an emperor in his own realm.⁹ At the Estates General of 1302 one of those legists, Pierre Flotte, the chancellor, made a speech explaining that the king of France held his kingdom directly from God and not from the pope. There was, however, a sinister side to Philip's triumphant regime, when it was shown how the full might of the state could destroy people and corporations. When the king judged that the powerful and wealthy Order of the Templars had become a rival force in the kingdom, he decided to strike. In one fell swoop, in the early hours of 13 October 1307, all the Templars in France were arrested, tortured, subjected to a series of mock trials and sentenced. A great number were burned at the stake.¹⁰

Four Stages

It may be useful here succinctly to characterise the four stages of the development just described.

In the first stage, in the early Middle Ages, the Germanic invaders who roamed all over Europe lived in tribal groupings, ultimately rooted in blood relationship. Those peasants and warriors, led by tribal chiefs, began to settle on ancient Roman land.

There followed a second phase, when Charlemagne made an attempt to build a Frankish-led multi-tribal state, which was overambitious and failed utterly. Already under his successor Louis the Pious his ‘Roman empire’ began to unravel and, under his grandsons, was divided, and such statehood as had been achieved was lost.

There followed a third phase when, particularly in France, uncontrolled feudalism took hold, based on personal bonds between lords and vassals. The old tribal links were lost, as was Charlemagne's legacy. In France, the king had become irrelevant, as power was in the hands of provincial feudal warlords.

This period of turmoil led eventually to the fourth phase, when royal power was restored and a successful French nation state was built.

It is tempting to speculate what made people move from one stage to the next. The move from tribe to state was no doubt inspired by the example of the Roman Empire and the fascination of the Mediterranean civilisation for the invaders from across the Rhine. Nor should we forget that, whereas the western Roman Empire was only a memory, the eastern was still very much alive and flourishing. It was an example of statehood for Charlemagne, who had extensive relations with the other Rome.

Feudal society was the answer to the void left by the tribal past and the failure of the ensuing quasi-state. It produced a model of personal bonds and land holding that could provide some stability if it was held together by a powerful overlord. Its failure in the tenth and eleventh centuries to guarantee a minimum of law and order led to the reassertion of central control and royal leadership. It is striking how different was the fate of England, where the end of the tribal era in the tenth century led to a national monarchy without an imperial interlude and without the feudalism of the other side of the Channel.

What's in a Name?

In the preceding pages we so often mentioned the state that it is time to delve somewhat deeper into the history and meanings of the word. Nowadays the state can simply refer to a situation or a condition, as when we speak of ‘the state of our health’ or ‘the state of the Union’, but it can also refer to ‘a community of people occupying a defined area and organized under one government’ (according to the definition of the 1998 New Shorter Oxford Dictionary on Historical Principles), as in a ‘Head of State, the Secretary of State’ or ‘the State is in peril’. Likewise in French l’état and l'Etat. This ambiguity goes back to the Latin status, which in Antiquity meant situation or condition, but in the early Middle Ages we find the standard expression of status regni, referring to the state of the kingdom, which could be flourishing or worrying. In the later Middle Ages the expression was shortened to status, which became a term in its own right, referring to the State in our sense. And hence the word passed into the vernacular languages. The old expression was not altogether lost, for we find ‘the state of the German Empire’ in a treatise by Samuel Pufendorf entitled De statu imperii germanici of 1667. The consecration of stato for our ‘state’ and the real breakthrough of the name came in sixteenth-century Italy, in the opening phrase of Machiavelli's Principe, hence also expressions such as ragione di stato (Guicciardini) and raison d'Etat. It then replaced res publica, which was more usual in the Middle Ages.

Church and State

In Old Europe, religion was a supreme and omnipresent force, so it is natural to wonder what role it played in the genesis of the modern State. Was the Church a help or a hindrance?

It is evident that coronation and anointment bestowed great prestige on a new king. It was a solemn religious ceremony, performed in a hallowed place of worship. It elevated the monarchs above ordinary mortals, such as dukes and counts who were not anointed, nor even was every king: Scotland had to wait until the thirteenth century to see its monarch crowned and anointed. It is clear that the king by God's grace, who had a divine mission on earth, was in a good position to build a strong monarchical state. Religion may have been in the hands of the kings, but they were themselves much indebted to religion. It is interesting to note that, in his recent study on the origins of the state, Francis Fukuyama devotes some thoughtful pages to the transition from tribalism to statehood in the early Middle Ages and stresses the role of the religious, as against the political or economic factor.Reference Fukuyama¹¹

It is clear that the Roman Church was an obvious model of a centralized bureaucratic organisation. Ever since the Gregorian Reform, it had acquired a permanent hierarchical structure, with an unbroken chain of command from the papal top in Rome to the archbishops, bishops and rural deans down to the most obscure parish in Scotland, Sweden or Portugal. The Pontiff, assisted by an army of sometimes sycophantic lawyers, wielded supreme executive, legislative and judicial power. He was also backed by an imposing body of canon law and legal theory. All this could not fail to inspire state-building monarchs.

There was a third, less obvious, channel of ecclesiastical influence, in the person of the scholars, all clerics, who reflected on the nature of the State. The later Middle Ages produced a varied literature of political theory, analysing the raison d’être of the State, its relations with the citizens, its legitimacy and, along Aristotelian lines, the forms of government. Their learning gave the secular State the intellectual respectability feudalism never had. They exalted the dignity of the temporal mission and the autonomy of the State against the clergy's claim of spiritual superiority. This was the ‘new science of politics’.¹² We remind ourselves of such authors as Giles of Rome and his De regimine principum, Marsilius of Padua and his Defensor Pacis, Nichole d'Oresme and his French translation of Aristotle's Politics, William Ockham and his De imperatorum et pontificum potestate and John Wycliff and his De officio Regis and De civili dominio. Even poets joined the fray, as when Dante wrote his De Monarchia in support of the imperial against the papal party.Reference Shaw¹³

The Church played a role in the rise of the State in yet another, somewhat unexpected way. During the Dark Ages it had been dependent on worldly leaders. Emperors appointed popes, kings appointed bishops and even sold bishoprics by public auction, and local lords owned the places of worship and their lands (the Eigenkirchen or proprietary churches) and appointed the parish priests. The Reform led by Pope Gregory VII, sometimes called the Papal Revolution, changed all that and, fighting under the banner of the libertas ecclesiae, the Church extricated itself from the grip of emperors, kings and feudal lords. The popes went even further and claimed jurisdiction over the worldly powers – the mere ‘secular arm’ of the Church: the spiritual order was superior to the temporal. Popes intervened in the internal politics of the kingdoms – Innocent III annulled the Magna Carta – and even in the marital problems of kings and queens, as most famously in the case of Philip August and his Danish wife Ingeborg, whom he repudiated, to marry Agnes of Meran, in spite of papal threats. Popes acted as arbiters in international conflicts and admonished crowned heads, addressing them as ‘my son’, as if the Popes were their fathers. Kings were sanctioned and interdicts were laid on their kingdoms, the rulers themselves being excommunicated.¹⁴

Paradoxically, this emancipation of the Church also led to the emancipation of the kingdoms, which were thrown back on their temporal pursuits, which we would consider their proper terrain: law and order, the integrity of the territory, commerce and industry, a stable currency and good relations between government and citizens. In dealing with these matters the states considered themselves the equals, in the temporal sphere, of the clergy and its care of souls. Political theory indeed stressed the autonomy and eminence of emperors and kings. Marsilius of Padua, whom I mentioned before,

The positive role of the Church is easily observed, but in various ways it also was a hindrance on the path of the State, or rather of the sovereign State. Medieval kings knew, even if they disliked acknowledging it, that the pope wielded superior authority as the representative of Christ on earth. As long as papal law was universally applied, appeals went to the Rota Romana, bishops were appointed by the successor of St. Peter and large sums of money left the countries to fill the papal chest: the kingdoms were not sovereign, i.e. ‘not recognizing any authority above them’. National sovereignty was only achieved in the sixteenth century when in Protestant lands all ties with Rome were cut and in Catholic countries papal decrees were only valid after they were accorded a royal placet, and the Eglise gallicane achieved a considerable degree of autonomy. In the eighteenth century papal power had weakened to the point where the kings put pressure on Pope Clement XIV to abolish, in 1773, his most devoted Order of Jesuits. Another medieval obstacle on the road to full statehood was the fiscal and judicial privileges enjoyed by the clergy (a very large group) and the Church fought hard to preserve them, even unto a martyr's death!Reference Barlow¹⁶

Typology

In the preceding pages I have spoken of the state as if it were a single easily identified form of government, but in the past the states appeared under a great variety of shapes and sizes. I will now endeavour to review some of them.

One notorious type can be described as the robber state, remembering St. Augustine's rhetorical question Sine justicia, quid sunt regna nisi magna latrocinia?, i.e. ‘without justice what is the state other than a vast robbery?’. Here a powerful ruling class ruthlessly dominates and exploits the common people. A crass example is offered by England after the defeat of 1066 when an alien band of knights, led by William the Conqueror, occupied the country and installed a regime of military occupation. The Norman invaders appropriated the Old English kingdom, dispossessed the English landowners and ejected the native leaders from all superior functions in state and Church, replacing them with continentals who spoke an alien tongue. Native culture was disdained and literary English, the oldest written European vernacular, driven underground by illiterate Normans for some two centuries.Reference Ormrod¹⁷ Rebellion was brutally repressed, as happened when, in 1069–1070, Yorkshire was devastated by heavily armed Norman bands who spared no one. ‘So terrible was the devastation that the results were still apparent twenty years later’Reference Douglas¹⁸ (when Domesday Book, the ‘Description of the whole kingdom of England’, was compiled).

At the other extreme we find the welfare state, which took on two shapes, the autocratic and the democratic. In the former category we find the Enlightened monarchs, Frederick II of Prussia (1746–86) and Joseph II of Austria (1780–90) and his brother, Leopold II, Grand Duke of Tuscany (1765–90). Their governments were genuinely concerned with the welfare of the citizens and strove to improve their living conditions, freeing them from superstition and feudal bondage. They fostered education, humanized the criminal law and proclaimed legal codes inspired by rational thinking.Reference Gilardeau¹⁹ All this, however, was done for the people, but not by the people: the measures for their happiness descended from the top.

In the twentieth century, the welfare state was the work of the elected representatives of the people. It ensured social security against poverty, old age and sickness, sometimes even outright nationalizing medical care and turning the medical profession into a branch of the state. It tried to achieve full employment and to reduce the gap between rich and poor by taxation and the redistribution of wealth. It successfully widened access to higher education.

Between those two extremes we situate the indifferent state, which believes in laissez faire and only a minimum of political interference. The classic example is nineteenth-century Britain, where the state gave a free hand to entrepreneurs, who created wealth for themselves and the country. Without actually being a ‘stateless society’, it was a near thing.²⁰

The citizen was supposed to take care of himself, and free enterprise reigned so supreme that even the prosecution of criminals was left to the initiative of private plaintiffs. The British Empire was launched on its course by commercial enterprise and capitalist shareholders. This state was not concerned with the plight of the sick and the poor, who were left to the mercy of private charities. The proletariat had the choice between the coal mines and the ‘satanic mills’ or the workhouse. Educating the masses was no governmental responsibility, let alone interfering in the life of the Universities (except for a few Regius professorships). Very few officials worked in the ministries in London, and there were equally few judges in the Court of Common Pleas in Westminster, ‘the lock and key of the common law’ as Sir Edward Coke put it:²¹ in 1830 their number was raised from 12 to 15. They were professional paid judges, in contrast with the justices of the peace, who were unpaid volunteers drawn from the better classes and sitting all over the country. They had no law degree for the simple reason that there were no Law Faculties and the Universities granted no degrees in common law (for Bagatellsachen there were also county courts). Redistribution of wealth was not on the cards, as private enrichment was encouraged and taxation was minimal and direct tax on income non-existent.

Britain was, however, no stateless society, for the government had a twofold important task. It ensured law and order, punishing a wide variety of crime with death, and it relied on the army and, in particular, on the navy to provide a military backbone for the Empire.

Most states were nation built: it was the nation that reached statehood. Occasionally, however, the opposite took place and we have a state-built nation. One example is Switzerland, which for many centuries was an area occupied by German, French and Italian mountain dwellers. In the thirteenth century, three German speaking rural communities – the Ur-cantons – fought free of Habsburg rule and formed a confederation. During the following centuries they were joined by neighbouring groups of villages and cities – German, French and Italian – the last acquisition being Geneva, which in 1815 became a canton of the sworn alliance, the Eidgenossenschaft. This was then still a loose confederation of autonomous cantons until, in 1848, after a short armed conflict, present-day Switzerland was born as one state with a central government and parliament, an army and a federal constitution, Swiss citizenship and eventually one civil code. All this created a true Swiss national feeling, distinct from the surrounding countries. The population was attached to its land, its federal form of government, its parliamentary democracy, tempered by the referendum, and its preparedness for war in defence of its neutrality. The new state produced a new nation on the European scene.

I would like, for its rarity value, to mention here the curious expression ‘racial state’ used by the well-known diplomat and art collector Harry Kessler for what we call the nation state. In Kessler's time race was an unimpeachable term, to a present-day readership, however, it is quite unpalatable. But then, again, what is in a name?Reference Easton²²

I could, of course, expand my typology, but I prefer to round it off with one more category, the good state. What would the ideal state look like? It would be unified but respectful of regional diversity. It would not enforce a single ideology or religion and would ban discrimination, torture and capital punishment. The government would be accountable and practise glasnost (no Official Secrets Act). The leaders would act in discussion with the citizens, winning their allegiance and giving them a homely feeling. Officials would be selected on merit, without favouritism. The state would not engage in imperialist adventures and beware of delusions of grandeur.

I leave it to the reader to find a country that comes close to this somewhat utopian picture (or is it a mirage?).

Cause and Effect

I started my discourse pointing out the success of the nation state in present-day Europe and I would like to conclude by asking what factors could explain it. One series of events clearly played an important role in the twentieth century, when three great supranational conglomerates – the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Soviet Union and Communist Yugoslavia – were dissolved and a good number of nations – small and not so small – were freed from the dictates of Vienna, Moscow or Belgrade and achieved national statehood.

Something similar had happened in the nineteenth century when the Ottoman Empire lost its grip on Europe, and Bulgarians, Greeks, Romanians and Serbs became independent kingdoms (three of them under German monarchs), modelled on western countries and even adopting their constitutions (as Greece did in 1844 and Romania in 1866, taking over the Belgian constitution of 1831).Reference Gilissen²³

The basic question remains why the nation state became so important in our more distant past. The core of the problem is the indestructible ethnic diversity of Europe which, unlike the Chinese Celestial Empire, never could produce a single nation. So, when the peoples emerged from their tribal and feudal past, and modern governance came into its stride, this naturally took place in the confines of the nations. For a long time the fate of the smaller or weaker members of the comitas nationum was in the hands of the Great Powers, which acquired them by marriage or warfare or bought, sold or bartered them and met at international congresses in order to draw new political frontiers, without regard for the cultural needs and sensibilities of the people involved (the partitions of Poland come to mind). Those nations understandably wanted at last to be masters of their own destiny and to achieve statehood.

I believe, moreover, that the warmth of a cultural community and its shared identity, traditions, literature and lieux de mémoire, combined with the pride in political freedom and self government, responds to a deep-seated human desire: a good point for the nation state.