[April, 1997]
It is a striking fact that for many of the medieval European chroniclers (invariably monks) who concerned themselves with recording the routines of their everyday lives, religious—that is, Christian—belief was such an all-pervasive and over-arching commonplace of their existence that it made little sense for them to refer to it in a direct way at all. So it is for us today with regard to what has become known as the ‘nation state’. Its contemporary pre-eminence is such that it is difficult for us to conceive of a world in which human affairs could be ordered differently, and, even when we do examine concrete phenomena involving actual nations or nationalisms, the very division of the world into a system of nation states in the first place will frequently, through familiarity, pass comment. Indeed, the very ubiquity of the concept should stand as a warning against the adoption of a teleological explanation of its genesis and history, an approach often exhibited in the work of writers directly inspired by nationalism. In this respect, Renan’s observation of the unavoidable connection between nation-building and ‘getting one’s history wrong’ is as pertinent today as when it was first made. [1]
In opposition to this approach, much of the historiography of the last fifty years or so concerning the broad arena of nationalism indicates that the modern nation state is, in historical terms, a relatively recent phenomenon. A clearly defining moment in its history was the French Revolution of 1789, and the century and a quarter that followed was a particularly febrile period of national state formation in Europe. Indeed, philological analyses of terms such as ‘state’, ‘nation’ and ‘government’ in western European languages tend to suggest that they only take on something approaching their modern meanings from the eighteenth century and even after. [2] However, if the ‘long nineteenth century’ of European nation-building saw the interplay between the national and the social in its most turbulent form, it could also be
argued that this process itself only represented the fruition of a preceding period of development of ‘national’ forms. The degree to which this may or may not be the case forms the substance of what follows below.
Before any further inquiry is undertaken, however, we need to be clear what we mean when we use terms such as ‘the nation state’. This is not necessarily a simple or uncontroversial task: the historiography of the nation state is so littered with attempts to define the concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’ that it almost appears as if there are as many definitions as historians. It will be forgiven, therefore, if—for the sake of clarity—a little time is spent on this point.
For our purposes here, perhaps the most fruitful approach will be to try to establish what is specific to the nation state as it exists in the modern world, and from there to begin to make comparisons with the political and ideological forms and processes which precede it. Clearly, the term itself implies an identification between ‘state’ and ‘nation’ (or ‘people’): indeed, it is this identity that is one of the direct legacies bequeathed by the constitutional concerns of French Revolution. For E. J. Hobsbawm, for example, the nation that emerged after the Revolution ‘was the body of citizens whose collective sovereignty constituted them a state which was their political expression. For, whatever else a nation was, the element of citizenship and mass participation or choice was never absent from it.’ [3] In addition to this identity between the state and the (sovereign) people, the modern nation state also involves an identity between state and territory. As Benedict Anderson has observed: ‘In the modern conception, state sovereignty is fully, flatly and evenly operative over each square centimetre of a legally demarcated territory.’ [4] These identities between the state on the one hand and people and territory on the other implies a final and important distinctive feature: its limited—finite—nature, and, following from this, the opposition between each actual nation state and all the others. Again, as Anderson points out: ‘No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind. The most messianic nationalists do not dream of a day when all the members of the human race will join their nation in the way that it was possible, in certain epochs, for, say, Christians to dream of a wholly Christian planet.’ [5] Nation states may seek to colonise other nation states and subjugate their populations, but they do not in general seek to convert them.
Thus, in the modern nation state, both state and people, and state and territory are contiguous, and obtain over a defined (and therefore limited) territory. The complex ideological content of these relationships is found in sovereignty, citizenship and popular identification with the nation state, and takes the form of national (or nationalist) self-identification of persons or peoples, and is—with certain qualifications—the predominant form of public human self-identification in the modern world, and is unique to the phenomenon from which it is derived.
A cursory comparison between this model of the nation state and the Europe that existed at the beginning of our millennium will indicate just how distinctive and—in historical terms—how new the contemporary world of the nation state actually is. What distinguished the political structure of Europe (or, more accurately, what was to become Europe) at the dawn of the eleventh century was the prevailing ‘enormous fragmentation of sovereignty’, in which emperors, kings and other potentates ‘ prevailed as conquerors, tribute takers, and rentiers, not as heads of state that durably and densely regulated life within their realms. Inside their jurisdictions, furthermore, rivals and ostensible subordinates commonly used armed force on behalf of their own interests. [...] Private armies proliferated through much of the continent. [...] Within the ring formed by these sprawling, ephemeral states sovereignty fragmented even more, as hundreds of principalities, bishoprics, city-states, and other authorities exercised overlapping control in the small hinterlands of their capitals.’ [6] The contrast between this world and our own could not be more stark: in place of the rigid territorial and political parcellisation of the contemporary world of the nation state, we are confronted with a world in which states (if indeed we can even use such a precise term for this period) ‘were defined by centres, borders were indistinct, and sovereignties faded into one another.’ [7] Overarching this diffusion of sovereignty stood the Church—or, more to the point, the medieval Christian outlook—which was, in contrast to the territorially and ideologically delimited nation state, imbued with a strong sense of ‘universalism’, in which the community (in this case the Christian community) viewed itself as ‘cosmically central’. [8]
The intervening centuries between this early medieval world and our own saw the emergence, fruition and eventual triumph of the modern system of nation states. Before we are in a position to examine the degree to which we can identify precursors to the nineteenth-century period of national state formation, we need first to note a necessary distinction between the elements of ‘nation’ and ‘state’ which make up the whole. For while in its ‘finished’ form the modern nation state embodies the ineluctable unity of these two elements, when we examine its early stages of development we can discern that the two are distinct and separate entities: ‘Historically, the formation of states with a centralised government administering and controlling a clearly defined geographical territory preceded the articulation of ideas of the nation.’ [9] The point is central. In practice, in attempting to determine the patterns of lineage of the nation state, we are faced with examining both patterns of state development and the forms of ideological identification with the state as distinct developments. The pattern is not, as nationalist-inspired historiography would have it, that it was ‘the people’ (constituted as the ‘nation’) that made the state, but rather that it was the state that made the nation. As V. G. Kiernan has observed, in reality ‘no dynasty set out to build a nation state; each aimed at unlimited expansion.’ [10]
The process of the supercession of the diffused and interwoven pattern of fragmented sovereignty by a system of states which began to organise sovereignty around a central point and over a fixed territory was a slow and evolutionary one. There was no ‘revolution’ in the emergence of the nation state (at least not, that is, until the shock of 1789). What we are faced with from the latter half of the fifteenth century and on is the gradual building up of states: that is, of the emergence of executive political structures, separate from the rest of society, and concerned with the functions of administration, government and war. The features particular to the early modern state—‘new’ features, and features in which we can begin to discern patterns of government and administration if not similar then analogous to our own systems of government and administration—began to take on a solid and identifiable form at this point. They began to develop as a consequence of and alongside the renewed economic, cultural and demographic expansion of European society as it emerged from the long crisis of stagnation and decline of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Now, in a survey of this scope, some degree of generalisation is unavoidable: it is important to point out, therefore, that this pattern of development was not universal or even particularly even. State formation in the eastern half of the European peninsular was retarded in comparison to the west; indeed, it is really only from the beginning of this renewed upturn in European economy and society from the end of the fifteenth century that we begin to see the fundamental divergence in patterns of development that prompts us to make the distinction between ‘east’ and ‘west’ in Europe (a distinction that is acutely relevant to the present day). Even with regard to western Europe the pattern was an uneven one, although it is the case that the reigns of Louis XI in France, Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain, Henry VII in England and Maximillian in Austria marked something of a turning point in the process and coincide in time almost perfectly. [11]
The particular state functions of government and administration which began to make their appearance from this point—nascent at first, but increasingly taking on stronger and, in terms of the modern world, more familiar forms—can be summarised as those involving the organisation of military affairs, the development of state bureaucracies, the institutionalisation of taxation, the expansion of trade and the systematisation of diplomacy. It is not so much that the existing state assumed control of these functions (if we go back into history before this period then it is in fact difficult to speak of the existence of a ‘state’ as such in any meaningful sense at all) but rather that the need for central control of these operations prompted the necessity of state formation itself. It was the development of centralised state functions of any type that is distinctive of this period, and it was their growth and consolidation that marked the political structure of European society (or now, increasingly, societies) over the following three centuries.
Such patterns of state organisation by their very nature began to pose limits to the geographical area over which the functions they incorporated were operative: ‘The nation was the empire manqué. It had to be large enough to survive and to sharpen its claws on its neighbours, but small enough to be organised from the centre and to feel itself as an entity. On the close-packed western edge of Europe, any excessive ballooning of territory was checked by competition and geographical limits.’ [12]
Over-arching these developments in the political structure of society came ideological challenges to the medieval world-view which had preceded: challenges which were themselves products of the very economic and social expansion which had prompted the necessity of developed state structures. The universalism of the medieval outlook, which had perceived an identity (potential if not actual) between humanity and Christendom, was undermined by the experience of the exploration of the non-European world: the resulting contact with other faiths engendered a conception of territorial distinctions between faiths and an understanding of humanity in a comparative sense, which directly foreshadowed the ‘limited’ and finite element which is at the heart of the nation state. Alongside this, the growth of a European print culture undermined the universal and sacral language of the medieval church: Latin. The weakening of the role of Latin as a result of the increasing legitimacy gained by the vernacular languages as a result of this process prefigured the fragmentation of the sacred community of Christendom itself into more pluralised and fragmented entities. [13]
This incipient ideological fragmentation of the medieval outlook cleared the way for the possibility for subjects (and ultimately citizens) to identify with states that were now beginning to operate over a ‘national’ territory. It was not so much that nationalism replaced religion, although it is true that there are marked similarities between the two outlooks: as Lewis Namier observed (perhaps stretching the point a little): ‘religion is a sixteenth-century word for nationalism.’ [14] Rather, it is the case that nationalism ‘has to be understood by aligning it, not with self-consciously held political ideologies, but with the large cultural systems that preceded it, out of which—as well as against which—it came into being.’ [15]
Is it reasonable therefore, to characterise these new dynastic states as nation states? Now, the developments described above—which characterise (western) European society from the mid to late fifteenth century to the mid to late eighteenth century—clearly mark a distinct phase in the development of the contemporary world. Indeed, if a tentative definition of the ‘early modern’ period itself could be offered at this point it could be said to be that era which witnesses an agglomeration of state structures by the western European dynastic states. But it is perhaps equally helpful to understand this phase of European history as something of an interregnum between the medieval and the modern worlds: standing, Janus-like, facing both past and future, suggestive of what is to come as well as incorporating much of what has gone before. Our overall judgement has to be coloured by the fact that the early-modern dynastic states were fundamentally just that: dynastic states. ‘Kingship organised everything around a high centre. Its legitimacy derives from divinity, not from populations, who, after all, are subjects, not citizens.’ [16] The state itself was the patrimony of the monarch, rather than something that arose from the sovereignty of its people.
In addition to this, the dynastic nobility was fundamentally a landowning nobility: the objective of its domination was the necessity of territorial acquisition, regardless of the ‘nationality’ of the communities inhabiting it. It was not language, ethnicity or shared common experiences that defined the limits of its power, but land. ‘No common tongues had to be shared between lords and peasants. [...] For public territories formed a continuum with private estates, and their classical means of acquisition was force, invariably decked out in claims of religious or genealogical legitimacy.’ [17]
All of this is not to deny the existence of forms of proto-nationalism (or, more accurately, proto-patriotism) in early modern Europe, even at the level of the rural mass. The evidence, however, points to the fact that such instances were relatively limited in scope and depth—at least in comparison with the modern world—and it is not always easy to discern elements of a modern positive sense of national identity in what was fundamentally a spontaneous xenophobia. [18] Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a mechanism for the development of positive sense of national community in societies that were largely illiterate (especially at the rural base), in which print culture was nascent (if growing), and in which economic ties across embryonic national territories were still mediated by regional particularisms and ‘feudal’ privileges. It was to take a significant development of a usury and mercantile economy as well as a qualitative growth in urban culture before genuine national identification was to grip sufficient numbers of subjects to prompt them to aspire to be ‘citizens’. And even when this did occur, as it did for example in spectacular fashion in the run-up to 1789, the great mass of the population of revolutionary France were peasants: significant in their social weight but largely bystanders with regard to the intellectual firment afflicting the urban population in general and Paris in particular. The title of one account of the national incorporation of the mass of the population in France—Eugene Weber’s Peasants into Frenchmen—precisely sums up the nature of the necessary process as well as indicating the incompatibility of the two poles. [19]
The designation of the early modern dynastic monarchies as ‘nation states’ would appear to beg more questions than it actually answers, therefore. Specifically, it clouds the contradictory nature of the period, standing as it did between the medieval and modern worlds. While it is certainly the case that in appearance the new state structures that emerged over this period exhibited features that are similar to later, modern patterns of political and social organisation, these existed structurally alongside patterns of dynastic kingship fundamentally at odds with modern forms of political and state organisation. The fact that the actual nineteenth-century fruition of national state formation in Europe was preceded by the revolutionary overthrow of some the most consolidated ancien regimes indicates the incompatibility between the early modern world and the contemporary. Propitious to the future development of the nation state, historically ‘necessary’ even for its future emergence, and incorporating the first ideological prodromes of what was to follow: all this is true. But to ascribe the designation of ‘nation state’ to the dynastic monarchies of the Europe of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—even to the most developed of them—would be to commit errors of teleology and anachronism similar to, although of a lesser scale than, those very modern propagandists of nationalism who Renan believed were doomed to ‘get history wrong’.
[1] ‘To forget and—I will venture to say—to get one’s history wrong, are essential factors in the making of a nation.’ Ernest Renan, ‘What is a Nation?’ in: Omar Dhabour and Micheline R. Ishay (eds.), The Nationalism Reader (New Jersey, 1995),145.
[2] Two representative examples of such analyses are: E. J Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge, 1992), 14-19 (with regard to the Castillian and German languages); and Albert Soboul, Understanding the French Revolution (London, 1988), 194-7 (with regard to French).
[3] E. J Hobsbawm, ibid., 18-9.
[4] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London, 1991) 19.
[5] Ibid., 7.
[6] Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States, AD 990-1992 (Oxford, 1992), 39-40.
[7] Benedict Anderson, ibid., 19.
[8] Ibid., 13.
[9] Mary Fulbrook, ‘Introduction: States, Nations and the Development of Europe’, in: Mary Fulbrook (ed.), National Histories and European History (London, 1993), 3.
[10] V. G. Kiernan, ‘State and Nation in Western Europe’, Past and Present 31, July 1965, 35.
[11] A point made convincingly by Perry Anderson in Lineages of the Absolutist State (London, 1989), 23.
[12] V. G. Kiernan, ibid., 35-6.
[13] For an account of these processes see: Benedict Anderson, ibid., 17-19.
[14] Cited in Christopher Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution (Harmondsworth, 1969), 36.
[15] Benedict Anderson, ibid., 111.
[16] Ibid., 119.
[17] Perry Anderson, ibid., 32.
[18] For an account of this in early modern England, see: Rodney Hilton, ‘Were the English English?’, in: Raphael Samuel (ed.) Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, vol. 1 (London, 1989), 40-43.
[19] Eugene Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen (London, 1977).