Before the Nation-state

I’m starting to harbor a suspicion that my incessant harping on the subject of the nation-state is creating an impression that there were no state forms before it.

Of course, there were. They were all successful for their time and served the needs of the moment. Machiavelli, Conde – Duque de Olivares, Cardinal Richelieu, Charles V – these were all great statesmen who would have found the rhetoric of nationalism bizarre.

I don’t speak of these preceding state forms because I’m not extremely interested but they have a long and glorious history. A moment would always come when they stopped serving the purposes of the times, and a new state form would arise.

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30 responses to “Before the Nation-state”

January 2, 2015

\ Machiavelli, Conde – Duque de Olivares, Cardinal Richelieu, Charles V

Were they all promoting monarchy?

I am very ignorant since it’s not a subject which is taught at schools, unfortunately.
Instead of studying Israeli wars and Holocaust twice (once in the middle school and once in the high school), I wish one year of high school history were dedicated to bird’s-eye view of world history: how different state forms developed, different ideologies, etc.

\ I don’t speak of these preceding state forms because I’m not extremely interested but they have a long and glorious history.

Is there a good book describing them?

Could you give one good scholary book and second book “for Dummies,” which is easier and faster to read? Or even a good article describing the developments?

I would love to read a post about that too.

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Clarissa

January 2, 2015
Machiavelli is the state of the princes and Richelieu is the king’s state, if I’m not mistaken.

“I am very ignorant since it’s not a subject which is taught at schools, unfortunately.”
- No, it’s not, which is sad. People don’t get any opportunities even to hear about the nation-state, what it is, when it arose, unless they meet somebody in college who is interested in the subject and can inform them.
“Could you give one good scholary book and second book “for Dummies,” which is easier and faster to read”
- I really don’t know any other resource than my blog that would offer this information in a concise, accessible manner. There are scholarly volumes that go on and on but, realistically, who can expect non-academics who have their own jobs and lives to spend years poring through this stuff? This is why I believe I’m doing something important here when I discuss these things without the academic jargon with people who are interested but can’t dedicate their lives to it. And this is a lot more useful to the general public than having open access to my research which most people are not equipped to read and understand (for one, because they don’t know Spanish.)
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1. el
  
  January 2, 2015
  
  \ I really don’t know any other resource than my blog that would offer this information in a concise, accessible manner.
  
  Formerly, you mentioned the book on liquidity and several books about nationalism. Are they the same books?
  
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  1. DWeird
    
    January 2, 2015
    
    As far as Machiavelli goes, you could simply read The Prince on your own! It’s considered a classic, which means you can get a version with excellent scholarly commentary in nearly any language. It’s also quite a lively book on it’s own, certainly more readable than many modern research articles I’ve seen.
    
    Amusingly, The Prince is to a good degree not about being a prince at all. The medieval view of politics was that it was all about the ruler or ruler’s virtues – the better a person a ruler is, the better off the realm. Machiavelli’s claim was that states had certain regularities in the way they worked independent from what their rulers were like. Thus, a good Prince isn’t a virtuous prince, but the Prince who best understands and can manipulate the reality of the state. This roughly boils down to instilling fear and avoiding hate, by, for example, doing all your cruel deeds in one sweep rather than spread out through time. The endings of Godfather films are machiavellian in this way.
    
    Caveat: the above is a “good enough” interpretation of Machiavelli. There’s also an interpretation of him as more of a republican (think monarchy versus republic rather than republican versus liberal, here), which reads the entirety of the Prince as biting satire that he wrote in exile about a political rival that had Machiavelli’s life in their hands. And there are certainly more subtleties to his writing and research on it that I haven’t the slightest clue about – he’s quite a challenging thinker.
    
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    1. Clarissa
      
      January 2, 2015
      
      And as for Richelieu, I’m sure you have read The Three Musketeers. 🙂
      
      As for Carlos V, I can answer questions if there are any. I’m not a specialist but I have some knowledge.
      
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January 2, 2015

Uri’s latest column is on the connection between Archeology and Ideology, connected to the subject of pre-nation state days, today’s nation state times and what is taught at schools:
http://www.avnery-news.co.il/english/

If you haven’t read, I liked his previous column “My glorious brothers” too.

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Clarissa

January 2, 2015

Archaeology is the best friend of nation-state builders.

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aglaonika

January 2, 2015

So basically BEFORE the nation state there were multi-ethnic empires ruled by a king or the equivalent (feudalism), and AFTER the nation state there will be multi-ethnic regions again ruled by interenational organizations and multinational corporations. The social cohesion force of multi-ethnic empires in the pre-nation state epoch was religion (which was only the easy-to-digest disguise of the economic dependence system), but what will be the social cohesion force of the multi-ethnic regions in the post-nation state era?

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J. Otto Pohl

January 2, 2015

I believe money.

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1. aglaonika
  
  January 2, 2015
  
  Yes, behind the scenes it’s always the money, but you can’t sell that to the masses as a digestable ideology.
  
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  1. cliff arroyo
    
    January 3, 2015
    
    Why do you think so many European governments are so determined to create non-integrating muslim communities in their countries?
    
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    1. Clarissa
      
      January 3, 2015
      
      This is the question of the century. There are many explanations but I don’t feel like any one of them is really giving the answer. All I can say right now is that this has got to be absolutely deliberate.
      
      WTF are they doing???
      
      People say it’s historic guilt. But why isn’t anyone feeling guilty for the shit done to Hindus or Latin American indigenous people?
      
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      1. musteryou
        
        January 3, 2015
        
        We thought we were so rational and scientific but then we killed a lot of Jews and made them diedid, so we cannot be trusted, not even by ourselves. It’s for the best if we embrace our enemies and allow them to overwhelm us. Maybe that will set us straight.
        
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      2. el
        
        January 3, 2015
        
        \ We thought we were so rational and scientific but then we killed a lot of Jews and made them diedid, so we cannot be trusted
        
        As a Jew, I am not likely to underestimate my importance. 🙂
        However, I am sure all this talk about historical guilt is 100% made up. It’s also true (for the most part) for the current generation of Germans, let alone for others.
        Antisemitism is alive and well too. How does it suit the guilt theory?
        
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        Clarissa
        
        January 3, 2015
        
        I remember how my extremely sociable brother – in – law asked a young visitor from Germany, “So, Hans, what do you think about Hitler? ” Hans’s reaction was very different from mine when I get asked what I think about Stalin. There’s definitely something there.
        
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        musteryou
        
        January 3, 2015
        
        Well they are guilty about colonialism too, but haven’t stopped it. Strange that. One can be guilty and therefore set up aqueducts, but these only facilitate one to continue to do what one had been doing, only more effectively. At least up to a point.
        
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Clarissa

January 2, 2015

The state of the people has turned into the state of the persons. 🙂 But there will be an enormous cohesion because we all watch the same YouTube videos, follow the same new sites, listen to the same music. Internet is the great cohesive force.

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1. cliff arroyo
  
  January 3, 2015
  
  Miley Cyrus over the rule of law……
  
  Oh yes, this will turn out well.
  
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aglaonika

January 2, 2015

I wonder if someone knows since when the notion of citizenship exists. I guess it didn’t exist in the pre-nation state era. What will happen to citizenship in the post-nation state where borders will become insignificant?

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J. Otto Pohl

January 2, 2015

It started really in 1789 with the French Revolution. Before that everybody was a subject.

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1. aglaonika
  
  January 2, 2015
  
  The Brits were subjects until 1981 8-).
  
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  1. J. Otto Pohl
    
    January 2, 2015
    
    No, they still are subjects as are the Canadians, Austrlians, and New Zealanders still under the rule of Queen Elizabeth II. 😎
    
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    1. aglaonika
      
      January 2, 2015
      
      Oops, you’re right. In 1981 they only restricted who can own this privilege. I thought they wanted to get rid of this term, but I was wrong.
      
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DWeird

January 2, 2015

It depends on what you mean by notion of citizenship, and how deep and broad you want to cast your net. It also helps if you can imagine that various political forms can coexist, especially if some of them are in a latent state (like, if I said that the Kennedies or the Bushes are an aristocratic dynasty, it wouldn’t be complete tosh, right?).

While I’m not a historian, I can think of roughly three pre-nation state forms of citizenship.

The citizenship in the ancient greek city-states, or some of them at least. While limited to dudes who, ah, weren’t slaves and weren’t women, it was in a large degree in contradistinction to being a “subject” – a citizen is someone who has some real say in political matters, and participates in at least some of the political institutions that comprise a greek polity. Big deal during the Rennaissance, still of importance to political theory now.

The forms of citizenship in medieval cities, which provided some degree of freedom from your feudal masters, to the point where an escaped serf could become “not it” if he managed to succesfully escape to a city. The easiest way to ‘get’ what that may have been like is to watch this video about the City of London, in London: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrObZ_HZZUc I have a pet theory, entirely unsubstantiated, that modern nation-state citizenship has its origins in medieval city citizenship writ large.

Finally, there’s the perhaps more significant sense of political citizenship (though nobody would have called it that) in how kings could be elected from a pool of aristocrats, by aristocrats – a bit like getting a class president. The notion of monarchy we have today, where what the monarch says goes, is itself remarkably modern, a direct predecessor of the nation-state. Prior to the enlightenment idea of an enlightened absolute monarch, the whole process of being king of something was a far more muddled affair, something between affectations for Roman law, mediated through a mostly Christian lens, and whatever local customs a locale had to find its best and most agreeable warlord.

The history of notions is a messy thing. 🙂

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1. aglaonika
  
  January 2, 2015
  
  DWeird, thanks for the sophisticated answer, I haven’t known many of these things. So basically the possession of citizenhsip is a historical process which included more and more people, and was enhanced to larger and larger regions, and meant more and more rights over time. Well, if it’s true the final step of this historical process must be the global citizenhip with one global country. Not in our lifetime though.
  
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  1. Clarissa
    
    January 2, 2015
    
    What changes is the meaning of citizenship. I see my passport as a convenience, a travel document. But the idea of sacrificing any convenience, let alone dying for it, is extremely bizarre to me. When I’m making a decision whether to swap my passport for the American one, or whether to keep both or stick with the old one, I don’t experience any emotional feelings of the kind people did in earlier eras when they would compose poetry addressed to their passports. I just think of it in terms of convenience.
    
    So it doesn’t matter as much who has passports, how many, and what they look like. What matters is the meaning we assign to them.
    
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    1. cliff arroyo
      
      January 3, 2015
      
      Passports are becomning just another consumer good, note that Malta basically sells them, not that people want to live there, but it gives the bearer the usual EU rights and privileges.
      I’m surprised Greece and Spain haven’t done that yet…. oh wait, do the Jews recently offered citizenship have to pay?
      
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niedermen

January 2, 2015

This is a really interesting (to me, at least) summary of a French philosopher’s recent work. He theorizes about how premodern family structure influences our current political structures and reactions to modernity. very eurocentric though

http://www.craigwilly.info/2013/07/07/emmanuel-todds-linvention-de-leurope-a-critical-summary/

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Clarissa

January 2, 2015
“But who knows where the logic of history ends? Not long ago, one might have said the mass destruction of nuclear war. Now, the mass consumption-destruction of environmental exhaustion seems as plausible as anything. Or will technology, the emerging Internet-hive-mind and machine-body meshing ultimately rob us of our humanity?”
- Or you will finally go into therapy and solve your boring psychological problems.
“A huge part of the book, perhaps the majority, is dedicated to Europeans’ varying choices of religion and ideology. These concerns can seem very alien to us nihilist-apathetic postmoderns.”
- The book sounds very interesting but the reviewer keeps trying to talk about his own psychological issues instead of the book and that’s annoying.
“Todd has an elegant and powerful answer: political ideologies in the modern age are projections of a people’s unconscious premodern family values.”
- I’m not into this sort of facile psychoanalyzing of cultures across millenia but the whole thing is inventive.
“The Englishman is a “free” individual who upon adulthood leaves his parents and his responsible for himself. The Japanese is an “integrated” individual who upon adulthood remains closely bound with his family in a hierarchical system of solidarity and obedience.”
- This is not about the Englishman or the Japanese. This is simply a varying degree of the destruction of the patriarchal order.
“For Todd, and this seems eminently plausible and intuitive, these families values are then projected, more or less crudely rationalized, as the country’s political ideologies once it enters the modern age.”
- Yes, patriarchy matters. Who could have thought.
“The country is 60% liberal-egalitarian, coinciding with the areas lost to Al-Andalus and then regained during the Reconquista, while the unconquered northern and eastern fringes have stem families.”
- Here he simply has no idea what he is talking about, so this part can be skipped.
The process of the erosion of the patriarchal family has been studied at length. This is all very old material repackaged in a new wrapping. But it’s great to see discussions of these issues go on.

Thanks for the link!

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musteryou

January 3, 2015

“A moment would always come when they stopped serving the purposes of the times, and a new state form would arise.”

This is a very different argument from saying that the nation-state is a false construct.

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