Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (130 page)

Christian theologians and biblical scholars, whose traditions are almost as long as those of the philosophers, have constantly been exercised by the rise and fall of states, though less by related questions of causation; they have usually been satisfied by explanations based on divine providence or the Wrath of God. The Fall of Babylon of 539 BC, which was a major historical event in the Old Testament, is presented in the Book of Revelation as a metaphor for the end of the existing world order and the advent of Christ-ruled ‘New Jerusalem’. Every good Christian had heard the story of Belshazzar’s Feast, where the prophet Daniel deciphered the writing on the wall: ‘MENE, MENE, TEKEL UPHARSIN… God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it;… thou art weighed in the balances and found wanting’;
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and few would be unaware of the words of the angel from heaven who ‘cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit.’
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St Augustine of Hippo (354–430), the senior Father of the Church, expounded these matters in his
City of God
; all human history, he writes, consists of a confrontation between the
civitas hominis
, the World of Man, and the
civitas Dei
, the divine World of the Spirit. The passing of the former is a necessary prelude to the triumph of the latter.
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St Thomas Aquinas OP (
c.
1225–74), Christian theologian par excellence, dominated Catholic thought into modern times. In his
Summa Theologica
, he consigned political questions like the birth and dissolution of states to the realm of universal or natural law, disentangling them from divine law and opening them up to the general, non-theological, discussions, in which all could participate.
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The Protestant reformers developed their own schools of politico-theological scholarship. In England, Thomas Cromwell, in his preamble to the Henrician Act of Supremacy, was at pains to deny the link between royal authority and traditional Catholic teaching, inventing a new scheme of English history to match.
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In Germany, Martin Luther’s doctrine of the Two Kingdoms was a new take on St Augustine’s old theme of the City of God.
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In the nineteenth century, anarchists like Proudhon or Bakunin, believing all government to be pernicious, were the first to postulate that ‘the destruction of the state’ was actually admissible.
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The Marxists talked in similar vein, though with different goals in mind. Marx himself denied that he aimed at ‘the complete destruction of the state’; the ‘withering of the state’ which Engels described was only to occur at a late stage when the sources of class conflict had been eliminated.
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But Lenin in his
State and Revolution
(1917) called openly for the ‘destruction of the bourgeois state’, as a prelude to the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’.
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In the twentieth century international lawyers have explored the subject in their own right and with their own methods. The defining term which they chose for it in English was the ‘extinction of states’.
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One of the most recent contributors to the debate argues that in a world where
terra nulla
(‘no one’s land’) no longer exists, the extinction of pre-existing states is a precondition for the creation of new ones.
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Political scientists entered the field relatively recently. All too often their hallmark has been prolix argumentation leading to blindingly obvious conclusions. So it is reassuring to see that the English term on which they appear to have settled, ‘State Death’, is uncharacteristically concise.
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Their approach, which depends heavily on factorial modelling and on comparison of case studies, is closely allied to analyses of territorial disputes and of conflicts preceding the outbreak of wars. Yet their arguments would carry greater weight if they did not rely so much on data originating in the simplistic Correlates of War Project (COW). To every historian’s despair, COW takes 1816 as the arbitrary start point of history, uses patently invalid definitions of state sovereignty and apparently (in studies written in the twenty-first century) does not yet include the USSR among its obituaries.
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It is a hopeful sign that a call has been made to revise the COW data.
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In the last decade, a further sub-field of study has appeared under the heading of ‘Failed States’. The term is clearly a misnomer, since the bodies concerned, though infirm, have still not reached the international graveyard. They should probably be called ‘Failing States’, and are said to be ‘in danger of disintegration’. As from 2005, an annual Index of sixty such invalids has been published, supported by quantitative measurements of their distress and dividing them into ‘critical’, ‘in danger’ and ‘borderline’.
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Somalia, Chad and Sudan topped the Index for 2010. Europe was represented by Georgia (no. 37), Azerbaijan (no. 55), Moldova (no. 58) and Bosnia and Hercegovina (no. 60).

Vocabulary is important, and terminological proliferation is indicative of a sorry pass where modern scholars betray little ability of harmonize their practices with neighbouring disciplines. If the ‘dissolution of the state’ was good enough for Hobbes and Locke (and for the French philosophers as well), one wonders why it should be dismissed by lesser mortals. As it is, on top of ‘dissolution’, one is now forced to worry about ‘destruction’, ‘withering’, ‘extinction’, ‘expiration’, ‘death’, ‘failure’, ‘disintegration’ and no doubt many more. One is reminded of the parrot which was ‘demised’, ‘passed on’, ‘expired’, ‘stiff’, ‘deceased’, ‘bereft of life’ ‘off the twig’, ‘gone to join the bleedin’ choir invisible’ – ‘in fact, an ex-parrot’.
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Likewise, the focus here is on the past tense and on the ex-state. In this connection, the term ‘extinct states’ has again been gaining currency; a popular website lists no fewer than 207 extinct states in Europe’s past, a definite underestimate.
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At one time, it was only thought necessary to consider two categories of dissolution, one caused by external force and the other by internal malfunction: in Hobbesian language, ‘forraign warre’ was contrasted with ‘internall diseases’. John Locke took a similar line in his
Two Treatises on Civil Government.
Having discussed how ‘the inroad of foreign force’ was ‘the usual and almost the only way whereby [a commonwealth] is dissolved’, he goes on to say: ‘Besides this overturning from without, governments are dissolved from within,’ and then explains the circumstances in which this takes place.
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The international lawyers also preferred a dual scheme, distinguishing the voluntary from the involuntary. ‘Voluntary extinction’ was exemplified in the British Isles, where ‘the Kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland were extinguished as states’ in order to create the United Kingdom.
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‘Involuntary extinction’ is illustrated by ‘Poland, destroyed in 1795’.
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Nowadays, most scholars would agree that external, internal, voluntary and involuntary factors are all observable, and that dual schemes no longer suffice. Among the case studies in this book, at least five mechanisms appear to be at work: implosion, conquest, merger, liquidation and ‘infant mortality’.

The Soviet Union is often said to have ‘imploded’.
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The metaphor may well be taken from the realm of astronomy where stars and other heavenly bodies, often large and apparently solid, are known to collapse in on themselves and atomize. It suggests that outside pressures may be present, but the essential event pertains to a catastrophic malfunction at the centre; a vacuum is created, the constituent parts disengage, and the whole is destroyed. Some such catastrophe occurred in Moscow in the autumn of 1991. The Soviet political system had been constructed round the centralized dictatorship of the Communist Party and the command economy. Hence, as soon as Gorbachev lost the ability or the will to command, all the Party-State structures ground to a half. Fifteen orphaned republics were pushed into taking the terminal step beyond mere ‘system-failure’. Implosion, therefore, must be counted as a form of death by natural causes.

Scholarly attempts to explain the demise of the USSR follow as many lines of argument as there are specialists to pursue them. Sovietologists frequently point to economic failings. Some also stress the ideological black hole created by Gorbachev’s decision to end the Cold War, which deprived the ‘first socialist state’ of its
raison d’être
, and others the revolt of the nationalities, which led to the fateful scheme to reform the Union Treaty and to the abortive coup of August 1991. Each of these has merit. But deeper questions centre on the puzzle of why the elaborate machinery of the Party-State proved incapable of responding. Here, one enters the unfathomable realm of the unintended consequences of
glasnost
and
perestroika
.
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The Federation of Yugoslavia, which fell apart in stages between 1991 and 2006, displayed many similar features to those in the USSR. Power leeched away from Belgrade, as it did from Moscow, as each of the federation’s republics ignored instructions from the centre. In Yugoslavia, however, the central institutions of the state rallied; and a long rearguard action was mounted from the Serbian-controlled centre to rein in the separatist inclinations of its neighbours. In time, however, Serbia’s brutal campaign to rescue the federation by military means reinforced the centrifugal forces already in motion. The more Milošević raged, the more surely the constituent republics were alienated, including, in the end, Serbia’s most faithful partner, Montenegro. Here one wonders whether ‘explosion’ might not be a more appropriate description.
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The Austro-Hungarian Empire, which collapsed in 1918, would seem to be another example of implosion. In that case, external pressures were more in evidence thanks to the military operations of the First World War. Yet the Empire survived the fighting intact, only to fall victim to the catastrophic failure of imperial authority at the war’s end. After peace had been signed on the Eastern Front in March 1918, the imperial heartland was no longer under threat from a major ‘inroad of force’. The conflict on the Italian Front, though intense, was essentially a regional affair. But in the following months the Habsburgs and their officials lost the ability to command. By October, the emperor’s writ no longer ran; and the Empire’s various provinces were making their own arrangements. Galicia, for example, did not rebel. It was deserted by an impotent Vienna besieged by Austro-German republicans. Then, lacking all guidance, it disintegrated amid the general chaos.
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As Locke observed, the ‘inroad of foreign force’ supplies the most usual cause of state death. The Kingdom of Tolosa, the States of Burgundy, the Byzantine Empire, the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania, and Prussia (as an element of the Third Reich) were all destroyed by conquest. Yet conquerors do not always proceed to destroy their defeated adversaries; both the Byzantine and the Polish examples suggest that the health and strength of a conquered country plays a part, alongside the conqueror’s intentions, in the loser’s fate. By 1453, for example, the once-mighty Byzantine Empire had shrunk to the dimensions of a tiny city-state, before being picked off by the final siege. Before 1795, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had endured a century of encroachments, debilitating malfunctions and internal haemorrhages before it faced the wars of the Partitions. The question posed, therefore, is whether the weakness of the state or the malevolence of its enemies was primarily responsible for its decease. Here, the moment of truth only arrives when the conquered state lies prostrate at the conqueror’s mercy, and the decision is taken to reprieve or to destroy. The sages of the Enlightenment mocked the commonwealth’s impotence. The patient was undoubtedly sick, but that sickness, in itself, was not decisive. The key lies in the knowledge that the commonwealth’s neighbours were planning to kill their victim and to seize his assets. The Partitions of Poland-Lithuania can rightly be likened to a sustained campaign of bullying and assault which ended with the murder of a battered invalid. ‘Poland-Lithuania was the victim of political vivisection – by mutilation, amputation, and in the end by total dismemberment: and the only excuse given was that the patient had not been feeling well.’
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In coroner’s language, the outcome would be described as ‘death by unnatural causes’.

Conquest, in other words, is not necessarily the prelude to annihilation, although it often may be. Cato might cry ‘
Delenda est Carthago
’, ‘Carthage must be destroyed’, but the advice does not have to be heeded. In the case of Prussia – which, though merged into Germany, still existed in 1945 – the Allied Powers waited almost two years before delivering the
coup de grâce
. In other instances, countries can be conquered, occupied, absorbed and at some later date revived. Rousseau was well aware of this possibility when asked to analyse Poland-Lithuania’s predicament in 1769. ‘You are likely to be swallowed whole,’ he predicted correctly, ‘hence you must take care to ensure that you are not digested.’
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The experience of the Baltic States in the twentieth century fits the same pattern. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were invaded by the Soviet Union in June 1940, occupied and annexed. But they were not fully digested. Fifty years later, like the biblical Jonah, they re-emerged from the belly of the whale, gasping but intact.