Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (131 page)

Geopolitical factors obviously play a role. Some states, like eighteenth-century Sweden or nineteenth-century Spain, can decline and degrade to the point where they become sitting ducks for would-be aggressors. They survive because no one takes the trouble to finish them off. States occupying more sensitive locations have no such luck. The leading scholar in ‘State Death’ theory places special emphasis on this mechanism.
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Many political organisms start life through the amalgamation of pre-existing units; the degree of integration achieved by such amalgams differs widely. Dynastic states are particularly susceptible to the collector’s syndrome. The Kingdom-County of Aragon was one such example; the fifth Kingdom of Burgundy another; and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland a third. By the same token, if the process is reversed, the likelihood of a collection breaking up into its original units can be high. Such operations are probably best described in the corporate language of merger and de-merger.

The ‘Kingdom of Sardinia’, 1718–1861, must be rated a dynastic amalgam par excellence. Its four main constituent elements – Savoy, Piedmont, Nice and Sardinia – had been assembled by the
Casa Savoia
much as multinational corporations now assemble a portfolio of brands and companies. After the Napoleonic Wars, the parts had little in common except the common subjection to the ruling house. In the 1860s, therefore, as the Risorgimento reached its height, the dynasty took a conscious decision to offload the Savoyard and Nizzardo parts of its portfolio to clear the ground for a new corporation, to be called the ‘Kingdom of Italy’. The Sardinian brand was sacrificed together with Savoy because they were incompatible with the dynasty’s new business plan.

Political dynasties, however, employ a variety of strategies, among which the marriage of heirs and heiresses is arguably the most important. Furthermore, since patriarchal cultures can normally insist that a wife’s assets be automatically subsumed into those of her husband, the realms of a sovereign heiress would usually lose their separate identity on marriage, as they did in the cases of Jadwiga of Poland in 1385 or of Mary of Burgundy in 1477. In practice, a great deal depended on the conditions agreed during pre-nuptial negotiations or succession contracts, and all sorts of variant settlements have resulted. British readers will be most familiar with the differences between the settlement for a personal union of ‘England and Wales’ and Scotland in 1603 after the death of Elizabeth I, and those for the constitutional union of England and Scotland in 1707 and of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801.

The case of the Crown of Aragon is particularly interesting in this regard. The dual state first came into being in 1137 due to a marriage contract sealed on behalf of the heiress of Aragon and the heir to the County of Barcelona. Formally, Aragon and Catalonia were still distinct entities more than three centuries later in 1469 when the prospective King-Count Ferdinand of Aragon married the Infanta Isabella, heiress to Castille. So, too, was their Kingdom of Valencia. These three heartland units, while being incorporated into the Spanish realms, remained juridically and administratively distinct for nearly 250 years after that second landmark marriage; the Crown of Aragon did not finally fade away until the aftermath of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. By that time, Spain was struggling with the tangled succession of the Bourbon and Habsburg dynasties – neither of which had been heard of in the distant days of Queen Petronilla and Count Ramón Berenguer.

Liquidation is a concept well understood in company law; and there is no good reason why it should not be applied by analogy to the particular circumstances in which a state entity or ‘political company’ is deliberately suppressed. The clearest example that comes to mind is when the leaders of the two parts of Czechoslovakia reached agreement on their ‘velvet divorce’ by consent in 1993. Since then, both the Czech Republic and the Republic of Slovakia have taken their places as sovereign states and good neighbours within the European Union.
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Of course, the trickiest question is to determine which liquidations are genuinely consensual and which are not. Many of them are not. In November 1918 the handpicked ‘Grand National Assembly’ which enabled Serbia to seize and liquidate the Kingdom of Montenegro by outwardly democratic means may be regarded a classic example of gangster-led political theatre. The Allied Powers, alas, were not very nimble or astute at spotting the rogues; they certainly let the Montenegrin question slip past the Paris Peace Conference, perhaps because they had no means of constraining wayward allies like Serbia. At least one British statesman, a future Nobel Peace Prize winner and serving in the founding commission of the League of Nations, seems to have seen what was happening; Lord Robert Cecil (1864–1958) summed up the Serbian delegates of the Peace Conference as ‘a band of dishonest and murderous intriguers’, and he was not taken in, as many were in that era, by the posturing of the Bolsheviks.
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On the other hand, six months before the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, Cecil had the misfortune to tell the council of the League: ‘There has scarcely ever been a period in the history of the world when war was less likely than at present.’ Even perspicacious statesmen have their moments of credulity.

In 1940, the Soviet takeover of the Baltic States was also accompanied by a combination of military invasions, phoney ‘referendums’ and international perplexity. Handpicked delegates were assembled. Portraits of Stalin were paraded. The public was terrorized. Critics were harassed or physically removed. The result was known in advance, and the world was told that the victimized countries had joyfully petitioned Moscow for admission to the USSR. In the process, the ‘bourgeois republics’ were liquidated. ‘Suicide by coercion’ might also fit.

Irish republicans would maintain that their Republic had been liquidated in like manner by the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. In their view, the treaty was invalid because the Irish delegates had been browbeaten into submission by the British threat of full-scale war, and they were not mistaken in their belief that browbeating had been applied. The Free Staters and their friends, in contrast, argued that the content of the treaty was not so drastic, and that the charge of ‘liquidating the Republic’ hid a more complicated reality. The facts are on their side. Though the name and form of the ‘Republic’ were indeed surrendered under pressure, the substance of a separate, self-governing Irish state was upheld. Despite everything, the treaty did not re-incorporate Ireland into the United Kingdom, and it provided the foundations on which the Irish Republic was subsequently constructed.

There remains a category which, for want of something more precise, may be described as the political counterpart of infant mortality. In order to survive, newborn states need to possess a set of viable internal organs, including a functioning executive, a defence force, a revenue system and a diplomatic service. If they possess none of these things, they lack the means to sustain an autonomous existence, and they perish before they can breathe and flourish. The ‘Republic of One Day’ in Carpatho-Ukraine illustrates the point nicely. Since its executive body did nothing other than to declare its independence, it may be said to have been stillborn.

Other young states succumb after a brief struggle. No state is as vulnerable as in the very early days of its existence, and the vultures begin to hover as soon as the infant takes its first breath. Many such infants falter because they are incapable of independent sustenance if the parent’s life support is withdrawn. All the Napoleonic creations, such as the Kingdom of Etruria, belong to this category. Others collapse because the political, military or economic environment is too hostile. Several can be found in the brief outline of Soviet history sketched in
Chapter 15
. One such state would be Kerensky’s would-be constitutional and republican Russia, which had overthrown the tsar’s government in February 1917 but whose provisional government was snuffed out by the Bolsheviks after only eight months. Another might be the Byelorussian National Republic of 1918 or the Ukrainian National Republic in the same era. A third would be the homeland of the Soviet Union’s founder, the Republic of Georgia, which held out for three years in its first incarnation from 1918 to 1921, and which is again gasping for air nearly ninety years later in the hostile environment of Russia’s ‘near abroad’.
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Successful statehood, in fact, is a rare blessing. It requires health and vigour, good fortune, benevolent neighbours and a sense of purpose to aid growth and to reach maturity. All the best-known polities in history have passed through this test of infancy, and many have lived to a grand old age. Those which failed the test have perished without making their mark. In the chronicles of bodies politic, as in the human condition in general, this has been the way of the world since time immemorial.

From the time of the ancient Greeks, and no doubt longer, the death of a monarch entailed a grand funeral, an oration, a burial or a burning pyre, an epitaph on the tomb and an obituary. Alaric’s committal to the Busento was but a specific variant to normal practice. The Anglo-Saxons and Vikings often buried their chieftain in his ship, to mark the end of his rule and the start of a new voyage either to Valhalla or to Heaven:

Scyld was still a strong man when his time came

And he passed over into Our Lord’s keeping.

His warrior band did what he bade them

When he laid down the law among the Danes.

They shouldered him out to the sea’s flood,

the chief they revered who had ruled them.

A ring-necked prow rode in the harbour,

clad with ice, its cables tightening.

They stretched their beloved lord in the boat,

laid out amidships by the mast,

the great ring-giver …  The treasure was massed

on top of him: it would travel far

on out into the sway of the ocean …

And they set a gold standard up

high above his head and let him drift

to wind and tide, bewailing him

and mourning their loss. No man can tell,

no wise man in the hall or weathered veteran

knows for certain who salvaged that load.
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Generally speaking, the death of a ship of state was not so fêted, though the occasional fine obituary has been penned. William Wordsworth mourned the passing of a state far older than the Kingdom of Etruria, but another of those which were snuffed out by a Napoleonic whim:

Once did she hold the gorgeous East in fee;

And was the safeguard of the West: the worth

Of Venice did not fall beneath her birth,

Venice, the eldest Child of Liberty.

She was a maiden City, bright and free;

No guile seduced, no force could violate;

And, when she took unto herself a Mate,

She must espouse the everlasting Sea.

And what if she had seen those glories fade,

Those titles vanish, and that strength decay;

Yet shall some tribute of regret be paid

When her long life hath reached its final day:

Men are we, and must grieve when even the Shade

Of that which once was great is passed away.
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Notes

INTRODUCTION

1
. John Hunt,
The Ascent of Everest
(London, 1953); R. Mantovani,
Everest: The History of the Himalayan Giant
(Shrewsbury, 1997); J. R. Smith,
Everest: The Man and the Mountain
(Caithness, 1999).
2
. T. Gwynn Jones,
Geiriadur: Cymraeg–Saesneg a Saesneg–Cymraeg
(Cardiff, 1953).
3
. William Johnson Cory (1823–92), after Callimachus (third century BC).
4
. Edward Gibbon,
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, Everyman edn., 6 vols. (London, 1910);
The Autobiography of Edward Gibbon
(London, 1910).
5
. Norman Davies,
The Isles: A History
(London, 1999).
6
. ‘The Day Thou gavest Lord is ended’ (1870), words by John Ellerton, melody of ‘St Clement’ by Clement Scholefield.
7
. ‘Nazi Gold: Publishing the Third Reich’, BBC Radio 4, 17 March 2011.
8
. A. J. P. Taylor,
The Struggle for Mastery in Europe
(Oxford, 1954);
English History
,
1914
–
45
(Oxford, 1965);
The Habsburg Monarchy
,
1809
–
1918
(London, 1948);
Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman
(London, 1955);
The Course of German History
(London, 1945);
The Origins of the Second World War
(London, 1961); etc.
9
. H. Trevor-Roper,
Historical Essays
(London, 1957), foreword, quoted by Adam Sisman,
Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Biography
(London, 2010), p. 293.
10
. Ibid., pp. 168, 294.
11
. See R. B. Cunninghame Graham,
A Vanished Arcadia: Some Account of the Jesuits in Paraguay, 1607
–
1767
(London, 1901); B. L. Putnam Weale,
The Vanished Empire
(London, 1920), on China; Mabel Cabot,
Vanished Kingdoms: A Woman Explorer in Tibet, China, and Mongolia, 1921
–
25
(New York, 2003); or Oriental Institute Museum, Chicago,
Vanished Kingdoms of the Nile: The Rediscovery of Nubia. An Exhibition
(Chicago, 1995).
12
. Murry Hope,
Atlantis: Myth or Reality?
(London, 1991); R. Vidal-Naquet,
The Atlantis Story: A Short History of Plato’s Myth
(Exeter, 2007).
13
.
www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/archaeology/bethsaida.htm
. See also P. R. Davies,
In Search of Ancient Israel
(Sheffield, 1992).
14
. 2 Samuel 13: 37.
15
. Thomas Gray, ‘Elegy Written in a Country Church-yard’ (1751).
16
. John Keats, ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ (1819).
17
. Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Ozymandias’ (1818). Rameses II, pharaoh of the XIXth dynasty, was known to the Greeks as Ozymandias. His statue, ‘the Younger Memnon’, which inspired Shelley, is in the British Museum.
18
. Horace,
Odes
, book I, ode 14, lines 1–4.
19
. From Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ‘The Building of the Ship’
(
1849).
20
. W. S. Churchill,
The Second World War
, vol. 3:
The Grand Alliance
(London, 1950), p. 24.