Vanished Kingdoms

by Norman Davies

  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.10 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.11 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’.12

  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’.13 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.14

  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.15 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.16 It is a hopeful sign that a call has been made to revise the COW data.17

  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’.18 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’.19 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.20

  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.21

  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.22 ‘Involuntary extinction’ is illustrated by ‘Poland, destroyed in 1795’.23

  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’.24 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.25

  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.26

  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.27

  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.’28 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.’29 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.

  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.30

  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.31

  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.32 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 phys
ically 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.