Category Archives: modernity

The first and most natural of nation states

The nation state is the political organisation of ethnically similar peoples. Historically, the nation state arose from strong kingship over lands which contained peoples who were ethnically similar. How those lands came to be ethnically similar is another matter – it invariably required the destruction or forced submergence of other cultures by one means or another – but relatively homogeneous they became. But powerful kingdoms have rarely coincided with ethnically homogeneous populations, not least because monarchs have tended to view themselves as dynasts rather than nationalists. Thus the nation state is a rarity even today.  Most of the modern countries designated as nation states are multicultural empires. This distinction is important because a multicultural state may exist because the state is a political entity, but a multicultural nation is a contradiction in terms for nationhood requires a sense of belonging, of common feeling ithin the population.

A singular fact about the nation state is that it is a European phenomenon, for nowhere else in the world did Mankind move of their own volition beyond forms of tribal, dynastic or theocratic government. But even in Europe the nation state is a johnny-come-very-lately. Germany was politically united in 1870, Italy in 1869. Neither is a natural nation, both containing peoples such as the Prussians, Bavarians and Sicilians possessed of a strong historic identity. Even the two continental countries which loom largest and longest in history as political entities, Spain and France, have always lacked cohesion. Spain was not united, even in the limited sense of a unification of crowns until 1469 and is to this day a deeply provincial country tottering on the brink of dissolution with disaffection from the very idea of Spain spread far beyond Catalonia and the Basque country into the old divides between Castille and Aragon and the smaller mediaeval kingdoms such as Galicia. France remained a disparate state of many tongues and peoples (Breton, Basque, Provencal and such forth) in 1789 and like modern Spain retains numerous natural divides at least as  great as those between England and Scotland (Brittany, Gascony, Provence) and a few social fissures (Basques, Corsica) as insoluble as that between England and the Ulster Catholics.

England is the odd man out. As we have seen, the English thought of themselves as a distinct people very early, while the political state of England has lasted for more than a thousand years, longer than any Empire ever known. By the time of the Conquest, England occupied most of the territory she does today – that is unique amongst the major powers in Europe. She had a system of law which operated in theory at least throughout England. The use of writs issued by the king was well established. When William came he gained a kingdom ready made, not a series of dynastic fiefs held together by marriage and treaty.

At every point in the past seven centuries at least England has been ahead of the pack in developing the adjuncts of what we today consider a normal and civilised state, viz: the development of a national system of law; the absence of great princely territories (appanages). the early break with feudalism; the unique development of parliament, the diminution of princely power; the institution of a national system of welfare relief in 1601; the encouragement of private enterprise combined with successful mercantilism; the discontinuation of judicial torture; the introduction of habeas corpus; the rights of property given the firmest legal basis. By the end of the seventeenth century England was already hinting at the form of the modern world.

David Landes in the “Wealth and Poverty of Nations” has no doubt about England’s status as the most advanced nation state. When examining the reasons for the first Industrial revolution occurring in these islands, Mr Landes (he refers to Britain but it is clear from the context that he means England) lists among the prime causes precocious English nationhood viz: “To begin with, Britain had the early  advantage of being a nation. By that I mean not simply the realm of a ruler, not simply a state or political entity, but a self-conscious, self-aware unit characterised by common identity and loyalty and by equality of civil status…Britain, moreover, was not just any nation. This was a precociously modern, industrial nation.” 1

How did England grow to be such a different social plant from any other country? Perhaps she was never truly tribal in the narrow sense of small and exclusive groups. Of all the parts of the Roman Empire in the West, England was peculiar in the completeness of the destruction of Roman culture after the legions withdrew. Elsewhere in the Empire, Germanic peoples took power but retained much of Rome. In England this did not happen. England was formed from people who both had a good deal in common culturally and racially and who were by whatever means, amazingly successful in suppressing native British culture. Thus England began in a way given to few nations, as a clean cultural sheet.

The mother of modernity

Part of the problem for those who would define Englishness in terms of highly visible emblems is that so much of our  general culture has become part of the general culture of the world, for example industrialisation, representative  government and organised sports.

David Landes in his “The wealth and poverty of nations” is emphatic about England’s unique status. At a time when casual  and gratuitous public insult of the English is commonplace,  the book is a salutary reminder of how disproportionate an  influence this country has had on the world. Two of the chapter headings will give a flavour of this: “Britain and  the others” and “Pursuit of Albion”. In the latter Mr Landes  is emphatic on England’s importance: “The Industrial  Revolution in England changed the world and the relations of nations and states to one another…The world was now divided between one front-runner and a highly diverse array of  pursuers. It took the quickest of the European “follower countries” something more than a century to catch up”. 1 In other words, without England industrialisation would have  been at best greatly delayed and at worst have never  occurred. (To that immense influence, may be added the Empire, the founding of the United States by involuntary proxy, the development of parliamentary government, the  international success of the English language and the  individual likes of Newton, Locke and Darwin.)

Before English readers get too bigheaded, it should be added that Dr Landes is distinctly critical of Britain’s failure to  maintain the momentum of their initial industrialisation and  cites as dreadful warnings to others such failures as Britain’s inability to keep the lead in the chemical  industry in the nineteenth century and the dismal story of  our car industry since 1945.

There is a curious tendency amongst academics these days to denigrate England’s status before 1500, to represent her as  backward, weak, insignificant country on the cultural as well as geographic periphery of Europe, altogether a second or even third rate power. The problem with this view is that it  puts its holder in a quandary not unlike that which afflicts those who argue for a general European inferiority vis-a-vis Ottoman, Chinese and Indian cultures in the late Middle Ages. The question is this, if England was so negligible in 1500, how was she able to meaningfully compete with supposedly vastly greater and more sophisticated powers, and compete  so successfully that by 1760 she had replaced the Dutch as  the leading commercial power, bested France and Spain in the colonial game and was on the doorstep of the first Industrial Revolution?

The only reasonable answer is that England was far from being a backward, third rate power in 1500. (One should not  forget that she had spent much of the previous century and a half running riot in France during the Hundred Years war).  Being divided from the continent by a channel only 22 miles at its narrowest point had ensured that England was never culturally isolated. Most importantly, it was a rich country. Visitors to England time and again over the centuries leading to the Industrial Revolution remark on the county’s general prosperity and note particularly the superior material condition of the English poor compared to the continental  poor.

To understand exactly how advanced England has been in comparison with all other states we need only consider the  condition of the country which is generally considered to be her main competitor for the title of archetypal nation state,  France. When the Bastille fell in 1789 no French national parliament had met for one hundred and seventy five years.  Executive power derived both in fact as well as theory solely from the King. Political power such of it as was devolved  from the crown remained overwhelmingly the prerogative of the higher aristocracy, while the notion of equality before  the law was treated as a quaint absurdity with the French nobility both protected from the legal actions of commoners  and granted privileges over them such as the lettres de cachet which allowed the imprisonment of Voltaire for insulting a nobleman. As for that perennial first bugbear of all pre-modern states, finance, France was renowned throughout the eighteenth century for her gigantic inability to balance her books. On the micro economic level, feudal dues and impositions were not merely maintained through the inertia of custom, but were actually enforced more severely in the eighteenth century as landowners sought to compete with the growing wealth of the bourgeoise. But revolutionary

France was no Britain dancing attendance upon an industrial revolution. She was and remained until the twentieth century,  primarily a rural land. Not until the 1930s did fewer than fifty percent of Frenchmen and women derive their living directly from the land.

Consider what the world today would be if England had not existed. There would have be no USA. Approximately an quarter of the states represented at the UN would not exist. The English language would not dominate international communication, especially in the fields of science and  technology and be the language of the Internet. Those things are certain. Others are probable, such as a failure to develop parliamentary government or an industrial revolution.