Great Empires, Small Nations

The Uncertain Future of the Sovereign State

Josep M. Colomer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134072835
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

'Colomer's book is a stimulating read, certainly for anyone willing to entertain nonconventional observations that hold up well in what is happening in the world. His most important argument is that global public services, such as security, a trading system, an international monetary regime, and communication networks provided by large democratic entities such as the United States and the European Union provide opportunities for small countries and regions to prosper. The successful smaller units – like Ireland or Catalonia– trade more in proportion to their economies than large ones, are generally more democratic, and have more multilingual populations. I expect this book to be widely read and greatly admired.' – Sidney Weintraub, William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy, Centre for Strategic and International Studies, Washington DC, USA

Part I
Empires, states and nations

The numerous and very diverse forms of government that have existed in the history of humankind or currently exist can be grouped into three very general categories: empires, states, and nations. There have always been large empires, increasingly large, in fact, as new transport and communication technologies have developed. Most of the world’s population lives today within these empires. Sovereign states, in contrast, succeeded in Europe within a historical period that began about 300 years ago and is today essentially finished. Finally, small political units with high degrees of autonomy or independence, including ancient and medieval cities and, in modern times, political “nations,” have always been a basic form of collective organization in human history. The main reason for small communities’ persistence is that, on the basis of high levels of social homogeneity, they can adopt soft or democratic forms of government with some ease. As a result of these tendencies, the present world is characterized by the broadness and inclusiveness of a few great empires, the decline or failure of sovereign states, and the flourishing of hundreds of small, politically autonomous or independent communities and nations.

1 Large empires

The notion of “empire” can account for more than two dozen cases of ancient, medieval, modern, and current experiences of human government. The ancient Chinese and Persian empires, the classical Roman Empire, the colonial empires of Spain, Britain and France, the modern Russia, and the present configurations of the United States of America and of the European Union, among others that are listed in Table 1.1 at the end of this chapter, share important defining characteristics. These can be summarized as follows:

• Very large size, in terms of both territory and population.
• Absence of fixed or permanent boundaries. Empires tend to expand over the territory, up to the point of conflict with other empires, and when in decline they may also contract. When an empire is organized on the basis of a large island or archipelago (like present-day Japan, for instance) its territorial borders may remain stable for relatively long periods. But, in general, “territory” should not be considered a strong defining element of empire.
• A compound of diverse groups and territorial units. In ancient and medieval times, an empire could be comprised of cities, republics, counties, principalities, bishoprics, and other varied forms of political organization. Today, multiethnic federations can be arranged with less heterogeneous institutional regimes. But democratic empires may also include political units organized with different forms of parliamentary or presidential, unichamber or multichamber, monarchical or republican governments. They may be linked to the center by diverse institutional formulas.
• A set of multilevel, often overlapping jurisdictions. Within an empire, no authority typically rules with exclusive powers. Rather, the central government may rule indirectly through local governments; the latter develop self-government on important issues; and power sharing is widespread.

These essential characteristics of the “imperial” form of government – very large size, no fixed boundaries, territorial diversity and multilevel jurisdictions – contrast with the essential characteristics of the “state” and ‘‘nation’’ forms of government that will be discussed in the following chapters. We should not confound “empire” with “imperialism.” While imperialism is a “policy,” empire is used here as a “polity” or form of political community. In fact there are empires which are not imperialistic, including, for instance, the Holy Roman and German empire and the present European Union, while some non-imperial but rather homogeneous and centralized states have developed imperialist policies, including Britain, France, Germany and other European nation–states, in this way creating colonial empires.

“Empire” should not be confounded with “dictatorship” either. There have indeed been a number of famous emperors who concentrated and exerted power by dictatorial means, including, for instance, Alexander in the Persian Empire or Genghis Khan in the Mongol empire, although these were not by far among the most durable empires. Actually, some of the most brutal and oppressive empires of modern times, such as Napoleon’s France or Hitler’s Germany, blatantly failed in very brief spans of time, largely as a consequence of their own extreme levels of power concentration and arbitrary decision making.

In contrast, certain empires with republican forms of government have in the past only delegated power to a temporary dictator in the face of emergency situations, as was originally the case with the Roman Caesars. Other softer and more lasting empires emerged as confederations of previously existing and largely respected political units on which a new central power was superposed, in this manner giving way to new imperial titles such as “king of kings,” “supreme king” or “maharaja of rajas.” In the Holy Roman and German empire, founded by Charlemagne, the emperor was chosen by a college of grand electors from the largest units, whilst his powers were limited by an imperial diet reuniting representatives from more than 200 cities, counties, principalities, and prelatures. While some colonial empires practised mass slaughter and violent imposition, others, like the British, tried to coexist with traditional local rules (an attempt that permitted the formation of the still existing Commonwealth of Nations, with 53 members encompassing 30 percent of the world’s population).

In fact, most empires in the past were organized as “mixed” regimes of self-government and authoritarianism. Some, like Japan, adapted in recent times the institutional figure of the traditional emperor to the uses of a parliamentary monarchy. This and other contemporary very large units, prominently including the USA and the EU, must be considered democratic empires.

In the long term there is an ever-continuing trend toward larger empires. There is no evidence of empires larger than 10,000 square kilometers much before 3000 BC. The largest ancient empires, in Egypt and Mesopotamia, with about one million square kilometers, were still tiny compared to the present ones. The largest ones at the beginning of our era, in China and Rome, were already much larger, with about five million square kilometers. But modern empires, including Russia and the colonial empires of Spain and Britain, have encompassed double-digit millions of square kilometers.

This continuing trend toward larger sizes of empires has been enabled, above all, by technological advances in transport and communications. In the sixteenth century Charles V, king of the Spanish empire, where “the sun never set,” and emperor of the Holy Roman and German empire, is said to have spent more than one-fourth of his 40 years of tenure traveling – 3,600 days by horse and 200 by ship, having slept in 3,200 different beds. Roads, canals, harbors, railways, and highways have always formed the skeleton of empires. But things changed dramatically with the invention of the telegraph in the nineteenth century, later followed by the telephone and the internet, which created the age of instant communication. The art of government at a distance has multiplied the size of viable empires.

Another historical trend is towards an increasing number of simultaneous empires, so that the imperial form of government includes increasingly higher proportions of the world’s population. Virtually none of the territories of the currently existing states in the world has been alien or outside some large modern empire. Among the very few exceptions are Thailand (which emerged from the old kingdom of Siam without Western colonization) and Israel (which was created from scratch in 1948).

The present world is organized in at least five very large, powerful empires. In alphabetical order, which may coincide with the order of their relative strength, they are: America, China, Europe, Japan, and Russia. These five political units encompass nowadays about 40 percent of the world’s population (and 80 percent of the world’s production). Five more very large units can also be considered of the imperial type, at least in terms of the size and variety of their population, and, in most cases, the multilevel federal style of their internal organization. They are: Indonesia, Brazil and India, closely linked to Pakistan and Bangladesh (Australia and Canada have comparable territorial sizes to the empires mentioned, but they are heavily under-populated). In all ten units together live more than two-thirds of the world’s populations at the beginning of the twenty-first century, as shown in Table 1.1.

These two lists of current “empires,” which are determined by population sizes, can be disputed. But in practice their composition largely coincides with the workings of some of the most influential worldwide organizations. The so-called Group of Eight (G8) aimed at gathering together the main world powers, reunited the United States of America, as well as its highly developed neighbor Canada and the four most powerful member states of the EU, that is Britain, France, Germany, and Italy, with Japan and Russia. Only China, of the top five empires listed above, is absent (but it has already participated at some meetings of the finance ministers of the G8). In the more formal Security Council of the United Nations Organization, five members enjoy veto power over collective decisions: America, China, Russia and the two European countries who won (or claim to have won) the Second World War, Britain and France. In this case the list matches the above top five very closely. Also, recent plans to enlarge the Security Council include as candidates the other empire in the first list, Japan, together with Brazil and India, prominent in the second list. The countries officially possessing nuclear weapons also match the imperial list rather closely; they include America, the two European powers Britain and France, Russia, China, India and Pakistan (together with Israel and possibly some other states not yet confirmed).

A very large empire implies that no exclusionary borders exist within its territory and, therefore, the occasions for interterritorial conflicts are lower than in a setting of numerous sovereign, mutually hostile states. The empire is an umbrella for the territories included which may prevent their mutual belligerency. External imperial borders tend also to be conflictive, especially if they neighbor other empires. But a world organized in a few empires implies a shorter total length of borders and, therefore, fewer lines of potential conflict than one organized in many sovereign states.

Regretfully, a single-government world is not foreseeable from historical developments. If the tendency toward increasingly larger sizes of empire, as measured by territory, is extrapolated, we find only a 50 percent probability of a single world empire by a date placed between 2200 and 3800 (depending on which author makes the calculation). If the extrapolation is based on the proportion of the world’s population within the largest empire, that expectation should be deferred to nothing less than the year 4300.

Even the United Nations accepts, in practice, acting on very important occasions as a complement to some of the largest empires, a kind of stand in for “the rest of the world,” rather than as an embryo of such worldwide single government. For the most durable of present-day conflicts, that between Israel and Palestine, the so-called “quartet” in charge is composed of the USA, the EU and the Russian Federation, in addition to the United Nations Organization, which is placed at about the same level as the former three. Similarly, for dealing with North Korean threats, another quartet of the most directly involved empires is formed, under the auspices of the United Nations, by China, Japan, Russia, and the USA.

Table 1.1 Large Empires

2 Sovereign states

The “state” is a form of government that has achieved wide appeal in the modern world. Apparently, the current world is organized into almost 200 states. But only a relatively limited number of these political units can be considered to be successful states in a strict sense of the word. Perhaps the fact that the worldwide organization reuniting all governments is called the United Nations might after all have some significance (besides that of avoiding confusion with the unit usually known as the United States).

The state as a form of government can be defined by the following characteristics:

• Large or middle-size, in terms of both territory and population.
• Fixed territory and formal boundaries. The clear establishment and foreign recognition of the territorial limits of a state are intended as protection from external attacks, invasions, immigrants, and imports.
• Sovereignty. The state has supreme authority over a territory and population. It recognizes no other source of jurisdiction but itself. The state’s power to make ultimate decisions is recognized by other sovereign states.
• Monopoly and homogenization. The state has reserved functions with exclusive jurisdiction within its territory. Whether dictatorial or democratic, it is organized with an internal hierarchy of powers. In order to facilitate the exercise of its functions and consummate its exclusiveness, it tends to establish a uniform administration over the territory, as well as to promote the homogenization of important social and cultural characteristics of its subjects or citizens.

As can be seen, these characteristics are in sharp contrast with the corresponding definition of “empire” presented above as an alternative form of political community. Actually, the first modern states emerged from and consolidated themselves against previously existing empires. In Europe, the so-called Thirty Years’ War, which was triggered by the Protestant challenge against the Holy Roman and German Empire, led to decisive weakening of imperial structures. The war ended with the treaty of Westphalia in 1648, by which the imperial territory was partitioned between increasingly stronger sovereign states, above all France and Sweden. Across most of the European territory, clear borders were drawn and mutually recognized by emerging states. At the same time, the states, which were organized as absolutist monarchies, tried to absorb hundreds of traditional autonomous territories, cities, small republics, and principalities under a single centralized power, whether by military conquest, dynastic combination or even mutual agreement.

The earliest political units deserving to be called states were England, France, Spain, and Sweden, which were formed on territories located at the periphery of the former Western Roman Empire. Out of imperial control, each of the four states mentioned could organize a new, highly centralized command of its territory from a newly privileged capital city – London, Paris, Madrid, and Stockholm, respectively. During the eighteenth century all of these states combined occupied only between two or three percent of the earth’s territory, while all other parts of the world were organized in small political units and larger empires of various formulas. New large states were also formed later in the core territory of the Roman Empire – Germany, and Italy –, but in these cases in a much more decentralized way based on the aggregation of networks of middle-sized cities and regions.

The largest modern states tended to organize heavy military apparatuses and fought frequent and highly lethal wars. The states created professional diplomacy and espionage, as well as the authority to require, give, deny or retire passports. Against the medieval universality of the Christian church, state rulers determined the religion of their subjects and appointed bishops and abbots. Each modern state tried to excel in providing internal standardization of weights and measures, a common currency within its territory, and civil law, by these means helping to consolidate relatively large markets.

Typically, each state attempted to create a culturally unified “nation” by means of repression, coercion, symbols and compulsory school. But very few European states had any obvious ethnic or linguistic unity and not all were equally successful at integrating disparate local units. A centralized control of the territory was instrumental in establishing external borders and affirming sovereignty in the face of other states. Certain newly peripheralized regions, given the increasing costs of secession, acquiesced to integration, but developed innovative demands for participation and power sharing within the state, thus challenging the homogenizing design.

Elsewhere, the European model of the sovereign state has been much less successful. The United States of America was created from the beginning as a “compound republic” (rather than as a nation–state) formed by previously existing units retaining their constituent powers. Instead of concentrating power around a single center as in the European-style states, the American empire is organized with a “checks and balances” regime based on division of powers, negotiations and jurisprudence. In Asia, a few very large, overpopulated empires have also escaped from the project of “statization:” China, the combined India–Pakistan–Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Japan have maintained certain traditional imperial characteristics of internal complexity, not adopting the homogenizing features of modern European states mentioned above.

Unlike in either North America or Asia, attempts to replicate the typical European “state” form of government were made in Hispanic America, Africa, and the Middle East as a consequence of the colonial expansion of European states and the further independence of their colonies. Indeed, the larger and more powerful states of Europe, which had been created as an alternative formula to empires, engendered new colonial empires in other parts of the world. When the people of the colonies rid themselves of imperial domination, the European states turned inward to create a new common empire in Europe – as will be analyzed in another part of this book. But still more paradoxically, the former colonies, in gaining independence, also lost the large-scale networks of imperial size and did nothing but imitate the old “state” forms of government of their former masters. The experience has been much less successful than it was in the metropolis – in many cases, indeed, a failure.

Since the foundation period of states in Europe, four waves of “statization” of the world can be distinguished, each of them punctuated by major wars and the dissolution of large empires, as detailed in Table 2.1, at the end of this chapter. At the time of the congress of the greater powers in Vienna in 1815, there were barely one dozen states in Europe, together with numerous traditional small political units. The first wave of formation of states started with the dissolution of the Spanish empire in the Americas, greatly aided by the destructive effects of the Napoleonic wars in Europe. The Spanish colonies split from the empire and almost immediately split up themselves after some new Pan-American projects failed. The four large Spanish colonial viceroyalties had become 15 republics of disparate size and composition by 1840. But most of the new republics had to be improvised under conditions of precarious colonial legacy, internal ethnic dispersion, and isolation from other world markets. They emerged as very weak states, in the sense that they attained only ineffective armies, tiny administrative structures, and little law enforcement. Some of them did not achieve even minimal degrees of institutionalization and social and political stability in the ensuing two hundred years.

The second wave of state formation arose during the First World War and with the fall of the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian empires. The so-called “principle of nationalities” supported by the US president Woodrow Wilson, which sought the formation of ethnically homogeneous units, had driven the creation of ten new states in Europe by 1920. However, most of the new states proved to be highly unstable and vulnerable. The aggression wars of Nazi Germany led to temporary absorption of most of them into the so-called Third German Empire, which preceded many of them becoming satellites of or being directly absorbed by the new Soviet version of the Russian empire.

The third wave of states formed after the Second World War out of the dismantling of the European colonial empires, especially the British and the French (but also the Belgian, Dutch, German, Portuguese, and Spanish) in Southeast Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Not less than 40 ne...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Summary
• Tables
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Empires, States and Nations
• Part II Broad Alliances, Small Governments
• Part III The European Empire
• Conclusion
• References and Further Reading