'How States Die' by Norman Davies

As sycophantic as humanists with inky fingers, today's Western academics are about as delusional as those whom they serve, albeit with way less introspection than their Renaissance peers

Today, perhaps even fittingly, I have a particular gem™ for you: the rather meandering and eclectic, if neither scholarly nor illuminating concluding lines of Norman Davies’ Vanished Kingdoms (Allen Lane, 2011).

Its author is Norman Davies—whose credentials are, as listed by Wikipedia:

Ivor Norman Richard Davies CMG FBA FRHistS (born 8 June 1939) is a British and Polish historian, known for his publications on the history of Europe, Poland and the United Kingdom. He has a special interest in Central and Eastern Europe and is UNESCO Professor at the Jagiellonian University, professor emeritus at University College London, a visiting professor at the Collège d'Europe, and an honorary fellow at St Antony's College, Oxford. He was granted Polish citizenship in 2014.^[2]

In other words: he’s as establishmentarian as possible. And keep in mind that most academics are little, if any, better than their Renaissance peers (whom were called humanists)—they are paid for by the powers-that-be, and they’re equally sycophantic.

I’ve added emphases and some commentary in the below excerpt. Enjoy.

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How States Die

The strange death of the Soviet Union—which played no small part in the trains of thought behind the present studies—suggests that a typology of ‘vanished kingdoms’ is worth attempting. Bodies politic clearly expire for a variety of reasons, and it is perhaps important to ask whether their disappearances follow discernible patterns. Historians are not comfortable with the idea of random causation, and some sort of analysis, however tentative, is desirable [methinks, that kind of stuff is the primary motivation of historians and historiographers since Thucydides…].

Political pathologies can be observed in endless guises. But the theme here is neither ‘revolution’ nor ‘regime-change’ nor ‘system-failure’. Revolution and regime-change refer to events where the social order or the government is overthrown, but where the territory and population of the state remain intact. ‘System-failure’ is concerned with political organisms which lose the capacity to function effectively, but do not necessarily collapse completely; they may be compared to a motor car that has broken down but has not yet been scrapped. This brief enquiry is limited to the more drastic phenomenon of states that cease to exist.

[I’m skipping over a few pages in which Norman Davies recounts his chief examples treated at length in his book, ranging from the Old Testament to the Church Fathers (specifically Saint Augustine), and from Thomas Aquinas to Martin Luther—before he quickly moves to nineteenth-century anarchists (Proudhon) and, of course, Marx and Lenin. Even more strange, his focus then rests squarely on the evolution (sic) of Anglo-American thought—mainly the Correlates of War project, which arbitrarily begins in 1816, and a short reminder as to why Davies’ book differs from ‘failed states’ and ‘extinct states’.]

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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.

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

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’. 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 [I’m quite certain Stephen Cohen would disagree (Wikipedia; NYT obituary)].

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 [in many ways, the end of Yugoslavia was aided, abetted, and powerfully stage-managed from abroad, esp. by Germany’s [and Austria’s) decision to formally recognise the breakaway republics of Slovenia and Croatia, thus subverting both the Yugoslav gov’t and the hitherto united, if fragile, European consensus on wisdom of keeping Yugoslavia intact¹—we note, in passing, that Prof. Davies surely knows that part of the history and ask as to why he would omit it…]

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 [even more stunningly, the other three dynastic empires (Germany, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire) also fell as a consequence of WW1, yet Austria-Hungary’s demise is an ‘example of implosion’: you cannot make this up]. 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 [this is where Prof. Davies notes (discovers™) the distinction between a gov’t and a people; for all his depravities, Josef Stalin also knew this about the Germans in spring 1945, as opposed to the genocidal Morgenthau Plan of the U.S., which was only (sic) after former president Herbert Hoover noted that its implementation would involve the genocide of 25m Germans²]. 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 [again, external actors—Russia, Prussia, and Austria—were the drivers]. The question posed, therefore, is whether the weakness of the state or the malevolence of its enemies was primarily responsible for its decease [here Prof. Davies abandons his earlier-proposed typology in favour of merely rephrasing truths known since time immemorial]. 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 [Polish-Lithuanian] 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.’ In coroner’s language, the outcome would be described as ‘death by unnatural causes’. [the same is also true of how all European gov’ts—including Tsarist Russia—treated (sic) the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries].

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 [here, too, Prof. Davies is making a point that’s rather not supported by the evidence before us: it was the North German Confederation of 1867 that provides the blueprint for the German state, which was technically—legally—unaltered by everything that occurred in-between (here are further notes on this particular matter)]. In other instances, countries can be conquered, occupied, absorbed and at some later date revived [why, once more, the conflation of ‘state’ and ‘people’?]. 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.’ 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.

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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…

[I’m skipping over Prof. Davies’ restating of facts]

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.

Of course, the trickiest question is to determine which liquidations are genuinely consensual and which are not [no more methodical considerations are left, it would seem, hence we’re back at value-judgements]. 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 [this is ludicrous, to say the least: the Allies just defeated Germany, and now we’re learning Serbia couldn’t be crushed after three years of occupation by Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Bulgaria?]. 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’ [well, it takes one to know one, I s’ppose], and he was not taken in, as many were in that era, by the posturing of the Bolsheviks. 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 [no comment].

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 [ahem, what about the Hitler-Stalin Pact in this? A mere distraction, it would seem].

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 [this is the final retreat by Prof. Davies from his above-trumped taxonomy]. 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 [people are, of course, an after-thought for the good Oxford-educated professor]. 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 [and who backed Lenin and his ilk is, of course, also, and conveniently so, left out (Germany did, as did both the UK and the United States)]. Another might be the Byelorussian National Republic of 1918 or the Ukrainian National Republic in the same era [lol, the latter one was a creation of the victorious Central Powers]. 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’.

Successful statehood, in fact, is a rare blessing. It requires health and vigour [back to cyclical considerations, then, Prof. Davies goes], 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.

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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.

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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Bottom Lines

Thus passes what once was known as scholarship.

Some twenty years ago, as a student at the U of Vienna, Austria, I once had the opportunity to listen to a guest lecture by Norman Davies. Back then, I was impressed by his British accent (here’s looking at you, many British upper-class sycophants) and erudition. Fast-forward twenty or so years, I’m no longer impressed: most of the above summary of his Vanished Kingdoms is contradictory and, frankly, serves more to obfuscate reality rather than educate anyone.

With the passing of time, and esp. the experiences of the recent past (the Covid Mania) and current events (pick any such conflict), we may conclude, however tentatively, that Prof. Davies’ musings are but an afterthought—rather: a sad, fading song—of what once passed for erudition and scholarship.

Nowadays, as we’re faced with the real-world prospect of the United States formally joining in Mr. Netanyahoo’s madness, we’ll soon see, once again, a seemingly eternal truth: states die of many causes, but moral depravity of its leaders and the departure from reality nearly always play oversized roles.

Thus, as humanity stands on the brink of truly earth-shattering consequences, I suppose it’s best to leave behind scholarship™ such as Prof. Davies’, and merely consider the world of difference between the 1930s and today: back then, the United States could merely engage in a mad bout of deficit spending to kick-start their economy (the New Deal had largely failed by the end of Roosevelt’s second term), incl. literally turning on the spigots of domestic oil production.

Today, both the American economy (sic) and specifically oil production are shadows of what they were 80-90 years ago.

Madness reigns in the West, and, as the ancients knew too well, Hybris invites Nemesis, the goddess of righteous retribution.

1. ‘As late as on 19 June 1991 all parties represented in the Bundestag agreed on a position which favoured the transformation of Yugoslavia into a confederation. But following the declarations of independence by Slovenia and Croatia, and after the subsequent brutal action by the Yugoslav Federal Army on 25 June, the German political elites surprisingly changed course. On 27 June, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) demanded recognition of the newly declared independence of the two Republics. On 1 July, at a meeting of the foreign political committee of the Bundestag, convened at the request of the Social Democrats (SPD) a mere six days after the declaration of independence, the SPD and CDU asked that Foreign Minister Genscher should insist on political recognition. By 9 July this principle had also been endorsed by the FDP. So, in the course of the two weeks following the Croat and Slovenian declarations of independence, the consensus on the German parliamentary scene on maintaining Yugoslav unity had changed completely. This undermined the already very fragile common ‘front’ of the EC member states.’ Tomáš Zipfel, ‘Germany and the recognition of the sovereignty of Slovenia and Croatia’, Perspectives, 6/7 (1996), pp. 137-146, at 137 (emphases mine).

2. This is from a now-scrubbed official website of the United Nations: ‘Hoover’s third report of 18 March 1947 noted: “There is the illusion that the New Germany left after the annexations can be reduced to a ‘pastoral state’. It cannot be done unless we exterminate or move 25,000,000 people out of it.”’ Here is the archived version, courtesy of the Internet Archive.