How States Die

Abstract

How States Die Norman Davies (bio) Bodies politic clearly expire for a variety of reasons, and it is perhaps important to ask whether their disappearances follow discernible patterns. Historians aren’t comfortable with the idea of random causation, and some sort of analysis, however tentative, is desirable. Political pathologies can be observed in endless guises. But the theme that I will explore 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 motorcar 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. Political philosophers, whose known ruminations began in ancient Greece, have been thinking about statehood for millennia, though state demise has seldom been at the forefront of their preoccupations. By describing the state as a “creation of nature,” and man as a “political animal,” Aristotle can be read as implying, among other things, that states, like other natural life forms, might be subject to cycles of birth and death.1 Thomas Hobbes, though mainly interested in the foundation and perpetuation of states, was more explicit about their demise. In Leviathan, he expounded on the “internall diseases” that tend to “the dissolution of the Commonwealth.” The ultimate factor is war: “When in a warre (forraign, or intestine,) the enemies get a final Victory; so as . . . there is no farther protection of Subjects in their loyalty; then is the Commonwealth dissolved.” At the last, “Nothing can be immortall, which mortals make.”2 Rousseau in his Social Contract reached the same conclusion. “If Sparta and Rome perished,” he asked rhetorically, “what state can hope to last for ever?” “The body politic, no less then the body of a man, begins to die as soon as it is born, and bears within itself the causes of its own destruction . . . the best constitution will come to an end.”3 Christian theologians and biblical scholars, whose traditions are almost as long as [End Page 68] those of the philosophers, have constantly been exercised by the rise and fall of states, though less by related questions of causation; they have usually been satisfied by explanations based on divine providence or the Wrath of God. The Fall of Babylon of 539 b.c., which was a major historical event in the Old Testament, is presented in the Book of Revelation as a metaphor for the end of the existing world order and the advent of Christ-ruled “New Jerusalem.” Every good Christian had heard the story of Belshazzar’s Feast, where the prophet Daniel deciphered the writing on the wall: “mene, mene, tekel upharsin. . . God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it; . . .thou art weighed in the balances and found wanting”;4 and few would be unaware of the words of the angel from heaven who “cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit.”5 St Augustine of Hippo (354–430), the senior Father of the Church, expounded on these matters in his City of God; all human history, he writes, consists of a confrontation between the civitas hominis, the World of Man, and the civitas Dei, the divine World of the Spirit. The passing of the former is a necessary prelude to the triumph of the latter.6 Saint Thomas Aquinas OP (c. 1225–74), Christian theologian par excellence, dominated Catholic thought into modern times. In his Summa Theologica, he consigned political questions like the birth and dissolution of states to the realm of universal or natural law, disentangling them from divine law and opening them up to general, non-theological, discussions, in which all could participate.7 The Protestant reformers developed their own schools of politico-theological scholarship. In England, Thomas Cromwell, in his preamble to the Henrician Act of Supremacy, was at pains to...