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CHAPTER XII The Ancient Cycle of Prenational Empire- Building – The Modern Cycle of Nation-Building
WE HAVE seen that the building of the true national unit was a problem of human aggregation left over by the ancient world to. the mediaeval. The ancient world started from the tribe, the city-state, the clan, the small regional state – all of them minor units living in the midst of other like units which were similar to them in general type, kin usually in language and most often or very largely in race, marked off at least from other divisions of humanity by a tendency towards a common civilisation and protected in that community with each other and in their diversity from others by favourable geographical circumstances. Thus Greece, Italy, Gaul, Egypt, China, Medo-Persia, India, Arabia, Israel, all began with a loose cultural and geographical aggregation which made them separate and distinct culture-units before they could become nation-units. Within that loose unity the tribe, clan or city or regional states formed in the vague mass so many points of distinct, vigorous and compact unity which felt indeed more and more powerfully the divergence and opposition of their larger cultural oneness to the outside world but could feel also and often much more nearly and acutely their own divergences, contrasts and oppositions. Where this sense of focal distinctness was most acute, there the problem of national unification was necessarily more difficult and its solution, when made, tended to be more illusory. The solution was in most cases attempted. In Egypt and Judea it was successfully found even in that ancient cycle of historical evolution; but in the latter instance certainly, in the former probably, the full result came only by the hard discipline of subjection to a foreign yoke. Where this discipline was lack- Page-342 ing, where the nation-unity was in some sort achieved from in, – usually through the conquest of all the rest by one strong claa, city, regional unit such as Rome, Macedon, the mountain clans of Persia, – the new State, instead of waiting to ",Be firmly its achievement and lay the foundations of the national unity deep and strong, proceeded at once to overshoot its mediate necessity and embark on a career of conquest. Be- re the psychological roots of the national unity had been driven deep, before the nation was firmly self-conscious, irresistibly possessed of its oneness and invincibly attached to it, the governing State impelled by the military impulsion which had carried so far, attempted immediately to form by the same means a larger empire-aggregate. Assyria, Macedon, Rome, Persia, later Arabia followed all the same tendency and the same cycle. the great invasion of Europe and Western Asia by the Gaelic race and the subsequent disunion and decline of Gaul were probably due to the same phenomenon and proceeded from a still more immature and ill-formed unification than the Macedonian. All became the starting-point of great empire-movements before they had become the keystone of securely built national unities. These empires, therefore, could not endure. Some lasted longer than others because they had laid down firmer foundations the central nation-unity, as did Rome in Italy. In Greece philip, the first unifier, made a rapid but imperfect sketch of unification, the celerity of which had been made possible by the previous and yet looser Spartan domination; and had he been followed by successors of a patient talent rather than by a man of vast imagination and supreme genius, this first, rough, practical outline might have been filled in, strengthened and an enduring work achieved. One who first founds on a large scale and rapidly, needs always as his successor a man with the talent or the genius for organisation rather than an impetus for expansion. A Caesar followed by an Augustus meant a work of massive durability; a Philip followed by an Alexander, an achievement of great importance to the world by its results, but in itself a mere splendour of short-lived brilliance. Rome, to whom careful Nature denied any man of commanding genius until she had firmly unified Italy and laid the basis of her Page-343 empire, was able to build much more firmly; nevertheless, she founded that empire not as the centre and head of a great nation, but still as a dominant city using a subject Italy for the springing- board to leap upon and subjugate the surrounding world. Therefore she had to face a much more difficult problem of assimilation, that of nation-nebulae and formed or inchoate cultures different from her own, before she had achieved and learned to apply to the new problem .the art of complete and absolute unification on a smaller and easier scale, before she had welded into one living national organism, no longer Roman but Italian, the elements of difference and community offered by the Gallic, Latin, Umbrian, Oscan and Graeco-Apulian factors in ancient Italy. Therefore, although her empire endured for several centuries, it achieved temporary conservation at the cost of energy, of vitality and inner vigour; it accomplished neither the nation-unit nor the durable empire-unity, and like other ancient empires it had to collapse and make room for a new era of true nation-building. It is necessary to emphasise where the error lay. The administrative, political, economic organisation of mankind in aggregates of smaller or greater size is a work which belongs at its basis to the same order of phenomena as the creation of vital organisms in physical Nature. It uses, that is to say, primarily external and physical methods governed by the principles of physical life-energy intent on the creation of living forms, although its inner object is to deliver, to manifest and to bring into secure working a supraphysical, a psychological principle latent behind the operations of the life and the body. To build a strong and durable body and vital functioning for a distinct, powerful, well-centred and well-diffused corporate ego is its whole aim and method. In this process, as we have seen, first smaller distinct units in a larger loose unity are formed; these have a strong psychological existence and a well-developed body and vital functioning, but in the larger mass the psychological sense and the vital energy are present but unorganised and without power of definite functioning, and the body is a fluid quantity or a half-nebulous or at most a half-fluid, half-solidified mass, a plasm rather than a body. This has in its turn to be formed and Page-344
organised; a firm physical shape has to be made for it,
a well-defined vital functioning and a clear psychological reality, self-
consciousness and mental will-to-be. In physical Nature vital organisms cannot live entirely on selves; they live either by interchange with other vital organisms or partly by that interchange and partly by devouring others; for these are the processes of assimilation common to separated physical life. In unification of life, on the other hand, assimilation is possible which goes beyond this alternative of either the devouring of one by another or a continued separate distinctness which limits assimilation to a mutual reception of Page-345
the energies discharged by one life upon another. There
can be instead an association of units consciously subordinating themselves to
a general unity which is developed in the process of their coming together.
Some of these, indeed, are killed and used as material for new elements, but
all cannot be so treated, all cannot be devoured by one dominant unit; for in
that case there is no unification, no creation of a larger unity, no continued
greater life, but only a temporary survival of the devourer by the digestion
and utilisation of the energy of the devoured. In the unification of human
aggregates, this then is the problem, how the component units shall be
subordinated to a new unity without their death and disappearance. Page-346 Germany, the steppes beyond the Danube and the deserts of Arabia. Dissolution had to precede a movement of sounder construction. In the mediaeval period of nation-building, we see Nature mending this earlier error. When we speak indeed of the errors of Nature, we use a figure illegitimately borrowed from our human psychology and experience; for in Nature there are no errors but only the deliberate measure of her paces traced and re- traced in a prefigured rhythm, of which each step has a meaning and its place in the action and reaction of her gradual advance The crushing domination of Roman uniformity was a device, not to kill out permanently, but to discourage in their excessive separative vitality the old smaller units, so that when they revived again they might not present an insuperable obstacle to the ; growth of a true national unity. What the mere nation-unity may lose by not passing through this cruel discipline, – we leave aside the danger it brings of an actual death like the Assyrian or Chaldean as well as the spiritual and other gains that may accrue by avoiding it, - is shown in the example of India where the Maurya, Gupta, Andhra, Moghul empires, huge and powerful and well-organised as they were, never succeeded in passing a ,team-roller over the too strongly independent life of the subordinate unities from the village community to the regional or linguistic area. It has needed the pressure of a rule neither indigenous in origin nor locally centred, the dominance of a foreign nation entirely alien in culture and morally armoured against the sympathies and attractions of India’s cultural atmosphere to do in a century this work which two thousand years of a looser imperialism had failed to accomplish. Such a process implies necessarily a cruel and often dangerous pressure and breaking up of old institutions; for Nature tired of the obstinate immobility of an age-long resistance seems to care little how many beautiful and valuable things are destroyed so long as her main end is accomplished: but we may be sure that if destruction is done, it is because for that end the destruction was indispensable. In Europe, after the Roman pressure was removed, the city- state and regional nation revived as elements of a new construction; but except in one country and curiously enough in Italy Page-347 itself the city-state offered no real ,resistance to the process of national unification. We may ascribe its strong resuscitation in Italy to two circumstances, first, to the premature Roman oppression of the ancient free city life of Italy before it had realised its full potentialities and secondly, to its survival in seed both by the prolonged civil life of Rome itself and by the persistence in the Italian municipia of a sense of separate life, oppressed but never quite ground out of existence as was the separate clan-life of Gaul and Spain or the separate city life of Greece. Thus psycho- logically the Italian city-state neither died satisfied and fulfilled nor was broken up beyond recall; it revived in new incarnations. And this revival was disastrous to the nation-life of Italy, though an incalculable boon and advantage to the culture and civilisation of the world; for as the city life of Greece had originally created, so the city life of Italy recovered, renewed and gave in a new form to our modern times the art, literature, thought and science of the Graeco- Roman world. Elsewhere, the city- unit revived only in the shape of the free or half-free municipalities of mediaeval France, Flanders and Germany; and these were at no time an obstacle to unification, but rather helped to form a subconscious basis for it and in the meanwhile to prevent by rich impulses and free movement of thought and art the mediaeval tendency to intellectual uniformity, stagnation and obscuration. The old clan-nation perished, except in countries like Ireland and Northern and Western Scotland which had not undergone the Roman pressure, and there it was as fatal to unification as the city-state in Italy; it prevented Ireland from evolving an organised unity and the Highland Celts from amalgamating with the Anglo-Celtic Scotch nation until the yoke of England passed over them and did what the. Roman rule would have done if it had not been stayed in its expansion by the Grampians and the Irish seas. In the rest of Western Europe, the work done by the. Roman rule was so sound that even the domination of the Western countries by the tribal nations of Germany failed to revive the old, strongly marked and obstinately separative clan-nation. It created hi its stead the regional kingdoms of Germany and the feudal and provincial divisions of Page-348 France and Spain; but it was only in Germany, which like Ireland and the Scotch highlands had not endured the Roman yoke, that this regional life proved a serious obstacle to unification. In France it seemed for a time to prevent it, but in reality it resisted only long enough to make itself of value as an element of richness and variation in the final French unity. The unexampled perfection of that unity is a sign of the secret wisdom concealed in the prolonged process we watch through the history of France which seems to a superficial glance so miserable and distracted, so long an alternation of anarchy with feudal or monarchic despotism, so different from the gradual, steady and r’ much more orderly development of the national life of England. But in England the necessary variation and richness of the ultimate organism was otherwise provided for by the great difference Of the races that formed the new nation and by the persistence of Wales; Ireland -and Scotland as separate cultural units with a subordinate self-consciousness of their own in the larger unity. The European cycle of nation-building differs therefore from the ancient cycle which led from the regional and city-state to the empire, first, in its not overshooting itself by proceeding towards It larger unification to the neglect of the necessary intermediate aggregate, secondly, in its slow and ripening progression through three successive stages by which unity was secured and - yet the constituent elements not killed nor prematurely nor unduly oppressed by the instruments of unification. The first stage progressed through a long balancing of centripetal and centrifugal tendencies in which the feudal system provided a principle of order and of a loose but still organic unity. The second was a movement of unification and increasing uniformity in which certain features of the ancient imperial system of Rome -were repeated, but with’ a less crushing force and exhausting tendency. It was marked first by the creation of a metropolitan centre which began to draw to it; like Rome, the best life energies of all the other parts. A second feature was the growth of an absolute sovereign authority whose function was to impose a legal, administrative, political and linguistic uniformity and centralisation on the national life. A third sign of this movement Page-349
was the establishment of a governing spiritual head and
body which served to impose a similar uniformity of religious thought and
intellectual education and opinion. This unifying pressure too far pursued
might have ended disastrously like the Roman but for a third stage of revolt
and diffusion which broke or subordinated these instruments, feudalism,
monarchy, Church authority as soon as their work had been done and substituted
a new movement directed towards the diffusion of the national life through a
strong and well-organised political, legal, social and cultural freedom and
equality. Its trend has been to endeavour that as in the ancient city, so in
the modem nation, all classes and all individuals should enjoy the benefits and
participate in the free energy of the released national existence. Page-350 |