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“The topic is Europe’s extinct states. Not just kingdoms but empires, republics – polities of any sort which have ceased to exist. Which is a normal phenomenon. States always collapse and disappear, sometimes very quickly, sometimes after centuries or millennia, but they have a finite term in any part of the world. It’s just a given of human institutions. Sooner or later they fall apart and are replaced by something else. The key quotation is from Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He says, ‘The body politic, like the body of a man, begins to die as soon as it is born. It contains the seeds of its own destruction’…People who have their eye on short-term, contemporary events and the world around us tend to forget this. I sometimes think they imagine the world politic to be a chessboard, where you play games, have a crisis, and then you put all the pieces back and have another game. Well it’s not like that. You can have a chessboard, you have players who are either pawns or kings or whatever, but the players themselves are always changing. In the last 20 years, four or five European states have vanished, depending on how you deal with Yugoslavia. The German Democratic Republic was merged into Germany. The Soviet Union – the biggest state in the world, with the biggest nuclear arsenal – went up in smoke. Czechoslovakia dissolved by mutual consent – the two parties decided to have a velvet divorce. And then the Federation of Yugoslavia exploded in slow motion – bits flew off and continued to fly off until there was nothing left, apart from Serbia.” Read more...
The best books on Europe’s Vanished States
Norman Davies, Historian
