UNIVERSAL STATES

VI UNIVERSAL STATES

A. ENDS OR MEANS?

B. UNIVERSAL STATES AS ENDS

I. THE MIRAGE OF IMMORTALITY

A Paradoxical Misapprehension

The Aftermaths of the Roman Empire and the Arab Caliphat

Aftermaths of the Manchu, Ottoman, and Mughal, Empires

Ghosts of Defunct Universal States

The Haunting of Cairo and Istanbul by the Ghost of the Caliphate

‛The Holy Roman Empire’

The Haunting of the ‛Osmanlia and the Mongols by ‛Ghosts of Ghosts’

‛The Great Idea’ of the Modern Greeks

‛Moscow the Third Rome’

The Riddle of the Prestige of the Imperial Office in Japan

The Grounds of the Illusion

II. THE DOOM OF TITHONUS

C. UNIVERSAL STATES AS MEANS

I. THE PRICE OF EUTHANASIA

II. SERVICES AND BENEFICIARIES

(a) The Conductivity of Universal States

(b) The Psychology of Peace

(c) The Serviceability of Imperial Institutions

1. Communications

2. Garrisons and Colonies
Who are the Beneficiaries?

3. Provinces

4. Capital Cities

(d) THE SERVICIBILITY OF IMPERIAL CURRENCIES

1. Official Languages and Scripts

2. Law

3. Calendars; Weights and Measures; Money

(e) THE SERVICEABILITY OF IMPERIAL CORPORATIONS

1. Standing Armies

2. Civil Services

3. Citizenships

VI

UNIVERSAL STATES

A. ENDS OR MEANS?

B. UNIVERSAL STATES AS ENDS

(I) THE MIRAGE OF IMMORTALITY

A Paradoxical Misapprehension

{VI. B. I, p. 7} As we have seen in the last chapter, the endings of universal states indicate that these institutions are possessed by an almost demonic craving for life; and, if now we look at them, no longer through the eyes of alien observers, but through those of their own citizens, we shall find that these are apt not only to desire with their whole hearts that this earthly commonwealth of theirs may live for ever,¹ but actually to believe that the immortality of this human institution is assured—and this sometimes in the teeth of contemporary events which, to an observer posted at a different standpoint in Time or Space, declare beyond question that this particular universal state is at this very moment in its last agonies. To observers who happen to have been born into the history of their own societies at a time when these have not been passing through the universal state phase, it is manifest that universal states, as a class of polity, are by-products of a process of social disintegration and are stamped by their certificates of origin as being uncreative and ephemeral.² Why is it, such observers may well ask, that, in defiance of apparently plain facts, the citizens of a universal state are prone to regard it, not as a night's shelter in the wilderness, but as the Promised Land, the goal of human endeavours? How is it possible for them to mistake this mundane institution for the Civitas Dei itself?

This misapprehension is so extreme in its degree that its very occurrence might perhaps be called in question, were this not attested by the incontrovertible evidence of a cloud of witnesses who convict themselves, out of their own mouths, of being victims of this strange hallucination.

The Aftermaths of the Roman Empire³ and the Arab Caliphate⁴

{VI. B. I, p. 7}In the history of the Roman Empire, which was the universal state

{p. 8} of the Hellenic civilization, we find the generation that had witnessed the establishment of the Pax Augusta asserting, in evidently sincere and good faith, that the Empire and the City that had built it have been endowed with a common immortality. Tibullus (circa 54-18 B.C.) sings of 'the walls of the eternal city' while Virgil (70-19 B.C.) makes his Iuppiter, speaking of the future Roman scions of Aeneas' race, say: 'I give them empire without end.' Livy writes with the same assurance of 'the city founded for eternity'. Horace, sceptic though he was, in claiming immortality for his Odes, takes as his concrete measure of eternity the repetition of the annual round of the religious ritual of the Roman city state. The Odes are still alive on the lips of men. How much longer their 'immortality' will continue is uncertain, for the number of those who can quote them has sadly diminished in recent times by changes in educational fashions; but at least they have lived four or five times as long as the Roman pagan ritual. More than four hundred years after the age of Horace and Virgil, after the sack of Rome by Alaric has already announced the end, we find the Gallic poet Rutilius Namatianis still defiantly asserting Rome's immortality and Saint Jerome, in scholarly retreat at Jerusalem, interrupting his theological labours to express his grief and stupefaction in language almost identical with that of Rutilius. The pagan official and Christian Father are united in their emotional reactions to an event which, as we now see it, had been inevitable for generations.

{p. 11} The shock administered by the fall of Rome in A.D. 410 to the citizens of a transient universal state which they had mistaken for an everlasting habitation has its counterpart in the shock suffered by the subjects of the Arab Caliphate when Baghdad fell to the Mongols in A.D 1258. In

{p. 12} the Roman world the shock was felt from Palestine to Gaul; in the Arab world from Farghānah to Andalusia.

The intensity of the psychological effect is even more remarkable in this than in the Roman case; for, by the time when Hūlāgū gave the ‛Abbasid Caliphate its coup de grâce, its sovereignty had been ineffective for three or four centuries over the greater part of the vast domain nominally subject to it. This halo of an illusory immortality, worn by moribund universal states, often persuades the more prudent barbarian leaders, in the very act of parcelling out their dominions among themselves, to acknowledge an equally illusory subjection. The Amalung leaders of the Arian Ostrogoths and Buwayhid leaders of the Shī‛ī Daylamīs sought title for their conquests by ruling them, in official theory, as viceregents of the Emperor at Constantinople and Caliph at Baghdad respectively; and, though this tactful handling of a senile universal did not avail, in this case, to avert the doom to which both these war-bands condemned themselves by clinging to their distinctive religious heresies, the same political manœver was brilliantly successful when executed by fellow barbarians who had the sagacity or good fortune to be at the same time impeccable in their professions of religious faith. Clovis the Frank, for example, the most successful of all the founders of barbarian successor-states of the Roman Empire, followed up his conversion from paganism to Catholicism in A.D. 496 by obtaining in A.D. 510 from Anastasius, the reigning Emperor at Constantinople, the title of proconsul with the consular insignia.⁶ In the history of the decline of the ‛Abbasid Caliphate there are notable examples of a corresponding practice.

Throughout the whole period of the decline of the Caliphate up to the date of the death of Musta‛sim (A.D. 1258), the Caliph was to all orthodox Sunnīs⁷ the Commander of the faithful, and a Successor of the Prophet he was held to be the source of all authority and the fountain of honour. The Caliph by his very name led men's thoughts back to the founder of their faith, the promulgator of their system of sacred law, and represented to them the principle of established law and authority. Whatever shape the course of external events might take, the faith of the Sunnī theologians and legists in the doctrines expounded in their textbooks remained unshaken, and, even though the Caliph could not give an order outside his own palace, they still went on teaching the faithful that he was the supreme head of the whole body of Muslims. Accordingly, a diploma of investiture sent by the Caliph, or a title of honour conferred by him, would satisfy the demands of the religious law and tranquillise the tender consciences of the subjects of an independent prince, though the ruler himself might remain entirely autonomous and be under no obligation of obedience to the puppet Caliph....Even the Buwayids, though their occupation of Baghdad was the culmination of the rapid growth of their extensive dominions, and though the Caliph was their pensioner and practically a prisoner in their hands, found it polite to disguise their complete independence under a pretence of subserviency and to give a show of legitimacy to their rule by accepting titles from him'¹

Aftermaths of the Manchu,² Ottoman,³ and Mughal,³ Empires

The Government of the Manchu incarnation of the Far Eastern universal state in China—surrounded, as the Middle kingdom was accustomed to find itself, by tributary states, such as Korea, Annam, and the Mongol principalities, whose rulers did not receive investiture from the Son of heaven at Peking—affected to believe that all sovereigns, in any part of the World, with whom the Celestial empire might be drawn into diplomatic relations, derived their title from the same unique source of legitimacy.⁵

⁵ See for example, the letter addressed in 1793, the Emperor Ch´ien Lung to King George III of the united Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, that has been quoted in I.i.161.⁵

The Ottoman Empire, which became, as we have seen in an earlier part of this Study, the universal state of a Byzantine civilization, exhibited the same characteristics of illusory immortality at a time when it had already become 'the Sick Man of Europe'. The ambitious war-lords who were carving out for themselves successor-states—a Mehmed ‛Alī in Eygpt and Syria, an ‛Alī Yannina in Albania and Greece, and a Pasvānoghlu of Viddin in the north-western corner of Rumelia—were sedulous on doing in the Pādishāh's name all that they were doing to his detriment in their own private interests. When the Western Powers followed in their footsteps, they adopted the same fictions. Great Britain, for example, administered Cyprus from 1878 and Egypt from 1882 in the name of the Sultan at Constantinople until she found herself at war with Turkey in 1914.

The Mughal universal state of the Hindu civilization displays the same features. Within half a century of the Emperor Awrangzīb's death in A.D. 1707, an empire which had once exercised effective sovereignty over the greater part of the Indian subcontinent had been whittled down to a torso some 250 miles long and 100 miles broad. After another half-century it had been reduced to the circuit of the walls of the Red Fort at Delhi. Yet, 150 years after A.D. 1707, a descendant of Akbar and Awrangzīb was still squatting on their throne, and might have been left there much longer if the Mutineers of 1857 had not forced this poor puppet, against his wishes, to give his blessing to their revolt against a rāj from overseas which had, after a period of anarchy, replaced the long-extinct Mughal Rāj which he still symbolized.

Ghosts of Defunct Universal States

A still more remarkable testimony to the tenacity of the belief in the immortality of universal states is the practice of evoking their ghosts after they have proved themselves mortal by expiring. The ‛Abbasid Caliphate of Cairo⁸, and the Roman Empire on the shape of the Holy Roman Empire of the West⁹ and the East Roman Empire of Orthodox Christendom;¹⁰ and the empire of the Ts´in and Han dynasties in the shape of the Sui and T´ang empire of the Far Eastern {p. 20}Society in China. The surname of the founder of the Roman Empire was revived in the titles of Kaiser and Czar, and the title of Caliph, which originally meant successor of Muhammad, after haunting Cairo, passed to Istanbul, where it survived until its abolition at the hands of Westernizing revolutionists in the twentieth century.

The Grounds of the Illusion

These are only a selection from the wealth of historical examples illustrating the fact that the belief in the immortality of universal states survives for centuries after it has been confuted by plain hard facts. What are the causes of a phenomenon that looks strange at first sight?

One manifest cause is the potency of the impression made by the founders of universal states and their successors who enter into the fruits of their labours¹—an impression that their contemporaries, who receive it at first hand as the direct beneficiaries of these great men's achievements, hand on to a receptive Posterity with an emphasis which, by the cumulative effect of transmission, exaggerates an imposing truth into an overwhelming legend. From the many famous testimonies to the impression made by the Emperor Augustus, we have singled out already, in another context, the almost lyrical tribute paid by Philo,²{p.42}who as a Jew, A Hellenist, an Allexandrian, and a philosopher, can hardly be suspected of having gone to exceptional lengths in his enthusiasms for the Roman founder of an Hellenic universal state. The prestige to which such tributes gave a flying start can be seen gathering momentum during the next two centuries.

'A very important 'virtue', which emerges and takes shape slowly is the Providentia (in Greek πρόυοια) of the ruler. This ... "foresight" or "forethought" ... as we meet it in Cicero ... appears to be a virtue at once of the wise magistrate, who foresees and so forestalls dangers, and of the loving father, who makes provision for the welfare and future of the family of which hi is head. Both these senses tend to blend and come together, as they naturally might in a ruler who was at once a magistrate ... of the Roman people and a father for the whole Empire.

'Through a hundred years it develops till it reaches its first climax under Trajan, "the most provident prince"....This aspect of the rule of Trajan and Hadrian and the Antoinine Emperors, stressed as it was on coins, on buildings, by speakers and publicists, was bound to have its effect. Slowly the common people learnt to look for help and aid to the Providentia of their all-powerful ruler—he knows, he cares, he can act: he is like some Hercules, who visits all corners of the World putting down injustice and ending misery. Remembering this, we can form for ourselves some faint idea of how tremendous the effect of Hadrian's great journey's must have been on the provincials: here was an Emperor who did not stay in Rome (or, if he left it, leave merely for campaigns), but who visited every part of his realm to put things in order and to restore.... As years pass, this Providentia of the one ruler becomes more comprehensive.... When men are in distress and trouble they turn to the one person of whose help they can be sure: oppressed tenant-farmers on an Imperial estate in Africa appeal for aid to the Divina Providentia at Rome, and the harassed colonists of Scaptopara in Thrace beg the Emperor to pity them and help them by his Θεία πρόνια.¹

'There is something very touching in this faith, in this belief in the providentissimus princeps: however far away he may be in Rome, he cares for them, he pities them, he cannot be deceived, and he exerts always, to quote the fine phrase of one of Hadrian's officers, "a care that is never tired, with which he watches unrestingly on behalf of the good of Mankind, (infatigabilis cura, per quam adsidue pro humanis utilitatibus excubat)"....justice, clemency, duty, warlike prowess—these are fine things; but even more important is it that the subject peoples and provincials over this vast area should have beleied in a ruler who was not merely a soldier but who cared for them and provided for their needs.'²

{p. 43}This epiphany of the ruler of a universal state as the one shepard whose oecumenical monarchy makes one fold for all Mankind¹ appeals to one of the Human Soul's deepest longings, as, in Dostoyevski's fable, the Grand Inquisitor reminds a subversive christ.

'Thou mightest have taken ... the sword of Ceasar. Why didst Thou reject that last gift? Hadst Thou accepted that last counsel of the mighty spirit, Thou wouldst have accomplished all that Man seeks on Earth—that is, someone to worship, someone to keep his conscience, and some means of uniting all in one unanimous and harmonious ant-heap; for the craving for universal unity, is the third and last anguish of man. Mankind as a whole has always striven to organise a universal state. There have been many great nations with great histories, but the more highly they were developed the more unhappy they were, for they felt more acutely than other people the craving for world-wide union. The great conquerors—Timūrs and Chingis Khāns—whirled like hurricanes over the face of the Earth, striving to subdue its people, and they too were but the unconscious expression of the same craving for universal unity. Hadst Thou taken the World and Ceasar's purple, Thou woudlst have founded the universal state and have given universal peace. For who can rule men if not he who holds their conscience and their bread in his hands?'²

² Dostoyevski, F.: the Brothers Karamazov, Part II, Book V, chap 5: 'The Grand Inquisitor'.

Another cause of the persistence of the belief in immortality of the universal state is the impressiveness of the institution itself, as distinct from the prestige of the succession of rulers who are its living incarnations. A universal state captivates hearts and minds because it is the embodiment of a rally from the long-unhalted rout of a Time of Troubles, and it was this aspect of the Roman Empire that eventually won the admiration of originally hostile Greek men of letters.

'There is no salvation in the exercise of a dominion divorced from power. To find oneself under the dominion of one's superiors is a "second best" alternative; but this "second best" proved to be the best of all in our present experience of the roman Empire. This happy experience has moved the whole World to cleave to Rome with might and main. The World would no more think of seceding Rome than a ship's crew would think of parting company with the pilot. You must have seen bats in a cave clinging tight to one another and to the rocks; and this is an apt image of the whole World's dependence on Rome. In every heart today the focus of anxiety is the fear of becoming detached from the cluster. The thought of being abandoned by Rome is so appalling that it precludes any thought of wantonly abandoning her.

'There is an end of those disputes over sovereignty and prestige which were the causes of the outbreak of all the wars of the past; and, while some of the nations, like noiselessly flowing water, are delightfully quiet—rejoicing in their release from toil and trouble, and aware at last that all their old struggles were to no purpose—there are other nations which do not even know of remember whether they once sat in the seat of power. In fact we are witnessing a new version of the Pamphylian's myth (or is it Plato's own?). At a moment when the states of the World were already laid out on the funeral pyre as the victims of their own fratricidal strife and turmoil, they were all at once presented with the [Roman] dominion and straightway came to life again. How they arrived at this condition they are unable to say. They know nothing about it, and can only marvel at their present wellbeing. They are like sleepers awakened who have come to themselves and now dismiss from their thoughts the dreams that obsessed them only a moment ago. They no longer find it credible that there were ever such things as wars....The entire Inhabited World now keeps perpetual holiday....so that the only people who still need pity for the good things that they are missing are those outside your empire—if there are any such people left....'¹

This quaint scepticism on the question whether there were in fact any people worth mentioning outside the Roman Empire is characteristic, and is our justification for calling such institution universal states. They were universal not geographically but psychologically. Horace, for example, in one of his odes tells us that he does not bother about 'the threats of Tiridates'. The King of Parthia no doubt existed, but he simply did not matter. In a similar vein the Manchu Emperors of the Far Eastern universal state assumed in their diplomatic dealings that all governments,

¹ Aristeides, P. Aelius (A.D. 117-89): In Roman

including those of the Western world, had at some unspecified period in the past received permission to exist from the Chinese authorities.

And yet the reality of these universal states was something very different from the brilliant surface that they presented to Aelius Aristeides and their other panegyrists in various ages and various climes.

(II) THE DOOM OF TITHONUS

An obscure divinity of the Nubian marches of the Egyptian universal state was transfigured by the genius of Hellenic mythology into a mortal king of the Ethiopians who had the misfortune to be loved by Eôs, the immortal Goddess of the Dawn. The goddess besought her fellow Olympians to confer on her human lover the immortality which she and her peers enjoyed; and, jealous though they were of their divine privileges, she teased them into yielding at last to her feminine importunity. Yet even this grudging gift was marred by a fatal flaw; for the eager goddess had forgotten that the Olympians immortality was mated with an everlasting youth, and the other immortals had spiritually taken care to grant her no more than her bare request. The consequence was both ironic and tragic. After a honeymoon that flashed past in the twinkling of an Olympian eye, Eôs and here now immortal but still inexorably ageing mate found themselves condemned for eternity to grieve together over Tithonus's hapless plight. A senility to which the merciful hand of death could never set a term was an affliction that no mortal man could ever be made to suffer, and an eternal grief was an obsession that left no room for any thought of feeling.

For any human soul or human institution an immortality in This World would prove a martyrdom, even if it were unaccompanied by either physical decrepitude or mental senility. 'In this sense', wrote the philosophic Emperor Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 161-80), 'it would be true to say that any man of forty who is endowed with moderate intelligence has seen--in the light of the uniformity of Nature—the entire Past and Future'; and, if this estimate of the capacity of human souls for experience strikes the reader as an inordinately low one, he may find the reason in the age on which Marcus lived; for an 'Indian Summer' is an age of boredom. The price of the Roman Peace was the forfeiture of Hellenic liberty; and, though that liberty might always have been the privilege of a minority, and this privileged minority might have turned irresponsible and oppressive, it was manifest in retrospect that the turbulent wickedness of the Ciceronian climax of the Hellenic 'Time of Troubles' had provided a wealth of exciting and inspiring themes for Roman public speakers which their epigoni in a smugly ordered Trajanic epoch might conventionally condemn as horrors, not nostri saeculi, but must secretly envy as they found themselves perpetually failing in their laborious efforts to substitute far-fetched artifice for the stimulus of importunate life.

On the morrow of the breakdown of the Hellenic society Plato, anxiously seeking to safeguard it against a further fall by pegging it in a securely rigid posture, had idealized the comparative stability of the Eygprtaic culture; and a thousand years later, when the Eygptaic culture was still in being while Hellenic civilization had arrived at its last agonies, the last of the Neoplatonists pushed their reputed master's sentiment to an almost frenzied pitch of uncritical admiration.

Thanks to the obstinacy of the Eygptaic universal state in again and again insisting on returning to life after its body had been duly laid on the salutary funeral pyre, the Eygptaic civilization lived to see its contemporaries—the Minoan, the Sumeric, and the Indus culture—all pass away and give place to successors of a younger generation, some of which had passed away in their turn while the Eygptaic society still kept alive. Eygptaic students of history could have observed the birth and death of the First Syriac, Hittite, and Babylonic offspring of the Sumeric civilization and the rise and decline of the Syriac and Hellenic offspring of the Minoan. Yet the fabulously long-drawn-out epilogue to the broken-down Eygptaic society's natural term of life was but an alternation of long stretches of boredom with hectic bouts of demonic energy, into which this somnolent society was galvanized by the impact of alien bodies social.

The same rhythm of trance-like somnolence alternating with outbursts of fanatical xenophobia can be discerned in the epilogue to the history of the Far Eastern civilization in China. The tincture of the Far Eastern Christian culture in the Mongols who had forced upon china an alien universal state evoked a reaction in which the Mongols were evicted and their dominion replaced by the indigenous universal state of the Ming. Even the Manchu barbarians, who stepped into the political vacuum created by the Ming’s collapse, and whose taint of Far Eastern Christian culture was less noticeable than their receptivity in adopting the Chinese way of life, never ceased to maintain itself underground and broke out into the open again in the T´aip´ing insurrection of A.D. 1852-64. the infiltration of the Early Modern Western civilization, in its Catholic Christian form, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries provoked the proscription of Catholicism in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. The blasting open of the sea-gates of China for Western trade between A.D. 1839 and A.D. 1861 provoked the retort of the anti-Western 'Boxer' rising of A.D. 1900; and the Manchu Dynasty was overthrown in A.D. 1911 in retribution for the double crime of being ineradicably alien itself and at the same time showing itself incompetent to keep the now far more formidable alien force of Western penetration at bay.

Happily life is kinder than legend, and the sentence of immortality which mythology passed on Tithonis is commuted, for the benefit of the universal states of history, to a not interminable longevity. Marcus's disillusioned man of forty must die at last though he may outlive his zest for life by fifty of sixty years, and a universal state that kicks again and again against the pricks of death will weather away in the course of ages, like a pillar of salt that was fabled to be the petrified substance of a once living woman.

C. UNIVERSAL STATES AS MEANS

(a) The Conductivity of Universal States

(b) The Psychology of Peace

(c)The Serviceability of Imperial Institutions

Communications

Garrisons and Colonies

Who are the Beneficiaries?

{VI. C. II. (c) 2, p. 144} In promoting this process of pammixia and proletarianization in the body social of a universal state, for whose benefit do civilian colonies and military garrisons chiefly operate?

There have been cases in which the beneficiary had been an alien civilization…

{p. 145} Such cases, however, as these are as rare as they are interesting, and it is evident that an alien civilization is not the normal beneficiary from the colonies and garrison that have been installed by a universal state. On the other hand the barbarians beyond the pale of a civilization derive conspicuous benefits from cantonments screening a universal state’s

{p. 146} outer frontiers; for the education which the barbarians gradually acquire from these military outposts of a civilization—first as adversaries and later as mercenaries of the imperial power—makes them capable , at the moment when the empire collapses, of swoping across the fallen barrier and carving barbarian successor-states out of derelict imperial provinces. This adventure and its sequel have been discussed in previous parts of this Study¹ and are dealt with further below.² At this point it is only necessary to remind ourselves that the barbarians’ triumphs are as short-lived as they are sensational.³ The transfers and mixtures of populations in a universal state produce deeper effects, with more important historical consequences, on the relations between the dominant minority and the internal proletariat….

¹ In V. v. 194-337 and 459-480.
² In VIII. Viii, passim.
³ On this point, see I. I. 58-62 and VIII. Viii, 45-87