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Anglo-French Relations (History)
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Hatty
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I think it's to do strengths and weaknesses and timing - the realisation that the larger'n'stronger country hasn't been watching its back but will turn round someday (England has been subjugating the Welsh, where next? Scotland. Portugal has more or less got rid of its Moors, she knows Spain will reach that stage too but she's already annexed Galicia in 1072, so it'll be Portugal next...).

The threat of a hostile take-over may be the mechanism by which rival factions are drawn together in a common purpose. No easy matter to unite Scottish clans or Japanese samurai but, if they overlook their differences long enough to forge a nation-wide group and it takes decades of battling to effectively form the state, even if the rivalries still seethe below the surface the nation has proved it can present a united front.
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Mick Harper
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Wouldn't the Germanic tribes have had to have a powerful state mechanism to continuously withstand the Roman Empire?

In the first place they didn't withstand the Roman Empire. Large swathes of them along the Rhine and the Danube succumbed. It is simply part of the German mythos that they "continuously withstood" the Romans. Actually, if you remember, Augustus made the decision not to expand after the loss of the legions in the Teutoberg Forest so they only withstood in the sense that the Romans decided not to expand in that direction. And who can blame them?

If this is so, wouldn't they be termed the first nation state? A nation state they themselves then ruined by expanding outwards in all directions.

Why so? Even if you accept the German mythos (which does have some semblance of truth) you can just say they are a powerful tribal confederacy -- or whatever technical term you choose. But since we are defining the term nation-state technically, as a self-governing area of land with the same borders for a hundred years or so, then it would be up to you to prove that "Germania" was such.

But you'd have a hard job because it never was and never has been such. It's not enough to wave your hand vaguely towards the east and say the Germans remained independent. As I have already pointed out there is not the slightest chance of a pre-literate society operating a state that large.

Actually I think I am wrong, a state mechanism doesn't make a nation state. oh well.

Doubly wrong because of course it very precisely does. Scotland, Portugal, Japan, Korea, England....France, Spain etc etc are highly wrought artefacts. They are unquestionably 'state mechanisms' though perhaps not wittingly so. Why they limit themselves (if they do) is something you should all think about now because it's what distinguishes them from other types of state.
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Mick Harper
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I think it's to do strengths and weaknesses and timing - the realisation that the larger'n'stronger country hasn't been watching its back but will turn round someday (England has been subjugating the Welsh, where next? Scotland. Portugal has more or less got rid of its Moors, she knows Spain will reach that stage too but she's already annexed Galicia in 1072, so it'll be Portugal next...).

This won't do at all, Hatty. The systems approach is expressly designed to get away from this stream-of-anecdote school of history. And such 'chat' is to be found in all academic history books -- it's what drove me to write THOBR.

Timing? What timing?...give us some times. Strengths and weaknesses? Are you really saying that Portugal went through this incredible bout of expert crystal-ball gazing and said to itself, "Hey, why don't we invent the nation-state?"

However you have lurched onto a curious set of coincidences: Portugal is weaker than Spain, Scotland is weaker than England, Korea is weaker than Japan....but then again, speaking as a systems analyst, I would have to point out (like the earth and the moon, remember?) that one state must in the nature of things be weaker than its neighbour and they only seem to be a pattern because we are looking for one..

The threat of a hostile take-over may be the mechanism by which rival factions are drawn together in a common purpose. No easy matter to unite Scottish clans or Japanese samurai but, if they overlook their differences long enough to forge a nation-wide group and it takes decades of battling to effectively form the state, even if the rivalries still seethe below the surface the nation has proved it can present a united front.

Ok, that's better: you make an assertion of associated-facts. Now does it stand up? Does anyone here know enough about Portuguese history to say that the ruling elite was specifically moved by the threat of...well, there's your first problem...there was no Spain. There was Castille...so why didn't Leon or the Asturians or Catalonia or the Basques take the Portuguese route? Well, no, not Catalonia since that did become a nation-state...or they thought they were forming one. But to what extent is Spain merely Greater Castille? Yes, Iberia might prove to be a good test bed.

I know enough about Scottish history to say that independence from England was not the mechanism for uniting Scotland: a much more internal matter -- and while we're on the subject, remember that Scotland is chronically badly organised internally, half the territory speaks the language of the Inglis and half something else entirely.

Who were the Japanese samurai afraid of? Koreans? Chinese? Mongols? A more divisive lot than the Japanese samurai is hard to imagine. Though on the other hand you might argue that this is merely the consequence of being a nation-state and not having to worry overmuch about external threats.
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Mick Harper
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Very well, make your point about the Himalayas in sober, straightforward language and I will demolish it with equal sobriety.
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AJMorton



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Okay.

The central, northern and southern interior of the great land mass contains the Himalayan Mountains and the inhospitable northern areas of Siberia and the equatorial heat of the south. Three distinctly uncomfortable climates for temperate natives.

It cuts right down the centre of Earth and Harperium and makes journeys to and fro more troublesome.

You said yourself "Then go round it." To go round something as big as this is always gonna be more troublesome than walking a straight line across flat countryside.

The politics, religion and systems of one side rarely influenced those on the other. I simply offer that the crazy central terrain was a contributing factor.

If the nation states truly sit at the extremities on both sides of the land mass, it means that our biggest rivals are not only incredibly far away, but also hidden behind a difficult and huge central area.
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Hatty
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Are you really saying that Portugal went through this incredible bout of expert crystal-ball gazing and said to itself, "Hey, why don't we invent the nation-state?"

No, I expressed it badly. Portugal has just come through a lengthy campaign to rid itself of the Moors and is strong enough, despite not having finished the job, to achieve independence. The fact that the rest of the peninsula was still occupied by the Moors (remember, they're there for the next three hundred plus years) gave Portugal time to consolidate her territory and she drove out the Moors a good couple of hundred years before the rest of Spain-as-it-would-become.

Does anyone here know enough about Portuguese history to say that the ruling elite was specifically moved by the threat of...well, there's your first problem...there was no Spain.

The Moors, not Spain, were the invading force.

There was Castille...so why didn't Leon or the Asturians or Catalonia or the Basques take the Portuguese route? Well, no, not Catalonia since that did become a nation-state...or they thought they were forming one.

But these regions don't have the defining feature of being 'at the back of beyond', they're part of the central peninsula except Catalonia which backs onto the Mediterranean and that doesn't count as people are continually plying their trade across the Med. Catalonia's position controls the east Pyrennean route between France and Spain though it seems that, once France and Spain grew into nation-states Catalonia became a non-entity, apart from its trading outlet through the Med via Barcelona. Too many fingers in too many tortillas perhaps.

But to what extent is Spain merely Greater Castille?

It was the union of Castille and Aragon which began the process of unifying the country (Aragon used to be ruled by Catalonia), though both provinces retained their autonomy; Castille was the dominant partner having formed alliances with Leon and other kingdoms and, being the leader in the Reconquista, it gained large tracts of land often depopulated as a result of years of fighting which could be given to supporters- it even called itself the "Kingdom of Spain". Can't be for nothing that mainland Spanish is "castellano" to differentiate it from the South American variety.

Who were the Japanese samurai afraid of?

The samurai were hired by landowners as private soldiers, they fought each other on behalf of their warlords, rather than Koreans or Mongols, and ultimately became the equivalent of the ruling elite. Not so different from the clan system. Actually, not so different from Spain's rival kingdoms prior to the accession of Ferdinand and Isabella, except that reconquest took priority over internal shenanigans.
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Hatty
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Really try to think what Japan, Korea, Portugal, Scotland, England have in common.

They all have spheres of influence disproportionate to their size.

Also, they all have their access to the land mass blocked so their theatre of operations is the sea (if they didn't have a powerful neighbour, they'd presumably expand over land).

Take Portugal: instead of becoming embroiled in a quarrel over the Canary Islands, the King of Portugal cedes the islands to the "Catholic Monarchs of Castile and Aragon" (1479) in return for the Azores, Madeira, the Cape Verde islands and "lands discovered and to be discovered...and any other island which might be found and conquered from the Canary islands beyond toward Guinea."
According to wiki This treaty, ratified later by the Papal bull Aeterni regis in 1481, essentially gave the Portuguese free rein to continue their exploration along the African coast while guaranteeing Castilian sovereignty in the Canaries. It also prohibited Castilians from sailing to the Portuguese possessions without Portuguese license.

So establishing trade routes and forming alliances takes priority over ruling a colony... a pattern is emerging, of small, self-governing nations investigating trade links by sea and avoiding direct confrontation through a treaty (investing in entrepreneurial activities could be a useful means of diverting too-powerful or disaffected elements from causing trouble at home). The Treaty of Windsor (1386) between England and Portugal is the oldest surviving treaty in the world.
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Hatty
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Why they limit themselves (if they do) is something you should all think about now because it's what distinguishes them from other types of state.

1. Engaging in warfare unless unavoidable is too costly and overstretches resources.
2. Sticking to sea rather than land routes means less likelihood of being embroiled in other people's territorial struggles.
3. Establishing trading posts not colonies allows them to participate in international trade without the need for maintaining an entire army, garrisons should be sufficient protection.

As England became a nation-state before France she could effectively control the Channel (the Channel Islands were granted privileges and rights in 1215 after John lost Normandy in return for their loyalty to the English sovereign) giving her a head-start in setting up trade routes.

Spain became a nation-state before France and duly launched herself into establishing trading networks across the ocean; however she also became linked to a huge land empire through dynastic alliances and exhausted her energies in The Netherlands and elsewhere. Portuguese mariners, on the other hand, opened up the spice route before their Spanish counterparts, an impressive feat by any standards.

France became constrained between two, no, three arenas of Spanish/Austro-Habsburg dominion; although her southern flank was protected by the Pyrenees she may well have been overwhelmed if Spain had concentrated less on her land-based possessions and concentrated on protecting her sea-borne empire. (Establishing control over the trade networks is crucial - Korea banned European access to its ports up to the 1880s). Northern sea access was limited by England's dominance, western access was blocked by Brittany, situated between the Atlantic and the rest of France, incorporated into France in 1532, though it wasn't until the seventeenth century under Louis XIV and his minister, Colbert, that France had a merchant marine and used Brittany's potential.
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Mick Harper
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Carry on Hatty. Doing great.

I entirely disagree. She's just hurling great gobbets at the problem and hoping something will stick. So let's see what does:

No, I expressed it badly. Portugal has just come through a lengthy campaign to rid itself of the Moors and is strong enough, despite not having finished the job, to achieve independence. The fact that the rest of the peninsula was still occupied by the Moors (remember, they're there for the next three hundred plus years) gave Portugal time to consolidate her territory and she drove out the Moors a good couple of hundred years before the rest of Spain-as-it-would-become

Stuff and nonsense. Parts of Spain were never occupied by the Moors, lots of the northern bits were freed before and/or contemporaneously with Portugal. And what does a phrase like "is strong enough, despite not having finished the job, to achieve independence" mean, pray? For a start this applies to other bits of the peninsula and in any case it's a complete cirularity since the bits that were freed from the Moors were by definition independent and those bits that weren't...weren't. Try to remember that Portugal is nothing special, it's just another patch of the patchwork that is Iberia.

The Moors, not Spain, were the invading force.

More stuff and nonsense. By the thirteenth century the Moors were not the invading force as far as Portugal were concened. It was Castille (or Leon or the Catalan Empire or whoever got their Christian act together firstest with the mostest) that was the threat to Portugal's existence. Remember again she just happened to be the one sliver of Iberia that survived the Castillian juggernaut.

They all have spheres of influence disproportionate to their size

Wha-a-at! Scotland, Korea, Japan (before the Meiji Restoration)?

Also, they all have their access to the land mass blocked so their theatre of operations is the sea (if they didn't have a powerful neighbour, they'd presumably expand over land).

England never bothered with the sea for centuries. Scotland never did ever. Korea and Japan actually banned their citizens from engaging in foreign trade for most of their existence.

Take Portugal...

Portugal scarcely bothered with the sea for the first two centuries of her nation-state existence.

So establishing trade routes and forming alliances takes priority over ruling a colony... a pattern is emerging, of small, self-governing nations investigating trade links by sea and avoiding direct confrontation through a treaty (investing in entrepreneurial activities could be a useful means of diverting too-powerful or disaffected elements from causing trouble at home). The Treaty of Windsor (1386) between England and Portugal is the oldest surviving treaty in the world.

Pff. Not only were colonies more important than trade a lot of the time but these nation-state powers fought like cats. Treaties? Portugal refused even to negotiate with the others so that Holland was forced to annexe the Portuguese colonies and the Brits had to fight the whole of the War of the Spanish Succession just to get the Spaniards to the table (Asiento).

1. Engaging in warfare unless unavoidable is too costly and overstretches resources.

Where are you at? Nation-states are war-fighting machines. They love it. Don't confuse modernism with liberalism.

Sticking to sea rather than land routes means less likelihood of being embroiled in other people's territorial struggles.

Other way round, poppet. Land trade can be regulated, sea-borne trade can't.

Establishing trading posts not colonies allows them to participate in international trade without the need for maintaining an entire army, garrisons should be sufficient protection.

So why did they all get busy building colonies? The only place you had trading posts was where, for whatever reason, colonisation was out eg West Africa, China, Japan etc.

As England became a nation-state before France she could effectively control the Channel (the Channel Islands were granted privileges and rights in 1215 after John lost Normandy in return for their loyalty to the English sovereign) giving her a head-start in setting up trade routes.

Leave it out. Those greedy bastards just calculated that London was further away than Rouen.

Spain became a nation-state before France

Other way round. Spain became a nation-state because she'd just observed how France had become one to get rid of the English.

and duly launched herself into establishing trading networks across the ocean; however she also became linked to a huge land empire through dynastic alliances and

Spain? trade? that's a good one. Name one thing Spain ever traded.

exhausted her energies in The Netherlands and elsewhere. Portuguese mariners, on the other hand, opened up the spice route before their Spanish counterparts, an impressive feat by any standards
.
Oh yeah? Ain't you forgetting that Spain actually annexed Portugal and her whole blessed empire in 1580 just when she was exhausting her energies against The Netherlands?

etc etc
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DPCrisp


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Herr MacTesla and Hatty are busy drawing mental pictures on mental knickers and then twisting them into knots. As we have all done. (Orthodoxy is fuelled by this process.) One of the things Applied Epistemology is about is refocusing on what's real in place of the artefacts of our own thinking.

The overview is a powerful tool, but what do you see in it? It is double-edged.
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DPCrisp


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Wouldn't the Germanic tribes have had to have a powerful state mechanism to continuously withstand the Roman Empire?

I'm still struggling with the difference (if there is one) between nationhood and nation-statehood and the chances that one or the other may have existed in preliterate times, contrary to Mick's assertion, and whether they may in fact perish... but I'm waiting for the end so we can graduate from "look, here are the nation-states" to "look, this is how nation-states work".

In the meantime: surely the opposite, Tel: the insubstantiality of non-nations makes them hard to conquer!
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DPCrisp


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The inability to expand is surely a contributing factor to the creation of strict borders.

Is this the kernel of the answer?

It starts where there is only one border, coz it only takes one to be settled for all your borders to be settled.

But it starts where there is a border: someone else of sufficient standing to stop you running rough-shod over them. Something to settle.

Now... ummm...
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Mick Harper
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I entirely agree with you, Dan. I shall be moving on to some proper systems principles shortly. But meanwhile, or perhaps to start the new ball rolling I shall take up your

I'm still struggling with the difference (if there is one) between nationhood and nation-statehood

The simplest way to observe the difference is to ask what is the German nation and what is/are the German nation-states? The second bit is easy enough in a complicated sort of way:
Switzerland is a German-speaking nation-state (with some linguistic minorities but 90 per cent German-speaking)
Austria is a German-speaking nation-state probably. She acquired her borders in 1919 so she'd better hustle if she wants another Anschluss
Neither of these two claim to be Germany or even part of Germany
Germany is not a nation-state (1945, 1991 borders). One might say 'yet' but you'd be surprised how, for instance, questons about her boundaries with Poland and even the Czech Republic (or even the Russkies over Königsberg) might blow up out of a clear blue sky. Germany does claim to be Germany in some sense.

But none of this corresponds to the German 'nation' though. However, following the population transfers of 1945, one might say these three countries between them contain the German nation.

As for pre-Roman Germania, well not only do we not know enough about her but what we do know is that it was neither a nation nor a nation-state. It appears to have been a whole bunch of tribes and they certainly weren't speaking 'German'. They were speaking Swabian, Schwyz or whatever but not Hoch Deutsch.

However, did Herman the German blow his horn and gather all the Germans around him to confront the Romans, as German nationalists are wont to claim? Well, if he did then yes, I suppose you might say there was a German nation at this time but I'm not a German nationalist.
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Mick Harper
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Without becoming too chewy (or nationalistic), you could say that 'nationhood' is a concept driven by intangible thought processes.

AE enjoins you to be entirely nationalistic (since it will lead you to challenge your own current orthodoxy) but surely the the thought-processes are not merely intangible, they do not exist. You support the team you were born in. Job done, body bag filled.

There is at least one big difference between patriotism and nationhood. Someone in a suitably patriotic state tends to lean towards the positive aspects of his or her society.

Please refrain from making these large and unproveable statements.

People with a sense of nationhood seem to be very well aware of who they are and where they come from, but they aren't especially proud of it.

Let me guess....this applies to you.

the Scots, Irish and Welsh see themselves as near kin

Are you serious? A few intellectuals during the last few decades maybe. Nobody else. Nowhen else. Been to Ibrox lately?

I was also intrigued by the fact that the borders of non-nation-states are incredibly erratic.

It is not clear whether you are sayin erratic in the sense of being not very natural or in the sense of ever-changing but it is nation-state borders that tend to be erratic in the first sense. Non-nation states can afford to expend quite a lot of blood and treasure in hammering out rational borders; nation-states have to make do with whatever they end up with.

It makes you realise how flexible and impermanent most borders really are.

Again I don't know what meaning of flexibility you are using, but yes, borders tend to follow neither rhyme nor reason but no, most borders are incredibly permanent. Looking at Africa today you can see that even though many of the states are ungovernable because their borders were laid down for the convenience of outsiders, everybody regards every border as sacrosanct. Perfectly ridiculous. What Africa needs is some proper wars.

Am I right in thinking that those borders which are more fixed, and for longer periods are the Nation-States?

Not more fixed, absolutely fixed; not for longer periods but for all time.
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Mick Harper
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Consider the border between Argentina and Britain. Does it run between the Argy mainland and the Falklands or somewhere between the Falkland Islands and Britain? Both positions are perfectly arguable but what was not arguable was the position that Argentina adopted by invading South Georgia and claiming the border was about a thousand miles out in the South Atlantic!

Offshore territory does not count in the making of a nation-state. Neither our nor Argentina's status as a nation-state will be effected whatever the final divvying of Las Malvinas. (Which means 'The People of St Malo' ...hey, let's hand the islands over to the Frogs... they started it.)

But the situation is not always this clear-cut. For instance, Britain can kiss goodbye to Ulster with nary a tear but Ireland's (ie Eire's) position is much more complex. You can observe that the last-man-standing rule is approaching (the border was 'fixed' in 1921) because the desire for Ireland to incorporate Ulster is waning sharply. All of a sudden it doesn't feel such a natural fit. Belfast, Celtic Tiger...yeah right.
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