The foundations of statehood

Introduction

Until quite recently most scholars shared the view that empires and nation-states do not have much in common. Moreover, the general perception was that an imperial form of political rule was a thing of the past destined to be replaced by the only rational, legitimate and feasible type of territorial political organization – the nation-state. This early confidence has now been replaced by much more cautious assessments. Over the last decade or so several influential historians and historical sociologists have questioned this premise, arguing not only that nation-states and empires have more in common than previously thought but also that the imperial mode of governance is not dead and buried but remains an ever present possibility for rulers to pursue now and in the future (Burbank and Cooper, 2010; Kumar, 2010; Munkler, 2007). Nevertheless, while we now accept that empires and nation-states are not mutually exclusive forms of social organization preordained to replace one another in a strictly evolutionary fashion, it is not completely clear how they are similar and where exactly this resemblance comes from. Some scholars argue that the modern political, cultural and economic institutions that define a nation-state have deep cultural or biological roots. Hence Smith (1986, 2009) and Hutchinson (2005, 2017) analyse the transition from the pre-modern imperial order to the modern day world of nation-states through the prism of cultural continuity: in this view traditional ethnic identities gradually transform into politicized forms of nationhood. Gat (2012) and Van Den Berghe (1981) make the case that this long-term continuity between different forms of political and cultural organization has strong biological roots: they insist that our genetic propensity for survival drives major institutional innovations including the evolutionary shift from imperial to national modes of governance. In contrast other scholars emphasize economic, political and military factors as being crucial in making the transition from empire to nation-state possible (Arrighi, 1994; Tilly, 1992; Mann, 1986; Wallerstein, 1974). In this article I briefly articulate an alternative interpretation that explores the similarities and differences between these two types of polity. By zooming in on three longue durée processes – the cumulative bureaucratization of coercion, centrifugal ideologization and the envelopment of micro-solidarity – I aim to identify what exactly makes empires and nation-states similar and where this resemblance comes from.

The two forms of statehood

Since the end of the Second World War the nation-state has been gradually institutionalized as the only legitimate form of territorial rule. This idea is clearly stipulated in the UN charter where Article 2 (Chapter 1) reaffirms the notion of ‘the sovereign equality of all its Members’ and states that no member is allowed to use ‘force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any [nation-] state’. Most other international organizations, from the IMF, World Bank, WTO, OSCE, to ICC or Interpol, to name a few, subscribe to the same principle: political sovereignty and territorial integrity is the sole prerogative of nation-states. Although our world still contains city-states, traditional kingdoms and even some chiefdoms of sedentary hunter-gatherers, all these entities could survive only by redefining themselves as small nation-states or as autonomous regions within existing nation-states. Hence Monaco and Singapore are city-states that take their seats in the UN and other international organizations as nation-states. Complex and sedentary hunter-gatherer societies such as the Guarani or Yanomami of South America or the Torres Strait Islanders are now re-labelled as ‘Native Brazilians’ or ‘Indigenous Australians’ and as such integrated within the organizational and ideological framework of their respective nation-states: Brazil and Australia. Traditional kingdoms such as Swaziland, Saudi Arabia, Oman or Brunei are all now re-defined in international law as nation-states.

Nevertheless, what is noticeable is that one type of territorial organization has not undergone such re-labelling – the empire. Unlike city-states, city-leagues, khanates, sultanates, composite kingdoms or tribal confederacies which have all been incorporated into the nation-state project, the empire has largely been excluded. Moreover, the contemporary world has made no legitimate space for the existence of empires. Hence, with the partial exception of Japan, which is still nominally headed by an emperor, no contemporary ruler embraces the imperial title and no state is self-described as an empire. ¹

Even though the remnants of imperial décor were still visible until the late 1970s with Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran or even Jean-Bédel Bokassa of the Central African empire insisting on their imperial titles, the age of nominal empires seemed to be at an end. The post-Second World War era was often described as the period of decolonization and political liberation where there was no room for empires. Furthermore, as the nation-state was originally conceived to be an entity that stands in direct opposition to the ancient imperial order its, world-wide proliferation was meant to appear at the expense of the old empires. In this context empire became a synonym for a decaying ancien régime that was destined to be replaced with modern and vibrant nation-states.

Hence while politicians and the general public now perceived empires as ‘prisons of nations’ bent on violent expansion, much of the academic community was resolute that these two forms of territorial organization are mutually incompatible models of state organization. The conventional wisdom had it that whereas empires are large entities underpinned by deep inequalities, formal social hierarchies and no sense of cross-class solidarity, the nation-state stood for liberté, égalité, and fraternité. Although many scholars remained aware of the complexities of individual cases and showed less enthusiasm towards such sharp distinctions there was still general agreement that imperial orders were destined to be replaced by the world of nation-states. This view was just as prevalent among historians who understood empires as the vanishing predecessors of nation-states as it was among the social scientists who identified similar institutional trends pointing towards the proliferation of the nation-state model throughout the world. ²

For example, the conventional historiographic views portray the late 19th-century unification of Italy and Germany as a result of strong nationalist movements led by Mazzini, Garibaldi, Bismarck and others aspiring to establish a modern nation-state. In these interpretations the shift from empire and city-state towards the nation-state model was perceived as willed and historically inevitable (Shreeves, 1984). In a similar way the Stanford neo-institutionalist school focused on documenting how the modern organizational models built around the nation-state apparatuses were gradually emulated throughout the world. As Meyer and his collaborators (1992, 1997) insist, the post-Second World War world is characterized by ever increasing standardization of models of governance and shared values that underpin these models. Meyer identifies a wide range of such isomorphic practices that have proliferated throughout the world: from standardized mass education, population control policies and welfare regimes to the adoption of relatively uniform constitutions, legal systems, and demographic records, among many others (Meyer et al., 1997). At the core of this theory is the idea that the global replication of the nation-state structure makes imperial and other models of governance redundant in the modern world.

Nevertheless, this well established, and largely teleological, narrative has recently been challenged by a number of influential historical sociologists and historians, all of whom claim that empires and nation-states have more in common than previously thought. For example, Burbank and Cooper (2010) argue that empires and nation-states share several important features including their dependence on the wider geo-political environments defined by the ongoing economic, political and cultural interaction with their neighbours and the rest of the world as well as their shared layered sovereignties. Just as empires of the past, so do nation-states today live in an interconnected universe:

The world did not then – and still does not –consist of billiard-ball states, with impermeable sovereignty bouncing off each other. The history of empires allows us instead to envision sovereignty as shared out, layered, overlapping. (Burbank and Cooper, 2010: 17)

The argument advanced in this article follows these new interpretations in the sense that I too acknowledge that empires and nation-states have more in common than conventional understandings allow. This is not to conflate these two ideal types of polity organization. Obviously a nation-state as an ideal type stands for a set of principles that clearly clash with those that underpin an imperial order. As I have argued elsewhere, nation-states are nominally conceptualized as ‘secularised social organisations with fixed and stable territory and a centralised political authority underpinned by intensive ideological particularism and the promotion of moral egalitarianism, social solidarity and cultural homogeneity among its populace’ (Malešević, 2013: 66). Nation-states are also defined by their ability to legitimately monopolize the use of violence, education, legislation and taxation on their territories (Weber, 1986; Elias, 2000; Gellner, 1983; Malešević, 2013). In contrast, empires stand for universalist principles, discourage cross-class solidarity and cultural homogeneity and usually do not aspire towards establishing permanent and fixed borders. They are conceived as deeply hierarchical social orders that ‘foster a vertical sense of attachment where each stratum maintains its socio-economic and cultural difference’ (Malešević, 2013: 35).

Nevertheless, these nominal features do not necessarily translate well into the everyday reality of empires and nation-states. For one thing, very few contemporary nation-states are culturally homogeneous or built around strict moral egalitarian principles. While this might feature as a strong ideological aspiration, often inscribed in the constitutions of many modern states, the actual realties rarely match these ambitions. For example, even the most prosperous and egalitarian polities such as those in Scandinavia still maintain a clear distinction between full citizens entitled to all rights and state provisions and non-citizen immigrants with only some rights, a lesser or no sense of symbolic belonging to the nation and lower status recognition by the majority population. For another thing, many contemporary nation-states struggle with establishing a legitimate monopoly on violence, education, legislation and taxation. For example, many African, Latin American and Asian polities do not fully control their territories and in some instances have to deal with well-armed warlords or breakaway regions. Even the militarily most powerful state on the planet, the US, does not possess a full monopoly on the use of violence: its citizens own no less than 300 million firearms (Horsley, 2016) and the government has to deal constantly with violent militias, vigilantes, armed religious cults and many other groups. While EU states largely maintain this monopoly on the use of violence they have relinquished some of their monopoly on taxation and legislation, as the EU Central Bank, the EU Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights have substantial powers that can override the courts and taxation policies of the individual member states.

This diversity is just as visible among the imperial orders of the past. Whereas some empires were strictly hierarchical others allowed for more social mobility. In a similar vein some empires were ignorant of cultural difference while others developed firm ethnic hierarchies (Burbank and Cooper, 2010; Gat, 2013: Darwin, 2013). John Darwin (2013: 160–9) writes about imperial ethnicities that emerge in specific historical contexts where some imperial orders clearly privileged one ethnic group over others, such as the imperial Britishness of the white settler colonies vis-à-vis the native populations or the Manchu dominance over the Han in China until the end of the Qing dynasty in 1911. Other scholars distinguish between ancient and modernizing empires and argue that, unlike their pre-modern counterparts, the 18th- and 19th-century empires had much more similarity with nation-states (Hall, 1985; Breuilly, 2017; Kumar, 2010; Burbank and Cooper, 2010; Malešević, 2013). This was particularly visible in terms of how they managed cultural difference and class conflicts: while the ancient empires were less pressed with these issues the modernizing empires had, just as the nation-states, to develop effective strategies to deal with popular mobilization around class and ethnicity.

However, to identify these similarities between empires and nation-states does not mean to suggest either that they are almost identical forms of social organization or that they have very little in common. Instead the argument is made that these ideal types appear in a variety of empirical guises and as such maintain a substantial degree of difference while also exhibiting some similar features. More specifically, I argue that empires and nation-states are different but highly compatible forms of social organization and as such are prone to transform into each other under the right historical conditions. This means that the transition from empires to nation-states is not necessarily a one-way process. Nation-states are not destined to replace empires and empires are not necessarily something that belongs to the past. Although the historical record indicates that there are many instances of empires developing into nation-states (Wimmer, 2012), there are also notable cases of nation-states and republics becoming empires: from Napoleon’s creation of the French empire (1804–14), to the empire of Haiti (1849–59) under Emperor Faustin I to the Mexican empire under Maximilian I (1864–7), the Central African empire (1976–9) under Bokassa I or the Brazilian empire under Dom Pedro I and II (1822–89). More importantly, some of their similar features indicate that reversibility and transformation from one into another is an everlasting possibility. So what are these common building blocks of empires and nation-states and what exactly makes these two forms of statehood different? What are the structural and interactional ingredients that make the transition from empire to nation-state possible?

Coercive-organizational power and state formation

As I have argued elsewhere, modern social organizations do not emerge ex nihilo but develop gradually on the organizational, ideological and micro-interactional contours of previous institutional forms. In this context I identify three key historical processes that have helped shape this long-term transformation: the cumulative bureaucratization of coercion, centrifugal ideologization and the envelopment of micro-solidarity (Malešević, 2010, 2013, 2017). The central issue here is the coercive capacity of social organizations and their ability to ideologically penetrate the social order under their control. In the pre-modern world coercive power was a primary mechanism of social dominance and organizational development. The increase in the organizational capacity to accumulate, store and distribute food, to provide permanent housing, to ensure protection and security were all premised on the enhancement of the coercive potential of the social organizations involved in this process. As Mann (1986) has demonstrated convincingly, the emergence of pristine states was parallel to the expansion of ‘social caging’ whereby an individual’s security and relative prosperity were tied to the continuous loss of individual liberties. Although Mann focuses on states, the same process affected other social organizations – from private corporations, religious institutions, and political parties to social movements and many other organized collectivities. In all of these cases the rise of organizational power went hand-in-hand with the increase in the coercive capability of these organizations. This process can be traced back to 12,000 years ago, but it has radically intensified in the last 200 to 250 years. Although throughout history individual organizations have experienced decline and many have disappeared, were destroyed or amalgamated into other entities, coercive-organizational power as such has largely been cumulative in the sense that it has greater infrastructural reach, wider territorial scope and deeper social penetration than ever before (Malešević, 2010, 2017). That is why I call this process the cumulative bureaucratization of coercion.

In this context the rise of imperial power was deeply wedded to empires’ organizational strength. The empires expanded through military might which also had to be underpinned by economic, political and ideological force. To become and remain a great empire it was necessary to develop and maintain a potent coercive-organizational scaffolding. Most empires retained and improved their organizational might through continuous expansion and conquest. For example, both the Roman and Chinese empires were forged in warfare and their incessant organizational growth was highly dependent on their ability to win wars and expand their territory and population. Although the Roman state attracted ‘barbarians’ with its relative affluence, rule-based order and vibrant civic life, the principal source of the empire’s success was its military might. This military capability was in part shaped by the state’s ability to recruit large numbers of soldiers (at its peak in 211 CE the army consisted of over 450,000 men), but even more important was the military’s highly effective system of organization. The military was comprised of three type of formations: legions (mostly volunteer heavy infantry force consisting of Roman citizens only serving 25 year terms); auxilia (non-citizens providing support staff but also cavalry, archers and light infantry) and numeri (‘barbarians’ who usually fought as mercenaries). The legion was the apex of Roman power as it combined strict discipline, professionalism and deep micro-level comradeship with organizational flexibility. Hence the army was well equipped to fight in constantly changing conditions but was also capable of building roads, bridges, canals, walls, dams and aqueducts. As Burbank and Cooper (2010: 28–34) and Mann (1986: 266–74) point out, the Roman empire had an almost non-existent civilian bureaucracy but it maintained an enormous military organizational structure built around the offices of a military commander – the praetor. As the empire expanded praetors were instituted in the newly acquired provinces to collect taxes, mobilize new recruits and develop the infrastructure. In this sense, the military was the state: it consumed up to two-thirds of the total state budget (Duncan-Jones, 1994).

In a similar fashion the early Chinese empire was also created and expanded through the might of its coercive-organizational capacity. The unification of the state under the Qin dynasty in 221 BCE was followed by the establishment of a powerful military machine capable of recruiting millions of individuals to fight or to be deployed as the slave workforce. For example the first emperor’s tomb was built by no less than 700,000 prisoners while the army could mobilize up to half a million soldiers to fight the confederation of tribal nomads in the Xiongnu and other regions (Burbank and Cooper, 2010: 48–9). Just as in the Roman case the central point of Chinese power was the military that combined organizational flexibility and discipline with hierarchical centralization and social cohesion. Qin governance was also defined by its ability to develop solid infrastructure, including road networks linking the capital at Xianyang with the conquered provinces and the canals that increased the speed of transport and communication. The empire also introduced new currency, uniform weights and measures, passports and checkpoints to control its population. The coercive capacity of the state was also enhanced by its legal system focused on severe forms of physical punishment for disobedience including hard labour, mutilation and death.

Unlike its Roman counterpart the Chinese empire also built a potent system of centralized officialdom. Over the years this civil service, shaped around a meritocratic system of recruitment through difficult state examinations, became a cornerstone of the imperial order. The Chinese empire’s rise and longevity remained deeply dependent on its coercive-organizational power, including both an effective military and forceful models of internal policing through bureaucracy. As Brubaker and Cooper (2010: 57) rightly argue, it is this efficient civilian bureaucratic structure that differentiates the Chinese from the Roman empire and that partially explains ‘why China revived and Rome did not’. Nevertheless, one can go further and argue that the durability and eventual transformation from empire into nation-state of China owes a great deal to this coercive-organizational continuity embedded in its uniquely centralized officialdom. This is not to say that the ancient empire and contemporary China are similar polities in any sociologically meaningful way but only that the organizational legacies of previous historical epochs matter. In this context the ancient bureaucratic structure has served as a foundation for the gradual and multifaceted development of various polities on Chinese soil all the way up to contemporary times.

This reliance on coercion was just as evident in other imperial projects. For example, the secret of the Ottoman empire’s and Mameluk sultanate’s military successes was their ability to combine organizational advancements with the proto-ideological justification framed in the Islamic militarist gazi tradition. Relying on their very effective systems of elite military and civil service recruitment (devşirme and Ghulam, respectively), these empires created an organizational model which forged skilled, disciplined, highly motivated and completely loyal warrior castes capable of maintaining imperial supremacy over huge territories including parts of three continents. This and many other organizational developments generated in the imperial period have proved instrumental in the creation of the modern Turkish and Egyptian nation-states in the early 20th century. Although Ataturk’s and Nasser’s new states were envisaged as diametrically opposed to the old empire, the coercive-organizational legacies of the imperial state served as a backbone of the new republics (Goldschmidt, 2004; Anderson, 1987). Even though the new states embraced a novel, aggressively secular, nationalist ideology and had smaller territory, their military, police and state apparatuses were mostly built on their Ottoman (and Mameluk) core. In this sense the transition from the empire towards the nation-state was highly (path) dependent on the already existing organizational scaffolds created by the ancient regime. ⁴ While the new state has ultimately built much more effective and powerful coercive structures its very existence was premised on the ability to utilize the remnants of organizational capacity that the old empire had produced.

Ideological penetration and social structure

In addition to coercive force, social organizations also require a degree of ideological legitimacy. Whereas in the traditional world coerciveness was soothed by various forms of proto-ideological justification (mythology, religion, civilizing missions, etc.) which usually were aimed at fellow aristocrats, in the modern era ideological power takes central stage. Conventional narratives emphasize that the French and American revolutions inaugurated a sharp ideological shift whereby political legitimacy was now attained not from the divine authority of monarchs but from the idea of popular sovereignty. More specifically, while pre-modern rulers could utilize mythological, religious or civilizational idioms to justify their right to govern, in modernity one’s right to rule is derived from the new ideological principles centred on a much wider sense of participation. Hence these new ideological doctrines, such as socialism, liberalism, nationalism, republicanism or corporatism, all invoke a sense of popular entitlement: it is the people or a particular group of people (workers, free individuals, co-nationals, etc.) that are now seen as having the right to govern. This major structural shift was aided by the rise of literacy, mass education, accessible media, democratization of political life, expansion of civil society networks, widening of the public sphere and other changes that made ordinary individuals more receptive to, capable of, and engaged with political life.

These ideological changes went hand-in-hand with the coercive-organizational transformations: the increase in the bureaucratic capacities of states, private corporations, churches and other organizations entailed expansion of ideological mechanisms capable of wide-scale public justification. Hence I refer to this ongoing process as centrifugal ideologization: a mass scale phenomenon centred on the proliferation of ideas, principles and practices able to legitimize particular forms of coercive-organizational power. In the modern age such ideological drives work towards undercutting existing social divisions by infusing different social strata with doctrines bent on generating a degree of ideological unity. Although it is clear that the nation-states differ from empires in terms of their principal sources of justification, one should be wary of projecting sharp dichotomies onto the highly complex and multi-faceted historical realities. In other words, while the ideal-type model of a nation-state is built around secularized ideological doctrines such as nationalism, liberalism or socialism and ideal-type empires espouse imperial creeds such as the Roman humanitas or the French mission civilisatrice, there are many empirical instances where this doctrinal purity did not materialize. Instead the political legitimacy of many nation-states is still couched in the discourses that emphasize imperial legacies. This is obvious with large and powerful states such as the US, China and Russia where nationalism is often combined with the imperial rhetoric of world leadership and geo-political dominance (Bacevich, 2004; Mann, 2003, 2012). However, even smaller nation-states such as Turkey, Austria, Portugal and Thailand invoke the historical legacies of former empires in order to boost their nationalist narratives.

As is the case of coercive-organizational power, so too ideological power does not emerge from nothing but is rather articulated and developed gradually along the contours of pre-existing ideas and practices. There is no doubt that the French Revolution brought about a very different system of governance legitimized by the novel idea of popular sovereignty. Nevertheless, such a model of rule and its ideological justification were deeply rooted in organizational and value transformations that developed over much longer periods of time. For one thing, the key idea invoked during the revolution – of the rights of the Third Estate – was articulated in reference to the well-established rights of ordinary citizens to be represented at the Estates General assemblies. The first such assembly was established by Phillip IV in 1302. Although the revolutionaries ultimately managed to profoundly change the meaning of the Third Estate (as visible in the famous Abbé Sieyès pamphlet of 1789), this ideological transition remained grounded in the historical legacies of medieval parliaments (Kiser and Linton, 2002). Furthermore, the central ideas of the French Revolution, including the notions of individual liberty, human rights, social equality and popular sovereignty, were all developed long before any sign of the revolutionary upheaval – these ideas can be traced back to several intellectual movements from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment and Romanticism, among others. These strong elements of organizational and ideological continuities were just as visible a century after the revolution when the French Third Republic (1870–1940) was simultaneously a nation-state (at home) and an expanding empire (abroad). The late 19th century French state was built around republican principles that espoused Enlightenment ideas such as the moral equality of all human beings, rule of law, human rights and political equity. Although the republic was deeply polarized with conservatives, the military, the Church and the peasantry opposing the liberal and republican left, most citizens were highly sympathetic to nationalist ideas. This was particularly visible during the two key political events of this period – the Boulanger crisis (1889) and the Dreyfus affair (1894–1906) – both of which revealed the strength of nationalist sentiment in France. Although republican and nationalist goals were dominant at home it was imperialism that shaped much of foreign policy. Hence the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century were characterized by unprecedented colonial expansion in Asia, Africa and the Pacific. The French Third Republic acquired and ruled over vast territories and populations in Indochina, north, west and central Africa, Madagascar, Polynesia and further afield. In this context the imperial doctrine of mission civilisatrice fed into nationalist ideology, thus generating a peculiar version of imperial nationalism. Hence rather than the dominant weltanschauung of the nation-state (nationalism) replacing the leading ideological topoi of the imperial state (imperialism), the two have largely merged into a single, although at times deeply contradictory, doctrine.

The same ideological ambiguity was present in late 19th-century Britain, which was simultaneously a world-leading empire and a nationalizing state. The British state was on the one hand involved in the continuous widening of citizenship rights at home while on the other hand pursuing coercive expansion abroad. As Marshall (1950) noted long ago, most inhabitants of Britain acquired civil rights in the 18th century, political rights in the 19th and social rights in the 20th. For example, while in the early 19th century only 3 per cent of the population had the right to vote, by 1885 around 8 million individuals had attained that right. Although this was far from being a smooth and consent-based process its outcome was a much more cohesive population sympathetic to nationalist ideas. At the same time the state was involved in building the most powerful polity in the world, ‘this vast empire on which the sun never sets, and whose bounds nature has not yet ascertained’ (Kenny, 2006: 72). As Hall (2017) argues, late 19th-century empires were attempting to increase their power through the gradual nationalization of their core territories – to augment force through greater internal coherence. Nevertheless this did not come at the expense of imperial conquest. On the contrary, in this period the British imperial project reached its apex as the empire controlled a vast archipelago of colonies, dominions, protectorates, mandates and other territories throughout the world. Just as in the French case, British political forces successfully combined imperialism with nationalism. This rather strange marriage also gave birth to jingoism, a fiercely pugnacious doctrine that merged aggressive imperial foreign policy with exclusionary nationalist policy at home. All of this indicates clearly that long-term ideological transformations do not necessarily develop in an evolutionary fashion whereby national(ist) ideologies simply replace imperial doctrines. Instead there is a great deal of continuity here in the sense that ideological change emerges often on the contours of previous ideas and practices. Hence, while ideological power matters more in the modern era than it did before, its influence is still built on top of the value and organizational transformations that have taken place over much longer periods of time.

The envelopment of micro-solidarity

Nation-states and empires cannot exist without organizational and ideological powers. However, these large-scale structural forces are not automatically accepted as given and unproblematic. On the contrary coercive-organizational control can and is often resisted while ideological discourses can be challenged and delegitimized. Hence to be successful the rulers and administrators of empires and nation-states have to integrate organizational and ideological powers with the micro-universe of everyday life. In other words, the longevity and effectiveness of any large-scale social organization is also determined by its ability to tap into the grassroots and to link this micro-world with one’s own organizational and ideological aims. This is particularly important as empires and nation-states are not the natural forms of social aggregation. As humans are generally wired for life in much smaller groups, any attempt to impose on them a large-scale social organization is likely to be resisted (Malešević, 2015; Turner, 2007). Daily interactions with surviving hunter-gatherers indicate that they, as a rule, reject encroachments by civil servants to bring them into the fold of the modern state. Furthermore, social organizations of this size are inevitably formal, anonymous, distant and hierarchical. This contrasts sharply with the microcosm of everyday life of neighbourhoods, friendships, kinships, peer groups, lovers and other small-scale groupings. These groups are defined by intimacy, familiarity, deep emotional and moral attachments, informality, and lack of strict hierarchies. Hence the key issue for any large-scale social organization is how to penetrate these grassroots in order to make them compatible with the broader macro-universe of empires and nation-states.

It is here that one can encounter the most pronounced difference between the imperial model and the nation-state model of social order. While ancient empires largely lacked the organizational and ideological means to successfully infiltrate the micro-world, the nation-states have proved to be effective in reconciling the public with the private sphere and the personal with the organizational realms. Since most individuals attain a sense of comfort, emotional security and fulfilment from face-to-face interaction developed in intimate settings of small groups, the nation-states have tapped into this micro-universe by attempting to emulate the language, rituals and everyday practices of such small groups. Unlike the ancient empires which were deeply hierarchical and fostered a sense of vertical solidarity, modern nation-states pride themselves on the idea of society-wide fraternity articulated as horizontal solidarity. This has become most apparent in the rise of nationalism as the dominant operative ideology of modernity (Malešević, 2006). It is no accident that most nationalist discourses are framed in the language and practices that invoke intimate and close-knit micro groups. For example, Russian nationalists speak about ‘Mother Russia’ as providing a ‘nest’ for all its children (Hubbs, 1993: xii–xiii). Croatian and Serbian nationalisms are full of the images that invoke family life and kinship: ‘our Croat brothers and sisters’, ‘our Serbian children’, ‘our sacred fatherland’, ‘old fireplaces’ that members of the Serbian brethren had to leave and so on (Malešević, 2002). French nationalism is also shaped around the idea of fraternité broadly understood in terms of close kinship and friendships, while American nationalism utilizes idioms and rituals that invoke the intimacy of small-scale groupings: the recital of the Pledge of Allegiance in schools performed in front of one’s peers and close friends, singing of the national anthem at sporting and other events accompanied by one’s friends and relatives, proudly displaying a national flag on the front porch so the neighbours can see it and so on (O’Leary, 2000). In all of these cases and many others, nationalism is potent precisely because it is embedded in the networks of genuine micro-solidarity.

This deep level of organizational and ideological penetration whereby micro-level solidarities become integrated with the macro-level goals of large-scale organizations was for the most part unachievable in the world of early empires. As Hall (1985) made clear, these early social orders were defined by ‘capstone’ features, meaning that the imperial elites were able to centralize their power but had neither organizational nor ideological means to fully infiltrate the social order they governed. Hence the early emperors were like capstones in a sense that they sat on top of different societies they could not penetrate. This point ties well with Mann’s (1986) distinction between despotic and infrastructural powers where the traditional rulers of large empires were often in possession of great despotic powers (i.e. could order the killing of nearly anybody under their control) but they lacked infrastructural capacities to implement their decisions throughout their realms. In this context nationalism and other society-wide ideological discourses could only develop and spread with the substantial increase in the organizational capacities of states: standardized weights and measures, unified currencies, developed systems of communication and transport, significantly increased literacy rates and so on. However, what is also important is that any deeper organizational and ideological penetration was dependent on the ability of the states to link these infrastructural advancements with the existing pouches of micro-solidarity.

The conventional sociological interpretations of modernity make much of the supposed distinction between pre-modern and modern forms of social bonds. From Tönnies’s gemeinschaft and gesellschaft and Durkheim’s mechanical and organic solidarity to Beck’s first and second modernity and Giddens’s reflexive modernization, sociologists have emphasized how social ties weaken and change with the expansion of modernity. The conventional narrative has it that unlike our predecessors who were strongly integrated into their small-scale networks of kinships, clans and tribes, we moderns are highly individualized creatures who pursue our own choices and engage largely in contractual relationships. However, as I have argued before (Malešević, 2013: 196–7), human beings are generally prone to life in small, face-to-face groupings, and in this context the ever-increasing organizational complexities do not necessarily diminish our predilection towards such micro-groups. On the contrary, such micro-groups thrive and expand in modern conditions not least because modern technology, transport, communication and literacy allow one to maintain such links over much greater space and longer time periods. Therefore the power of nation-states in today’s world stems in part from their ability to envelop the universe of micro-solidarity and project these micro-dramas onto the canvas of its large-scale social organization. In this environment nationalism and other ideologies succeed mostly when they embrace the language and practices that emulate the micro world.

Capstone empires and nation-states represent two very different ideal types where the former is mostly unable to properly link micro-solidarity with organizational and ideological powers while the latter is largely defined by this very ability. Nevertheless, this difference between the empire and nation-state is less pronounced when one compares latter-day imperial projects. As both Darwin (2013) and Breuilly (2017) argue, most modern empires were nationalizing states that had to balance their national cores with their non-national peripheries. For example, France and the Netherlands simultaneously pursued nation-building at home and imperial conquest abroad. In this context the imperial and the national tended often to overlap as imperial expansion reinforced nationalist legitimacy at home. In such an environment the link between micro-solidarities and organizational power in the metropolitan territory was extended through imperial successes abroad. The late 19th century mass media was a major purveyor of imperial jingoism that successfully framed the colonial conquests as a source of national pride.

Nevertheless, this was also a double-edged sword as exhausting imperial wars and defeats could just as much undermine organizational capacity, ideological legitimacy and their links with micro-solidarities at home. The fact that early modern imperial projects, such as those of Portugal and Spain, expanded relatively quickly but then faltered and eventually collapsed has a great deal to do with the historical timing of their growth. Since this wave of imperial expansion largely occurred before the rise of nationalism and the dramatic increase in the coercive-organizational capacities of states, these empires were always prone to imperial overstretch which would undermine their very existence. Furthermore, as these empires emerged before developing their national core, their overseas losses (including military defeats, economic collapse, etc.) tended to severely undermine metropolitan stability and delay the process of ideological and organizational growth and their links with the networks of micro-solidarity.

These modern, nationalizing, empires were often just as capable as nation-states in weaving the networks of domestic micro-groupings into the broader national/imperial narratives. Moreover, some of these 19th-century empires had more sophisticated organizational scaffolds than many nation-states of this period and as such could forge much stronger links between ideology, organization and micro-solidarities than these nation-states. Consequently major imperial powers such as Britain or France were able to tap into micro-solidarities abroad so that some citizens of their colonial possessions saw themselves first and foremost as British or French. In the British case, as Darwin (2013) shows, it was the dominions dominated by the white Anglo-Saxon populations, such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa, among others, that were eager to blend the national and the imperial, often by relying on the discourse of race. In the French case the empire was nominally open to full inclusion of indigenous populations who could apply for French citizenship and in some instances had symbolic representation in the French Parliament. However, in reality only a very small number were granted citizenship and most elected deputies from overseas were white Frenchmen. Hence in both of these cases, just as in other 19th-century imperial states, the national and the imperial were gradually moving towards a collision course as the nationalization process never included, nor was it intended to encompass, the micro-solidarities of the indigenous populations. In this sense the centrifugal ideologization was a very uneven process that largely did not penetrate the indigenous networks of micro-solidarity. Hence, although modern empires and nation-states are similar in their organizational, ideological and other structural attributes, they remain different in how widely some of these attributes and processes impact the population under their control. In other words, precisely because nation-states are built on the principle of cultural homogeneity and clearly delineated organizational compactness, they cannot accommodate unlimited cultural diversity. Since nationalism is an ideology that posits the nation as a principal unit of human solidarity and political legitimacy it is bound to eventually clash with the universalist ambitions of the original imperial projects. In this sense imperial nationalism is an oxymoron with a limited shelf life. Once the cumulative bureaucratization of coercion and centrifugal ideologization become fully embedded in the networks of micro-solidarity, the imperial form is bound to give way to the nation-state model of political organization. Nevertheless, this does not mean that such a process is irreversible. On the contrary, precisely because the unity of micro-solidarity networks depends on ongoing ideologization and bureaucratization, these networks can also crumble and dissipate as soon as the nation-state re-embraces an imperial direction of development.

Conclusion

In a world largely dominated by nation-states, such as ours, the term empire still evokes deeply negative images associated with aggressive territorial conquests, deep social inequalities, political discrimination, racism and war. Most of all the popular perception of any imperial order is now firmly embedded in the notion of empires being ‘prisons of nations’. Nevertheless, when one moves away from such conventional, mostly nationalist, accounts of the past it is possible to see that empires and nation-states have a great deal in common. Hence to fully understand the historical and sociological relationships between these two ideal types of polity it is necessary to explore not only their rather obvious differences but also their numerous similarities. Furthermore, to make sense of where these similarities (and differences) come from it is vital to focus on the organizational, ideological and micro-interactional mechanisms that facilitate the transformation from empires to nation-states and vice versa. In this article I attempted to explore these complex relationships by zooming in on the three long-term historical processes that I believe were, and remain, pivotal in the transformation of any polity: the cumulative bureaucratization of coercion, centrifugal ideologization and the envelopment of micro-solidarity.