"State Formation Through the Lens of Local Religious and Civic Authorities In Early Modern Europe" (original) (raw)
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Český časopis historický, 2023
The emergence of nation states in Europe is associated in contemporary historiography with the French Revolution and the development of national movements in the 19th century. The author draws attention to an earlier phase of the formation of nation states, which was related to the power-political crisis of the Holy Roman Empire in the second half of the 15th century. The medieval Empire crossed the boundaries of three major language groups that were mutually unintelligible (Germanic, Romance and Slavic languages). At the time of the creation of the Estates’ monarchies at the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries, the question of linguistic identity became an important state-forming element.
Wichmann-Jahrbuch des Diözesangeschichtsvereins Berlin, 2015
The end of the Holy Roman Empire marked the beginning of a new era in the German world. Napoleon transformed hundreds of small political entities into 37 sovereign states, each one with an individual tale of integration and territorialization. The delimitation of religious boundaries was an important feature of these tales, since a centralized administration would not accept cross-border religious authorities. The previously existent competition between religious and political authorities could not be tolerated by these developing new states. This was not just a matter of legal reforms or secularization but rather a question of spatial boundaries regarding the formal definition of religious districts and their correspondence with the state ones. The reformation and counter-reformation roughly divided the German population into three religious churches: Catholic, Lutheran and Reform. The subsequent religious wars of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led to a relatively clear spatial and political division between the different churches. The Peace of Augsburg (1555) in particular, which officially ended the first wave of religious wars, established the principle of “Curius region, eius Religio”, thus forming a legal and binding connection between the choice of religion and political affiliation. However, the chaotic Holy Roman Empire was not a place for homogeneity or rational distribution of authority. Consequently, Catholic principalities with small Protestant minorities and Protestant principalities with small Catholic minorities were quite common in the eighteenth Century. As a result, religious authorities often operated beyond the realm of their political territorial affiliation. The late eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century brought about two fundamental changes to church/state relations: first, the restructuring of German territories into 37 states changed the demographics and the relative homogeneity of past centuries; second, the evolving modernization and growing bureaucracies of the various states expanded the horizons of the state public sphere and the levels of centralization it aspired. Officials of these new states, influenced by French centralism, operated under a primary directive of integrating the new territories. The existence of cross border religious authorities was both a threat to the concept of state centralism and popular integration, due to the large religious minorities. This led to both legal and spatial delimitation of religious authorities, Catholic and Protestant, in all the states. In this article, I will analyze the spatial strategies used by five medium sized German states, Bavaria, Saxony, Hanover, Württemberg and Baden. Although these states differed in demographic, political, social, economic and geographical circumstances, I will show that the essential strategies were identical, and were a response to the nature of the Catholic and Protestant Churches, and not the specific circumstances of each state.
The Cost of States. Politics and Exactions in the Christian West (Sixth to Fifteenth Centuries)
What were the models and ideal-types through which historians of the medieval West have dealt with the topic of the funding of state and of institutions? First conceived in the context of a meeting between historians of the Christian West, of Islam and of Byzantium, this paper sets out a historiographical analysis, setting out some contradictions and suggesting some additions as well. Its focus is on three basic questions: 1) How were the creation and functioning of political structures and institutions financed? 2) How were political structures themselves influenced by the forms of their funding? 3) What were the social and economic consequences of the circulation of resources derived from politics?
Acta Poloniae Historica , 2017
This article shows the close link between religious policy, especially that of the confessional option, and the politicization of space in the building processes of territorial states. The study focuses on the two Danube Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, which implemented their state building owing to three decisive steps: i) the jurisdictional option in favour of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople; ii) the territorial and social implementation of the Byzantine-Orthodox faith by institutional infrastructure and monastic reform; iii) the Orthodox enculturation of the two Wallachian principalities. The main goal of this chapter is to show how cultural and historical phenomena transform the abstract geographical space into the political space of a state.
Migrations of “tribes”, and mobility of elites, figure in many narratives of state formation and nation-building. But the frequent assumption that early medieval migrations regularly led to state formation is not borne out by a critical look at western European cases between the fi fth and eleventh centuries AD. The outcomes of migrations in this period varied considerably. The case studies discussed in this paper include the Anglo-Saxon immigration into England and other migrations of the fi fth — seventh centuries AD in western Europe, and the Viking immigration into the British Isles as well as other Scandinavian cases of the ninth — eleventh centuries AD in the west. Taken together, these cases demonstrate that migration does not necessarily lead to state formation. But even in the absence of state formation, some social change among migrants is likely because migrations require organisational leadership. State formation appears to have been a likely consequence only where immigrants encountered native populations of a certain level of social complexity. The reason might lie in the nature of segmentary (tribal) organisation: it presupposes social links and shared ancestry among the lineages of the tribe. This imposes size limitations, but more importantly restrictions in terms of identity. After conquest by an immigrant population or elite, one possible solution is that the native population is reduced to the status of slaves who are attached to the households of lineage members. The alternative would be the creation of a joint state based on a common ideology (such as afforded by Christianity in early medieval western Europe).
Religion and nation in Europe in the 19th century: some comparative notes1
2008
This essay aims to analyze the relation between nation and religion from the second half of the 19th century to the first decade of the 20th century, during the process of Nation building that could be observed in several European nations. We propose a comparative analysis of the following cases: France, Italy, the Czech part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Germany. Considering the recent researches on the affirmation of nationalism in that period, we respond to the simplistic statement that the success of nationalism depended on the ruin of religion after the end of the 18th century.
Churches and Federal State in Europe: the paradigm of Germany and Switzerland
Stato, chiese e pluralismo confessionale, 2011
Facing a renewed role of religion in the public square, we can say that Germany and Switzerland are facing off a “positive secularism“ which implies, for the State legal system and for its institutions, the respect of religious facts, having its embodiment in the neutral and pluralistic acceptation of cultural differences and aiming at shaping their coexistence and the construction of their meaning. Positive secularism implies that the factual presence of religious confessions in the civil society is an essential condition to the positive start of a process of "secularisation of secularism", implying first of all the overcoming of political hegemony on every dimension of human experience - thing to which any thought open to the hypothesis of transcendence can effectively contribute. According to this concept, the secularism of a democratic State must free itself more and more from any ideological assumption, in order to open to cultural and religious pluralism and to let this pluralism become an instrument of promotion of the development of a person. For this reason, the State ruled by positive secularism cannot be completely indifferent to the religious phenomenon - even if it guarantees the free practice of religion by individuals - and only qualify confessions as simple expressions of the associative autonomy of private citizens.
Journal of History Culture and Art Research, 2019
This article presents an analysis of the socioeconomic specifics and political and legal characteristics of a traditional state. The authors illustrate the latter on a vast array of historical examples from the evolution and development of the ancient and medieval states. The authors substantiate that the key feature of traditional states is the absence of the state apparatus in its classical political and legal interpretation. At the same time, using various historical examples, the traditional state, and its publicimperious organization has been proved to base on an extensive system of personal relations and property basis, which was legally documented and represented in the socio-political reality in the land ownership. The absence of public service and, accordingly, state-service relations in the traditional state, in our opinion, was the reason that its state apparatus was not its structural and organizational basis. It seems that this feature should be considered one of the main typological characteristics of the traditional state. In science, however, it is stated that such indivisibility of managerial and economic functions had, allegedly, a place only at the earliest stages of statehood. Gradually, as the state develops, there is a distinction between private and public law functions of the state, due, among other things, to the separation of private property of the ruler from the property of the state (treasury).