Basic Units of Political Organisation

Or why Toynbee struggled to make sense of the Middle East

Feb 28, 2025

The problem why Arnold Toynbee struggled in identifying a distinct civilisation in the post-Alexandrian Middle East was that it had a unique basic unit of political organisation, with which he was unfamiliar. Yet when trying to understand the history of diverse civilisations, we need to immerse ourselves into their worldview and to whom they owe their allegiance. In Europe, but also the Far East, we find that the nation-state (understood as a political unit encompassing a relatively large geographical area with a common government and a common language) to be the standard form of political organisation. We can take France, Italy or Germany as nation-states, which are held together by common French, Italian or German language. True, there exist regional distinctions, as Frenchmen can think of themselves as Normans or Picards, and Italians as Lombards or Tuscans, and Germans as Bavarian or Saxons, but ultimately, when asked in India or New York, they would say that they are, well, Frenchmen, Italians or Germans. Some nation-states, such as Portugal, France and England are very old and date from the early mediaeval period. Others were novel creations of the 18th century, and national unification, such as Germany and Italy. Others still found their first expression in the 20th century following the First World War, such as Latvia. The concept of the nation-state is so deeply ingrained in our view of the world, that we have hard times of understanding other forms of political organisation, apart perhaps the city-state.

The Nation-State

The nation-state is the most common form of political organisation, which can be found throughout Europe. The nation-state has gradually evolved over time, and presupposes that a common language is the most important factor of identity. Simply put, you are a Hungarian if you speak the Hungarian language as your Umgangssprache, or daily language of interaction. Another presumption the nation-state works with is that linguistic groups can be properly delineated.

These presumptions are not true in many parts of the world. The Scots have historically been speaking two languages: the Germanic Scots language in the Lowlands and the Scottish Gaelic language in the Highlands. A common English language has not prevented the majority of Catholics from feeling distinct from the English-speakers of Great Britain to such an extent that they pushed for independence. In Latin America, the same Spanish language is spoken from Mexico to Argentina, while Afro-Americans speaking English are still seen as distinct. The term Afrikaner in South Africa for example relates to the Afrikaans-speaking Whites, but does not include the Afrikaans-speaking Coloured community^[1].

In some cases, the languages are so mixed that it was almost impossible to delineate a reasonable ethno-linguistic border. Prior to the First World War it was difficult to delimitate the Armenian-majority area from neighbouring Turkic-speaking and Kurdish-speaking areas. Many areas of the Ottoman Empire had a Greek-speaking coast and a Turkish hinterland, and the Treaty of Lausanne, which drew the current borders of Turkey, saw massive population exchanges^[2].

In Europe, the very first traces of the nation-states can be found as far back as the year 1000, when the political shape of Europe was taking form. Already at that time, we have found Western Europe articulated into kingdoms, which were relatively large, and were tied to a single ethnic group speaking a distinct language. This was the case of England, Poland, Croatia, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, England and the proto-Spanish kingdom of León. In the Frankish core, we already have a durable West Frankish successor state of the Carolingian Empire in future France, while the Holy Roman Empire consists of a Kingdom of Germany and Kingdom of Italy^[3]. Further implications of feudalism meant a general fracturing of these early nation-states, with France, England and Spain emerging as nation-states during the Renaissance period. The Dutch Revolution is perhaps an early manifestation of nationalism as an ideological movement. However, throughout the mediaeval period, the concept of the nation-state had still been challenged by the universal vision of a Res Public Christiana, which was to be be presided either the Holy Roman Emperor or the Pope - the struggle between the two for supremacy, known as the Investiture Controversy has ultimately resulting in the weakening of both.

The Westphalian Peace, which underlined the principle of sovereignty has greatly empowered the concept of the nation state. The states had become sovereign and strengthened their hold over the local nobility, while limiting outside interference. This meant, that really Europe could no longer be seen or portrayed through the game mechanics of the Crusader Kings game from Paradox Interactive, with a feudal hierarchy from Kings through Dukes to Counts and Barons and varying degrees of control, but rather through the mechanics of Europa Universalis which sees the state as a unitary actor. The policies of Richelieu saw the emergence of the concept of Raison d´État , roughly translatable as “national interest”.

A new wave of nationalism emerged with the French Revolution. From the slogan of “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” , the last word, brotherhood, was one that referred to nationalism. This brotherhood of all Frenchmen meant that no longer were the distinctions between the estates the important distinction, neither the religious distinctions between Catholics and Huguenots (reduced to a tiny minority by that time), but the common identity of the Frenchmen. It was the French nationalism that allowed France to conscript its large citizen army, and allowed Napoleon to conquer most of Europe save Britain and Russia. French nationalism manifested itself in the assimilationist policies against the Occitan, Breton, Basque and other regional languages of France, removing local varieties, known as patois, in favour of standard French. Even in the modern period, France did not ratify the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, as it contradicts the French constitution, which has clearly stated the official language to be French.

The French concept of nationalism saw the existence of a pre-defined territory and sought to assimilate all minorities existing within it. A similar policy was enacted in pre-Trianon Hungary and post-Sevres Turkey. The spread of nationalism into Germany and Italy, fractured into smaller states such as Bavaria, Prussia or Saxony, since the mediaeval period has brought about the war of national unification, which saw the emergence of Germany and Italy in the second half of the 19th century.

Following World War I, nationalism was used as a principle to delineate the borders of East-Central Europe, leading to the creation of many new countries from Finland to Yugoslavia^[4]. The Fourteen Points of American president Woodrow Wilson saw the zenith of nationalism, but even the Versailles Conference was not fully coherent in the application of this principle, favouring the victors of 1914-1918 over the vanquished in mixed or disputed areas

The City-State

The city-state is familiar to us two traditions. The younger tradition of Italian (Venice, Ragusa, Genoa, Florence) and German (Ulm, Bremes, Hamburg) city-states of the Mediaeval period and the Renaissance, with their guilds and their city walls and their merchant leagues (the Hansa). The much older tradition is that of the Classical city-state or polis, that of Miletus, Sparta, Corinth, Thebes and Athens, but also of Rome and Syracuse, where loyalty was not that to a kinsman speaking the same language as you, but to the city-state along.

When we look at the physical morphology of central and southern Greece, as well as the far side of the Aegean shore, we find a long coast, with many islands, and mountains separating one part of the coast from the other. The Cithaeron and Parnitha Mountains, separate Attica itself from neighbouring Boeotia on one side, while the other sides are washed by the Aegean Sea. The mountainous terrain thus created barriers between neighbouring communities, and communication was thus easier by sea than by land. Thus, the physical geography of southern Greece was a major factor that has shaped the fragmentation of the ancient Greek world into city-states.

A similar phenomenon was also present in the Canaanite civilisation. The Phoenicians, living along the Lebanese coast, found themselves squeezed between the Mediterranean on one side and the deep, forested valleys of the Lebanese mountains on the other. As such they turned their focus towards the sea, to cut down the forests to build ships and have sailed across the entire Mediterranean, founding colonies along the Maghrebi coast (with the most notable being Carthage), southern Spain (the cities of Cádiz, Malaga, and later Cartagena were all Phoenician colonies). In the homeland, the most important city-states were Tyre, Sidon and Byblos. The political sphere in this case saw a gradual replacement of absolute royal power by councils, composed of the merchant oligarchy. Ultimately, we see in Carthage the government dominated by two judges (sufetes).

The city-state was also the principal form of organisation of the Sumeric civilisation: with the most notable being Eridu, Ur, Uruk, Larsa, Isin, to name a few. The Sumerian cities were built of mudbrick and were found in relatively flat terrain. The reason why Sumer has not been unified for so long were the defensive walls around the cities. However, ever since the time of Sargon of Akkad, Mesopotamia was no longer organised into city-states. The Sumerian city-states were governed initially by priest-kings, later to be replaced by military leaders.

On the other side of the world, the city-state was the prevailing form of political organization in Mesoamerica. In the Mesoamerican civilisation, it was known as altepetl in Nahuatl, cah in Mayan and ňuu in Mixtec. These were the basic forms of political organisation, and each altepetl was divided into several sections, known as calpulli in Nahuatl. Interesting is that these calpolli maintained their distinct identities, and their names often implied foreign origin. While duties among the calpolli were rotated, the altepetl remained under the control of the leader of the top-ranking calpolli. We could imagine this as if the city of New York was an altepetl, divided into several calpolli, such as Manhattan, Brooklyn, Bronx and so forth. If Manhattan were the leading calpolli, the teuctli (speaker) of Manhattan would also, by the virtue of his office, hold responsibilities as the tlatoani of the whole of New York City.

The altepeme^[5] thought of themselves first and foremost as a people, not as tied to the specific plot of land. The altepeme could be combined into a complex altepetl (Tlayacatl) composed of multiple altepeme the same way an altepetl was composed of multiple calpullis. A good example of the a tlayacatl (complex altepetl) is the Triple Alliance of Tenochtitlán, Texcoco and Tlacopan, better known as the Aztec Empire.^[6]

The Triple Alliance of Tenochtitlán was thus a hegemonic empire, similar in ways to the Peloponnesian League of city-states under the hegemony of Sparta or the Delian League under the leadership of Athens. The lack of pack animals and the mountainous terrain of Mesoamerica prevented any other form of political organisation.

In Southeast Asia, we find a very distinct model of political organisation, which has again as its base essentially a city-state. In mainland Southeast Asia, this city-state is known as the mueang (from a Thai word designating a fortified town with its surrounding villages led by a noble), while in the Malay world they were known as the kedatuan (from the Malay word meaning residence of the datu- a regional leader or elder). In both cases the model of power diffusion sees a shared sovereignty. Rather than speaking of countries with capitals and borders, it is better to think of this model as a seat of power and its sphere of influence. Mueangs closest to the seat of power would pay a relatively high tribute; those further away would pay only a symbolic amount. They could, and would pay tribute to more than one centre of power, if they were found in the buffer zone. The tributary system of mandalas manifested itself also in the perpetuation of the autonomous chiefdoms of highland peoples in the mountains of southern China (tusis) , as well as in the maritime hegemonies of the Malay empires, such as Srivijaya.

The city-state was prevalent in the Swahili coast, with the largest city-states being Kilwa, Zanzibar, Mombasa and Pate. A similar model existed also along the oases of the Silk Road, in Sogdia (modern-day Uzbekistan) and the oasis-cities of the Altishahr (modern Xinjiang). Here, it was quite natural to have the oases maintain their distinctiveness.

The city-states were also prevalent among the East Slavic peoples: the Kievan Rus after its collapse was divided into several principalities named after their capitals: Novgorod, Pskov, Kiev and so forth, though they encompassed a relatively large surrounding countryside and were ruled by the princes (though Pskov and Novgorod at the very north became merchant republics).

In the contemporary period, we still see several countries, which are effectively city-states: Belize, Panama, Djibouti, Malta, Singapore, Brunei, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain to name a few.

The Ummah

However, there are other, far less understood, units of political organisation. One such peculiar form can be found in the Syriac world, which emerged in the Seleucid Empire. The Syriac civilisation emerged, yet unlike the other civilisations, it failed to articulate itself in an independent state. Oswald Spengler in his Decline of the West called this a pseudomorphosis, a term he took from mineralogy, essentially saying that Syriac civilisation articulated itself peculiarly because the conditions of its creation were peculiar. Until the cataclysmic war of 602, the heartland of the Syriac world was divided roughly in half, with Khabour River being the border between Rhomania in the west and the Sassanid Empire in the East. To characterise this particular form of political organisation, let us quote Spengler himself describing the ummah^[7]

A nation of the Magian type is the community of co-believers, the group of all who know the right way to salvation and are inwardly linked to one another by the ijma of this belief. Men belonged to a Classical nation by virtue of the possession of citizenship, but to a Magian nation by virtue of a sacramental act — circumcision for the Jews, specific forms of baptism for the Mandaeans or the Christians. An unbeliever was for a Magian folk what an alien was for a Classical — no intercourse with him, no connubium — and this national separation went so far that in Palestine a Jewish-Aramaic and a Christian- Aramaic dialect formed themselves side by side. The Faustian nation, though necessarily bound up with a particular religiousness, is not so with a particular confession; the Classical nation is by type non-exclusive in its relations to different cults; but the Magian nation comprises neither more nor less than is covered by the idea of one or another of the Magian Churches. Inwardly the Classical nation is linked with the city, and the Western with a landscape, but the Arabian knows neither fatherland nor mother tongue. Outwardly its specific world- outlook is only expressed by the distinctive script which each such nation de- velops as soon as it is born. But for that very reason the inwardness and hidden force — the magic, in fact — of a Magian nation-feeling impresses us Faustians, who notice the absence of the home-idea, as something entirely enigmatic and uncanny ^[8].

Spengler thus presents a unique picture of the Syriac world, where the crucial question is What is your religious community? rather than What language do you speak? or Which city are you from? This form of political organisation was institutionalised latter by the Ottoman Empire in the form of the millet system, where the Ottoman censuses tell us that the primary question was again religion: the Muslims, be they Arab-speaking, Turkish-speaking, Slavic or Greek converts, all were regarded simply as Muslims. The Eastern Orthodox population all belonged to the Rum millet (millet-i Rûm), led by the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. The Armenians, having doctrinal disputes with the Eastern Orthodox, formed their own millet, as well as the Jews.

The Jews are a particularly well-known example of this: despite speaking different languages depending on wherever they live: be it Yiddish among the Ashkenazi Jews of Germany and Poland-Lithuania, Ladino among the Sephardic Jews of Spain and their diaspora in Thessaloniki, various Judeo-Arabic variants. ^[9] Regardless of their language, the Jews maintained their common identity, well until the 20th century, when this Jewish consciousness transformed, under the influence of the Western concept of nationalism into the Zionist movement. Until then, they had remained a dispersed people among other such peoples. For a Magian nation needs neither home nor community of origin ,^[10] and the Jews in their diaspora were not the sole community of such kind. However, we need not to imagine that the Jews were all the genetic descendants of the people that had lived in Judea and the surrounding regions until the Roman conquest. More often than not, the spread of Judaism was aided by local conversions.

But already in Parthian times there occurred amongst both Persians and Jews that profoundly intimate change which makes no longer tribal attach- ment but orthodoxy the hall-mark of nationality . A Jew who went over to the Mazda faith became thereby a Persian; a Persian who became a Christian belonged to the Nestorian "people^[11].

Religion was deeply connected to the state. The same way that nationalist governments of the Western civilisation had persecuted minorities speaking a different tongue, empires belonging to the Syriac civilisation often persecuted religious minorities, while in other cases they had allowed religious minorities self-rule via their patriarchs.

When the Monophysites and the Nestorians separated themselves from the Orthodox, new nations came into being as well as new Churches. The Nestorians since 1450 have been governed by the Mar Shimun,3 who was at once prince and patriarch of his people and, vis-a-vis the Sultan, occupied exactly the same position as, long before, the Jewish Resh Galutha had occupied in the Persian Empire. This nation-con- sciousness, derived from particular and defined world-feeling and therefore self- evident with an a priori sureness, cannot be ignored if we are to understand the later persecutions of the Christians. The Magian State is inseparably bound up with the concept of orthodoxy.Caliphate, nation, and Church form an intimate unit. (...)If Christians lived in the Islamic State, Nestorians in the Persian, Jews in the Byzantine, they did not and could not as unbelievers belong to it, and consequently were thrown back upon their own jurisdictions.^[12]

In later history, both the Maronites and Nestorians had remained governed by this principle. It had been the Maronite Patriarch, Elias Peter Hoayek who led the delegation to the Paris Peace Conference demanding the contemporary boundaries of Lebanon. It has also been the Patriarch of the Assyrian Church of the East that had also played a political role, and was their chief authority demanding Assyrian autonomy^[13]. The very concept of the ummah or millet is the root cause, while today we see the inability of the local Aramaic-speaking Christians of Upper Mesopotamia to agree on a single ethnic name: these range from Assyrian, Aramean, Chaldean to Syriac and ultimately various combinations thereof. These are based mostly on sectarian divisions: while Assyrian evokes the Assyrian Church of the East', this aims to be cross-sectarian as it refers to the ancient Mesopotamian empire and has supplanted the earlier designation Nestorian. Chaldean refers to the Chaldean Catholic Church, while Syriac refers to the Syriac Orthodox Church (also called Jacobite) and the Syriac Catholic Church while Aramean refers to the language itself. It is therefore not as if the indigenous Christians of the Middle East were unable to agree on the name of their nation. They were in fact different nations, united only by the advance of the Western concept of nationalism.

In the contemporary Middle East, we still find several other “ethno-religious groups” such as Alawites or the Druze, or Yezidis,, which had maintained endogamy.

Returning to Arnold Toynbee, he was hesitant about the Abbasid Caliphate to be comparable to the Roman Empire, ^[14] as the Arabs had not unified half a dozen or so competing states. But perhaps, Toynbee had not looked at the issue from the same perspective as Spengler. If we take the non-territorial ummah as the basic building-block of the Syriac civilisation, we find that this unity of the Syriac world has ultimately been achieved by Islam. The historian Tom Holland has identified how Islam was able to incorporate elements of Jewish and Zoroastrian religious law.^[15] Perhaps because it was able to absorb the monotheistic influences of the entire region, it ended up being the most successful ummah of the Syriac civilisation. In that way, it was able to achieve the same level of civilisational unity as the Romans had unified the Mediterranean world by winning scores of converts across the whole area.

Today, Manichaeism and Mithraism have been fully displaced by Islam. The Zoroastrians, Samaritans and Mandeans are reduced to tiny fragments, while the Christian minorities are left in an uneasy position^[16]. Thus the same way that Rome prevailed in the gladiatorial contest of city-states of the Classical civilisation, Islam prevailed in the gladiatorial contest of ummahs of the Syriac world.

Civilisation and Tradition

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