Could the Byzantine empire have been thought of as a 'nation?'

[Traitorfish]

I don't know much about their ethnic characteristics, so I couldn't say.
...
No idea. I haven't the least education in that era; I'm just making a conceptual argument.

These concepts don't amount to much without historical content, though. You can certainly say that a self-identified "Roman" c.200BCE and a self-identified "Roman" c.800CE would seem pretty strange to each other, but that does not in itself tell us anything about Roman-ness, or about distinguishing Romanness fro non-Romanness.

Why wouldn't it be?

It's a universal occurrence. Take England: there's an identifiable sense of Englishness as early as the 9th century, at last, but would a 9th century Englishman recognise a 21st century Englishman as his countrymen? They speak different languages, wear different clothes, eat different foods, practice different religions and follow different patterns of life. There is in every respect a greater cultural distance between our 9th and 21st century Englishman than between our 9th century Englishman and the Danes or Britons against whom he constricted his Englishness. So why permit the English these sorts of continuities, but not the Romans?

I definitely don't think mere descent is a justification for Jewish nationalism. We have unified religious and historical traditions. Jews from all eras would almost certainly have identified with one another to varying degrees.

The Romans also had unified religious and historical traditions, carried from antiquity into the Medieval period. (They converted to Christianity, yes, but this conversion occurred well within what your calling the time of "real" Romans.) What is it about the Jewish traditions that marks the out as so much more unified and robust than the Roman traditions?

It is. (Maimonides, ironically, is famous for propounding and clarifying what Judaism was.) I can't imagine he would think of a modern Israeli, religious or secular, as being something else, especially since his ideas are now undisputed as the proper definition of faith. On the other hand, I'd say comparing a 21st century Jew to a pre-Babylonian Exile Judean would be a stretch.

The Romans, similarly, had firm (if not always unambiguous) ideas of what it meant to be Roman, and a considerable canon supporting it. So, again, where's the distinction?

 

[Mouthwash]

It's a universal occurrence. Take England: there's an identifiable sense of Englishness as early as the 9th century, at last, but would a 9th century Englishman recognise a 21st century Englishman as his countrymen? They speak different languages, wear different clothes, eat different foods, practice different religions and follow different patterns of life. There is in every respect a greater cultural distance between our 9th and 21st century Englishman than between our 9th century Englishman and the Danes or Britons against whom he constricted his Englishness. So why permit the English these sorts of continuities, but not the Romans?

We don't. We call them Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms or whatnot. At best they're "proto-English," simply because of their attitude on Englishness. (This is rapidly becoming a philosophical discussion, btw.)

The Romans also had unified religious and historical traditions, carried from antiquity into the Medieval period. (They converted to Christianity, yes, but this conversion occurred well within what your calling the time of "real" Romans.) What is it about the Jewish traditions that marks the out as so much more unified and robust than the Roman traditions?

The Romans, similarly, had firm (if not always unambiguous) ideas of what it meant to be Roman, and a considerable canon supporting it. So, again, where's the distinction?

Well, the Byzantines were Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians under an imperial state. The early Romans lived in a Republican city state (presumably having a much more civic attitude), which was identified with their gods. So I really can't believe that the two could have had a meaningfully similar canon.

 

[Traitorfish]

We don't. We call them Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms or whatnot. At best they're "proto-English," simply because of their attitude on Englishness.

Well, for the record, in Britain at least we do call generally them "English", at least by the sort of period I'm talking about. "Anglo-Saxon" tends to be used more narrowly to refer to the peoples who came across the channel between 400 and 600, but the resulting hybrid of British, Romano-British and Germanic is generally just called "English". (Otherwise, you'd tend to think, the country would be "Anglia-Saxony" and the language "Anglo-Saxon", rather than "England" and "Old English".)

(This is rapidly becoming a philosophical discussion, btw.)

Maybe so, but it's also an historical discussion. Historians have to deal with issues of identity and cultural change in pretty much every period they study, and they don't really have the luxury of delegating the issue to philosophers.

Well, the Byzantines were Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians under an imperial state. The early Romans lived in a Republican city state (presumably having a much more civic attitude), which was identified with their gods. So I really can't believe that the two could have had a meaningfully similar canon.

Why are you assuming that these are the characteristics that were essential to Roman identity? Or that, if they were essential at one point, they remained so? Certainly, the bit about "Republican city-states" doesn't survive the turn of the common era, but it's hard to image what we call the citizens of the Empire in the first century if not "Romans".

 

[Mouthwash]

Why are you assuming that these are the characteristics that were essential to Roman identity? Or that, if they were essential at one point, they remained so? Certainly, the bit about "Republican city-states" doesn't survive the turn of the common era, but it's hard to image what we call the citizens of the Empire in the first century if not "Romans".

This basically sums up the whole argument. Nation changes. Is it still the same nation?

 

[Evie]

I have changed very significantly from the man I was ten years ago. Am I still the same man?

 

[ubergeneral]

This basically sums up the whole argument. Nation changes. Is it still the same nation?

Yes. The people get to decide what their identity is. Not historians.

This is why I consider the egypt today the same one as ancient times. Because the people living there have decided that they are still the same. Ancient Eqypt and modern Eqypt are the same because the people living there identify themselves as such.

Now here is a more important question. If the Byzantium people decided that they are still Romans, why do historians call them Byzantine? Isn't that insulting to them? Maybe we should call them Romans, or East Romans?

This is sorta like the Persia topic I made before. Persians never called themselves persians, they called themselves Iranians. So maybe in Civ6 Persia should be referred to a Iran.

 

[Plotinus]

We don't. We call them Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms or whatnot. At best they're "proto-English," simply because of their attitude on Englishness.

But they called themselves "English", at least after Bede popularised the concept. The term "Anglo-Saxon" is a modern one, invented partly to distance us from them. The point is, they called themselves English, and we call ourselves English, and there's continuity, yet we're completely different from them qualitatively speaking. The same thing applies to any culture or country where there's a long period of continuity, whether it be England, Rome, or China.

Tales of origin, mythological or not, don't determine what the people actually are.

But here's the problem: you're assuming that there's a correct answer to the question "what the people actually are". But there's no such thing! It's purely a made-up concept. In the case of Byzantium we can consider, say, the Roman empire under Augustus and look at its racial, linguistic, cultural, etc. makeup. And we can then consider the Roman empire under, say, Basil II, and do the same thing again. We could, in theory, ascertain objective facts such as what language the people in each era speak or what religion they practise or how they think of themselves. But if you want to know whether they're the same people there's simply no objective fact you can uncover to answer that question. Any answer you give will assume some criterion of sameness that's ultimately arbitrary - whether it's linguistic continuity, or religious, or political, or self-image.

That's why the question you're asking isn't really a historical question at all, it really is a philosophical one, and I don't see what kind of historical facts anyone could adduce that would answer it.

 

[Traitorfish]

This basically sums up the whole argument. Nation changes. Is it still the same nation?

Nations are works of collective imagination, and that's always changing. American self-imagination before the election of Obama was different from American self-imagination after Obama, for example. You're only running into this problem because you're trying to set up "nations" as objectively real, as entities which can be measured and defined and distinguished, but that simply isn't tenable. As Plotinus says, there's no correct answer to "who are these people", there's only the answers that people give, and with any substantial society you're going to find multiple, equally-valid answers at any given time, let alone over years and centuries.

 

[sophie]

Nations are works of collective imagination, and that's always changing. American self-imagination before the election of Obama was different from American self-imagination after Obama, for example. You're only running into this problem because you're trying to set up "nations" as objectively real, as entities which can be measured and defined and distinguished, but that simply isn't tenable. As Plotinus says, there's no correct answer to "who are these people", there's only the answers that people give, and with any substantial society you're going to find multiple, equally-valid answers at any given time, let alone over years and centuries.

Yeah, this. You just need to read some history books which address the concept of identity and ethnicity. The first couple chapters of Halsall's Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West does a pretty good job of it, at least in getting the basics. It'll also give some good, hard examples of how identity, particularly self-defined identity, can dramatically change political systems.

 

[Traitorfish]

Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities might be a good place to start, because although it is limited to modern national identities, it does a pretty good job of staking out how these identities work and how they developed historically, so it'll do a lot to expand on Owen's previous observation that nationality is basically not a Thing in the Byzantine period. It also captures a sense of the fluidity and negotiability of identities quite well, although probably not quite as well as more contemporary work like Halsall's.

 

[Kyriakos]

The New Byzantine Empire will be seen as a nation

 

[Pangur Bán]

But they called themselves "English", at least after Bede popularised the concept. The term "Anglo-Saxon" is a modern one, invented partly to distance us from them. The point is, they called themselves English, and we call ourselves English, and there's continuity, yet we're completely different from them qualitatively speaking. The same thing applies to any culture or country where there's a long period of continuity, whether it be England, Rome, or China.

Yes, Anglo-Saxon is a modern term, though the kings of the 9th and 10th centuries did use the term on which it was based, meaning 'English Saxons'. Indeed far from being an intermediate stage between Englishness and no 'national' identity, it already took for granted that 'English Saxons' existed to be distinguished from 'Old Saxons'. In earlier use the term 'English' is used, at least in southern England, to distinguish from 'Welsh' .. which was as much a class-distinction as a 'national' one, perhaps more like the indio-latino distinction you get in parts of Latin America. If you were Welsh ('Welsh' or 'Roman' depending on context), you may have been a slave or a neighbouring enemy ... in either case you had a lower wergild in English jurisdictions.

 

[Mouthwash]

Nations are works of collective imagination, and that's always changing. American self-imagination before the election of Obama was different from American self-imagination after Obama, for example. You're only running into this problem because you're trying to set up "nations" as objectively real, as entities which can be measured and defined and distinguished, but that simply isn't tenable. As Plotinus says, there's no correct answer to "who are these people", there's only the answers that people give, and with any substantial society you're going to find multiple, equally-valid answers at any given time, let alone over years and centuries.

Now that I think about it, I recall you arguing that Jews weren't actually a nation prior to the Zionist movement. But we've referred to ourselves as a nation for thousands of years. Under your definition, this absolutely makes it true.

 

[Tahuti]

Nations are works of collective imagination, and that's always changing. American self-imagination before the election of Obama was different from American self-imagination after Obama, for example. You're only running into this problem because you're trying to set up "nations" as objectively real, as entities which can be measured and defined and distinguished, but that simply isn't tenable. As Plotinus says, there's no correct answer to "who are these people", there's only the answers that people give, and with any substantial society you're going to find multiple, equally-valid answers at any given time, let alone over years and centuries.

I used to think the same way, yet if you could graph the social ties of all people of several countries, that could probably end up in a rather neat correlation with nation states - mar political conflicts within states - that cannot be explained by geographical and political limitations. And I don't see why it would be incompatible with the notion of measurably existing nation states and the idea that nations change.

Now that I think about it, I recall you arguing that Jews weren't actually a nation prior to the Zionist movement. But we've referred to ourselves as a nation for thousands of years. Under your definition, this absolutely makes it true.

Pre-Aliyah Jews arguably form a sub-nation within a nation they live in (i.e. German Jews are a subset of Germans rather than Jews). The current 'Jewish' nation is rather new, the result of Zionism. As someone of Israeli descent I will say that Israel was founded as a haven for victims of anti-semitism - which can include non-Jews - and not because an ancient unified Jewish identity, which is more the result of it.

 

[Kyriakos]

+1

Nations are no more "a work of the collective imagination" than "spoons" or "people" are. Something does not at all have to exist in a stable way or in an easy to define progression of altering states, so as to be deemed as existing regardless of anyone observing it through imagination

 

[Traitorfish]

Now that I think about it, I recall you arguing that Jews weren't actually a nation prior to the Zionist movement. But we've referred to ourselves as a nation for thousands of years. Under your definition, this absolutely makes it true.

Well, no, you haven't. In the first place, you didn't have the conceptual framework to do so until the 18th century, because nobody did. They saw themselves as a "people", sure, but the content and implications of that identity are not necessarily the same as, or even similar to, those of a modern "national" identity.

In the second place, Jewishness-as-nationality was actually a hugely controversial idea among 18th and 19th century Jews, because Jewishness was tied to a religious rather than ethnic community. Jewishness was first and foremost about a particular relationship to god, and while the reproduction of this relationship across the generations was obviously of enormous importance, it could not be stripped of it religious content. In the eyes of Jewish traditionalists, a Jewish convert to Christianity ceased to be a Jew, or, at the very least, they ceased to be a member of the Jewish community. (Most converts would also agree, thinking of themselves simply as being of Jewish ancestry. It wasn't until the 19th century that you get folks like Disraeli, proudly and unapologetically Jewish despite their non-Jewish religious commitments.) The idea that Jewishness was simply heritable, that one could be a Jew simply because ones parents or grandparents were Jews, yet never so much as glance at a temple in one's whole life, was entirely alien to them.

And this isn't simply ancient history, either, because until the post-war period, most Orthodox Jews were deeply sceptical of the idea of a "Jewish nation", equivalent to a "German nation", "Polish nation" or "Russian nation", because they felt it to represent an entirely confused notion of what it was to be a Jew. Mizrahi Jews, similarly, don't seemed to have entertained any particular concept of Jewish nationhood, in part simply because "nationality" wasn't a category that figured into the self-identity of most people in the Middle East.

On top of all this, I'll also say that "truth" simply isn't an appropriate category. Nations are works of collective-imagination, so when talking about nations, we're talking about what and how people imagine themselves (and to some extent how they imagine others). It is not that people bring a nation into being by imagining it, and that it ceases to exist when they stop, but that it only ever existed as an ongoing act of imagination in the first place.

I used to think the same way, yet if you could graph the social ties of all people of several countries, that could probably end up in a rather neat correlation with nation states - mar political conflicts within states - that cannot be explained by geographical and political limitations. And I don't see why it would be incompatible with the notion of measurably existing nation states and the idea that nations change.

You wouldn't actually be measuring nations, though. You'd be measuring certain kinds of social activity which are taken to express shared national identity. And it's by no means obvious that it doesn't work the other way around, that repeated interaction generates shared identity. (It's most likely seem measure of each, and that measure is probably another variable.) So national identity remains an act of imagination, and while your proposition might give us some insight into how nations are imagined and how that imagination changes over time, it doesn't actually affirm nations as actually-existing entities.

 

[Mouthwash]

Well, no, you haven't. In the first place, you didn't have the conceptual framework to do so until the 18th century, because nobody did. They saw themselves as a "people", sure, but the content and implications of that identity are not necessarily the same as, or even similar to, those of a modern "national" identity. In the second place, Jewishness-as-nationality was actually a hugely controversial idea among 18th and 19th century Jews, because Jewishness was tied to a religious rather than ethnic community. Jewishness was first and foremost about a particular relationship to god, and while the reproduction of this relationship across the generations was obviously of enormous importance, it could not be stripped of it religious content.

No, you're proving my original point. The problem is that Judaism has an inescapably nationalistic canon, even if Jews generally aren't feeling that way at the moment. It might not be nationalistic in the modern sense, but that feeling of being a unified 'people' is always going to bubble up when circumstances allow. You can see this in how the early, secular Zionists thought; they took scripture regarding the Land of Israel and removed God from it. That's what I mean about Jews being a nation-in-hiatus rather than a full-fledged nation.

In the eyes of Jewish traditionalists, a Jewish convert to Christianity ceased to be a Jew, or, at the very least, they ceased to be a member of the Jewish community. (Most converts would also agree, thinking of themselves simply as being of Jewish ancestry. It wasn't until the 19th century that you get folks like Disraeli, proudly and unapologetically Jewish despite their non-Jewish religious commitments.) The idea that Jewishness was simply heritable, that one could be a Jew simply because ones parents or grandparents were Jews, yet never so much as glance at a temple in one's whole life, was entirely alien to them.

Really? I've been taught all my life- from an almost universal standpoint- that any Jew remains a Jew forever, even if they abandon their faith. This is actually still a religious viewpoint, the idea being that they have a Jewish soul. I'm not sure what rules apply to descendants of apostates.

On top of all this, I'll also say that "truth" simply isn't an appropriate category. Nations are works of collective-imagination, so when talking about nations, we're talking about what and how people imagine themselves (and to some extent how they imagine others). It is not that people bring a nation into being by imagining it, and that it ceases to exist when they stop, but that it only ever existed as an ongoing act of imagination in the first place.

No, I think you're quit wrong on this issue. The idea of being part of a nation seems to assume that there are others to find common cause with you. Isn't that a 'real' thing, in the same way that proletarian internationalism is real?

 

[Traitorfish]

No, you're proving my original point. The problem is that Judaism has an inescapably nationalistic canon, even if Jews generally aren't feeling that way at the moment. It might not be nationalistic in the modern sense, but that feeling of being a unified 'people' is always going to bubble up when circumstances allow. You can see this in how the early, secular Zionists thought; they took scripture regarding the Land of Israel and removed God from it. That's what I mean about Jews being a nation-in-hiatus rather than a full-fledged nation.

"People" and "nation" are not equivalent categories. You're taking a particular modern set of concepts and imposing them onto the past, turning peoples into "nations" regardless of they themselves would have understood such categories. That you can find precedents for this misreading of the past in the Zionist tradition doesn't make it any less spurious.

<edit> It is argued that the pre-modern Jews were a "nation" because they saw themselves as possessing common descent, and as members of a distinct extra-local community, right? But neither of these two characteristics are themselves indicative of nationhood. The pre-modern Gaels had, like the Jews, a strong sense of themselves as sharing common descent from certain semi-mythical fore-bearers, the Milesians, which distinguished them from neighbouring peoples such as the Britons and English, but we don't talk about a "Gaelic nation"- and indeed, when national identities do emerge among the Gaels, we see distinct Scottish and Irish national identities, both of which draw on an English and Norse as well as Gaelic heritage. Christians and Muslims have both traditionally imagined themselves to be members of universal religious communities, but we don't talk about a "Christian nation" or a "Muslim nation". (Some do, but the fact that they are fringe radicals emphasises how contrary their ideas are to these traditions.) Neither does the coincidence of identification with shared descent and religious community create a "nation", because both are also found among the Druze, but it is not widely accepted that the Druze form a distinct nation, even among the Druze themselves. (Many Druze living in Israeli identify quite strongly as Israeli, as you'll no doubt be aware.) So if neither of these qualities are enough to make a nation, and neither is their coincidence. So what makes it so among the Jews, except that a Jewish nationalist movement would later emerge, and attempt to discover its justification in the ancient past? </edit>

Really? I've been taught all my life- from an almost universal standpoint- that any Jew remains a Jew forever, even if they abandon their faith. This is actually still a religious viewpoint, the idea being that they have a Jewish soul. I'm not sure what rules apply to descendants of apostates.

Well, I'm not well-versed on the finer points of the Jewish philosophy, so you I'll concede on that point. But suffice to say, Jewish converts to Christianity or Islam are no longer members of the Jewish community, which necessarily means they are not longer members of any Jewish national community. Their soul might remain Jewish, but their social being does not. Community-membership, for traditionalist Jews, cannot simply be inherited, but has to be affirmed by active participation in Jewish religious life.

No, I think you're quit wrong on this issue. The idea of being part of a nation seems to assume that there are others to find common cause with you. Isn't that a 'real' thing, in the same way that proletarian internationalism is real?

I don't believe it is, no. Identifying mutual interest does not conjure into existence an actually-existing entity embodying that interest, and certainly not one as totalising and enduring as the modern nation is imagined to be.

 

[Tahuti]

Christians and Muslims have both traditionally imagined themselves to be members of universal religious communities, but we don't talk about a "Christian nation" or a "Muslim nation". (Some do, but the fact that they are fringe radicals emphasises how contrary their ideas are to these traditions.)

In the mediterrenean and Europe, organised religion was originally an expression of cultural and ethnic identity: Practicising Judaism made one a Jew, practicising Hellenism made one a Greek, practising Germanic polytheism made one a German, etc. regardless of birthplace or descent. The Dharmic religions - like Christianity and Islam - did however transcended ethnic boundaries, though they did carry traces of the ethnic origins.

 

[Traitorfish]

"Hellenism" and "Germanic polytheism" aren't exclusive religious systems, though, and weren't perceived as such by contemporaries; they're later historical constructs. (The Roman enthusiasm for exotic deities should stand as proof of the porousness of Classical religion.) Exclusive religious communities like the Jews or Zoroastrians existed, yes, but they didn't represent any sort of general logic of religious or ethnic identity in the pre-Christian/pre-Islamic period.