Worshiping Power. Peter Gelderloos
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military discipline, feudal obligations such as forced labor and the tithe, and a culture of reverence for divine and secular authority. The Wendish rebellion was successful, as were many rebellions against early states. The population killed off or drove out all the German nobles and priests, and for the next century and a half, lived as pagans, stateless and free.
It required a much larger apparatus of state formation than the elite German warrior brotherhoods to subdue them. No less than the Catholic Church, the most potent agent of state formation in the entire European subcontinent28 (and subsequently in the South American continent as well), declared a Holy Crusade against the Wends in 1147, organizing the various states, state fragments, and politogens29 of Central Europe to conquer and colonize them.
Other Slavic peoples who lived farther to the east, some of them inhabiting lands vacated by Germanic tribes moving into the collapsing Roman Empire, did not develop states until significantly later. In what is now Ukraine, the Rus—forebears of the Russians—settled on the Dniepr River and began what would eventually become a powerful state. But the Rus were a brotherhood of Norse warriors who colonized the Slavic locals, just as happened with the Wends.
At Wielkopolska, over the course of the ninth and tenth centuries, the Polanie tribe formed the first endogenous state in Central Europe. Unlike the colony states on the Spree and the Dniepr formed by invading politogens, Wielkopolska provides a clear example of another model of state formation: the imitative state. Local elites within the preexisting autochthonous hierarchies were impressed by the greater power amassed by elites in neighboring societies, and sought to copy them. Having a model close at hand conferred two great advantages for state formation.
Firstly, it decreased the risk entailed by seizing the power necessary for state formation. Unlike original states, imitative states had an example they could follow, and proof that increasing their level of stratification and hierarchy was possible. As in early states, power was by no means stable in non-state societies. Tribes and chiefdoms also faced rebellion and fracturing that toppled the leadership, and unlike their homologues in state societies, the leadership of non-state societies was largely subordinate to the population and did not enjoy coercive capacities. They had to protect themselves with status and charisma alone. Being seen as power-hungry and tyrannical was a proven way to undermine those qualities and end up deposed, exiled, or assassinated.30
Secondly, having states as neighbors changed the political situation faced by a society and made the option of militarization more attractive. States are highly dangerous to their citizens and to the externalized barbarians alike. They obligate neighboring societies to consider the question of self-defense. This question does not have an inevitable answer in state formation, as some historians have wished to assert. Many societies, from the Mapuche and the Lakota of the Americas to the Wa of Zomia, were able to organize for effective defensive warfare against far more powerful state neighbors without an increase in social hierarchy (in fact their collective self-defense sometimes even led to an accentuation of their anti-authoritarian characteristics, as a way to mobilize enthusiasm for defensive warfare and differentiate themselves from the statist neighbors).
More precisely, the need to organize for warfare offers up a trajectory of state formation for those societies where an elite already exists and is prepared to seize the situation and sell a solution to their lower-ranking kin. This is especially the case when self-defense can be sold, by the local elite to their subordinate kin, as a kind of national independence rather than the rebuffing of any kind of domination, whether endogenous or exogenous. This same tension was evident in the state-formation processes of post-colonial countries, where national liberation movements tended towards nationalism (liberation as cultural and political independence attained through interclass unity).
In the case of what is now Poland, increasing populations and belligerent pressure from neighboring states did not make state formation inevitable. The rest of the region faced the same conditions, and also experienced a growth in the construction of fortified settlements, but only at Wielkopolska did a state emerge in the ninth and tenth centuries. It seems that their pathway was to use the increase in construction and military measures (both of which can be accomplished with relatively egalitarian means) as an opportunity for political unification, first perhaps in the form of a strong confederation of tribal leaders enacting an ambitious plan to administer the closely related concerns of trade and warfare, and then to support a monarchy.
Poland’s unique position as an endogenous state surrounded by states of Germanic origin indicates the first strands of an interesting pattern. Elsewhere, the Visigoths, another Germanic tribe, poured into the Iberian Peninsula and founded a rudimentary kingdom in the vacuum left by the Roman collapse, over three hundred years creating an increasingly effective, centralized authority when Tariq ibn-Ziyad swept across from northern Africa and established an emirate at Córdoba. The Muslim state spread quickly, soon reaching as far as the Pyrenees. Formation of a Muslim state in the Iberian Peninsula was aided by the apathy of the local population who scarcely raised their hands to defend their burdensome Visigoth lords,31 preferring the lenient Moorish rulers. This is another mechanism for stable state-formation: the progressive state, a lesser of two evils that takes advantage of the popular rejection of a more onerous form of state. This category could include those democratic states that restored governing institutions after popular revolt made it impossible for dictatorships to rule with any kind of stability (the early French Republic, democratic Spain, democratic Greece, Albania…). Ironically, the Iberian inhabitants of the Peninsula’s northern coast, who had long resisted full inclusion into the Roman and then the Visigothic states, finally formed a state—the Kingdom of Asturias—when the remnants of the Visigothic nobility allied and intermarried with local tribal leaders in order to organize a defense against the incursions of the more effective Umayyad state.
In the Italic peninsula, Germanic tribes invaded Rome itself, not exclusively to destroy its power, as Hannibal’s army from New Carthage (Cartagena, in modern day Spain) had attempted centuries earlier. On the contrary, the ostensible goal of the Germanic barbarians, from Odoacer to Theodoric the Great, was to rule Rome, generally in concert with Roman authorities and political institutions.
The British Isles present another case. The tribes of the Angles and Saxons came over from modern-day Denmark and Friesland to conquer the Gaelic inhabitants (rallied unsuccessfully under the legendary Arthur)32 and establish a kingdom that, depending on the criteria, potentially qualified as an early state. Five hundred years later, other Germanic politogens came over with a more perfected state model. In the same year, 1066, Vikings under King Harald Hardrada and Normans under William the Duke of Normandy invaded Eng-land (the land of the Angles). The latter were successful. And though the politico-military force from Normandy was French-speaking, Normandy’s state model was another Germanic import, arriving a century earlier in the form of a successful Viking invasion—the eponymous “North-men” of Nor-mandy, who quickly integrated themselves with another Germanic early state, that of the Franks, founded by Clovis at the end of the fifth century, when a confederation of Frankish tribes under Clovis’s leadership conquered northern and then southern Gaul, subordinating other Germanic tribes as well as the Gallo-Roman inhabitants, “eliminating the tribal chiefs (kings) and taking over their rights” (although the tribes retained semi-autonomous existence for a few more centuries.33 Also in the eleventh century, the Normans were instrumental in state-building efforts in fractiously diverse southern Italy, where Byzantines, Catholics, Jews, and Muslims had competed for control. The Frankish crusader states in Syria and Jerusalem, where Arabic and Turkish state-building efforts were largely decomposing, also deserve mention.
Since we have mentioned the Norse, we shouldn’t forget the three Scandinavian states of Germanic origin. And of course there are those territories that we have naturalized as “Germany,” as well as Austria and Switzerland. Within those territories, for a while unified as the Holy Roman Empire, are dozens of duchies, counties, principalities, and kingdoms formed by various Germanic tribes.
The last tribal [stateless] areas in Europe were taken over by state organizations in the 13th century. These were the territories settled by the Baltic peoples; the Prussians, the Yadzvingians, the Lithuanians and the Latvians […] Most of their tribal organizations were destroyed by the expansion of the Order of the Teutonic