Customer Reviews

The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe

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Geary's work on the recent origins of ethnic nationalism sheds much-needed light on the subjects of ethnogenesis and national identity. His principal thesis is the difference between ethnic and constitutional peoples, between static and dynamic views of the social and political entities around us. He gives a quick overview of Enlightenment era scholarship on nationhood and national history to outline how ethnicities have become more defined, however artificially, from the 18th to 20th centuries. He then moves on to a rather detailed account of early Medieval Europe, the complex interactions between the barbarian tribes and the deteriorating Roman Empire, and finally the rise of the kingdoms of the Franks, Anglo-Saxons and other amorphously defined groups of people. He ends with a quick comparison between Zulu and European examples of ethnogenesis to hint at the universality of his argument, which is based primarily on West European history.

Geary is relatively easy to read, except when he goes into great detail about early medieval law without sufficient explanation, and his interesting arguments are well-supported. His aversion to maps, chronologies and other study aids make it slightly more difficult for us lay folk, especially since he refers to so many archaic place-names and territories. Nonetheless, one can still easily grasp his main points without knowing exactly who the Juthungi were or where Pannonia was.

I really liked Geary's ideas, and so I wish he would have added a chapter developing his points on European myths of national origin into a more comprehensive theory that could be applied to such myths around the world.

A historian specializing in the history of Europe during the first millennium CE, Geary poses several important challenges to the notion of ethnic identity, a concept that is very much in vogue these days.

Analyzing the Roman Empire from about 200 CE onward, he shows how the fundamental idea of ethnicity arose in Europe. Romans were united by following a set of laws, while non-Romans were "barbarians" whose tribes were united by having been born in a given location. Roman historians categorized ethnic groups on the basis of common genetic ancestry and ascribed fixed characteristics to each tribe, but these were assumptions based on their own prejudices rather than facts based on objective observation.

Much of the book summarizes the shifting alliances of the "barbarian tribes" who sometimes fought for the Roman Empire (against other tribes) rather than against it. One point that Geary emphasizes several times is that the sudden appearance of a tribe on the stage of history is more often a result of remnants of earlier tribes regrouping under a new leader than it is a result of a "grand migration."

He also takes aim at the notion of "national language," calling it a political invention of the 19th century. Geary points out that only a bare majority of the French spoke French as recently as 1900. In the territories of the former Holy Roman Empire, only about a quarter of the population spoke German in the early 19th century, when German nationalism was first proposed by the Prussian Minister of State as an ideology for resisting Napoleon.

The book is written for a general audience and Geary's style is good enough to keep the reader interested, though the book occasionally bogs down in detail. I agree with the Amazon reviewer who suggested that maps would have been very useful to readers in visualizing the territories of the various tribes. If you have a historical atlas, I strongly recommend that you keep it nearby while reading this book. One drawback of targeting a general audience is that a lot of the evidence for Geary's ideas is buried in footnotes and he tends to expect the reader to accept his interpretations of primary sources.

I personally enjoyed most of the details and found this book to be an excellent education in how the Roman Empire transitioned into European feudalism. I also found many of the ideas provocative, such as the claim that nationalism was invented in the 19th century when various nations projected their origins back in time to legends that "authorized" them to inhabit the lands they controlled at the time. The idea that the Romans were united by agreement about a set of laws and a social contract that transcended the customs of their places of birth is worth contemplating as the United States struggles to find a core identity while respecting the rich diversity of peoples who say "I'm an American."

In his short but complex book, Patrick Geary explains why the nomadic migrations of barbaric peoples, combined with the collapse of Roman authority,created a series of weak and temporal political units.
To appeal to the diverse citizens of these units (it is hard to call them kingdoms), many of whom were recently absorbed through conquest, leaders attempted to define their cultural identity and unity by appealing to mythic stories of ethnic purity. If the citizens of the unit could be coaxed to accept the commonality of origin, a sense of superiority over others was created. This served the leader's purpose by providing soldiers for future conquest and taxes.
By contrast, Roman citizens attained their status by agreeing to accept Roman law. Citizenship in the 300s and 400s was expanded to the point where a barbaric Frank or Goth could claim citizenship irrespective of his ethnic origin. When Rome was strong, the barbaric tribes were absorbed by it and they took pride in their Roman affiliation. As Rome weakened, the opposite occurred; Romans sought protection from their immediated neighbors and the distinction between the Imperial and the Barbaric faded. This movement of people from barbarian to Roman authority and then back to barbarian ultimately changed peoples identity so that they had no real ethnic roots. Attempts by modern populist leaders to claim an ancient historical connection to some mythical forebearers are precisely that--mythical connections that leaders have conjured up since the fall of Rome to separate, and finally legitimize, themselves from others.
Can anyone in France claim that they are truly descended from the Franks, when that territory was crossed, invaded, conquered and lost by Goths, Visigoths, Huns, Vandals and other lesser groups all before 500 AD? History creates nations, and people adapt to nationhood for survival. A people's willingnes to recognize themselves as a nation is largely out of political necessity and economic expediency. Geary argues that nations are being formed today,and new arguements to identify and purify a people will be made. They are likley to be no less fragile than the Visigoth nation of the 400's.

A very interesting book, this is really an extended essay. Although three-quarters of his book is a general history of the peoples of late antiquity and the tumultuous early Middle ages, it will provide the laymen an introduction to this period as well as Geary's thesis. I do not paricularly like his writing style, especially the vulgarly emotive conclusion, yet it is an important work. Well-worth the read, I found much to ponder. I hope the Europeans and other peoples who idealize their so-called nationalism will take the time to read it. I am not optimistic.

This well-written, tightly argued book was referred to me about five years ago by my good friend Martin Snell, who I did not notice until yesterday (as I was reviewing the book "The Invention of the Jewish people,") had long ago reviewed this book. At the time, we had traded rather heated emails defending our respective points of view about the ultimate message of Geary's book. Apparently Geary wrote it while Martin was attending Princeton, where at the time Geary himself was either a professor or a graduate student. In any case, as the reader will note, Martin, in his excellent review, preferred (as he did in our arguments) to stick rather close to the ground, examining the trees one by one in the same meticulous, detailed, and complex way as the author had done in writing the book itself. So, for a clean review of the book's details, the reader can do no better than Dr. Snell's excellent Amazon entry here. For a dirtier review, the reader may wish to read on, for my predilection, when in search of any larger meanings that the author may have intended to convey, unlike Dr. Snell's, is to stand back and survey the forest rather than examine and deconstruct each tree.

And in this vein, I believe that what Professor Geary was trying to tell us, using the invention of the European nations on the periphery of the crumbling Roman Empire as cases in point, is that national identity is an exceedingly fragile commodity: fashioned mostly out of fleeting and very insubstantial materials; materials such as invented and ever-changing languages, myths of heroic exploits that are as often as not, spun from whole cloth; tenuous claims to legal or moral legitimacy; and most importantly, phony claims to land ownership (or discovery) and on equally weak ideological, religious and racial theories all based on some vague notions of purity.

These very insubstantial, almost ephemeral materials, which are often recycled many times over centuries, are invariably fashioned into a national narrative or situational or cultural drama, imagined to be of heroic proportions. And it is this narrative (and its self-conscious construction and enlargement) that "wills the nation into being." By becoming in the end the sole motive force as well as the existential imperative for national existence, the narrative "wills into being" as a wholly symbolic construction the national entity. For upon this narrative package rests all meanings of nationhood; and upon it also hangs the entirety of the national identity. Social organization and exploits may come, but they come later and are then carefully folded into the narrative, very much after the fact.

In the same way as is the case with religion, patriotic fealty to the narrative itself becomes an existential act of patriotism: a veritable imperative of nationhood. One is required -- on pain of being accused of (mental) treason -- to "believe" and accept the national story "on faith" without examining too critically the validity of its details. We need not go very far to see that Geary has hit the nail on the head. For anyone who has read the histories of France, South Africa, Israel, Nazi Germany, or the USA, among others, will recognize the validity of his paradigm.

My favorite book defending America's symbolic nationhood is written by Professor Roger Wilkins -- the nephew of the great Civil Rights hero Roy Wilkins. It is called "Jefferson's Pillow." It is a brilliant attempt to try to square the circle of contradictions created by the quartet of founding Virginia patriots, who all the while fighting for their own "white freedom" from the British, were imminently aware of, but refused to acknowledge the humanity of, not to mention the "black freedom" of their slaves. Professor Wilkins gives it a gallant try, but I believe in the end he fails because he could not bring himself to commit the mental treason required for him to breach the neat narrative of American Democracy with its white only version of freedom. Five Stars