The Realm of Ozymandias

Norman Davies, Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe (Allen Lane, 2011), 830 pages, $59.95

Crumbled empires, empty thrones and vanquished powers. Each is an endless source of human fascination. It’s no surprise that the greatest work on Rome tells the story of its decline and fall.

Norman Davies’s new book, Vanished Kingdoms, is the latest contribution to the field. A distinguished Oxford historian, Davies asks: Why do states vanish, and what does it mean when they do? Davies is aware of the ancient genesis of these questions. The monument to Ozymandias pokes out of the sand just nine pages in.

The purpose of the book is to start correcting the record. Historians, Davies says, spend inordinate amounts of time telling the history of things that are presently “powerful, prominent and impressive”. Dead kingdoms “have almost no advocates at all”. Davies’s book takes up the case of the vanquished, but in the service of giving a fuller account of that which remains. Vanished kingdoms are, in a sense, the dark matter of human history. Without them everything else can only be partly understood.

These are powerful ideas, whose genesis can be traced to gem of a speech, “False Comparisons and False Contrasts”, that Davies delivered in 1996 under the giant ticking clocks of the examination schools at Oxford University (since published in his book of essays East and West). Davies, who as well as being a formidable generalist historian is a pre-eminent scholar of Poland, criticised the neglect of Eastern subjects in European history. Warming to the theme, he singled out the late 1980s text Europe: A History of Its Peoples. Its French author simply took the twelve existing (Western) members of the European Economic Community “and projected his selection back through the past”. The Berlin Wall fell before the book was published and the author’s “Western perception of Europe collapsed with it”. Vanished Kingdoms is a riposte to historians who continue to take the countries they find today and “read history backwards”.

The popular image of Europe, of enduring stone cathedrals and monuments, is apt to mislead. Europe is always changing, its constituent members coming and going. Nowhere is this more true than in its East, the location for many of the finest chapters in Davies’s book. I found particularly gripping a passage concerning an unlikely subject, the fall of Prussia. It is told through the vehicle of Konigsberg, which was left at the end of the Second World War at the mercy of the invading Soviet army. It became “one of the few places where Stalin succeeded completely in what he set out to do”, a city filled with “outsiders”, concrete blocks replacing all churches, houses and trees, a place whose past was consciously and deliberately obliterated.

Posterity—either destroying it for rivals or seeking it for oneself—is a considerable factor in European history. Every megalomaniac (and Europe has seen many) who aspires to total control of the present ultimately becomes obsessed with leaving his mark on the future. Adolf Hitler would often harangue his slippery chief architect Albert Speer to design buildings in accordance with the crackpot theory of “ruin value”. The idea was that a great empire must design its buildings and cities so as to ensure that they give the impression of greatness even when in ruins. He got that wrong too. As Davies points out, one needn’t plan ruins nor posterity—like it or not, every empire leaves its trace.

Though about vanished states, the book also has an intriguing focus on states that have survived or reappeared. The story of the collapse of the USSR, described by Davies as “the ultimate vanishing act”, is told through the prism of plucky Estonia, a nation that somehow survived occupation by the Soviets, then the Nazis, then the vindictive return (for nearly five decades) of the Soviets. Poland is celebrated as a state that was once swallowed by its totalitarian neighbours “but not digested”. Davies’s chapter on what he sees as a slowly vanishing UK is really about the perseverance of Celtic Ireland. These stories of state survival underline a poignant tension in the book. We can cheer, for example, the fall of the monstrous USSR, but those states that survived it will also one day disappear. And so it goes.

If a criticism is to be made, the rambling final chapter, “Why States Fail”, is an underwhelming end to an otherwise masterful performance. It includes a candidate for nomination to what I have designated the Niall Ferguson Award for Unfortunate Historical Metaphor. There Davies adopts the concept of liquidation, “well understood in company law”, to explain the demise of the former Czechoslovakia. Not quite up to Ferguson’s standard—he last year published Civilization, a book devoted to explaining the success of Western civilisation through the head-slapping concept of “killer apps” (if, like me, you find the point is not obvious, the idea is that the relative advantages of Western states are akin to useful computer software)—but a bit of a howler nonetheless.

On the whole though, this is a splendid book, endlessly enjoyable to dip into and a great companion for a winter down-under.

It can be sobering too. We live in a new nation that is often riven with angst about national identity and a desire to reconcile its history between first Australians, recent Australians, and everyone in between. Our perspective can only be broadened by reading of the waves upon waves of states and nations, duchies and kingdoms that have passed through every corner of Europe. The only thing each holds in common is that each was designed to endure and failed.

In the Florentine church of the Santa Maria Novella, religious observance was scared into its Renaissance subjects by the inscription of an epitaph over bones, “I am once what you are, and what you are one day I will be”. What is true of people is true of all they create, including their kingdoms and states. Sooner or later, as Davies says, “the final blow always falls”. At the end, he quotes Rousseau: “if Sparta and Rome perished … what state can hope to last forever”. Vanished Kingdoms makes it clear that all things must pass. Whether this is a comfort or a terror must be left to the reader.

Benjamin Jellis wrote most recently in Quadrant on “Abbott, Australians and Oxford” in May 2011.