The best histories are always slightly eccentric - and this one certainly is eccentric. Its range is great, both in time and space: ancient, modern and trans-European, it deals with "failed" or "vanished" states but in reality reminds us that everything is transient. Things only feel permanent and fixed when we stand in the centre.
I suppose what I like about this book is its serendipity - the fact that you can dive in virtually anywhere and find something interesting and informative. It has variety because it is not the history of any one place but of many places and it is exotic because none of these "nations" (on the whole) exist any more. These could almost be fabled lands lost in the mists and dusts of ancient libraries.
One of the great weaknesses of many histories is the long lists of rulers and their offspring; who begat who (in our Judaeo-Christian culture we know where that failing first arose). As the son of a labourer and the grandson of a peasant I'm not really interested in the "true-blooded" lineage of these so-called lords and rulers yet, I suppose, it is a necessary evil for we are looking at the creation, growth and eventual decline of nations (and to be fair Davies does a lovely job of explaining this just at the moment one is thinking "lists" in a derogatory way). Davies actually compares these states to great corporations and famous brands, and their rulers to CEOs - a lovely analogy.
The chapter on Litva makes me feel like a refugee in some Tolkinesque world, with individuals, tribes and places that have a halo of myth about them. It serves to remind one how exotic-sounding Varangians, Trabki and Mir are as much a part of the history of Europe as the Normans, Paris and Windsor. The chapter soon enters familiar ground for students of Polish-Lithuanian history along with the tragedies of partition and submission to the brutality of the Russian states (both Tsarist and Soviet).
The chapter on Burgundy is both amusing and confusing. I think it shows Davies at his very best, trying to untangle a highly complex Gordian knot as patiently and simply as possible. He even advises weaker readers when to take a break! The chapter on Byzantium, on the other hand, is a very strange one (to say the least). It reads more like an introduction to some larger book rather than a "history" in the context of this weighty tome (readers with weak wrists beware!). It is almost like a rushed essay, given up in the end because the topic is either too vague or too great. Davies deals more with the abuses of historians rather than the decay of the state. One feels he could almost be on uncomfortable ground here - a strange chapter indeed.
I have always had a high regard for Norman Davies for he is, in my opinion, the first historian of Europe to try to rebalance the focus of history and correct the western bias which, mistakenly, ignores everything between Germanic Europe and Russia or treats it as unimportant, even insignificant and humorous. Thus it is inevitable that Davies is at his best when dealing with his particular area of interest: Eastern Europe. I have already mentioned his chapter on Litva but his chapter on "Borussia" (or Prussia) is excellent. He looks at the emergence of this state from an eastern perspective and thus gives it a freshness one hasn't come across before.
Sometimes it seems as if Prof Davies has chosen his topics in order to discuss something of particular interest to him, so that his chapter on Etruria is an excuse to follow the career of the Buonaparte (deliberate choice of spelling here) clan, and that on Rosenau to talk about Prince Albert (Queen Victoria's consort) and Carl-Eduard (the last duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha) and the British Royal family's attempt to re-brand itself and thus hide its German connections.
As is inevitable, there are many injustices brought to our attention, perhaps the most haunting being the fixed plebiscite which handed Savoy to France, and the post-Great War treatment of Montenegro which disturbingly mirrors that of the treatment of Poland after World War 2. No-one comes out of it with clean hands except, perhaps, for the victims.
History is full of such injustices carried out by ambitious, deluded or power-hungry individuals and their supporters or, as Davies points out in his chapter on the mayfly state of the Carpatho-Russyns, by historians who look at Eastern Europe as some backwater whose nationalistic hopes and dreams are inferior and lack the educated, cultural strengths of the West. I never forget the attitudes of my English colleagues during the Balkan upheavals that led to the collapse of Yugoslavia. They patronisingly asked why such far-off people should even think they were entitled to having their own states in this day-and-age.
I have to admit that I read the chapter on Eire with a degree of bafflement as I couldn't see how that state could fall into Davis' brief of "vanished" or "half-forgotten". I remained in this state of confusion until it became apparent, near the end, that Davis has used his discussion of Ireland as an excuse to discuss the manner in which the United Kingdom may fall apart. I have to say that this discussion left me feeling that historians should really stick to studying the past. It is a trend for historians to try to analyse the present through the mirror of the past... it reminds me of Hitler sitting in the bunker during the Nazi Gotterdammerung, waiting for the beat of destiny's wings to save him just as they had saved Frederick of Prussia, thus placing his faith in "German History" and forgetting that the future, just like the past, is a different country and will unfold in very different ways.
With the penultimate chapter we are back on safe ground. Davis looks at the death of the Soviet Union and balances that with the birth, demise and rebirth of Estonia. He reminds us that the history of modern Eastern Europe is one where individuals faced two great evils and often had to make choices that were not, and still are not, understood in a West that saw only one evil, Nazi Germany, and ignored the other - arguably greater evil - Stalinist Soviet Russia. I once read a short Science Fiction story in which the Earth was "liberated" again and again so that, in the end, we see the dire plight of the surviving liberated humans eking out a pitiful existence on the fragmented ruins of their planet... this was "liberation" in Eastern Europe. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the flowering of a free Estonia are a wonderful point on which to end the book.
This is a good read. The "failure" and collapse of nation states is a topic that merits study. Like the Romans, men walked the streets of Moscow unaware that they were on the brink of a change none of them could ever have imagined. When it came none of them could understand how it had happened... such creatures can be pitied... they should also be feared.
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