If you were to take a map of Europe and color in all the areas where state authority was introduced or reintroduced by Germanic tribes, you might surpass the area tamed by their predecessor, the Western Roman Empire.
With such a track record, it would be easy to fall back on the ready stock of cheap stereotypes regarding ze Germans. But still, looking at state origins in the graveyard of the Roman Empire during the first millennia of the Common Era, one must ask, what gives? One is almost reminded of the franchising Phoenicians, a Semitic people originating in what is today Lebanon, who crossed the Mediterranean world and made their home in settlements far and wide, founding, for example, the cities of Málaga, Cádiz, Tarragona, Tangier, Carthage, and Genoa. But instead of establishing trading posts, the Germanic tribes were establishing states. Incidentally, the linguist John McWhorter hypothesizes a Phoenician influence on ancient German, by way of a possible Phoenician settlement in Jutland, modern-day Denmark, all the way on the other side of the European coast.
James C. Scott talks about certain ethnicities as state-making technologies. Such ethnicities are a complex of religion, historical narrative, customs, administrative tools, kinship and lineage systems, agricultural techniques and productive modes that all converge to enable state formation. What might be the specific characteristics of this “technology”? The religion probably won’t involve an adoration of Mother Earth, of specifically local-based deities, and a worship of animals, rivers, and trees as the brothers and sisters of human beings. On the contrary, the religion will probably be patriarchal, and if it is not monotheistic, the pantheon will be hierarchical. Worshiping authority will be key. The historical narrative will focus on warrior-kings and father figures. Organizational forms will be centralized rather than decentralized, and even if the culture still contains acceptance of things like general assemblies, there will also be a tradition of officials with well defined ceremonial and administrative duties. The kinship system might allow for nuclear families or large extended clans, but elder males will have authority and the inheritance of property should be a relatively unambiguous affair (and they will, of course, have the concept of private property, even if the elite have not yet managed to destroy the parallel custom of communal property). Agriculture will focus on the production of field crops that can easily be controlled and taxed (with irrigation and milling constituting choke points).
Because the cultural technologies of a specifically statist ethnicity are evangelist and colonizing, a politogen can be a small group of warriors and administrators who conquer a larger population and eventually absorb it into a common identity. This is the conquest or colony state. A politogen is a cultural group that constitutes a state-making technology and often takes the form of an ethnicity or proto-ethnicity. It is like a virus that will form a state once it acquires a host population. The conquest state is a process of secondary state formation, a politogenesis that is the result of or at least influenced by other, previous processes of state formation. In the nineteenth century, Humplowitz and Oppenheimer published the “Conquest Theory” of state origin, suggesting that the first states arose when warlike nomadic societies, such as the Magyar or groups like the Vikings, conquered sedentary agricultural societies. And, while there are numerous examples of such occurrences, I cannot find any examples of primary state formation that follow this model. In other words, all such militaristic nomads already had examples of preexisting states to learn from. The politogen capable of forming a conquest state must have passed through a process of direct or indirect tutelage under a preexisting state, as the German tribes did with the Romans, whereas the colony state is formed when a patron state orders or permits a group of its subjects to undertake the conquest, subordination, and administration of a stateless territory.
In the conquest state, the economic mode and agricultural techniques are almost always imposed by the colonizing group, even where they might gain a greater profit margin and competitive advantage by adapting more fully to local conditions; their own way of life is adhered to religiously as a sign of identification with the governing authority. Meanwhile, the religion of the conquerors tends to syncretize with that of the conquered, co-opting local deities and festivals within its framework, giving the locals an incentive to adopt the new religion, and adapting old practices to a new moral universe. As for the language of the conquered group, it tends to affect the conquerors’ language in unpredictable ways, changing the grammar but not the vocabulary, as Welsh did to Old English, shedding grammatical complexity and taking in a duplicate set of vocabulary, as Old English did during the Norman and Viking invasions, or replacing the conquerors’ language entirely, as the local Slavs did with their Rus colonizers.
How exactly does a state-making technology come about? One early account of the Germanic tribes comes from the pen of Tacitus, a highly placed Roman historian. The description he gives is easy to synthesize into one unified picture, as he often conflates one tribe with another, or projects his ethnography from one group to the others. Looking past Tacitus’s exotification, we can argue that the Germans are the creation of the Roman Empire. Given the name of “German” and assigned a singular identity by their imperial neighbors, they were actually a multiplicity of peoples only loosely linked by linguistic and other cultural similarities.
No doubt the Suebi (or Schwaben) themselves saw some affinity with the Cherusci, the Goths, or the Vandals, as they could communicate with one another, speaking related dialects, worshiping the same or similar gods, and practicing similar forms of social organization. But they were not a unified group. They fought wars against one another, there is no record of a majority of them ever coming together in one political formation, and they generally maintained their autonomy, although there is record of members of one tribe referring to other tribes as kinsmen, especially in the face of Roman hostility.
The process of an empire constructing the barbarians is by no means unique to the Germans. Empires habitually manufacture ethnicities at their frontiers. Ethnicity begins where sovereignty ends, to cite James C. Scott.35 In order to control an uncontrollable, it must first be named. All domination flows from an original categorical enclosure. The very category of “tribe,” so influential in classical anthropology and pregnant with a sense of the primitive and pristine, is in fact an imperial creation. In the Roman Empire, tribes were administrative units for populations that defied direct rule but could be intimidated into paying protection money (or “tribute”), participating in “tribunes,” and taking part in other aspects of imperial business. Over time, they were increasingly integrated into the Roman state, holding on to a semi-autonomous status. Clearly, the tribes were never intended to remain autonomous forever. Identification and constitution as a tribe were early rungs on the ladder of colonization.
Germany as an entity existed in the Roman imagination, whence it was transposed to a German imagination (nor is this a unique process: Benedict Anderson and Alfred Kroeber describe how colonial state administration was able to create separate ethnic “tribes” that eventually became self-identifying, in the case of a separate Chinese ethnicity in Dutch Batavia or distinct ethnic tribes as understood in the Western sense in North America).36 Germany as a political reality was not born until 1871, created by Chancellor Bismarck on the grave of the Paris Commune. But its imaginary existence up until that point was by no means insubstantial. It reflects greatly on the worldview of the Germanic tribes in the era of the Roman collapse that they named the greatest state they eventually built the Holy Roman Empire. This would be the first Reich referred to by the Third Reich, whose ideologues also found great validation in the fact that Tacitus casually referred to the tribes across the Rheine as having “pure blood.”
What else did Tacitus find among the Germanic tribes? At the time he published Germania, in 98 CE, there was little to suggest the German ethnicity as a state-making technology. The different German peoples were stateless. Many of them had chiefs or kings, though it was often the Romans who appointed these among the conquered tribes or allied tribes living along the border. The chief, however, was not a coercive figure. Tribes made decisions in open assemblies, generally held after drunken debates during feasting. Tacitus, with both pleasure and irony, records the almost constant feasting and the unlimited hospitality of the Germans. Both of these are common features of stateless societies.
Tacitus refers to the Germans as a “free people,” in contrast