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Don't be fooled by the change in government systems. Governments are the expression of political ideals and ideas, not the essence of them.
The modern struggle between the concepts of Church and State are quite visible in Charlemagne's plots and schemes around his coronation as the first Holy Roman Emperor.
(I'll head off the joke by making it myself, he was neither holy, nor Roman.)
Charlemagne had planned to crown himself as Holy Roman Emperor, but Pope Leo III outsmarted him, and as Charlemagne was at prayer in the Church of St. Peter, Leo declared him Emperor of the West.
At least one chronicler notes that he was not pleased by this.
Why? Well, in this way Leo forced him to accept the theoretical concept of the Emperor of the West status on Papal terms. I have a suspicion Charlemagne saw the role of Emperor of the HRE in something like the same terms that the Byzantine Emperor held in relation to the Patriarch.
But it was too late.
(Why did all this matter so much? The Middle Ages took symbolism with a deadly seriousness foreign to moderns. The Investiture Controvery was a good example of that.)
In England, when William the Conquerer became King, he got involved in a dispute over Peter's Pence, basically a tax.
The dispute turned on the question of whether the West was a theocratic universal church-state (the Church view, harking back to one view of the Roman Empire) or a theocratic universal empire-church (the crown view, harking back to another view of Rome). In practice, this meant that the monarchs tend to become to focus of local and provincial thinking, the Church was the bastion of internationalism and universalism.
This struggle continues to this day.
When kings tried endlessly to conquer their neighbors by marriage and force, they usually expressed in terms of unifying Western Christendom. This wasn't entirely cynical, they were trying to create the earthly manifestation of the Christian West as a universal state. They often saw Byzantium as something of what they had in mind.
Nationalism was originally a side-effect of the monarchical struggle for power against the Church. Later, nationalism was turned into a tool that restrained those very monarchs, transforming them from chieftains in Western Christendom into heads of state of modernized nations. The early Angevin kings of England spoke French, as did many other aristocrats across Europe. In the High Middle Ages, nationality was nearly meaningless except when contrasted to such alien cultures as the Mongols or the Islamic world, or toward Jews. The aristocratic class of England, France, etc, saw each other as part of a single whole. A couple of centuries later, any king of England that wanted to stay king spoke ENGLISH, and everyone knew quite well what nationality meant.
But the conflicting impulses remained.
When the labor movement started in 19th century, they liked to believe they were rejecting the West's past in many ways, but they weren't. Note how many labor unions have the world 'international' in their names, even when most of them aren't. That's a legacy of their origin in the socialist movement, which disavowed nationality. When Karl Marx dreamed of a world-wide worker's revolt, he had no idea that he was simply the latest manifestation of the Universalist impulse in the West that had at once time been embodied in the religions he opposed. I'm sure he never counted on his Communist movement successors to absorb so much of the apocalyptic thought pattern from traditional religion and apply it to their movement. But then Communism was a religion.
Today, the struggle is between the view of 'inherent' values, natural rights, etc, and those who hold that the majority defines morality, and that absolutes don't exist. It takes other forms as well.
When modern nationalists insist that their nation's sovereignty is absolute, and that they'll fight a world government to the death, that's the same impulse that powered the monarchical efforts to defang the Church politically, and that provided much of the earthly energy of the Protestant Reformation. When they say 'we' they mean their own nation.
Today, when internationalists, Greens, and NGOs and the like call for world government, world authority, etc, they are embodying the same impulse in the West that once drove the Church to strive to subordinate all the local monarchies to an overarching vision, (again not entirely cynically). When these groups speak of 'we' they mean the entire West, though they mistake the entire human race for part of the West when they do so.
This sort of thing, BTW, is part of why non-Westerners don't look at the West and see a new thing, risen from the Englightenment, they see the same society that existed here 300 or 400 years ago, with new clothes and habits, but the same entity.
A modern Westerner says, "But I'm NOTHING like my great grandparents!"
A modern non-Westerner replies: "So why do you behave exactly like them?"
The modern struggle between the concepts of Church and State are quite visible in Charlemagne's plots and schemes around his coronation as the first Holy Roman Emperor.
(I'll head off the joke by making it myself, he was neither holy, nor Roman.)
Charlemagne had planned to crown himself as Holy Roman Emperor, but Pope Leo III outsmarted him, and as Charlemagne was at prayer in the Church of St. Peter, Leo declared him Emperor of the West.
At least one chronicler notes that he was not pleased by this.
Why? Well, in this way Leo forced him to accept the theoretical concept of the Emperor of the West status on Papal terms. I have a suspicion Charlemagne saw the role of Emperor of the HRE in something like the same terms that the Byzantine Emperor held in relation to the Patriarch.
But it was too late.
(Why did all this matter so much? The Middle Ages took symbolism with a deadly seriousness foreign to moderns. The Investiture Controvery was a good example of that.)
In England, when William the Conquerer became King, he got involved in a dispute over Peter's Pence, basically a tax.
The dispute turned on the question of whether the West was a theocratic universal church-state (the Church view, harking back to one view of the Roman Empire) or a theocratic universal empire-church (the crown view, harking back to another view of Rome). In practice, this meant that the monarchs tend to become to focus of local and provincial thinking, the Church was the bastion of internationalism and universalism.
This struggle continues to this day.
When kings tried endlessly to conquer their neighbors by marriage and force, they usually expressed in terms of unifying Western Christendom. This wasn't entirely cynical, they were trying to create the earthly manifestation of the Christian West as a universal state. They often saw Byzantium as something of what they had in mind.
Nationalism was originally a side-effect of the monarchical struggle for power against the Church. Later, nationalism was turned into a tool that restrained those very monarchs, transforming them from chieftains in Western Christendom into heads of state of modernized nations. The early Angevin kings of England spoke French, as did many other aristocrats across Europe. In the High Middle Ages, nationality was nearly meaningless except when contrasted to such alien cultures as the Mongols or the Islamic world, or toward Jews. The aristocratic class of England, France, etc, saw each other as part of a single whole. A couple of centuries later, any king of England that wanted to stay king spoke ENGLISH, and everyone knew quite well what nationality meant.
But the conflicting impulses remained.
When the labor movement started in 19th century, they liked to believe they were rejecting the West's past in many ways, but they weren't. Note how many labor unions have the world 'international' in their names, even when most of them aren't. That's a legacy of their origin in the socialist movement, which disavowed nationality. When Karl Marx dreamed of a world-wide worker's revolt, he had no idea that he was simply the latest manifestation of the Universalist impulse in the West that had at once time been embodied in the religions he opposed. I'm sure he never counted on his Communist movement successors to absorb so much of the apocalyptic thought pattern from traditional religion and apply it to their movement. But then Communism was a religion.
Today, the struggle is between the view of 'inherent' values, natural rights, etc, and those who hold that the majority defines morality, and that absolutes don't exist. It takes other forms as well.
When modern nationalists insist that their nation's sovereignty is absolute, and that they'll fight a world government to the death, that's the same impulse that powered the monarchical efforts to defang the Church politically, and that provided much of the earthly energy of the Protestant Reformation. When they say 'we' they mean their own nation.
Today, when internationalists, Greens, and NGOs and the like call for world government, world authority, etc, they are embodying the same impulse in the West that once drove the Church to strive to subordinate all the local monarchies to an overarching vision, (again not entirely cynically). When these groups speak of 'we' they mean the entire West, though they mistake the entire human race for part of the West when they do so.
This sort of thing, BTW, is part of why non-Westerners don't look at the West and see a new thing, risen from the Englightenment, they see the same society that existed here 300 or 400 years ago, with new clothes and habits, but the same entity.
A modern Westerner says, "But I'm NOTHING like my great grandparents!"
A modern non-Westerner replies: "So why do you behave exactly like them?"
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