The Empire of Pabistan

Was the medieval Roman Empire at some point like a “nation?” There is a solid argument that it was: “In the middle period of its history, Byzantium was understood to be the state of the Roman people: Romania was just the arche of the Romans. The vast majority of its population identified themselves as Romans and knew, regardless of whether they were from Naupaktos or Attaleia and of whether they knew each other personally, that they were all Romans precisely because they shared the same religion, language, art and architecture, history, state and laws, customs, and probably material conditions. They were not split into ethnic groups or social castes. They were subject to the same laws and each of them could theoretically occupy any office in the state. Official power derived from the state and its offices and not from clan or caste. All this makes the Byzantines a nation.” “Also, their state was not a federation of tribes or regional states. Its borders, beyond which lived hostile barbarians, were coterminous with the reach and jurisdiction of their national institutions, namely their Church, army, courts, social hierarchies, and bureaucracy. All this makes Byzantium a nation-state.” “Given the concession that even in modern times ‘national identity is fundamentally multi-dimensional and can never be reduced to a single element,’ as well as that any one particular element may be absent from the makeup of a particular nation, we have here a perfect fit between Byzantium and modern definitions of the nation-state. The latter require a sense of political community, ‘however tenuous,’ and ‘at least some common institutions and a single code of rights and duties for all the members of the community’; a territory controlled by the state and valorized by religious or historic associations; and ‘a measure of common values and traditions among the population, or at any rate its ‘core’ community.’ Byzantium flies past these minimal requirements, with its single dominant language, religion, state apparatus, and fairly homogeneous culture.” I think one of the things that makes the Eastern Roman Empire hard to pin down in terms of what it was is how long its history was. By that I mean, if you look at the time of Justinian, you could make an argument this just a multi-ethnic empire and that the term Roman was more civic in nature. However, after the Arab invasions it is fairly clear when reading primary sources that Roman was an ethnic identity. Kaldellis defends his theory: “This view will doubtless meet with resistance among both Byzantinists and modern theorists of the nation. But the former have discussed the nature of Romania in an imprecise way and have generally not studied modern discussions of nations and national identity, while the latter are generally unaware of the evidence for pre-modern states and hold to the modernist fallacy, namely the belief that some historical developments such as national identity (or religious skepticism for that matter) are exclusive features of modernity. Though the projection of (allegedly) modern phenomena onto the past distorts history, the same is true when we allow the fear of anachronism to be used pre-emptively as an indiscriminate rhetorical topos that prevents us from under-standing genuine parallels, especially now that it is becoming increasingly clear that national identity is not an exclusively modern (far less industrial) development. ‘All in all, there is little reason to hold dogmatically to the conventional view that nationalism came into existence for the first time in the modern world. At the very least, the possibility of premodern nationalism should not be ruled out a priori.’” Source: Hellenism in Byzantium by Anthony Kaldellis