Читаем Putin's Wars полностью

Small communities, however corrupted, are not prepared for despotical government: their members, crowded together, and contiguous to the feats of power, never forget their relation to the public; they pry, with habits of familiarity and freedom, into the pretensions of those who would rule. . . . In proportion as the territory is extended, its parts lose their relative importance to the whole. Its inhabitants cease to perceive their connection with the state, and are seldom united in the execution of any national . . . designs. Distance from the feats of administration, and indifference to the persons who contend for preferment, teach the majority to consider themselves as the subjects of a sovereignty, not as the members of a political body. It is even remarkable that enlargement of territory, by rendering the individual of less consequence to the public, and less able to intrude with his counsel, actually tends to reduce national affairs within a narrower compass, as well as to diminish the numbers who are consulted in legislation, or in other matters of government.^[41]

And Ferguson concluded:

Among the circumstances, therefore, which . . . lead to the establishment of despotism, there is none, perhaps, that arrives at this termination, with so sure an aim, as the perpetual enlargement of territory . . . . In the progress of conquest, those who are subdued are said to have lost their liberties; but from the history of mankind, to conquer, or to be conquered, has appeared, in effect, the same.^[42]

These early laudatory speeches in praise of small is beautiful were written before the American Revolution, at a time when it was almost axiomatic that democratic rule was only possible in small territories, such as the ancient Greek polis or the Italian and Swiss city-states. However, even in the twentieth century authors continued to express their doubts about the viability and utility of large states. In 1914 the British historian Sir John Seeley made the following remark about the size of the British empire: “At the outset we are not much impressed with its vast extent, because we know no reason, in the nature of things, why a state should be any the better for being large, and because throughout the greater part of history very large states have usually been states of a low type.”^[43] He added: “For a long time no high organisation was possible except in very small states.”^[44] This assessment led him to make the following remark about Russia: “We cannot, it is true, yet speak of Russia as having a high type of organisation.”^[45]

The United States was the first counterexample, showing—contrary to all historical evidence—that it was possible to organize a democratic society over a large territory. But the young United States was not an empire; it was a former colony with a homogeneous population that had liberated itself from British rule.^[46] Russia was different. It was from its foundation an imperialist, as well as an absolutist state: continuously expanding its territory and subjugating and incorporating foreign peoples within its frontiers. Its mere size and its heterogeneous populations seem, indeed, to have been determining factors that have hampered its development into a modern, democratic polity.

Notes

1.

Montesquieu, “Lettres persanes,” in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1964), 89.

2.

Montesquieu, “Lettres persanes,” 89.

3.

Montesquieu, “De l’esprit des lois,” in Oeuvres complètes, 539.

4.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne et sur sa réformation projettée,” Oeuvres complètes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Part III (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 1039.

5.

Rousseau, “Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne et sur sa réformation projettée,” Oeuvres complètes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Part III, 1039.

6.

Cf. Denis Diderot, “Observations on the Instruction of the Empress of Russia to the Deputies for the Making of Laws,” in Diderot: Political Writings, ed. John Hope Mason and Robert Wokler, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 81.

7.