History has often been put to use tracing the developments that led almost inexorably to the achievement of nation status. The collection of articles in Networks, Regions and Nations: Shaping Identities in the Low Countries, 1300-1650 both sustains and refutes this focus. Throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period, there was one region, socially and economically sophisticated to the point of maturity that should have, could have, would have achieved country status equal to that of the perfectly coherent kingship states of England and France, but did not. The very name, "Low Countries", represents overt recognition that the region was not a single nation, a single state, but several. Only the northern seven would capture the Holy Grail of nationhood in the early seventeenth century; the southern ten remained anomalies, only achieving nation status (Belgium) in 1830.
And now, as if to put the heretofore whole European experience to shame, that very nation is slowly discorporating, not quickly within the crucible of war nor slowly through the disintegration of empires. This collection could not be more timely nor a more useful contribution to the debate about nations, nationalism, and identity. Belgium has now been without a central government for 300+ days, a world record. And yet the country has not fallen apart. How is this possible? A look back to the early modern Low Countries might just supply an answer.
Like the various parts of Belgium, these articles make up a coherent whole, a single work. This is due not only to the integrity of each contribution, but also to the skillful way in which they are organized. The arrangement is subtly chronological: although heavily focused on topics such as urban networks, theatre states, war, propaganda and patriotism, the volume moves gracefully from the fourteenth century to the mid-seventeenth, as the region itself evolved from an amorphous collection of unrelated principalities, counties and cities, into two separate and almost mature entities, the southern Low Countries and the newly minted Dutch Republic.
After introducing the authors and their articles, the editors hand the collection over to the Dutch historian Pieter Hoppenbrouwers ("The Dynamics of National Identity in the Later Middle Ages") to provide a theoretical foundation to which the rest of the articles can be anchored. Hoppenbrouwers tackles the thorny question of the relationship among ethnicities, "nations" and identity. The Low Countries have been organized and governed since the early Middle Ages on the basis of a dynamic more local than regional and more regional than national. A "national" identity would thus necessarily be one in which the psychological transposition "from its location in the individual to the realm of the collective" (30) takes place beyond the confines of local politics. In two short pages Hoppenbrouwers disposes of the usefulness of the language debate. He focuses instead on boundaries as the dynamic in the formation all three sorts of identities, whose jostling, pushing, and interaction shaped the history of the early modern Low Countries.
Robert Stein's exploration of urban networks ("An Urban Network in the Low Countries. A Cultural Approach") bootstraps off Hoppenbrouwers' discussion of boundaries. Stein challenges the idea that a collective identity can only develop within existing boundaries and must by definition be homogenous. Stein eschews the usual examination of economic and social networks, postulating instead the existence of a cultural network, peculiarly urban and forged by shared experiences such as military contests, and religious and urban festivals. Perhaps his most intriguing contention is that the dynamic behind these networks, being principally urban in nature, relied not on similarities shared among regional towns, but rather on the mature internal identities that fed on the external comparison integral to competition.
Competitions pitting groups against each other are the microcosm in which larger identities can experience the events that often breed unifying mythologies. It is this latter that is the subject of Justine Smithuis's "The Imagined Community of Friesland in the Late Middle Ages." Her sources are both from the fifteenth century, but one is what she calls "mythical" in nature (the Gesta-cycle) while the other more "contemporary (the "Sneek" annalistic tradition). In the fifteenth century "Friesland" existed more in shared cultural experience than it did in political reality. Despite political fragmentation, a sense of being "Frisian" existed, aided by shared language, historical memory, and political and legal elements, which by becoming routine, shaped a consciousness of shared practice.
Frisian identity stands at one end of the spectrum, Brabantine at the other. Sjoerd Bijker ("The Functions of the Late Medieval Brabantine Legend of Brabon") convincingly argues that the history of Brabant in the fifteenth and sixteenth century exemplifies how regional identities survived within a political state in which it had a large stake. Past historical experience encoded in legend in Brabant functioned as a link between their past and their present. The legend of Brabon reaches back in to the Roman past. The legend explains the origins of Antwerp (Brabon hacked off a giant's hand (Hand) and threw (werpen) it into the river -–thus Antwerp) and of Leuven (Ter Ghelove, the place where Brabon swore an oath, morphed into Leuven). This tale demonstrates the insertion of the (French) Burgundians into the Brabantine story: the Burgundian duke became one of their own, a "Brabon"tine.
Guelders, to the north and east of Brabant, presented another reality. It is axiomatic that identity rests in part of what one is not. Guelders was an imperial fief, not a French one. Guelders, unlike Brabant, Flanders and Holland, according to Aart Noordzij ("Against Burgundy. The Appeal of Germany in the Duchy of Guelders"), resisted integration into a Burgundian state, preferring the identity found both in the "medieval discourses about the dignity of the Empire" and in the "humanist discourses about the German people" (129). Guelders' experience exemplifies the forces that while allowing, even encouraging networks, cultural associations and the evolution of local identities, prevented the establishment of a supra-regional political identification, buttressed by the pragmatism of routine administrative practices in the service of the romance of dynasty, from solidifying into a nation.
The question thus arises: how were the Burgundians and then the Habsburgs going to convince the various regions that central concerns (social, political, economic, and after 1517, religious) were more important than local ones? The answer, according to Anne-Laure Van Bruaene ("The Habsburg Theatre State. Court, City and the Performance of Identity in the Early Modern Southern Low Countries") was the adaptation of the Burgundian theatre state to Habsburg needs. In a period when the metamorphosis of rule into government was not quite complete, the answer appeared to lie in establishing some sort of defining relationship with the prince. Bruaene argues that the Hapsburg dynasty, the successor to the Burgundians in the Low Countries in the sixteenth century, attempted to appropriate the "Theatre State" initially established by Burgundians such as Philip the Good and Charles the Bold in order to remold civic culture. Communication and negotiation between prince and particularly between prince and particularly urban elites took place on the stage of public ritual. Public ritual attempted to appropriate local civic pride through the participation of princes such as Archduchess Isabella in cross-bow contests. Urban elites took their place on the stage of public ritual. As Bruaene astutely points out, "it was pointless to try to control this complex urban world when one could not pull the strings from within" (141).
War makes for good theatre. War, however, did not solidify the identity of the region into one coherent enduring whole. Steven Gunn ("War and Identity in the Habsburg Netherlands, 1477-1559") sets out to examine, in very succinct and elegant prose, why not. He neatly outlines forces of unity and than aligns against them almost equal and opposite forces of particularism. Appeals to common welfare, investment in a common dynasty, a general reputation for military prowess, the spreading of propaganda through the network of the clergy and region-wide support expressed through simultaneous celebrations worked to sustain support throughout the region for the Habsburgs and their military endeavors. Opposed against these, however, were the forces of particularism. Localities perceived taxation as a peculiarly local burden, all propaganda appeals to the common welfare to the contrary. Processions almost always had a local flavor and included local saints or patrons. "Netherlanders" might follow their prince into battle from a sense of loyalty, but "war undermined these tendencies towards the coagulation of large identities, encouraging particularism, political dissidence and religious diversity" (171). Habsburg was at war with Valois, whose cultural ties, particularly to the southern part of the region stretched back to the early Middle Ages. In "War Propaganda, Literature and National Identity in Renaissance France, c. 1490-1560" David Potter examines the evolving channels of propaganda-–pamphlets, narratives of war events and treaties--that connected French Renaissance kings with localities on a regular basis. Much of this propaganda was couched in appeals to French myths and history; the former played an important role here as it had in Friesland. France, the state, had matured by the end of the Middle Ages, but more as a top-down idea, a concern primarily of social and political elites. The Wars of Religion taxed not only the king's subjects, but also his ingenuity in broadening a sense of national consciousness that would foster the mobilization of resources in the service of that consciousness.
By the mid-sixteenth century the region had reached a stalemate. Towns and counties were too entrenched to be broken to an imperial bridle; despite stability of cultural networks, they were too disparate and independent to coalesce into a single coherent polity. Yet, by the end of the century the region was united in revolt against their imperial masters. Something had happened. This was not, however, to be the tale of a horseman galloping out of the east to rally the oppressed. According to Peter Arnade ("The City Defeated and Defended. Civism as Political Identity in the Habsburg-Burgundian Netherlands"), the Habsburg practice of selective violence against particular recalcitrant cities reaped a more bitter harvest. The unanticipated result was instead a sense of solidarity among both the guilty and the innocent, an awakening of a cultural identity that cut across both linguistic and dynastic lines, based as it was on a perceived threat to all local political identities. It was out of this matrix, in part, that the Dutch Revolt was born and sustained.
The dream of a united Low Countries expressed itself concretely in the maps of the region that began to appear when the realization of that dream seemed possible. As Alistair Duke argues in "In Defense of the Common Fatherland. Patriotism and Liberty in the Low Countries, 1555- 1576," victory may have looked possible, but the problems facing actual achievement were ultimately overwhelming. The rebellion, based not on political ideology, needed one. To do that, the rebels and their leader, William of Orange had to overcome a singular obstacle: how to formulate an ideology in such as way as merge various "nations" into a single fatherland. This problem was compounded by the fact that the Low Countries were not used to investing in a common prince to the point where central concerns could overcome local ones. The magnitude of the problem was probably best manifested in the difficulty in finding a useful name for this disparate group. "The Netherlands" did not resonate with the culturally French, while Belgica, as Duke points out "lacked street credibility" (237). Added to this was the explosive religious fervor of Tridentine prelates against radical Calvinist propaganda. In 1585, the rebels lost Antwerp, the region which could have worked to bridge the two slowly discorporating regions. The dream lived on only in maps.
The fall of Antwerp sealed the fate of the Low Countries. The split, which was initially viewed as temporary, hardened as time passed, the breach was not healed. The impulse to persuade via a variety of media had the opposite effect of bringing about what Judith Pollmann calls "Reinventing Netherlandish Identities." William of Orange had developed and refined this method of attack. Pamphlets, sermons and rituals vilified the Spanish and celebrated the virtues of the Netherlanders. But who were these "Netherlanders"? The population of the seven provinces of the north had been swelled by refugees, immigrants and others who fled the south, some for political and others for religious reasons. The south was now rid of Calvinist radicals and political liberals; the north was unified by hostility to Spanish, Catholics and those subject to princely rule. The combatants called a truce in 1609 that was to last twelve years and to culminate in virtual Dutch independence in 1621. Traffic which had been seriously impeded between the regions until then, picked up. Enough time, however, had passed, that northerners going south began to notice distinctions between themselves and their southern brethren; their children had never viewed the south as anything but the Other. Mistrust between the two built up despite continuing calls for unity. It was within this context that north and south reinvented new identities, ultimately separate from each other.
One of the most important results of these discussions has been to re- orient the debate about identities from the narrow world of the nineteenth-century nation-state. This concept is not useful for understanding identity in the early modern world, particularly with the Holy Roman Empire, the subject of the volume's last article "'Lands' and 'fatherlands'. Changes in the Plurality of Allegiances in the Sixteenth-Century Holy Roman Empire" by Robert von Friedeburg. He focuses primarily on the rise of the notion of German "fatherland" and patria within the context of the technological advances, the threats to the borders by both France and the Turk, and on elections. To this was joined Lutheran rhetoric, which added greatly to the success of the Reformation, and, at the same time, almost guaranteed that patria did not include clerical institutions. Von Friedburg's chapter functions less as a summary and more as a coda, focusing, as it does, on the existence within political entities of a variety of allegiances. These both shape and form a sense of cultural solidarity but, at the same time, undermine construction of political unity. The example of the Holy Roman Empire serves to remind us that "identity" is not a monolithic, singular condition. The lesson one draws is that local concerns are still more important than central ones, but not necessarily hostile to them. And this may well function as a description of the situation currently on-going in Belgium.