and i am blogging here despite the fact that exams are almost upon me. in 7 days' time, in fact - a week; we humans, according to the Xestobium rufovillosum of julian barnes's novel, are particularly fond of multiples of seven. or perhaps he was just poking a little harmless fun at the best-selling book of all ages, and one of the fastest growing faiths in the world.
in fact i think i blog only when i have nothing better to do than mug. mugging is nasty business, i tell you.
but i was surfing wikipedia today out of boredom and i chance upon an article on european micro-states. it is odd how many relics of history are left lying around in the modern, 'rational' world. we hardly look at them because we don't really understand why they exist; for most the state has come to be synonymous with 'the nation', and in singapore especially the state is responsible for building 'a nation'. yet there are medieval relics in this world which we note with slight bemusement - we take mental note at the fact that the vatican city is the smallest sovereign state in the world, followed by the principality of monaco - but there they are, untouched by the rationalising efforts of the modern world, and defying our common understanding. the vatican, of course, is the site of the oldest combined temporal-spiritual authority, the holy see, a category which used to include a large number of princely bishoprics along the rhine. liechtenstein is the only relic of the holy roman empire to have survived the massive reorganisations of 1806, 1815, and 1871, oweing its lucky existence to a fortuitous geographical location between switzerland and austria. san marino is the only independent italian commune still sitting around, having survived its more illustrious comrades like venice, florence, and genoa by at least two centuries. cavour seemed to have forgotten about its existence. monaco was a genoese trading colony; and would be sisters with ragusa today if the latter had not been swept up by the croatian nation-state and renamed dubrovnik. andorra has been around since the 13th century; today its joint heads of state are the bishop of urgell and the president of france, who, of course, inherited his title from the king of france, who in turn got it from the king of navarre during the reign of henri iv. it is somehow odd that the ultimate heir to the french regicidal tradition has inherited the sovereign rights of royalty.
which reminds me of something my tutor said last term when exploring the barbarian successor states to the roman empire: it's like a series of political/social experiments, some of which failed and some which didn't. whether or not they survived depended sometimes on sheer luck and on whose lands they were sitting on. and even then there were living fossils: what was the last bit of the roman empire still surviving into the middle ages? he had asked - and it wasn't byzantium, or the roman outpost kept by aegidius and syagrius in soissons; it was a part of wales called llandaff where the local notables retained their roman titles and wrote their charters in latin words and conventions. "think of it as a little corner of britain which was forever rome," a rare sparkle of wit from my tutor as he deliberately inverted rupert brooke's war poem.
so there you go: historical coelecanths, as it were, surviving into the present age and pretty much unknown by most other people. which set me on a counterfactual and delightfully irrelevant path down southeast asian history. after all, european micro-states had been accidents of historical evolution; had it not been for the dreadfully rationalising forces of imperialism and nationalism perhaps southeast asia might possess some of these oddities. had the dutch and french and english never arrived, who knows - a principality of bugis, the kingdom of malacca, the federated states of hmong, the karenni free state? might there have been little enclaves within the 'nation-states' of our region today? (and swaziland and lesotho exist to illustrate that colonialism need not have been complete; and we are what we are today perhaps because of a strange quirk of fate or the twitch of a european statesman. and i now think the tunku's bout of shingles had a great deal to do with our independence.) but here we enter the realms of utter fantasy, and i have less and less excuse to be blogging: hence i should return back to the art of louis xiv in order to understand how paintings contribute to the construction of authority...
in fact i think i blog only when i have nothing better to do than mug. mugging is nasty business, i tell you.
but i was surfing wikipedia today out of boredom and i chance upon an article on european micro-states. it is odd how many relics of history are left lying around in the modern, 'rational' world. we hardly look at them because we don't really understand why they exist; for most the state has come to be synonymous with 'the nation', and in singapore especially the state is responsible for building 'a nation'. yet there are medieval relics in this world which we note with slight bemusement - we take mental note at the fact that the vatican city is the smallest sovereign state in the world, followed by the principality of monaco - but there they are, untouched by the rationalising efforts of the modern world, and defying our common understanding. the vatican, of course, is the site of the oldest combined temporal-spiritual authority, the holy see, a category which used to include a large number of princely bishoprics along the rhine. liechtenstein is the only relic of the holy roman empire to have survived the massive reorganisations of 1806, 1815, and 1871, oweing its lucky existence to a fortuitous geographical location between switzerland and austria. san marino is the only independent italian commune still sitting around, having survived its more illustrious comrades like venice, florence, and genoa by at least two centuries. cavour seemed to have forgotten about its existence. monaco was a genoese trading colony; and would be sisters with ragusa today if the latter had not been swept up by the croatian nation-state and renamed dubrovnik. andorra has been around since the 13th century; today its joint heads of state are the bishop of urgell and the president of france, who, of course, inherited his title from the king of france, who in turn got it from the king of navarre during the reign of henri iv. it is somehow odd that the ultimate heir to the french regicidal tradition has inherited the sovereign rights of royalty.
which reminds me of something my tutor said last term when exploring the barbarian successor states to the roman empire: it's like a series of political/social experiments, some of which failed and some which didn't. whether or not they survived depended sometimes on sheer luck and on whose lands they were sitting on. and even then there were living fossils: what was the last bit of the roman empire still surviving into the middle ages? he had asked - and it wasn't byzantium, or the roman outpost kept by aegidius and syagrius in soissons; it was a part of wales called llandaff where the local notables retained their roman titles and wrote their charters in latin words and conventions. "think of it as a little corner of britain which was forever rome," a rare sparkle of wit from my tutor as he deliberately inverted rupert brooke's war poem.
so there you go: historical coelecanths, as it were, surviving into the present age and pretty much unknown by most other people. which set me on a counterfactual and delightfully irrelevant path down southeast asian history. after all, european micro-states had been accidents of historical evolution; had it not been for the dreadfully rationalising forces of imperialism and nationalism perhaps southeast asia might possess some of these oddities. had the dutch and french and english never arrived, who knows - a principality of bugis, the kingdom of malacca, the federated states of hmong, the karenni free state? might there have been little enclaves within the 'nation-states' of our region today? (and swaziland and lesotho exist to illustrate that colonialism need not have been complete; and we are what we are today perhaps because of a strange quirk of fate or the twitch of a european statesman. and i now think the tunku's bout of shingles had a great deal to do with our independence.) but here we enter the realms of utter fantasy, and i have less and less excuse to be blogging: hence i should return back to the art of louis xiv in order to understand how paintings contribute to the construction of authority...
posted by zhongkai at 6:02 AM
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