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Ternary Societies: Trifunctional Inequality
The purpose of Parts One and Two of this book is to set the history of inequality regimes in a long-term historical perspective. More specifically, we will look at the transition from the ternary and slave societies of the premodern era to the ownership and colonial societies of the nineteenth century. This was a complex process, which followed a number of different pathways. In Part One we look at European societies of orders and their transformation into ownership societies. Part Two will examine slave and colonial societies and at the way in which the evolution of trifunctional societies outside Europe was affected by contact with European powers. Part Three will analyze the twentieth-century crisis of ownership and colonial society precipitated by world war and the challenge of communism. In Part Four we will look at their regeneration and possible transformation in the postcolonial and neo-proprietarian world of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
The Trifunctional Logic: Clergy, Nobility, Third Estate
We begin our investigation by looking at what I call “ternary societies.” The oldest and most common type of inequality regime, the ternary model has left a durable imprint on today’s world. There is no way to study later political and ideological developments without first examining the ternary matrix that gave social inequality its initial shape and justification.
The simplest type of ternary society comprised three distinct social groups, each of which fulfilled an essential function of service to the community. These were the clergy, the nobility, and the third estate. The clergy was the religious and intellectual class. It was responsible for the spiritual leadership of the community, its values and education; it made sense of the community’s history and future by providing necessary moral and intellectual norms and guideposts. The nobility was the military class. With its arms it provided security, protection, and stability, thus sparing the community the scourge of permanent chaos and uncontrolled violence. The third estate, the common people, did the work. Peasants, artisans, and merchants provided the food and clothing that allowed the entire community to thrive. Because each of these three groups fulfilled a specific function, ternary society can also be called trifunctional society. In practice, ternary societies were more complex and diverse. Each group could contain a number of subgroups, but the justification of this type of social organization generally referred to these three functions. In some cases, the formal political organization of society also invoked the same three functions.
The same general type of social organization could be found not only throughout Christian Europe down to the time of the French Revolution but also, in one form or another, in many non-European societies and in most religions, including Hinduism and both Shi’a and Sunni Islam. At one time anthropologists believed that the “tripartite” social systems found in Europe and India had a common Indo-European origin, traces of which could be seen in mythology and language.1 More recent theories, still incomplete, suggest that tripartite social organization is actually far more general, thus casting doubt on the old idea of a single origin. The ternary pattern can be found in nearly all premodern societies throughout the world, including China and Japan. Many variants exist, however, and the differences between them are ultimately more interesting than the superficial similarities. Astonishment at what is taken to be intangible often reflects a certain political and social conservatism; historical reality is always various and changeable, full of unexpected possibilities and surprising and tenuous institutional experiments, unstable compromises, and abortive offshoots. To understand this reality and to anticipate future developments, we must analyze historical change as well as continuity. This is true not only for ternary societies but also for societies in general. It will therefore be useful to compare social dynamics observed over long periods in a variety of contexts, primarily in Europe and India but more generally in a comparative transnational perspective. This will be the task of this and subsequent chapters.
Ternary Societies and the Formation of the Modern State
Ternary societies differ from later historical forms in two important and closely related ways: first, the justification of inequality in terms of a trifunctional schema, and second, the fact that these premodern societies preceded the advent of the modern centralized states. In ternary societies political and economic powers were inextricably intertwined and initially exercised at the local level, often over a small territory, and in some cases with relatively loose ties to a more or less distant monarchical or imperial power. A few key institutions—village, rural community, castle, fortress, church, temple, monastery—defined the social order, which was highly decentralized, with limited coordination between different territories and centers of power. Rudimentary means of transportation meant that communication among dispersed power centers was difficult. Despite this decentralization of power, social relations of domination were nevertheless brutal, but the modalities and configurations were different from those found in modern centralized states.
In concrete terms, property rights and regalian functions in traditional ternary societies were inextricably intertwined with power relations at the local level. The two ruling classes—clergy and nobility—were of course propertied classes. They generally owned the majority (and sometimes nearly all) of the cultivatable land, which is the basis of economic and political power in all rural societies. In the case of the clergy, property was often held by ecclesiastical institutions (such as churches, temples, bishoprics, religious foundations, and monasteries), which existed in one form or another in Christian, Hindu, and Muslim regions. By contrast, noble property was generally held by individuals or, more commonly, associated with a noble lineage or title. Ownership was in some cases subject to entail or other restrictions intended to prevent dispersal of wealth and loss of rank.
In all cases the important point is that the property rights of clergy and nobility went hand in hand with essential regalian powers necessary for maintaining order and exercising military and police functions (which in theory were monopolized by the warrior nobility but could also be exercised on behalf of an ecclesiastical lord). Property rights also went hand in hand with judicial powers: justice was normally rendered in the name of the local lord, whether noble or religious. In medieval Europe and pre-colonial India, the masters of the land were also the masters of the people who worked the land, regardless of whether they were French seigneurs, English landlords, Spanish bishops, Indian Brahmins or Rajputs, or their equivalents elsewhere. They were endowed with both property rights and regalian rights of various and changing types.
Thus, in all premodern ternary societies, whether in Europe, India, or elsewhere, and regardless of the class (clerical or noble) to which the lord belonged, we find that power and property relations were very deeply intertwined at the local level. In their most extreme form this meant forced labor or serfdom, implying that the mobility of most if not all workers was strictly limited: workers were not free to leave one place to go work in another. In this sense they belonged to their noble or religious lord, even if the ownership relationship was of a different nature from the one we will study in the chapter devoted to slave societies.
Less extreme and potentially more benevolent forms of control also existed, and these could give rise to quasi-state formations at the local level, with the clergy and nobility sharing the leading roles in various ways. In addition to powers of police and justice, the most important forms of social control in traditional ternary societies included supervision and registration of births, deaths, and marriages. This was an essential function bearing on the perpetuation and regulation of the community; it was closely linked to religious ceremonies and rules pertaining to marriage and family life (especially in all things related to sexuality, paternal power, the role of women, and child-rearing). This function was generally the monopoly of the clerical class, and the relevant registers were kept in the churches or temples of the relevant religious authority.
The registration of transactions and contracts was another important function. It played a key role in the regulation of economic activity and property relations and could be exercised by either a noble or a religious lord, generally in association with the local judicial authority, which dealt with civil, commercial, and successoral* disputes. Other collective functions and services such as teaching and medical care (often rudimentary but sometimes more elaborate) also played important roles in traditional ternary societies; infrastructure such as mills, bridges, roads, and wells should also be mentioned. Note that the regalian powers exercised by the clergy and nobility were seen as the natural counterpart of the services those two orders rendered to the third—services having to do with security and spirituality and, more generally, with structuring the community. Everything fit together in trifunctional society: each group had its place in a structure of closely interrelated rights, duties, and powers at the local level.
To what extent did the rise of the modern centralized state spell the end of ternary societies? As we will see, the interactions between these two fundamental political-economic processes were too complex to be described in a mechanical, deterministic, or unidirectional fashion. In some cases, the trifunctional ideological scheme found durable support in the structures of the centralized state, redefining itself in such a way as to survive, for a time at any rate, in this new setting. Think, for instance, of the British House of Lords, a noble and clerical institution directly descended from medieval trifunctional society, which nevertheless played a central role in the government of the first global colonial empire through most of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. Think, too, of Iran’s Shi’ite clergy, which constitutionalized its role in the late-twentieth-century Islamic Republic with the creation of the Guardian Council and Assembly of Experts (an elected chamber reserved for clergy and charged with choosing the Supreme Leader). This historically unprecedented regime remains in place to this day.
The Delegitimation of Ternary Societies: Between Revolutions and Colonizations
Nevertheless, the advent of the modern state inevitably tends to undermine the trifunctional order and generally gives rise to rival ideological forms, such as the ideologies of ownership, colonialism, or communism. In the end these competitors usually replace or even eradicate the trifunctional scheme as the dominant ideology. Once the centralized state can guarantee the security of people and goods throughout a sizable territory by mobilizing its own administrative personnel (police, soldiers, and officials) without drawing on the old warrior nobility, the legitimacy of the nobility as the guarantor of order and security will obviously be greatly diminished. By the same token, once civil institutions, schools, and universities capable of educating individuals and producing new knowledge and wisdom come into being under the aegis of new networks of teachers, intellectuals, physicians, scientists, and philosophers without ties to the old clerical class, the legitimacy of the clergy as the spiritual guide of the community will also be seriously impaired.
The delegitimation of the old noble and clerical classes can be quite gradual, in some cases unfolding over several centuries. In many European countries (such as the United Kingdom and Sweden, to which I will return), the transformation of the society of orders into an ownership society took quite a long time, beginning in the sixteenth century (or even earlier) and ending only in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Furthermore, the process is still not complete, since traces of trifunctionalism persist to this day, if only in the monarchical institutions that still survive in several Western European states, preserving largely symbolic vestiges of noble and clerical power (the British House of Lords being one example).2
There have also been phases of rapid acceleration, when new ideologies and associated state structures worked together to transform, radically and deliberately, old ternary societies. We will be taking a closer look at one such case, the French Revolution, which is one of the most emblematic examples, as well as the best documented. Following the abolition of the “privileges” of the nobility and clergy on the night of August 4, 1789, revolutionary assemblies and their associated administrations and tribunals were obliged to define precisely what the word “privilege” meant. Within a very short period of time it became necessary to draw a clear line between what the revolutionary legislators regarded as the legitimate exercise of property rights (including situations in which those rights were exercised by a formerly “privileged” individual, who may have acquired and solidified them in dubious circumstances) and what they considered to be illegitimate appropriations of outmoded local regalian powers (henceforth reserved exclusively for the central state). Because property and regalian rights in practice were so inextricably intertwined, this was a difficult exercise. By studying this period we can gain a better understanding of how these rights and powers were interconnected in traditional ternary societies, especially European societies of orders.
We will also look closely at a very different but equally instructive historical episode involving British efforts to understand and transform the trifunctional structure they found when they colonized India. We will focus in particular on caste censuses conducted between 1871 and 1941. What happened there was in a sense the opposite of what happened in the French Revolution: in India, a foreign power sought to reconfigure a traditional ternary society and disrupt an ongoing native process of state building and social transformation. By comparing these two very different episodes (along with other transitions in which the post-ternary and postcolonial logics were combined, as in China, Japan, and Iran), we will gain a better understanding of what trajectories were possible and what mechanisms were at work.
On Ternary Societies Today
Before proceeding further, however, I need to answer an obvious question: Apart from historical interest, why study ternary societies? Some readers might be tempted to think that these relics of the distant past are of little use for understanding the modern world. With their strict status differences, aren’t these societies diametrically opposed to modern meritocratic and democratic societies, which claim to offer equal access to every occupation—that is, both social fluidity and intergenerational mobility? It would be a serious mistake, however, to ignore ternary society, for at least two reasons. First, the structure of inequality in premodern ternary societies is less radically different from the structure of inequality in modern societies than is sometimes imagined. Second and more importantly, the conditions under which trifunctional society came to an end varied widely by country, region, religious context, and colonial or postcolonial circumstances, and we see indelible traces of these differences in the contemporary world.
To begin with, although rigid status structures were the norm in trifunctional society, mobility between classes was never totally absent, as in modern societies. We will discover, for example, that the size and resources of the clerical, noble, and common classes varied widely in time and space, largely due to variations in the rules of membership and marital strategies adopted by the dominant groups, some of which were more open, others less so. Institutions also mattered, as did the relative power of different groups. By the eve of the French Revolution, the two dominant classes (clergy and nobility) accounted for just over 2 percent of the adult male population, compared with 5 percent two centuries earlier. They accounted for roughly 11 percent of the population of Spain in the eighteenth century and more than 10 percent for the two varnas corresponding to the clerical and warrior classes—Brahmins and Kshatriyas—in nineteenth-century India (the figure rises to 20 percent if we included the other high castes). These figures reflect very different human, economic, and political realities (Fig. I.1). In other words, the boundaries dividing the three classes of ternary society were not fixed; they were subject to continual negotiation and conflict, which could radically alter their location. Note, too, that in terms of the size of the two top classes, Spain resembles India more closely than France. This suggests, perhaps, that the radical contrasts that are sometimes said to exist between civilizations, cultures, and religions (when, for instance, Westerners remark on the oddity of India’s caste system or take it to be a symbol of oriental despotism) are actually less important than the social, political, and institutional processes by which social structures are transformed.
FIG. 1.1. The structure of ternary societies: Europe-India, 1660–1880
Interpretation: In 1660, the clergy accounted for 3.3 percent of the adult male population in France and the nobility for 1.8 percent, for a total of 5.1 percent for the two dominant classes of trifunctional society. In 1880, the Brahmins (the ancient priest class, as measured by the British colonial census) accounted for roughly 6.7 percent of the adult male population in India, and the Kshatriyas (ancient warrior class) for roughly 3.8 percent, for a total of 10.5 percent for the two dominant classes. Sources and series: piketty.pse.ens.fr/ideology.
We will also discover that estimates of the size of the three classes are themselves complex social and political constructs. They are often the result of attempts by emergent state authorities (absolute monarchies or colonial empires) to study the clergy and nobility or to conduct a census of the colonized population and its constituent subgroups. These efforts yield knowledge but are at the same time political acts in service of social domination. The categories used and the information generated tell us as much about the political intentions of the study’s authors as about the structure of the society under study. This is not to say that there is nothing to be learned from such studies—quite the contrary. Provided one takes the time to contextualize and analyze the results, these studies are invaluable sources for understanding conflicts, changes, and ruptures taking place in societies that should not be seen as static or stagnant or more different from one another than they really are.
Ternary societies often generated a variety of theories concerning the real or imagined ethnic origins of dominant and dominated groups. In France, for example, the nobility was said to be of Frankish origin, the people Gallo-Roman; in England, the nobility was reputedly of Norman descent, the people Anglo-Saxon; and in India, nobles were said to be of Aryan origin, the commoners Dravidian. These theories were used sometimes to legitimize, at other times to delegitimize, the existing system of domination. One sees this as well in colonial societies, which liked nothing so much as to radically differentiate between colonizers and colonized. The latter were assigned an identity that set them apart from European modernity, which was characterized as dynamic and mobile. Nevertheless, the historical evidence suggests that classes mixed to such a degree that any supposed ethnic differences disappeared almost entirely within a few generations. Social mobility in ternary societies was probably less significant quantitatively than in today’s societies, although it is hard to make precise comparisons. One can find any number of examples to the contrary, where new elites and nobilities arose in both India and Europe. Ternary ideology found ways to legitimate them after the fact—showing that it could be quite flexible. In any case, the difference was one of degree rather than principle and should be studied as such. In all trifunctional societies, including those in which clerical status was theoretically hereditary, one finds clerics who were born into either of the two other classes, commoners who were ennobled for their feats of arms or other talents and achievements, clerics who took up arms, and so on. Although social fluidity was not the norm, it was never entirely absent. Social identities and class divisions were matters of negotiation and dispute in ternary societies as in others.
On the Justification of Inequality in Ternary Societies
In general, it is wrong to think that ternary societies were intrinsically unjust, despotic, and arbitrary and therefore radically different from modern meritocratic societies, said to be harmonious and just. All societies have two essential needs—meaning and security. This is true in particular of less developed societies, where the territory is fragmented, communication difficult, instability chronic, and existence precarious. Pillage, mayhem, and disease are constant threats. If religious and military groups can provide credible responses to these needs by supplying institutions and ideologies adapted to their time and place, it should come as no surprise that trifunctional order emerges and is accepted as legitimate by the people. The clergy provides meaning by developing a narrative of the community’s origins and future, while the military defines the scope of legitimate violence and provides security for people and goods. Why would anyone risk everything to attack powers that provide material and spiritual security without knowing what would replace them? So impenetrable are the mysteries of politics and of the ideal social organization, and so extreme the uncertainty about how to achieve the ideal in practice, that any government offering a tested model of stability based on a simple and intelligible division of these two major social functions is likely to succeed.
Success obviously does not require consensus as to the exact distribution of power and resources among the three groups. The trifunctional schema is not an idealist rational discourse proposing a clearly defined theory of justice open to deliberation. It is authoritarian, hierarchical, and violently inegalitarian. It allows religious and military elites to assert their dominance, often in shameless, brutal, and excessive fashion. In ternary societies it is not uncommon for clergy and nobility to press their advantage and overestimate their coercive power; this can lead to rebellion and ultimately to their transformation or overthrow. My point is simply that the trifunctional justification of inequality that one finds in ternary societies—namely, the idea that each of the three social groups fulfills a specific function and that this tripartite division of labor benefits the entire community—must enjoy a minimum degree of plausibility if the system is to endure. In ternary or any other kind of society, an inequality regime can persist only through a complex combination of coercion and consent. Pure coercion is not enough: the social model championed by the dominant groups must elicit from the population (or a significant portion of it) a minimum level of adhesion. Political leadership always requires some level of moral and intellectual leadership, which depends in turn on a credible theory of the public good or general interest.3 This is probably the most important thing that trifunctional societies share with the societies that came after them.
What distinguishes ternary societies is the specific way they justify inequality: each social group fulfills a function the other groups cannot do without; each performs a vital service, just as the various parts of the human body do. The bodily metaphor frequently appears in theoretical treatises on trifunctional society: for instance, in the Manusmriti, a north Indian legal and political text dating from the second century BCE, more than a millennium before the first Christian texts dealing with the ternary schema appeared in medieval Europe. The metaphor assigns each group a place in a coherent whole: the dominated group is usually compared to the feet or legs, while dominant groups correspond to the head and arms. These analogies may not be very flattering to the dominated, but at least they are recognized as performing a useful function in service of the community.
This mode of justification deserves to be studied for what it is. It is especially important to pay attention to the conditions under which it was transformed and supplanted and to compare it with modern justifications of inequality, which sometimes resemble it in certain ways even if the functions have evolved and equality of access to various occupations is now proclaimed as a cardinal principle (while avoiding the question of whether equal access is real or theoretical). The political regimes that succeeded ternary society have made it their business to denigrate it, as is only natural. Think, for example, of the way the nineteenth-century French bourgeoisie criticized the nobility of the Ancien Régime or of the way British colonizers spoke of Indian Brahmins. Those discourses sought to justify other systems of inequality and domination, systems that did not always treat the dominated groups any better. These too call for further investigation.
Divided Elites, United People?
Why begin our inquiry with the study of ternary societies in their many variants and manifold transformations? The answer is simple: however different ternary societies may be from modern ones, the historical trajectories and transitions that led to their disappearance have left an indelible stamp on the world we live in. We will discover, in particular, that the main differences among ternary societies derived from the nature of their dominant political and religious ideologies, especially in regard to two key issues: the division of the elites, which elites themselves more or less embraced, and the real or imagined unity of the people.
The first issue involved the hierarchy and complementarity of the two dominant groups, the clergy and nobility. In most European societies of orders, including Ancien Régime France, the first order was officially the clergy, and the nobility had to settle for second place in the protocol of processions. But who really exercised supreme power in ternary societies, and how was the coexistence of the spiritual power of the clergy and the temporal power of the nobility organized? The question is by no means banal. Different answers were given in different times and places.
This first issue was closely associated with another, namely, how the celibacy or non-celibacy of priests affected the reproduction of the clergy as a distinct social group. In Hinduism the clergy could reproduce itself and therefore constituted a true hereditary class: the Brahmins, clerical intellectuals who in practice often occupied a politically and economically dominant position vis-à-vis the Kshatriyas, or warrior nobility. This we will need to understand. The clergy could also reproduce itself in Islam, both Shi’ite and Sunni; the Shi’ite clergy was a true hereditary class, organized and powerful, with many clerics heading local quasi-states and a few ruling the central state itself. Clerics could also reproduce in Judaism and most other religions. The one notable exception was Christianity (at least in its modern Roman Catholic version), where the clergy needed to constantly replenish its ranks by drawing on the two other groups (in practice, the high clergy drew from the nobility and the low clergy from the third estate). For this reason, Europe is a very special case in the long history of ternary societies and of inequality regimes in general, which may help to explain certain aspects of the subsequent European trajectory, especially its economic-financial ideology and juridical organization. In Part Four we will also see that competition between different types of elites (clerical or warrior) and different discourses of legitimacy can shed light on the conflict between intellectual and business elites that one finds in modern political systems, even if the nature of that competition today is very different from that of the trifunctional era.
A second issue has to do with whether, on the one hand, all statuses within the class of workers are more or less the same, or, on the other hand, different forms of servile labor (serfdom, slavery) persist. The importance ascribed to occupational identities and corporations in the process of central state formation and traditional religious ideology is also crucial. In theory, ternary society is based on the idea that all workers belong to the same class and share the same status and rank. In practice, things are often much more complex. In India, for example, there are persistent inequalities between groups stemming from the lower castes (Dalits or untouchables) and those stemming from middle castes (ex-Shudras, former proletarian or servile laborers, less discriminated against than the Dalits), a distinction that still influences social and political conflict in India today. In Europe, the unification of worker statuses and the gradual extinction of serfdom took nearly a millennium, beginning around the year 1000 and continuing until the end of the nineteenth century in the eastern part of the continent. Traces of this process survive today in the form of certain discriminatory attitudes, the Roma being a case in point. Most importantly, Euro-American proprietarian modernity went hand in hand with unprecedented expansion of slavery and colonialism, which has given rise to persistent racial inequality in the United States and inequality between native and postcolonial immigrant populations in Europe; the modalities are different but nevertheless comparable.
To recapitulate: inequalities linked to different statuses and ethno-religious origins, whether real or perceived, continue to play a key role in modern inequality. The meritocratic fantasy that one often hears is not the whole story—far from it. To understand this key dimension of modern inequality, it is best to begin by studying traditional ternary societies and their variants. The goal is to understand how those societies were gradually transformed, starting in the eighteenth century, into a complex mix of ownership societies (in which status and ethno-religious differences are theoretically effaced but differences of income and wealth can attain unbelievable levels) and slave, colonial, or postcolonial societies (in which status and ethno-religious differences play a central role, potentially in conjunction with significant income and wealth inequalities). More generally, the study of the diversity of post-ternary trajectories is essential for understanding the role of religious institutions and ideologies in structuring modern societies, especially by way of their influence on the educational system and, more broadly, on the regulation and representation of social inequalities.
Ternary Societies and State Formation: Europe, India, China, Iran
This book will not provide a complete history of ternary society, in part because to do so would take many volumes and in part because the primary sources that would be needed are not yet available and in some respects never will be, precisely because ternary societies were by nature extremely decentralized and left few records. The purpose of this and subsequent chapters is more modest: namely, to map out what such a comparative global history might look like, focusing on those aspects most important for the analysis of the subsequent development of modern inequality regimes.
In the remainder of Part One, I will take a more detailed look at the case of France and other European countries. The French case is emblematic because the Revolution of 1789 marked a particularly clear rupture with the Ancien Régime, which can be taken as a paradigmatic example of ternary society, while the bourgeois society that flourished in France in the nineteenth century can be taken as the archetype of the ownership society, the major historical form that succeeded ternary society in a number of countries. The expression “third estate” comes from France and clearly conveys the idea of a society divided into three classes. By studying the French trajectory and comparing it with other European and non-European trajectories, we can also learn a great deal about the respective roles of revolutionary processes and longer-term trends (having to do with state formation and the evolution of socioeconomic structures) in the transformation of ternary societies. The British and Swedish cases offer a particularly useful counterpoint: both countries remain monarchies to this day, and the transformation from ternary to successor society was more gradual there than in France. We will discover, however, that moments of rupture played just as crucial a role in those countries as in France, and that their two trajectories also illustrate the multiplicity and diversity of possible switch points* within the same overall pattern of evolution.
In Part Two I will analyze non-European variants of ternary (and sometimes quaternary) societies. I am particularly interested in how their evolution was affected by the slave and colonial systems of domination established by European powers. I focus especially on India, where the stigmata of the old ternary divisions remain exceptionally salient, despite the desire of successive governments to eliminate them after India achieved its independence in 1947. India is the ideal place to observe the results of the violent encounter between a premodern ternary civilization, the oldest in the world, and British colonialism—an encounter that had a tremendous impact on state formation and social transformation in the Indian subcontinent. Furthermore, comparing India with China and Japan will suggest several hypotheses concerning possible post-ternary trajectories. Finally, I will touch on the case of Iran, where the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979 offers a striking example of late constitutionalization and persistent clerical power. With these lessons in mind, we can then move on to Part Three, where I analyze the collapse of ownership society in the wake of twentieth-century crises, as well as its possible regeneration in the neo-proprietarian and postcolonial world of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
1. See esp. G. Dumézil, Jupiter. Mars. Quirinus. Essai sur la conception indo-européenne de la société et les origines de Rome (Gallimard, 1941); G. Dumézil, “Métiers et classes fonctionnelles chez divers peuples indo-européennes,” Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations, 1958; G. Dumézil, Mythe et épopée. L’idéologie des trois fonctions dans les épopées des peuples indo-européens (Gallimard, 1968).
2. In 2004, on the eve of its enlargement through incorporation of the formerly communist states of Eastern Europe (all of which became republics despite a few attempts to restore monarchy after the fall of communism), the European Union consisted of fifteen member states, seven of which were parliamentary monarchies (Belgium, Denmark, Spain, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Sweden) and eight of which were republics (Germany, Austria, Italy, Ireland, Finland, France, Greece, and Portugal).
3. The same comment has often been applied to systems of global domination: the dominant power, whether European in the nineteenth century or American in the twentieth, has always needed a credible narrative to explain why the Pax Britannica or Pax Americana served the general interest. This is not to say that the narrative has to be entirely convincing. But this way of looking at things can help us to understand how the existing system of domination can ultimately be replaced. See esp. I. Wallerstein, The Modern World System (Academic Press, 1974–1988), and G. Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Time (Verso, 1994).