4

On Unions

Historians of late medieval and early modern Europe have shown a remarkable lack of interest in political unions. This is not to say that there has been no study of them; there has been a great deal, but it has overwhelmingly been conducted within the framework of individual national histories, or of the history of individual dynasties. With some distinguished exceptions, there have been few comprehensive attempts to define the nature of political unions in this period, or to study them in a comparative framework. The domination of political history by interest in the rise of the modern state means that historians have traditionally concentrated on state power, concerning themselves with the rationalization and extension of that power at the expense of particularism and provincial diversity. This domination was first established in the nineteenth century by the siren call of nationalism and the idea, given powerful sanction by the American and French revolutions, that the nation-state was the natural and highest form of political organization, to the extent that Alter has claimed that: ‘Since . . . 1789, the nation-state has become the sole legitimating principle of the order of states.’¹

Whether or not this is true, the stories of nation- and state-building have been linked by generations of historians. Although the establishment and growth of the European Union has revived interest in the issue of non-unitary states and political federations, this revival is of questionable value for the study of unions before 1789, since faith in the sovereign nation-state as the basic component of what Steiger termed ‘Überstaatlichkeit’, has remained largely unruffled, and studies of political union usually focus on the relations of sovereign states entering into federal arrangements.² Thus Forsyth, who entitles his 1981 study Unions of States, adds the significant subtitle The Theory and Practice of Confederation, stressing that he is interested in: ‘the process by which states form themselves into federal unions or confederations’.³ Insofar as he is interested in the historical background, Forsyth, like many others, considers only those pre-modern states deemed to have been proto-federalist, such as the Ancient Greek leagues of city states, the Swiss confederation, and the Dutch republic. He excludes unions that saw ‘a complete fusion or incorporation in which one or all the members lose their identity as states’, is uninterested in ‘so-called “real” unions’, and spurns unions that were monarchical rather than republican in form.⁴ He is not interested in the United Kingdom, which embodies one of the longest-lasting political unions in modern history. This is not uncommon among political scientists, since the United Kingdom, as Elazar observes, ‘is assiduous in its rejection of federalist terminology’.⁵ Davis states, with a hint of disapproval, that ‘texts on “federal governments”, having distinguished the “federal” form by a process of positive and negative differentiation, proceed to gather all “the rest” into an undifferentiated pile—confederal, devolutionary, unitary, federal unitary, etc.’, suggesting that ‘there is a treatise to be written on the “non-federal system of government”’, but showing no interest in providing one.⁶

This obsession with federal unions leaves scant room for the many non-federal forms of union so common before 1789. One has to go back to 1882 for a comprehensive attempt to provide a framework for the study of all types of political union. In that year Georg Jellinek began his Lehre von den Staatenverbindungen with a characteristically pungent condemnation of current scholarship:

In few areas of public law does such a lack of clarity reign supreme as in the study of unions of states. The essence of leagues of states and of union states, the nature of real unions, the juridical character of protectorates and of sovereignty, and so on, are so far from scholarly clarity that with regard to some of these ideas . . . no dominant interpretation has been constructed, and the academic legitimacy of the whole field can even be called into question.⁷

Jellinek cannot be accused of a lack of clarity. With forensic skill he formulated his views on the nature of unions, examining colonies and dependent territories; unions by incorporation and personal and dynastic unions; communities of states (Staatengemeinschaften) and systems of states, which he defined as unorganized juridical associations; the Staatenstaat, in which sovereign authority was not centralized to create a unitary state; what he called ‘organisierten Verwaltungsbündnisse’, by which he meant arrangements established between states to facilitate international postal services and the like; confederal unions (Staatenbunde); real unions; and, finally, properly federal unions (Bundesstaaten).

As Jellinek observed, despite the concentration on the unitary state (Einheitsstaat) in classical political theory, such states were, in 1882, very much the exception. Yet scholarship on pre-1789 unions was then, as it is now, dominated by a teleological concern with the origins of unitary states. Jellinek’s rigorously conceived ideas were informed and illustrated by examples drawn from history; yet despite his critique of abstraction, his training in jurisprudence formed his account of unions, which was based on two principles: the indivisibility of sovereignty, and the state as a legal personality (Staatspersönlichkeit) in which that sovereignty resides. He dismissed the idea, central to much early modern political discourse, that sovereignty could reside in more than one part of the polity, be it the prince, the people, or some external or abstract principle, such as God, the law, or justice; or that it could be shared between different elements. Sovereignty, according to Jellinek, lies with the state alone and is embodied in its organs.⁸

Jellinek distinguished between political-historical and juridical unions. By the former he meant relationships that arose through contingency, such as personal unions, based on the vagaries of dynastic inheritance, in which states remained united only in the person of the ruler, and the union could dissolve at any time—as happened to the union of Britain with Hanover through the operation of the Salic Law in Hanover in 1837.⁹ His principal interest, however, was in juridical unions, which rested on a legal basis, usually in the form of a foundation treaty or treaties, and which he categorized as unorganized or organized. By unorganized juridical unions he meant communities and leagues or alliances of states, and what he termed the ‘state of estates’ (Staatenstaat), by which he meant polities that formed political unions on a legal basis, but whose feudal roots and legal interpretation of lordship and authority were incompatible with modern ideas of sovereignty, which meant that they cannot be seen as true federations. Thus he contested the common view that the Holy Roman Empire after 1648 was a federation in which Landeshoheit was a form of sovereignty.¹⁰

In the second category, organized juridical unions, Jellinek analyses confederal unions, real unions, and federal unions. Although much of his treatment of the issues is similar to that of modern scholars, it is striking that he insists that federal unions, rather than constituting more mature forms of confederal unions, are a form of real union. They are juridical unions because, as with the 1707 Anglo-Scottish union, or the federal union of the United States of America established in 1789, they are legal creations and, as states brought into existence by the law, possessed the legal personality necessary to embody Jellinek’s idea of sovereignty, while confederal unions fall short of the fusion of sovereignty required for a unitary state.

Jellinek’s distinction between confederal and federal unions was strongly influenced by the debates among the founding fathers of the United States over whether sovereignty was vested in the states of the union or in the union itself. The great merit of his work is that, unlike most modern political scientists and historians, he endeavoured to provide a comprehensive taxonomy of political union that looked beyond federal unions. There are problems with his approach, however, not least in his jurist’s insistence on what Hughes once called ‘a false politico-legal doctrine, the analytical theory of sovereignty’, a view echoed by Franklin, who accused Bodin of primary responsibility for ‘the seductive but erroneous notion that sovereignty is indivisible’.¹¹

Yet even if most of his examples were drawn from the nineteenth century, Jellinek had a sense of history, arguing that judging historical unions within a framework based on theories of the modern state is of dubious value. Thus in talking—with an uncharacteristic note of humour—of what he termed the scholastic distinctions made by medieval and early modern writers between incorporating unions, unio per suppressionem, per confusionem, per novationem, of unio realis aequali jure, inaequali jure, and of incorporativa, incorporatio plena and minus plena, he recognized that before the development of the modern state, based as he saw it on the principle of indivisible sovereignty, it was perfectly legitimate for scholars to conceptualize unions differently, borrowing their ideas from private and canon law, rather than public law, or a law of nations that did not yet exist.¹²

It is important to recognize, as Jellinek did, that medieval and early modern unions should be understood on their own terms, a task for which the tools of modern political scientists are not always useful. As Jellinek observes, it is by no means only federal unions that are formed by a foedus or treaty; this was equally true of real unions such as the British union of 1707 or the British-Irish union of 1801. Yet modern political scientists may be forgiven their uncertainty regarding the classification of pre-modern unions. For historians have not been as helpful as they might in providing the necessary raw material upon which comparative work might be based. That is not to say that they have ignored pre-modern unions; far from it. There is a considerable body of work devoted to them, but almost all of it has been written within the framework of national history, with little attempt at comparison.¹³ Although Pocock’s appeal for a new British history that abandons the anglocentric history of the British unitary state has stimulated impressive attempts to replace the writing of separate histories of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland with a more integrated vision of the political unions of the British Isles, the new British history has neither killed off the writing of separate national histories, nor has it, as Robertson observes, brought any particular interest in locating the British unions in a comparative context.¹⁴ Robertson’s own work is a distinguished exception to this trend; much of the recent work on the British unions, however, shows little interest in contemporary comparisons, preferring to locate the problem within an Atlantic framework.¹⁵

Much study has recently been devoted to the idea of composite or multiple monarchy in late medieval and early modern Europe. This paradigm did not develop out of an interest in unions per se, but stemmed from unease about standard accounts of the development of the modern state before 1789. When Koenigsberger observed in 1975 that: ‘most states in the early modern period were composite states, including more than one country under the sovereignty of one ruler’, he was merely erecting one section of the conceptual framework within which he wished to discuss his main concern, the history of early modern representative assemblies and their relation to state formation.¹⁶ Elliott, who was interested in monarchical unions, pointed out just how common the phenomenon of what he termed ‘composite monarchy’ was in early modern Europe.¹⁷ By applying Koenigsberger’s term ‘composite state’ to what were conventionally termed ‘unions of the crowns’ or ‘personal unions’, Elliott introduced a possible source of confusion into the debate. For Koenigsberger was explicitly referring to what Joseph Strayer had termed ‘mosaic states’, made up of many different provinces and regions with different characteristics, which, so Strayer argued, was true of most European states in this period.¹⁸ Russell recognized this tension and preferred to use the term ‘multiple’ rather than ‘composite’ for monarchies of this type, arguing that since England did not have the single system of law characteristic of the unitary state it was therefore a composite monarchy, whereas after 1603, the Stuart realms of England and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland constituted a multiple kingdom. He concluded that: ‘All multiple kingdoms are composite monarchies, but not all composite monarchies are multiple kingdoms’.¹⁹

The distinction is important, although it might have been clearer had Russell used the term ‘composite state’ instead of ‘composite monarchy’. For the debate on composite monarchies is still overwhelmingly concerned with the development of the modern sovereign state, rather than the process of political union. Strayer, who argued that by 1300 ‘it was evident that the dominant political form in western Europe was going to be the sovereign state’, was not interested in unions, but in states and the ways in which state-builders, usually—although not necessarily—monarchs, overcame provincialism and regional resistance to central authority to produce the unitary states that embodied their claims to undivided sovereignty.²⁰ Rulers of multiple monarchies might seek to integrate their different realms more closely and treat them as provinces of a single state, but—as James I discovered after 1603—such a project was easier to conceive than to realize. Addressing the English parliament in 1607 he claimed that it was as impossible:

for one King to governe two Contreys Contiguous . . . then for one head to governe two bodies, or one man to be husband of two wives, whereof Christ himselfe said, Ab initio non fuit.²¹

Parliament was unmoved, despite the analogies James drew between the union of the Picts and Scots that had created the kingdom of Scotland, and of the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy out of which the medieval English kingdom had emerged.²² In practice, as Elliott shows, rulers of multiple kingdoms were more likely to respect the institutions, laws, and privileges of their separate realms and govern them separately:

In return for a degree of benign neglect, local élites enjoyed a measure of self-government which left them without any urgent need to challenge the status quo. In other words, composite monarchies were built on a mutual compact between the crown and the ruling class of their different provinces which gave even the most arbitrary and artificial of unions a certain stability and resilience.²³

When monarchs sought to impose a greater unity on their subjects, as in the British Isles under Charles I, or in Olivares’s Spain, the result was often resistance, rebellion or civil war.²⁴

Not all unions were arbitrary or artificial, however, and although historians have tended to view personal unions from above, from the point of view of monarchs and dynasties, the political communities of their various realms often took a close interest in the relationship between the constituent parts of political unions, and on occasion played a full part in the construction of that relationship. Elliott stresses the importance of examining the terms and concepts used by contemporaries when talking of political union, observing that they thought much about such issues as contiguity and conformity in institutions and political culture, both of which were regarded as important—if not sufficient—factors for the establishment of successful unions. He drew attention to the work of the seventeenth-century Spanish jurist Juan de Pereira Solórzano, who distinguished, as many did, between what Elliott termed ‘accessory unions’—in which ‘a kingdom or province, on union with another, was regarded juridically as part and parcel of it, with its inhabitants possessing the same rights and subject to the same laws’—and unions aeque principaliter, in which a union’s constituent parts retained their separate identities, retaining their own laws and privileges.²⁵

Elliott’s recognition that contemporaries devoted considerable attention to the problems of political union, and his suggestion that early modern unions should be judged on their own terms and not according to the state-building paradigm are very welcome. For, as Duchhardt observes in his preface to one of the rare attempts at a comparative approach to dynastic and personal unions, historians as yet lack any convincing typology of what was such a common phenomenon before 1789.²⁶ The structure of the collection in which it appears, however, indicates the problem, with parallel essays on monarchs from the national perspectives of individual components of the unions which show little interest in the problems of typology. The distinctions between different kinds of monarchical union matter, however. Europe was formed largely by composite states and multiple monarchies. Yet these multiple monarchies and unions differed greatly, both internally and in comparison with one another. France may well have been, as Strayer argued, a mosaic or composite state; it was not, however, a multiple monarchy.²⁷ The relationship between England and Scotland within the United Kingdom was very different to the relationship of either with Wales or Ireland, just as the relationship of the United Kingdom with Hanover was of another nature entirely. Some dynastic or personal unions proved highly durable; others faltered after a few years. In some personal unions, such as Poland-Lithuania’s brief unions with Hungary (1370–82 and 1440–4) and Sweden (1592–9), and its rather longer union with Saxony (1697–1763), the component parts of the union remained very separate. As Jellinek recognized, however, in personal unions, long coexistence, institutional fusion, and attempts by monarchs to rule previously separate parts of their inheritance as one state, could lead to a growing together of the political communities in a process that could result in a real union, as in Britain between 1603 and 1707.

For such a process to occur needed the engagement of those political communities in the various parts of the union, and required sufficient support among them for fusion to take place. Yet political unions are usually studied and categorized on the basis of the treaties that founded them, rather than on the messy reality of these unificatory processes, and historians are often cavalier in their use of terms. As Jellinek observed:

Scholarship concerning so-called unions in a closer sense, i.e. the uniting of several states under one and the same ruler, has been obscured by vague and unstable terminology, in which historical and legal aspects are partly confused, and partly mixed up.²⁸

He pointed out that for some, a real union meant the formation of a unitary state, while the term ‘personal union’ simply denoted the sharing of a common ruler. For Jellinek, a real union was founded on a statute (Gesetz) agreed by the parties to the union, which integrated some—if not necessarily all—state institutions. Such a union of independent states could only come about with the full agreement of both parties.²⁹

It is worth bearing these distinctions in mind. The term real union is often used—especially by historians of the United Kingdom—as a synonym for parliamentary union. Yet for Jellinek, the union of Sweden and Norway, confirmed by the parliaments of both states in 1815, was a real union of states that remained sovereign, each with its own parliament and without a common government erected over them, since they conducted a common foreign policy through the common ruler; likewise, he regarded the Austro-Hungarian monarchy as a real union, although the Austrian and Hungarian parts of the monarchy retained separate parliaments after the 1867 Ausgleich.³⁰

As Jellinek maintained, there is a distinction to be drawn between legal definitions and historical and political reality. There was a spectrum of relationships between the constituent parties to personal and real unions that can blur the lines between the neat jurist’s categories: it is for this reason that Jellinek insisted upon the necessity of a formal statutory basis for a relationship to be considered a real union.³¹ Yet although he recognized that personal unions could develop into real unions, he does not consider how this occurs, as this is properly the territory of the historian rather than the jurist. Regardless of whether a union is a personal or a real union from the jurist’s point of view, however, it is also a relationship between two polities that changes over time, often substantially. Although historians understandably devote considerable attention to the treaties that define the legal basis of unions, these treaties reflected long processes in which the relationship between the partners to the treaty changed and developed. As in the case of Scotland and England, the development towards closer union was not necessarily the result of friendly feelings. Relations between the two countries in the seventeenth century were characterized more by hostility than harmony, with invasion, conquest, and the forced—albeit brief—Cromwellian incorporating union of 1652 more prominent than any growth of mutual affection.

Yet neighbours could have common interests. There were strong unionist currents of thought in both England and Scotland. English unionism might have rested on the hegemonic and tactless assertion that Scotland was a fief of the English crown; nevertheless, a considerable body of Scottish unionist thought existed long before 1603, some of it pragmatic, some idealistic.³² As Kidd argues, such pro-unionist sentiments have not been given the attention they deserve, since historians of Scotland tend to focus on the distinctiveness of Scotland and Scottish historical and cultural trends, and have generally ‘paid vastly greater attention to nationalism than to unionism’.³³

Historians of Scotland are by no means the only ones. The development of modern political nationalism after 1789 created a climate hostile to the concept of political union. The doctrine of the sovereign nation, one and indivisible, exported on the bayonets of the French revolutionary armies, roused powerful forces across Europe, as nations—or at least their elites—sought to define themselves and express their claim to sovereign independence according to Bodin’s seductive concept of indivisible sovereignty, in order to take their place in the post-1648 international system, which treated all sovereign states as legally equal regardless of their size and importance. Multinational polities faced demands for independence and came under increasing pressure to recognize claims to national autonomy within their borders long before Woodrow Wilson pulled the stopper from the genie’s bottle with his endorsement of the right of self-determination in 1918.

This hostile climate affected the writing of the history of the Polish-Lithuanian union; it was exacerbated by the unexpected return of political independence for Poland and Lithuania in 1918 following the collapse of the partitioning powers. Among the Polish-speaking elites of the former Polish-Lithuanian state, there had long been support for its reconstitution within the borders of 1772 as a multinational federation. In the nineteenth century, however, the rise of national consciousness among Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians brought competing demands for the establishment of new nation-states on the basis of these national groups, all of which developed traditions of history-writing in the nineteenth century hostile to the idea of union, and to the old union state. By the 1830s Narbutt’s Polish-language history of Lithuania was already marked by a strong commitment to Lithuanian independence.³⁴ As the philologists Kristijonas Donelaitis and Liudvikas Rėza studied the origins of the Lithuanian language, historians writing in Lithuanian began constructing an alternative account of the Lithuanian past. The partitioning powers fostered the publication of historical works presenting the union as a Polish imperialist project. In Ukraine, where nationalist historians had the dual problem of extricating the story of the Ukrainian past from its entanglement with Russia as well as Poland, Hrushevsky, whose great history of Ukraine-Rus' was published between 1898 and 1936, and who in March 1917 was head of the Ukrainian government that declared independence from Russia, used his formidable erudition to give a highly negative portrayal of the union and its effects on the Ukrainian nation. In what is now Belarus, Mikhail Koialovich fostered the development of ‘western Ruthenianism’, which preached the unity of western Ruthenians, and trumpeted the negative effects upon them of all contacts with Poland.³⁵

The territorial and national struggle after 1918 created a climate even more hostile to objective study of the common Polish-Lithuanian past, as Polish-speakers in the lands of the former grand duchy of Lithuania who had regarded themselves as Lithuanians or Ruthenians faced growing hostility from nationalist movements among Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Belarus'ian nationalists, who simply regarded them as Poles unless they renounced all traces of their Polish identity in a process that divided families and communities.³⁶ The problems were exacerbated by the terrible fate of these lands between 1939 and 1945, where people suffered genocide, ethnic cleansing, and the complete breakdown of political order. Quite apart from the Holocaust visited upon the Jews, in the bloodlands of eastern Europe,³⁷ Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and others were subject to—and sometimes perpetrators of—the massacres and ethnic cleansing that changed eastern Europe forever. Between 1945 and 1990, historical study in the Soviet Union, with its Russian nationalist foundations, encouraged negative portrayals of the union.

The twentieth century created deep wounds, not all of which have healed. Polish historians, apart from those who saw the union as an unmitigated disaster ultimately responsible for the failure of the Polish state, tended to portray it in broadly positive terms, even in communist Poland, where historians after 1956 were allowed more latitude than elsewhere in the Soviet bloc. Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian historians were far less willing to see anything of value in the union. Hrushevsky depicted the Ukrainian people as the victims of adverse historical circumstances, which ‘bedimmed its manifestations of vitality and its creative energy, and abandoned it for long centuries at the crossroads of political life as a defenceless and vulnerable prey to the avaricious appetites of its neighbours’.³⁸ Lithuanian attitudes were broadly similar in the interwar period, when historians concentrated on the medieval origins of Lithuania and its achievements until 1385, when Jogaila set Lithuania on what Sužiedėlis, writing in 1935, termed the ‘fatal path’ to union.³⁹

During the debates over the formation of the United States of America, Alexander Hamilton quoted Mably’s observation that neighbours were naturally enemies unless common weakness forced them to join together to form a confederative republic.⁴⁰ Relations between neighbours in European history have frequently been characterized by hostility, war, and mutual loathing. If an important factor in the construction of the sense of identity that today is so often seen as central to the nation-building process, is using the ‘other’ to define what one is not, then neighbours are the most readily available other against which this definition can be established, even if those neighbours speak a related—or the same—language. Yet the obsession with the ‘other’ in recent literature on identity-formation and its relation to the state has produced a distorting emphasis on polarization, when attitudes to other peoples in practice spread across a broad spectrum in which outright hostility was by no means necessarily dominant. The formation of unions—often despite long traditions of mutual hostility—showed that neighbours could and did recognize that relations need not be characterized by violence, however difficult the necessary hatchet-burying might be, and that political union had much to recommend it. This study focuses on one such union, in which a long process of unification, driven from below as much as from above, established a framework within which mutual hostility was contained and channelled, and in which a powerful political fusion gradually developed, forming a unique political culture, yet one that was also truly European.

1 Peter Alter, Nationalism (London, 1989), 93.

2 Heinhard Steiger, Staatlichkeit und Überstaatlichkeit: Eine Untersuchung zur rechtlichen und politischen Stellung der Europäischen Gemeinschaften, Schriften zum Öffentlichen Recht, Bd 31 (Berlin, 1966).

3 Murray Forsyth, Unions of States. The Theory and Practice of Confederation (New York, 1981), ix.

4 Forsyth, Unions, 1. For similar approaches see: S. Rufus Davis, The Federal Principle: A Journey through Time in Quest of a Meaning (Berkeley, CA, 1978); Ernst Deuerlein, Die historischen und philosophischen Grundlagen des föderativen Prinzips (Munich, 1972); Daniel Elazar, Exploring Federalism (Tuscaloosa, 1987); Carl Joachim Friedrich, Trends of Federalism in Theory and Practice (London, 1968); David Lassere, Étapes du féderalisme (Lausanne, 1954); G.F. Sawyer, Modern Federalism (London, 1969).

5 Elazar, Federalism, 48.

6 Davis, Federal Principle, 61, n. 33.

7 Georg Jellinek, Die Lehre von den Staatenverbindung (Berlin, 1882), 3.

8 Jellinek, Lehre, 24–6.

9 Jellinek, Lehre, 82–8.

10 Jellinek, Lehre, 137–57.

11 Christopher Hughes, Confederacies: An Inaugural Lecture delivered in the University of Leicester 8 November 1962 (Leicester, 1963), 10; Julian Franklin, ‘Introduction’, in Jean Bodin, On Sovereignty, ed. and tr. Franklin (Cambridge, 1992), xiii.

12 Jellinek, Lehre, 68–9.

13 Notable exceptions are Thomas Fröschl (ed.), Föderationsmodelle und Unionsstrukturen: Über Staatenverbindungen in der frühen Neuzeit vom 15. zum 18. Jahrhundert (Vienna, 1994); Joachim Bahlcke, ‘Unionsstrukturen und Föderationsmodelle im Osten des ständischen Europa: Anmerkungen zu vergleichenden Ansätzen über das frühneuzeitliche Ostmitteleuropa’, Comparativ (1998), 5, 57–73; Balázs Trencsényi and Márton Zászkaliczky (eds), Whose Love of Which Country? Composite States, National Histories and Patriotic Discourses in Early Modern East-Central Europe (Leiden, 2010).

14 J.G.A. Pocock, ‘British History: A plea for a new subject’, JMH, 47 (1975), 601–21; J.G.A. Pocock, ‘The limits and divisions of British History: In search of the unknown subject’, AHR, 97 (1982), 311–36; John Robertson, A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707 (Cambridge, 1995), 3–4, 16.

15 For example Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837, 2nd edn (New Haven, CT, 2005). For attempts to redress the balance, see Micheál Ó Siochrú and Andrew Mackillop (eds), Forging the State: European State Formation and the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707 (Dundee, 2009) and D.W. Hayton et al. (eds), The Eighteenth Century Composite State: Representative Institutions in Ireland and Europe, 1689–1800 (Basingstoke, 2010).

16 H.G. Koenigsberger, ‘Dominium Regale or Dominium Politicum et Regale: Monarchies and parliaments in early modern Europe’, Politicians and Virtuosi. Essays in Early Modern History (London, 1986), 1–25.

17 J.H. Elliott, ‘A Europe of composite monarchies,’ P & P, 137 (1992), 48–9, and ‘Introduction’, in Jon Arieta and J.H. Elliott (eds), Forms of Union: The British and Spanish Monarchies in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Donostia, 2009), 14.

18 Joseph Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton, NJ, 1970), 53.

19 Conrad Russell, ‘Composite monarchies in early modern Europe: The British and Irish example’, in Alexander Grant and Keith Stringer (eds), Uniting the Kingdom: The Making of British History (London, 1995), 133.

20 Strayer, Origins, 57.

21 James I, ‘A speech to both the Houses of Parliament, delivered in the Great Chamber at White-Hall, the last day of March 1607’, in The Political Works of James I, ed. Charles Howard McIlwain (Cambridge, MA, 1918), 292.

22 James I, ‘A speech, as it was delivered in the upper house of the Parliament . . . Munday the XIX day of March 1603’, in The Political Works of James I, 272–3.

23 Elliott, ‘Europe’, 57.

24 Elliott, ‘Europe’, 63–4.

25 Elliott, ‘Europe’, 52–3.

26 Heinz Duchhardt, ‘Vorwort’, in Heinz Duchhardt (ed.), Der Herrscher in der Doppelpflicht: Europäische Fürsten und ihre beiden Throne (Mainz, 1997), 3.

27 Strayer, Origins, 53.

28 Jellinek, Lehre, 82.

29 Jellinek, Lehre, 82–4, 197–9.

30 Jellinek, Lehre, 223–53.

31 As he drily observed, the Swedish-Norwegian union of 1815 was variously categorized as a real union, a Bundesstaat, a personal union, and a personal union that could also be called a real union: Jellinek, Lehre, 225 n. 27.

32 Arthur Williamson, Scottish National Consciousness in the Age of James VI (Edinburgh, 1979), 97–107; Roger Mason, ‘Scotching the Brut: Politics, history and national myth in sixteenth-century Britain’, in Mason (ed.), Scotland and England 1286–1815 (Edinburgh, 1987), 60–83; Roger Mason, ‘Imagining Scotland: Scottish political thought and the problem of Britain 1560–1660’, in Mason (ed.), Scots and Britons: Scottish Political Thought and the Union of 1603 (Cambridge, 1994), 3–13; and Colin Kidd, Unions and Unionism: Political Thought in Scotland, 1500–2000 (Cambridge, 2008), 39–80.

33 Kidd, Unions, 1, 2.

34 Teodor Narbutt, Dzieje starożytne narodu litewskiego, 10 vols (Vilnius, 1835–41).

35 Rimvydas Petrauskas, ‘Der litauische Blick auf den polnisch-litauischen Staatsverband–“Verlust der Staatlichkeit” oder Bewahrung der Parität’, ZOF, 53 (2004), 363–72; Robert Frost, ‘Unmaking the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: Mykhailo Hrushev^'skyi and the making of the Cossacks’, HUS, 27 (2004–5), 313–33; Henadź Sahanowicz, ‘Źródła pamięci historycznej współczesnej Białorusi: Powrót zachodniorusizmu’, in Jerzy Kłoczowski and Andrzej Gil (eds), Analizy Instytutu Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej, 14 (Lublin, 2006), 6–7.

36 See Robert Frost, ‘Ordering the Kaleidoscope: Nation and State Power in the lands of Poland-Lithuania since 1569’, in Oliver Zimmer and Len Scales (eds), Power and the Nation in History (Cambridge, 2005), 212–31.

37 For the bloodlands, see Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (Philadelphia, PA, 2010).

38 Mykhailo Hrushevsky, History of Ukraine-Rus’, i, ed. Andrzej Poppe and Frank Sysyn (Edmonton, Alberta, 1997), 2.

39 Sužiedėlis, ‘Lietuva’, 14; cf. Zenonas Ivinskis, ‘Vytauto jaunystė ir jo veikimas iki 1392 m.’, in Paulius Šležas (ed.), Vytautas Didysis, 1350–1430 (Kaunas, 1930; repr. Vilnius, 1988), 28.

40 Davis, Federal Principle, 101.