Origins of the Concept of "National Sovereignty"

1. Introduction

One of the issues that has occupied me the most throughout my professional life is the concept of “nation” (Andrés-Gallego 2005b, 2012). This interest has been the result of the study of various nationalist movements and of the evolution of some of them towards terrorism (idem 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2004b, 2004c, 2005, 2007, 2013, 2014, 2018). I mention only the most substantive.

At a certain point, I understood that the conceptual – and only conceptual – key to all these movements was the conviction implied by the phrase “national sovereignty”. I thought (and think) that every nation tends to “sovereignty” because it is human and it is each of us human beings who tend to be sovereign of ourselves (and some, also of others). But, for the same reason, any human community whose raison d’être is not precisely to renounce its own sovereignty for the benefit of another grouping tends to be sovereign. The tendency to be sovereign is not an exclusive privilege of nations.

My research led me to verify something unexpected. In some countries, “nation” was used to refer to the political community, but smaller political communities that were part of that larger community were also called “nation”. I found that, until the eighteenth century, there was talk of the “Spanish nation” and that, at the same time, people declared themselves “of the Galician nation”, “of the Castilian nation”, “of the Basque nation”, of the “Andalusian nation” and a long etcetera. The meaning had nothing to do with politics in the usual sense of the word. Quite simply, belonging to a nation was a matter of kinship, and kinship admits degrees. Therefore, one could be a Spaniard from Galicia and declare oneself from “Spanish nation” and from “Galician nation”, within the Spanish nation, without any problem.

This way of speaking was interrupted in 1812 with the approval of the first Spanish liberal constitution in the Cortes of Cádiz. In it, only the “Spanish nation” and “national sovereignty” are spoken of. It went so far as to declare in the constitutional text itself that all the inhabitants of Hispanic America, including the indigenous people, were “Spaniards”, that is, “of the Spanish nation”. All the other “Hispanic nations” disappeared from the Spanish lexicon. But the dozens of indigenous “nations” that had never been called the “Spanish nation” and yet inhabited the so-called “kingdoms of the Indies” also disappeared. The concept of “national sovereignty,” in other words, did away with the predominantly familiar meaning of the word “nation.”

My conclusion is clear. If every nation tends to sovereignty as something inalienable, there can be no “nations of nations”. In fact, in the Spanish constitution of 1978, the opposition of the more moderate Catalan and Basque nationalists was overcome with the introduction of the concept of “nation of nationalities”. It was a useful play on words. But nothing more. It was a matter of everyone accepting the Transition to party democracy.

The direct knowledge of “Catalan nationalism” (idem 2014, 2018) and “Basque nationalism”, which I have also studied for years, with its terrorist aspect (idem 2003, 2004b, 2005, 2007), led me to conclude that there was no solution if the sense of kinship that the word “nation” originally had was not recovered. To put it bluntly, I concluded that the concept of “national sovereignty” is simply poisoned candy.

I chose, therefore, to study the emergence of both expressions - “sovereignty” and “nation” - and that of the phrase formed by both, and the results of such research are those that I would like to begin to expose now.

I am aware that I will come up against a wall that is difficult to break: the idea of “national sovereignty” has so permeated the civilization of the West and the countries influenced by it that many experts take for granted its presence in the most remote times. It is an anachronism; but one would say that it has become part of our imaginary “identity” and that it is inconceivable to doubt it. For example, a scholar like Hasting (2000: 30-2) – to give a more than relevant example –considers the Latin natio as an expression with sovereign political meaning referring to all the periods in which it was used in England. Of the quotations that he himself adduces, the first that comes close to this meaning - that of “sovereign nation” - is from 1624. Besides, I think that, here and in chapter 2 of your book, especially, he confuses the undoubted existence of a national sentiment with the will to be constituted the same as a sovereign nation.

I have no doubt that the validity of the concept of “national sovereignty” continues to be the main obstacle for more than half the world to be at odds with the other medium today. To be sure, there are many other reasons, even more weighty. But the recourse to this concept, which I consider poisonous, has become universal.

I have not hidden this conclusion in previous studies. But the last one is going to be fifteen years old (2012), and, in this time, the bibliography and my own research have given me more elements to remake the history of that concept. In fact, most of the data in this text does not appear in my previous publications.

That story requires much more space than that of an academic journal article. I have therefore chosen to begin by updating the first part of my thesis: the one referring to the gestation of the expression “national sovereignty”. It would not make sense, however, to present a kind of showcase of innovations. It seems to me better to reconsider the subject without worrying about adducing again data – as little as possible – that I have already exposed in other pages. It is the only way that what improves is the whole of this story. I will be committed, however, to redo the second part of the thesis with the same criterion: the history of the consequences of the universalization of that concept. It will depend, of course, on how long my own life lasts.

2. Materials and Methods

The bibliography on “nation” and “nationalism” (and “national sovereignty”) is very extensive, and it would not make sense to use all the necessary space to prove that the undersigned knows everything. Actually, I don’t know everything. I do know what has given more to talk about and to write about because, for a dozen years, I organized interdisciplinary seminars on this theme – the nation and nationalism – and perhaps fifty specialists of diverse knowledge participated in them (Barba 2022: 55, 175-6, 184-94, 200-4, 281, 316, 330-2, 342). With about twenty of them, I finally had a substantial conversation that we collected in a book (De Andrés 2008). I take the liberty of referring to him to prove that I know – to give an example – that there are authors who have collected more than fifty definitions of the word “nation”. Allow me not to feel forced to quote this or that author of obligatory mention in these cases. I have investigated the use that has been made of the word “nation” and its derivatives in the sources of the various periods, and I will only refer to them. These fifty definitions have arisen from the problems and the different perspectives born of the concepts of “national sovereignty” and “nationalism” (thus Renan and Thom 1990, Smith 2002, Guibernau 2010) and my intention is to show the ambiguity of the origin of the first, which is why the second arises.

From the point of view of method, mine will be the mere analysis of texts and the history of concepts (Begriffsgeschichte) that owes so much to Reinhart Koselleck. The German historian had clear epistemological bases. His main assumption is that there is a difference between word and concept: in his view, words can be strictly defined, whereas concepts can only be interpreted. Any concept has different temporal layers, and its understanding depends on its alteration over time.

It is therefore necessary to use both diachronic and synchronic approaches. Concepts follow dynamics of structural and categorical continuity and change, even to the point of generating other concepts and counter-concepts that may also evolve throughout history. This change may give rise to the use of different terms for the same concept and its opposite (and this demands a “semasiological” analysis) and can also lead to the use of the same term for different concepts (and this requires an “onomasiological” analysis). It is not necessary to remember that semasiology is a branch of linguistics that studies the meaning of words. Semasiological (or simply semantic) analysis goes “from sign to concept”: it starts from an already existing word and asks what it means, how many meanings it has and how it relates to different concepts or realities. The onomasiological examination, by contrast, follows the opposite path: from the concept to the word. That is why, according to Koselleck, where possible we must analyse each concept diachronically, synchronically, semasiologically and onomasiologically if we wish to reconstruct the meaning of the concept at any given point in history.

Obviously, it is not a matter of rigidly applying these four approaches, but of continually bearing them in mind and ensuring they are constantly maintained in a careful state of equilibrium. In this case, I will start from the Latin word natio. Therefore, I will act semasiologically. Otherwise, I would have to start with those fifty-odd different definitions that have been given to the word “nation.” Then I would have to ask myself if, in all languages, each of these definitions is expressed with a derivative of natio, and the task would be endless. On the other hand, choosing the Latin natio is not arbitrary. Its adaptation to other languages is almost universal.

This has been the underlying basis of my research. However, I will refrain from overstating this when I divulge my results. This work is intended as a historical essay, let us say, positive, “empirical”, and not simply a demonstration that one method works over another. We use language to make ourselves understood... by others. So, if we give the word “language” its broadest possible meaning, we could say that reality only exists in language (not necessarily in words). But, although we are constitutively interrelational, each of us has an intimate core –our own intimacy– which no other human being can access. Sometimes, not even we ourselves.

Therefore, I will not start by recalling the criticism levelled at Begriffsgeschichte from post-structuralist positions, or simply from positions that differed from those of Koselleck (Welskopp 2010; Pankakoski 2010, Oncina 2022). As far as post-structuralism is concerned, this is really a question of “to be or not to be”. And obviously, we are. Besides, Koselleck himself recognized (1985: XIV) that not only the junction between synchronic and diachronic orders, but also the position of each reader at this junction, are the conditions that make historical understanding possible for everyone. Quite another matter is whether Begriffsgeschichte should be part of a new dialogical metaphysics which resumes the method of reflection abandoned by Descartes as soon as he encountered success with his first step: I think, therefore I exist. The continuation that Descartes opted for was reduced to mere voluntarism: God will not let me deceive me (Corazón 2016).

Notwithstanding the development of dialogical metaphysics, the importance of the word “nation” throughout our history is sufficient justification for this essay. It is already an honour that Brunner, Conze and Koselleck (1972-97) included the word “nation” in its monumental German lexicon of social-political concepts and that, despite this, it seems to me that more than one nuance can be added. In fact, this will be here my contribution. I will go to the original sources when it is advisable and possible. With this and the reading of the bibliography I will try to improve the state of the art.

3. Results

3.1. The Word “Nation”

3.1.1. The Difference Between Populus, Gens and Natio

The word “nation” is merely an evolution of the Latin natio. But, in the Rome of the classics, it was used very little; they preferred to use the term gens. It differed from populus in that the latter was the most general denomination of the human community, while the gens referred to a human community constituted by paternal-filial generation. With populus, there was not necessarily any emphasis on the possible political rights of the community in question—not even on whether it had them, or whether it had a defined legal status— but neither did it reveal its possible parental basis, which was clear in gens and, when it was used, in natio. Of course, this was not an obstacle for the word populus to also be used to refer to a political community if a demonym or a toponym was added. The main case was that of the populus Romanus (Bobertz 2017).

Both populus and gens and natio were “political” expressions in the noble sense of this term. But, to refer to the political community itself, the Latins tended to opt for a fourth expression, civitas, “city”, probably to prolong the Greek idea of the polis. The Greeks (those who thought of such a thing) believed that the polis was the minimum community indispensable for a man to be truly free). Thus, populus was a “human community” and may or may not be civitas, or gens, or natio, or of any other nature; whereas, to be a gens or a natio (which were almost synonymous), it was necessary that there be kinship, which was not always the case with populus and civitas (see Smith 1875: 288-93, 567-70; Reilly 1998-1999).

Natio was a quasi-synonym of gens with which he wanted to emphasize the “foreignness” or “strangeness” of these people. It was sometimes used to refer to “gentiles”, foreigners, those who did not belong to the Roman people (thus in Forcellini 1940; Zernatto & Mistretta 1944; Niermeyer 1984). And, in the first centuries of our era, some Christian writers resorted to that same word to mention the “pagans”. This was done, for example, by the convert Arnobius de Sicca around the year 300, which was when he wrote Adversus nationes. In fact, Arnobius referred in his work to those whom Christians called gentiles because they were not Jews, and gentiles were still a Latin derivative of gens (thus in Arnobius [c.300] 1846: 55, 63, 213-4, 332).

Quintilian, in the first century, in the Oratorical Institutions (5.10.24), considered gens and natio synonyms when he said that, in order to argue, we must prefer, in this order, (i) what can be deduced from the person of whom we speak, (ii) from his nation, (iii) from his country, (iv) from his sex, (v) from his age, (vi) from the education he had received, (vii) of the form and complexion of his body, (viii) of his condition or state, (ix) of his nature and, finally (x), of his trade or profession. And he justified putting in second place the natio in that every people (gentibus) has its own customs and it is often not the same in a foreigner (barbarus), in a Roman and in a Greek.

Then you had to look at the homeland, because the same thing used to happen: the laws, institutions, and opinions of the cities (civitatum) tend to differ.

I transcribe it in Quintilian’s Latin because my translation is free, although I have respected the couple of synonyms he used: that of nationes and gentes and that of patriae (homelands) and civitates (cities):

“Natio, nam et gentibus proprii mores sunt nec idem in barbaro, Romano, Graeco probabile est: Patria, quia similar etiam civitatum leges, instituta, opiniones habent diferentiam”.

That Marcus Fabius Quintilianus distinguished “nations” and “peoples” by their customs and not by kinship was obvious to his readers: parents did not limit themselves to procreating but then proceeded to inculcate their customs in their children, and this was the link that led them to live with other relatives and form a natio or gens. However, the human community par excellence was the “city” (civitas) which used to be the place of the fathers (homeland, patria in Latin) but which no longer required -necessarily- to have the same blood. The civitas or patria was distinguished by its laws, institutions and ways of thinking (opinions: opiniones in good Latin).

Of this second pair – that of homeland and city – we will speak later. Now we will only say that, between natio and gens, natio was rarely used and continued as a marginal word for centuries; it was not until the thirteenth century that it was finally imposed to give names to ancient peoples (gentes, the Latin plural of gens), we will see why. In fact, in the Vulgate (the Latin translation of the Bible written around the year 400), Jerome translated the Greek ethnos for gens in most cases, even though there were not a few phrases in which he opted for natio. But he even preferred to speak of aetas gentium instead of aetas nationum when he referred to what was later called the “age of nations” (in which we have been since the time of Abraham).

Around 600, when Saint Isidore wrote the Etymologies – which had such an influence on the knowledge of the following centuries – the wise man from Seville insisted on the same thing. He did not even include a definition or etymology of the word natio, although he pointed it out in passing when speaking of the gens and the genus, which is what he dealt with at length:

“Gens is a crowd of people who have the same origin or who come from a different race according to their particular identification, such as Greece or Asia. Hence its name of ‘gentility’. And they are called gens by the ‘generations’ of families, because the word derives from ‘to generate,’ just as ‘nation’ [natio] derives from ‘to be born’ [nascor].”

“Genus (lineage) comes from ‘begetting’ and ‘generating’, or from the delimitation of certain descendants – such as nations – which, related by their own kinship, are called ‘gentes’” (Sevilla 1982: IX, 2.1 and 4.4).

Around the year 800, the Anglo-Saxon sage Alcuin of York came to encourage some monks who had settled in the northwest of Ireland to shine their light in the midst of nationis perbarbarae, that is: “such a barbarous nation” (“Luceat lux vestra in medio nationis perbarbarae”), when, to speak of his own nation, he preferred to say gens Anglorum (“people of Anglos”) (Epistolae 276, in Alcuin 1876: 847]). And, around 1140, Bernard, the first Norman bishop of Saint David, explained to the pope that the peoples of that province – who, strictly speaking, were not only Welsh – were different in “nation, language, laws and customs, ways of judging and usages”. I copy the complete enumeration given the progressive distortion that has been made of this text when passing from one hand to the other and losing sight of the original. The six concepts are simply juxtaposed. I put in quotation marks: natione, lengua, legibus et moribus, iudiciis et consuetudinibus. Here is the complete text:

“Noveritis autem proculdubio inter provincias, nostram quidem et Cantuariensem Londonie provinciam cum viii comitatibus interiacere, et populos nostre provincia, natione, lengua, legibus et moribus, iudiciis et consuetudinibus discrepare” (in Davies 1920: 142).

It is one of the first known texts in which there is more than a strange use of the word natio. Grammatically, it is not a definition, but a juxtaposition of expressions that, however, were considered similar when it came to marking the differences between human communities that we can consider political – in the broadest sense – or, simply, articulated around an authority.

That would have to do at the time with the definition of natio. But the fortune of this word was probably due to another factor, which I propose as a hypothesis: when the Romance languages were formed, gens tended to become a more generic denomination, possibly because that general meaning was already in classical Latin – although as a secondary meaning – and it made its way into Low Latin and Vulgar Latin, from which the Romance languages largely came. Thus, the corresponding derivative of gens ended up being used to refer to people in general – gentes in Hispanic and Italian romances, le gens in French – and, in short, the Latin gens and its Romance derivatives ceased to be used in the sense of a community of relatives who shared a lifestyle. It was thus that the word natio had to supplant the expression gens when it was intended to point out that last nuance: the kinship that generates community.

Where it occurred, the imposition of the generic meaning of gens must have begun to happen when human movements became spatially lengthened, especially from the tenth century in Western Europe. With this, the awareness of otherness and, what is more, the perception of the difference between some peoples and others were imposed as something evident and obvious. And, when they looked again at the distinctions between peoples , they no longer called themselves gentes but nationes.

In most of the rest of the European languages – Slavic and Germanic – the same usage was followed and what resulted was that, in several of them, gens did not generate any word and, instead, “nation” was adopted: thus, Natione in German or nacija in Croatian, a language in which, on the other hand, the equivalent of gens was (and es) rod (it is said rodjen san to express that “I was born”), whereas, in German, Volk is equivalent to people, but, de facto, it is often used as a synonym for gens, with a parental sense. In English, for that general meaning, populus was correctly chosen and became “people”.

3.1.2. The Definitive Imposition of the Word Natio

The word natio, however, did not fully impose itself until the thirteenth century. This is clearly shown by the universities and councils of the twelfth century in which it began to be used profusely, even as a criterion for the articulation of these two – so different – institutions.

The fact that it was seen precisely in universities and councils does not mean that they were the cause. Logic (which is not usually fulfilled in history) rather leads us to suppose what we have just argued: that the development of human movement of all kinds that was taking shape in Europe from the tenth and eleventh centuries fed the consciousness of otherness in people who stumbled upon others who came from other nations and, with that, the word gained prominence. The fact is that the ethnic meaning of the word gens was lost or confused. But it is not negligible that it appeared precisely in the universities that began to be created in the twelfth century. Teachers and students had to define themselves in some way and they decided to do it by nations. The use of Latin as a common language meant that they were often universities as small as they were truly international, and foreign people had to be distinguished from those of the country. Thus, immediately, in the universities themselves, it was decided to use that natural articulation and that word – natio – as an organizational criterion for internal administration (Kibre 1948).

This thesis has had illustrious detractors, not many. Maravall (1972) openly rejects that the diffusion of the term natio was linked to the birth of universities and believes he proves it with numerous quotations from authors who did not speak of any university and, nevertheless, used the word in question. But most of the quotations he adduces are after 1400. For now, the remarkable study by Mattéo Vierling (2024) must be considered conclusive: he compares the organization by “nations” in Western universities from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries and there is not the slightest doubt. What he also highlights is that the institutional organizational form of this fact in each university was extremely heterogeneous. But the detail of what happened with the natio hispanica at the University of Bologna between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries will serve to qualify our thesis: being a word that expressed family belonging, that is, kinship, it was submitted to reality, and there are very different degrees of kinship. That would imply two main things: one, the recognition that there was a hierarchy of nations; the other, that, for the same reason, there could be “nations of nations” (and even “nations of nations of nations” in the case of the natio Hispanica).

Loomis (1939: 510) is wrong when she writes that in the universities of the time four nations were generally formed. She overgeneralizes the case of Paris. At the University of Bologna, for example, the nationes were formed in the thirteenth century for the simple reason that the jurists had to organize themselves in some way to vote and took advantage of a way of grouping that was until then informal, that of the nationes: they were divided for the time being between Citramontanes and Ultramontanes, and these – the foreigners – into thirteen nations. So, it was interesting to have as many nations as possible to have more votes, which is why – it seems – from the natio Hispanorum (which already existed there in 1281 and included all the “peninsulars”, including the Portuguese) a natio Cathelanorum (of which at least there is news in 1295) was split.

The latter presented difficulties because there were few Catalans. But they solved it with the help of Aragoneses and Castilians, who posed as Cathelani when necessary. Later, from the fifteenth century, the Aragon, Mallorcan, Navarrese, Indian nations and some others would segregate. Obviously, the natio Indiana only could exist desde el momento en que existieron los “reinos de Indias” en América. Their members, however, continued to consider themselves members of the real natio Hispanorum (Tamburri 1992: 74, 86, 88, 115, 182, 227, 232).

Members of all these nations continued to consider themselves Hispani, and therefore members of the real natio Hispanorum, but also truly naturales (id est: “national”) of the different nations of which the Hispanic consisted of. Some of them – the Catalans for example – were at the same time Hispani, Aragonenses and Cathelani. (Catalonia was part of the “crown of Aragon.”)

The fact that the term took shape simultaneously in the councils of the Latin Church, on the other hand, is an indication that, in fact, it was then that the word natio gained notoriety; there had been councils for thirteen centuries and until then there had been no reason for them to be articulated into nations. At the Council of Lyons (1274), specifically, cardinals confronted Gregory X – among other reasons – for his intention to modify the norms for the election of pontiff according to his personal criteria, and the pope did not hesitate to gather the archbishops and abbots by nations to approve his proposals in writing. And something similar – calling prelates by nations when voting – Clement V did at the Council of Vienna in 1311-1312. For that purpose, he grouped them into Italians, Spaniards, Germans, Danes, English, Scots and French.

It is not that there were no more nations; it is simply that, most of the prelates who attended that council had this origin. It had to be simplified, of course. There were council fathers who were neither Italian, nor German, nor Danish, nor English, nor Scottish, nor French. But they were not enough – or strong enough – to form their own group and they had to join some of the sayings.

This articulation of councils was immediately related to the schism of the West – the duality of bishops of Rome that lasted from 1378 to 1417 – and to the impossibility for the cardinals to agree to elect a single pope. The emperor – in use of the powers granted to him by Eusebius of Caesarea in the fourth century – and other Christian princes were impelled to intervene to bring order. Often, it was they who took the initiative in convening the consequent councils. They sent the ecclesiastical hierarchs of their respective territories there and, having ruled out the possibility of voting by kingdoms or continuing to restrict the vote to the cardinals, the criterion of grouping those ecclesiastical hierarchs by nations and giving a vote to each nation was maintained.

Only now, and for that reason – eminently pragmatic: voting – it was necessary to decide who constituted nations and who did not and, with this, a first conceptual effort was made, which, moreover, only showed that, by nation, at least two different realities were already understood.

3.1.3. The First Discussion on the Concept of the Nation, at the Council of Constance, and National Sentiment

It happened exactly at the Council of Constance, in 1414-1417: it was in this way – by nations – that the Council Fathers were organized, and that with all the required formality. Each nation had its president, its deputies and its notaries; each was assigned seats in the cathedral and a meeting place, where they decided their vote. Then, these votes were transferred by the respective deputies to the central commission or to the general assembly.

The matter was capital. The first thing at stake was who had the right to appoint pope. It was a matter that had been discussed for centuries, which had been resolved in the eleventh century when the pope attributed it to the cardinals, which was the name by which the bishops of the Roman environment had been designated, especially since the eighth century. At the end, they had become the supreme ecclesiastical dignity, even if it was not of divine right, but purely canonical.

The inability of the cardinals to resolve the schism of 1378 renewed the matter, however, and, before the Council of Constance, not a few bishops, abbots, princes, and other persons of note recalled that the cardinals were no more than the Roman clergy. Rulers of the other churches (the churches which are now called particular, that is, like that of Tarazona-Calatayud and that of Paris) also had the right to vote. Consequently, the cardinal monopoly having been discarded, what had to be discussed was how the votes of the representatives of the various churches were attributed: whether by head, by nations or even by ecclesiastical provinces.

It was decided that by nations. But that raised other problem: that of deciding what they were. In principle, the criterion was imposed to accept the four nations that were recognized as such in those days at the Sorbonne University (the Gallican nation – that is: the French – the German nation, the English nation and the Italian nation). It prevailed not without resistance; because the Emperor Sigismund wanted the Hungarian nation to be accepted as well. Thid was, however, ended up being incorporated into the German, as did the Czechs, Poles, Danes and Swedes – even though many of them were not Germans – while Dalmatians, Cypriots and Greeks did it in the Italian way (without actually being Italians).

It was not a matter of politics, nor, strictly speaking, of culture; although it was the language that made the Savoyards, Provençals and quite a few Lorenes – all of them subjects of the emperor – part of the Gallican nation and not of the Germanic one. Certainly, in those cases, it was done like this; in others, it was not.

But, in addition, the French – for political reasons – wanted the English to be denied the character of a nation, that is, the vote, on the grounds that they were Germans. And not only did they fail, but they had to accept that, when the Aragonese arrived – more than a year after the council began – a fifth natio was constituted, the Hispanic. As other “peninsulars” arrived in Constance, including the Portuguese and Navarrese, the joined this nation without difficulty, even though they were part of different kingdoms and that, in both, different languages were spoken, Portuguese and, in Navarre, Navarrese romance and Basque.

Note that the Portuguese considered themselves members of the Spanish nation, although they were from a kingdom different from the others of the peninsula and the islands. The reason, in their case, was that they came from the territory that the Romans had begun to call Hispania. (Roman had spread the word Ispania, with which the Phoenicians had only called the coast they sighted when they arrived near the strait that faces the Atlantic and, at most, their Hinterland, where they found many blacksmiths of great quality. In Phoenician of the second millennium BC, Ispania indistinctly meant “northern coast” and “blacksmiths’ coast”).

But do not dismiss the fact that, at the Council of Constance in the fifteenth century, the Greeks and Cypriots were brought into the Italian nation. Perhaps they were aware that Italian culture was the offspring of Hellenistic culture. But still.

The followers of the French cardinal d’Ailly even wanted the national system to be abandoned and the individual vote to be reimposed, alleging that it destroyed the unity of the Council. But they failed. The only thing they managed to do was get the French and British to physically fight in the street. And Emperor Sigismund’s commissioners eventually decided that they should be organized by nations “as the Holy Spirit has inspired us,” he argued (in Loomis 1939: 522. On the foregoing, ibidem, 512-521).

It was all this that gave rise to the discussion of what a nation was. D’Ailly asserted that a nation was, de facto, a secular political organization—a political community—and that what was to be respected was the ecclesiastical organization. And, as this did not prosper, the representatives of the French nation drew up a memorial, as early as 1417, according to which a distinction had to be made between general nations and particular nations, among the latter of which was the English, which was part of the German general nation. Thus, it was born a distinction that was to bring good and bad consequences – some very healthy, the others very serious – in about six hundred years.

Strictly speaking, it was not a negligible distinction, even if it was insufficient: it was tantamount to acknowledging – tacitly – that the word natio was so labile, that there could be nations within other nations, which would therefore be nations of nations. Certainly, it will be observed that, with this, either the French did not agree among themselves, or they were confused: first D’Ailly had said that the nation was a political organization and it now turned out that within these political organizations – nationes generales – there could be and were particular nations, which were supposed to be also political organizations, only of a lower rank.

Tacitly again, the English arranged it by drawing up another memorial, in which they acknowledged that there were indeed general nations and particular nations, but that what chiefly differentiated a nation—one might say, from the context, a particular nation — was language. Thus, there could be no doubt that, in any case, the English formed a general nation, and that for the simple reason that it embraced eight kingdoms and five languages.

“[...] The nation, they explained, is understood as a people [gens] distinguished from others by a relationship of blood [cognationem] and a habit of unity [collectionem] or by a diversity of languages, which are the highest and truest of the proofs of a nation and its very essence [quae maximam et verissimam probant nationem et ipsius essentiam] by divine and human right.”

It had nothing to do with politics in the vile sense of this word:

“Everyone knows that it doesn’t matter if a nation obeys one prince or several. Aren’t there many kingdoms in the Spanish nation that don’t render obedience to the King of Castile, the main ruler of Spain? And yet, it does not follow that they are not part of the Spanish nation. Provence, the Dauphiné, Savoy, Burgundy, Lorraine, and many other regions which have nothing to do with our adversary of France, are they not, however, included in the French or Gallican nation?”

Strictly speaking, the argument of the English did not fit with what was done at that same council: the Poles, for example, formed a natio with all the Germans and were Slavs. We couldn’t say that they were united by a special relationship of blood or a habit of unity, nor by language. But those who argued were the representatives of the churches of the West and it was not properly a matter of establishing canonical doctrine on what a nation the Polish was. The main questio was bringing order to the concrete situation that had been created. In the end, the one that broke through was the English criterion, which was, it is true, the most in line with the tradition of classical Rome. But, in another circumstance of the same Council, it became clear that the duality of criteria was something more than a dispute between two nations, the French and the English. In defining the natio hispanica, Sardinians and Sicilians had also been included, along with the people of the crowns of Portugal, Castile, Navarre and Aragon, for the sole reason that the Sardinians and Sicilians were subjects of the king of Aragon, although they did neither inhabit the Iberian Peninsula nor speak any Spanish language. The Portuguese Council Fathers had already protested and warned just that: those from Sardinia and Sicily spoke another language and that they were truly from a different nation. They had not noticed that they also had a different language – the Porguguese - and that, on the other hand, nor was there linguistic unity among the territories of the kings of Aragon and Castile, with whom they -the Portuguese Fathers- accepted, however, to constitute the natio Hispanica.

To understand the zeal with which they affirmed their protest, it must not be forgotten that, with the votes of Sicilians and Sardinians, the subjects of the crown of Aragon could obtain a majority within the natio Hispanica. Therefore, since each nation had one vote, Aragonese representatives could decide how and for whom the natio Hispanica had to vote.

The enumeration of “nations” that we have just made shows that the criterion of differentiating them by language was mixed with that of distinguishing them by “kingdoms”, even if, in some of these, several languages were spoken. A good example was what happened in the kingdom of Navarre, where Basques and Romances coexisted and there were also two minorities that spoke Arabic or Hebrew. Thus, the distinction between nation and kingdom was expressly maintained years later, in 1434, at the Council of Basel, when the problem of who had the right to vote, and who should do so first – English or Castilian – was raised again, and the convert and bishop Don Alonso de Cartagena argued that, in the domains of the King of Castile, there were different nations and different languages; “because the Castilians and the Galicians and the Biscayans are diverse nations, and they use different languages of the whole,” he explained (in Echevarría 1992: 343).

Finally, it is necessary to note that the political use of the word natio and its Romance versions should not tarnish a reality, which is the existence of national sentiment at the time of which we speak. If anything, we could say that it could be called, for the same reason, “patriotic feeling”. There was a real feeling of belonging to a community by kinship, and first it was referred to the homeland and later to the nation. “That for love of you I have left my land and the sweetness of my nation” (“Qui por amor de vos avoie ma terre lessiee et la douçor de ma nacion”), reads a French literary story of the thirteenth century, La queste de Saint Graal (in Loomis 1939: 509; see Baumgartner 2003). With the increase in the use of writing (out of necessity derived from this increase in long-distance relationships and from mere literary creation), it became more common to express love for one’s own nation (Baumgartner 2002).

3.2. Sovereignty

3.2.1. From Plena Potestas to Souveraineté

It is more complex to explain the gestation of the second word that constitutes the expression “national sovereignty”. The first thing I can do is to say that what we know about it makes us think of a French lexical creation. In the form suvrainetet (“upper extremity”), it appears in a document from around 1120. It is a derivation of souverain, and this is derived from the medieval Latin superanus, which in turn comes from the classical Latin superus, “superior”. “Souverain” is documented in 1050 (Guilbert et al. 1977: “souverain”, “souveraineté”). In the definitive form (souveraineté), but in the sense of the authority of parents over children, it was used by Joseph Joubert in his Pensées of 1574 (Imbs 1975: “souveraineté”; although Grimm [2015: 15] states that the souveraineté of the King of France was already spoken of at the end of the fourteenth century)see Scan09744.doc and dpf. Several centuries before, however, the concept that expressed the idea of supreme authority and power had been coined. In Roman law there was no longer only talk of suprema lex (“supreme law” in Latin), but also of legibus solutus (“independent of the laws”, not subject to them) and plena potestas (“full power”). These were two resounding ways of affirming the sovereignty of those who legislated: not only did they have the supreme legislative power, but they were not subject to any law (Post 1943: 356).

The latter was already an important innovation and even a contradiction with the Hellenistic political thought that the Romans had taken from Greece. The principle legibus solutus had nothing to do with “national sovereignty” (to speak of which a millennium was missing). But, as we will see later, the concept of “absolute sovereignty” was forged before the concept of “national sovereignty”. In fact, historically, it arose from it. We must therefore pause to explain why, until the coining of the principle legibus solutus, even the legislators themselves had to submit to the laws in classical Greece and Rome. And that has to do with the concept of “really free man” outlined, among others, by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.

3.2.2. How to Be a Truly Free Man and Deserve Honor in Greece and in the Roman Republic

As Marín (1993) recalls in studying this question, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and others had concluded that the fundamental difference between human beings is at the end of life, but only some men enjoy, meanwhile, true rational freedom. Every man and woman is the product of the sexual union between a woman and a man who already exist. But this result is not a man in the full sense or, better, it does not reach human fullness for that reason alone. To achieve this (according to the mentioned Greeks) more steps had to take and the first was to generate in any man all the psychophysical equipment that corresponds to the human species and that is distinguished from all other living creatures by its rational and free character (according to them).

The conclusion could not go further. There were those who were born malformed, or were malformed later, even to the extent that they could not even reason; much less be free. Their value as men was, consequently, precarious and, in Greek and Roman cities, there were legal regulations that allowed them to be disposed of, killed or alienated. It did not matter that they were children born in families of citizens with full rights and the best social or economic position.

In the best of cases, as a moral duty, a woman or a man of low intelligence had to put himself (or be placed) at the service of another who was more intelligent.

This last statement was expressed by so many, but in such a diverse way, that it was going to cause confusion for centuries in the people who were influenced by Greek culture – as it happened throughout Europe (to begin with) – and it was going to have consequences of the first order. Argued in the simplest way, it was a matter of common sense: it was taken for granted that, when it comes to commanding – in any order of things, in the polis or in the workshop – the best thing is for the one who has the greatest and best capacities for it, that is, the best prepared, the best endowed, to do it. The best endowed, however, not only for his psychophysical development, but also for his training. Conversely, it was natural for the clumsiest to obey the less rude .

Some writers even preferred verbs that had the meaning of “to serve,” rather than “to obey”: the rougher had to serve the less rude. “All wise men are free, and all stupid serfs are serfs,” Cicero wrote (Paradox 5), with clear reference to freedom or interior servitude, that of the soul, and not to the legal condition of free or serf.

But there were those who did reach the latter. It was above all Aristotle’s affirmation that there were “natural serfs”, that is, that they were so by nature, that not a few wise men understood in an institutional sense, and not as a pure metaphor: they had to submit to servitude. The consequence was that, for centuries, they were finding out who those natural serfs of which the Stagirite had spoken could be and there was no way to find them (Kamtekar 2016).

Christians were no strangers to that discussion. At best, they let it go. Jesus Christ had lived in a society where there were serfs. he had expressly asked that they be treated as brothers, but not that servitude be abolished; the first apostles had spread the news of the existence of Jesus Christ throughout the Hellenistic world above all, where there was also servitude, and no one had cared too much, except to say that a Christian can only treat another Christian as a brother, no matter how much of a servant he may be.

For those people of the first centuries of the Christian era, inhabitants of the territory dependent on Rome, serfdom was nothing more than a social condition like any other (even if they were clear that it was the worst). Serfdom was not considered a perverse institution. It was, on the one hand, a lawful form of punishment for certain crimes; on the other, a way of facing – with full freedom – a difficult personal situation, especially from an economic point of view. One could, in effect, submit oneself to servitude to pay off a debt.

The least admissible for us was a third way of arriving at this situation, which consisted of applying to human beings the Latin proverb partus sequitur ventrem (“birth follows the womb”). Probably this sentence was born for cattle, but it was applied to human beings. If you was the son of a handmaid and a free man, you was a serf; if you was the son of a free woman and a servant father, you was free (thus in Digesta, 37.9, passim, where, moreover, in 533 the emperor Justinian was referring to the jurist Ulpian, one the great legal authorities of the Roman second century [Huemoeller 2026]).

In any case, to be truly free, it was not enough for a male not to be a serf and to have satisfactorily developed his rational capacity. In addition, a man was only free if he did not have to work to provide for his needs and those of his family (that is, if others provided for them, usually his servants and serfs). Work to eat freed from the need (to eat); but he did not add an iota to the freedom of the one who carried it out.

Moreover, those who traded and enriched themselves with more than necessary, earning money and acquiring all kinds of movable or immovable property, were no freer either; they simply had more. To be truly free, a man had to do things that were free but also made him more and better. And the more he was and the better he was the more he achieved the benevolence of the gods, the more he had friends.

All this meant that, to be fully free, one had to have any economic need resolved and consecrate oneself to the gods and to others with full gratuitousness (which did not exclude power, but on the contrary). Concretely, in the real life of the Athens that the Stagyrite knew, true freedom could be achieved in one of five ways: (i) by dedicating oneself to worship body and soul, as the priests did in the temples, (ii) by cultivating pure and simple knowledge, (iii) by telling others how they should live and organize themselves, (iv) defending them – if necessary, with arms – and (v), ultimately, governing them. To be in one of these five situations, one had to be a man who did not have to work for a living, because, if he did, he was already acting out of necessity, even if it was only for part of his life.

Deep down, that’s what completely excluded women. The Greeks recognized that every woman tends to freedom just like a man. But motherhood is their main function, and that function does not allow them to devote themselves to governing or fighting or to consecrate themselves to the gods. They could not, therefore, be really free (Fuentes 2012).

If you look closely, you will see that these five ways of attaining the fullness of freedom, because they depend closely on the exercise of reason, had to be rational. That is, freedom was such when it consisted in the full triumph of reason, whether it was expressed (i) in the rules of worship of the temples, (ii) in the domain of speech, (iii) in philosophy and law, (iv) in war or (v) in the decision of government. In the broadest sense, it was, in short, the law, and to be free, therefore, was equivalent to living and making people live according to law, which was the same as saying according to free reason (always, without adding any work to satisfy needs).

All, therefore, had to submit to the law: the freemen because it was the expression of reason, which only they could fully develop, and the others, because they were there to serve the former in accordance with the law (to serve them, in fact, for their own good because it was the service of the servant that made it possible for the servant himself to enjoy a world governed by the right law).

The family that achieved all this deserved to be “honored”; its “honor” must be recognized by everyone else. No one was free to comply with the law; they could never become legibus solutus. As far as I know, this expression appears in the fifth century signed by the emperor Justinian (Merello 1979: 28-9).

3.2.3. The Implication of the Primacy of Peter in the Problem of Plenitudo Potestatis

It is obvious that the Greek idea of real freedom had much to do with theory and that the reality of Greece and Rome was more prosaic (see Cébeillac-Gervasoni and Lamoine 2003). Aristotle himself, who was one of the main definers of the ideal forms of government (aristocracy, monarchy, democracy), recognized that, in practice, the best form was usually mixed. Among other things – he argued -, for things to go well, it was necessary to tolerate a certain amount of corruption. It was not a matter of advocating the corrupt forms of government that corresponded to the three indicated (oligarchy, tyranny and anarchy). But it was necessary to find the right combination of one and the other, and that was so difficult that Aristotle tried to detail it and specialists are still discussing what he meant (thus Seijas 1999: 100-8 ; Ewbank 2005; Giorgini 2019). The few who believe they have understood it conclude that the Stagirite pointed towards a mixture of oligarchy and democracy. When it came down to it, the oligarchs did not usually marginalize the rest of the citizens, nor, in a democracy, would they really manage to govern all citizens, but would delegate power to some. In the end, what was imposed – or should and could be imposed – was a balance of power between the poor and the rich.

This is very serious, of course. But what interests us now is to point out that not only profit, but pure and simple “honor” of being “honored” by others - excuse the redundancy - meant that, more than two millennia later, the condition of “citizens” continued to evoke the idea of freedom. The best proof is that, since the eighteenth century, the word “citizenship” does not exclude peasants in the West world. But, until this came, it was very important that the recognition of the existence of a social group that deserved special consideration be institutionalized by means of a legal statute that would ensure it. This aspect was to be one of the factors that influenced the Latin status (legal status) to contribute to the emergence of the “State” as a set of institutions with which a political community is governed. The importance of this fact in exercising what would be called “national sovereignty” is obvious.

We will return to this. First we have to say that, for the concept of “sovereignty” to be formed, it was very important another consequence of the importance of “honor”. As Roman institutions became Christianized, this ecclesiastical , it was necessary to delimit the potestas that corresponded to the bishop of Rome and that which was proper to the highest civil authority of every political community (the first, the one we call “Roman Empire”). Perhaps this was one of the elements that deformed Christianity when it was imposed on the Roman world. Jesus Christ had avoided all honor and had even said that to win heaven, one had to make oneself small. And the relegation of this warning also had important consequences when Christianity was socially formed. Here we are interested because it was going to be another way to arrive at the concept of “sovereignty.”

In any case, the territorial magnitude of Rome’s jurisdiction makes it very difficult to know whether it was an aristocracy, a monarchy or a democracy. The acronym SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus) had appeared in the first century BC (Moatti 2017) and is still used today. However, a theoretical process had begun to take shape that had been taking shape since the days of Augustus – at the time of the birth of Jesus – but especially since those of Tiberius, who succeeded. The conviction had been imposed that the gods provided – providentia deorum – for the future of men through the capacity for reflection and, therefore, the power of the one in whom they placed authority. Augustus, Tiberius and their successors were thus constituted as divine persons, who generated a divine family, through whose women the legitimacy and success in government was transmitted (Martin 1982: 89-100, 120-7, 274-5). With Aurelianus, in the thirteenth century, the patronage of the supreme deity would move towards the cult of Sol Invictus. In images the legend Providentia deorum remained, but it acquired a distinctly military meaning, as was then the proclamation of the emperor (Vojvoda 2015: 59).

The change would be drastic, of course, with the recognition of the Church by Constantine. Among Christians, the need to delimit the scope of the authority and power of the bishop of Rome came to the fore. They had not forged a political thought of their own, apart from glossing the separation implied by giving to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s, in the words of Jesus Christ. It had also been considered the recognition of the divine origin of all authority, which, therefore, correct or not, had to be obeyed, according to St. Paul. When the Roman rulers learned that Christianity was widespread and that Christians did not take part in the cult of the emperor, some of the followers of Jesus Christ were quick to realize that they had nothing to do with politics. Thanks to their prayers and their sacrifices – Tertulian had argued around the year 200-, the emperor was doing well (Tertuliano 2001: no. 30-9; Sánchez-Salor 1986: 291-292, 399-405.). But it did not prevent them from being persecuted, even in a bloodthirsty way. Thus, the legitimization of the Church by Constantine, with the subsequent conversion of Christianity into the “official religion” under Theodosius, and the definition of the temporal power of the pontiffs as something that reached all spheres, eliminated the mere possibility of advancing along a path that would lead to another destination than the Christian Sacrum Imperium.

• Eusebius de Cesarea

The first great theoretician of the new state of affairs was bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, especially in De laudibus Constantini (335) and in what may have been his own version – now lost – De vita Constantini (337): Eusebius had not the slightest kind of doubt about the spiritual character of the reign of Christ; he even corrected, in this sense, the hypothesis affirmed in the second century by the bishop Papias of Hierapolis according to which Jesus would reign first in this world for a thousand years, until the end of time. It distinguished him, therefore, from the Roman Empire, in which he lived. But he notably developed the idea of the kingship of the Logos, who is Christ, and from there he went on to propose the parallelism between the Father and the Empire (which would be the icon of the former) and between the Logos and the Emperor (who would be mimesis of Christ). God is the origin of all power; but it is concretely the Logos who is the mediator between the Father and creatures and, therefore, it is he too – the Logos – the direct creator of every kingdom, including the Empire of Rome according to Eusebius. Only, in creating the Empire of Rome, God himself would have conceived it as a Christian Empire, in the likeness of the Kingdom of Heaven; an empire that, because it is the latter – the image of the God who is one and only one – would have to be only one.

For this reason, God would not only have created the institution but also chosen the persons of the specific emperors. He would even have endowed the supreme authorities of Rome the celestial imperial virtues and characters: thus temperance, goodness, justice, fortitude, wisdom... and this from the very origin of the city of Rome. Who, because she was not initially a Christian, induced Christ to retain for Himself the direct government of Heaven and to entrust that of men to the angels. After the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus – carried out in the bosom of the Empire itself – which was the victory over Satan, it was no longer necessary for angels to oversee governing men; the Christian emperor had to do it, argued the bishop of Caesarea. His task was therefore to ensure that the universality of law that corresponded to the Church – as the kingdom of Christ on earth – coincided with the universality of fact.

With that, at the end of time, Jesus could be offered his full kingdom. This meant that one could speak of identity between pax romana and pax christiana and between the Christian Roman Empire and the Church as a human community. For the moment, the coincidence had been completed by the time Constantine made the decision to admit the public activity of the Church. From now on, it was up to the emperor to eradicate polyarchy, idolatry and polytheism. And, in return, the emperor had to be obeyed by everyone, including the bishops of the Church of Christ, first and foremost because the Christian Roman emperor had been constituted by God as a universal bishop. Even if he was not properly a bishop, that gave him the supreme power of ministry, the supreme power of the magisterium, and the supreme power of government.

• Saint Jerome

It must be borne in mind that Eusebius of Caesarea did not properly recognize the apostolic primacy of St. Peter – nor did he deny it – but a special relevance in the task of giving stability to the Church (Farina 1966; Maraval 2001; Johnson & Schott 2013). Eusebius did not explain this relevance because of the statement made by St. Matthew (16:16-18) about the role of St. Peter, as Origen had done in the third century and Chriysostom and Jerome ratified in the generation that followed that of Eusebius of Caesarea. Eusebius thought that the primate of saint Peter was the result of a special providence of God, which culminated in leading Peter to Rome and allowing him to be martyred precisely there, where he wanted to lay the foundations of the Church, in the place where God himself had already allowed that correlate of the Church to be erected, which was the Empire. His successors, therefore, were but specially distinguished bishops, subject like the others to the emperor. It cannot even be said that they were, for Eusebius, successors of the apostles. Although the thinking of Eusebius of Caesarea changed over the years, it can be said that, in the end, it was the martyrs – and therefore St. Peter and St. Paul as martyrs – whom he had as successors of the apostles (Twomey 1982: 47-50, 64-7, 221-9).

This was combined with different ecclesiologies, among which Zakharov (2017) highlights two, whose theology had been cleared, on the one hand, by saint Irenaeus and Tertullian since around the year 200, the pope Julius (†352), saint Athanasius of Alexandria (†352), and had been assumed in the conclusions of the council of Constantinople in 382. This ecclesiological line was especially concerned about the spatial, geographical character of the development of the Church and its consequent institutional articulation. They were not opposed, but they were different positions from those who emphasized the universal and hierarchical character of the Church. In this second line, saint Cyprian of Carthage (†258), saint Basil the Great (†379), Palladius of Ratiara, who died after the year 391 according to the data provided by Bishop Vigílio in the following century, had stood out.

According to Zakharov, a third line had emerged from council of Serdica (343). Here, Bishops proclaimed the Roman See the only center of catholic communion and invested it with special legal prerogatives. In fact, this model was the result of ecclesiological synthesis of two early conceptions of apostolicity. Pope Damasus, developing the doctrine of the Roman See as sedes apostolica, put the principle of Roman primacy above the principle of synodal consensus. Eastern bishops did not support this interpretation of the church order, defending the autonomy of the Eastern Churches. They proclaimed Constantinople ‘New Rome’, in fact denying the uniqueness of the status of the Church of Rome.

Saint Jerome (†420) does not contradict or agree with Eusebius in his letter to pope saint Damasus in 376-7: “I speak with the successor of the fisherman and the disciple of the cross. Following none but Christ as my primate, I am united in communion with Your Beatitude – that is with the chair of Peter” (Letter 15: ed. by Lawler 1963: 71). But his vision of the Empire is different, even though he maintained the desire that it coincide with the Church in its latitude. The previous Roman idea of providentia deorum had no difficulty in linking up with his theory of empires. Jerome ended up his vision of this question outlining it as an interpretation of the one that the prophet Daniel had made of a certain dream of Nebuchadnezzar almost a millennium earlier. Daniel had understood that Nebuchadnezzar’s empire would beget another empire, and this a third, and finally there would be a fourth empire, “strong as iron,” which would break everything as iron breaks (Daniel 2, 36ss. in Sánchez-Salor 1986: 231-2).

For saint Jerome, the emergence of a Christian Roman Empire was providential. He could not foresee all the consequences that this process would have. He was, on the other hand, aware of what barbarian invasions meant. He was not unaware of the sack of Rome in 410. The miscegenation had begun with the Christianization of the Roman world but also with the Romanization of Christianity and opted for its hope in the maintenance of a Christian Empire that today seems utopian to us (Ibidem, 194-236, 272-292; Lavacude 2020: 24-5, 47-55, 83-117, 154-9). His vision could not see amiss that Christians not only obeyed the authority of the emperor, as they certainly should according to St. Paul, but that some of them came to form a Christian imperial nobility, including the conviction that they were truly free and deserving of honor (Salzman 2002).

• Augustine of Hippo

It is remarkable that the primacy of Peter and that of his successors as bishops of Rome was strengthened when some bishops of the East wanted to make it clear that the emperor lacked authority over them and that, therefore, the ecclesiology of Eusebius was not correct. At the end of a complex process, in a decree of the synod of Rome in 382, pope Saint Damasus also declared the primacy of the Roman See over Christendom, although the Petrine doctrine would take time to fully develop (Dell’Osso 2006). In any case, it was St. Augustine who took the first great step by emphasizing that the emperor’s mission was not religious, but to make it easier for his subjects to live together.

For the bishop of Hippo, salvation is eschatological, and everything in this world is provisional. Saint Augustine did not try, therefore, to propose a Christian nature for this world, but to let it be the world and to seek itself – the world – its own good, according to its own logic. That did not amount to affirming a positive view of the world (Andrés-Gallego 2024). But Augustine was clear that Christianity does not have as its purpose – nor as one of its aims, among others – to alienate itself from the Empire or to identify with it. All the empires of the world are, for Augustine, “earthly” and therefore subject to their own internal logic and to the limitations of men, who, among other things, are born with original sin. The purpose of the Empire is none other than to make possible the peaceful enjoyment of temporal goods, that is, coexistence. And this may even advise that human laws that are alien to the natural law and even contrary to it should be tolerated. Christians—who are in the world but are not of the world—do not have to force the change of the community by means of positive laws, by encouraging and claiming them from the rulers, but with their holiness, as vehicles of grace. It is another thing for his holiness to generate social goodness and for this to result in the promulgation of laws closer to Christian beliefs. The only thing that must be demanded in any case is the freedom of the Church to spread the Gospel (Ratzinger 1972: 51-77).

The truth is that the Christian political theorists who wrote after the bishop of Hippo interpreted his thought differently, and the ideal to be achieved seemed to them to be indeed a humanity grouped in the one Church and ruled by the same emperor (according to Arquillière’s much-debated classic [1935] 1955; see Atkins and Dodaro 2001; Dufal 2008; Souza 2014). On the other hand, the problem of the limits of pontifical power was not resolved. On the contrary, canonists of the twelfth century rescued the Roman concept of plena potestas and eventually that of plenitudo potestatis (“plenitude of power”). And around 1200, Innocent III declared that his power as pope also encompassed temporal matters (Nieto-Soria 2000).

3.2.4. From the Ius Commune to the Second Scholasticism

The confrontation was served. In the thirteenth century, the plenitudo potestatis was also attributed to the princeps (“prince” in Latin, a generic way of giving name to the one we now call “head of state” (Engster 2001: 47-50). In fact, there had never been a lack of those who leaned towards a dualistic solution (Quaglioni 2005, 2007-2008, 2012). It was difficult, however, to find a way to express it in a form that left no doubt. Especially fortunate was the explanation given by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux in the twelfth century, in his work De considerationes: the pope used two swords, he argued; one was spiritual and he used it personally, and the other was material and he exercised it through the princeps. In this case, Bernard explained, the pontiff intervened in criminis, in the sense of judging the form of exercising secular potestas in a just manner (Prodi 2008: 58).

It can be costly assured that, at the end of the fourteenth century, this criterion predominated. The debate continued. Now they fed him jurists of the newly born universities who devoted themselves to glossing the set formed by the Roman law of Justinian and the canon law compiled by Graziano in the twelfth century. In this way, a corpus of legal doctrine emerged that we know today as common law (ius commune in Latin) in which, among many other things, the question of the limits of power was addressed from very different perspectives (see Von Gierke 1963: no. 189-90, 337-9).

From the year 1378, moreover, the affirmation of the pope’s plenitudo potestatis was opposed to the movement we call “conciliarism”, powered by what historians call the “schism of the West” (1378) was declared. It did not make sense that there were two bishops of Rome and there were even three. This problem was solved in 1423 with the death of Pope Luna. But the idea that the ecumenical council had authority superior to that of the pope did not end that fact. Long before 1378, episcopal status had become in part one of the ways to get the scions of noble families to maintain a status appropriate to their condition, and that – nepotism – had become a serious problem in the Church itself. It was not always ambition for power; remember what we said about the role attributed to “honor” in classical Greece and assimilated by Roman culture. Like it or not, some of the popes from the fifteenth century onwards accepted regalism precisely because they could not curb the nepotism with which benefices were allocated – in the canonical sense of the term – in the Roman curia.

One way to avoid this was to grant lay principes the “right of presentation” of candidates for ecclesiastical benefices at all levels: the princeps “presented” the elect or eligible candidates to the bishop of Rome and the bishop of Rome made it a formal appointment. The plenitudo potestatis, therefore, could only be exercised in an absolute way by the bishops of Rome in the Papal States. But this had also turned the status of pope into a disputed perk between aristocratic families.

For the reasons we will see, we will focus on just one example: the Borgia family (from the place name Borja, Aragonese). One of his members, Alfonso de Borja, was a professor of Law at the University of Lleida and became tutor to an illegitimate son of Alfonso V of Aragon. He successfully mediated in the confrontation between this monarch and Pope Martin V and was appointed bishop of Valencia. Pope Eugene IV made him a cardinal; he went on to serve in the Roman curia and was made pope in 1455. As bishop of Rome, under the name of Callistus III, he made cardinals of two of his nephews, one of whom would come to the papal throne in 1492 with the name of Alexander VI. The latter’s relations with a lady of the Farnese family influenced the appointment of one of his brothers – Alexander Farnese – as cardinal. He would become pope in 1534 with the name Paul III and, as such, he appointed cardinals two of his grandsons. And we should still add a great-great-grandson of Alexander VI: Innocent X (1644) (La Parra 1996).

In 1692, Pope Innocent XII issued the bull Romanum decet Pontificem, which forbade his successors to grant rents, offices, or estates to his relatives. At most, they could make one of them a cardinal. But that only stopped the nepotism in the head, which was the bishop of Rome himself. In the Roman curia, these uses did not simply cease (Röder & Curcuruto 2014).

It is fair to remember that, among the popes of the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, there were others who stood out for their virtues and that some of them were canonized (St. Pius V in 1712) or beatified (Innocent XI in 1956) and that there was also holiness in the Borgias. If I have dwelt on the Borgia family, it is because one of its offspring decided – in the fullness of his temporal power – which, over time, turned out to be extremely important.

• The Requerimiento

In 1493, by the bull Inter caetera, Alexander VI granted the kings of Portugal and Castile jurisdiction over the newly explored lands on both sides of the Atlantic: in Africa and in what was to be called America. He did so – the bull expressly reads – “de apostolice potestatis plenitudine”. It was not the first time that a pope had granted full civil jurisdiction over a territory because of his own plenitude of power (see Sevilla 2006). But perhaps none had the scope of this one. The two halves of the world that resulted from this division between Spain and Portugal were the object of the same intention: to evangelize their people. But the awarding of “full power” over them to the two Iberian monarchs was to show some of the worst consequences of this plenitude of power.

Based on the donation of Alexander VI, Ferdinand the Catholic approved in 1513 a Requerimiento. It was the main result of the meetings of theologians and jurists gathered in Burgos and Valladolid in 1512-1513, which should henceforth serve to publicly justify the conquests made in the so-called “Indies” and, above all, as a legal instrument with which they would be made effective. The Requirement (“Requerimiento” in Spanish) consisted in telling the indigenous chiefs that God had made Saint Peter lord and superior of all men, with the whole world by his kingdom and jurisdiction; that one of the successors of Saint Peter had given those islands and mainland of the Ocean Sea to the kings of Spain and that, therefore, they required them – I paraphrase the text – to recognize the Church as mistress and superior of the universe world, and the Supreme Pontiff, called Pope, in her name, and the Emperor and Queen Doña Juana, our lords, in their place, and thereby consent to the religious preaching the Catholic faith to them (in Pereña 1992: 237-9).

The truth is that this paragraph belongs to the text of the Requirement that was read in Peru and that the document was adapted in each case to what the respective conqueror or missionary considered most prudent (even if it was imprudent). Thus, in the instructions given by the governor of Cuba to Hernán Cortés when he sent him to Yucatán, in 1518, he was ordered to do this:

“Fourth, you will urge them that the Indians peacefully give themselves to the service of His Majesty the King of Spain, so that the Spaniards will not have a battle or war with them.

“Fifth, you will let them know that the main thing by which His Majesty permits the discovery of new lands is for the initiation and conversion of as many Indians as have been and are outside our holy faith” (ibidem 46).

Certainly, when he explained to Emperor Charles V what he had said to other natives on the way to Mexico City, Hernán Cortés already added a different nuance that was also part, in his case, of the Requirement: he told them that, if they obeyed their new monarch – the European – “they would be very well treated and kept in justice, and their persons and estates protected; and if they did not do so, they would be prosecuted and punished according to justice” (ibid. 48).

But, in later versions, he returned to the peaceful tone, especially when he encouraged the twelve Franciscan missionaries who had arrived from Spain a few months earlier to meet with the Aztec “lords and satraps” on the Anahuac plateau in 1524. The Franciscans were fragmenting the Requerimiento point by point. Each day, they read one to the Aztec authorities and, on that basis, they urged them – in fact, they encouraged them with the greatest humility – to accept Christianity, without any threat. De facto, the “satraps and lords” converted, and after them their subjects, as is clearly stated in the act that, in Spanish and Nahuatl, Fray Bernardino de Sahagún immediately wrote (Sahagún 1984; see Zaballa 1990; Caffera 2000). The idea that what was expounded by the twelve Franciscans was precisely the Requerimiento, I deduce from the mere comparison of their words with those of the various versions of the Requerimiento transcribed by Pereña (1992: 45-50, 237-9).

But the same did not happen in Peru, in whose conquest, begun in 1533, the reading of the Requerimiento – to the natives gathered in the plaza of Cajamarca with their monarch, the Inca Atahualpa – constituted the main express justification and ended in a bloody manner.

• Azpilcueta and Vitoria

Before dwelling on the consequences of this last fact, chronology advises an aside, and that is to remember that, in 1513, Julius II had excommunicated the kings of Navarre for allying themselves against him with Louis XII of France. Besides, he had expressly written the warning that the subjects of the Navarrese monarch were exempt from the duty of fidelity they had sworn to him. As a result, Ferdinand the Catholic found justification for being accepted as monarch in the Cortes of the Navarrese kingdom.

Four years later, in 1517, Luther posted his ninety-five theses on the door of the church attached to Wittenberg Palace, and in 1532, Henry VIII of England asserted his superiority over the Church of England. He had repudiated his wife Catherine of Aragon, daughter of Ferdinand the Catholic, without the consent of the pope. The events in Cajamarca occurred the following year, 1533.

I point out all this because, in a very different way in each case, all this implied the problem of the pontifical auctoritas to intervene in temporal matters. Thus, it is possible that anyone of these facts led a Spanish humanist to argue forcefully, no longer doubtedly, about the only indirect power of the popes in temporal affairs. Only that meant the illegitimacy of the bulls with which Alexander VI – Spanish too – had granted the kings of Castile the lands discovered on the other side of the Atlantic. That could force the kings of Spain to reconsider their jurisdiction over the New World.

The humanist I mention was the one who would go down in history as Doctor Navarro, Martín de Azpilcueta, whose importance in the philosophy of Law was especially relevant during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the whole Christian world, also the protestant one. He was a supporter of the excommunicated and defeated kings of Navarre, and this suggests that perhaps the doubt that had already spread about that excommunication of 1513 weighed on him. Defeated, he accepted the new dinasty and returned to Navarre in 1523-1524 through the pass of Roncesvalles, of whose collegiate church Francisco of Navarre was prior. Francisco was a member of the defeated dynasty itself, but his priory appointment had been accepted by Charles V (already King Charles I of Castile and Navarre, as grandson of Ferdinand the Catholic. The prior encouraged him to take the habit of the order of canons regular of St. Augustine, which was the one that governed Roncesvalles, and he joined the ecclesiastical chapter for the necessary time to complete the novitiate. Then, without either of them having to resign from their positions, the two – Francisco and Azpilcueta – set sail for Salamanca. Martín entered that university – although he was forced to obtain his doctorate again – and won the chair of his specialty. He pronounced his first relectio precisely De potestate civile (“On Civil Power”) in 1528. Twenty years later, transferred to the University of Coimbra, he would pronounce here a new relectio. In it he expounded again the doctrine of the indirect power of the pope over temporal things and about the origin of authority and said that he had already said it twenty years ago, “that happy day in which, in Salamanca, in an outstanding and very large meeting of scholars and scholars, we defended, for the first time and before anyone else, not without great applause, the conclusions indicated” (in Otaduy 1988: 317).

That he said this in 1548, two years after the death of Francisco de Vitoria and the same year in which, at the University of Salamanca, the agreement was made to publish the complete works of the Dominican – which, unfortunately, was not carried out (Orrego 2004: 118n) – is surely no coincidence. There was something, if only the itch to set the record straight. Vitoria, certainly, had expounded this same doctrine and it is said that he did so in 1528 as well. Whether this was the case or not, in Vitoria - Castilian of Burgos - what happened with the excommunication of the kings of Navarre should not have weighed as in Azpilcueta. Perhaps Alexander VI’s concession of the people on the other side of the Atlantic did, or the problem already posed by Henry VIII in England, or both, or all three. In 1528, it is probable that the jurists and theologians of the University of Salamanca looked with greater concern towards Europe, where the repudiation of an infanta of the Spanish royal house, sister of Queen Juana and aunt of Emperor Charles V, Catalina of Aragon, had just been consummated. It is also plausible that the Spanish monarch – who took the side of his aunt – asked for advice on a problem that once again called into question the limits of pontifical authority.

Francisco de Vitoria summarized his doctrine in 1538 in his first Relectio de indis. If Christ did not have temporal dominion, much less will the pope, who is only his vicar. It does have an indirect one, in terms of spiritual things that are affected by authority over the temporal. He could, therefore, he continued explicitly, entrust the evangelization of the people of the New World to the kings of Spain and even prohibit it to others. He could even prohibit these others from trading with those lands, to prevent Christian princes from hindering them in the main task, which is to spread the Gospel. But nothing more.

Ten years earlier, at the end of the twenties, by the royal preachers gathered in the Dominican convent of Santa Catalina, in Barcelona: ignorance of the faith, they said, was not enough to take away from the Indian lords the dominion over their lands (Murillo 116-7).

It was not, in fact, a reflection that was confined to America. What they wanted to warn was that it was one thing for the apostasy of a Christian prince to render him illegitimate and thus enable any other Christian prince to throw him out of power, and quite another for a Gentile authority, who did not know Christianity and had not been baptized, to be thrown out of the government. It was a consequence of the doctrine of Saint Augustine and Sanit Thomas on the lawfulness of coercively persecuting apostates.

• The Question of the Origin of Power: The Pactum subiectionis

But the Second Scholasticism did not stop there; continued to systematize and refine what some of the theoreticians of ius commune had proposed in the previous two hundred years and ended up proposing a whole political theory (see Tierney 1983). It has sometimes been written that it was only in the fourteenth century that the first of the main points that were to make representative and participatory political systems possible had begun to take shape in the Christian world itself: “pactism”. The truth is that the idea is already in the thirteenth century in St. Thomas according to Schmidt (2015). In the words of this author, Aquinas had resorted to Aristotle’s political thought to elaborate a conceptual framework that would guide rulers at the present time. He had arrived at the dualism that we have seen, expressed in another way. According to him, the Christian community is governed by two authorities. There is a civil government, that guides it so that the members of the community can live the “good life” (a fundamental concept of classical Greece). But that only achieves natural perfection. To achieve supernatural perfection and salvation, every human being depends on the authority of the pontiff.

This approach was going to have bass consequences that we can only point out here. It could be deduced from this that every man has a double end, one natural and the other supernatural. Now, if supernature is a free gift of God, only what is received by nature is demandable, and this poses an obvious problem for divine justice. God cannot demand what man has received by his free divine gift. We cannot dwell on this issue, which constitutes one of the most pressing theological problems posed above all in the twentieth century (Andrés-Gallego 2004d, 2012b). What interests us here is to see how this led Aquinas to speak of the existence of a pact. According to him, the political community has a natural origin and, historically, existed before the Church and coexists with it; but Church and community have different purposes. That of the community is a strictly natural end: to remain united and to sustain the harmony of the social order, Aquinas explained in his treatise De regno. However, for this to happen, all citizens must have a certain degree of participation in the government itself. He went so far as to insinuate that the community has legitimate capacity to enact laws, and the ruler cannot break them. Every positive law presupposes a rational ordering to the common good. But neither Aquinas nor the theologians and jurists of the Second Scholasticism of the sixteenth century were able to distinguish clearly between representation and participation. They said, yes, that, since the ruler is part of the community, he had to act in harmony with it. But they were clearer in defending the legal value of custom as a limit to the exercise of government.

Both – Aquinas and the Scholastics three centuries later – claimed that the foundation of this mode of governing is a pact - tacit or explicit - and this political pact implies a right to resistance in the face of an unjust government. The political pact is a pactum subiectionis (“pact of subjection”) that implies shared responsibilities and thus makes possible the lawfulness of disobedience when the regis officium (“office of king”) is not respected. The expressions pactus subiectionis and translatio imperii (“transfer of power”) were already in common use among thirteenth-century theologians and jurists (according to Schmidt 2015: 23).

Among the glossators who gave rise to the ius commune, a similar idea appears in the fourteenth century. According to them, politically organized societies usually had their origin in a pact between a people and a person who, because of this agreement. This person was constituted as princeps and as such could be maintained on the condition that it respected a specific normative body, that is, not a general system of rights but a specific historical system that was the counterpart of the agreement, therefore a lex privata, a “privi-lege”.

In some monarchies, “pactism” had been imposed not without difficulties. It had been opened as a claim to a historical right (as if, historically, that pact had taken place, which is what the leading Englishmen argued around the year 1100 and was consolidated with the Magna Carta in 1215). The Kingdom of Navarre imposed it on the Frenchman King Theobald of Champagne in 1234 and the Aragonese in 1283 on Peter III.

As a strict political doctrine, “pactism” was adopted by Marsilius of Padua in the Defensor Pacis, written around 1324; in the same fourteenth century by the Franciscan Francesco Eiximenis, and in the fifteenth century by Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, in the Concordantia catholica. But, in the same Quatrocento, a civic humanism still developed, with a Platonic background, which incipiently marginalized natural law in favor of the idea of belonging to a unity. And that unity was already called “state” at the end of that same century and was open to absolutism. It was the penultimate consequence of turning Cicero’s proposed triad into a hierarchy: rhetoric, morality and law. If rhetoric prevailed over morality and was sanctioned by law, moral universalism was broken and the prince – who was the legislator – became a priest, the definer of morality (Swiezawski 1990: 165-7, 172-4).

It was going to have continuity. But, first, we cannot overlook the fact that the De optima politia by El Tostado (bishop of Ávila in the fifteenth century who had glossed Aristotle’s Politics in that text and had come to the conclusion that democracy should be preferred) was given to the press a few months after the relectio of Martín de Azpilcueta in 1528 [De Madrigal 2003]).

• The indirect power of the bishop of Rome over temporal matters

The Hispanic scholastics of the sixteenth century would in fact opt for this other path: they purified, systematized and sought a justification that could be definitive and universal for “pactism”. The connection with the question of America and the Alexandrian bulls was obvious: if the pope did not have direct authority over the temporal, who did? The former, they said, in whom the political community itself places it.

The statement is already resoundingly in that opinion that Don Martín de Azpilcueta read in Salamanca in 1528: “The kingdom is not of the king, but of the community, and the royal power itself does not belong by natural right to the king, but to the community, which, therefore, cannot entirely detach itself from it” (in Otaduy 1988: 316-7).

In case there were any doubts, Francisco de Vitoria would dispel them at the end of the thirties of the sixteenth century and take a position on the events of the Plaza de Cajamarca in Peru. Vitoria would argue decisively: it is not that the community ceded authority to the prince in exchange for him respecting specific conditions – which is what the “pactists” came to affirm – but that the community generated in itself – within the community itself – the competent body (whether natural or legal person) that should exercise power, and the latter to the extent and with the attributions that the social body itself decides. What there was, therefore, was not a pact, but a concentration of power in one organ, a delegatio (De Balbín 1964: 143-4.)

As we can see, scholars of these issues have not always reached fully convergent conclusions. But they all make one thing clear: it made no sense to speak of absolutism: “It is not possible to make such a distinction between ordinary and absolute power in human kings,” writes Bishop Diego de Covarrubias in Variarum resolutionum. “This is an absurd and most false division [...], we must flee and abhor entirely the mere mention of absolute power”. When kings act in accordance with divine, natural and human law, he added, their power is never absolute, but ordinary, and, outside these three juridical spheres, they can do nothing. To get out of them is tyranny.

Another thing is that a particular political community decides to delegate all authority to the prince. In these circumstances, the prince can legislate as he sees fit. That was, in his opinion, the case of the kings of Castile. But authority belongs to the community and never alienates it completely. Besides, in any case, it is always subject to divine and natural law (Covarrubias 1552; 1561; 1724: II, 307, 492-515).

Historians suppose that all this could have sown problems of conscience in Charles V, especially about the lawfulness of remaining as king of Navarre and as sovereign of the kingdoms of the Indies, and that this led him to abdicate in favour of his son Philip and brother Ferdinand at the end of 1555 and the beginning of 1556. A few months earlier, in April 1555, his mother, Queen Juana, daughter of Ferdinand the Catholic and imprisoned since 1514 in Tordesillas for alleged insanity, had died. She had been the legitimate queen until then, but incapacitated.

Ferdinand accepted the imperial crown of the Habsburgs in 1558 and Philip II king of Aragon and Castile, on both sides of the Atlantic and the Pacific, and heir to all the Flemish, Burgundian and Italian territories in which his father had ruled. He was already king consort of England by his marriage to his cousin Mary Tudor in 1554. Certainly, the power that all this implied and the concessions made to the German Protestants in the Peace of Augsburg in September 1555 may have weighed more heavily on Charles V than his own doubts about the legitimacy of his jurisdiction over the kingdoms of the Indies and Navarre. He abdicated but did not renounce those territories. Bajo el gobierno de los Austrias, hubo un paralelismo práctico sorprendente, riguroso y significativo entre las peticiones regias castellanas que se dirigían a los virreyes de Indias para que enviaran remesas de tanta o cuanta plata y las reales órdenes a fin de que se formasen en el centro de Europa tales o cuales cuerpos de ejército para luchar contra los herejes o sus aliados católicos (Martín-Acosta 1992).

The controversy over the fair titles (“justos títulos” in Spanish) of the Conquest of the New World lost one of its main incentives. Among some theologians of Salamanca, recourse to the much more debatable doctrine of prescription had already been chosen. In the last analysis, just or not in principle, the peaceful possession of America had prescribed.

Some preferred a pragmatic reason: in fact, since 1492, a Christianity had been formed on the other side of the Atlantic and, with the Protestant threat in between, it was not possible to abandon those peoples. Another thing was what concerned the Requirement. As Vitoria said, the Christianization of these peoples had to be done peacefully: with no other instrument than conviction and grace.

Not only that, but Christianization itself could not be part of the constitutive pact of authority, if they accepted the king of Spain: the indigenous people who freely submit to Christian princes on the condition that they are not forced to believe in the Christian religion cannot be coerced to convert and must be respected for the religious freedom agreed upon.

This is important. Some of these theologians affirmed this with such force that they came close to the assertion that this respect is due to the character of the image and likeness of God that man’s nature has. They did not say so, certainly, but they did say that every man has the same right to declare his convictions. In the middle of the sixteenth century, the Dominican Pedro de Sotomayor came to publicly wonder why the sultan of the Turks should not have the same right to conquer Spain to make the Spaniards Mohammedans (Pereña 1992: 147).

This did not prevent the extra ecclesia nulla salus (“outside the Church there is no salvation”), a dogma defined in the fifteenth century, from continuing to be taken as true. The Jesuit Acosta – the main theoretician of the missions ad gentes – explicitly recalled this before the end of the sixteenth century in his De procuranda indiorum salute: it was necessary to be evangelized and baptized to achieve salvation. And it was also necessary – noted theologians of note such as the Augustinian Pedro de Aragón and the Dominican Domingo Báñez – to know the fundamental truths of the Christian, which were precisely what one had to believe to remain within the Church (Jericho 2005). In 1567, however, Pope Pius V had condemned an extreme interpretation of the former—the necessity of evangelization—by condemning the claim that “purely negative infidelity in those among whom Christ has not been preached is sin.” He did not mention the source; but it had been sentenced by the theologian Miguel Bayo (Denzinger 1963: 288).

3.2.5. Between the Tradition of the Law of the Roman Republic and the Imperial Law

Although the distinction is not as sharp as would be desirable, scholars of Roman law usually distinguish between a republican law (de la res-publica) and imperial law (thus Kriegel 1998). In the sixteenth century, the Second Scholasticism, through the knowledge of the ius commune, came to systematize and develop republican law, while Jean Bodin would base his idea of the “absolute sovereignty” of the King of France on imperial law.

• Civitas and cives

Strictly speaking, the so-called Roman republican law was prior to the so-called imperial law. It developed in the last four centuries before Jesus Christ and, from the point of view of the history of concepts, was not based on the natio, but above all on the patria (“homeland” in Latin) and on the civitas (“city”). In Latin, patria was philologically the place of origin of the parents (from pater, “father” in Latin). The patria could be the place inhabited by the gens from which one came. But in a broader meaning, it could be the place of whose inhabitant community – the populus – a person was a part, regardless of whether this populus was the gens to which that same person belonged.

This second meaning was imposed by the singularity of Rome. It was a civitas – the urbs par excellence – to whose jurisdiction belonged what we now call the “Roman Empire”. I say that today we call the jurisdictional territory of the Urbs “Roman Empire” because it was called in several different ways throughout its history. Imperium means “power”, “command”, in Latin. It was a military designation, as the “emperor” (imperator) was the person who had the command of the army.

It is important that we keep all these nuances, given the importance they had in subsequent history. I just said that the human community par excellence was the “city” (polis in Greek, civitas in Latin) in the classical centuries. We could add that natio and gens coincided in being human communities shaped by life assumed in the family, while the civitas was the place inhabited by a human community complex enough to be sufficient for itself.

But not all members of a community were considered cives (“citizens” in Latin). In this respect, the Romans had adopted the criteria of classical Greece and had added to it what some Romans might think that required the peculiarity of Rome’s jurisdiction. In Greek cities, women, serfs, and foreigners were not recognized as “citizens.” The latter was obvious: if someone was legally a “foreigner” (metic in Greek), he was not legally a “citizen”, with all that this entailed. Nor is it necessary to argue why a serf could not be considered a “citizen” since the latter condition was of the highest degree. The case of women was more difficult to justify. People were clear that every woman tends to freedom as a man does. But, as we saw, to be truly free required conditions that only a man could have.

All the cities located in the territory of Rome’s jurisdiction considered in a special way those who were recognized as “citizens” of each of them. But, being in the jurisdiction of Rome, they could also be “Roman citizens”, if they managed to be considered so for one reason or another. When that happened, that “citizen” had two homelands and, therefore, a double loyalty: to Rome and to his civitas of origin (Bonjour 1975). Saint Paul (formerly Saul of Tarsus) was a patriot of Tarsus and Rome, and the poet Martial longed for his patria Bilbilis, in Hispania, when he lived in his patria Rome (Dolç 1953, 1987), both in the first century of our era.

I dwell on all this because the imposition of the word natio on its synonym gens, of which we have spoken, did not affect that meaning of the word patria. It never stopped being used. It was simply clear that natio concerned the belonging that we can call “carnal” and patria to the original space of the parents, the place of family roots, the “fatherland”. It should be remembered that, when founding a city, the Romans used to bury in the center of the space chosen for this purpose a casket, the mundus, which contained relics of their ancestors (Trías 2000: 16-7).

It is not necessary here to trace the evolution of the concept of “citizen” for what we intend to conclude is, in short, the weight of Roman republican law in the Second Scholasticism. The fact is unique because the code in force then (and until the nineteenth century) in Castile was the Siete Partidas, definitively imposed as a legal order by the Ordinance of Alcalá, promulgated by Alfonso XI in 1348. (I do not enter the debate on the process of elaboration of the text, which had begun a century earlier with Alfonso X the Wise [see Fradejas 2024].) And the Partidas were based on imperial Roman law as Justinian had it elaborated. It is true that it must have been drawn up by a group of jurists who did not hesitate to also resort to canon law and Castilian fueros and customs. In fact, the wording of the first ten laws of the Second Part, where the origin and extent of the authority and power of the emperor and the king are discussed, does not contain an entirely absolutist vision. Its authors did not forget to speak of tyranny as a vice (see LSP 1807: II). But, in the sixteenth century, among the Scholastics, the idea prevailed that, in Castile, the authority of the monarch had no other limit than divine and natural law; something that did not happen in the crown of Aragon (although it had been discussed in the fifteenth-century Castile [Nieto-Soria 2008]). In any case, that is why Ferdinand the Catholic, king of Aragon and king consort of Castile, had no objection – as far as is known – to the territories found on the other side of the Atlantic being incorporated into the latter crown. This implied that they were “realengos”, that is, subject to the direct authority of the Castilian monarch (Castaño 2018).

The Partidas, therefore, were in force in the kingdoms of the Indies until their independence at the beginning of the nineteenth century as far as public law was concerned; because private civil law took longer to be codified in the American republics that emerged in the first third of the Ottocento and that meant that, in some countries, the validity of the Partidas in private civil law – in particular family law – was maintained until the beginning of the twentieth century (García-Rodulfo 2026).

• Absolute sovereignty: Jean Bodin

There is not much to add to what was supposed in this story Les six livres de la Republique (1576) by Jean Bodin, where the French humanist proposed the quasi-absolute sovereignty of the princeps for the case of France. Bodin, in fact, used the term souveraineté as a synonym for absolute power over the republic (res-publica, political community). In support of it was the exegetical tradition derived from Roman imperial law. He showed great knowledge of the ius commune that we will call imperial. That is why it seems implausible to us that he was unaware of the doctrinal elaboration of the Second Scholasticism, to which we have referred. He did not mention any of its works or its theses. Of course, with more reason, he was also silent about what Covarrubias had written in Variarum resolutionum (1552), which was already circulating in the rest of Europe. (Latin remained the lingua franca for all Christians in the West.) I am referring to the affirmation of the Castilian philosopher and bishop who Covarrubias was that it didn’t make sense to distinguish between ordinary power and absolute power of kings and that “we must flee and abhor entirely the mere mention of absolute power”.

Catholic as Bodin was (Franklin 1973: 70-92), he affirmed in the Republic that the exercise of authority must respect divine and natural law; but, about this, he warned, in passing, that it was difficult to establish what it consisted of (which, it must be said, had also been the conclusion of Aquinas: the further we depart from the more general natural laws, the more difficult is to solve questions according to the natural law). St. Thomas even advised that, in such cases, it is best to seek advice from experienced people.

Bodin said nothing of divine right, nor did he therefore consider how it could be reconciled with his main conclusion, which was that the monarch should not interfere too much in religious affairs that divided his subjects. It should not be forgotten that the reason for his work was precisely the division of the French into Catholics and Huguenots. The divine law to which the king had to submit - Bodin pondered - what was it?, or who decided which it was?, the king himself?, the pope? And, if so, what to do with the Calvinists?

And since he did not take up the doctrines of those scholastics on authority as a delegation carried out by the political community, he limited himself to assuming, also in passing, that authority came from God. But from that he jumped to the assertion that absolute sovereignty resided in the king, that he had no account to anyone for what he had not received from anyone, nor, therefore, for that absolute exercise of sovereignty. Consequently, there was no reason why the subjects could resist him. The right of resistance – which the Scholastics carried to the possibility of tyrannicide – was expressly denied: tyrannicide could not be licit in a system of government whose prince was not obliged to be accountable to anyone.

He still questioned whether custom or pact bound the king (as Vitoria, Covarrubias, Soto and the other scholastics who dealt with it had insisted). And he concluded that it did not; because it did not make sense that those who had and exercised all the power considered themselves committed to themselves (about all this Franklin 1973: 47-8, 93-102; Quaglioni 1992: 11-3, 22-4, 34, 200-25, 270-1).

What Bodino did remember is that the purpose of the exercise of power was the good of the community and, therefore, it made no sense for it to be exercised against it. This led him to conclude that, in addition to divine law (which was not known) and – with the decisive exception we have mentioned – natural law -, there were some fundamental laws that the monarch could not break: at least, the hereditary nature of the crown and the inalienability of the kingdom (Mesnard 1962; Franklin 1973: 70-92).

• Absolutism as Alienation

Franklin himself speaks of the inconsistency of Bodin’s reasoning (ibidem 93-102), and I think he is right; his is not a systematic work, and he frequently resorts to evading questions on the grounds of difficulty. If their position was accepted, Catholic political right theorists had no choice but to develop the doctrine of direct divine right. And this is what another French theorist, Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, did in the Politique tirée des propres paroles de l’Écriture Sainte, which, unfinished and posthumously, would be published as early as 1709. His study of the Bible, which continually showed God’s direct involvement in the guidance and appointment of the authorities of the Chosen People, led him to conclude that the rulers of God’s new people—Christendom—received authority directly from the Creator, and not from any covenant with the governed. In Bossuet there was not the hint of tolerance that Bodin pointed out (see Rouanet 2025).

The doctrine of the direct divine origin of the authority of princes had been revived. To many people, of course, the proposal Bodino had made seemed very happy. In Spain itself, it was a disputed matter. The six books of the Republic were published in Spanish in 1590, in Turin, translated – and expurgated – by Gaspar de Añastro Isunza, treasurer general of Catalina de Austria, Infanta of Spain and Duchess of Savoy (Bodino 1992; see Albuquerque 1978). It is not in vain that absolutism was the great temptation of the Count of Olivares in his work as a “valido” of Philip III well into the seventeenth century. In fact, they were refuted more by his criticisms of the kings of Spain and religious intolerance than by the doctrine of absolute sovereignty (according to some experts, against the opinion of the philosopher of law Francisco Elías de Tejada, who affirmed in the twentieth century that it was precisely Bodin’s absolutism that was rejected in Spain [see Vallet 2004]).

It is known that what had induced Bodin to elaborate his disjointed political theory (Franklin 1973: 59-69) was the Night of St. Bartholomew (1572) (Bourgeon 1989). The massacre of Huguenots by French Catholics had made him clearly understand that it was necessary to arbitrate a political regime that would allow those who thought so diametrically differently to live together. But he did not know how to argue it. It would have been enough for him to start from Vitoria’s conclusion on the possibility that, in the constitutive pact of authority, religious freedom could be included. In any case, it would have had to be asked what happened when beliefs changed, as had happened with the Reformation, and the same people (in this case, France) was divided. Bodin’s intention was as good as the solution was wrong. The political thought of the French Catholics who asserted themselves from then on was a less or more fortunate adaptation of the doctrine of imperial Roman law in transit through the ius commune towards the monarchical absolutism of divine right.

Although what I am about to say has a very remarkable scope and it is not possible to justify it here, there is a proven historical fact that we cannot ignore: the Catholic style – spirituality – of the sixteenth century was similar in France and in Spain. In the seventeenth century, the divergence was evident (see RHEF 2004). The cause of such a change cannot be reduced to Bodin’s influence. It would be implausible. But it is true that a far-reaching mediation is on the horizon: in seventeenth-century France, absolutism had become a “mystique of absolute obedience”, in the words of Le Thiec (2004). In Bodin, the analogy between the family and the state plays a fundamental role. He expressly maintains in the Republique that the well-managed family is the true image of the republic, and that the internal power resembles the sovereign power. This analogy concerns four areas: the husband’s power relationship over the wife, the father’s power relationship over the children, the lord’s power relationship over the slaves, and the master’s power relationship over the servants. It is an absolute power (it evokes, of course, the Roman patria potestas). This is what God wants and is therefore equivalent to “divine harmony”. Bodin himself presents it as the divine will that descends to men through angels and, from men, to beasts. In every man, moreover, it descends from reason to appetites. In later works, the role of angels is reinforced in a striking way.

It is not surprising that, in the most prosaic advertising of the following decades, the simpler idea that the monarch embodies the nation and the “state” began to take shape. The expression – real or not – attributed to Louis XIV – “I am the State” – may have this meaning, which is totally foreign to the arrogance that appears in it. It is, in fact, the affirmation of a dependence. By divine design, the king has the moral obligation to embody the nation, the fatherland, the people, the state (ibidem 149-56). From the point of view of the subjects, it meant, however, the most complete alienation. The king was their incarnation and, consequently, they could think that they ruled.

• Hobbes

The one we have just summarized expresses the evolution of thought that leads to the concept of “national sovereignty”. Strictly speaking, it would not be necessary, therefore, to mention Thomas Hobbes and his work Leviathan (1651). It is necessary, however, to highlight a nuance, and that is that it shows a hint that led Locke years later to outline the possible convergence between the Second Scholasticism and Jean Botin. Bodin’s work, written in French, was republished twice in 1577, twice in 1579, in 1580 and in 1583 and, in 1586, an edition appeared in Latin, a lingua franca, as we said, in the Europe of that century and the next. It was also translated into English, Spanish, Italian and German. The English edition dates from 1606 (according to Calleja 2014: 19, 25). Hobbes was able to read it, therefore, but he did not follow it. Bodin’s great impact barely exceeded the turn of the century.

Hobbes’ option for absolute sovereignty is not even linked to the monarchy or to the “mystical” elements of which we have spoken when referring to the Frenchman’s thought. Hobbes, however, has a place in this story at least because the starting point of his absolutist reasoning was the concept of the state of “pure nature” (Teixeira, 2014). I have already alluded to the debate on the double end of the human being that divided the Scholastics in the sixteenth century and that would resurface with great force in the twentieth century. Remember that it was about the distinction between the natural and the supernatural. I did not notice in those lines that this led to conceiving as “pure nature” the natural state prior to the elevation to the supernatural. The Second Scholasticism had reached its zenith with the figure of Francisco Suárez (†1617) in whose work this concept is still fundamental. The one he calls “state of integral nature” (that is, pure) is the original one. “Fallen nature” is saved by grace. If they had not sinned, our first parents would not have stopped forming a family and, in it, Adam would have had the “economic power” (in the Greek sense of this term: that of “familiar” in short). But the multiplication of families would have given rise to the community and, therefore, also to the “political power”, which would have been constituted by the original pact of that community.

This is what Vitoria had said, except for something fundamental: in Vitoria, the original pact is given within the community and constitutes, as we have seen, a “pact of subjection” (pactum subiectionis). In it, those who make pacts do not cease to share authority and, therefore, the ruler must act in harmony with them. Suárez introduced a major change here: the pact is a pactum traslationis, in which, by the will of the community, all authority is “transferred” to the one elected to govern. There is no need for participation, therefore, in the exercise of government. It is enough for the ruler to satisfactorily comply with what has been agreed.

Now let us remember the Greek idea of the really free man, which could only occur in the polis. Suárez assumed this criterion as something imposed by sin: in the state of nature would have arisen what now (in fallen nature) arose by the work of grace or against it: the domestic community, several of which form the village community (pagus in Latin). However, the problem that sin causes would not arise: the division of activities that only allows one to be truly free in the polis, thanks to the fact that others are not free and solve the needs of the really free and their own. In fallen nature, therefore, the domestic community and the village are imperfect. The perfect one is the civitas (Prieto 2020: 597-600).

According to Hobbes, the “state of nature” is maintained in every man until the moment he consents to integrate into a community (Cendejas 2024: 104). Men group together to defend themselves; they feel in continuous threat. They fear for their own lives.

They are not free; the man acts out of desires, understood as psychological states based on material reality in a way that impels him to act. The motivation of the human act is passive. There are no good ends in themselves. There is no difference between efficient cause and final cause. All motion proceeds from efficient causality (Pink 2019). That is, in fact, the nature of the human being.

• Locke

Locke, on the other hand, agreed with Bodin and Suárez on the relevance of the family and, like the latter, starts from the concept of “state of nature”, which includes, however, the right to property. That is why he insisted – unlike Bodin – on the importance of subjecting oneself to the natural law, which is – for him – the one on which the right to property is founded and the one that obliges – morally – to obey authority. God has arranged it that way. Locke assumed the idea that authority cannot violate divine law or natural law.

In any case, what is opposed to the “state of nature” is the “state of war”.

Man only feels his property threatened, because of sin. That is why it constitutes itself as a community (Commonwealth) and prepares to defend it under the authority of someone. However, as in the Second Scholasticism, in Locke too the political community depends on the consensus of those who form it and it is they who must decide on the form of government that proceeds (Teixeira 2014: 805-7, 814-5; Portela 2020: 165-72). In any case, the authority is not absolute because its limit is in its division: in the Second Treatise on Civil Government (1689), in fact, he is ahead of Montesquieu by requiring the separation of the legislative, judicial and executive powers, although it extends especially to the former, which is the one he considers supreme, and the executive. It does not extend over the judiciary.

• Rousseau

Locke therefore advocates a “natural” legislative sovereignty, not a “national sovereignty”, and this even though he recognizes “national” rights (Resnick 1992). Some experts affirm that in whom the concept of “national sovereignty” does appear is Rousseau. Let me question it, or, better, point out the shortcomings that would characterize this concept if, in fact, it was really Rousseaunian. No wonder that Quaglioni (1992: 285-94) considers the absolutist Bodin to be the root of Rousseau. Both are inaccurate. But in a different way.

For the time being, Rousseau’s explicit debt to Francisco de Vitoria and Francisco Suárez cannot be ignored. For both Suárez and Rousseau, “pure nature” is the key that allows them to understand real states, and this even if “pure nature” had never been real. Rousseau prefers to speak of a “state of innocence”, which, according to the Genesis account , was a historical state: the one before the fall. The “state of innocence” serves him to discover everything that has been added until he reaches the “real state” of man. In Suárez, as in Rousseau, grace – in the theological sense – helps to avoid what the loss of that innocence entails. In Rousseau, moreover, what is acquired by the fact of living, that is, the history of the human being, also configures the “real state” (Moreau 1978: 349).

But, when we put together the Project of a constitution for Corsica and the Social Contract, that difference takes a back seat. It is one thing to consider the “real state” as a concept – which is what predominates in the Social Contract – and another to examine the “real state” of Corsica in 1765. Contradictions multiply.

Let us begin with the possibility that the sovereignty of which Rousseau speaks is “national.” In the Project of a Constitution for Corsica Rousseau opines that “what is in the interest of Corsica is a mixed government in which the people are met only by parts [parties in his French] and in which the depositaries of power are frequently changed.” I translate the expression parties as “parts” because it is implausible that Rousseau spoke favorably of “political parties.” According to the Social Contract, any intermediate body between the state and the individual restricts the freedom of the latter. But, in the paragraph I have just quoted, it seems to express precisely the desire to weaken the strength of the people by making them assemble in parts; that is: creating “parts” that mediate between the state and the individual. Thus, in practice, it would have the same effect translating the French word parties as “parties” in the English sense. The word “party” (political) was common at the time, in some places (England) to articulate governments and, in others (Spain), to prohibit them categorically, precisely so that they would not influence the exercise of authority (Andrés-Gallego 1989, 2001). It would seem that, at the very least, Rousseau is trying to weaken this influence – in Corsica – by means of parties .

According to Rousseau, the people are the legitimate holders of sovereign power and citizens must participate in the decision-making process. The form of government that he speaks of in both texts is republican democracy. He considered the monarchical form a nursery of little scoundrels, little rascals and little intriguers. But we have just seen that, in the Project, preferred for Corsica a mixed government in which the people are met only by parts, and that leads him to describe a democracy in which not all adults will have the right to vote. Only those who are twenty years of age, married or widowed, have at least two living children, own housing and sufficient land for their subsistence can be citizens (citoyens) with the right to vote.

Certainly, according to the Social Contract, it will be ensured that “the property of the state is as large, as strong, and that of the citizens as small, as weak as possible”. In short, as in classical Greece, property guarantees freedom. But only the owners.

In the words of Teixeira (2014: 816) it is nothing more than a conventional freedom, which comes to replace natural freedom. The problem is that it is necessary to ensure that this conventional freedom has effects as intense as if it were natural. Otherwise, the state would become the enemy of human nature.

Is not this a semblance of democracy? In fact, in the Project, the word souveraineté only appears twice, in none of them linked to the nation or the national. In this text, he mentions “the general spirit of the nation”; in the Social Contract, speaks of the “general will”. In the Project, to give consistency to the general spirit of the nation, the political community must have a national character, and that to the point that, if it did not have it, it had to be promoted. This is even better. He expresses it already in the Avant-propos and it is so important for our purpose that it is worth reading the entire paragraph:

“The wisest in such cases, observing relations of convenience, form the government for the nation. There is, however, much better to do, and that is to form the nation for the government. In the first case, as the government declines, the nation remaining the same, convenience vanishes; in the second, everything changes at an equal pace, and the nation carries the government along by its strength, maintains it when it is maintained, and causes it to decline when it declines. One suits the other in all times” (ed. 2018).

This text is of brutal sincerity as to the importance of national sentiment for the proper functioning of the state. But what Rousseau proposes in it cannot be considered the sovereignty of the nation, but that whoever governs fosters or even “creates” national sentiment.

Perhaps that is why in the Social Contract he prefers to speak of the “general will”. There has been much discussion about the meaning of this expression. In reality, it seems to refer only to the will of the citizens. Perhaps it is simply an inadequate expression for what he meant: that “the general will” must form a sovereign collective body within which freedom is maintained by means of the notion of equality that exists in the group. That way, no one will be able to subjugate others. It seems clear that, by “general will”, he means the result of the debates, since he adds that, for the will to be general, it is not always necessary that it be unanimous. What is necessary is to consider all voices, without excluding any.

But is the general will of a sovereign collective restricted body the general will of the nation?

• At the end, Sieyès

We must now make a warning about one of the sources I have compared. The Project of a Constitution for Corsica is considered an unfinished writing. The manuscript is preserved in the Bibliothèque de Genève and does not bear that title. It was given to this text in its first edition, in 1861. The text that is considered best is the one established by the historian Sven Stelling-Michaud, published in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. The edition we use is based on the latter, with modernized spelling and with the essential punctuation so that the sentences that present difficulties are understood. The original makes it necessary.

It has even been written that Rousseau could have begun it in 1765 and worked on it until perhaps 1768. What is surprising is that, in September 1765, it was known that copies were circulating in Livorno of a “code of laws” drawn up by Jean-Jacques Rousseau for Corsica, whose people had returned for their independence from the Republic of Genoa. The editor of the Spanish monthly newspaper Mercurio histórico y político where we read it foresaw its transcendence: “It is to be believed that these laws will do a lot of honor to Philosophy. There is, however, a kind of fanaticism from which we doubt that the Legislator of the Corsicans has been able to liberate” (MHP/09/1765: 21). He was undoubtedly referring to Pasquale Paoli and, perhaps, to his Catholic convictions. “Fanaticism” was a word much loved by the cultivators of the Lumières (see De La Harpe 1838).

In any case, the conventional character of freedom that describes the alternative source – the Social Contract – and its remoteness from “national”, let’s say “natural” sovereignty, remains in place.

In his own way, the French abbé Sieyès outlined it in Qu’est-ce que le tiers état? (1789) and in his speeches to the French National Assembly. I paraphrase his words: for him, a nation was a body of associates living under a common law and represented by the same legislature. But it is well understood that all public powers, without distinction, are an emanation of the general will; they all come from the people, that is, of the nation. These two terms should be synonymous (in Van Deusen 1970: 76).

He only outlined the Rousseaunian idea to a certain extent because Sieyès took for granted the synonymy between people and nation, and therefore the general will as be coming from both. But he also considered that the step that Rousseau had asked for had already been taken. Before concluding that nation and people were one and the same thing, it had to be said that nation and people should be the same thing. It could be that they were not and, in that case, the people – which was the basic thing – had to become a nation. Perhaps unconsciously, the difference between populus and natio in classical Rome became in Rousseau something to be overcome and, in Sieyès, something to be denied.

Thus, the nation became a fruit that had to be built. And it had to be done, Sieyès explained, by dint of complying with formal conditions (the acceptance of a common legal order and a common sovereign) and specific economic and institutional conditions. And the way to get down to work was not the conjugal relationship that generated kinship and transmitted culture – in short, a real “nation” -, but the general will through the social contract (Rousseau’s two main concepts (Forsyth 1987: 69-87, 216-7). That was - Sieyès added of his own -, the expression of the will of the third estate to constitute itself as a nation or, what was the same, as a state.

It was once again a conventional process about something real that had to seem, however, something natural: Sieyès did not shy away from speculating on the French character and idiosyncrasy (Van Deusen 1970: 78-81), which obviously presupposed a culture and allowed us to really speak of a “nation”.

4. Conclusions

The thought of Rousseau and Sieyès could be assimilated – with effort, no doubt – to the “pactism” of the Second Scholasticism of the sixteenth century, admittedly only in a Suárez version (because, in the Rousseaunian state, there was no room for custom as in Vitoria). But there was an important conceptual difference, which had a substantial lexical consequence: Rousseau had made it clear that the government of the state could not be in conformity with the “general will” if this was considered to come from the people. In his proposal, it was not the people who imposed their will. Deep down, he had devised an oligarchy that could reach totalitarianism by strengthening the state (see Berlin 2004, Rubio 2005).

On the part of Sieyès, the relevance of the tiers état as the constitutive engine of the nation made sense as a reply to the position of those who maintained the idea that the nation consisted of a group of individuals who had in common customs and a legal status specifically nobiliary. It was the third estate – that is, the common French who were not nobles – that could give rise to a nation complète, which would have to coincide with the state. Everything that is national is ours – says the third estate through the mouth of Sieyès – and everything that is ours is a nation (in Foucault 1997: 198).

With Sieyès, by “monopolizing” the name of nation for the state that was the result of the “general will”, a gigantic step was taken in political thought: simply, the possibility of different nations living together within the framework of the same state was eliminated. It was the case in the Spanish monarchy. It would no longer be possible to be a Catalan nation, a Basque nation and a Spanish nation at the same time. One could only be of the nation that was the state or separate to form a state of one’s own.

There was even the possibility that the state already constituted was not national. In that case, it is not that the minor nations should be excluded, but that all those that existed in that state, minor and major, had to disappear as nations, so that the new nation that coincided with it would be generated. In this case, nation-building simply required inventing it, creating it ex nihilo. Rousseau and Sieyès agreed on this.