Tribalism in Europe is long dead, but when and why did the ancient tribes die out? They seem to have been extinct by the time the Middle Ages rolled around, but they were obviously still around during the decline and collapse of the Western Roman empire. At what point in between did the tribes cease to be significant social and political units? At what point did membership in a tribe cease to be an important part of one’s sense of personal identity? When did Germans, Frenchmen, Spaniards and Italians cease to think of themselves as Goths, Franks, Lombards or Helvetii? Sure, as late as the early twentieth century many Brits and Americans took pride in their “Anglo-Saxon blood” and what not, but that seems to me a far cry from actual membership in a tribe.
I ask this question because I don’t understand why tribalism would still exist in the Middle East, which if anything had been civilized and urbanized much earlier than Europe. How is that tribalism died out in places like Europe and China? While I’m not saying that tribalism is incompatible with civilization, it does seem that tribalism appears to decline the more urbanized a culture or society becomes.
So why does tribalism die out or decline in some regions but not in others?
I think that in the case of Europe, “tribalism” was replaced with Nationality. Although that appears to be a semantic issue (i.e. Czechs and Slovaks, Basques and Spanish, Irish and English, everyone who used to be Soviet, various Slavic tribes, etc.). Even today, regional signifiers are often used (which is essentially just an offshoot of tribes being divided by territory), think about the different London stereotypes of people from different parts of the cities.
As for why tribal identifiers persisted much longer in the Middle East than anywhere else, I think the biggest reason is that post-WWII, the Mideast was carved up to make it easiest for the Europeans to rule. They really didn’t pay attentnion to how the different groups got along and somehow, these divisions became entrenched so we have the problems your familiar with. In Europe, this process of “nationalization” has been going on as far back as the Holy Roman Empire, if not to the Roman Empire. That’s a significantly longer time than 50-some years ago, but as we see from the first paragraph, “tribalism” isn’t dead at all.
In western Europe the disappearance of adherence to a tribal consciousness in appears to have occurred in the 9th-12th centuries. For example most of the “Stem Duchies” of the early German kingdom were tribal in origin - Bavaria ( Bavarians - a merged super-tribe of the old Quadi, Marcomanni, and others from that region in the late Roman period ), Saxony ( Saxons ), Swabia ( Alemanni ), Franconia ( East Franks - those that hadn’t migrated to Francia ), plus the subterritories like the sometimes quasi-seperate County of Frisia ( Frisians - originally offshoots of the Saxons who had settled the swamps and wetlands of the German coast ) and the Landgravate of Thuringia ( Thuringians - a German tribe originally near the Danish border that had migrated into central Germany ). Only Lorraine, a northern chunk of the old ‘Bowling Alley’, the very artificial kingdom of Lotharingia created by the Treaty of Verdun in 843 ( which seperated the Carolingian empire into thirds, with Lothair I keeping the title of Emperor and the central territories - hence ‘Lotharingia’ ), was not tribal in origin.
The biggest cause for the breakdown of those old tribal ties was probably feudalization, which replaced one model of extra-familial loyalty and allegiance with another. Old tribal dynasties died out and were replaced by completely outside families that re-vamped the old system of subordination. Further, the ever-increasing subdivision of territories in feudal Germany quickly eroded traditional tribal allegiances.
In other areas like France, Italy and Spain, the incoming German tribes were never anything beyond of thin ruling veneer over a much greater non-tribal Latinized populace and they had disappeared fully by the 9th century. Of course one could still find linguistic and other divisions in these countries - there was for example a real linguistic and cultural distance between northern and southern France, as seperated by the Massif Central, with the dialectical differences of Langue d’Oil ( from which descends modern French ) and Langue d’Oc serving as just one marker of this. But this was not the same as a tribal identification.
By contrast in the Middle East we have a conquest by an alien tribal people ( the Arabs ) over settled urban and agricultural peoples, who initially lived as a parasitic class and found the tribal system entirely useful to perpetuate there military rule and divide internal opposition. Further this was an area with much more extensive marginal lands than Europe, where pastoralism/transhumanance, both seemingly promoters of tribal political systems, were often the most efficient use of the land. This was exacerbated by both the multiple Turkic eruptions, that intoduced new populations of pastoralists that displaced agriculture, as well as trends towards desertification, which did the same. Further from the late Abbasid period until at least the 16th/17th centuries ( and lingering into the 20th in more minor way ), the dominant military paradigm was adminstration by settled urban elites and military recruitment from Turkic pastoralists. As the need to maintain oneself in power can trump even the demand for greater agricultural revenue, the tribal pastoralists were often just too useful to weaken. Hence tribal politics blended, merged and often trumped urban politics. Tribes were just vastly more useful as political units in the ME/NA than they were in Europe and as a ( very unfortunate ) consequence they lingered.
Can a people become “tribalized” after being settled for a long period of time, due to war, depopulation, a breakdown of urban life and other factors?
For instance, at one time Baghdad was perhaps the largest city in the world (outside of China) and the center of Arab-Muslim civilization. Then the Mongols invaded and destroyed the city, depopulated the countryside, and life in Iraq became less centered on urban structures and more “tribal” until the 20th century. Also the Mayas were urban in their classical era but by the time of the Spaniardsweren’t they a “tribal” people?
Europe’s urban structures never collapsed since the Middle Ages either, even with the stress of two World Wars.
However, Baghdad was never part of the sort of megatropolis that, say, New York or Paris are, today. It was a major city in close proximity to peoples who had never moved away from tribal society. When the city and its society were destroyed, the nearby tribes moved in to the void, bringing their culture with them rather than having the metropolitan survivors of Baghdad “revert” to tribalism. (And, as Tamerlane noted, when the Arabs conquered that portion of Mesopotamia, they imposed a structure of tribalism on the city, itself.)
In terms of the Arabian peninsula, the more rural you go, the more tribal you get. Somewhat like northern Pakistan, and rural parts of Afghanistan, where people identify tribally and swear allegiance to tribal warlords, who are not under the control of the governments whose “country” they are in. Tribalism transcends the borders drawn on maps.
