Multiculturalism Toppled Rome. By Jens Kurt Heycke. A long but important read.

What was the secret sauce that accounted for Rome’s spectacular and enigmatic longevity? It is actually not secret at all. In fact, the Romans obligingly hammered out the recipe for us on a bronze tablet, which now resides in a Lyon museum. The tablet records a speech in which Emperor Claudius explains Rome’s ethnic policy and how it enabled Rome to succeed where others had failed:

Is it regretted that the Cornelii Balbi immigrated from Spain and other equally distinguished men from southern Gaul? Their descendants are with us; and they love Rome as much as we do. What proved fatal to Sparta and Athens for their military strength was their segregation of conquered subjects as aliens. Our founder Romulus, on the other hand, had the wisdom — more than once — to transform whole enemy peoples into Roman citizens within the course of a single day. …

Over the centuries, numerous other Romans were also very clear about it. …

A more detailed analysis of Roman ethnic policies comes from an outsider, the Greek orator Aelius Aristides. Aristides surveyed empires of the past and noted how each had fallen because it failed to sufficiently assimilate the different ethnic groups within its domain. Rulers of unassimilated populations had to continually scramble about to quell uprisings, whereas the Roman emperor could “stay where he is and manage the entire civilized world by letters.” …

Rome faced the challenge of incorporating diverse ethnic groups into its realm from the very beginning. Even in the early days of the republic, Rome comprised a mixed population of Latins, Sabines, Volscians, Etruscans, and others. Later, it embraced numerous other groups: Gauls, Spaniards, Britons, Africans, and so on. The Roman policy for handling this challenge was remarkably consistent for nearly 1,000 years: progressively extend citizenship to the people under its control and assimilate them. …

Esprit de corps — asabiyah:

The medieval Arab historian Ibn Khaldun hypothesized that societies rise and fall with the ebb and flow of a social bond that he called asabiyah. Scholars have translated asabiyah in a variety of ways — “group consciousness,” “esprit de corps,” “social cohesion,” and “group feeling.” Ibn Khaldun describes it as the unifying feeling that binds a group together and makes collective action possible. Like an extended sense of kinship, asabiyah inspires individuals to subordinate their own interests to those of a larger community. In its strongest form, it is the “irrational bond” that can give people the “mutual affection and willingness to fight and die for each other.” …

Contemplating the ruins of past civilizations that surrounded his hometown in North Africa, Ibn Khaldun speculated about how some civilizations had outlasted others. He asserted that asabiyah is the key: it is the glue and the engine that holds a society together and makes it work.

A society’s success and longevity ultimately depend on its ability to forge and maintain a unifying asabiyah that embraces its entire population. History is a repeating cycle of societies rising on the initial strength of their asabiyah and collapsing when they fail to maintain it.

Assimilation, assimilation, assimilation:

Although they lived 1,000 years before Ibn Khaldun’s time, the Romans had a good sense of asabiyah and strove to spread it wherever they went so that diverse peoples who originated thousands of miles from Rome were assimilated and came to identify themselves as Roman. When Rome annexed a region, it typically granted citizenship to the local leaders quickly, appointing them as magistrates answerable directly to Rome. Other residents often qualified for Latin rights (that is, citizenship without voting privileges).

After the region had firmed its bond with Rome over time, all the free residents might qualify for full citizenship. Until then, it would provide auxiliaries to serve alongside the Roman legions. The auxiliaries normally earned full citizenship on retirement. But an individual who demonstrated exemplary valor might receive it before then and might even be promoted to a command or to the privileged equestrian class.

The genius of this system was that it configured incentives around building an affiliation with Rome. The rewards for serving Rome were themselves progressive degrees of Roman “team membership”: first Latin rights, then full citizenship, and then elevation to the equestrian class. So an individual’s and a province’s aspirations and ambitions were channeled into joining the Roman team. …

In the Roman world, a province or a country could greatly improve its lot by demonstrating its loyalty to Rome and by Romanizing. …

The incentives for individuals to integrate themselves as Romans were also clear. A Gaul or a Spaniard did not get ahead by being a Gaul or a Spaniard but by becoming Roman. …

Although new citizens typically kept their religions, they were expected to adopt some of the shared culture, particularly the language. When a Lycian appearing before the senate failed to answer questions in Latin, Claudius summarily revoked his citizenship, saying it was “not proper for a man to be a Roman who had no knowledge of the Romans’ language.” …

Neither ethnic origin nor race precluded an individual’s ascent in the imperial administration. Over 2,000 years before the United States elected its first minority president, Rome had already elevated minorities to the consulship. Even the imperial throne was an equal-opportunity possibility. Emperor Trajan was from Spain, and several of his successors also had Spanish roots. Septimius Severus, Geta, and Caracalla were part African, and Marcus Philippus’s ancestry was probably Arab. Other emperors hailed from areas now in Bulgaria, Hungary, Serbia, Syria, and Turkey. …

The Roman Army included everyone:

In modern movies, the Roman army is typically depicted as a homogeneous collection of white guys, all presumably originating from Rome or Italy. This could hardly be further from reality. Roman soldiers were Roman by virtue of Romanization, not birth. Most were not from Rome or even Italy. For example, in the first century, the Legion III Augusta was only 19 percent Italian; by the third century, it had no Italians at all. …

The writings of Roman historians, as well as various inscriptions, describe countless high-ranking leaders of barbarian stock. …

While some soldiers did serve in their home provinces, Rome was careful to relocate units whose local ethnic affiliation might pose a risk. For example, Britons were normally stationed on the continent, and it was typical for Gauls to serve in Africa and Syrians to serve in Egypt. …

While in the military, soldiers had to learn to speak Latin and might also be required to read and write it. …

Melting pot, not cultural enclaves:

Like republican Rome, imperial Rome did not eradicate the cultures it embraced but integrated many of their elements into the shared sense of Romanitas. It was a true melting pot, incorporating not only the highly esteemed contributions of Greek civilization but also of Near Eastern and North African cultures. …

Rome’s melting pot ethnic policy, combined with its liberal enfranchisement, helped make it incredibly resilient to both internal and external threats. From Britain to the Middle East, Rome enjoyed support from vast numbers of people who identified with it and had a stake in its success, even though their ancestors were not originally Roman or even Italian. …

With so many people in the provinces identifying with Rome, there was little incentive to rebel, even when there was discord or anarchy at the top. Outsiders were likewise reluctant to attack a polity that was so unified and powerful. The result was an unprecedented, long era of peace — capped by the two-century period known as the Pax Romana. This peace fostered widespread prosperity that would remain unrivaled for more than a thousand years after Rome’s fall. With the entire Mediterranean basin living peaceably under a single regime, beneficial commerce and trade flourished.

Common wealth:

Beyond fostering peace, Rome’s asabiyah increased prosperity in another way: it bolstered the provision of public goods like infrastructure. Modern economic research has shown that less fractionalized societies — those with a sense of shared, common identity — tend to provide far more public goods than more fractionalized societies. A society is much more inclined to build roads and bridges for the benefit of “its own kind” rather than for the benefit of outsiders. The Greek city-states, for example, cooperated in maintaining Delphi and a few other sites but otherwise did little to provide public goods outside their city walls.

By contrast, Rome, which had “made one city of the once wide world,” built a staggering number of aqueducts, roads, baths, and other infrastructure all the way from Britain to the Red Sea. The Roman road network, for example, was more extensive than the current U.S. interstate highway system. It is unlikely that Rome would have built so vastly without the sense that all this area and its inhabitants were Roman. …

In other classical civilizations, citizenship was a jealously guarded tribal entitlement, seldom granted to other ethnic groups. In Athens, for example, nearly one-third of the population were metics — foreigners who had few rights and a vastly inferior status to ethnic Athenians. Unlike provincials in the Roman Empire, metics in Athens had no hope of ever becoming Athenian citizens, even after living there for generations. We find in Demosthenes’ speeches, for example, how jealously Athens restricted its citizenship. …

But then Rome went multicultural. Shortly afterwards — after standing for a thousand years — Rome fell:

So why did Rome finally “fall?” In Der Fall Roms, Alexander Demandt famously provides 210 reasons. We will only consider one of the key reasons here: Rome’s shift from a “melting pot” to a “multicultural” system of managing its ethnic diversity.

This shift accompanied the mass immigration of entire communities of Goths and other barbarians into Roman territory, starting in the fourth century and culminating with the massive flood of refugees fleeing the Huns in the fifth century. Unlike communities that the Romans had absorbed in the past, these refugees were neither integrated nor granted citizenship. Instead, they were allowed to settle in enclaves, maintaining their own languages, loyalties, and leadership.

For example, in just one instance, Emperor Valens agreed to allow a group of 200,000 Thervingi to cross the Danube and settle on Roman lands. One of our Roman sources cynically writes that Valens took the greatest care that “none of those destined to overthrow the Roman Empire should be left behind.” Another describes the Thervingi and other Goths as being “sown in the Roman Empire like teeth.” Both may have had a point: the Thervingi never assimilated and eventually became a big problem for Rome, ravaging Thrace and virtually destroying Rome’s army in the Battle of Adrianople.

As unintegrated immigrant enclaves proliferated, the emperors also took a more multicultural approach to Rome’s military. As we have seen, the military was the core of Rome’s melting pot, smelting barbarians into loyal Romans and defenders of the empire. But the last few emperors abandoned the melting pot approach, staffing the army with unintegrated barbarian units, known as foederati. The traditional arrangement that encouraged barbarian soldiers to Romanize and identify with Rome did not apply to the foederati. In earlier days, barbarians were integrated into auxiliary units (or legions) with Roman leadership and enough Roman recruits to provide a critical mass of Roman cultural influence.

By contrast, the foederati were not integrated at all. Their units comprised only barbarians who swore oaths of allegiance to their own tribal leaders. They were not required to learn Latin or practice the customary Roman military devotions. Unlike earlier barbarian units, who were often relocated to loosen their original ethnic ties, the foederati remained with their ethnic communities and settled in ethnic enclaves on assigned areas of land. During the fourth century, the emperors rapidly expanded the foederati, enlisting Alans, Attacotti, Franks, Vandals, Goths, Sarmatians, and others so that they ultimately constituted the majority of Rome’s military power. …

There were distinct ethnic groups vying against each other to advance their group status at Rome’s expense. Under the multicultural organization, which allowed, or even sanctioned, ethnic separation in lieu of shared identity, the rewards were for serving one’s own ethnic group. …

To put it in modern terms, “identity politics” became the order of the day. …

The ethnic separateness of the refugee enclaves and the foederati spurred distrust between them and the Romans, who came to see the unassimilated foreigners as a menacing fifth column. There was a backlash — one that has been echoed in modern times by anti-immigrant and “National Front” type groups in response to the flood of immigrants and refugees into Europe and the United States. …

Distrust of the barbarians led to widespread anti-barbarian discrimination. Thousands of the wives and children of foederati were killed in a series of purges. Not even loyal, assimilated Romans of barbarian ancestry were spared.

Most notably, Stilicho, the last great Romanized barbarian leader, was targeted. Despite his stellar record of defending Rome against barbarians, the identity politics of the day made his own barbarian ancestry fodder for court intrigues. Rumors spread that he had invited Goths to invade and that he had colluded with the rebellious leader Alaric. In response, the emperor had Stilicho apprehended. A loyal Roman to the end, Stilicho willingly submitted and was executed.

If the foederati ever had any doubts about where their ethnic loyalties belonged, the purges and Stilicho’s execution must have dispelled them. Thirty thousand of Stilicho’s former soldiers joined Alaric in rebellion. … Alaric and his compatriots were never Romanized: they would remove their animal skins briefly when they entered the senate house but scoffed at the Roman toga. …

It was those unassimilated barbarians that ultimately sacked Rome and dismembered its empire.

The lesson for today is obvious.