THE CONTEXTS AND CONSEQUENCES OF UNIVERSAL CITIZENSHIP
The universalization of citizen under Caracalla took place within an empire with a distinctive (and later influential) normative framework for understanding its own internal linguistic, cultural and legal heterogeneity.
Though Romans employed the symbolism and language of world rule both before and after Caracalla, it was also universally understood that there were peoples and polities beyond its borders.[39] These facts shaped the understandings achieved then and later regarding the trajecÂtory of the Roman state, from some earlier condition in which the world consisted of Romans, those whom they had and those whom they had not yet conquered, to a later condition, in which the borders of the empire distinguished a population wholly Roman from assorted others.[40] The important consequences of these facts are many, of which several are particularly salient to legal history and empire studÂies. I begin with law.First, the conceptual, legal and administrative structures of the Roman empire were slow to develop. In consequence of their trajectories, and likewise as a result of the limitations on communication and transportation in the ancient world, the Romans continued into the high classical period to conceive of subordinate polities within the borders of their empire as autonomous. Relations between those comÂmunities and the metropole were therefore understood to be conducted through diÂplomacy, and much of what later Europeans read as Roman practice and law in reÂspect to diplomatic relations was not simply imperial in the sense that it came into being in a world in which imperialist action was normative; it was imperial by virÂtue of structuring relations within an empire.
Second, in consequence of the autonomy of its subordinate communities, Rome regarded citizens of those communities as alien in respect to the metropole and largely required those communities to use their own laws.
As a matter of public and private law, the landscape of law within the empire was therefore pluralist. Private legal relations within the Roman empire prior to the universalization of citizenship thus amount to the first well-attested context of international private law in legal history.[41]Third, the trajectory of Roman public law toward the version codified by JusÂtinian and bequeathed to Europe was therefore in important respects federalist. Rome in the first centuries of this era provided a superordinate structure that faciliÂtated private relations of contract among persons and rules of recognition between legal systems, as well as courts of the second instance. The trajectory of internaÂtional private law in particular, and of public law as well, thus merit attention as case studies in the development of federalist structures over the long term.[42]
Fourth and last, Rome naturally remained an empire, and the universalization of citizenship needs to be understood in light of this fact. Caracalla not only imÂposed citizenship on aliens whose individual consent was neither sought nor thought relevant; he did so in respect of persons living on land deemed foreign. Roman law of citizenship thus betrays continual tension on two levels: between its notionally republican, contractarian roots and its imperial context, on the one hand, and beÂtween the doctrines of sovereignty and territoriality inherent in its private law diÂmensions and those inherent in its imperial extension, on the other. The imperial aspects of Roman citizenship were occasionally remarked in their rebirth under Napoleon and post-Napoleonic Europe; their legacy in a Europe of nation-states has received less attention.
Turning to empire studies, the interest of the Antonine Constitution and its hisÂtory might be assessed on a number of levels. First and foremost, it effected a change in the juridical status of persons. Within the structures of legal pluralism obtaining to that point, this should have caused an enormous disruption in existing social and economic relations.
Periodic attempts over the last century to assemble and assess the evidence for such disruption have yielded surprisingly little fruit. The moment is ripe for a reassessment for three reasons: the evidence has grown expoÂnentially in volume over the last generation; the forms of legal-historical inquiry now practiced are substantially more sophisticated; and our understanding of the forms of legal pluralism prevailing to that point are vastly more robust.The second ancient level on which the impact of Caracalla’s revolution should be assessed concerns ideologies of empire. Neither Greek nor Roman political theÂory, different as they were, provided an apparatus by which to theorize, or a lanÂguage that might give normative description to, the political formation that CaraÂcalla brought into being. In Greek thought, for example, the imperial rule of Greeks over Greeks had regularly been destabilized by its foundation upon ideologies of liberation; in Roman thought, the apparatus of public law required and refined disÂtinctions across multiple levels between Roman and alien, Italian and provincial. Roman law and ideology thus allowed for the existence of autonomous and even free states within the empire, with the explicit caveat that their autonomy and freeÂdom was granted and might be withdrawn by a sovereign act of the Roman people. What sort of state was the empire, when Rome ceased to rule over anyone?
The universalization of citizenship - the erasure of distinction between conÂquerors and conquered and the disturbance worked upon prevailing forms of localÂism - might be expected to have triggered a massive reorientation in political subÂjectivity and the structures of political belonging writ large. But to speak thus is to impose upon antiquity expectations derived from the experience, ideologies and ambitions of modern western states operating under quite distinct regimes of comÂmunicative technology. We should likewise beware misapprehending the work that had theretofore been accomplished in provincial political cultures through actions of imperial government.
The impact of the universalization of citizenship upon poÂlitical subjectivity and local structures of affective attachment constitute a third area that demands further investigation.Despite the radical nature of Caracalla’s act, there was one tradition in which the universalization of citizenship was taken merely to consolidate a process long ordained. This was the strand of Christian providential historiography and ScripÂtural exegesis that understood the foundation of empire by Augustus as an act of Providence, taken in order to prepare the world for Christ. But the varied elisions and identifications required by this understanding - the alignment of state with God, the identification of empire with world and of citizen status with species memÂbership - proved epistemically unstable. The history of how they were sustained, defended and modified, in both the high empire and the ages after Rome, when RoÂman public law continued in force even as new forms of social differentiation came to the fore, constitute a fourth focus for our inquiry.
Moving beyond the ancient world, we find numerous echoes of the Antonine Constitution in contexts of late medieval and early modern European empire, of which a number have been cited above. Two might be singled out for further attenÂtion. First, the struggle over the meanings, ambitions and legitimacy of imperial rule conducted with special vigor in the Spanish world was always already strucÂtured by the doctrines and languages of Roman public law. In it, the ghosts of impeÂrial conquest haunted any imputation of formal equality to all subjects of the crown, even as Rome had made the equality of all subjects the formal telos of empire, whatever the origin of those subjects in discrepant lands and polities.
A second and particularly salient echo may be detected in debates about citizenÂship within European states and Europe as a whole. There, the possibility and poÂtential of varied forms of unity find their appeal in part in the memory of unity once achieved and lost.
The relevance of that former condition, to which Caracalla gave final, formal form, rests in large measure in the sense that a notionally universal jural superstructure had once provided a meaningful mode of belonging, one which did not erase the on-going existence of its constituent polities as targets of affection or fora for rights redemption. But Rome began in empire: in that world, localism had been a tool to fragment, not unify, the objects of imperial rule. The universalizaÂtion of citizenship and unification of humankind that Rome claimed as its proudest achievement was accomplished in part through a massive public forgetting of just this past. The project of European union seeks to forge another such superstructure and to harness the particularist aspirations of its constituent cultures, without the power of empire or the cultural work such power achieves. The Antonine ConstituÂtion must appear a problematic precedent for this effort.