Creating a Common Polity. Emily Mackil
depth in chapter 5) is likewise inexplicable from the perspective of ethnic identity.24 These are only examples to illustrate the broader point that while the construction and articulation of ethnic identity certainly contributed to the process of koinon formation, it does not on its own explain that phenomenon.
The Greeks had other ways of grouping communities together, which had more to do with power than with a sense of belonging, and this brings us to a second development in ancient history that has indirectly facilitated the approach to the koinon developed in this book. The ability of one polis to subordinate another to its control resulted in the frequent creation of complex political entities that incorporated multiple poleis but never became more than a polis, a city-state. It has always been clear that becoming a member of a koinon significantly restricted a community’s ability to determine its own laws, and whether or not autonomia was a formal juridical status of a polis, in modern terms it is clear that this meant a loss of partial autonomy.25 This fact, combined with the orthodox principle that absolute autonomy was a central value of the polis, has always made the phenomenon of federalism in the Greek world seem particularly strange.26 But recent work has shown that Greek poleis were quite frequently in positions of dependence and subordination to other poleis; becoming part of a koinon was only one way in which this happened.27 If this work on the dependent polis changes the perspective from which we view the koinon, it still does not explain the phenomenon. Instead, it invites us to consider in detail the ways in which political power was distributed among member communities and the koinon and the processes by which such arrangements were produced. Were they the result of coercion, or of cooperation? And what role was played by the sense of belonging that stemmed from a shared identity?
If these major changes in our understanding of the Greek world have raised new questions and invited fresh perspectives on the development and nature of the koinon, so too has the discovery of a considerable amount of new evidence. Most of it is epigraphic. New inscriptions have been found and recently published that shed light on each of the koina that form the core of this study. Texts discovered long ago but published in obscure and inaccessible journals and books are also beginning to receive fresh attention from scholars. Because of their detailed archival quality—their recording of the internal workings of koina that are rarely exposed by literary sources—these texts are of tremendous importance and provide clues that enable a complete reevaluation of the koinon as a phenomenon. And although archaeological evidence rarely exposes anything about institutional arrangements, new discoveries have significantly affected our understanding of the relationship between settlement patterns and the emergence of regional political structures. All this must be taken into account. The subject is ripe for fresh consideration.
There are two major questions before us: How did the koinon develop? And why did so many poleis become part of a koinon? They are, I suggest, best answered in tandem. The obvious way to approach the first question is simply to trawl through the ancient sources looking for evidence of political or military cooperation among communities in a region later known to have formed a koinon. The results of such an approach are, however, disappointing, not only because the sources make it impossible to determine what kind of political institutions lie behind such cooperative acts.28 They are disappointing also because the approach works on the assumption that the koinon was a purely political entity that governed the joint military undertakings of its member communities; but the explicit evidence for the koinon in later years, when its institutions were fully developed, suggests that the koinon was much more than that, and we should entertain the possibility that it was also more complex from the beginning. This is where we return to the relationship between religion and the koinon. In Boiotia, Achaia, and Aitolia, we have clear evidence that sanctuaries served as archives for the koinon, repositories of its decrees, and frequently as meeting places for its deliberative assemblies. This is well known.29 We also have evidence, less familiar, that these states themselves made dedications, in at least two cases extending the pervasive political strategy of representation into the sphere of ritual action, and seeking in religious practices both the legitimation and the protection of their institutional arrangements. Other evidence points to an engagement by the koinon in facilitating regional exchange and promoting a unified regional economy. These are hints that we should not be looking only for political and military cooperation, perhaps undergirded by myths promulgating a claim of ethnic unity. We should rather be asking how far back we can trace the evidence for interactions of all kinds—religious, economic, social, and political—among communities that later became part of a koinon. If we can detect this evidence prior to or coincident with early political and military cooperation and the emergence of the formal institutions of the koinon, then we shall have good reason to hypothesize that such interactions contributed significantly to the willingness of independent communities to become part of a larger state. But all hypotheses need to be tested, and the only way to do so in this case is to ask whether, on purely theoretical grounds, it would make sense for a state with an essentially federal character to have its origins in shared religious and economic interactions as well as a need or a desire to develop greater military strength. What, in other words, could religious and economic interactions between communities have done to encourage the formation of political institutions of a federal kind, and why should the state, having developed those institutions, have had an interest in becoming directly involved in regulating those interactions, whether by reinforcing them, shutting them down, or repatterning them?
Tracking the totality of interactions between communities prior to the emergence of the formal institutions of the koinon, analyzing their function and impact, and then asking how the koinon as an emergent state responded to that history of interactions is one productive way to proceed. But in order to understand why, we need to pause to think carefully about the nature of institutions and how they emerge and develop over time.
INSTITUTIONS
The emergence of formal institutions is tremendously complex, a process that is particularly difficult to understand when, as in the case of the Greek koinon, we have no direct account of it. The very complexity and precision of these institutions in their fully developed state belie the possibility that they developed in an entirely accidental and ad hoc manner. To take only the most obvious example, around the turn of the fourth century the Boiotian koinon was governed by a council, to which representatives were sent by districts. These districts were composed in such a way that they had roughly equal populations, and they formed the basis for the appointment of judges to Boiotian courts, the payment of taxes, and the provision of manpower to the Boiotian army.30 This arrangement can only be the outcome of a deliberate and probably difficult process involving high-level planning by magistrates and political leaders as well as negotiation between the poleis and the koinon.31 Yet there are good reasons to think that these institutions were rooted in a history of cooperative interactions and arrangements—indeed, that they could only have emerged from that history. In order to explain why, we need to dwell momentarily on the nature of institutions more generally and the processes by which they emerge and evolve.
Institutions are typically, and are certainly in our case, endogenous to the society that uses them. Where the old institutionalism treated institutions as static entities that affected outcomes, scholars working in the field of the new institutionalism have shown that they are highly dynamic, humanly devised constraints that structure and pattern social interactions of all kinds.32 Sociologists have shown that institutions reflect the assimilation of cultural norms and practices into organizations of all kinds, including states; they are, in other words, socially embedded.33 The economist Douglass North has argued that institutions are created by actors in order to guide or constrain human action, to secure the cooperation of others in collective action, and to reduce the inefficiencies (or transaction costs) that would ensue if they were to attempt a particular activity without such an institution.34 Once created, on this view, institutions tend to structure individual behavior and are conceived as “the rules of the game in a society or, more formally, . . . the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction.”35 They are analyzed primarily as structural elements in society, and institutional development is rarely given another look.36 While the idea that institutions are imposed from the outside, or from the top down, captures something of the process that must have lain behind the remarkably