State formation

-Definitions

  • Weber, Marx(ist), Nettl (1968), Tilly (1990)

-State-formation, -weakness, -failure

  • Formation: Huntington (1968), Rosenau (1970), Anderson (1974), Wallerstein (1974)
  • War-making/violence:Tilly (1975), Cohen, et al. (1981), Tilly (1990)
  • [Can connect to regimes throughOlson (1993)]
  • Rational choice/institutionalist: Spruyt (1994), Ertman (1997)
  • [North (1981), North (1990), Milgrom, North, and Weingast (1990)]
  • Normative argument – nationalism/”nation-state”: Anderson (1983), Hobsbawm (1992), Meyer, et al. (197)
  • Normative argument – sovereignty: Jackson and Rosberg (1982), Krasner (1995/6)
  • Questioning whether these links make sense: Herbst (2000), Centento (2002), Mazzuca (2003)
  • State weakness/failure: Milliken and Krause (2002), Fukuyama (2004), Bates (2008)
  • [Can connect to material on ethnic and civil war; state-building from regimes]

-Definitions

  • Weber: the state is a human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory; states are compulsory associations claiming control over territories and the people within them; they include administrative, legal, extractive, and coercive organizations
  • From Jackson and Rosberg (1982):
  • Definition of means, not ends (where distinctive means are force)
  • This emphasizes the empirical rather than the juridical – the de facto rather than the de jure attributes of statehood (that is, he doesn’t explore the idea that jurisdiction is an international legal condition rather than some kind of sociological given)
  • The de facto emphasis implies that two concurrent monopolies of force cannot exist over one territory and population; in situations where one of several rival groups – claimant states – is unable to establish permanent control over a contested territory, Weber would maintain that it is more appropriate to speak of “statelessness”
  • From Fukuyama (2004):
  • The essence of stateness is enforcement: the ability, ultimately, to send someone with a uniform and a gun to force people to comply with the state’s laws
  • Marx(ist): the state as the ruling class (instrument for dominating society – see Anderson (1974) and Wallerstein (1974) below for examples)
  • Nettl (1968): countries vary in their level of “stateness,” which depends on four components of the state: (1) collectivity that aggregates a set of functions and structures in order to generalize their applicability, (2) unit in international relations, (3) autonomous, and (4) sociocultural phenomena
  • Tilly (1990): the state is a coercion-wielding organization, distinct from households and kinship groups; the state exercises clear priority in some respects over all other organizations within subnational territories
  • “National state” –state governing multiple contiguous regions and their cities by means of centralized, differentiated, and autonomous structures (note: this is not necessarily the same as a “nation-state,” where people share linguistic, religious, and/or symbolic identities)
  • Note that, historically, national states have appeared only rarely (most have been non-national, like empires or city-states)

-State formation

  • Various approaches (from Tilly (1990)):
  • Statist analyses: individual states act on their defined interests within an anarchic international system wherein the interactions among states ultimately reduce to the thrust of self-interested actors (structural realists, rational choice); often posit a single, central path of European state formation and a set of deviations from the path explained by inefficiency, weakness, bad luck, geopolitical position, or the timing of economic growth
  • Huntington (1968) – singles out the effect of war on changes in state structure, but considers war to have roughly similar effects throughout Europe
  • Critique: often dissolves into particularisms explaining why the “modern” form of some given state emerged based on the special character of a national population/economy; neglect the hundreds of states that once flourished but then disappeared
  • Geopolitical analyses: attach great importance to the international system as the shaper of states within it; state formation responds strongly to the current system of relations among states
  • Rosenau (1970): distinguishes four patterns of national adaptation to international politics: acquiescent, intransigent, promotive, and preservative; each pattern has distinctive consequences for the character of the executive, party system, legislature, military, and so on
  • Critique: fails to specify mechanisms that link particular forms of state to specific positions within the international system
  • Modes of production analyses: spell out the logic of the organization of production (feudalism, capitalism), then derive the state and its changes almost entirely from that logic, as it operates within the state’s territory; explanations of state structure derive largely from the interests of capitalists who operate within the same state’s jurisdictions
  • Anderson (1974) – Marxist treatment, typical Western constellation in early modern epoch was an aristocratic absolutism raised above social foundations of a non-servile peasantry and ascendant towns; typical Eastern constellation was an aristocratic absolutism erected over the foundations of a servile peasantry and subjugated towns; Swedish absolutism unique because it was built on a base that combined free peasants and unimportant towns
  • Critique: offers few clues to reasons for variations in form and activity among states having similar modes of production
  • World system analyses: explanation of diverse paths of state formation is grounded in a characterization of the world economy; the structures of individual states are consequences of their positions within the world economy
  • Wallerstein (1974) – mode of production in a given region creates certain class structure, which emanates in a certain kind of state; the character of that state and the relations for the region’s producers and merchants to the rest of the world economy determine the region’s position – core, peripheral, or semi-peripheral – in the world economy, which in turn significantly affects the state’s organization)
  • Critique: fail to produce theory linking actual organizational structures of states to their positions within world system

-Links between state-making and war-making/violence

  • Tilly (1975)
  • War-making and state-making are both forms of organized crime
  • The reason that we see the narrowing of hundreds of potential states over time to only a small number (Europe) is that successful states made war
  • Needed to maintain and increase military establishments, which required higher levels of taxation, which required a more extensive bureaucracy
  • The extractive capacities initially used for military capabilities later were applied for other purposes
  • Four main state activities: (1) war-making (eliminating outside rivals), (2) state-making (eliminating inside rivals), (3) protection (eliminating enemies), and (4) extraction (taxation)
  • Cohen, et al. (1981)
  • Entire historical process of creating a national state was a long and violent struggle pitting the agents of state centralization against myriad local and regional opponents; by 1900, there were 20 times fewer independent polities in Europe than there had been in 1500 – they did not disappear peacefully or decay as the national state developed; they were the losers in a protracted war of all against all
  • Many new states of today are engaged in similar struggles of primitive central state power accumulation – they are competitive political conflicts for control over the power resources of the respective territories and populations
  • Collective political violence, in and of itself, indicates neither order nor political decay (decay is standard argument)
  • Newly established states are likely both to exacerbate old conflicts and to create new ones by financing the expansion of the state apparatus through increases in the tax burden on the major producers of agrarian societies: the peasants
  • One of the crucial differences between eruptions of peasant resistance in new states and that in early modern Europe is that the former are more integrated into national power struggles
  • But, similar in that until these states accumulate the amount of power resources that will make the costs of anti-state action prohibitive, their opponents will fiercely resist their extractive claims (to reach this point, must pass through the violent phase of primitive accumulation of power)
  • The extent to which an expansion of state power will generate collective violence thus depends on the level of state power prior to that expansion
  • It is the progression toward greater order itself that produces much of the relatively greater violence we find in new states
  • Tilly (1990)
  • What accounts for the variation over time and space in the kinds of states that have prevailed in Europe since AD 990 and why did European states eventually converge on different variants of the national state?
  • War and the preparation for war produced the major components of European states – how?
  • Those who controlled means of coercion tried to extend their power – if they encountered no one with comparable means, they conquered, but if they met rivals, they made war
  • The most powerful rulers set the terms of war for all – smaller rulers had a choice to either accommodate the more powerful or to put extra efforts into war preparations (which meant they had to extract the means of war – like arms, men, and supplies – from others)
  • The need to extract the means of war (which involved struggle, especially depending on the organization of major social classes within a state’s territory) created the central organizational structures of states because extraction requires an infrastructure of taxation, supply, and administration that requires maintenance of itself
  • Europe had coercive-intensive regions and capital-intensive regions with varying organizations of major social classes – these variations affected the demands made on and influence over the state and thus the organizational forms of states (uneven distribution of coercive and financial resources)
  • Coercive-intensive: area of few cities and agricultural predominance, where direct coercion played a major part in production (coercive specialists were both soldiers and great landlords)
  • Triad: coercion, states, and domination
  • Capital-intensive: areas of many cities and commercial predominance, where markets, exchange, and market-oriented production prevailed
  • Triad: capital, cities, and exploitation
  • Coercive and capitalist means can both accumulate and concentrate
  • When the accumulation and concentration of coercive means grow together they produce states (note, though, that this isn’t a direct path of accumulation and concentration – has peaks and valleys)
  • States that lost wars commonly contracted or ceased to exist
  • States with largest coercive means tended to win wars
  • The increasing scale of war and the knitting together of the European state system through commercial, military, and diplomatic interaction eventually gave the war-making advantage to those states that could field standing armies; states with access to a combination of large rural populations, capitalists, and relatively commercialized economies thus won out and set the terms of war; their form of state – the national state – became the predominant one in Europe
  • In European history, we see three types of states:
  • Empires – coercion-intensive; followed by continent’s eastern and northern rim
  • Fragmented sovereignty – capital-intensive; followed by city-states
  • National states – capitalized coercion (this path was most effective in war); intermediate path; England, France, Prussia; thanks to their superior resources and organizations, these states dominated the continent, thus forcing their neighbors to adopt their methods or perish
  • The formation of states was not a type of engineering/planning
  • No precise model – the principal components formed as inadvertent by-products of efforts to carry out more immediate tasks like the creation/support of armed force
  • Other states strongly affected the path of change followed by any particular state
  • Struggle/bargaining with different classes in subject population shaped the states that emerged; popular rebellions usually lost, but left marks on the state in the form of repressive policies or settlements specifying rights of affected parties
  • Note: assumes that war leading to state structure holds everywhere, but the peculiarities of the argument apply only to Europe
  • Critiques: too much causal weight on war; ideological issues play no role in state-making (Reformation? nationalism?)
  • Most states fail due to problems with tax collection, primitive transportation infrastructure, and religious/ethnic/national divisions

-Rational choice/institutionalist argument

  • Spruyt (1994)(fits in nicely with North’s work)
  • The sovereign territorial state prevailed because it proved more effective at preventing defection by its members, reducing internal transaction costs, and making credible commitments to other units
  • Sovereign rulers were better at centralizing jurisdiction and authority, which allowed them to prevent free riding and rationalize their economies/standardize coinage, weights, and measures
  • Sovereign territoriality was a means of structuring inter-unit behavior – states preferred other states because they could more credibly commit
  • Actors from other institutional arrangements defected to states or copied their institutional makeup
  • By the 14th century, existing forms like theocracy, feudalism, and traditional empires proved unsuitable for an emerging pre-capitalist economic environment because transaction costs were high (example: England had hundreds of different major measures; in France and Germany, there were hundreds of lords who minted their own coins  traders had to learn which exchange rates were operative  much speculation) – the future thus laid with three “state forms” – the city-league (Germany), city-state (Italy), and sovereign territorial state (England and France), which were attempts to solve the discrepancy between emerging trans-local markets and existing political arrangements (all three were able to mobilize more resources than could traditional feudal organization)
  • Why did the sovereign territorial state beat out the other two options?
  • Key: the principle of sovereignty, which says that authority is limited by precise spatial terms and is subject to no other authority (authority is territorial and exclusive)
  • Sovereign rulers centralized fragmented political systems and thus reduced legal uncertainty and domestic transaction costs; reduced problems of trans-boundary trade because clear who should be negotiating ( credible commitments  less uncertainty/more legitimacy)
  • It solved the tension between markets and hierarchies
  • City-league: fragmented sovereignty and non-territoriality (problems with establishing internal hierarchy and was thus less successful than states in standardizing coinage and centralizing jurisdiction; couldn’t credibly commit to international treaties)
  • City-state: fragmented sovereignty
  • Ertman (1997)
  • Criticizes war-oriented theories of state formation because they (1) pay too little attention to the role played by different kinds of representative institutions in the failure/triumph of royal plans to introduce absolutism, (2) are too willing to link one kind of political regime with only one kind of state apparatus (example: absolutism with bureaucracy v. constitutionalism with non-bureaucracy), and (3) underplay the prevalence of dysfunctional, patrimonial institutional arrangements in early states (which makes them underestimate the difficulties involved in creating proto-modern bureaucracies)
  • Four types of states according to different combinations of political regime (patrimonial or bureaucratic) and state infrastructure (absolutist or constitutional)
  • So what accounts for this variation across Europe?
  • Organization of local government during the first few centuries after state formation (during first period of state-building)
  • England, Sweden, and Poland created national representative bodies to approve taxes to meet external military threats  constitutional infrastructure
  • Latin Europe and German officials answered to the center, but had little role for local population  absolutist infrastructure
  • Timing of the onset of sustained geopolitical competition
  • Similar to Gerschenkron (1962): early state-builders expanded infrastructures using methods that became outdated but proved difficult to replace due to stake in established institutions while late state-builders adapted latest techniques, learned from mistakes of early state-builders, and had more expert access
  • Independent influence of strong representative assemblies on administrative and financial institutions
  • Existed only in constitutional states, but interacted with timing
  • England – early onset of geopolitical competition; state apparatus with patrimonialist tendencies already in place before parliament; goal of representatives became to reform this system  bureaucratization
  • Hungary/Poland – onset of sustained geopolitical competition occurred after representative assemblies existed, so they were able to block the construction of bureaucratic infrastructure patrimonialization

-Normative argument – nationalism/”nation-state”

  • Anderson (1983)
  • Hobsbawm (1992)
  • Meyer, et al. (1997)
  • Many features of the contemporary nation-state derive from worldwide models constructed and propagated through global, cultural, and associational processes
  • Nation-state is culturally constructed and embedded, where culture is substantially organized on a worldwide basis, not simply built up from local circumstances and history
  • This is why it routinely organizes and legitimates itself in terms of universalistic models like citizenship, socioeconomic development, and rationalized justice
  • Nation-states must be understood as, in part, constructions of a common wider culture (not self-directed actors responding rationally):
  • Exhibit a great deal of isomorphism in their structures and policies (example: see an increase in rates of women in higher education everywhere, not just in developed economies)
  • Make valiant efforts to live up to the model of rational actors (uniform definition of goals as enhancement of collective progress, individual rights, and development)
  • Marked by considerable decoupling between purposes and structure, intentions and results (nation-states modeled on external culture that cannot simply be imported wholesale as a fully functioning system)
  • Undergo expansive structuration in largely standardized ways (example: impoverished countries routinely establish universities producing overqualified personnel)
  • If a nation-state neglects to adopt world-approved policies, domestic elements will try to carry out or enforce conformity (nation-states tend to copy one another)
  • Note: this links to Gerschenkron (1962) and the dependency school of thought
  • The development and impact of global sociocultural structuration greatly intensified with the creation of a central world organizational frame at the end of WWII (UN, IMF, WB, GATT)

-Normative argument – sovereignty