Princeton Studies in International History and Politics

Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change

Daniel H. Nexon

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781400830800
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Scholars have long argued over whether the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which ended more than a century of religious conflict arising from the Protestant Reformations, inaugurated the modern sovereign-state system. But they largely ignore a more fundamental question: why did the emergence of new forms of religious heterodoxy during the Reformations spark such violent upheaval and nearly topple the old political order? In this book, Daniel Nexon demonstrates that the answer lies in understanding how the mobilization of transnational religious movements intersects with--and can destabilize--imperial forms of rule.
Taking a fresh look at the pivotal events of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--including the Schmalkaldic War, the Dutch Revolt, and the Thirty Years' War--Nexon argues that early modern "composite" political communities had more in common with empires than with modern states, and introduces a theory of imperial dynamics that explains how religious movements altered Europe's balance of power. He shows how the Reformations gave rise to crosscutting religious networks that undermined the ability of early modern European rulers to divide and contain local resistance to their authority. In doing so, the Reformations produced a series of crises in the European order and crippled the Habsburg bid for hegemony.
Nexon's account of these processes provides a theoretical and analytic framework that not only challenges the way international relations scholars think about state formation and international change, but enables us to better understand global politics today.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

IN JUNE 1546 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and ruler of a vast realm stretching from the New World to Central Europe, began preparations for war against the rebellious towns and princes of the Protestant Schmalkaldic League. He explained to his sister, Mary of Hungary, that

if we failed to intervene now, all the Estates of Germany would be in danger of breaking with the faith . . . After considering this and considering it again, I decided to embark on war against Hesse and Saxony as transgressors of the peace against the Duke of Brunswick and his territory. And although the pretext will not long disguise the fact that this is a matter of religion, yet it serves for the present to divide the renegades.¹

Charles’s gambit inverts one of the standard stories found in political-science scholarship: that elites use the rhetoric of identity—whether religious, ethnic, or nationalist—as a way of generating support for policies that, in truth, serve their own power-political or material ends. Critics often challenge such stories, of course. They argue that a particular set of claims about identity reveal the genuine interests of elites. Or they suggest that even if elites deploy identity claims cynically, we still need to understand why such claims succeed or fail in generating popular support for particular policies.² We seldom, however, envision the reverse: that a head of state might seek to fragment the opposition by hiding his religious objectives behind a cloak of political rhetoric.

It is even more striking, then, that Charles’s divide-and-rule tactics met with initial success; his forces scored a decisive victory in the Schmalkaldic War. But at the 1547–1548 Diet of Augsburg, he overplayed his hand. The 1548 Interim of Augsburg sought to reconcile religious schism in Germany, but instead prompted a new Protestant alliance against Charles.

With the support of the French king, Henry II of Valois, it seized the offensive against Charles and his supporters. Charles’s brother, Ferdinand, opened negotiations with the rebels. Ferdinand ultimately concluded the 1555 Peace of Augsburg. Charles abdicated his titles and divided his domain between Ferdinand and Charles’s son, Philip II of Spain.³

This chain of events represents only one puzzling part of a much larger story: how the Protestant Reformations led to a profound crisis in the European political order.⁴ Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the emergence of new forms of religious heterodoxy catapulted much of the European continent into violent conflict, caused political authority in entire states and regions to implode, and destroyed the Habsburg bid for European hegemony. Despite significant attention to early modern Europe among international-relations scholars, few treat these events as an explanatory puzzle. Some look to the period merely for evidence of the enduring struggle for security and domination among great powers. Others expend a great deal of energy arguing over whether or not the Protestant Reformations, and the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which supposedly put an end to inter-state religious conflict in Europe, marked the origins of the modern, sovereign-territorial state system.⁵

Contemporary developments render our comparative lack of interest in the dynamics of religious struggles in early modern Europe all the more puzzling. We live, many tell us, in an age of religious revival. Anxieties about violent religious movements now exercise a strong influence over foreign and domestic policy in the United States, Europe, and many other political communities. Most existing attempts to draw “lessons” from the European experience, unfortunately, suffer from extraordinary superficiality or a terminal infatuation with stylized stories about European political development. Thus, serious policy analysts inform their readers that “Islam’s problem” is that it never had a “Westphalian moment.” Some suggest, similarly, that Islam needs a “reformation” that will break the hold of its clerics and usher in an era of tolerant religious pluralism and secularism.⁶ Henry C. K. Liu, writing in the Asia Times Online, draws an even more breathtaking set of analogies:

The Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years’ War, a secular war with religious dimensions. Subsequent wars were not about spiritual issues of religion, but rather revolved around secular issues of state. The “war on terrorism” today is the first religious war in almost four centuries, also fought mainly by secular institutions with religious affiliations. The peace that eventually follows today’s “war on terrorism” will also end the war between faith-based Christian evangelicals and Islamic fundamentalists. Westphalia allowed Catholic and Protestant powers to become allies, leading to a number of major secular geopolitical realignments. The “war on terrorism” will also produce major geo-political realignments in world international politics, although it is too early to discern its final shape . . . . [It] will eventually lay to rest U.S. hegemony and end the age of superpower, possibly through a new balance of power by sovereign states otherwise not particularly hostile to the United States as a peaceful nation.⁷

Whatever the merits of these claims, the fact remains that international-relations theorists have been staring directly into the face of a rich and consequential case of the impact of transregional and transnational religious movements on conflict, resistance, political authority, and international change for decades. Yet we have mounted few sustained investigations into its causal processes and mechanisms.⁸

This book addresses, first and foremost, this oversight: I provide an explanation for why the Protestant Reformations produced a crisis of sufficient magnitude to alter the European balance of power, both within and among even its most powerful political communities. I argue that the key to understanding this impact lies in the analysis of the dynamics of resistance and rule in the composite political communities that dominated the European landscape. Many of the most important political ramifications of the Protestant Reformations did not stem from any sui generis features of religious contention; they resulted from the intersection of heterogeneous religious movements with ongoing patterns of collective mobilization.

Religious contention, given particular formal properties and specific ideational content, triggered up to five processes extremely dangerous to the stability of early modern rule:

• It overcame the institutional barriers that tended to localize resistance against the rulers of composite states, thereby making widespread mobilization against dynastic rulers more likely.

• It undermined the ability of rulers to signal discrete identities to their heterogeneous subjects, thereby eroding their ability to legitimate their policies on a range of issues, from religion to taxation.

• It provided opportunities for intermediaries to enhance their own autonomy vis-à-vis dynastic rulers; religious contention complicated the tradeoffs inherent in the systems of indirect rule found in composite polities.

• It exacerbated cross-pressures on rulers—by injecting religious differentiation into the equation, by increasing the likelihood of significant resistance to central demands, and by creating often intense tradeoffs between political and religious objectives.

• It expanded already existing channels, as well as generated new vectors, for the “internationalization” of “domestic” disputes and the “domestication” of inter-state conflicts.

Given the right circumstances—a transnational, cross-class network surrounding religious beliefs and identities—the spread of the Protestant Reformations therefore activated many of the existing vulnerabilities in early modern European rule. Not every instance of religious contention, of course, produced all of these dynamics. Variation in institutional forms, the choices made by agents, and other contextual factors also influenced how these mechanisms and processes played out in particular times and places. And nonreligious contention sometimes triggered similar processes. On balance, however, the injection of religious identities and interests into ongoing patterns of resistance and rule made cascading political crises more likely than they might otherwise have been.

This explanation contributes to this book’s secondary task: to assess the status of the early modern period as a case of international change. Was the early modern period, as Daniel Philpott suggests, a “revolution in sovereignty” or otherwise, as traditionally understood in international-relations theory, a key moment in the emergence of the modern state system?⁹ My answer involves two claims. On the one hand, the Protestant Reformations shaped the development of the sovereign-territorial order, but in far more modest ways than many international-relations scholars assume. On the other hand, a better analytic approach to the concepts of “continuity and change” in world politics allows us to see what kind of a case of change the Reformations era represents: one of the rapid emergence of new actors—transnational religious movements—altering the structural opportunities and constraints of power-political competition.

The third, and final, goal of this book is to specify precisely such an analytic framework for the study of international continuity and change.

I develop an approach to this problem, called “relational institutionalism,” in the second chapter. It combines key aspects of sociological-relational analysis with historical-institutionalist sensibilities. This framework provides the theoretical infrastructure for my explanation of the book’s primary puzzle, as well as for how we should understand early modern Europe as an instance of international change. But I also intend it to serve as a novel way of approaching inquiry into continuity and transformation in world politics. Relational institutionalism, I argue, incorporates insights from the major prevailing approaches to the study of international relations; it also provides a way of reconciling some of their apparently very different claims about the fundamental dynamics that drive international relations.

The next three sections of this chapter offer a more comprehensive introduction to these facets of the book. I provide greater detail with respect to my central argument about the impact of the Protestant Reformations on early modern European politics, and I briefly elaborate on my claims about the Reformations’ role in the emergence of the sover...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Theorizing International Change
• Chapter 3 The Dynastic-Imperial Pathway
• Chapter 4 Religious Contention and the Dynamics of Composite States
• Chapter 5 The Rise and Decline of Charles of Habsburg
• Chapter 6 The Dynamics of Spanish Hegemony in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries
• Chapter 7 The French Wars of Religion
• Chapter 8 Westphalia Reframed
• Chapter 9 Looking Forward, Looking Back
• References
• Index