War and the Rise of the State

Bruce D. Porter

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781439105481
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

States make war, but war also makes states. As Publishers Weekly notes, "Porter, a political scientist at Brigham Young University, demonstrates that wars have been catalysts for increasing the size and power of Western governments since the Renaissance. The state's monopoly of effective violence has diminished not only individual rights and liberties, but also the ability of local communities and private associates to challenge the centralization of authority. Porter's originality lies in his thesis that war, breaking down barriers of class, gender, ethnicity, and ideology, also contributes to meritocracy, mobility, and, above all, democratization. Porter also posits the emergence of the "Scientific Warfare State, " a political system in which advanced technology would render obsolete mass participation in war. This provocative study merits wide circulation and serious discussion."

1
The Mirror Image of War

War is the father of all and king of all.

—Heraclitus, Fifth century B.C.

States make war, but war also makes states. The origins of the modern state, its rise and development, are inextricably linked with violent conflict and military power. There are few states in the world today whose existence, boundaries, and political structure did not emerge from some past cauldron of international or civil war. This is true of democracies as well as of dictatorships; of small states as well as of large. It is true of the venerable European states formed at the dawn of the modern era five centuries ago as well as of the fledgling nation-states that joined their ranks in the century after Waterloo. It is even true, in an indirect sense, of the scores of non-European states established since 1945: imperial conquests defined their boundaries, and the collapse of European empires after World War II made possible their political independence. The passing of the Cold War and the proliferation of ethnic conflict in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union are having a similar effect today. What Heraclitus declared over two millennia ago remains valid yet: war is a grand progenitor of history, a catalyst of change that has done much to create the structures of power we know today.

This book is about the impact of war on the rise and development of modern states. It is concerned not with what causes war, but with what war causes—with how it affects the internal dynamics, structure, and power of the political systems that wage it. The following pages will argue that warfare and military rivalry played a fundamental role in the origin and development of modern European states, that the institutions of contemporary Western politics reflect the pervasive influence of organized violence in modern history. Since at least 1513, when Niccolò Machiavelli declared strong armies to be the foundation of all states, the link between the organization of physical force—the military—and the organization of political power—the state—has been a prominent leitmotiv of modern history.¹

The following pages encompass the five centuries of history that range from the Hundred Years’ War to the Yugoslav Civil War, the period commonly known as the modern era. Though only a fragment of the whole of human history, it was this era that witnessed the rise of the modern state and its proliferation as the dominant political organization throughout most of the world. Our attention will focus on the larger European world, including the United States. Europe was the birthplace of the modern state, and it remained the great breeding ground of states and the most active arena of world conflict until 1945. Though the proliferation of nation-states throughout the globe since World War II is also in part a legacy of imperialism and regional conflict, this study will not attempt to analyze in any depth the politics of states outside the Western world. In Europe, state and society developed in tandem over hundreds of years; outside Europe, in much of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, the state remains largely an imported phenomenon, a set of institutions and a way of organizing politics that has never been fully accepted by traditional societies. A separate volume would be required to deal with the impact of war and European military institutions on political development in the extra-European world.²

Previous studies on the relationship between war and the state have focused primarily on international wars. This book will argue that civil wars played an equally crucial role in shaping states. By triumphing in civil wars, central governments established their authority and asserted the all-critical monopoly on violent force that Max Weber identified as the essence of the modern state. Though the suppression of popular revolts by military force may not be regarded as “civil war” in the strict sense of the term, such suppression was also a critical factor in establishing the authority of the early modern state, and such instances will be regarded as germane to this study when they entailed intervention by the central armed forces of a state, as opposed to local police or militia alone. (In the early period of European state formation, there was in any case little distinction drawn between military forces and police forces.)

The term “war” in the title of this book should be taken in the broadest possible sense. We will not confine our attention to periods of actual combat or focus only on the home front of states at war. The full impact of a war becomes manifest only after hostilities cease: it is then that combatant states must cope with paying off wartime debts, caring for returning soldiers, recovering from physical losses, and dealing with the internal repercussions of victory or defeat. It is essential, therefore, to look also at postwar trends and long-term effects. Further, even during periods of nominal peace, rivalry among states may impel them to undertake military preparations; these may have effects similar to actual conflict, particularly when they are intense and prolonged. And finally, since armies are products of war whose existence inevitably influences politics even in peacetime, we will consider how military establishments affect the internal political development of states over time.

What this book will not do is postulate a military dialectic of history. War is a profound agent of historical change, but it is not the fundamental driving force of history. Whatever causes war—economic factors, class conflict, human nature, modes of production, technological change, divine will—is by definition a more basic causal agent than war itself. No matter how ubiquitous or profound the effects of war may be, war itself is a derivative and secondary phenomenon, never a prime moving force. By the same token, war should never be seen as an exogenous force that acts on states and societies from without; it derives rather from within them. When we say that war causes a given political effect, we should keep in mind that this is only a convenient shorthand; what really happens is that state leaders, governments, military officers, armies, and populations, in waging war and in coping with its myriad challenges, cause those effects to occur. And finally, we should keep in mind that history is not just political, but involves the whole of human affairs—the arts, science, commerce, society, family, education, etc.—rich and complex spheres of life that often evolve in at least partial independence from the stormier worlds of war and politics.

THE IMAGES OF WAR REVERSED

Kenneth Waltz in his classic Man, the State and War sets forth three “images” of war, each being a different philosophical viewpoint on the origins of war.³ The first image sees the cause of war in human nature; the second, in the internal structure of states; the third, in the international system. Since our concern is with the effects of war rather than with war’s causes, it is necessary to reverse these images, to point Waltz’s arrows in the opposite direction. Each of the three images has a mirror image: How does war affect human behavior?, How does war affect the internal structure of the state?, and How does war affect the international system? Sociologists and psychologists have studied the first of these mirror images extensively, while students of political science and international relations have examined many facets of the third. By comparison, the inverse image of the second image has been neglected. Only in the past two decades has interest in the subject begun to mount, stimulated by the work of Charles Tilly and a handful of other scholars.⁴

As early as the beginning of the century, the German historian Otto Hintze lamented this lacuna. In 1902 he wrote that students of politics frequently overlooked “the development of the state in relation to its neighbors.” According to Hintze, a state’s rivalry with foreign powers has as much bearing on its internal structure as does domestic competition among class and interest groups. To ignore this, he writes, is to wrench individual states from the context in which they were formed—to regard the state, wrongly, as an isolated entity whose development has no relation to its surroundings. In a later essay Hintze argued that “all state organization was originally military organization,” and that the form and spirit of the modern state derived primarily from its organization for war.⁵ Hintze’s insights, regrettably, have not had the impact they deserve on contemporary political analysis. The causes of war continue to receive far more scholarly attention than its effects; the role of war as an independent variable remains neglected.⁶ This neglect may stem in part from a hope or an assumption that concentrating on war as an outcome, and seeking to probe its causes, will contribute to reducing its incidence. Yet understanding the state as a creature of war may be equally relevant to achieving that end.

This book will examine three broad facets of the relationship between war and the state, three distinct mirror images of the second image: the role of war in the origin of the modern state; the influence of war on the evolution of states after their formation; and the impact of war on the power of states vis-à-vis their own societies.⁷

THE FIRST MIRROR IMAGE: WAR AND STATE FORMATION

Most of the world’s landmass today is divided into states, and most of the world’s population falls under the jurisdiction of political organizations that rightly can be called states. Their boundaries are the demarcating lines of political sovereignty; their interactions are the essential element of world politics; their governments are agents of power that control most of the world’s military force. States are amorphous and fluid, never fully unified in purpose, and often badly fragmented by competing political factions, bureaucratic politics, and institutional conflict. Nevertheless, states do exist; they are not convenient fictions of political analysis and dialogue, as some would have us believe.⁸ They come complete with “frontiers, capitals, flags, anthems, passports, currencies, military parades, national museums, embassies and usually a seat at the United Nations.”⁹ They conduct wars, engage in diplomacy, vote in international organizations, and appear in graphic color on political maps of the world. When we speak of France in a political context, we normally do not mean the people of France, the government of France, or even the country, geography, and terrain of France. We mean the state of France.

In contemporary political discourse, the term state conveys a dual meaning, though the distinction between the two senses of the word is often overlooked.

First, in the field of international relations as well as in traditional and vernacular usage, the state encompasses both a sovereign government and the geographically bounded territory, society, and population over which it presides. It comprises what Fred Halliday has termed the national-territorial totality, or in other words, that which is denoted visually on a map—the country as a whole and all that is within it, the territory, government, people, and society.¹⁰

Second, in much contemporary scholarship, including the “Return to the State” school of social science, the state is regarded as an apparatus of power, a set of institutions—the central government, the armed forces, the regulatory and police agencies—whose most important functions involve the use of force: the control of territory and the maintenance of internal order.¹¹ This conception of the state is largely Germanic in origin, with its roots in the writings of Max Weber. Weber defined the state as “a compulsory association which organizes domination,” and argued that its principal characteristic was its monopoly on the legitimate use of force within its territory.¹²

These two conceptions of the state are not mutually exclusive; they merely represent different ways of looking at a complex phenomenon. In either conception, sovereignty is the indispensable attribute of the state, though the first tends to emphasize its external sovereignty within the larger international system; the second, its internal sovereignty and monopolization of coercive power. But it is important to keep in mind that despite the prevalence of the state as the organizing unit of politics today, states by either of these definitions simply did not exist in the medieval world. The state as we know it is a relatively new invention, originating in Europe between 1450 and 1650. Its emergence brought about what John Gerard Ruggie has called “the most important contextual change in international politics in this millennium: the shift from the medieval to the modern international system.”¹³

Politically, the European medieval world was highly fragmented, consisting mainly of private estates and vaguely defined kingdoms. Jurisdictions overlapped, central authority was weak, and true sovereignty was nonexistent. Medieval warfare was a localized, small-scale affair that relied heavily on the valor of individual warriors and on technologies requiring only a low level of social organization. While the birth of the state was a complex phenomenon, involving many historical processes, it is significant that it took place at a time of unprecedented violence and chaos, during the era of religious wars unleashed by the Protestant Reformation. The intensity of armed conflict during this period precipitated what has been called a “revolution in military affairs,” in which the size of armies, the cost of warfare, and the sheer firepower of military technology took a quantum leap forward. During this transitional era, the patchwork of feudal realms, duchies, independent towns, small principalities, and religious estates that made up medieval Europe was thrown into a crucible of military conflict that consigned many of its smaller parts to political oblivion. The rigors of military survival in such an era favored larger, more centralized political units that were able to control extensive tracts of territory, master complex military technologies, and mobilize the immense physical and human resources required for battle.¹⁴ The result was the dawn of modernity and a revolution in political affairs that paralleled the military revolution. How it happened is the first object of our inquiry.

THE SECOND MIRROR IMAGE: WAR AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF STATES

It is not sufficient merely to make the case that war contributed to early state formation and the transition from medieval to modern politics. We must also confront the critical double question posed by Charles Tilly: “What accounts for the great variation over time and space in the kinds of state that have prevailed in Europe, and why did European states eventually converge on different variants of the national state?”¹⁵ Tilly’s attempt to answer this question ranges over a millennium and covers both the medieval and modern periods; his use of the term state encompasses premodern political systems that were not truly states in the modern sense of the word. Since our focus is on the modern period, we are primarily concerned with the rise of “different variants” of the national state. Put differently, our objective is to determine how war affects the development of states after their initial formation. Why did some states became absolutist monarchies, others constitutional monarchies, and others republics? How did dynastic states become nation-states? What accounts for the rise in nineteenth-and twentieth-century Europe of divergent political systems such as liberal democracy, the welfare state, and the totalitarian state?

Obviously the factors shaping state development and differentiation are multifaceted and complex, and war is only one of them. There are numerous theories of state development that emphasize alternative factors—modes of economic production (Perry Anderson); internal political dynamics (Samuel P. Huntington); the influence of the global system (Immanuel Wallerstein); collective rational choice (Mancur Olson, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita); or geographic and cultural factors (Stein Rokkan), to name some of the most prominent.¹⁶ This book will neither advocate a unicausal theory of state development nor attempt a comprehensive theory, but it will argue that alternative explanations of state formation and evolution fall short empirically to the extent that they fail to take into account the pervasive role played by violent conflict.

One evidence of the link between war and state development is the correlation that exists between the political structure of states and the organization or “format” of their armed forces. Friedrich Engels noted t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue THE PARADOX OF WAR
• 1 The Mirror Image of War
• 2 War and the Passing of the Medieval Age
• 3 The Military Revolution and the Early Modern State
• 4 War and the Rise of the Nation-State
• 5 Total War and the Rise of the Collectivist State
• 6 War and the Totalitarian State
• 7 War and the American Government
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index