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National Collective Identity: Social Constructs and International Systems
Rodney Bruce Hall (ed.)
1999
3. Identities and Social Orders: International Systems in Modern History
Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in. (The times change and we change with them.)
—Lothair I (795–855)
All great changes are irksome to the human mind, especially those which are attended with great dangers and uncertain effect.
—John Adams
This chapter will provide an empirical illustration of how change in societal collective identity helped to produce three historically distinct international systems. The rest of the book, beginning with the following chapter will provide an empirical elaboration of the consequences of transformation of societal collective identity and attendant system change for relations between states and nation-states.
Collective Identity and Early-modern Dynastic Sovereignty
Recall the assertion that individual self-identification with respect to constituted public authority is conditioned by the emotive and socialization mechanisms outlined by Durkheim. In the early modern era a strongly dynastic principle of authority legitimated the early modern state. Early modern dynastic authority also carried with it the ideational (for Durkheim, sacral) baggage of the medieval-feudal theocratic order. Monarchs and lesser nobility were strongly identified in terms of religious confessional status from the onset of the Protestant Reformation in the early sixteenth century on through the end of the Thirty Years’ War in the mid-seventeenth century. They were Catholic or Protestant princes, and their subjects were decidedly expected to conform to the confessional status of their prince. No sixteenth century European prince could tolerate the chronic unrest that tended to result when the people became reform-minded much faster than did he. 1
Given the passing of a generation for the reproduction of reformed ecclesiastical institutions, and allowing for regional variations in the level of penetration of a given early modern state into the daily life of society, individuals would generally not fail to identify themselves as the subject of either the “most Catholic” or “most Christian” prince “X.” If state penetration of society was particularly significant, as it sometimes was, particularly in Germany, the subjection of the post-Reformation European to a prince with a specific confessional status was likely to be an attribute that was constitutive of his or her individual self-identification. 2 Little prodding would be required to evoke this self-identification in any event. In a period defined by religious conflict, a primary source of personal identity for most mature and reflective early-modern Europeans would be a religious, and specifically confessional Christian self-identification. This status was strongly constitutive of their self-identification and their collective identity as either reformed or unreformed people of Christendom, and the collective status of subjects of their Protestant or Catholic prince was largely an extension of this individual identity (see figure 1, in chapter 2).
This is not intended to imply that Christian factional or confessional status was the only component of early modern collective identity. Certainly, as has been the case in all eras, Europeans of the time identified themselves with an ethnicity or a linguistic community, but because of fragmented topography and difficulties of travel and communications, these were fragmented into many subdivisions of dialect. Hobsbawm has noted, in addition, that linguistic historians share a general consensus that it is only recently that linguistic distinctions have become means by which “friends” and “foes” are identified. Moreover, linguistic nationalism is the “construction of nationalist intellectuals, of whom Herder is the prophet” 3 and is not any sort of element constitutive of self-identity early in the modern era.
Of course, it is not difficult to find references to “nations” in the historiography of the European early modern period in general, and of the Reformation period in particular. 4 Even before the maelstrom of the Lutheran Reformation Maximilian I had commissioned the Alsatian publicist Jacob Wimpheling to draft a memorandum of complaint to the Roman Church that could be read as an articulation of national principles, as could an earlier letter written by the chancellor to the Archbishop of Mainz, Martin Mair, to Cardinal Enea of Siena in 1457. “National” grievances against Rome began their articulation as early as the 1417 Council of Constance, according to Gerald Strauss. 5 Together, these Gravamina Nationis Germanicae—grievances of the German “nation”—constitute the grievances of various German princes and Holy Roman Emperors, but are hardly a key to a collective identity of peoples, even though the princes sometimes spoke in their name. If they did so, they did so as a rhetorical device. Various Roman responses to these documents of grievance suggest that Rome suspected that these princes most often spoke in their own names, which the legitimating principles of the Augsburg system gave them the perfect right to do. For precisely this reason it is nonsensical to speak of sixteenth-century nations or nationalism.
This legitimating principle identified the prince as sovereign, emancipating the prince, at least in Protestant states, from the tutelage of the Roman Church. E. H. Carr appears to uncritically accept sixteenth-century usage of the term “nation” as an operationally viable progenitor of contemporary nationalism, and refers to what I call the Augsburg system as “the first period” of nationalism. We should note that in the view of the best and most recent scholarship on nationalism, it is simply a factual error to equate a limited consciousness of cultural, ethnic, and linguistic distinctions among societal elites with the nationalism that Anderson, Smith, Gellner, Greenfeld, and Hobsbawm have so rigorously analyzed. Irrespective of these shortcomings, Carr does provide an insightful passage that illustrates the legitimating principle of the Augsburg system, though the applicability of this principle should be dated from the 1555 Peace of Augsburg to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, not from Augsburg to the French Revolution, as Carr’s “first period of nationalism” conception would have it.
In the new national [sic] unit it was normally the secular arm which, relying on the principle cuius regio, eius religio, emerged predominant; but there was nothing anomalous in a bishop or prince of the church exercising territorial sovereignty. The essential characteristic of the period was the identification of the nation [sic] with the person of the sovereign. Luther regarded ‘the bishops and princes’ as constituting the German nation. 6
What was primarily constitutive of the collective identities and legitimating principles of the social order that grew up around the Augsburg system was the fundamental orientation of each toward the person of the prince, and particularly toward his confessional status within the Christian faith. New domestic sociopolitical principles had developed from the transformation of collective identities. Individuals had previously regarded themselves as generic subjects of Christendom, subject to both the secular, temporal authority of a lord and a king, and the spiritual authority of the Church and the papacy. They now acquired a more particularistic, factional collective identity developed during the Reformation. 7 Where ties to Rome had been cut, the spiritual authority of the papacy had been thoroughly supplanted by that of a “national” Church that professed one of the rapidly proliferating variants of the reformed faith.
In the economic sphere, the rise of the lay bureaucracy had slowly ended the medieval Church’s monopoly of literacy, and literate laymen began to populate the courts of princes and kings for the first time. This had the salutary effect of providing European princes with the option of entrusting those matters of “state” which required literacy to men who were not invariably the scion of the medieval Church. 8 This expanded the longstanding feudal, trifunctional division of labor 9 to include a class of lay-bureaucrats, and involved laymen in the extraction of societal resources to the benefit of the princes of the lesser nobility, and of the crown. This lay literacy also accelerated the development of the manufactures of artisans and permitted the expanded operations of the merchants who traded across the borders of the realms of the day, as this expansion required rational bookkeeping systems that permitted merchant and artisan to tally their accounts. 10 Significantly, it had also permitted the laymen to receive religious ideas at variance with those promulgated by the Church, study and ponder them at their leisure, and discuss among themselves what they had read in the privacy of their homes. Thus literacy had in no small measure helped to provide society with a tool for economic expansion that helped sustain an extractive crown which required these resources for its state-building proclivities. The expanded societal division of labor made possible by lay literacy also helped to induce the Reformation, which made the Augsburg system possible. 11
Most importantly the Reformation and its adaptation by many European princes had created the intersocietal norm of dynastic sovereignty in the principalities and free states that adopted Protestantism. Rome could be freely and willfully ignored without fear of domestic retribution, or even domestic sullenness, in these newly created Protestant states. The prince could take any action that pleased him with respect to other states and princes without fear of excommunication, the interdict, or the ban—or at least without fear of any serious consequences of these papal penalties, which he was likely to already have suffered in any case. And often this had involved no suffering at all in the domestic political arena, as a Protestant prince in the German states in particular had as likely as not adopted Protestantism because his people had done so in the heady and raucous years of the 1520s. Under such circumstances, a papal sanction might even enhance the domestic standing of such a prince. An intersocietal norm of what we might call “dynastic self-determination” then developed, at least among the Protestant princes.
In the immediate aftermath of the Reformation, nontoleration of religious difference appears to have emerged as a norm. Disastrous wars of religion were fought among Catholic and Protestant princes of the Holy Roman Empire. The introduction, by way of Geneva, of Calvinism in the French “Huguenot crescent” had resulted in the conversion of up to ten percent of the population of sixteenth-century France to Protestantism. From Hapsburg Austria and Germany to Valois France, the initial reaction of Catholic monarchs ruling regions where the reformed faith had been introduced was invariably to repress these religious identities. 12 These wars ran on for decades, exhausting both sides, their length and their viciousness persuading Catholic dynasts reluctant to accept this result that Protestant collective identity could not be put down by force of arms. Concerned for the integrity, and anxious for the pacification of their states, the Hapsburg Holy Roman Emperor and the last Valois and early Bourbon dynasts converted the norms of intolerance to principles of toleration of religious confessional distinctions of the principalities within their realms. Significantly what began as toleration was later, in the seventeenth century, to take on the characteristics of a positive right. 13
The internecine French Wars of Religion ended with just such a toleration edict, the 1598 Edict of Nantes. But in Germany, the 1555 Peace of Augsburg had left a tenuous political consensus for mutual toleration of neighboring principalities populated by people of another faith. This consensus did not develop into a principle of mutual toleration of religious difference between societies, or within many societies. We must avoid generalizing from the French case. Religious identity continued to be highly, and aggressively, constitutive of societal collective identity. We should pause here to note that the sequence of events described above cannot be understood within the conceptual framework of structural realist theory.
By the dawn of the seventeenth century, a fifty-year-old peace of convenience had proved to be an inadequate institutional prop to a highly underdeveloped principle of toleration between Protestant and Catholic German principalities. In order to ensure and protect their Protestant collective identity, and dynastic interests, the Protestant princes of Germany and the Freistaaten (Free States, independent of the control of the Emperor) formed a military alliance called the “Union” in 1608. Catholic princes countered with the “League” the next year and tensions between these two political and military alliances escalated into hostilities by 1618, inaugurating the Thirty Years War. Emboldened by support from his relative, the Hapsburg King of Spain, the Catholic Hapsburg Holy Roman Emperor pressed his claims of rights over the Protestant princes and Freistaaten and in 1629 directly threatened Protestant collective identity with the Edict of Restitution, decreeing much of Protestant Germany Catholic, and threatening to make good the decree by force of arms. Protestant monarchs in Denmark and Sweden now joined the fray in defense of Protestant collective identity.
Catholic France behaved anomalously, supporting the Protestant cause in hopes of weakening the Hapsburgs, whom they chronically faced as foes in Spain, Germany, and Austria. 14 Here, significantly, France behaved as Morgenthau’s balance of power theory would predict, but it is worth noting that at the time that the Union and the League were allying themselves against one another, the first Bourbon king, Henri de Navarre (Henry IV), still sat on the French throne. During the French civil Wars of Religion Henry had fought as a leader of the Calvinist faction. He had only begun taking instruction in Catholic doctrine, and converted to Catholicism as an expedient, and had displayed an ambivalence toward his religious confessional status throughout his life. Henry died in May 1610 at the hand of an assassin, Ravaillac, who was connected with the extreme Catholic politiques in the French politics of the day. 15 This incident discredited the domestic faction of the “League” in France for years to come, and the influence of French Catholic politiques with Henry’s successor was bound to have suffered enormously. Moreover, France had endured more than forty years of religious civil war in the sixteenth century, ending much later than the 1555 pacification of Augsburg. War exhaustion, a new, religiously pragmatic Bourbon dynasty, the death of the first Bourbon King of France at the hands of an agent of the French Catholic faction, and the threat of Hapsburg powers on nearly all land borders goes a long way toward explaining the anomalous behavior of a still overwhelmingly Catholic French nation during the Thirty Years War.
Here appears what looks like a significant, if temporary, wrinkle in the fabric of France’s collective identity as a Catholic nation. Certainly four decades of religious civil warfare had resulted in a “legitimation crisis” of the French regime as a Catholic social order. It is interesting to ponder what the future of France might have been without the installation of a de facto Calvinist, de jure Catholic, but in every way religiously pragmatic prince on the French throne as the century waned. The extreme Catholic faction of the sixteenth-century French body politic had been so averse to accepting the religious toleration that characterized French domestic policy with the accession of Henry that it began to agitate for a pro-Spanish policy and alliance with Catholic Hapsburg Spain, which posed as a chronic challenger to France. Le Roy Ladurie notes this “clear and explicit preference for religion over nation [sic]” with the consequence that:
the intelligentsia of Henry of Navarre’s reign went so far as to cut the nation [ sic], in its own interests, from its Catholic roots. France began gradually to acquire the shape familiar today, divorced from heaven-sent notions of sacrality and sometimes even away from royal descent. The nation [ sic] strove to achieve its own unique identity, even if, from this point of view, it was a long way off in c. 1600. 16
Significantly, as France wandered in to its own protracted involvement in the Thirty Years War on the side opposing France’s co-religionists, this passage from Ladurie indicates that Catholicism was no longer hegemonically constitutive of French collective identity. It is doubtful that this can be said of the Hapsburgs, or other Catholic belligerents. Certainly, the formation of the “Union” is an event that in itself suggests that Protestantism was sufficiently strongly constitutive of the collective identity of the states and principalities comprising it to serve as an impetus to a collective security arrangement. This suggests that France had passed through, and had spent more time being tempered in, the cauldron of Christian factional warfare earlier and more thoroughly than its fellow belligerents in the Thirty Years War. As France had excised religious identity, at least to this extent, from its collective identity in this cauldron, France emerged into the thoroughly modern era a bit earlier than the rest of Europe, as indicated by the earlier decoupling of religious identity from French foreign policy. 17 Only a religious conflagration roughly equivalent to France’s four decades of religious civil war permitted the rest of Europe to emerge from the crucible of the Thirty Years War in a similar form.
Collective Identity and Westphalian Territotial Sovereignty
In the modern, Westphalian era the confessional status of the prince continued to have constitutive consequences for individual self-identification. The reproduction of ecclesial institutions, be they reformed or unreformed, had continued apace from the time of the Reformation. The general European exhaustion at the end of the wars of religion, and the secular Westphalian settlement, had dissipated religious identity and confessional status as primary sources of interstate conflict.
In domestic society religious identity continued to be constitutive of individual self-identification. In an international context religious identity now lacked the highly emotive quality required to so thoroughly demonize those abroad who possessed a different religious identity. It appears that decoupling of the religious complexion of a foreign power from the issue of its status as a sovereign power was an innovation formulated by societal elites, and then slowly adopted by their subjects. The monarch, Catholic or Protestant, had acquired a sovereign status that was in no way conditioned by his or her confessional status. While all members of society might now still be the subjects of a sovereign whose confessional status they shared, that status was now largely relevant only in a domestic context. In post-Westphalian international conflict, the enemy of the subject’s Protestant prince and state might be Catholic, but his Catholicism was incidental to his belligerence, rather than responsible for it. To the extent that the individual experienced a filial loyalty to the prince, and a cultural affinity to the prince’s lands and peoples, the individual would identify with the prince and his state, and defend him and it in the absence of a confessional motivation. The prince’s legitimacy, and the state’s sovereignty, were now emancipated from the issue of confessional status. The individual’s self-identification now coalesced with a collective identity and institution that was no longer hegemonically dependent upon confessional status. This development had causal significance for future casus belli in conflict with other societies.
The Westphalian peace settled the great religious issues that had stirred up the vehemence of the European masses for three or four generations. Protestant and Catholic states, it had been determined, after war exhaustion and military stalemate, would live side by side, so that all could live. With the disastrous war behind them, seventeenth-century European states for the most part settled down to resume their state-building projects within their own borders. For the next century and a half, from the Westphalian settlement to the French Revolution, the agency of the European masses, which had been so evident in their mobilization to religious causes from 1525 to 1648, would be supplanted by the agency of the burgeoning state.
In the Reformation period, particularly in the case of the German Reformation, princes had followed their people 18 as often or as significantly as the converse had been the case, particularly in the urban areas, which had been hotbeds of social unrest and religious reform. Popular sentiment had brought on the Reformation (with the notable exception of the English Reformation). 19 Popular sentiment in the Netherlands and the Freistaaten had resulted in the formation of military alliances along the religious cleavages between the “Union” and the “League.” Popular sentiment had exacerbated the viciousness of the Thirty Years War. Popular religious ardor had now finally collapsed in war exhaustion and the states that had emerged juridically autonomous and equal from the Westphalian settlement now resumed their penetration of their societies without the distraction of general and protracted continental warfare.
This is not to suggest that the century following Westphalia was wholly devoid of conflict. Kalevi Holsti has documented up to twenty-two European conflicts between 1648 and the close of the broader War of Spanish Succession ending in 1713. One or two of these conflicts involved as many as five European states. 20 Holsti observes, however, that of the fifty-one issues that he identifies as contributing to the initiation of hostilities in these twenty-two conflicts, only three of the fifty-one issues involved the protection of co-religionists and, according to Holsti’s reckoning, the issue was primary in none of these conflicts. 21
Osiander has argued persuasively that the most novel and important principles of international interaction inaugurated by the Westphalian settlement were those of autonomy (each state would be recognized as an autonomous actor in its foreign and domestic relations) and equality (each state and its prince or representatives would be treated as equivalent actors in their rights and obligations in their relations with one another). 22 As Osiander suggests:
Equality was the unavoidable corollary of autonomy....In the European system at large, rejection of the universal authority formerly vested in the Emperor and pope logically implied complete equality for all the actors that recognized each other as such. In a system where the autonomy principle was accepted fully, the question could no longer be that of where in the system actors ranked, but merely whether or not they legitimately (that is consensually) belonged to the system. 23
Having created the principles of international autonomy and sovereign equality among states and princes, the international system began to operate on principles that were quite inconsistent with the equation of the state with the faith of the prince. With religious identity subsumed within a sovereign identity of an expanding state, societal collective identity began to coalesce around that state. Popular passions, lacking religious fervor to give them impetus, lost their significance in affairs that were external to domestic society. The belief system of the common people again became less significant to intersocietal interaction than the belief systems of the sovereign, and political and societal elites, specifically “the nobility, the military leaders, churchmen, members of parliament (where parliaments existed).” 24 International conflict rarely involved any conflict of faiths in the Westphalian system.
Evan Luard suggests that international policy was determined by the uniquely secular Westphalian legitimating principle “the interest of the state: raison d’état.” 25 The justifications of the policies and actions of the Westphalian state were inevitably provided in terms of this interest of the state, particularly the justifications for going to war. Luard stipulates these justifications with recourse to the empirical support of the justificatory utterances of belligerent monarchs between 1648 and 1789. Territorial-sovereigns went to war (1) to defend the “honor” of the state; (2) to enhance the “glory” of the state and its “standing” in Europe; (3) to “anticipate” or “pre-empt” war by another state; (4) to protect the “interests of subjects” of the state, particularly their trade and commercial interests whose surpluses often provided the financial life’s blood of the crown. 26
Significantly, more than any other system, the interests of the state justified most expedients in the Westphalian, territorial sovereign system, and “war was thus widely seen as a legitimate instrument for promoting national interests. Rulers themselves were frank in declaring that view.” 27 Just as significantly, interests were not invariably defined in terms of the will-to-power even in frank admissions that the interests of the state justify recourse to war for their attainment. The defense of “honor” and pursuit of “glory” suggest a significant congruence of the prestige of noblemen and dynasties with the “interests” of the territorial-sovereign state. The great confessional issues had been settled. The system had evolved into a system governed by the principles of autonomy and equality among princes, segmented according to another constitutive principle of the system, that of territoriality. John Gerard Ruggie suggests that this issue dominated international politics straight from the Peace of Westphalia through the Seven Years’ War. The latter conflict will constitute the first case to be studied in the empirical chapters of this work, to serve as an illustration of international behavior in the non-nationalized system.
This first [Westphalian] phase was followed by warfare in which the nature of the units [territorial-sovereign states] was accepted but their territorial configuration remained contested. We might call these ‘configurative’ wars. The Wars of Succession of the early eighteenth century—Spanish, Polish, and Austrian—and the Seven Years’ War (1756&-;63) illustrate this form. Among other factors, these conflicts revolved around the principle of territorial contiguity versus transterritorial dynastic claims as the basis for a viable balance of power. In the end, territorial contiguity won out, at least in the European core. 28
Ruggie goes on to assert that “[h]aving established territorially fixed state formation, having insisted that these territorial domains were disjoint and mutually exclusive, and having accepted these conditions as the constitutive bases of international society” the territorial sovereigns of the late-seventeenth through eighteenth century reduced all problems of international interaction to a territorial solution.
As the territorial-sovereign state continued to increase its penetration in domestic society, particularly where various forms of absolutist rule developed, significant innovations in the composition of armed forces were developed. Even without the ideologically mobilizing power of nationalism, eighteenth-century states had developed the technical administrative capacity to ensure a significant amount of continuous revenue would flow to the crown. One of the most significant consequences of this enhanced extractive capacity of the state was the development of professional standing armies. Monarchs were no longer content to have access to small armed forces, only in time of war, which they were constrained to lease on an ad hoc basis from private military contractors, as they had done throughout the Thirty Years War. This had tended to require the raising of large sums of money quickly, and at high rates of interest. The increasing capacity of the state to extract surpluses from domestic society had permitted the provisioning and payment of relatively large armed forces in peacetime, and eighteenth-century monarchs generally availed themselves of the opportunity to create these forces. One illustration of the effects of this extractive capacity is the case of Prussia, which was able to field and maintain 6,000 men at arms in 1660, 30,000 by 1688, 83,000 by 1740, and 200,000 by 1786. 29
No “national” collective identity could be found among these eighteenth-century European societies, and the citizen-army of later Revolutionary France was nowhere in sight. Due to the rigors and miseries of military life in this period recruitment was a chronic pressing need. This need was alleviated in part by mass infusions of the alien exiles who obtained opportunities for advancement in these absolutist armed forces that would otherwise be unavailable to them. The officer corps provided an outlet for the energies of the scion of the domestic nobility. Some foreign mercenaries could be obtained, but much of the rank and file had to be recruited or otherwise pressed into service from among the dregs of domestic society. 30 While the crown could assemble quite sizable standing forces from such an ensemble, the mere recounting of the disparate social origins of its constituents leads one to question its cohesiveness as a military unit.
In this sense, as societal collective identity had solidified around the state, however entwined this state might be with a dynasty, it permitted the growth and societal penetration of the state to increase dramatically the state’s extractive capacity to furnish the state with the ornament or tool (depending upon circumstances) of powerful standing armed forces. This territorial-sovereign collective identity had not yet, however, provided the capacity to mobilize the society’s emotive connection to the state such that life and limb would be offered willingly by those who served. The societal emotive response to the “sacrality” of legitimate authority that Durkheim investigated manifested itself in allegiance to the crown. Yet the vast majority within domestic society were pleased to pursue profit with their own peaceful professions, and more than pleased to see the crown fight its wars with the aid of foreign mercenaries, alien exiles, haughty domestic nobles, and ne’er-do-well adventurers. This was particularly the case inasmuch as military obligations, and access to a military career, was the perquisite of the aristocracy in absolutist Europe.
While societal collective identity might cohere at the intersocietal level around a dynasty and a state identified with the dynasty—as exemplified by the Bourbons, Hapsburgs, Hohenzollerns, and Romanovs—societal collective identity at the level of domestic society was still largely fragmented by de facto legal inequality among members of prenational European society. Under conditions of legal inequality, as exemplified by the estates system in France, the emerging urban and rural bourgeoisie would pay their taxes to crown and state, but would not yet do the fighting themselves. 31 The urban and rural poor, encompassing large segments of prenational European society, could not be induced to believe that they had any stake whatever in society, or to the regime that ruled over it. Absolutist eighteenth-century European regimes thus tended to view the non-noble segments of their societies as compliant suppliers of resources for the maintenance of the state. Of course this provided a significant advantage in international competition for those states—larger states with larger populations—which tended to have more resources to extract for the procurement of larger armed forces.
Significantly, however, Hendrik Spruyt has recently pointed out that the size of a territorial state, and its population, are imperfect predictors of the military effectiveness of a state. It is the resources that the state can mobilize that are key to its military success. Yet he argues further that success in war was “not the dramatic decisive selection mechanism” 32 ensuring that the form of the territorial-sovereign state, juridically recognized in the Peace of Westphalia, would yet rule as the constitutive “unit” in the modern international system. The territorial-sovereign state was competitively privileged, in Spruyt’s view, as it provided the institutional structure that a political authority needed to gain a competitive advantage in military and economic competition. Yet selection:
also advanced...by the process of mutual empowerment. Sovereign actors only recognized particular types of actors as legitimate players in the international system. Because the Hanseatic system of rule proved to be incompatible with that of territorially defined states, and because it was less able to credibly commit itself to international treaties, it was not considered to be a legitimate player in international relations...it was barely recognized in the Peace of Westphalia. Yet very small entities, which were organizationally compatible with sovereign states, were considered to be legitimate. The miniature states of Germany and Italy continued in the international system until their respective unifications. 33
One significant consequence of this process of mutual empowerment was the emergence of the conception, however limited, of international law. Of course the influence of this conception on the policies and behaviors of territorial-sovereign states and their monarchs was quite limited. Luard notes, for example, that Charles XII of Sweden was tutored by Pufendorf, whose international legal conceptions seem not to have stemmed Charles’s bellicosity on the throne. 34
Yet the effectiveness of international legal thinking is not circumscribed by its presumed effectiveness or ineffectiveness in inducing pacification among states. Neither is its utility circumscribed by presumed rates of compliance with its prescriptions, particularly so early in the conceptualization and institutionalization of international legal thinking. This is best illustrated with recourse to Kratochwil’s arguments regarding the international legal status of the highly contemporary phenomena of international regimes. 35 In Kratochwil’s analysis, the analogy of domestic legal jurisprudence is wholly applicable to the question of the status of international legal reasoning, as the accumulating corpus of prior authoritative decisions functions in a similar capacity to the function of precedent, and case law, in domestic legal jurisprudence.
Kratochwil argues that human actions require interpretation. As this is the case, instances of noncompliance with regime norms and rules must be interpreted and adjudicated with reference to the “reasons” offered to mitigate the charge of noncompliance. It is inherent in the properties of Kratochwil’s description of norms that they are counterfactually valid. An instance of violation of a norm does not render it invalid. Norms are not generalized universal propositions that can be invalidated by the demonstration of a single counterfactual instance, as is the case with the universal propositions positivist inquiry so diligently seeks to uncover. Kratochwil argues that an admission of noncompliance by an international regime participant can even strengthen the regime for the future, if sufficient reasons for the stipulated instances of noncompliance are provided. The adjudication of the subject instance of noncompliance can add to the corpus of authoritative decisions against which future compliance issues are to be decided, providing a significant additional guidance for adjudication of these cases. 36 This reasoning appears to be as valid when applied to general international legal norms as it is to specific twentieth-century international regime norms. However, little “case law” was available as bases for adjudication by authoritative decisions, even by small ensembles of powerful dynasts, in eighteenth-century Europe.
Yet even at this time, as Luard relates, the principles of raison d’état did not forestall the development of international norms that exhibited a constraining effect on belligerent conduct, and one may observe in the historical record the evolution of an eighteenth-century discourse on the legitimate uses of force. Monarchs invariably took pains to depict their wars as “just.” Further, they began to define the rights of neutrals, particularly circumscribing action that might be directed toward neutral shipping and commerce, and to issue codes of conduct for their armies operating abroad. 37
Another significant consequence of the mutual empowerment of states which Spruyt suggests resulted from mutual recognition after Westphalia, is what Paul Schroeder calls the “fact of functional differentiation.” 38 As Schroeder recounts, Waltz argues that an imperative for success in domestic competition is specialization, while in international competition the state must look after its own interests and replicate all of the functions of all other successful states in the system. While most states did replicate the institutional structures and domestic “functions” of other successful states in the system, Schroeder recounts that as a matter of historical, empirical fact:
throughout the Westphalian era states both great and small, aware of their vulnerability and threats, sought survival in the international arena not only by means of strategies other than balancing (by bandwagoning, hiding, and transcending) but also, precisely by specializing. They claimed, that is, an ability to perform certain important international functions or fill particular vital roles within the system that no other unit could do or do as well, and expected other powers to recognize these functions...failure to specialize in the international system could equally well be punished. 39
The Westphalian autonomy and equality principles identified in the Westphalian consensus agenda by Osiander appear to have been flexible enough to mitigate “anarchy” to the extent that specialization became a feature of the Westphalian territorial-sovereign system. Osiander further suggests that in the face of a French grab for European hegemony in the War of Spanish Succession, the preservation of the territorial-sovereign system, and the principle of “subordination of ‘private’ [state] to ‘public’ [system] interest” became a new intersocietal consensus principle upon which the Treaty of Utrecht was founded. 40 This public / private distinction indicates, to Osiander, Europe’s “self-awareness” as a system, the notion of a “public” interest of the system, and the illegitimacy of the subordination of this public interest to the “private” interests of a state, house or dynasty. Thus interest defined in terms of the will-to-power of realism, was subordinated by an intersocietal consensus principle that legitimated the system wide social order. State interest, defined in terms of the will-to-power, was juridically subordinated to the interest of a “system” qua international social order that was defined in terms of the will-to-manifest-identity of a system of states free of the hegemony of any other state, and embodied in the equality principle.
Thus while the structure of identities and interests of the prenational territorial-sovereign state system conforms on many levels to a notion of state interests that is consistent with that of classical realism, interests can not be so neatly defined in terms of the will-to-power as Morgenthau’s account suggests. If Osiander’s account is correct, the balance-of-power principle emerged as an intersocietal legitimating principle of the territorial-sovereign states system for the first time at Utrecht, in reaction to an unprecedented Westphalian grab for European hegemony by France. If this is the case, then interest defined in terms of the will-to-power is in large measure a contingent artifact of the French attempt to violate the existing interest defined in terms of the will-to-manifest-identity of a self-aware system of states.
This is a useful illustration of the statement that arose in the context of my earlier theoretical development of the significance of collective identity in the transformation of the international system. Once reconstituted by transformations in collective identity—and by the related variables developed earlier in this chapter—the norms, rules, and principles of intersocietal interaction develop through practice. Practice admits historically contingent phenomena, such as attempts at hegemony, to influence the generation and subsequent evolution of these structures. At the level of domestic society, collective identity, in the Westphalian system, delegated social agency entirely to state elites, who developed these intersocietal principles without consulting domestic society. Elite mediation of collective identity does nothing, however, to defeat the significance of territorial-sovereign identity for the understanding of state behavior, and the patterns of politics within that system. On the contrary, I will shortly develop the notion of national-sovereign collective identity to illustrate precisely the significance of these transformations in collective identity on the norms, rules, and principles of intersocietal interaction in a system where less political authority in international interaction is delegated to societal elites.
Collective Identity and National Sovereignty
It is difficult to argue that religious or confessional identity was strongly constitutive of individual identity, let alone collective identity, at the dawn of the age of nationalism in the late nineteenth century. The ideas of the Scottish and French Enlightenments had fostered a radical secularization both in European society and in the colonial periphery. Many of the fathers of the American Revolution, for example, had supplanted increasingly deinstitutionalized forms of Christianity with an optimistic deism in their personal religious confessions. Their correspondence rarely refers directly to a deity, but is merely spotted with diffuse references to “divine providence.” 41 The secularism of leading lights of the French Enlightenment, particularly of D’Alembert, Diderot, Condorcet, Voltaire, Rousseau, Mably, and Marat has been well studied and scarcely requires reference. 42
In the nationalist era religious identity and national identity are generally decoupled. Religious identity in the liberal west is thoroughly relegated to the status of a cultural attribute within domestic society, a matter of personal preference no more significant in the civic order than is the individual’s tastes in music, food, clothing, or any consumer commodity. Religious identity emerged (in the context of the civil societies that emerged from the associational framework that founded the capitalist state) as a cathectic choice. This is particularly true in the liberal, citizen-based variant of nationalist thought. The more culturally based, Hegelian, communitarian form of nationalist thought, in particular, views society as an organic entity. In this variant of national identity, of course, individual identity constituted in such a context is less likely to ascribe a purely incidental, cathectic signification to religious identity or other cultural attributes. This fact does not defeat the assertion that religious issues were largely domesticated in the nationalist era, in what had become a radically secularized world.
Yael Tamir has illustrated the importance of more secular cultural attributes of individual identity for the formation of national collective identity. She has done so in the context of a comparative analysis of liberal and national thought. Both the liberal and communal schools of nationalist thought contain a theory of human agency. Though she makes no reference to him, she develops her analysis in a fashion that elaborates on the utility of Durkheim’s notions of “collective consciousness” and “organic solidarity” in a discussion linking individual identity and collective identity. She observes that:
...both schools of thought can agree on characteristics of individuals as agents who look to society to lend context to their personal thoughts, namely as agents who acknowledge that their ends are meaningful only within a social context...[but conflict between them]...concerns the process whereby individuals acquire membership in particular social groups, the links between these memberships and personal identity. 43
Tamir argues that liberals and nationalists agree that “affections, loyalties, and social ties are constitutive factors of individual identity” but liberalism views these as matters of personal choice. Communitarian nationalists see these “affiliations as inherent, as a matter of fate rather than choice.” 44 Still, the thesis of Tamir’s book is that one can be a liberal and a nationalist at the same time. This was and still is certainly true of American nationalism. The distinction between liberal-nationalist and communitarian-nationalist self-identification will become important later on when the book addresses the consequences of nationalism for international behaviors, particularly in the context of explaining variations in western versus central European nationalist behavior.
Yet the twin development of the ideologies of liberalism and nationalism is highly germane to the development of the notion of national-sovereign states. It is difficult to see how national-sovereign identity could have been constructed without the assistance of the liberal pluralism that is so essential for the unimpaired functioning of capitalism. Recall the discussion in chapter 2 regarding the importance of capitalist production relations for the development of the notion of citizenship. I argued that the freedoms of association and freedoms to strike private contracts—and a structure of property rights conducive to capitalist accumulation 45 —were essential positive rights in the legal structures of states where capitalist production relations were successfully established. The extraction of societal surpluses through the private modality of capitalist production relations had accelerated from as early as 1750 to as late as 1830 and had continued through the nineteenth century in a great industrial revolution. The effects of this economic revolution were so varied and profound for European and American society that even a significant stipulation of them would fall far outside the scope of the present study. One of the most important of these effects, however, is that particularly “between 1848 and the early 1870s...the world became capitalist and a significant minority of ‘developed’ countries became industrial economies.” 46
The years coincident with the operation of the vaunted Concert of Europe—particularly those between 1832 and 1880—saw the “triumph of old regime liberalism” in which increasing societal liberalism was passed into domestic law by states governed by the notables of the ancien regime, 47 who permitted this expansion of liberal ideology and law to flourish. They did so in reaction to the French Revolution, in hopes of avoiding what they perceived to be the unenviable wages of absolutism; in reaction to the threatening cataclysm of challenges of Revolutionary France, under various guises from Jacobinism to Thermidor to Directory to Empire; and in reaction to the demands of their burgeoning domestic petty bourgeoisie, whose aspirations had been heightened by a newly found property stake in society.
National-sovereign collective identity had been recently forged in the American and French Revolutions. Both uprisings were undertaken against more or less virulent forms of autocratic decisionmaking that were so characteristic of territorial-sovereign identity. Both had emerged to replace notions of the individual-as-subject with notions of the individual-as-citizen. The roots of this notion of citizenship in both the French and Scottish Enlightenments are easily discernible. The liberalism and pluralism latent within these traditions, and the revolutionary ideologies of “citizenship” founded upon them, made these revolutions against monarchy susceptible to consolidation by the bourgeois elements of society, which sooner or benefited from these struggles. This occurred sooner in the American case. The American Revolution was led entirely by property owners, men who had a significant stake in society. The federal constitution that emerged from the convention which had been convened to replace the failed Articles of Confederation had firmly entrenched property rights in the fundamental law of the land. 48 Bourgeois consolidation occurred later in the French case as the revolutionary status of citizenship, and the principle of popular sovereignty, was created largely by aristocratic rather than bourgeois reaction to French absolutism, and coopted by the bourgeoisie. 49
Certainly the French Revolution was a “bourgeois revolution” in the sense that it did not occur “in a backward, or in a late or uneven developing country,” a fallacious component of Skocpol’s argument, according to Mann. 50 A major crisis of legitimacy of the old regime in France had resulted from the prolonged and increasingly serious financial crisis that resulted from France’s loss to Britain in the Seven Years’ War. “Britain acquired a global empire [in the war]; France acquired debts.” 51 Subsequent to this loss, in virtue of this debt, the French Monarchy not only suffered challenges to its legitimacy from having alienated the aristocracy on account of its persistent autocracy, but now suffered from a “crisis of confidence” of the French financiers and bourgeoisie on account of the insupportable war debt. 52 It certainly constituted a significant “legitimation crisis,” in the Habermassian sense, for the old regime in France.
Whatever the intellectual origins of national collective identity in its early American and French manifestations, the notion of citizenship and of sovereignty lodged in the people, rather than in the monarch, and the right of these people to determine their own affairs, became legitimating principles for a new social order struggling to emerge from civil society. This civil society might have been created-to-order for the benefit of the full flowering of capitalist production relations. As capitalism flowered through the nineteenth century, a conception of economic class was experienced by domestic society, but contrary to the expectations of Marx, the political organization of nineteenth-century domestic society did not emerge directly from the relations of production. Certainly the notion of economic class could have never developed without the triumph of capitalist production relations. The Marxist notion of economic class is an artifact of the fact that Marxism emerged as a critique of liberalism and would otherwise be incoherent. Political organization by economic class was mediated, however, through societal reaction against one institutional artifact of the territorial-sovereign state that was in crisis by the nineteenth century: its militarism. 53 The twin burdens of high taxes, and conscription to support the inefficiency and militarism of the old regime state, resulted in a legitimation crisis for the social order upon which this particular institutional form of collective action was founded.
In turn, the bourgeoisie and then the petty bourgeoisie and workers and peasants now “claimed civil citizenship [in order] to freely protest political economy, and when protest was ineffective they demanded political citizenship.” 54 This protest ultimately brought on the “failed” revolution of 1848. The state found that it had to expand participation in order to hold at bay this new legitimation crisis and progressively extended the franchise to ever broader circles of domestic society throughout the nineteenth century. Class, as previously observed, was an attribute of individual identity, but an attribute that always developed in a specific cultural, domestic context. As the expansion of the franchise continued throughout this “long nineteenth century,” the struggle for it was shared across classes. The simultaneous expansion of literacy, with the franchise, to ever more humble, less propertied segments of society enhanced the cultural affinity within domestic society, and its significance. 55 The privileges of the old regime served as a common source of grievance that transcended the class-identities of the non-noble classes. There then developed a “cross-class-self-consciousness” that expanded into national collective identity. 56
It is interesting, in the context of this discussion of the importance of the struggle for enfranchisement in the development of national collective identity, to consider the manner in which the enfranchisement of the citizen qua co-national implies closure against non-nationals and creates noncitizens, and thus disenfranchises others. Note that eventually citizenship was everywhere acquired either by ascription (birth) or by naturalization. 57 In the context of Ruggie’s discussion of territoriality in the international system we might note that the territorial-sovereign state was also a method of territorial closure to individuals and interests pertaining to another sovereign. Territorial sovereignty permitted closure against them through the physical control of a contiguous territory, and of its borders, by a centralized political administration. In the territorial-sovereign system European powers typically administered individuals within their borders in the capacity of subjects, not citizens. In the national-sovereign system, the regulation of citizenship provides the nation with an expanded capacity of closure against noncitizens.
This capacity becomes extremely important as the territorial-state gives way to the nation-state qua eudomonic state, which is by now concerned with the material well-being of its citizens. The notion of enfranchised citizenship, the citizen as an individual with a material stake in the well-being of the nation and a voice in the regulation of its affairs, in many ways constitutes a fundamental legitimating principle of the national-sovereign system. The difficulties that autocratic territorial-sovereign dynasts experienced in meeting these expectations accounts, in many ways, for the legitimation crisis of the old regime as it blinked into the glare of the nationalist era. This is well expressed in the following passage by a recent work of Rogers Brubaker.
Domestic closure against noncitizens rests on this understanding and self-understanding of modern states as bound nation-states—states whose telos it is to express the will and further the interests of distinctive and bounded nations, and whose legitimacy depends on their doing so, or at least seeming to do so. The routine exclusion of noncitizens from modern systems of “universal” suffrage is exemplary in this respect. Suffrage has always and everywhere been closed, but the post-French Revolution nationalization of politics occasioned a gradual shift in the axis and rationale of closure....That the exclusion of noncitizens from the franchise for national elections has nowhere been seriously challenged, even in the many European states with sizable populations of long-term resident noncitizens, testifies to the force—indeed the axiomatic status—of nationalism in modern states. 58
Conclusion
The literature on the causes of nationalism is vast. This book is predominantly concerned with the consequences of nationalization of territorial-sovereign actors, not the causes of nationalism. The book has not yet been written that can coherently delineate among the competing explanations, none of which are, in any case, likely to be wholly applicable for any particular case or state. What is undeniable, for those familiar with the literature on the causes of nationalism, is that many of these “causes” are endogenous to the societies which spawn these nationalisms. They invariably include what structural neorealism dismisses as “unit level causes.” This is no doubt in large measure the reason that the word “nationalism” can not be found in the index of Waltz’s 1979 formulation of structural neorealist theory.
What I have hoped to emphasize with the reconstructive theory and the brief empirical illustration developed in the proceeding pages is that any system theory that hopes to account for and explain phenomena which accompany transformation in the international system must comprehend the self-identifications of collective actors in the system. This perforce entails an examination of the “units” as it is within the units (and their cultural, linguistic, and shared historical contexts), as well as the system, that these self-understandings arise. The self-understandings, or collective identities of collective actors, do have causal significance for the interaction of the “units” and thus must be included as an element of structure. 59
These self-understandings have, historically, strongly influenced which states have allied with other states and for which purposes. Societal self-understandings have helped to determine the norms, rules, and principles of interaction between societies, privileging some modes of interaction and constraining others. Contrary to the assumptions of systemic theories featuring the billiard-ball model of the state, the character of the units has historically affected their behavior quite substantively. The institutional forms of collective action have evolved to reflect changing notions of legitimate domestic and global social order with significant and empirically observable impact on the norms and rules of interaction between the units. The structure of the notion of interests of the units that motivates their behavior is strongly influenced by the structure of identities that mediates their self-identifications and self-understandings with respect to legitimate social authority.
I will now move, in Part II of this work, to describe and analyze the structure of identities and interests that constituted a system comprised of actors possessing territorial-sovereign identity. I would ask the reader to pay special attention to the notion of state interests that emerges from this structure of sovereign identity.
Endnotes
Note 1: See, for example, Gerald Strauss, “The Reformation and its Public in the Age of Orthodoxy” in R. Po-Chia Hsia (ed.) The German People and the Reformation. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1988), pp. 194–215. Back.
Note 2: For an interesting discussion of the level of social penetration of the sixteenth-century state in Germany see Gerald Strauss, Luther’s House of Learning: Indoctrination of the Young in the German Reformation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). Strauss provides a fascinating discussion of the elaborate measures taken by Protestant German princes to ensure that the reformed faith was being taught and internalized in the far reaches of their realms . This involved visitations by an entourage of clerics and state officials, elaborate examinations of parochial clerics and catechists, and the transcriptions and archiving of highly detailed protocols of the examinations. See especially chapters 8, 9 and 12. Back.
Note 3: E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, Second Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 57. Back.
Note 4: See, for example, the first chapter of A. G. Dickens, The German Nation and Martin Luther (London: Edward Arnold, 1974). Chapter 1, entitled “Nationalism and Anticlericalism: Prophecy and Piety,” is studded, quite anachronistically, with references to sixteenth-century “nationalism.” Back.
Note 5: Gerald Strauss, Manifestations of Discontent in Germany on the Eve of the Reformation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971). The book contains a wealth of primary source documents of the period, in English translation. Back.
Note 6: Edward Hallett Carr, Nationalism and After (London: Macmillan, 1945), p. 2. Back.
Note 7: Even in the medieval period from the inception of the Carolingian Empire (800 A.D.) to the late medieval period when Strayer suggests that the outlines of the modern territorial state could be clearly discerned (circa 1300 A.D.), the institution of kingship increasingly had become secularized, and its legitimacy separated from the legitimating principles provided by the political theology of the Church. See Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957). Kantorowicz provides a monumental study of how the particulars of the political theology of divine ordination changed significantly, between the tenth and early sixteenth centuries, with respect to the specific qualities the king’s anointing was thought to have conferred upon him. The sacrality of the anointed king was significantly downgraded over the centuries from what Kantorowicz has referred to as an early “Christ-centered kingship,” to a “law-centered” kingship, to a “man-centered” kingship. See especially chapters 3, 4, and 8. See also my “Moral Authority as a Power Resource.” Strayer’s argument regarding the origins and appearance of the modern state is found in Joseph Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970). Back.
Note 8: See, for example, R. N. Swanson, Church and Society in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989). Back.
Note 9: Georges Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, Arthur Goldhammer (trans.) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), see chapter 1. Back.
Note 10: Robert L. Reynolds, Europe Emerges: Transition Toward an Industrial World-Wide Society 600–1750 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961), pp. 403–19. Back.
Note 11: For valuable discussions of the importance of literacy in the early modern state, see Ronald J. Deibert, “Typographica: The Medium and the Medieval to Modern Transformation,” Review of International Studies 22 (1996): 29–56. For a more highly developed version of these arguments see Ronald J. Deibert, Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia: Communication in World Order Transformation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). For the importance of literacy in the promulgation of the Reformation, see: E. J. Baskerville, “John Ponet in Exile: A Ponet Letter to John Bale,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 37 (3) (1986): 442–47; Mariam U. Chrisman, “Printing and the Evolution of Lay Culture in Strasbourg: 1480–1599” in R. Po-Chia Hsia (ed.), The German People and the Reformation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 74–101; Carole Levin, Propaganda in the English Reformation: Heroic and Villainous Images of King John, (Lewistown, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1988); Nancy L. Roelker, “The Impact of the Reformation Era on Communication and Propaganda,” in Laswell, Lerener and Speier (eds.), Propaganda and Communication in World History, II (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1980), pp. 41–84; Helga Robinson-Hammerstein, “Luther and the Laity,” In Helga Robinson-Hammerstein (ed.), The Transmission of Ideas in the Lutheran Reformation (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1989), pp. 11–46; and Robert W. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Back.
Note 12: For a study of the French case during the transition from the Valois to the Bourbon, and the causes and consequences of the French civil wars of religion, see Emannuel Le Roy Ladurie, The Royal French State 1460–1610, Juliet Vale (trans.) (London: Blackwell, 1994). See especially chapters 4–11. Back.
Note 13: Greengrass argues that early on in the Augsburg system: “Edicts of toleration presented a principle which it was difficult for French monarchs to be seen to concede openly. They were Most Christian Kings, and the traditions, rituals and ceremonies of their office were closely linked to the beliefs and practices of the Catholic Church. Edicts of toleration were difficult, but not impossible, to justify [but] [t]here was already the example of the famous Interim settlement in the Holy Roman Empire in 1548, modified and eventually accepted as the pacification of Augsburg of 1555. The ‘permitting’ of another religion could be presented as necessary to the state’s survival. The verb ‘permettre’ (as in the ‘permitting’ of a privilege) was much more acceptable that the verb ‘tolérer’, which still carried overtones of the kind of dangerous license which would lead inevitably to atheism and libertinism, fears of which were often voiced by contemporaries during the civil wars.” Mark Greengrass, The French Reformation (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), p. 69. Back.
Note 14: A very tidy summary of the events leading up to the Thirty Years War may be found in Andreas Osiander, The States System of Europe, 1640–1990: Peacemaking and the Conditions of International Stability, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 16–17. Back.
Note 15: Le Roy Ladurie, The Royal French State 1460–1610, pp. 232–40 and p. 298. Back.
Note 17: England proved a significant exception. Her early self-identification as a “Protestant nation” had early and significant consequences for her domestic institutional formation, with significant and sanguine consequences for the early emergence of capitalist production relations as well as national self-identification. See Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). See Chapter 1, “God’s Firstborn: England.” Back.
Note 18: For studies of the impact of rapid social change in the Anabaptist movement see R. Po-Chia Hsia, “Munster and the Anabaptists,” in R. Po-Chia Hsia (ed.). The German People and the Reformation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 51–69, and Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, Revised and Expanded Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 252–80. For the impact of rapid social change on the Lutheran Reformation, particularly in an urban context, see Robert Scribner, “Ritual and Reformation” in R. Po-Chia Hsia (ed.), pp. 122–44, and Hans-Christoph Rublach “Martin Luther and the Urban Social Experience” in Helga Robinson-Hammerstein (ed.), The Transmission of Ideas in the Lutheran Reformation, pp. 65–82. Back.
Note 19: For the “top-down” character of the English Reformation, see J. J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984). Back.
Note 20: Kalevi J. Holsti, Peace and War: Armed Conflicts and International Order 1648–1989 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). See Table 3.1, pp. 48–49. Back.
Note 21: See Table 3.2 in Ibid., p. 49. Back.
Note 22: Osiander, The States System of Europe, 1640–1990, pp. 77–89. Back.
Note 23: Ibid. pp. 87–88. Back.
Note 24: Evan Luard, War in International Society: A Study in International Sociology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 346. Back.
Note 26: Ibid. pp. 348–50. Back.
Note 28: John Gerard Ruggie. “Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations,” International Organization 47 (1) (1993): 163. Back.
Note 29: Isser Woloch, Eighteenth-Century Europe: Tradition and Progress 1715–1789 (New York: Norton, 1982), pp. 51–52. Back.
Note 30: Jeremy Black, Eighteenth Century Europe 1700–1789 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), pp. 315–21. Back.
Note 31: It is interesting to note that in Napoleonic France, where noble privilege saw a normative resurgence during the Empire that followed the Jacobin and Thermidorian republics, and that proceeded the Bourbon Restoration, the bourgeoisie in France returned to their pre-Revolutionary pattern of evasion of military service. Isser Woloch’s recent study of post-Revolutionary French society indicates that the urban bourgeoisie obtained bogus medical deferments and hired replacements during the Napoleonic conscription at rates much higher than other segments of society. Woloch, The New Regime, pp. 383–87. Back.
Note 32: Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors, p. 178. Back.
Note 33: Ibid. pp. 178–79. Back.
Note 34: Luard, War in International Society, p. 352. Back.
Note 35: While the literature on international regimes is vast, the best introduction to the topic may be found in Stephen D. Krasner (ed.). International Regimes. Back.
Note 36: Kratochwil, Rules Norms and Decisions, pp. 61–64. Back.
Note 37: Luard, War in International Society, pp. 352–53. Back.
Note 38: Schroeder, “Historical Reality vs. Neo-realist Theory.” Schroeder begins this argument on p. 124. Back.
Note 40: Osiander, The States System of Europe, pp. 110–20. Back.
Note 41: See, for example, the wartime letters of Washington in Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris (eds.). The Spirit of Seventy-Six: The Story of the American Revolution as Told by Participants (New York: Bonanza Books, 1983). Back.
Note 42: See Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932), and Alisdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984). Especially Chapters 4–5. Back.
Note 43: Tamir, Liberal Nationalism, pp. 18–19. Back.
Note 45: See Douglass C. North, Structure and Change in Economic History (New York: Norton, 1981). Back.
Note 46: E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital:1848–1875 (New York: Scribner’s, 1975), p. 29. Back.
Note 47: Mann, The Sources of Social Power, II, pp. 125–26. Back.
Note 48: Mann, The Sources of Social Power, II, p. 161. See also Catherine Drinker Bowen, Miracle at Philadelphia: The Story of the Constitutional Convention (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966), pp. 69–72 and pp. 139–40. Back.
Note 49: Liah Greenfeld questions the assertions of analysts of Marxian heritage such as Barrington Moore that the French Revolution should be regarded as a bourgeois revolution, as its intellectual heritage was a French Enlightenment that was in significant measure a product of aristocratic reaction to absolutism. Rather than seeing them as intellectual agents of the revolution, she argues that the French bourgeoisie “consisted of a middling sort of people, smart enough to recognize a good opportunity. The elite forged and armed the middle classes with weapons it had not much use for itself. The French national identity was of a mixed heritage. The chief reason for the adoption of the idea of the nation in France was the fact that this French elite in the eighteenth century was in a state of crisis, and the idea of national patriotism offered a means of resolving it.” Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, p. 186. Back.
Note 50: Mann, The Sources of Social Power, II, p. 170. Back.
Note 52: For a description of the war debt and the crisis of confidence that resulted from subsequent inability of the French crown to manage it see James C. Riley, The Seven Years War and the Old Regime in France: The Economic and Financial Toll (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986) See especially chapters 6 and 7. Back.
Note 53: Mann, The Sources of Social Power, II, p. 221. Back.
Note 55: Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, p. 118. Back.
Note 56: Mann, The Sources of Social Power, II, p. 225 . Back.
Note 57: Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 31–34. Back.
Note 59: Little, “Rethinking System Continuity and Transformation.” Back.
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