|
|
|
|
The Nation-State and Global Order: A Historical Introduction to Contemporary Politics , by Walter C. Opello, Jr. and Stephen J. Rosow
4. The Absolutist State:
Sovereignty Instituted
The modern territorial state took several centuries to become established. In this chapter we discuss the first form the territorial state took in Europe, from roughly the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and focus on how territorial sovereignty was imagined and instituted. Specifically, we look at the transformation of political structures, the rise of capitalism, and the transformation of the relation of state to capital. The emphasis is on the transformation of political space, in thought and practice, into an idea of territoriality that linked the local to the national and the rest of the world in ways that broke with the traditions of medieval Christendom. After painting each of these transformations in rather broad strokes, we turn to two specific case histories that show how sovereignty was instituted in two early modern states, England and France.
The Emergence Of Sovereign Territoriality
An important catalyst for the transformation of medieval monarchies was the Reformation and the religious violence and wars it spawned. The Reformation was a revolt against the Catholic Church by those who considered it corrupt, more concerned with maintaining its power and privileges than with guiding the spiritual salvation of Christendom. At first, reformists were members of the clergy, such as the German monk Martin Luther (1482–1546). But soon the reform religions, such as Lutheranism, Presbyterianism, and Calvinism, spread throughout Europe, especially among the bourgeoisie, but also among some of the nobility. Reformers, known as Protestants, argued that salvation depended on faith alone. Protestant religious practice emphasized the private, personal relationship between the individual person and God; this relationship, they argued, obviated the need for the Catholic Church’s liturgy, sacraments, and official hierarchy of priests, bishops, and pope. Indeed, Protestants argued that the Catholic Church’s statues and images of its saints amounted to false gods; some even viewed the Catholic hierarchy, including the pope, as the Antichrist.
Religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants developed in every European monarchy, especially in northern Europe. States began to advance the religions of their rulers by attacking states whose rulers professed opposing faiths. These wars, known as the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), began in German-speaking kingdoms, principalities, and dukedoms and pitted Catholic and Protestant rulers against each other. The fighting was bloody because the combatants thought they had God on their side and that the enemy was the instrument of Satan. It is estimated that about one-third of the population of German-speaking Europe died as a result of the fighting. Eventually, the desire to end the bloodshed and the resulting economic devastation led to a new concern with peace in Europe. Peace treaties, signed at Münster and Osnabrück in 1648, known collectively as the Peace of Westphalia (1648), sanctioned the division of Europe into states according to the religious principles of their rulers.
The Peace of Westphalia recognized the principle of state sovereignty and enshrined the concept of secure and universally recognized state borders in law. It accepted the principle of nonintervention in the territorial space of other states and pioneered a rough standard for relating different currencies to limit the fluctuation of the value of money across different states; this encouraged trade by making financial transactions more predictable. Such a standard made it important for each state to control the value of its coin of the realm.
The treaty also encouraged further development and use of diplomacy, that is, the art and practice of conducting relations among states through embassies and ambassadors, which had begun in the sixteenth century. 1 Modern diplomacy, with its concepts of extraterritoriality and diplomatic immunity, reflected a new sense of estrangement in Europe. Increasingly, the political other was conceived of as a state, with a specific geographic location, rather than heretical religious group, a rival noble family, or a person of inferior rank. Gaining knowledge about and communicating with other states required different norms, rules, and formal institutions than did overcoming the estrangement from heretics or rival nobility. The new institutions of diplomacy, then, both presupposed the organization of territorial states and helped to further their entrenchment into a system of states. 2
The Peace of Westphalia is perhaps the most important historical benchmark in the formation of the modern territorial state. Through it the principles of state sovereignty became normalized into a new political imaginary that, inside the state, sovereignty referred to legitimate, controlling authority, while outside, sovereignty referred to the reciprocal right to self-determination against dynastic or other claims, as well as to freedom from external religious interference. 3
Territoriality arose, then, in good part as a historically contingent resolution of a spiritual crisis in Christendom. By sanctioning the division of the Christian commonwealth into territorially bounded states, the Peace of Westphalia also consolidated and gave a new political form to Europe. Europe as a political identity began to take hold; that is, the term “Europe” increasingly was used to refer to an imagined political space defined by its own rules. Within Europe there obtained a system of states and an international society with an international law to regulate conflict and trade. The peoples outside Europe came to be understood not only as non-Christian others but as extralegal peoples who were not governed by the same rules of the international society of Europe; this had enormous consequences for colonial and imperial policies, as we will show in Part 3. Estrangement of European peoples from themselves becomes a double estrangement, simultaneously religious and political. A third estrangement, through colonialism, was also in the making. European states will come to be seen as more economically and culturally advanced than the non-European peoples they conquered and colonized, about which we will say more in Part 3.
Representing Territorial State Sovereignty
The Peace of Westphalia created a problem: how to imagine and represent a combined religious, moral, and political authority in a secular, earthly entity confined within territorial borders and boundaries. Finding a solution was imperative given that these territorial entities were created by conventions and agreements, which gave some measure of peace to the Europe of religious wars and which had to be grounded and secured.
The first and predominant solution to this crisis of the representation of territorial authority was to imagine the state as a symbolic body, a body politic. Such a discursive practice had two notable sources. First, locating authority in a symbolic body had a long history and resonance in Christianity and was recognizable by both Protestants and Catholics. Christians located authority in the human world in the body of Christ, who, as the son of God, had a dual nature. He was both flesh and blood and ethereal at the same time; that is, “man and God.” Second, legal discourses during the Middle Ages had similarly endowed the body of the king with a special significance and dual nature. Political factions in the early modern state, in spite of their differences, could appeal to the fiction of the king’s two bodies. One side emphasized the tradition of the divine right of kings in which the king’s authority was traced through the patriarchal lineage of Adam, the first male given authority over other men and women by God. The other side appealed to the king’s body as a collective body composed of his subjects. 4
The latter, which was to have lasting influence, was developed in England, for example, by Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) in Leviathan (1650). For Hobbes, the basis of the state, which he called a commonwealth, was the interest of individual subjects in securing their own peace and protection. He hypothesized that without a sovereign, people lived in a state of nature characterized by a war “where every man is Enemy to every man,” which made “the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.” 5 According to Hobbes, individuals living in a state of nature created a sovereign power to defend themselves “from the invasion of Forraigners, and the injuries of one another, and thereby to secure them in such sort, as that by their owne industrie, and by the fruites of the Earth, they may nourish themselves and live contentedly.” Hobbes saw the sovereign as a unity of the wills of the individual subjects who composed it: “The only way to erect such a Common Power . . . is, to conferre all their power and strength upon one Man, or upon one Assembly of men, that may reduce all their Wills, by plurality of voices, unto one Will.” Moreover, he argued that to create this sovereign, one consents to a “ social compact, ” a promise on the part of all individual subjects to “Authorise and give up my Right of Governing my selfe, to this Man, or to this Assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy Right to him, and Authorise all his Actions in like manner.” 6 Blending the religious and legal conceptions of the symbolic body, Hobbes describes the sovereign as an “Artificiall Soul” residing in the “Artificiall Man,” which is the Commonwealth, 7 or, alternatively, as a “Mortall God.” 8
This new way of imagining and representing the sovereignty of the state had two primary effects. First, it rendered the state more abstract and enacted the dualistic structure (inside/outside) of the Westphalian settlement. The sovereign treated his subjects inside the territory as a collective being, a population to be regulated and molded for the good the state. At the same time, it mediated their estrangement from those outside (who were increasingly presented as threats), which required the internal organization of the subjects by the sovereign. The head/soul (sovereign) needed to organize, coordinate, and regulate the physical body (subjects, territory) to protect it from the outside.
The second effect of the new way of imagining sovereignty was to deepen the patriarchal domination of women. The state, or collective body, comprised a robust public life in which war, intrigue, and the pursuit of wealth were reserved largely for men. States now protected something increasingly referred to as “society.” “Society” came to refer to a private, interior world, first in the court life among the courtiers of the king, and then in the social world of art, high culture, and fashion, which was generated by the court, and through which capitalism was rapidly spreading throughout the population. 9 Increasingly, the state depended on a private sphere in which male subjects were socialized to participate in public activities, such as owning property, serving in the state bureaucracy, or fighting in the army—activities reserved for men. In this private sphere men learned to be individuals, to cultivate their particular talents, which could then be appropriated and used by the sovereign.
Rather than being viewed as individuals whose status resulted from personal abilities, achievements, and wealth, as was the case for men in public life, women continued to be understood as products of nature, better suited to the private than the public sphere. The functions of this private sphere, such as nurturing and caring for children, giving emotional support, and developing personal habits of hygiene, increasingly came to be associated with a new norm of “femininity,” which was held in opposition to the public world’s “masculine” characteristics, such as competing in business, gaining a rational education, and exercising governing power. 10
Changes in the basic idea of the family, then, were crucial components of the new sovereign states. The family became bound up with a new idea of privacy. The family became the institutionalized form of the private sphere; here men developed their individuality and here, too, they cultivated their usefulness to and participation in the body politic. Spaces such as the bedroom, in which, during the medieval period, it had been the custom to entertain important guests, became private enclosures from which outsiders were excluded. Women came to be seen as belonging “naturally” in this private space. This prevented them from becoming individuals themselves and rendered them aides to the development of men’s individuality.
Reimagining Political Space 11
The early modern state reimagines political life and sovereignty within territorial boundaries. We have seen various ways in which states at different times imagined the boundaries and key components of political space. Classical republican city-states, such as those of ancient Greece and Rome, considered the state as an association of human beings that provided for the common good. Politics properly took place in cities because this was where citizens met to discuss common needs and make common decisions. Because the republic meant the association of citizens, territorial boundaries were less important. Cities were separated from other cities by open areas rather than by fixed boundaries. Political space was associated with the specific place in which citizens met to debate and decide about laws and the common good. This classical republican idea of political space was manifested in the city-states of northern Italy during the Renaissance and still informs some elements of modern states.
Nevertheless, the republican imaginary of political space is not the predominant one in modern states. Modern states are defined in terms of sovereignty and territorial boundaries. Political space is not the specific place in which citizens meet to debate and decide political matters, but refers to the area inside the territorial boundaries under the state’s control. Politics comes to be associated less with the debating and deciding of the common good and more with securing borders and maintaining the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the state. The political space of the modern state becomes something to be pacified, administered, and defended. 12
Unlike republican theories of political space, which refer to the specific place where politics occurs, and includes all the specific attributes of that place (especially its people, with their distinctive culture and traditions), political space in modern states is more general. It refers to territory that states control. This idea of political space draws on the concepts of space that were invented in Euclidean geometry during the early modern period. 13 Space was increasingly seen not as separated places having little to do with one another, but rather as a continuous field, a singular and empty space. Political space for the modern territorial state, then, in principle, included the entire planet, and was seen to enclose particular political spaces on the planet that particular states could pacify, administer, and defend effectively. The political ordering and governance of specific places was contingent, not natural or sacred. In this way of imagining political space the type of government a state has is less important than its being a state. Whereas the modern state can be designated in various ways, its designation simply as a state, that is, as an entity that exercises administrative control over a specific territory with fixed and secure boundaries, becomes predominant.
Not tied to place, state sovereignty could become an abstract and general model; it could be transplanted, and sometimes reconfigured, to suit different locales. Being based on such a generalized model allowed particular states to expand into the space outside, and permitted the state form to be exported via European colonialism and imperialism. By the end of the nineteenth century, as we will see in Part 3, the entire planet came to be divided into separate states. This was made possible by the new idea of the planet as space filled by the contingent organizations of territorial states, rather than the naturally differentiated spaces of ancient or medieval conceptions, or the non-Western conceptions of space, which either sacralized place, as did the Chinese and Mayan Empires, for example, or which considered human societies as embedded in their natural environment, as did the native peoples of North America, for example. Other forms of political life, such as nomadic tribes, traditional empires, and republican city-states, were no longer recognized as legitimate ways of organizing and practicing politics.
Economy And State/Public And Private
Territoriality and the new imaginary of political space that constituted it broke sharply with the past. They made possible both an intensification of internal consolidation by the state and the modular extension of the state to the rest of the world. In order to understand the different forms the state took in this period, we need to look at the reconstitution of economic life and its relation to the state.
In medieval states economic accumulation was still largely considered the province of corporate groups, especially the nobility who owned the land, from which the greatest amount of wealth derived, and the bourgeoisie, whose guilds regulated manufacturing and commercial activity in the towns. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries fundamental changes occurred in economic activity and the way it was understood and envisioned. Two developments were crucial.
First, the type of wealth characteristic of the bourgeoisie—that involving manufacturing and trade—became more and more important. Mobile property such as money and the financial instruments necessary for trade, as well as those commodities produced for the local market, accounted for an increasing proportion of the state’s wealth. These commercial practices were developed first and most fully in the city-states of northern Italy, as well as the Hanseatic cities on the north coast of Germany, but eventually spread throughout Europe. They spread especially to states such as the Netherlands and England, which depended on long-distance trade because local supplies of important goods, such as wheat, grain, wood, and wine, had been exhausted or had to be imported.
The second development, closely connected to the first, was the general acceptance of the principle of individual ownership of property. Property came to be seen as a right of the individual, not the corporate group, and thus the individual was allowed to buy and sell it at will.
Early modern states attempted to use these new economic conditions of mobile and individual property in policies called mercantilism by eighteenth century economists. 14 The specific ways they did so had much to do with the development of different forms of the state. It should be remembered, however, that an economy based on private property (i.e., capitalism) and the modern state developed together, each intertwined with and required by the other. Only later, at the end of the eighteenth century, would a science of political economy emerge that tries to disentangle them. 15
Mercantilism assumed that a state’s wealth was based on the amount of gold and silver it could accumulate and that the quantity of these precious metals that one monarchy accumulated was an equivalent loss by another. States therefore wanted to colonize lands rich in gold and silver, and export as many manufactured goods as possible. By exporting as much as possible and minimizing imports, states gained what economists call a favorable balance of trade. To make sure that exports exceeded imports, states levied tariffs (i.e., taxes) on imports in order to keep foreign goods out and subsidized the development of domestic industries by granting them monopolies, or by founding the industries themselves. 16
Such policies created a mercantile sector of the economy that related differently to the rest of the state’s economy, depending on the circumstances of the particular state. Two broad types of economic structure can be distinguished.
In certain states the landed nobility continued as the dominant economic power. Most wealth within these states derived from land ownership, which largely remained in the hands of the nobility. The private sector consisted primarily of petit bourgeoisie, i.e., shopkeepers and small manufacturers engaged in local markets. The portion of the private sector that engaged in long-distance trade and large commercial ventures was small, in part because of the relatively undeveloped financial sector, especially banks. 17 The result was that the revenues generated by the mercantile sector —consisting largely of enterprises created and chartered by the king to control specific aspects of long-distance, colonial trade, especially joint-stock companies, or to engage in large manufacturing enterprises—did not filter through the general economy to generate further growth of the private sector.
In other states, such as England and the Netherlands, a substantial private sector engaged in long-distance trade and large-scale manufacturing, which utilized newly invented machines and the factory system. Indeed, in these states, the private sector now predominated over the landed nobility. Such ventures were facilitated by highly developed financial industries (banking and credit). 18 Joint-stock companies chartered by the state controlled much of the colonial trade, but given the relatively large private commercial sector and the financial industries, its profits were circulated through this sector and fed further growth. This economy created a very different situation for the state than was the case in those states where the landed nobility remained predominant.
Absolutism
The world absolutism (from the Latin absoluta, meaning unbound) usually refers to rule by an all-powerful, all-embracing monarch who faces no checks or control on his power. The absolute monarch rules his realm directly through a staff of administrative officials whom he has rendered totally dependent upon him. The assembly of estates has been “put to sleep” by the crown; that is, it has been suppressed and is no longer consulted by the king. Moreover, local entities have been brought under the direct authority of the crown. Power is exercised without the concurrence of the estates, and the monarch has become absolute territorial sovereign. Monarchical absolutism was generally justified by the theory of “divine right of kings.” 19
Absolutist monarchies as a form of the early modern state are usually counterposed to parliamentary monarchies—that is, to a form of the early modern state in which the estates have won the struggle for power with the crown and the king’s ability to rule his realm on his own has been reduced or eliminated completely. In place of the feudal constitutional order of joint or mixed rule, an assembly embodying the estates, called a parliament (from the French verb parler, meaning to speak), has defeated the king and become the territorial sovereign. 20
We believe that the dichotomy between absolutist monarchies and parliamentary monarchies is a false one. In our view both are varieties of absolutism. Recall that the military revolution that took place from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, and transformed the feudal host into the standing army of infantry and artillery, led to the creation of an incipient centralized governing apparatus and practices realized primarily for the purpose of directly extracting from the realm the men, money, and matériel needed to fight wars. 21
War and preparing for war generated a great struggle in all medieval realms between the crown, on the on hand, and the estates, on the other, over which would be the absolute sovereign of the emerging territorialized state. This great struggle evolved in two main directions: one was toward the crown, which became the absolute territorial sovereign to the total exclusion of the estates; the other was toward the estates, which became the absolute territorial sovereign at the total expense of the crown.
Varieties of the Absolutist State
Which of the two institutions, crown or estates, became the absolute territorial sovereign in a particular emerging early modern state depended on the outcome of the struggle between the two. The outcome of this struggle was conditioned by the contingent “situational factors” of the monarchy in question—factors such as the realm’s geographical position with respect to rival monarchies, the “starting condition” of the realm, the personal strength of individual kings, and the ability of the estates to resist. 22
The way these situational factors and the starting condition of the realm have influenced the instituting of absolute sovereignty can be seen in the following brief comparative histories of early state formation in England and France. In England, contingent situational factors, such as the insularity of the realm, its small size, its early centralization by conquest, and the importation of feudalism allowed the estates to win the struggle for absolute territorial sovereignty. In France, on the other hand, contingent situational factors, such as the realm’s indigenous feudalism, strong regionalism, and its geographical location near emerging rival kingdoms (especially Spain), allowed the crown to win the struggle for absolute territorial sovereignty. 23
England: An Absolutist Parliamentary State
In 1066, William, Duke of Normandy (r. 1066–1087), invaded England and defeated the Anglo-Saxon king Harold, at the Battle of Hastings. William the Conqueror, as he is known, imported feudalism from France. He distributed among his Norman barons the choicest lands in the kingdom as fiefs. The barons had to supply a certain quota of knights, whom they supported by dividing their fiefs among their vassals. Thus, a feudal hierarchy was imposed, which gave rise to a struggle between the crown and the baronage as each attempted to increase its power against the other.
William was a strong king who did not hesitate to jail great barons and assert his right to appoint bishops and abbots. To finance his court, he did not hesitate to extract heavy taxes. He warred against the king of France over the territorial boundaries of his realm. When William died in 1087, his eldest son inherited Normandy as a separate dukedom, and a younger son, William Rufus, inherited England. Rufus, who was unpopular with the Church because he was satirical and also homosexual, ruled until he was murdered in 1100. He was succeeded by Henry I (r. 1100–1135), who persuaded the barons to accept him as king provided he would stop the objectionable practices of his brother, which included charging unreasonable taxes and forcing widows to remarry.
Henry restored Normandy to his realm and developed a central administration and an efficient financial system. The kingdom was divided into shires, to each of which he assigned a reeve recruited from the lower ranks of the feudal hierarchy. His shire-reeves, or sheriffs, were made to appear before the barons of the exchequer to pay the revenues they had collected for the king. Henry’s heavy-handed rule resulted in a series of revolts by the baronage, which he was able to put down. 24
When Henry died in 1135 he left no heir but a daughter, Matilda; as a result, a dynastic war broke out among rival claimants to the throne. During the strife, the barons were able to build much local autonomy by promising support to the claimant who offered the most extensive privileges. Thus, when Matilda’s son Henry II (r. 1154–1189) ascended the throne in 1154, the kingdom, which reached from Scotland to the Pyrenees and included half of today’s France, had been pulverized into numerous powerful baronies. Henry fought these barons and took away many of the lands and privileges they had gained during the previous fourteen years of turmoil. Henry II’s sons, Richard I (r. 1189–1199) and John (r. 1199–1216), continued to expand the power of the crown at the expense of the barons. Richard, the Lion-Heart, was a crusader who taxed his realm to the utmost to pay for his campaigns in the Holy Land. John, who faced high inflation, taxed the realm inordinately for his wars in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, violated laws, and demanded frequent scutage (payments of money in lieu of military service). John’s actions resulted in a baronial revolt. The barons demanded a return to the laws of Henry I, which recognized the rights of the nobility and limited the powers of the crown. On June 15, 1215, John accepted the demands of the barons and drafted a document called the Magna Carta, sealed at Runnymede, in which he agreed not to levy taxes that had not been approved by an assembly of the barons. After the Magna Carta, the barons gained the upper hand in their struggles with the crown. They forbade the king’s sheriffs from entering their lands, took possession of his courts, and usurped the powers of his local administrators. 25 Rather than being a victory for the liberty of the common people as it is often claimed today, the Magna Carta was actually a victory for England’s powerful barons.
Henry III (r. 1216–1272), who needed money and troops, expanded the Great Council to include two knights from the shires, two leading citizens from the cities and towns, and the clergy. He consulted this “Model Parliament,” which was divided into two chambers, the House of Lords and the House of Commons, when he levied taxes, especially for fighting wars. The financial exigencies of fighting wars strengthened Parliament rather than the king, however, because it was able to exchange approval of tax requests for extensions of parliamentary rights and privileges. The power of Parliament was strengthened greatly during the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453) by granting the king’s request for money to fight the French king over conflicting dynastic claims in exchange for the right to meet regularly, to control royal ministers, and to examine the crown’s accounts. 26
The wars against the Irish, Welsh, and Scots extended the territorial boundaries of the English monarchy and had an important influence on the military defense of the realm. As with medieval monarchies elsewhere, the feudal host of heavy cavalry was the core of the king’s army. However, wars against the Welsh and Scots, who were able to defeat mounted cavalry thanks to rough terrain and guerrilla tactics, encouraged the English to incorporate more foot soldiers into their armies. These foot soldiers were recruited by the barons, under whose control they remained as local militias. This meant that the English crown was not able to build a strong army under its direct control. Moreover, the crown had come to depend upon Parliament for the money to fight wars. The lack of a centrally controlled, standing army was not a problem, however, for the survival of the realm because England was an island kingdom and was not directly threatened by the increasingly centralized and powerful monarchies on the continent. What efforts the crown made to strengthen its military capacity went into the navy, upon which it came to rely to defend the realm. 27
Dominions of Henry II, 1154-1189
During the reign of Henry VIII (r. 1509–1547), the crown sought to strengthen itself by forming an alliance with the landed gentry, a group of farmers below the nobility who were becoming rich thanks to the gradual commercialization of English agriculture. Henry regularly sought approval for his taxes and his policies, one of the most important being the reformation of the Catholic Church in England. Henry separated the English Church from Rome, made himself its head, and confiscated the property and lands of the great monasteries and convents. During this period, the House of Commons became the focus of the gentry’s power.
Despite increasing military involvement in wars with other centralizing monarchies, especially France and Spain, the English crown did not become absolute during the reigns of the two strongest rulers of the House of Tudor, Henry VIII and his daughter, Elizabeth I (r. 1558–1603). Parliament remained a force to be reckoned with. No large standing army was created. To a great extent the ranks of England’s army were filled with mercenaries and freebooters, who were demobilized and sent home at the end of a war. Emphasis was placed on the navy, which was, in large part, composed of privateers —that is, ships belonging to private owners authorized by the crown to conduct hostilities in its name. 28
The crown’s wars were paid for, in part, by selling crown lands, confiscating Church property, and borrowing money abroad. Additional money came from taxes granted by Parliament. Parliament became a steady source of revenue for the crown. Thus warmaking, even during the period of strong Tudor monarchs, was conducted within the limitations of England’s feudal constitutionalism. Moreover, a small standing army and reliance on privateers for a navy meant that the English crown did not need a large, centralized bureaucratic apparatus of direct rule. Parliament was strengthened by granting the crown the money it requested in exchange for the recognition that certain forms of taxation were illegal. 29
Eventually, Parliament became so strong as an independent institution that it was itself able to go to war against the crown. This war, known as the English Civil War (1642–1648), was precipitated by a breakdown of the agreement between king and Parliament concerning taxation. Charles I (r. 1625–1649) needed money to put down rebellions in Scotland and Ireland, which Parliament was unwilling to grant. Charles imposed taxes to pay for his military campaigns without Parliament’s consent. Parliament responded with the Petition of Right (1628), which restated its traditional right to be consulted. Charles answered by dissolving Parliament and attempting to rule alone; Parliament then took up arms against the crown. The king’s army was small, poorly equipped, and irregularly paid. Moreover, Charles did not have an administrative structure through which he could extract the financial and human resources to support his army. He had to rely, instead, upon donations from wealthy supporters and proceeds from the sale of land seized from the supporters of Parliament. Parliament’s army was also small, but it was well supported by funds raised from the sale of confiscated royal property as well as forcibly collected taxes. Owing to its superior ability to raise revenues necessary to support the army, Parliament won the war and abolished the monarchy. Charles was beheaded in 1649, and England became a republic. 30
After the war, the unity of the Parliamentarians collapsed into factionalism and backstabbing, which ushered in the rule of Oliver Cromwell (r. 1649–1660). During the Protectorate, as Cromwell’s rule is called, Parliament continued to sit and exercise its right to approve war subsidies, however. Despite disagreements with Parliament, Cromwell was committed to it as an institution and to the concept of the gentry’s representation.
The Protectorate was unstable, and in 1660 the monarchy was restored. When Charles II (r. 1660–1685) of Scotland became king, he attempted to circumvent Parliament. Cromwell’s “New Model Army” was demobilized, leaving only a small force. Charles was succeeded by his brother James II (r. 1685–1688), a dedicated absolutist, who also attempted to rule without Parliament by relying on loans, increased customs revenues, and the taxation of religious dissidents—in other words, by relying more and more heavily on the wealth generated by the private sector. This continued to increase the power of the bourgeoisie and to limit the power of the monarchy. The result was a strengthened Parliament.
James was opposed by Parliament and driven into exile. A new dynasty was founded when Parliament installed William III (r. 1688–1702), of the Dutch House of Orange, on the throne. In the Act of Settlement (1689), William accepted the crown on terms set by Parliament. The ouster of James II and the installation of William, which is known as the Glorious Revolution (1688–1689), demonstrated the absolute power of Parliament and the utter futility of any monarch’s challenging its authority. Parliament had become without question the sovereign of the emergent modern English state. Over the next two centuries the power of the crown continued to decline and that of Parliament to increase, so that by the eighteenth century absolute sovereign power had been completely acquired by Parliament. 31
France: An Absolutist Monarchical State
When Hugues Capet (r. 987–996) was chosen to be the king of West Francia, that portion of Charlemagne’s empire that had been ruled by his son Louis, the entire kingdom, except for a small royal demesne called the Île-de-France around Paris, was in the hands of six great barons: the count of Flanders, the duke of Normandy, the duke of France, the duke of Burgundy, the duke of Aquitaine, and the count of Toulouse. The new king’s power was severely limited by these powerful barons, who believed that they, who had helped Hugues gain the crown, had established an elective monarchy. 32 Although early Capetian kings, such as Philippe I (r. 1060–1108) and Louis VI (r. 1108–1137), increased the size of the royal patrimony, the kingdom remained for the next two centuries a loose aggregation of baronies protected by feudal limitations on the king’s power.
Philippe II (r. 1180–1223) was the first of four late Capetian kings who centralized and expanded royal power. He reconquered Normandy from the English crown in 1204 and later annexed Brittany, Anjou, Maine, Touraine, and Poitou to his directly ruled domain. Philippe supervised local courts and made alliances with the bourgeoisie against the nobility. Many towns were given charters, and trade was encouraged by granting privileges to merchants. 33
Philippe’s son, Louis VIII (r. 1223–1226), gained portions of Aquitaine and Languedoc. His son, Louis IX (r. 1226–1285), also known as St. Louis, did not extend the crown’s territory but centralized its power. Although he respected the rights and privileges of the nobility, Louis did not tolerate feudal infringements on royal authority. He suspended the baronial courts and replaced them with his own and gradually established a common law for the realm. The third powerful king, Philippe IV (r. 1285–1314), extended the boundaries of his kingdom to the Atlantic in the west, the Pyrenees and Mediterranean in the south, the Alps in the east, and the Rhine in the north; this established the present territorial dimensions of the contemporary French state.
Initially, the administration of the kingdom was simple. Officials of the king’s household managed the affairs of the realm. The steward had general supervision over the demesne. The king’s constable and marshal, who cared for his horses, commanded his knights in battle. Since the time of Hugues Capet, royal lands were looked after by officials called prévôts who collected revenues, performed judicial functions, and maintained peace. As the kingdom expanded it was divided into bailiwicks and a bailli (bailiff) was assigned to each. The baillis, who represented the royal presence, controlled various prévôts, sat as judges, and carried out police functions. Prévôts and baillis were recruited from the lower nobility and bourgeoisie. The French monarchy continued to centralize under Philippe IV’s descendants, and by the beginning of the fifteenth century it had an extensive administrative system in place supported by a regular tax called the taille. 34
France, 1035-1328
Like other medieval monarchs, Philippe convoked an expanded curia regis (royal court) called the Estates General (in medieval fashion, this was composed of clergy, nobility, and bourgeoisie) that gave advice on major decisions affecting the realm and approval for the taxes he levied. Unlike the English Parliament, however, the Estates General did not evolve into a strong institution capable of resisting the demands of the king. It was convoked only when the king wished for it to meet and usually only during an emergency. Because each estate met separately in Paris and Toulous, the Estates General was easily manipulated by the king’s lawyers. Using his own administrators, the king was easily able to bypass the Estates General and forge direct links with the pays d’états, or local assemblies. Later, the crown was able to destroy these local centers of power and replace them with its own centralized, bureaucratic apparatus to extract resources in order to make war and maintain a large standing army.
French kings continued to rely on the feudal host for military defense long after the superiority of the infantry had been demonstrated. Disastrous defeats of French chivalry during major battles of the Hundred Years’ War at Crécy (1346), Poitiers (1356), and Agincourt (1415), where 6,000 French knights were annihilated by a small English army armed with longbows and pikes, did not bring about military modernization. After watching English armies march across France and defeat French knights during the Hundred Years’ War, the French crown decided to modernize its military. In 1439, the Ordonnance sur la Gendarmerie created a regular military force composed of cavalry, artillery, and infantry units armed with longbows. Although this initiative gave the crown a stronger and more reliable military force, discipline and training were lacking. In order to pay for these units, which were garrisoned and supplied locally, the crown levied a uniform tax without the approval of the pays d’états. The uproar that resulted forced the king to negotiate a series of complicated taxes with each pays d’états. Although some early French kings occasionally resorted to raising taxes without the consent of the pays d’état, at no point in the early history of the French state was the power of the pays d’états destroyed. 35
This situation began to change during the reign of Louis XIII (r. 1610– 1643). Louis’s finance minister, Cardinal Richelieu (1585–1642), realized that the armed forces were the backbone of the king’s power within the realm and beyond. In 1626, he ordered the destruction of all private fortresses and forbade the construction of fortified private dwellings. In that same year, he created a standing army of 20,000 soldiers under a disciplined chain of command and with regularized pay, uniforms, arms, and quarters provided by the king. Richelieu also created a royal navy of 30 ships, fortified French harbors, and established arsenals. In order to support the army and navy, both of which rapidly grew in size, Richelieu reorganized the bureaucracy and imposed stringent taxes. These taxes were directly collected by thousands of administrative agents, called intendants, who were loyal solely to the crown. The intendants supervised local administration, finance, justice, law enforcement, and the conscription of troops. These measures, and even more stringent ones applied by Richelieu’s successor as finance minister, Cardinal Mazarin (1602–1661), taken in order to fight a war against the Spanish Habsburgs, resulted in a rebellion of the nobility, known as the Fronde (1648–1653). The Frondeurs sought to restore feudal rights and privileges against the crown, but were crushed. 36
The policies of Richelieu and Mazarin allowed Louis XIV (r. 1643– 1715) to establish monarchical absolutism in France. Louis, who believed that he had been ordained by God to rule France with absolute power, centralized all the functions of government at his palace at Versailles. He personally chaired the meetings of the councils that managed provincial affairs, taxation, expenditures, and major policies, and involved himself in every detail and decision. Louis XIV became known as the “Sun King,” around whom the realm revolved. In 1661, the supreme practitioner of mercantilism, Jean Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683), became minister of finance and proceeded to organize the entire economy of France to serve the state, and especially its industrial sector. He issued detailed standards for manufacturing, established new industries protected by tariffs, and created state monopolies financed at public expense. He provided scientific and technical education, kept wages low, abolished all internal tariffs, improved France’s network of roads and canals, and expanded the navy to protect French commercial interests abroad. Under Louis’s minister of war, the Marquis de Louvois (1641–1691), the army was expanded to well over 100,000 well-disciplined men equipped with the latest weapons. 37
French monarchs ignored the Estates General after 1440 and eventually abandoned the policy of frequent convocations. From 1484 until 1560 the Estates General did not meet. In the words of one scholar, “After having battled over three centuries to achieve . . . sovereignty vis-à-vis foreign and domestic rivals, by the late 1400s the kings of France were not prepared to share that sovereignty with the Estates General.” 38 The Estates General stopped being called in 1614. The crown had centralized itself sufficiently by that time and no longer needed the consent of the Estates General for the extraction of revenue. Thus, the monarchy excluded the estates of the realm from any role in governing the kingdom. The nobility had been rendered useless and the rising bourgeoisie of industrialists, merchants, and professionals were cut off from any significant involvement in the affairs of the realm. The crown had become beyond all question the embodiment of absolute sovereignty in the early modern French state.
Summary
The early modern state, developing roughly from the late sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, pioneered a political organization based on a new understanding of sovereignty. Fundamental ideas of a unified, indivisible state ruling over people within a given territory emerged and took shape. Economies came to be envisioned as spaces within states in which wealth is produced, and wealth became the object of state control in order to build large armies and, in some cases, navies. Contingent situational factors encouraged the institution of sovereignty in either absolutist parliamentary monarchies or absolutist monarchical ones.
Endnotes
Note 1: On the development of modern diplomatic institutions and their connections to spying, see Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955). Back.
Note 2: On modern diplomacy as a new form of estrangement, refiguring the idea of who the political other and enemy was as a state, see James Der Derian, On Diplomacy (London: Basil Blackwell, 1987). Back.
Note 3: On the dualistic nature of sovereignty in modern states and its sharp dichotomy of inside/outside, see J. H. Hinsley, Sovereignty, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). For a critical analysis of the politics that flow from this dichotomy, especially for the future of modern states, see R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Back.
Note 4: Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957). Back.
Note 5: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 89. Back.
Note 6: Hobbes, Leviathan, 120. Back.
Note 7: Hobbes, Leviathan, 9. Back.
Note 8: Hobbes, Leviathan, 120. Back.
Note 9: For an account of this in England, see Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985). Back.
Note 10: There is now a large literature on the development of the distinction between a public and private sphere in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. See especially Carole Pateman, “The Fraternal Social Contract,” in The Disorder of Women (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989); Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), chap. 3. Back.
Note 11: This section owes much to Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, rev. ed. (London and New York: Verso Press, 1991); and Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991). Back.
Note 12: On the importance of surveillance and pacification to the spatial construction of sovereignty, see Anthony Giddens, The Nation State and Violence (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1985). Back.
Note 13: See Alfred W. Crosby, The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Back.
Note 14: It should be remembered that this term was originally a pejorative term coined by advocates of free trade in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Back.
Note 15: This argument is made convincingly with respect to property rights, the state, and the states-system by Kurt Burch, “The ‘Properties’ of the State System and Global Capitalism,” in Stephen J. Rosow, Naeem Inayatullah, and Mark Rupert, The Global Economy as Political Space (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1994), 37–59. Back.
Note 16: On mercantilism see Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce: Civilization and Capitalism 15th–18th Century, vol. 2 (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 542 ff. Also see Benjamin J. Cohen, The Question of Imperialism (New York: Basic Books, 1973). Back.
Note 17: See John U. Nef, Industry and Government in France and England, 1540–1640 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1964). Back.
Note 18: For the case of the Netherlands see Violet Barbour, Capitalism in Amsterdam in the 17th Century (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1963). Back.
Note 19: Emile Lousse, “Absolutism,” in Heinz Lubasz, ed., The Development of the Modern State (New York: Macmillan, 1964), 43–48. Back.
Note 20: On the parliamentary state see David Judge, The Parliamentary State (London; Newbury Park, CA; and New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1993). Back.
Note 21: See Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, A.D. 990–1990 (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990). Back.
Note 22: This idea of situational factors influencing state trajectories was first articulated by the German scholar Otto Hintze at the turn of the nineteenth century. See his lecture “Military Organization and the Organization of the State,” in Felix Gilbert, ed., The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). Its most recent iteration is in Brian Downing, The Military Revolution and Political Change: Origins of Democracy and Autocracy in Early Modern Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992) and Thomas Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Back.
Note 23: Downing, The Military Revolution and Political Change, chap. 1. Back.
Note 24: Sidney Painter, The Rise of the Feudal Monarchies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1951), chap. 2. Back.
Note 26: Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan, 167. Back.
Note 27: Bruce D. Porter, War and the Rise of the State: The Military Foundations of Modern Politics (New York: The Free Press, 1994), 79–83. Back.
Note 28: Janice E. Thompson, Mercenaries, Pirates and Sovereigns: State-Building and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), chap. 2. Back.
Note 29: Downing, The Military Revolution and Political Change, chap. 2. Back.
Note 30: Carl J. Friedrich and Charles Blitzer, The Age of Power (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1957), chap. 6. Back.
Note 31: Norman Davies, Europe. A History (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 631. Back.
Note 32: Painter, The Rise of the Feudal Monarchies, chap. 1. Back.
Note 33: Hendrick Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), chap. 5. Back.
Note 35: Downing, The Military Revolution and Political Change, chap. 5. Back.
Note 36: Friedrich and Blitzer, The Age of Power, chap. 5. Back.
Note 38: Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan, 93. Back.
The Nation-State and Global Order: A Historical Introduction to Contemporary Politics
Email this citation