2. Introduction
David Held sees the modern state emerging at the
intersection of the national and international systems.
He traces the state's development through a variety of
historical forms- from the classical European empires, the
divided authority of the feudal states (Papacy and Holy
Roman Empire), the estates system and the absolutisms of
the early modern period, to the emergence of the forms of
political authority, secular power, legitimacy and sovereignty
characteristic of the modern.
The chapter considers the roles of warfare, militarism and
capitalism in underpinning the supremacy of this nation-
state form.
Into this story are woven the changing conceptions of politics
elaborated in western political philosophy by writers such as
Hobbes, Locke Rousseau, Mill, Marx and Weber.
3. Why Europe?
The states system of Europe has had extraordinary
influence in the world beyond Europe: European
expansion and development has had a decisive role in
shaping the political map of the modern world.
Debates about the nature of the modern state in large
part derive from European intellectual traditions,
notably the Enlightenment.
4. History of European States
Roman Empire( 16-1700 years ago), Theodosious I
Western and Eastern Roman Empire.
Western was attacked repeatedly,
Eastern was economically securer than Western.
After 1430 warfare was begun, state with ill-defined
boundaries.
The European map of the late fifteenth century
included some five hundred more or less independent
political units, often with ill-defined boundaries.
7. Empires
Empires required an accumulation and concentration
of coercive means- above all, of war-making ability- to
sustain themselves.
When this ability waned, empires disintegrated.
Empires were ruled but they were not governed.
8. Mediaeval Europe:
Feudalism:
Depended on trade and manufacture.
Developed different social and political structures.
The Middle Ages 'Europe' more accurately meant
'Christendom'.
Christendom:
To unite and centralize the fragmented power centres
of western Christendom into a politically-unified
Christian empire.
Empire was always limited by the complex power
structures of feudal Europe on the one hand, and the
Catholic Church on the other.
There was no Political Theory.
9. Absolutism
The absorption of smaller and weaker political units into
larger and stronger Political structures.
A strengthened ability to rule over a unified territorial area.
A tightened system of law and order enforced throughout a
territory.
The application of a 'more unitary, continuous, calculable,
and effective' rule by a single, sovereign head.
The development of a relatively small number of states
engaged in an 'open-ended, competitive, and risk-laden
power struggle'.
10. Modern State
The concept connotes an impersonal and privileged legal
or constitutional order with the capability of administering
and controlling a given territory.
Territoriality: Fixed border.
Control of the means of Violence: Means of coercion
possible only with the pacification of peoples.
Impersonal Structure of power: Sovereign political order
bound with property rights, religion, and the claims of
traditionally privileged groups.
Legitimacy: The state to be legitimate because it reflected
and/ or represented the needs and interests of its
citizens.
11. Different Forms of Modern State
Constitutional State: Refer to implicit and/ or explicit
limits on political or state decision-making.
Liberal State: Freeing civil society - personal, family and
business life- from unnecessary political interference, and
simultaneously delimiting the state’s authority.
Liberal or Representative Democracy: Representative
democracy means that decisions affecting a community are
not taken by its members as a whole, but by a sub-group of
representatives whom 'the people' have elected for this
purpose.
One Party or Single Party Polity: A single party can be
the legitimate expression of the overall will of the
community.
12. War And Economy
Wallerstein makes a fundamental distinction between two types
of world-system which have existed historically: world-empires
and world-economies. Whereas world-empires were political
units characterized by imperial bureaucracies, with substantial
armies to exact tax and tribute from territorially dispersed
populations, their capacity for success depended upon political
and military achievements. World empires were not as flexible
and, ultimately, as adaptable as the emerging world-economy of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and they were finally
displaced by the European world-economy as it expanded
globally. They were displaced, Wallerstein argues, because the
new world economic system was based on a process of endless
accumulation of wealth. This world-economy was an economic
unit which transcended the boundaries of any given political
structure.
