POS 6933 - 9681
State Building
M E1-E3
Conference Room, AND
Schirmer
Office Hours: W 2:00 – 4:00, F 10:00 – 11:00, AND 205
Email:
Course Objectives:
The course is intended to give students a thorough introduction into the literature on one of the largest questions political scientists can ask: How and why did a world without states transform into one where the whole of the terreferma of our globe – to almost the last speck – belongs to one or another state? The answers to this question variously emphasize either domestic or interactions between different political units, and locate the driving forces for changes in state-formats either in economic or military (sometimes also cultural) changes. Whatever the preferred explanation, we obviously deal with social change on a scale that is vast – both in its temporal and spatial expansion. Surprisingly, something like a standard narrative has emerged: It begins with the origin (or perhaps the rebirth) of the state in medieval Europe, the establishment of the modern state in the 17thand 18th centuries, and the global expansion of what had originally been a European state-system in the 19th and 20th centuries.
This standard narrative – however grotesquely oversimplified my portrayal – generally stands. However it raises more questions than it answers, i.e.: What is it that drives changes in ways in which states operate? How do the tasks that states take vary across time and space? What accounts for the capacity of states to take on these tasks? What is the relationship between the conditions under which states come into being and the regimes that run them?
And it invites critical interrogations: How valid is the modernization-trajectory that visibly underwrites this story? Does the simple dichotomy of pre-modern and modern states, with 1648 as the divide, adequate summarize the history of the state, or are things a little bit more complicated? And is it possible that people and regions that remain outside state control do so not because they are too backward and remote to be included in the state, but because they actively evade it?
Much of the reading material concerns the long duree of state building from the Middle Ages until today. What, then, makes state building a topic worthy of the attention of political scientists not historically inclined? The easiest and least committal answer would be a general didactical reference to the value of history as such. But we won’t go there. For state building continues to be an ongoing process – witness the continual creation of new states (the 1990s alone saw the number of sovereign political units increase by some 30), the failure of old ones, and the continual adaptation of all to changing social, economic, and technological environments.
Course Format and Mechanics:
The course will be conducted in a discussion format. Each session will feature two student presentations. The presentations consist of a short paper (ca. 3-5 pages), which will be circulated at least 24 hours before class, and the in-class presentation itself. The presenters are free in their division of labor and their choice of form of presentation (oral with or without visual support). We will further use Sakay for an ongoing discussion of the materials in discussion forums where all students can post comments, ask and answer questions, etc. as they work on their readings.
Course Requirements:
- Two presentations/papers on weekly readings – 30%.
Papers written in preparation for discussion would have to be submitted to the entire class at least 24 hrs before our weekly class meeting (i.e no later than Sunday, 7 pm)
- Class participation and discussion (including forum) – 20%.
- Final exam or term paper– 50%
Final exam will be a 48-hour take home exam. Students will be able to select two questions from a number of prompts. Each response should be 8-10 pages in length.
Alternatively, students can opt to write a term paper. Term papers are expected to be about 30 pages in length. Students who which to write a paper instead of the final exam should discuss their plans with me as early as possible, but no later than the week following spring break.
Part I: Introduction
1/7The Military State, the Capitalist State, the State and Resistance
Otto Hintze, “Military Organization and the Organization of the State,” in: The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze.
Karl Marx, The German Ideology, excerpts.
Mario Vargas Llosa, The War of the End of the World (New York 1984).
1/14Stating the Problem
Charles Tilly, “Reflections on the History of European State-Making,” in: Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 3-83.
Samuel E. Finer, “State- and Nation-Building in Europe: The Role of the Military,” in: Tilly, Formation, 164-242.
Gabriel Ardant, “Financial Policy and Economic Infrastructure of Modern States and Nations,” in: Tilly, Formation, 243-327.
1/21no class (MLK-Day)
Part II – The Grand Narratives
1/28Towards the Territorial, Sovereign State
Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1992 (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2nd rev. ed, 1992), 1-160.
HendrikSpruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems Change (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
2/4no class
2/11Variation of State Formation in Europe
Stein Rokkan, State Formation, Nation-Building, and Mass Politics in Europe: The Theory of Stein Rokkan, ed. by Peter Flora with Stein Kuhnle and Derek Urwin (New York and Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999).
2/18State Formation and Regime Outcomes
Thomas Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1-88, 156-223.
Brian M. Downing, The Military Revolution and Political Change: Origins of Democracy and Autocracy in Early Modern Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 3-83.
2/25Critical Intervention: “Westphalia” and the Modern State
Leo Gross, “The Peace of Westphalia, 1648-1948,” The American Journal of International Law 20 (1948), 20-41;
Andreas Osiander, “Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Westphalian Myth,” International Organization 55/2 (2001), 251-87;
BennoTeschke, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics, and the Making of Modern International Relations (London and New York: Verso, 2003), chapter
Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London and New York: Verso, 1974), Part I, chapters 1 and 2, and Part II, chapters 1 and 2.
3/4no class (spring break)
Part III – Enter: The Nation
3/11The State as Nation-Maker
Eugene Weber, Peasants Into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1879-1914 (Standord, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1976), 195-220, 278-338, 485-496.
Eric Hobsbawm, “Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870-1914,” in: Hobsbawm and Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
3/18The National Imagination
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections On the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 2nd rev. ed., 2006).
3/25The Institutional Origins of “Nations”
Philip G. Roeder: Where Nation-States Come From: Institutional Change in the Age of Nationalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
Part IV – State Power and Resistance
4/1The Overbearing State
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Conditions Have Failed (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 1-179.
Dan Slater, Ordering Power: Contentious Politics and Authoritarian Leviathans in Southeast Asia (Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 3-142.
4/8State Evasion and Contention
James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 1-97,
Wayne Te Brake, Shaping History: Ordinary People in European Politics, 1500-1700 (Berkeley, Cal.: University of California Press, 1998).
Part V – Beyond the State?
4/15 and 4/22
We’ll keep the last two meetings open for now. At this point in time, we live in a thoroughly statist world, which suggest that thinking “beyond the state” might be an exercise in futility. However, if there’s anything law-like in history, it is that things change. There was a world before the state, and there will be one beyond it (unless, that is, states use their considerable capacity for destruction to synchronize the end of the state with that of the world at large). And there are some indications at least that at least the contemporary nation-state form has peaked some time in the post-WW II-period (remember, the moment of perfection is always also the beginning of decline). “Beyond the state” may suggest the replacement of the state by another form of political authority, the development of non-state forms of political authority above and alongside the state, or the exhaustion of the state’s capacity to organize and domesticate social interactions without anything to take up the baton. The latter can either be imagined in the dramatic fashion of state failure or,less visibly, in a gradual contraction of state capacity (real world examples include the proliferation of privatized security in semi-public spaces and gated communities, the use of for-profit proxies in warfare, or reductions in state capacity to facilitate solutions to collective action problems). Here are a few suggestions:
The European Union as Postmodern State
Stefano Bartolini, Restructuring Europe: Center Formation, System Building, and Political Structuring between the Nation-State and the EU (Oxford, UK, and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007 (a Rokkan/Hirschman-ian analysis of European integration and the subversion of liberal democracy and the welfare-state).
Jan Zielonka, Europe as Empire: The Nature of the Enlarged European Union (Oxford, UK, and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
James Caporaso, “The European Union and Forms of State: Westphalian, Regulatory, or Post-Modern?” in: Journal of Common Market Studies 34 (1996).
Exhaustion of State Capacity
Martin van Creveld, The Rise and Decline of the State (Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 336-420 (for the purposes of this segment, we could focus on the Decline-part of the book – which actually is only one chapter).
State Failure and Societal Collapse:
Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Penguin, rev. ed. 2011)(Admittedly, I am not a big fan), and a host of texts on state failure (often case studies)
Institutional Structure and Low-Performance Economy
Nicolas van der Walle, African Economies and the Politics of Permanent Crisis, 1979-1999 (Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001)