Coercion, Capital, and European States: AD 990-1990.

Johnson, Christopher H.

As he so often does, Charles Tilly has taken on an enormous problem in this book and has produced an intelligent and provacative analysis of it. In many ways, this study represents the capstone of his lifelong interest in state formation. It appeared, of course, at the very moment when the world system was profoundly shaken by the collapse of the Soviet empire. It is a sure sign of the plausibility of the main arguments of the book that they were not in the least undermined by this event.

Much in the manner of Charles Sabel's challenge to the single-path interpretation of the history of capitalism, Tilly's work provides an elegant classification of patterns of state development in Europe since the tenth century (the appropriate starting point certainly) based upon the ways two fundamental systemic forces, military power and capital, intertwined. There was nothing inevitable about the "triumph of the nation-state" nor is its permanence likely. In the course of the Middle Ages, three forms of state power evolved, each based on contingent circumstances of history and geography: coercion-intensive, capital-intensive, and capitalized coercion. Although none of their leaders ignored Josiah Child's famous dictum that "power and profit ought jointly to be considered," the balance between the two elements gave particular character and particular historical potential to these three different types of European state. Each manifested a path of state formation that led to national states, but it was clearly the third that proved the most viable and paved the way toward Western world domination in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. France and Great Britain mobilized capital for war and used war to generate capital in an optimal fashion, while simultaneously within both nations the exponents of each struggled for political power, thus mobilizing larger and larger segments of their populations into the process of state development. This social and cultural dynamism gave these states an unprecedented vitality, and they proved to be the model for modem state development. But captial-dominant city-states, largely seagoing, such as Genoa, Venice, and the Dutch Republic, where capital holders dominated the military, also contributed to state formation, as did landlord-based territorial empires such as Prussia or Russia where coercion generated tribute from conquered areas as well as unrecompensed service and stipends from physically subjected internal populations. Some in each group evolved directly into nation-states, but those that did increasingly adopted (often quite consciously) many characteristics of the third, while those that did not were swallowed up (e.g. the two Italian city-states) or fell apart (e.g. Poland). It is impossible in a short review to do justice to the nuances of Tilly's analysis, but I believe historians will find it rich and satisfying, rooted as it is in the best of the secondary literature and structured by the key theoretical debates on state formation.

In a profession where the vogue is currently shifting away from systems analysis to culture, discourse, and questions of human agency, Charles Tilly's work reminds us of the continuing power of large-scale problematizing. His conclusion, based securely in macro-social history, is convincing - as far as it goes. The nation-state indeed became the twentieth-century model, principally because interstate competition in the West compelled it to be so. Although it brought a host of institutions beneficial to its populations and in the West itself created formal representative democracy, its main support remained military, as World War II gave way to the Cold War. As the model was exported to the Third World through the good offices of development funds and armies of social scientists to states often artificially shaped by colonial boundaries, institutions, and social structures, the key ingredient, not surprisingly, was military: Western or Soviet hardware, huge armed services, and political leadership in the hands of generals who used the very mechanisms of the state to oppress their internal enemies (especially ethnic rivals) and attack their neighbors. The Western model in fact was inappropriate, riding roughshod over indigenous political institutions and creating havoc in ordinary people's lives. Although Tilly does not disucss it, recent political change in Ghana has proved that stability with widespread popular approval can be achieved by abandoning aspects of the Western model and revitalizing "traditional" institutions, in this case king/queenship among the Ashanti. The larger point: the Western nation-state was time-and-place specific and overrode other types of state in the West itself, types in fact that may be on the rebound. Loose federations, reduced nation-state sovereignty, and greater regional autonomy (indeed statehood as in the former Soviet Union) seem to be the new formula. And this, of course, corresponds - a point Tilly does not make with sufficient vigor - with the emergence of a qualitatively new organization of capital, the emergence of a truly global economy under the aegis of multinationals that recognize no traditional state boundary. Socialist In These Times (6-27-94) calls it "The Death of Nations" and capitalist Wall Street Journal (6-20-94) speaks of a "global paradox: the closer that trade and technology bind nations together, the bolder the moves to break nations apart." While Tilly tends to think - along with Habermas and many others - of capital and coercion as equal players in the evolution of social systems, one must wonder whether there might still be a place in our conceptual toolbag for Eric Olin Wright's defense of "weak historical materialism."

Christopher H. Johnson Wayne State University