essay on the origins of states

State is one of the most common political phenomena in our daily life. We live in a given domain of territory, enjoy the public goods provided by the state government, and most of us are regarded as citizens of one certain state. At the same time, state is the most important, not to say the unique, actor in the international system. Although with the process of globalization, some experts have observed a declining importance of state and thus argued for the crisis of sovereign state, others argue that the dissolution of the state is still a distant prospect. Nowadays, sovereign states still work in as much similar ways as they first appeared. Internally, states collect taxes and provide protection to their citizens. Externally, states ally, or wage war, with other states and sign treaties. Despite the fact that there are a myriad of views on the origins and future of the states, almost all social scientists share the common understanding of the idiosyncratic characteristics of the state: internal hierarchy and external autonomy. Thus a state is usually defined as a political entity possessing sovereignty, which is not subject to any higher political authority and monopolizes the usage of force within a certain territory. After defining the states, we now can switch to the much more complicated question concerning the origin of the states. It is commonly accepted that the modern states started in Europe before the 16th century. Many observations show that the modern states, with the specific characteristics mentioned previously, distinguished themselves from the earlier modes of governance. The readings of this week just concern the transitional leap from those earlier modes of governance to the modern states by employing an eclectic mix of sociological theory, political theory, and economic and political history. With the aim of dispelling common myths surrounding the question of how modern states were formed, the authors of the readings mainly explore the following question: 1) how can we explain the variations that affect the medieval and early modern European state-building processes, or what variables can explain the emerge of the sovereign state and its alternatives at that time? 2) Why could the sovereign state beat out city-state leagues to become the dominant institutions in the modern world? In this review essay, I will analyze the two readings separately. For each reading, I will first give a brief summary and then locate the author’s positions in a bunch of relevant arguments or debates. I will point out that although both readings shed inspiring lights on their arguments, their empirical sources are problematic and both authors fall trapped into the trip of selection bias. In the Birth of the Leviathan, Thomas Ertman, with a historically comparative approach, proposes a new model for explaining the different typologies of states formed in the medieval and early modern times. To accomplish this task, Ertman provides an excellent literature review of the previous approaches that theorized the process of state-building. He criticizes the variables used in those broad-ranging theories, including the degree of geographic exposure by Hintze, the variation in war making by Tilly, the revenue by Mann, income from abroad by Downing, and socioeconomic evolution by Anderson, which have maintained unsatisfactory mainly because of two reasons. First, the authors under consideration all tend to link one kind of early modern political regime with one kind of infrastructure, though the argument employed is somewhat different. Second, they suffer from some deficiencies mainly in the case of Hungary and Poland. To deploy his own argument and model, Ertman summarizes four types of early modern states in terms of types of political regimes and types of administration. Then he attributes the differences in political regime and state infrastructures observed across the continent on the eve of the French Revolution to three variables: 1) “the organization of local government during the first few centuries after state formation”; 2) “the timing of the onset of sustained geopolitical competition”; 3) “the independent influence of strong representative assemblies on administrative and financial institutions”. Compared with those dismissed approaches and theories, Ertman’s new model is much more powerful. An incisive insight in Ertman’s model is that he introduces the variable of timing, which was ignored by all of his predecessors. Ertman strongly argues that the process of state-building is not static or simultaneous. There is no doubt that state infrastructure is one kind of institutions. Thus, when we borrow some great ideas from the flourishing research field of neo-institutional economics, we can find that the institutions have the function to innovate automatically. In our case study of state-building, the nonsimultaneity of the onset of sustained geopolitical competition gives the successors (refer to the “later statebuilders”) a chance to stimulate the successful institutions and to exclude those failed ones. Actually, Ertman shares the importance of war or geopolitical exposure with Hintze and Tilly. However, Ertman’s contribution is that he goes even further from the previous war making theory and argues that it is not war or danger per se that leads to the different state infrastructures. It is the timing of the onset of war or danger that matters here. While Ertman seeks to explain variation in the type of state which emerges from the state-building process, Hendrik Spruyt, adopting a historical institutionalist as well as rational approach, focuses on why certain governance took the form of sovereign, territorial rule whereas others did not and why a sovereign state displaced other organizational forms in the first place. Thus, in the discourse of the Sovereign State and Its Competitors, he looks upon the process of state-building as two separated but relevant phases. The first one is variation where the new forms of organization emerged out of feudalism, while the second phase, in Darwinian’s word, is called selection. When explaining the variation phase, Spruyt uses two variables: different material interests and belief system of social groups and political actors. Referring three cases of different governance forms, sovereign rule in France, city-league of Hansa and Italian city-cities, Spruyt states that the material interests and ideological perspective conduce to the different coalitions and bargains between kings, aristocracy, and town, and further lead to the different institutional variations. As to the second phase where the form of sovereign, territorial rule was selected as the dominant institution, Spruyt provides the explanation that the sovereign, territorial states were “more effective and more efficient in curtailing freeriding and defection, and hence they were better at mobilizing the resources of their societies.” So Spruyt, from an original perspective, distinguishes the process of variation and selection from the process of state-building and avoid the simply unilinear explanation. However, his arguments on selection mechanisms are confusing. Spruyt uses mutual empowerment as one of the reasons to explain the eventual triumph of sovereign state. First, mutual empowerment of territorial states is a result of the domestic stability which makes a sovereign state a favorable trading partner. Second, mutual empowerment of territories is a result of their external similarities. City states were compatible with a sovereign state because city states acknowledged territorial demarcations and externally behaved themselves much the same way as the sovereign territorial states. According to the argument of Spruyt, territorial states empowered city states because of their external similarity. Two problems arise here. First, how these two different meanings of mutual empowerment work together? Second, what is the mechanism of mutual empowerment? Does it empower the sovereign state, or those similar city states? In addition, within the analytical frame of Spruyt, because the internal functions and ideological perspective make the sovereign state triumph out of its alternatives, we can conclude if the idea of sovereign state has inspired a fundamental reordering of political preferences, it seems possible that the decline of this idea may permit a similar process of sovereign state in the future. Spruyt does not provide such a prediction and it is also a field that needs to be researched more. Although both readings’ proposals shed bright lights on the topic of the origin of state, I will argue that both of them are epistemologically problematic and neither escapes the trap of selection bias. Although Spruyt does not employ any novel archival source, he admits that he mainly relies on secondary sense when conducting his research, then how can we know that Spruyt’s analysis represents the true story? The same thing happens in Ertman’s analysis, that is, they choose the historiography, rather than history, to analyze and evaluate their statement. For example, in Spruyt’s discourse, the variable of material interest is of great importance. He argues that the trade determines the size and acting capability of a town. Then towns with different sizes choose different strategies to survive. In France, the low volume and low add value trade coerced towns into allying with kings; whereas in Italy, the blooming trade allowed cities to develop more independently. Spruyt’s analysis seems plausible. However, he enunciates the functions of trade through explanation and inference, rather than facts. Thus, relying on secondary material and explanation of facts, rather than first-hand material or facts per se, Spruyt has slipped into the pitfall of selection bias proposed by Ian Lustick. The same problems are also witnessed in Ertman’s analysis. In my point of view, where there is selection, there is bias. As a political sociologist, it is almost impossible to completely avoid bias or selectivity while taking the historical institutional methods. In sum, both readings satisfactorily answered the questions that the authors proposed and both of them might deepen our understanding of statebuilding process in medieval and early modern Europe.