In previous lessons, we've largely concentrated on war itself. That is, what does this process look like? What does it do to human beings? What does it require? What are the kinds of organizational necessities for it? Now we're going to shift gears a little bit, and talk more about what war does to society. How war not only destroys, but also builds societies in particular way. I want to argue that while in the 20th century, we primarily understand war as destructive, as cruel, as brutal, and even useless. The social consequences may be much greater than we often realize. I want to first argue that war is particularly good reflection of the kind of society that practices it. That is, the forms of war on every tactical and strategic level, can't help but reflect the social organization, the political authority, and the material resources that are involved in those societies. That is, the war serves as a mirror. Wars shape their societies and provide a picture of what will happen to those societies afterwards. Because wars are such extreme events, they may serve as a catalyst for dramatic social transformation. The demands of wars create opportunities for innovation and adaptation. War contributes, I want to argue, to three critical components of modern society, the nation's state, democracy and citizenship, and social equality. And we're going to talk about each one in turn. Let's first discuss the effect of war on states and nations. And let's start with the definition of states. States can be defined as the institutionalized rules by which a society governs itself. That is, states, in a sense, are the concrete expression of the kinds of political authority that are accepted, legitimated in a society. I want to argue that states are the foundation for social and economic life. Without states there are no markets, for example, because there's no way of assuring that any contract will be filled. There are no courts because no one has the power to impose a kind of law. There are certainly no elections because there can be no systematic polling of a population. And obviously, no public services. That is, states are, are central to our very modern existence. And again, they reflect Hobbes, and the critical importance of Leviathan, as a way of avoiding the struggle of all versus all. That is, states represent the monopoly over the means of violence. In order to enforce rights and obligations, states must have the means by which to enforce their edicts and rules. States, in a sense, are the enforcement mechanism of the very societies. And this requires that they be the strongest military institution in any kind of given territory. This is the bottom line of any state. Without this kind of monopoly, no state can impose itself. Nor can any state defend it's own citizens. For states to function as anything more than an armed gang or protection racket, they must possess some form of legitimacy or the support of their population for their claim to absolute rulership. What we have here is a combination. It's both a capacity and a legitimacy of that capacity. Now I want to argue that wars are an incredibly effective stimulus for state building. Wars help build the institutional basis of modern states by requiring a deal, a degree of organization and efficiency that only can be provided by these kinds of political structures. States, in a sense, are the by-products of ruler's efforts to acquire the means of war. War is inherently an organizing phenomenon, we've just studied that. For which the state, in a sense, acquires it's administrative machinery. And that is that wars may be the stimulus by which we create these architectural institutions on which we depend for modern life. The advance of bureaucratic forms, for example, may be partly explained by the increasing demands for administrative efficiency, generated by the needs of growing armed forces, and the escalating cost of waging war. We've seen that progression of escalating cost, we've seen that progression of complexity. Now we have to remember, how did that come about? What kinds of changes had to occur for this complexity, for this organization to exist? And I want to argue that the rise of the modern European state may be traced to the military evolution of the 16th and the 17th centuries, about which we spoke earlier. During this period, three critical organizational developments changed the nature of military struggle. First, control of the means of violence shifted from private to public control. That is, the, access to the means of violence became a collective good rather than a personal one. Two, the size of armies increased dramatically. That is, these means of violence required much more organization and much more resources. And three, their composition, the composition of these armies became less varied and more and more based on a specific national identity. I want to argue that war, at least as practiced in Europe during this period. War made the territorial consolidation of the state more feasible and imperative. That is, only those states that could wield great armies and guarantee control over their own territories could play the great game. Only those states that were able to marshal, in a sense, those forces to compete in this game could survive. Only those states able to impose that central control could survive the military revolution. That is, only the states that were able to impose those authority and provide all these services in a particular territory could survive this Darwinian process. Countries that were unable to do so, for example Poland, simply disappeared. We see this, in a sense, in the decline of the number of European states after the 15th century, from roughly 1,500, that is counting small principalities, Bishipbriggs, etc., to about 25 by 1900. And this is, in a sense, an obvious indicator of the centralization of power wrought by military conflict. The nations we have come to associate with the basic European map were originally made up of much smaller units. That became aggregated, in a sense, through this process of increasing power and military conflict. We may think of war, in a sense, as a form of competition between a variety of organizations. That is, a whole variety of ways of assuring political authority and imposing control. And there are many different ways of doing so. We have now come to universalize the nation state, but that is not the only way we could have organized politics. What happened is that following the logic of competitive markets, the threat of war placed a great premium on the efficient delivery of violence, which only a nation state was able to do. We may think of this as a nascent market in which there are many forms of organized production or marketing or retailing. And this is the one that seems to manage to establish its market dominance by its very ability to deliver violence. Moreover, this ability to deliver violence produces institution by-products that further the aid the organizational development. The key to the relationship between war and state-making in western Europe is what Samuel Finer, Otto Hintze, Max Weber, most recently Chuck Tilly, have called the extraction-coercion cycle. Let's begin with one observation. Wars require capital. By the 16th century, war had become so expensive as to require the mobilization of an entire country. That is that process that we talked about, historical aggregation. All these greater and greater units meant that war was becoming more and more expensive. Professional armies clearly outperformed any rivals, but these professional armies required ample and continuous amounts of money. That is, war became a more and more expensive enterprise requiring more and more organizations that could produce those kinds of resources. And these changes were causally linked to military and political development thereafter. I want to argue that states penetrated their societies in increasingly complex in order to obtain resources. That is, that states had to go in farther and farther and deeper into their societies in order to be able to extract the kind of resources that would assure their survival. The organizational innovations that occurred during war time did not disappear with peace, but often left an infrastructural residue. What Arad called the physiology of the state. The, the nervous system, the muscular system of the state, in a sense, is developed through the exercise of war. This new form of the post-Westphalian state, lets say after 1648, was particularly well suited to the organizational task of managing this penetration, and channeling those resources that came to that penetration into the productive violence directed at some external enemy. Now I want to be careful here. This is not to argue that the nation state was the best organization possible. This is not to argue that this was a necessarily positive development. Simply, in the face of this kind of environmental pressure. Where one had to produce this kind of organized violence. This kind of organization that happened to be very well-suited for it, also developed. We will also see that in some cases where states, for example, in the 19th and 20th centuries, have not had this exposure to war, this route to a nation state has taken very, very different forms. So, we can argue that wars both were built and were an expression of power. War, in a sense, obviously reflects power, but it also builds power. The western way of war, the focus of my undergraduate class, is an expression of the western way of ruling. We cannot understand the western way of war without appreciating the particular characteristics that political authority took on in western Europe. How do we do this? What's the best way of, sort of, getting a grasp on this idea? [BLANK_AUDIO]
