War and the State
The predominant trend in European political development between 1500 and 1800 was that of the consolidation of states defined by a monopoly of legitimate violence over a given area.
This monopoly was twofold and encompassed war-making as large-scale organised violence and judicial violence inflicted on inhabitants deemed to be criminals or rebels. These two dimensions were linked through the creation of permanent armed forces; another distinguishing feature of this period and which formed the most obvious institutional manifestation of the monopoly of violence. Armies and, to a lesser extent, navies were employed to defend the state and the social order against those threatening it, including criminals and pirates. Simultaneously, the state imposed its own form of martial law on its military and naval personnel, who were subject to corporal punishments for infractions.These developments profoundly shaped ideas of violence which persist in today's Western world. Foremost amongst these is the belief that state- controlled violence is not only legitimate, but rational in the sense of being integral to civilised, ordered society. The state's monopoly of warfare was achieved by delegitimising war-making by other actors, as well as removing previously autonomous judicial structures and practices. State-controlled warmaking and judicial violence remained extremely violent, but the killing and maiming were presented as both necessary and purposeful, in contrast to quotidian violence, which was generally conceived as unnecessary, irrational and meaningless. The validity of these claims has been widely accepted and internalised by historians and social scientists, who have sought to explain them as a civilising process through which human society allegedly became more ordered, self-disciplined and productive. In turn, this process is often related to ideas of historical time as following a linear path towards modernity.
Presentation of change over time frequently rests on distorted notions of ‘medieval barbarism' contrasted with modern civility, allowing Western observers to cast those threatening that civility as belonging somehow to the past.As the preceding suggests, the crucial issue here is one of legitimacy. The crystallisation of European states around monopolising violence was directly related to Christian ideas about what kinds of conflicts could be considered ‘just'.1 Such ideas had deep resonance throughout society at a time when individual salvation was believed to depend on moral conduct, including observing the commandment not to kill. For a war to be just it had to be conducted by a ‘proper authority', for the ‘right purpose' and by the ‘right means'. States monopolised organised violence by claiming that they alone constituted such ‘proper authorities'. From this exclusive position flowed their other war-making powers, including the sole right to start and end wars, and to possess and wield the means to wage them.
This process was crucial to the formation of European states since it entailed defining what form they should take and articulating what became modern distinctions between ‘public' and ‘private'.[286] [287] The exact form varied across Europe, but was always shaped by the interaction of rulers and ruled rather than simply by the imposition of new ideas from above.[288] States were ‘formed' rather than consciously ‘built' according to some preconceived blueprint by allegedly far-sighted monarchs or statesmen. Moreover, this process was lengthy, uneven and far from complete by 1800. All European states relied on agents partially or completely outside their control, such as provincial nobles, autonomous communes, privateers and military contractors to recruit personnel and supply the materiel and technological means to wage war.[289]
The older literature generally interpreted this reliance as a sign that European states were still weak or underdeveloped.
The use of contractors, privateers and mercenaries was considered a transitionary phase between a relatively decentralised medieval ‘feudal' way of war, and the modern era of ‘nationalised' war-making in which the armed forces became fully public institutions intended to fight in the ‘national interest'. Such forces were deemed inherently superior to those of early modernity, adding an institutional and organisational dimension to the standard linear modernisation narrative of conventional military history, which presents a technological ‘progress of destruction' based on evermore powerful weaponry.[290] This approach ignores the fact that many Europeans did not see nationalised warmaking as desirable, if they conceived it at all. The right to carry arms was found not only in Anglo-American political ideas, but elsewhere throughout Europe. For example, Germans and Swiss regarded serving other rulers as an expression of their individual liberties and freedom of movement, while Polish and Hungarian nobles felt their right to raise their own troops was a guarantee against monarchical tyranny. Contracting out was also not necessarily inferior to organising war directly through state institutions. Many states indeed struggled to cope with the pressures of war between 1500 and 1800, but overall the scale and intensity of European warfare grew exponentially. Meanwhile, Europeans conquered or influenced large parts of the globe through private or semi-private enterprises like the English and Dutch East India Companies.Thus, rather than already monopolising war during this period, states secured a decisive ‘comparative advantage' in organised violence relative to other agencies.[291] This advantage was won at considerable cost. The numerous civil wars and rebellions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were often struggles over the form and extent of state power, as well as over who would share its benefits and burdens, and how far central authorities could dictate affairs in localities and on the geographical or political periphery.
Religious controversies from the 1520s exacerbated these struggles where the rival parties also disagreed over faith. The changes associated with the Reformation represented a major extension of state power, because secular authorities, regardless of which faith they professed, now claimed to decide which version of Christianity was correct. While they still largely left doctrinal matters to the Pope, even Catholic monarchs like those in France and Spain asserted greater powers to regulate the church and religious life within their political jurisdictions. These internal wars were largely decided by the mid seventeenth century. Politically or geographically distant regions were no longer able to challenge central control, or break away entirely as had the northern Netherlands and Portugal, which had freed themselves from Spanish rule by 1648 and 1668 respectively. Likewise, the existence of the state was no longer challenged from within by powerful nobles or autonomous cities.Meanwhile, external wars decided the geographical extent of each state and how they would interact across regions and the continent generally. Europe's flashpoints remained those regions where sovereignty was most fragmented, especially the Low Countries, northern Italy and the eastern Danube. There was a direct correlation between conflicts to demarcate territory and the desire to represent boundaries with greater cartographical precision, as in the case of the Austrian Habsburgs, who commissioned Italian experts to map their frontiers with the Ottoman Empire in Hungary during the 1560s. Territorial conflicts were structurally determined by the way in which monarchical power was legitimised. Virtually all European states had adopted some form of hereditary monarchy as a way of ending violent struggles among the aristocracy as to who was entitled to rule. However, prevailing ideas of social hierarchy restricted available marriage partners to other royal families, thus establishing the basis for competing claims to territory, especially if a ruling line died out, as happened in Spain in 1700 and Austria in 1740.
Many of the continent's conflicts were ‘wars of succession' triggered by such eventualities, or at least involving dynastic claims as part of their justification.Notions of hierarchy also translated into attitudes about interstate relations. Kings were regarded as ‘emperors in their own kingdoms' already in the thirteenth century, but this expression of sovereignty was always articulated unilaterally in relation to the traditional powers of the Pope and Holy Roman Emperor. Monarchs did not see each other as equals, and certainly always regarded Europe's few republics, for example Venice or Genoa, as political inferiors. Just as they saw their own paramount position as essential to the internal order of their state, they could not conceive of an international order on anything but hierarchical terms. However, the ability of either pope or emperor to arbitrate disputes declined drastically by the mid sixteenth century, leaving others, notably the French and Spanish monarchs, to claim they should exercise this function in the interests of wider European peace.[292] While the peace congress talks held in the Westphalian towns of Münster and Osnabrück between 1643 and 1648 did promote new ideas that all sovereign states were equal, actual European relations remained hierarchically structured into the nineteenth century. The principal change was a shift from an order based on rank and status, to one more clearly determined by actual military and, increasingly, economic power during the later eighteenth century.
A major consequence of political centralisation was a concentration of the power to open and conclude wars, as well as to determine their objectives. These powers were vital parts of sovereign prerogatives and were generally reserved exclusively to monarchs, though were frequently hemmed in by requirements at least to consult parliaments, diets and other intermediary bodies. These representative institutions developed throughout most of western, central and northern Europe by the fifteenth century as means to amortise debts from previous wars.
In return for sanctioning new taxes to pay for old debts, parliaments and similar institutions gained a say in legislation and policy. Their power of the purse remained the main restraint on royal war-making throughout this period. Strategic direction likewise remained formally in royal hands, though in practice monarchs relied on the advice of key officials in formulating both goals and the methods to achieve them. Decisions remained highly personal, though no monarch stood detached from wider political, cultural or religious influences. Governments remained primarily reactive, with little capacity for longer-term strategic planning.[293] War councils and other specialist agencies developed during the sixteenth century, such as that established by the Austrian Habsburgs in 1556. These remained understaffed and were primarily concerned with administration rather than planning. The most that such bodies could do was provide cost estimates and other guidance to assist immediate operational planning, rather than coordinate longer-term strategies.Operational command remained another royal prerogative, and though it was frequently delegated to generals or admirals, senior military and naval appointments depended on royal approval. Many monarchs led their forces personally. King Christian IV lost an eye while commanding the Danish fleet at Colberger Heide in 1644. His Swedish rival Gustavus Adolphus was killed at the Battle of Lutzen in 1632, while another Swedish warrior king, Charles XII, died at the siege of Fredriksten in 1718. There are numerous other examples of kings at least accompanying their armies, and while this was not expected of queens, female monarchs such as Austria's Maria Theresa or Russia's Catherine the Great nonetheless closely identified with their soldiers. Rather than representing a new departure, Napoleon was only novel in being a general turned monarch.