We addressed the history of state-formation in continental Europe and learned that, as Charles Tilly has noted, war and state-making were interconnected. The stronger the nascent state, the better it was able to wage war and vice versa. War-making, of course, required strong coercive and extractive (in the form of taxes and other renumerations) of the state vis-a-vis its domicile population. Mix in a little bit of nationalism and you’ve got the perfect recipe for a strong state.
A recent article in the Journal of Peace Research [subscription only] by David Lektzian and Brandon Pine, demonstrates the empirical validity of the state-making/war-making nexus. The argue that the larger the perception of “external threat” the more latitiude do leaders have in increasing the capacity of the state. Here is the abstract to the paper:
Taming the Leviathan: Examining the Impact of External Threat on State Capacity
This article argues that the systemic security environment influences the structure of domestic political and economic institutions. If states have been primarily created to protect one group from predation by another, then the state may visibly change as external threats rise and fall. The authors argue that political elites respond to threatening environments by enhancing the ability of the state to extract resources from society in order to protect itself. Using data from the Armed Conflict Dataset, Banks’s Cross National Data Archive, and COW data from 1975 to 1995, the authors find evidence that supports the conjectured relationship between threat and state strength. As a response to a more threatening environment, the authors find that states significantly increase their capacity in terms of revenue, government spending, and military spending, but they do not easily relinquish these gains. The authors also observe that nation-state security is heavily influenced by regional regime-type patterns. State capacity increases as the regional neighborhood becomes increasingly autocratic. This suggests political elites not only regard violent conflict in the region as a serious concern to national security, but also appear to consider political change a threat as well.
Clouds, Clocks, and Sitting at Tables 