George Washington and Tony Soprano or: Statebuilding as Organized Crime

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George Washington and Tony Soprano
orState-building as Organized Crime
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Europe in 1500
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Europe in 1600
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Europe in 1700
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Europe in 1800
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Europe in 1900
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Europe in 2000
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Observations from the European Experience

• Present day states had many competitors in the
  16th century
• For every state that survived, many did not
• Many of these surviving states expanded through
  highly conflictual processes, such as warfare.

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Where do states come from?

• Social compact
• Open market
• Shared culture and norms
• Organized coercion

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What does George Washington have to do with Tony
Soprano?

• What basic functions do states perform?

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What does the Mafia do?
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Protection Rackets

• The Mafia provides security from outside
  predators and then charges a protection fee to
  prevent the destruction of property from
  occurring.
• The Mafia is offering a service (protection from
  outside predators).
• But the cost of providing protection is less than
  the protection money paid by merchants. The
  difference is a rent (or profit) from providing
  protection
• The Mafia also often creates a threat of property
  destruction where there was none before.

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When there is no threat, the mafia creates a
threat to increase the demand for protection
All Im saying is that most people think it wise
to take out a little insurance.
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State Building as a protection racket

• The state provides protection from external
  threats (other states) as well as from internal
  threats (bandits, criminals, etc) through use of
  its military and police
• In return for protection, the state makes
  citizens pay a tax
• Taxes are used to fund the military and police as
  well as other government services

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Problem

• Citizens dont want to pay taxes

Wesley Snipes owes the government 13.5 million
in taxes
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Solution

• Use military and police to force citizens to pay
  taxes

Wesley Snipes owes the government 3 years in jail
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• War made the state and the state made war
• Charles Tilly

Military Institutions
State building
Taxation
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The Process of State-building

• recurrent chain of causation1) change or
  expansion in land armies2) new efforts to
  extract resources from the subject population3)
  the development of new bureaucracies and
  adminsitrative innovations4) resistance from the
  population5) renewed coercion6) durable
  increases in the bulk or extractiveness of the
  state

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Rulers werent trying to build strong states

• Faced more immediate threats
• Competition from other states
• Competition from would-be rulers
• The church
• Landlords
• Nobles

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State-building as a by-product of war making

• In order to make war more effectively rulers
  attempted to raise capital
• Conquest and plunder
• Taxation

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Legitimate and Illegitimate Violence

• Often taken as part of definition of state
• Early on, many actors could use violence
• Pirates
• Bandits
• Nobles
• Rulers
• These other actors often competed with rulers for
  control over territories
• In times of war rulers used pirates and bandits
  against enemies
• Encouraged own troops to take booty

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• The elimination of these other sources of
  violence and coercion is in many ways one of the
  most significant accomplishments of the state

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Early states

• Relied on indirect rule through nobles,
  magnates or strongmen
• Werent on the government payroll
• But had authority to perform functions we might
  associate with the state

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State Building and the elimination of Indirect
Rule

• Extended their officialdom outside of the cities
  and towns and into the local community
• Encouraging the creation of police forces that
  were subordinate to the central government, not
  strongmen.
• Separating the police from the military to make
  them less useful as tools of dissident strongmen

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Financing State Building

• State building was costly
• Maintaining a standing army
• Maintaining a police force
• Building a bureaucracy
• Providing a court system
• Paying local officials

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Limits on the Power to Tax

• In some states, such as England, the crown only
  had the power to tax in times of war
• This gave states a strong incentive to go to war
  in order to maintain a stable revenue

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Case study Prussia

• Prussia (in what is now Germany and Poland),
  faced strong competition from its much larger
  neighbors, the Austrian and French empires
• Generated the need for a large army relative to
  its population
• This generated a strong incentive to build a
  state capable of taxing effectively to raise
  capital
• Tax collection agency originally known as
  General War Commissariat
• These dynamics strengthened the Prussian state.

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State failure

• States that were not successful in the
  combination of taxation, state building and
  warfare often failed to survive.
• Poland, for example, was the largest state in the
  world in the 16th century before disappearing
  completely until 1918
• Even then, it was conquered by the Nazis in WWII
  and only resurrected as a Soviet satellite state

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Which states survived?

• Factors promoting survival
• 1. the availability of extractible resources
• 2. a relatively protected position in time and
  space
• 3. a continuous supply of political entrepreneurs
• 4. success in war
• 5. homogeneity (and homogenization) of the
  subject population
• 6. strong coalitions of the central power with
  major segments of the landed elite

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Population Density in 2003
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Population Density
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• What is Herbsts puzzle?
• How does Africa differ from Europe in terms of
  land and population?
• What role did war play in African state building?
  
• What did African rulers seek when they waged war?
• What is the difference between state power in the
  cities and in the countryside in Africa?

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• Herbst suggests that 3 dynamics explain state
  building patterns. What are they?
• What role did the territorial boundaries set by
  European colonizers play in the development of
  African states? Was it a positive role or
  negative role?
• Were relations between African states cooperative
  or competitive? What would IR theory lead us to
  expect they would be?

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• How can we characterize the pre-colonial state?
• Unproductive agriculture (rain-fed agriculture)
• Large amounts of open land
• Primacy of exit (flight over fight)
• Control of land independent from control over
  people

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• What was Africa like during the colonial period?
  How much of the continent did the Europeans
  control?
• What can we say about the capacity of the
  colonies?
• Within their colonies, how much coercive control
  did the colonial governments have?

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• Why are roads important to state power?
• What can roads tell us about state-society
  relations?
• South Africa repeatedly stands out from other
  African states in terms of how power was
  broadcast. Why is this so?
• What role did migration play in state-building
  and state power in Africa?

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• How did the Europeans approach the colonization
  of Africa? What were their concerns? How were
  these similar or different to native rulers?
• How would you characterize the interactions of
  European powers in colonizing Africa. Does it fit
  the depictions of international relations theory
  as a state of anarchy?