Wednesday, February 18, 2015

'Protection' As Both Custody and Force: Beginnings of the Territorial State


To be able to both define the common good and coerce those who would not obey was part of the new European sense of agency for a ruler of men. Men such as Cortes, or Savonarola, Henry VIII in England or Charles VIII of France, would use this idea to their advantage. In an era and region of seemingly perpetual violence, German lands developed some similar responses to their Italo-Franco-Anglo neighbors. Right up front, Brady says there were two complementing solutions that worked to resolve the problems created by such a locally weak imperial government.

One path was the growth or change of the local, inherited traditions of the 'late-medieval patrimonial estates' - an old system of increasing partitioning and parcelization of inherited lands - which morphed into 'institutionalized territorial states.' The other solution that worked out alongside the other - a
process of decades and centuries - was where imperial governing grew due to 'collaborations between emperor and Diet'. Again, gradually, the princes, nobles, magistrates were not 'the king's men' but had their own castles and levied their own armies to support them. But still, in time, "they came to support the suppression of feud, because thereby their own power would enhance."
You could gain power if you made war successfully, and even more power if you could maintain a state. Maximilian would alternately try each of these methods.

Max Weber's 'rationalization of domination' was a notion that 'lay at the heart of early modern state foundation'; where 'protection' meant the (stunningly modern) notion of what we might call 'security' while the tradition of 'guarding subjects and extracting fruits of their labor' was already the old time-tested means. In turn, modern bourgeoning cities and regions in the european renaissance era learned new practices from each other. A European-wide refashioning grew, wherein as Brady puts it, a 'new tool kit' was gained and developed to help adapt.

Once established, a launders list of new methods grew wings on their own. Greater education encouraged 'bureacracies of specialized functions' with
legal teams,
new 'taxation and auditing skills,
mercantile trade policies,
standing armies', and
external diplomacy cadres,
who all expanded their own new perches,
and all of which cost money. [p.97]
Such was the optimism that this problem was solved for a while by new taxation methods and strategies. Within a hundred years or so, the very term sovereignty was developed to describe a state with these above basic functions.

But, adroitly Brady then quotes Charles Tilly to caution us. War making, he says, and state making are merely the legitimized crimes of 'protection rackets'. Brady also reminds us that protection and the German word gewalt both mean the same things, both custody and force. The old notion of a 'lord protector' that provides and protects was basic for medieval self-governance. But if they did not or could not protect? The old notion was that one was not obliged to serve a lord that did not. But a new lord with such a greater, rationalization of systems with cadres and teams at his disposal, could just force obedience. Like a monarch, but increasingly more local.

This then became a norm, as local princes, bishops, and magistrates in German lands took matters into their own hands and, time after time, failed to support the emperor in pursuing his plans. This swelling lack of imperial support diminished the emperor's power and Maximilian knew it. Astute observers like Machiavelli knew it too. In a local world where more municipalities and territories became more or less autonomous, competing and warring with each other, with new methods and means available, the mark of success was a more stable territory both internally and with regard to it's external neighbors. Brady compares this dispersed power with the monarchy in France.
"In France the monarchy gradually appropriated and absorbed the jurisdiction of aristocratic lineages, noble seigneurs, abbeys, and cities; in the German lands similar programs foundered on durable reefs made up of some thousands of polities." [p.98]
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This is Brady's bibliographic note for,
Tilly, Charles. Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1992. Studies In Soical Discontinuity. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990
-- "Reflections on the History of European State-Making." In The Formation of National States in Western Europe,  ed. Charles Tilly. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975, 3-83
-- "War Making and State Making as Organized Crime." In Bringing The State Back, Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985 169-91
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quotes,  pagination & bib note from: Thomas A Brady Jr: German Histories in The Age of Reformations, 1400-1650;  University of California, Berkeley for the Cambridge Univeristy Press, 2009

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