Last week I
finished reading Charles Tilly Coercion,
Capital and European States, AD 990-1992, a superb book from a first-rate mind
(I have to thank one of the judges in my dissertation panel, professor Jose María
Rosales, for pointing Tilly’s work to me), and it triggered a whole set of
reflections of great relevance to my understanding of the most desirable social
units towards which we should steer our current system which I intend to
explore in more depth in this post.
The core of
Tilly’s argument dovetails very nicely with my own ideas about the development
of the dominant reason within the European State System, identifying the
continuous armed conflict between the different societies as the great catalyst
of their formation, consolidation and growth in the period under consideration.
It was the need to extract additional resources from their populations to wage
ever costlier wars what led the budding states to go down the path available to
them, be it capital intensive development (leveraging the commercial acumen of
their city-based bourgeoisie to hire mercenaries, like in the case of the Low
Countries or England); or coercion intensive development (granting their noblemen
permission to exploit their vassals for a similar end, like in Russia and
Prussia). Those that did well would end up converging in the organizational form
of the modern nation-state, and those that did not were finally absorbed by
greater units (like most German states, Italian city-states, Occitania,
Normandy, Bourgogne and most Iberian kingdoms). A surprising aspect of the
authors’ analysis of such long period, over such a vast geographical area, is that
although the main actors where for most of the time either directly at war or
preparing for war, that didn’t translate in specially war-like mentalities, or
required the instillation of an especially combative mindset in their citizens.
Since
antiquity the waging of war, the hardships experienced by the soldiers and the
physical exposure to potential pain and death were borne by well segregated parts
of the population, extracted mostly from the less favored classes (or directly
contracted for such exploits from outside the realm, with some regions, most
notably the Swiss cantons, specializing in the provision of mercenaries for every
warring party that could afford them). Even when such portion of the people
were led by the local nobility the casualty rate for the latter was orders of
magnitude lower than for the former. Not only was a self-contained part of the
population involved with the actual fighting, but the scenario where such
fighting took place was pretty limited once the main state actors were in place
after the Peace of Westphalia, with the more populous urban centers of the
continent (London, Paris, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Stockholm) safely ensconced in
the center of national territories surrounded by a buffer zone that almost
guaranteed that they would not be visited by the indignities of a foreign
invasion until very recent advances in transportation technologies (railway and
motorized division well into the XXth century) made that possibility likely
again.
Thus although
the possibility of fighting more expensive wars was the ultimate explanation of
much of their social development, the European societies could live blissfully
ignorant of the preeminence of such motive, and focus instead on developing
ever more successful institutions and in the end ever more innovative and
prosperous economies. Of course, the ultimate success was defined by their
ability to produce more material goods, which in turn would allow them to field
more powerful armies and navies, as I have ceaselessly repeated in this forum.
No revolutionary discovery here, then.
However, what
does such history teaches us about the importance of war (“the father of all
things” in the unexpectedly prescient words of Heraclitus)? And what happens when
such source of creativity, or of societal innovation, dries up, as it seems to
be happening in our own times? Finally, how should we consider the influence of
conflict when designing the transition to a more humane kind of society? To
begin with, for war to be a net positive to the development of social systems the
following conditions seem to be necessary:
·
a
reasonable balance of forces between the likely contenders that makes the end
result of war uncertain enough to make it infrequent enough (where the forces
of one side are disproportionately greater, it will either invade and absorb
the weaker part outright or impose some kind of vassalage over it; the weaker
will in turn submit or resort to any alternative –pay tribute or yield
territory- rather than be overwhelmed by force)
·
a
dynamic of escalating costs and diminishing returns from fighting as each actor
takes the fight farther from its power base (because of the extension of its
supply lines, the increasing resistance of the encountered population and the greater
difficulty of administering distant lands), thus constraining the amount of
territorial gain that could be profitably pursued, and adding to the stability
of the system
·
a
social stratification system that limits the amount of able bodied males that
can be conscripted at any given moment, limiting the disruption war itself
causes and the drag on economic growth imposed by the maintenance of a standing
army (on a side note, how much of the population can be devoted to war is
greatly affected by the particular circumstances and level of economic
development of the society in question: Sweden in the XIV and Prussia in the
XIX centuries seem to have reached the upper limit of mobilization, that is,
until Nazi Germany found itself caught in a struggle for its very existence
well into the XXth, but nobody would make the argument that giving a panzerfaust to any 14 year old, or 64
year old for that matter, is a sensible or sustainable idea) and freeing enough
talent and manpower to pursue interests with a more immediate economic
application
Not that you
need the three factors for armed conflict to be a spur to technical and
economic development without its costs seriously underwhelming it. For the
first two, it helps to have different groups with different histories,
languages and even religions but a rough demographic balance, or you end up
having a “warring states” scenario at the end of which a triumphant elite ends
up dominating the whole territory (as the Han famously did in China).
The vagaries
of history, climate and geography created such combination of social conditions
only in Europe, and thus it is only in Europe that “progress” took shape, and
finally exploded, giving it the institutional framework to dominate most of the
world in the XIX century. A bit before that the third condition had been
seriously weakened by the appearance of the mass-conscripted national armies
created right after the French revolution, and the second was obliterated by
the technological advances that came to fruition with WWII (and that had been
first applied, at a more limited scale, already in the American Civil War, which
saw the first mass movements of troops by rail and Sherman’s raid through the
Southern States which severely impacted the civil population and infrastructure).
Once you have developed the conditions for “total war” the incentive structure
totally changes, and war becomes entirely antithetical to and incompatible with
even a shred of economic development. What did Europe and its offshoots do
under those new conditions? They essentially stopped making war in their
territory (until the Balkan wars of the 90s, where a separate set of reasons
took precedence) and limited themselves to “project force” where their economic
interests where threatened and keep residual fighting forces which were barely
enough to protect them from any mid-sized outside invasion, which was a perfectly
rational thing to do given that their safety did not depend on the size and
quality of their armed forces as much as on the credibility of the American “nuclear
umbrella” that sheltered them…
Unsurprisingly,
both economic and institutional development have stalled, and all the public
investment of the world doesn’t seem enough to kickstart it back into life. The
great institutional innovation that was hatched after the latest carnage showed
all too clearly the unacceptable price of the old incentive system (“evolve to
better make war or be conquered”) was the supra-national European Union, which
made all the sense back then but has not been very capable of evolving in
response to the new demand imposed by a very different international scenario, where
there is a similarly supra-national agent (vaguely known as “Islamic extremism”
under different banners) that does not territorially threaten the
well-established nation states, but rather floods them with displaced people
from a very different cultural background creating a wave of instability they
find themselves ill-prepared to deal with.
That is of course an unfortunate
state of affairs, one for which the old response of improving the ability of
the state to extract resources from its native population that would then pour
into a better equipped, more numerous armed forces doesn’t seem very well
suited (essentially, that’s what the USA has kept on doing since the beginning
of the new century, with quite underwhelming results). But I do not want to
deal now with how such threat should be dealt with (something that would merit
a post of its own), but to what such dynamic affects the optimal design of a
new kind of society, be it one built on the Anarcho-traditionalist principles
that I sketched in a series of posts (AT Manifesto I)
or according to my Idyllic view of what the future of humans here on Earth will
look like (Sunny future I).
One aspect conspicuously absent from the discussion of such ideal (and
idealized) social arrangements was how they would defend themselves in case of
external aggression. In both cases deviance from the collectively agreed norms
was dealt with by a minimal police force, which could be adequate to the task
only in the case of internally bred, low intensity, low scale bad behavior. No
provisions were made to defend the polity from a full blown external invasion,
or to deal with the potentially destabilizing efforts of a significant segment
of the population that received support (in any form: armament, training, or
even just ideological inspiration) from an external agent.
Back when I penned those ideas I
thought that the need for “defense forces” equipped well beyond the
capabilities of a constabulary would be at most a temporary nuisance, as a
stable equilibrium would be quickly reached where all institutional actors
would see that it was in their best interest to get rid of such forces and
jointly enjoy the worldwide “dividend of peace” of being able to devote the
material resources demanded for the maintenance of such force to the betterment
of the whole group, resulting in the utopia of everybody realizing the futility
of keeping such costly resources (you can not invade a modern democracy and
force all its citizens to work productively for you anyway), so “turning their
swords into ploughs” and living peacefully ever after. What European history teaches
us, then, is that for millennia an alternative equilibrium (equally stable) is
possible in which the progress catalyzed by low intensity conflicts more than
compensates the drag on economic development derived from the maintenance of
the capabilities to keep those conflicts going. Even after eliminating all the
armies and achieving for a few generations a peaceful, demilitarized world
there will always exist the possibility of a single group (or federation of
groups) deciding to rearm and restart the ages-old quest for world domination,
a strategy that in a scenario of surrounding disarmed polities has the
potential to offer a huge payoff (at least to the first actor to pursue it,
thus increasing the incentives for every actor to take the lead).
Which basically means that in the
ideal polity there will probably need to be a supra-national single body with
the monopoly of violence, dominant enough to prevent any single phyla to
attempt to dominate their neighbors (and beyond). Which in turn poses the
problem of how such body is prevented from taking its prerogatives too far and
ending up dominating tyrannically all the rest, parasitically taking advantage
of their work to live comfortably. And we are back to Hobbes and Locke about
the principles of government and how much of a Leviathan makes for preventing
the war of everybody against everybody else without itself impinging on their
basic liberties. And, in a more down to Earth version, poses the problem of how
the first anarcho-traditionalist phratria will ensure they are not “tread upon”
by the more traditional polities surrounding them (a problem not that different
from that of establishing free cities, which in many ways could be seen as
slightly enlarged version of my phratria), which will likely want to either
subjugate them or “protect” them (for a fee, thus preventing them from what they
would see as secession). I don’t have an answer for such problems yet, but I
will keep on thinking about them and share the solutions I see in a following
post.
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