Читать книгу Global Political Cities - Kent E. Calder - Страница 31

Across both Europe and Asia, the early seventeenth century was a turbulent one, portending major global transformation at multiple levels. In Europe, particularly, the age was one of interminable and debilitating warfare over religion, following the Reformation of the previous century. Fully 8 million people are believed to have died in the Thirty Years War (1618–1648) alone.³⁴ A British civil war exploded, culminating in the execution of King Charles I. In Central Europe, the Thirty Years War raged on, with Germany losing more than half of its prewar population. Surrounding nations, including Denmark, Sweden, and France, were drawn, one by one, into the bloody conflagration.

The shrewd strategic advisers to French King Louis XIV, including Cardinal Richelieu, looked on with particular alarm. France bordered on the war zone and feared spiraling international conflict, turbulence on its borders, and Habsburg encirclement from the north and south, as well as the potential emergence of a powerful, revanchist German neighbor. Countering France were the Habsburgs themselves, exhausted despite their vast colonial wealth in the Americas, after eighty years of protracted conflict with the renegade Calvinist Dutch Republic.³⁵

The European power structure of the day was tragically complex, featuring subnational and national groups, together with an atavistic supranational entity—the Holy Roman Empire. All vied for recognition in a volatile environment supercharged by decades of bloody religious warfare. Lack of clarity regarding the authority of the Holy Roman emperor over sprawling yet weakly administered imperial domains aggravated the disputes. Sixteen nations, 140 imperial states within the Holy Roman Empire—many of them city-states—and nearly 40 nongovernmental interest groups all had grievances to be resolved.³⁶

Negotiations between France and the Habsburgs began in 1641 at Cologne but rapidly proved cumbersome and tortuous. The 109 delegations who participated never met in a plenary session. In the end it took seven years to conclude a peace, which involved three separate treaties, negotiated and signed in two separate locations (one dominated by Catholics and the other by Protestants). Collectively these complex elements composed what ultimately became the Peace of Westphalia.

The Peace did involve some important territorial adjustments, including recognition of the independence of the Dutch Republic and Switzerland. It included some financial provisions, including an indemnity of 5 million thalers to Sweden, which the Swedes used to pay their own impoverished troops. The heart of the Peace, however, was a common recognition of two basic principles: nonintervention in the domestic affairs of sovereign states and the inviolability of national borders. Given the complexity of the conflict, these principles were the only possible basis of agreement to resolve a bloody, interminable struggle that had exhausted an entire continent, including many of its most prosperous cities.

The economic costs of conflict were massive and fell first and foremost on the rising nation-states, which had been most heavily armed. Recouping those enormous losses was an unavoidable policy imperative. To that end, the newly ascendant nation-states increased taxation and regulation over the long-autonomous trading cities under their control, further magnifying the crippling costs the cities had incurred during wartime.

Soon after the Peace, in 1651, came a powerful theoretical justification for a strong, controlling nation-state: the publication of Leviathan, a classic of modern political theory, by Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes, deeply influenced by the execution in 1649 of the British king, Charles I, and the protracted carnage of the Thirty Years War in Europe, argued that the key to avoiding civil strife, given the brutality he perceived inevitable in a “state of nature” without government, was necessarily to vest all authority in a single entity. “Powers divided mutually destroy each other,” threatening a return to the ruinous state of nature, he argued.³⁷

The diplomatic accomplishments of Westphalia, reinforced by the philosophical support of Hobbes and widely prevailing political backing for the divine right of kings, resonated with broad political-military trends prevailing across the European continent. As Charles Tilly has observed, surveying the turbulent history of European state building, “War made the state, and the state made war.”³⁸ A concentration of capital, much of it drawn from colonies overseas, supported the growth of military forces and the concentration of coercive capabilities, as did the rising potency of weapons themselves. A new era of nation-state dominance was thus being born, at the expense of cities. And it has been sustained in country after country, across the nearly four centuries since the signing of the Westphalian Peace.

In Britain, nation-state sovereignty triumphed in the War of the Roses (1455–1485). Spain was also among the first to unify through the exigencies of war, under Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492, as they expelled the Moors. In France, Sweden, Poland, and Russia, national cohesion was also growing. In northern Germany, Prussia was rising, and in Italy, Venice, although neither Germany nor Italy achieved full unity for two centuries after Westphalia.

War, as Tilly insists, was clearly contributing to the rise of the nation-state. Behind that fateful transformation were historic changes in the technology of violence, including the introduction of gunpowder, muskets, and cannons. Military investments were capital intensive. Changes in financial structure, including the emergence of commercial banking and more systematic taxation, thus aided the rise of the nation-state by enabling the manufacture and deployment of expensive weapons, as well as the expansion of state capacity in other dimensions.

Nation-centric regulation and taxation also naturally reshaped the operation of cities and their interaction with one another. Deprived of resources, cities deferred to nation-states not only on security matters but on welfare and infrastructural questions, as well. In many nations, such as France, central authority assumed virtually total control of local government.

One cannot, of course, ignore the role of individual leadership in the rise of nations and the eclipse of cities. Strong leaders such as Henry VIII (1509–1547) and Elizabeth I (1558–1603) in Britain; Gustavus Adolfus in Sweden (1611–1632); Louis XIV in France (1643–1715); Peter the Great in Russia (1682–1725); Giuseppe Garibaldi in Italy (1861–1882); and Otto von Bismarck in Prussia (1860–1890) were all centralizers, contributing to the rise and cohesion of their respective nations. Almost invariably, these leaders capitalized, however, on the international conflicts—in most cases wars—that were driving the ascendancy of nation-states.

The ability to defend society against outside military challenge was the single transcendent advantage that nations enjoyed in their competition with cities and other agile subnational actors in international affairs. This ability easily sustained nation-state preeminence in Europe for three long and turbulent centuries following the Peace of Westphalia. The continent suffered through the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714); the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748); intracontinental conflicts generated by the American Revolution, including the Anglo-French, Anglo-Dutch, and Anglo-Spanish Wars (1778–1783); the French Revolution (1789–1815); World War I (1914–1918); and World War II (1939–1945). Each conflict reaffirmed the elemental importance of a nation’s ability to ensure hard security.

Meanwhile, nations were growing more interdependent economically and financially, especially following the Industrial Revolution. Communications were also giving birth to a more borderless, networked socio-economic world. Yet the relentless progress of weaponry and a dangerous Cold War competition between nuclear superpowers held subnational challenges to the nation-state in check. Cities were relegated to distinctly subordinate political roles in domestic affairs, while their transnational ties atrophied.