From: The Journal of Slavic Military Studies

December 1994

WALTER C. UHLER

Review Of:

The Military Revolution and Political Change: Origins of Democracy and autocracy in Early Modern Europe, By Brian M. Downing (Princeton University Press, 1992, $35. ISBN 0-691-07886-6)

War and the Rise of the State: The Military Foundations of Modern Politics, By Bruce D. Porter (New York:The Free Press, 1994, $27.95, ISBN 0-02-925095-1)

As the titles of these two engaging studies suggest, both Brian Downing and Bruce Porter are "concerned not with what causes war, but what war causes" (Porter, p.2). Both monographs examine the impact of the "Military Revolution" upon state formation in early modern Europe. Downing's study is narrow in time and focus; limiting itself to assessing the impact made by the military revolution upon medieval constitutionalism. Porter's work begins with an examination of the passing of the medieval period, but continues to examine war's ever expanding impact to the present.

Downing places great emphasis upon the existence of medieval constitutionalism in order to demonstrate that the origins of democracy existing long before the arrival of capitalism as a democratizing force. Briefly stated. "parliament predates capitalism" (p.239). As such. Barrington Moore's classic study, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (which Downing characterizes as "a sophisticated elaboration of the 'bourgeois revolution' line of thinking" [p.246]) is rendered "one-sided" (p.254).

Unique characteristics such as elective representative assemblies, royal subordination to law, the independence of towns, a balance of power between kings, nobles, and clerics, peasant property rights, and decentralized military forces, "provided Europe with a predisposition toward democratic political institutions, a predisposition that can never be repeated in the modern developing world" (p.3).

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, the military revolution - the gunpowder-inspired transition from small, decentralized, feudal cavalry forces to large, state-organized, infantry forces - eroded these predispositions and strengthened monarchial power; especially in those protostates where the extraction of resources severely burdened its own people. Nevertheless, asserts Downing, "in countries that avoided the military revolution, or found alternate methods of financing war than domestic resource mobilization, military modernization did not destroy constitutional government," (idem) thus permitting the possibility of democratic development.

After briefly examining those factors which "may intervene to break the nexus between war on the one hand and the destruction of constitutionalism and the rise of absolutism on the other" (e.g., foreign resource mobilization, alliances, advanced economy and commercial wealth, and geography and topography, pp.78-9) Downing devotes the next six chapters of his book to the respective experiences of Brandenburg-Prussia, France, Poland, Britain, Sweden and the Dutch Republic.

Downing concludes that high levels of warfare requiring high levels of domestic mobilization brought military-bureaucratic absolutism to Brandenburg-Prussia and France (which the latter escaped only as a consequence of its revolution). Britain, having low levels of warfare and low levels of mobilization up to 1648 and high levels of warfare but medium levels of mobilization between 1688 and 1713, was able to preserve its constitutional elements. Sweden and the Netherlands, having high levels of warfare but (respectively) low and medium domestic mobilization requirements, also retained their medieval constitutionalism. Finally, Poland lost its sovereignty due to high levels of warfare but state paralysis on the domestic front (p.242).

Downing explicitly excludes Russia from his study because it contained "almost none" (p.38) of the characteristics which predisposed medieval Europe to democracy. In Downing's interpretation, the legacies of both Kievan Rus and Novgorod, the activities of both the boyars and the Cossacks, as well as the operations of the obschina, veche, and zemskii sobor are readily dismissible; given "the decisiveness of the Mongol period" (p.39) which placed Russia on "an autocratic trajectory" (p.38). Consequently, almost no attention is given to the impact made by the military revolution in Russia.

Even if one were inclined to accept "The Mongol Origins of Muscovite Political Institutions" (Donald Ostrowski, Slavic Review, Winter 1990), such acceptance hardly establishes Downing's autocratic trajectory. Notwithstanding the "deep similarities" which Ostrowski found in the dual administrative structures of the Mongol and Muscovite political institutions, he also notes that "in Muscovy, as in the Kipchak Khanate, the council of state could act to limit the authority of the ruler; it was not merely an extension of the ruler's authority" (p.533). Finally, Ostrowski takes pains to reject the idea that "Moscovy acquired 'oriental despotism' from the Mongols" (p.542).

Porter, by contrast, says little about the influence of the Mongols and pays almost no attention to Russia prior to the reign of Peter the Great. He merely states that "the traditional barriers to absolutism were weakest in Russia, where the oprichniki of Ivan IV . . . in the sixteenth century had executed over 10,000 boyars and converted the nobility into a service class with minimal corporate privileges" (p.108).

Given Downing's far too simplistic linkage between the Mongols and Russia's autocratic trajectory and Porter's silence on the subject, these works are quite deficient in identifying potentially democratic characteristics in Russia's medieval past and in explaining the origins of her military-bureaucratic absolutism.

Porter's War and the Rise of the State is much less concerned with fixed predispositions toward democracy than with state formation (beginning in the fifteenth century) which, he asserts, was forged and nourished by "an iron triangle of arms, capital, and bureaucracy" (p.58). He adds that this iron triangle "has been with us ever since. In a self-perpetuating cycle, the need to wage war impelled rulers to accumulate capital in order to fund bureaucracies; these in turn extracted more capital, which bought armies, which made possible greater wars. Each war in turn pushed the cycle to a new level of destruction, as well as to higher levels of power accumulation" (idem).

Having examined the passing ot the medieval age, Porter turns his attention to the three stages of modernity through which the state has passed: (1) the dynastic state (1648-1789), the nation-state (1789-1914), and the collectivist state (1914-Present).

The dynastic state emerged as a consequence of its proper size. Although it is true that the nobility could not afford to outfit their fiefdoms with artillery and that the widespread use of handguns permitted the infantry to prevail over the cavalry, Porter concludes that "it is too simplistic to say that the emergence of the modern state was a process of larger political units crowding out smaller ones. The tiny fiefdoms and principalities of the medieval era could not field effective armies after the Gunpowder Revolution and so perished; but large empires also could not wield effective power over the whole of their territory, and they too fell apart. The modern state emerged in the middle of the size range as the political unit best suited in scale and organization to field modern armies" (p.102).

Identification with the nation-state arose in the eighteenth century as religious passions subsided in the wake of the Enlightenment and as the limited wars became more exclusively identified with the interests of the state. The national enthusiasm which propelled French military forces across Europe also provided the catalyst for arousing opposing national sentiment. But Porter also credits Napoleon with bringing about "an administrative revolution of continental proportions" (p.138).

The creation of a central bank, the establishment of the ministry of police, the consolidation of tax collection, the institution of central auditing, and the reorganization of the judiciary are examples the rationalization, secularization, and centralization which were derived from the need to field, organize and equip large national armies. The French model not only swept across Europe, but by the late nineteenth century, "the bureaucracy, the taxation system, the administrative techniques, the legal regime, the conscription system, the military establishment, the concept of fixed borders and sovereign authority - in short, the whole organizational logic and paraphernalia of the modern warfare state" (p.146) were exported throughout the world.

Before moving to the Porter's final (and present) stage of state formation, the collectivist state; a few words need to be said about the divergent paths which states followed during these stages, Porter asserts that European states generally have followed a continental path, constitutional path, or a coalitional path through the stages. The continental path was characterized by the military-bureaucratic absolutism found in eighteenth century France, Russia, Austria, and Prussia. Britain, rendered more secure by a narrow body of water separating it from the continent, "retained the representative system it had inherited from the medieval era" (p.108). The coalitional path, comparatively speaking, produced hardly any central state at all. The Dutch Republic and Switzerland are cited by Porter as followers of this path. These paths seem to lose much of their distinctive characteristics, however, as the states move through the stages.

With the industrialization of warfare and the concomitant potential for mobilizing the entire population a collectivist state emerged which, Porter argues, "was really three states intertwined in one: a regulatory state, characterized by extensive state intervention in the national economy; a mass state, in which political participation and privilege were divorced from class or economic status; and a welfare state, assuming direct responsibility for the well-being of its citizens" (p.150).

That the welfare state emerged out of the large scale planning and mobilization required for the prosecution of industrialized warfare is an issue which political conservatives would prefer to ignore. Nevertheless, pensions for Civil War veterans in nineteenth century America, infant health care programs which arose in Britain during World War I (British tabloids had decried the fact that 12 infants were perishing per hour at home, compared with but 9 soldiers at the front), and the various GI Bills found in twentieth century America attest to a growing welfare obligation, even in those states considered most immune to the penetration of the state.

Although he singles out America's experience as a special case where the Jeffersonian value of the limited state long prevailed, Porter notes that during World War II "the 'nonmilitary' sectors of the federal government actually grew at a faster rate. . . than under the impetus of the New Deal!" (p.280). He concludes that "at some point in the last fifty years, the United States crossed the welfare threshold. . . the point at which the state transcends its military origins and acquires a new raison d'etat as the pilot of the economy and the provider of social welfare" (p. 294).

The collectivist state spawned a perverse totalitarian variant as a consequence of World War I. In Porter's view, "more than any other factor, it was the unprecedented destructiveness of World War I that devastated civil society in Russia and Germany... and spawned states in which wartime levels of mobilization, complete disregard for human rights, and the pervasive dominance of state authority became everyday features of political life in peace as well as war" (p.197).

The collapse of the Soviet Union begs the question of whether the accumulative and intrusive powers of the state have reached their peak. Given the fate of Yugoslavia, could we be heading towards the "remedievalization of Europe?" (p.301). Porter correctly praises the efforts of Brian Downing in demonstrating that the source of our liberties is located in medieval constitutionalism. Will our freedom from state intervention therefore increase; or decline as a consequence of some new military revolution giving rise to the Scientific Warfare State? (p.303)

Although the efforts of Brian Downing and Bruce Porter provide no definitive answers to such questions, their respective examinations of "what war causes" do provide us with many points of reference - from which thoughtful policy recommendations or civic action might arise.

Walter C. Uhler is an independent scholar and freelance writer whose work has been published in numerous publications, including The Nation, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Journal of Military History, the Moscow Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. He also is President of the Russian-American International Studies Association (RAISA).

waltuhler@aol.com