From State-Nations to Nation-States:
1776 – 1914

 

A swamp still skirts the mountain chain

And poisons all the land retrieved;

This marshland I hope yet to drain,

And thus surpass what we achieved.

For many millions I shall open regions

To dwell, not safe, in free and active legions.

Green are the meadows, fertile; and in mirth

Both men and herds live on this newest earth,

Settled along the edges of a hill

That has been raised by bold men's zealous will.

A veritable paradise inside,

Then let the dams be licked by raging tide;

And as it nibbles to rush in with force,

A common will fills gaps and checks its course.

This is the highest wisdom that I own,

The best that mankind ever knew:

Freedom and life are earned by those alone

Who conquer them each day anew.

Surrounded by such danger, each one thrives,

Childhood, manhood, and age lead active lives.

At such a throng I would fain stare,

With free men on free ground their freedom share.1

 

THE INCESSANT COMPETITION of the new European society of territorial states required enormous and ever increasing expenditures on professional armies. Although the territorial gains permitted by the balance of power to any single state could not possibly justify such expenses, without an extensive professional army any single state risked piecemeal losses to the other states that could be catastrophic (such as happened to Poland when it lost 29.5 percent of its population and 35.2 percent of its territory in 1772).

The diplomatic relations among eighteenth century states were conducted according to a precise diplomatic code of behavior; so were their wars. Neither left much room for innovation. The increasing burden on states thus could not be significantly relieved externally; that meant that there would be increasing pressure for constitutional change, internally, as each state struggled to wring greater and greater effort from its own society.

Those territorial states, like Britain, that were able to survive eventually transformed themselves into state-nations in the nineteenth century. Those states that had not made the transition to the territorial constitutional order—that remained kingly states in their constitutional life (like France or Sweden)—could not call on the leadership of elites to support the increasing demands of the State. At some point, the groups on which the kingly states depended simply refused to support the State any further. Each monarch was then faced with a difficult choice for the social order: either cut back on military expenditure and give in to what every state feared as external threats but which the kingly state saw as a threat to dynastic sovereignty itself, or ally with elements in the threatened society that were traditionally outside the leadership. Every kingly state eventually made the choice to do the latter, and everywhere this occurred, the old order was destroyed.2 Thus at the end of the eighteenth century, Europe entered a period of intense crisis from which it did not emerge until 1815.

Adherents of the revolution, who could be found all over the European world in 1790, liked to see themselves as part of a single movement… [b]ut the revolutions of the 1790s were not brought about by revolutionaries, nor were they the product of a revolutionary movement. They were situations resulting from the collapse of the previous order; the situations produced the revolutionaries… The collapse of the old order resulted, in general, not from attacks by those excluded from its rewards, but from conflicts between its main beneficiaries—rulers and their ruling orders.3

 

For this reason the first states in the new international order to be transformed into the next state constitutional form, the state-nation, were those that had made the least accommodation to change hitherto; by mid-century, however, virtually every great power had followed suit. Although it might have horrified some of the statesmen of these countries to be told so, they were all following in the path of the military genius and dictator Napoleon Bonaparte.