Plates

 

PLATE I: THE CONSTITUTIONAL ORDERS

PLATE II: THE EPOCHAL WARS

PLATE III: THE INTERNATIONAL ORDERS

PLATE IV: BASES FOR LEGITIMACY

PLATE V: HISTORIC STRATEGIC AND CONSTITUTIONAL INNOVATIONS

 

The following charts give a graphic if oversimplified representation of the six successive constitutional conventions of the international society of states. It will be immediately seen that these various periods correspond to those described in Book I: the eras of the princely state (1494 to 1620), the kingly state (1567 to 1702), the territorial state (1688 to 1792), the state-nation (1776 to 1914), the nation-state (1863 to 1991), and the emerging period of the market-state (1989). Each of these eras was defined by the triumph of one constitutional archetype for the State. The third chart shows the moment at which that dominant constitutional archetype was ratified by the society of states as the legitimate constitutional order: for example, this occurred with the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, which ratified the victory of the princely state and the defeat of a “universal” regime for Europe based on the premodern constitutional order of Christendom. It occurred again at Westphalia in 1648, where two peace treaties ended the Thirty Years' War and ratified the legitimacy of the secular, absolutist forms of the kingly state that had superseded the sectarian, dynastically plural forms of the princely state. The Peace of Utrecht in 1713 performed a similar constitutional function for the society of European states by enshrining a new security order in Europe based on the balance of power and recognizing the limited monarchies of the territorial state. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 ratified the success of one state-nation, Great Britain, over another, the revolutionary Napoleonic Empire, and set up an international institutional system of the great powers with periodic congresses, while at the same time embracing the defeated French state-nation and integrating it into the new society. The Peace of Versailles performed the same function for the triumphant nation-state, which replaced the collapsing model of the imperial state-nation of the nineteenth century.