Early modern state formation
Early modern state formation describes the process of the development of the modern institutional state in the early modern period in Europe and the European colonies. The process began at the end of the late Middle Ages and ended with the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789.
The world of European rule around 1500
Around 1500 at the beginning of the early modern period there were at least 80 more or less independent rulers in Europe. With a broader definition of self-employment, there were at least 500 rulers, most of them within the Holy Roman Empire. In the center and west of the continent, autonomous bodies (estates, city federations , free cities , mansions ) had extensive powers. This included the jurisprudence in their areas of disposal and authorization rights for financial payments. Even without an existing separation of powers, the power of the princes was linked in a purely objective manner.
The largest unified state structures were Poland-Lithuania , the expanding Grand Duchy of Moscow , France and Spain . The Holy Roman Empire was a special form due to its constitutional character ( Golden Bull and Peace of Land of 1495 ), it corresponded to a conglomerate of relatively autonomous rulers that were only loosely held together. The central government institutions of the empire around 1500 were rather weak. The empire was always based on the minimal consensus of the “possessing” imperial estates . Political agility therefore always came from imperial structures only briefly and on a case-by-case basis. Domestic political paralysis tendencies, time-consuming consensus-finding processes and blockade attitudes limited the ability of the medieval confederation to shape and change and promoted centrifugal forces that weakened the Reichsbund. Due to its considerable size, the lack of backwardness against external powers, the Reichsverbund maintained its structure despite all external and internal attacks until the 18th century, but then fell apart.
Rulership rights and rulership were divided into several types of authorization. The manorial system was based on the right to dispose of land and everything on it, and enabled the right to farm taxes. The rule over the low and high jurisdiction also lay with landlords or corporate cities, the sovereign church regiment in Protestant territories lay with the bishops appointed by the sovereign. There was also informal, partly contractual overlaps of secular and spiritual rule in Catholic areas that were not affected by the secularization of church property during the Reformation .
Participation in rule was structured according to classes. Emperor and Pope were at the head; followed by the princes ruling over their sovereignty. State rule initially meant the monopoly of high jurisdiction in an area, the imperial estate (right to participate in imperial days ); no submission to violence other than the emperor and the empire. Landstandschaft meant the right to participate in the estates meetings of a sovereign territory. Citizen status brought participation in the administration of the municipality. In part, the citizenship status was divided into councilors and other citizens. The guilds , consisting of craftsmen and the patriciate, made up the largest part of the citizenry.
As their own advisory body, princes only had court councilors who were part of the prince's personal retinue . In terms of administration, there was a court chancellery and a court chamber . They operated a travel domination within their territory from sovereign castle to the next. Residences were only just beginning to emerge. What was already there in terms of administration found its way into the rooms of the castles and palaces without any problems. There were hardly any regulated public finances.
With the transition from the natural economy to the money economy , the introduction of new cashless forms of payment, also known as the commercial revolution , the economic and social dynamics increased noticeably. In the context of social change , new social groups emerged. Including the middle class , who also understood themselves as a social class . The first forms of wage labor in the progressive regions of Europe also spread. Early capitalist leases emerged and replaced unfree feudal economic structures. The economic structures changed. Old elites got into an economic crisis from which they could no longer free themselves. Humanism encouraged the creation of new educational institutions, such as state universities, which were no longer in the sovereignty of the churches. The level of education rose overall. Experts such as lawyers and doctors were available for sovereign tasks. The individualization increased. In addition, there were far-reaching disputes about right faith in the course of the Reformation . The standing order wavered.
A majority of the noble European dynasties competed for the disposal of material goods (land, people, goods, money) and immaterial resources (fame, honor). In doing so, they relied on increasingly professional power elites with expert knowledge, such as scholars who owed their status to the prince and therefore had similar interests. The growth of statehood intensified rivalry; each sought to expand at the other's expense, including through violence.
State formation took place as a result of increasing cutthroat competition between the rulers of Europe. In the process, stately wars became more and more resource-intensive, which contributed to the emergence of a state organization consisting of a central administration and a financial income organization. The tendency towards standardization of the rulers increased around 1500. The princes tried to bundle their severely restricted rights as sovereigns and to organize them uniformly. In some cases in the late Middle Ages they had to pledge their rights and possessions in order to gain access to estate financial grants and funds. They therefore endeavored to restrict the class rights again and to replace it with a unified, disciplined subordinate society directed and aligned with them. Their expansion was directed against the estates , which were established in many places in the late Middle Ages , especially cities, wealthy nobility and the church.
Concomitants, requirements
ideology
The development of new intellectual approaches was required to form a higher-level spiritual ideal , a kind of moral guiding principle or a compass pointing the way for the rulers of that time. These shaped the imaginations of the princes in their training for their rulership from an early age and had a socializing effect on the rulers. They defined permissible and non-permissible rulers roles and aligned the ruler's person to a social system that had no official constitution. “The” state did not yet exist in the imagination of secular rulers. At first it was just "her" private property, a kind of oversized property with residence and the character of a wildlife park. A higher sense of responsibility and duty for their own subjects was also not pronounced among the princes. Princely sovereignty, raison d'état, power treaty, and later enlightened absolutism became new core elements of political theories, which developed in stages from several stages of development from 1500 to around 1650 and prescribed a more sophisticated catalog of tasks and duties for the princely rule.
In the Middle Ages, only the military secured princely rule. Legitimation was based only on strength, threat and the ability to sanction. Until then, the prince was only able to legitimize his rule with a symbolic divine grace . With political theories of state and treaty , additional, new legitimation of rulers could be established by and in front of the intellectual elite. They linked the princely rule with the task of promoting general welfare. Princes should now strive for common benefit for the cause. This is how they were measured from then on. Resistance rights were linked to it.
In the late Middle Ages, the desperados and robber barons dominated the nobility. This was also due to the late medieval agricultural crisis . A good prince was a good warrior who kept the entourage in order and kept the exuberant feuds to a minimum . The rise in the self-image of the sovereigns to be more than just an ordering power as primus inter pares required the creation of the model of a potent, renaissance prince striving for power , who at the same time possessed the ability to organize, centralize and objectively. Applied to today's standards, this would correspond to a general with business management skills.
Until the beginning of the early modern period, the ideal of Christianity existed as a ruling association under the dual leadership of the Roman emperor and pope, with gradual participation of the other power holders. Charles V (1519 / 20–1556 emperor) was the last to try to establish a universal monarchy aimed at this. Supported by political theories , the concept of the sovereign (princely) state emerged into the 17th century. In the Peace of Westphalia (1648), the subjects of international law considered to be sovereign were listed for the first time, thus constituting an international system of states .
In Six livres de la République (1583) Jean Bodin defined the attributes of princely sovereignty. This included the decision-making power over war and peace, pardon, legislative and tax power, control of a government and administrative apparatus. Sovereignty is attributed to princes who have received it directly from God and without the intermediary of the emperor and the pope. Accordingly, it is the duty of the other members of a political community to submit to the prince. This also forms the basis for the idea of absolute domination within ( absolutism ).
Beginnings of state policy can be found in Niccolò Machiavelli in principe Il (1513/1532). The idea found training with Giovanni Botero in the work Della ragion di stato (1589). The maintenance of the stato , i.e. the state of power, by whatever means was now the primary goal of political action. The state was thus intended to be replaced by the manorial association of persons . His leadership became the object of reasoning only. This attitude found practical implementation towards the end of the Thirty Years War , when the Spanish king, in his self-image a Catholic king, concluded treaties with the “ heretical ” Dutch States General and Protestant Confederates in view of the military-political situation ( necessitas ) . Submission and control of the church strengthened the state-building process. Confessional pluralism, which established itself over the long term in the European wars of religion, forced the princes to make the legitimation of central rule independent of the denomination and led to the development of new bases of legitimation ( natural law , welfare state utilitarianism ).
Thomas Hobbes' work Leviathan of 1651 was fundamental for the social contract . The book provided a theoretical foundation and justification for a central state authority. In the natural state without law and state, all people fought against everyone for scarce resources. Even a righteous man had to assume the intention of an assault on the part of his neighbor and therefore strive to eliminate this threat as a precaution. The benefits in terms of security and welfare for all increase when all members of a community transfer their power and their right to self-determination to an individual or an assembly that has the power to force all to inner peace and mutual aid against external enemies.
Autocracy and strivings for absolutism always stood in contradiction to the possibilities of participation of the state parliaments and political representation. Since the late Middle Ages there have been assemblies of the estates in the form of state assemblies , which acted as an advisory body to the ruler (England: Magna Charta 1215, Reich 1495). Without a consensus among the estates, princes could not collect taxes or set new laws. Unlike a modern Parliament premodern parliaments but not the citizens put out equal, elected representatives together, but rather from rule-makers or their messengers: the Reichstag looked electors , princes, counts, prelates and imperial cities with. Parliaments therefore did not represent a political association, but constituted it themselves. Decisions were not made according to the majority principle , but separated according to class chambers (nobility, clergy, cities). The political order was thus based on the social hierarchy. In an effort to establish an absolutist rule, princes tried, with varying degrees of success, to eliminate the assemblies of the estates. After 1614, the rulers of France refrained from convening the estates general .
The person of the ruler embodied the state. This basic attitude lasted until the end of absolutism, in the form of the saying L'état, c'est moi . Another point of view concerned corporatism (also related to Corpus ), which regarded the state as a body and all of the feudal bearers and thus nationals belonged to the state body. People formed members of a state that had grown organically. This biological concept of a state reified, materialized and depersonalized as more and more new authorities were established that were located outside and far away from the court. An expertocracy emerged .
The enlightened absolutism, which defined the position of the prince as the first servant of the state , brought with it a further degradation of the prince's position towards the state. From this point on, the prince had been externalized by the concept of the state and designed the public facility complex, which has now been transformed into an institutional state, as an independent external actor. Problems from this arose on the basis of legitimacy. The separation of powers and the terminology and position of the people were missing . Both approaches were developed at the same time, by Montesquieu , Rousseau and Voltaire . They led to the further development of the princely institutional state into the constitutional state , which was implemented from the 19th century. The early modern state stopped halfway through development. It suddenly became obsolete from the beginning of the French Revolution , and new concepts that took the third estate into account politically had emerged.
Military revolution
The increased military needs that arose from the technical and social revolutions became the impetus and motor for the expansion of sovereign state activity. The replacement of the feudal succession , which traditionally included the position of feudal horses , by freely recruited mercenaries , led to the permanent replacement of the traditional knight armies. The nobility thus lost their role as traditional feudal military leaders. It emerged mercenary armies were increasingly equipped with firearms. Discipline and order brought the Orange Army reforms , which became the model for all of Europe. Improvements to the fortification system became necessary with the introduction of field artillery . This could destroy vertically towering structures such as city walls. Fortifications now had to be built in such a way that they no longer offered straight fronts (main form: citadel ). Fortifications required additional financial resources that the prince did not have. The size of the armies that could be mobilized rose from 10,000 men by 1500 to up to 150,000 men in the Thirty Years' War and then further to up to 400,000 men in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1713). All of this increased the resource requirements of warfare. Mercenary armies dominated until the 17th century, after which standing armies were gradually built up on the basis of early forms of military service and advertising. Fortress construction, procurement and production of weapons, support for the disabled and barracking (including food) as a result of billeting with civilians were also cost-intensive factors. The size again had to be taken into account by enlarging the army administration. New offices were created and had to be maintained. Magazines, weapons depots and enrollments also required permanent management. The replacement of the company economy became one of the goals of the sovereigns in order to maintain control of the military apparatus and to curb the soldiers .
In order to be able to survive wars successfully, the resource base of a ruling association had to be expanded. Subjects were to be won as soldiers , and income was increased through customs duties, excise duties on salt, beer, wine, grain milling, taxes and increased use of the crown domains . Raising these funds required the establishment of a continuously active government and administrative apparatus. Increasing expansion of resources met resistance from assemblies of the estates (for example in France Fronde 1648–1653) and subjects. As a result, restrictions were placed on the rights of assemblies of estates and subjects. The village autonomy with regard to the local self-government in many places concentrated. There was a social compulsion to subordinate to the sovereign structures. Sovereigns tried to influence communal structures by circumventing traditional law.
The increasing resource intensity in the course of the military revolution favored large states. With their higher income and population base, they were able to build up and maintain a greater potential for power. A series of armed conflicts resulted in the development of an international state system. Temporary embassies became permanent establishments at foreign courts around 1700. Communication between the ruling centers intensified. State treaties were concluded with increasing frequency. A dense communication network of the sovereigns and kings in Europe manifested itself. This had an inward stabilizing effect on the rulership structure and brought the prince information advantages and initiative. The small-scale estates were thrown back on their provinces and no longer kept pace with developments.
Social selection struggles of the emerging social classes for position in the system of rule began and ended in a general class struggle of early bourgeois revolutions . In the struggle for hegemony among the formally equivalent states for supremacy in Europe: for example: Reunion Wars , Dominium Maris Baltici , Gathering of the Russian Earth , a sustainable balance had to be achieved. This was achieved through the cabinet war system .
Wars of succession were an expression of the close ties between state identity and ruling dynasties in the early phase of state development. The best-known examples were the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1713), the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748), and the War of the Polish Succession .
Social discipline
The social discipline aimed to strengthen the orderly life in society with a view to the state and to discipline human behavior in terms of work and morality. From an unguided and unguided social group that appeared undisciplined, violent and chaotic, a command and obedience structure emerged through the use of coercion and public violence. In urban areas in particular, a clearer order should be enforced, which the rural feudal social order was unable to resolve.
Addressees were the corporate-hierarchical estates society with clergy, nobility, urban and rural population on the one hand, and the absolutist-hierarchical state society in court, bureaucracy and military on the other. The aim was to align actions with individual ethical aspects. Policey legislation and church discipline (Catholic confession , reformed moral discipline ) were important means of social disciplining the population at large . They contained constitutional and criminal law provisions and were often promulgated from the town hall. The ruling regiment tried to enforce its own superstructure everywhere.
In view of the low coverage of the local level by the early modern state with its inadequate administrative support, this was characterized by an enforcement deficit. The success of the civilization process and social discipline was thus limited; Absolutism was more of a political ideal than a lived reality.
The development of the state took place in response to the increased need for the use of rights by local communities. In the course of falling incomes of the lower class and growing social inequality , the need for higher legal institutions increased in order to maintain social peace.
State formation went hand in hand with the expansion of courtyards and residences. The rulers tried to bring the nobility from their estates into their own vicinity in order to better control them and to prevent nobility confederations that were directed against them. The class of the court nobility was formed . The position of the nobility therefore increasingly depended on their proximity to and favor with the prince. Everyday life at court was rationalized into a series of ceremonies for the permanent representation of court society. In order to be socially successful, its members had to submit to strict codes of conduct. External compulsion turned into self compulsion. Civilized, "polite" behavior spread to wider society through the appearance of courts with their court regulations and ceremonies . The court promoted civilization by forming an avant-garde. Political communication was now celebrated. Politeness, courtesy masked rawness and forms similar to the state of nature. Diplomacy and state acts differentiated themselves in all spheres of princely manners and included the most private activities. Their main significance for today's people seem extremely disconcerting.
bureaucracy
The individual princely states of the Holy Roman Empire , which had a decentralized structure, and the north-western European states, which pursued a centralized approach, became pioneering states in the formation of states in the early modern period . The divergence of the Roman Empire model from the approaches of other states can also be explained with the political failure of the Habsburg emperors in the 16th and early 17th centuries to develop a unitarian imperial power over the entire territory from their seat in Vienna. The north-eastern edge of the empire formed a strong princely countervailing power, which enforced princely territorial rule in their states despite all imperial resistance. Because of the small-scale organizational structures that this entails, the center of Europe was the center of state and bureaucratic development. Each small principality set up its own central ruling structures around its feudal ruling court, while in France everything was geared towards central Paris. Feudal structures lasted much longer in Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Their institution-building lagged behind in density and number for a long time and only experienced a catch-up boost from 1700 with the Petrinian reforms .
Starting from a feudal persons member State had pronounced to 1800 significant European features of pre-modern state and disseminated. These goods:
- Accumulation and concentration of the rulership rights on the sovereign through elimination of former rulers of equal rank, integration and suppression of intermediate class powers (church, nobility, cities);
- Consolidation and penetration of the territory; Circle and official formation
- Increase in the tasks of rulership from safeguarding legal and civil peace to more active shaping of all areas of life;
- Development of central administrative structures: creation of a bureaucracy (finance, justice, church, army)
- Expansion of the court to an institutionalized nationwide center of power
- Change in the legitimation of rule (from traditional-sacral legitimation of God's grace in the Middle Ages, to enlightened , rational rule in enlightened absolutism ).
What was missing and what distinguishes the early modern state from the modern state was the lack of separation of powers. The strong position of a ruler's court and the continued large share of private property of the prince in the territory and his ability to intervene in the executive. The people did not even exist in the state.
The medieval institutions in all their fragmentation and overlapping competencies continued to exist. They hindered progress.
literature
- Stefan Breuer : Social Discipline, in: Christoph Sachße / Florian Tennstedt (eds.), Social Security and Social Discipline, Frankfurt a. M. 1986, 45-69.
- Norbert Elias: About the process of civilization, 2 vol., Frankfurt a. M. 1976.
- Norbert Elias : The court society, Frankfurt a. M. 1983.
- Hanse Fenske et. al .: History of Political Ideas, Frankfurt a. M. 1996.
- Winfried Freitag: Misunderstanding of a “concept”., On Gerhard Oestreich's “Fundamental Process” of social disciplining, in: Journal for historical research 28 (2001), pp. 513-538.
- Geoffrey Parker : The military revolution: the art of war and the rise of the West 1500-1800, Frankfurt a. M. 1990.
- Wolfgang Reinhard : History of State Power: A Comparative Constitutional History of Europe from the Beginnings to the Present, CH Beck, Munich 1999.
- Gerd Schwerhoff : The process of civilization and the science of history Nobert Elias' research paradigm in a historical perspective, in: Historische Zeitschrift 266, 1999, pp. 561–605.
- Charles Tilly : Coercion, capital and European states, AD 900–1990, Cambridge, Mass., 1990.
Web links
- GROWTH OF GOVERNANCE in an introduction to the early modern era on uni-münster.de
Individual evidence
- ^ Daniel Tilgner: Social disciplining and social regulation: the police regulations for Schleswig-Holstein from 1636 and for the Bergedorf office from 1623, LIT Verlag Münster, 2000, p. 20
- ↑ Reinhard (1999), p. 55
- ↑ Reinhard (1999), p. 81
- ^ Daniel Tilgner: Social discipline and social regulation: the police regulations for Schleswig-Holstein from 1636 and for the Bergedorf office from 1623, LIT Verlag Münster, 2000, p. 19
- ↑ Reinhard (1999), p. 24
- ↑ Interpretation from Tobias Bevc: Political Theory. UVK, Konstanz 2007, p. 62, ISBN 978-3-8252-2908-5 . The biblical passage is given on the title page as 41:24.
- ^ Daniel Tilgner: Social discipline and social regulation: the police regulations for Schleswig-Holstein from 1636 and for the Bergedorf office from 1623, LIT Verlag Münster, 2000, p. 21
- ↑ Reinhard (1999), p. 51
- ^ Daniel Tilgner: Social discipline and social regulation: the police regulations for Schleswig-Holstein from 1636 and for the Bergedorf office from 1623, LIT Verlag Münster, 2000, p. 19
- ↑ Parker (1990), p. 24
- ^ Daniel Tilgner: Social disciplining and social regulation: the police regulations for Schleswig-Holstein from 1636 and for the Bergedorf office from 1623, LIT Verlag Münster, 2000, p. 40
- ^ Daniel Tilgner: Social disciplining and social regulation: the police regulations for Schleswig-Holstein from 1636 and for the Bergedorf office from 1623, LIT Verlag Münster, 2000, p. 39
- ↑ Reinhard (1999), p. 82f
- ↑ Reinhard (1999), p. 93
- ↑ Reinhard (1999), pp. 52-54
- ↑ Reinhard (1999), p. 65