Democracy is usually considered as a universal phenomenon. This means that it is conceptualised as the necessary result of certain social processes. Democracy, according to this logic, can develop at any time and place, given the right combination of circumstances. I want to move away from the universalistic approach to a genealogical perspective on representative democracy. The genealogical perspective entails an analysis of the origins of democracy. I will show that the intellectual and institutional foundations of liberal democracy developed out of the fragmented sovereignty of late medieval Europe. It was because of these institutions that democracy could gradually be established in certain regions of Europe during the nineteenth century. This research project makes clear why the relatively gradual and peaceful transition to representation was such a unique event that could not be repeated in other parts of Europe or anywhere else. It is only through an analysis of the origins of democracy that this can be demonstrated. In the first part of the introduction, the main weaknesses of the existing theories on representative democracy are discussed. In the second part, I will introduce the authors who have inspired my genealogical approach to the question of democracy.

The universalistic approach has dominated the research on democracy for many years. Although it is still important, many scholars have successfully criticised its basic premises. The starting point of the universalistic perspective is the idea that developments in the social, economic or cultural sphere have certain necessary political consequences. Different theoretical schools explain the rise of democracy on the basis of this logic. One of the most influential universalistic theories on democracy is formulated by the Neo-Marxists, who have argued that particular economic classes are pro- or anti-democratic. The dominance of one of the classes or a coalition between several of them has led, according to these scholars, to either democracy or authoritarianism. (See Moore 1966; Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens 1992). A major problem for this approach is that all of the social economic classes, whether bourgeois, working class or aristocracy, have acted for and against democracy at some point in history. In the absence of an objective relationship between class and certain political interests, the Neo-Marxist perspective loses much of its value.

Since the class-based analysis of the rise of democracy has become less popular over the last decades the culture-oriented theorists are making much headway. However, their explanations are not really more successful. They have, in the vulgarised tradition of Max Weber, hypothesised that particular features in Western European culture promote democracy, whereas cultures in other parts of the world are unfavourable to democracy. The problem with these arguments is that the supposedly essential features of these anti-and pro-democratic cultures have constantly been subject to change. Long term theories that link culture to political regime types become rather weak, in the absence of any stable cultural characteristic of larger social units.

Maybe economic evolutionary theories, which maintain that there is a link between capitalist development and democracy, have been the most successful so far within the universalistic approach. Large-scale cross-national quantitative research undeniably shows a strong correlation between the level of economic development and democracy (Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens 1992; Lipset 1959; Cutright 1963). However, correlation does not yet entail a causal theory, and there are also strong counter examples. The classic case of Germany and the economically highly developed countries in the today's South East Asia prove that there is no unambiguous relationship between economic modernisation and democratisation.

There are of course also theorists who do not assume that democracy is the necessary consequence of a certain set of social processes. Many contemporary social scientists have given up the search for the universal preconditions of democracy; they argue that a great number of different routes lead to democracy. Scholars that work with this perspective claim that it is more helpful to concentrate on the process of transition to democracy, instead of on its social, cultural or economic origins. They analyse the strategic moves of the most powerful political actors in the process of transition. (Recent examples of this type of research are O'Donnell and Schmitter 1986; Linz and Stepan 1978, 1996; Burton & Higley 1989; Karl 1990). Although the transition perspective on democracy is much more feasible in theoretical terms than the studies in the universalistic approach, the historical insights it provides are very few. Besides the valuable idea that it takes a long time for political actors to learn the rules of the democratic game, the transition theories cannot make clear why representative democracy became a relevant option in the first place. All this is not to say that the scholarship on democracy discussed so far is of no help in the present investigation. However, first a theoretical perspective is needed that is not ridden with problems before the insights of the existing research can be integrated.

In order to write the genealogy of liberal democracy it is necessary to go back to its origins and see how it developed from that point onwards. The problem is that it is not at all clear how one should do this. It would certainly be a mistake to just go back in history and start describing traces of what looks like the roots of democracy. We either end up with a random collection of historical events or even worse come up with some teleological account. The danger of teleology is particularly great, because a large part of the vocabulary and the units of analysis that are used in historiography has been created in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The consequence is that the mechanisms and boundaries of the contemporary political and social world are read much further back in history than is justified.

It is over the last two decades that scholars have come to realise that many common social scientific notions are not as straightforward as they seem to be. Particularly the uncritical use of terms like 'society' and the 'national state' have been looked at with considerable scepticism (See Mann 1986). Students of international relations have played a critical role in this process. They have taught us that major patterns of political, social, cultural, and economic interaction have not always followed the boundaries of today's national states as closely as they have during major parts of the twentieth century. Scholars like Immanuel Wallerstein, Theda Skocpol, Michael Mann, and Charles Tilly have shown that strictly intra-national models of political development have become obsolete. They have argued successfully that patterns of trade and warfare on European and world-system level have had major influence on the political affairs on the level of the state and within its sphere of influence (Wallerstein 1973, 1979, Skocpol 1979, Mann 1986, 1993, Tilly 1975, 1992).

Particularly Theda Skocpol (1979) has been effective in reasoning that the form of the state cannot be taken for granted in historical research. Precisely the way in which the state has transformed, should according to her, be the central focus of macro historical social scientific research. Recently, Charles Tilly has taken in Coercion, Capital, and European States (1992) another important step forward along this path by showing that the national state has been a newcomer among states. Most of European history has been characterised by non-national states like empires, city-states or other kinds of states. Only over the last few centuries did states converge on the model of the national state.

In this thesis, I aim to connect the recent theoretical innovation on state transformation to the discussion on the development of representative democracy. An extremely useful starting point of such an analysis is Tilly's variation finding model of state transformation. His model solves the major weaknesses of previous theories on state transformation, like Skocpol's States and Social Revolutions (1979) and Mann's Sources of Social Power (1986, 1993), that are not sensitive to the variations between trajectories of state transformation. Both authors give a linear account of state transformation. This does not mean that they argue that every state exactly transformed in the same way. The point is that the differences in the form of the state, for instance between an empire, a pre-national state or a federation of cities, are not seen as theoretically of any relevance. This is why Skocpol could make a bold comparison between the eighteenth century European kingdom of France, the twentieth century Eurasian empire of Russia, and the three thousand year old Asian empire of China, without running into major theoretical problems. However, the result of this perspective is that the differences between states in respect of their representativeness or any other aspect cannot be conceptualised in terms of the transformation of the state. This problem is clearly reflected in their work; Skocpol never directly discusses democracy, while Mann's contribution to the field of historical sociology only really gives insights in the general growth of collective power, instead of the changes in distributive power (Mann 1993: 3). Tilly partly solves the problem by theorising European history in terms of the variation between trajectories of state transformation. This makes it possible to construct theories about the differences between national states over the modern period in type of political regime, welfare system, distribution of political power etc., within a larger framework of state transformation. These kinds of theories cannot be constructed in a linear account of state transformation.

Although the starting point of my analysis of the rise of representative democracy in Europe is Tilly's state transformation model, I do not incorporate his ideas on democratisation. It is important to note that the development of liberal democracy is not one of the primary interests of Tilly's study. He even avoids the use of the word democracy and prefers to speak about representative institutions. Tilly relates the rise of representative institutions largely to the negotiations over the means of war between the rulers of European states and their subject population. The argument in this thesis on the link between state transformation and democratisation differs in two respects. First of all, the roots of the European representative institutions cannot primarily be connected to the efforts of rulers to gather the means of war, but have to be analysed in the light of the late medieval power balance between the king, the church, the nobles and the cities. Secondly, the extraction of the means of war by rulers not only led in certain instances to new representative structures, but in a lot of other cases also destroyed the existing medieval institutions of power-sharing.

My ideas on democratisation are primarily inspired by Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966), and Brian Downing's The Military Revolution and political change (1992). Moore's study is one of the classics in the field of historical sociology, and it has been a major source of inspiration for both Tilly and Downing. His work is especially useful in grasping the political consequences of the changes which haven taken place in agriculture over the modern period. This is the only part of his theory that I adopt in my own analysis, because his overall argument on democratisation is ridden with theoretical problems. Not only are there strong class reductionist tendencies in his theory, but his reasoning is strictly based on an intra-national logic. The Military Revolution and Political Change (1992) by Downing is theoretically less problematic. Downing stresses the causal significance of military and geopolitical variables. His study is important to establish the link between state transformation and democratisation. Furthermore, he has focussed the attention on the late medieval origins of liberal democracy. Although Downing's study is very helpful, there are still a few problems in his analysis. First of all, he does not seem to be aware that the transformation of medieval assemblies, which I call power-sharing, to the modern representative institutions is by no means a straightforward matter. I will demonstrate that before representative democracy could actually become a relevant option the fragmented sovereignty of the early modern period first had to be transformed into the national states of the nineteenth century. Secondly, Downing's analysis is not sensitive to the influence of the expanding world economy on the nature of the medieval assemblies and councils in the various regions of Europe.

In order to overcome the shortcomings of Downing's argument, I will borrow some crucial insights from world-system theory. Of course, world system analysis in its original formulation by Immanuel Wallerstein is quite problematic. His functionalist approach does not work very well with the state transformation perspective adopted in this analysis. The less ambitious theory on the development of the international division of labour in early modern times of Herman Schwartz in States versus Markets (1994) is much more useful. He shows how the rise of the European international economy influenced the political relationships between the principle actors in the various regions of Europe, without assuming any deterministic system mechanisms. Although Schwartz has nothing to say about state transformation or political regime change, his theory is helpful in understanding the particular power relations that developed throughout Europe. I use the analysis of the expansion of the international division of labour to explain why the national state could first be developed in the kingdoms of Western Europe, while fragmented sovereignty persisted in other parts.

The integration of the theories of Downing, Moore, and Schwartz in Tilly's state transformation model make it possible to explain the variation between trajectories of political development in nineteenth century Europe. This analysis is performed in the five chapters of the thesis. The first chapter, the theoretical framework, demonstrates how the ideas of Tilly, Downing, Moore, and Schwartz can be combined to analyse the rise of liberal democracy. The four following chapters give a historical elaboration of the theoretical framework. The second chapter looks at the medieval origins of liberal democracy, while the third shows how the fragmented sovereignty of the late Middle Ages was transformed into the national state in the course of the early modern period. The fourth and the concluding fifth chapter, analyses the consequences of the variation between trajectories of state transformation for the chances of representative democracy in nineteenth century Europe.

The main claim of this thesis is that the two basic conditions for the development of representative democracy1 are an unbroken tradition of power-sharing and the construction of a national state2 before the era of mass politics. When either or both of these conditions were not met, as was the case in most parts of nineteenth century Europe, the transition to democracy became complicated. Only two of the states under analysis, Great Britain and the Netherlands, experienced a gradual and relatively peaceful change to democracy. The other European states went through revolutions, coups, civil war, and long period of authoritarian rule up to the Second World War.

It was not that democracy lacked support; although it was not yet regarded as the universal ideal form of government, like it is at the end of the twentieth century, many people did struggle for greater representation. The construction of national states not only gave the masses of Europe the opportunity to emancipate themselves, but it made representation a central issue of political contention because the tradition channels of influence were rapidly being destroyed. This is not to say that democracy is the logical consequence of a long historical process. The claim is that the political participation of large parts of the European population had become inevitable. Whether this would take the form of Socialism, Fascism, National Socialism, Communism or Liberal Democracy could not beforehand be predicted. This thesis does not explain why representative democracy eventually prevailed in Europe and not any of these other regimes. It simply shows why representative democracy was more likely to develop in some regions of Europe than in others. The rise of democracy was not predetermined or objectively necessary. It was as everything in history a contingent event. Because representation became a central issue of political contention in most European countries in the course of the nineteenth century it does seem to be relevant to ask why the political community could in certain states be extended with relatively little complications, while it caused so much bloodshed in other states. Moreover, the question why democracy became a subject of political struggle from the end of the eighteenth century onwards and not before this period, is also intriguing.

The theoretical discussion of the rise of democracy in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe takes place in this first chapter of the thesis. First, the origins of power-sharing and the national state are discussed. It is demonstrated that both conditions are based on conflicting principles, which greatly complicated the transition to democracy. The second part of the theoretical framework analyses the consequences of the variation between trajectories of state transformation for the development of democracy in the different parts of Europe. It shows how the interaction between patterns of warfare and capitalist trade affected medieval power-sharing and the construction of national states.

The historical elaboration of the theoretical framework takes place in the remaining chapters of the thesis. First, the development of the two conditions for democracy, power-sharing and the national state, is analysed. The second chapter demonstrates how power-sharing originates from the fragmented sovereignty of late medieval Europe and the third chapter discusses the growth of national states as a result of the interaction between warfare and capitalism. The second part of historical elaboration studies the consequences of the variation between trajectories of state transformation for the development of democracy. The fourth chapter looks at the affect of the interaction between warfare and capitalism on the development of the two basic conditions of democracy in each of the three paths of state transformation. Finally, the concluding fifth chapter shows how the absence or presence of the two conditions influenced the actual development of political regimes in the different European states of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century.

Large numbers of social scientists have tried to explain why European states were characterised by different types of political regimes in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Very few have asked why democracy became an issue of political contention over this period and not for instance in the sixteenth century. This is an important question, since it draws the attention to the historical origins of liberal democracy, and to the structural circumstances under which it could be developed. It is argued in this first part of the theoretical framework that the origins of liberal democracy can be found in the fragmented sovereignty of the late Middle Ages. Fragmented sovereignty produced power-sharing arrangements that could in case they survived up to the nineteenth century form the basis for the development of representative democracy. However, only when fragmented sovereignty was transformed into the sovereign national state did democracy become a realistic option. The transformation of fragmented sovereignty to the national state was the result of the interaction between war and capitalism. The main problem in the whole scheme was that the very dynamic between war and capitalism that created the national state also destroyed in many parts of Europe the power-sharing institutions. This greatly complicated the development of democracy.

Late medieval Europe was characterised by fragmented sovereignty. The principle political actors, the emperor, king or prince, the aristocracy, the Church, the cities, and in some regions also the peasant communities, were engaged in an open competition for power. The dominant actor in a region formed the state, but this does not mean that it could also monopolise power on a permanent basis, as the modern state does. Rulers in Medieval Europe were conquerors, and tribute-takers, but not the sovereigns of states that dominate clearly demarcated territories. Kings were in a constant struggle with rivals outside their territory, but also with nobles and partly or fully autonomous city-states within their territory. Private armies existed over most of the continent. (Tilly 1992, Rokkan 1975) Besides this fragmentation of sovereignty in terms of coercion, there also existed a constant tension between the state and the Church. Both of them tried to dominate the other, but there was never a state governed by an uncontested theocratic ruler, like in other parts of the world (Tierney 1982).

Medieval states were usually formed by a king or prince, but in case such a figure was absent, states were also created by the cities, the aristocracy, and the Church. However, governance over a wider territory was as a rule, irrespective of the actor who dominated, only possible when different actors decided to share their power instead of fighting over it. Even the most powerful rulers needed to cultivate good relations with local elite. Indirect rule, through local power holders without central officers and agencies, was usually more efficient than extreme centralisation. (Aylmer 1996) The result of this allocation of tasks was that rulers had to negotiate in assemblies, councils, and courts with the various power actors over the extraction of resources for government and warfare, which was the main activity of late medieval states. The negotiations in these power-sharing institutions in turn produced systems of law and thought, which later on provided the basis for the development of liberal democracy.

The actual development of democracy, however, only became an option when fragmented sovereignty was transformed into the sovereign national state of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Governance in a democracy functions on the basis of representation, while medieval and early modern rulers governed through power-sharing. Brian Downing's identification of medieval assemblies and councils as representative institutions in The Military Revolution and Political Change (1992) was in this respect mistaken. The distinction between representation and power-sharing is by no means a matter of degree, but refers to a radically different distribution of power. Institutions of power-sharing can be constructed in a situation in which various political actors are engaged in an open competition for power, whereas representation can only exist when the competition for power is monopolised and is organised according to a specific set of rules. Representation means that someone or something is represented in a higher authoritative order. Only the modern national state has so far been able to almost completely monopolise violence, taxation, and jurisdiction. 3 One must not be mistaken by the fact that many medieval assemblies were called representative. Although they often vaguely referred to a represented people or community the basis of these institutions was always power-sharing; only actors that wielded independent political power could co-operate in the rule of a certain territory.

Similar to the current argument are the remarks made by Norbert Elias in The Civilizing Process on the subject of democracy. He makes clear that democracy can only exist if the state has the monopoly of violence and taxation in order to finance other monopolies. The competition for power has to be regularised for a democracy to function. Democracy in Elias' terms could be described as a monopolised competition for the right to decide how the monopolies of the state are to be used. 4 (Elias 1983) Democracy is not an open competition in which the contestants may use whatever means available to acquire power. We are justified to speak of a democratic system when the most important power actors settle their disagreements through routine negotiations instead of violence. This is only possible in a situation in which the state has a monopoly of violence.

How states transformed from fragmented sovereignty to the sovereign national state is one of the most hotly debated subjects in historical sociology. Particularly interesting is Charles Tilly's contribution to the debate. He has shown in Coercion, Capital, and European States how the transformation of states resulted from the interaction between war5 and capitalist development6. Tilly argues that war leads to the transformation of state structures through two general mechanisms. First of all, conquerors have to rule the lands, people and goods they acquire, which means that they become involved in the extraction, and distribution of resources. Secondly, the extraction of the means of war leads as a side effect to the construction of an infrastructure for taxation, supply and administration that also requires maintenance. (Tilly 1990: 17-20) However, the two mechanisms did not necessarily transform European states into national states. Tilly makes clear that many types of states existed at the end of the Middle Ages, which were able to compete more or less successfully in warfare.

This changed at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The growing scale of warfare necessitated states to field ever larger armies, which became progressively more expensive. War functioned like a selection mechanism in modern European history. Of course, this mechanism did not work perfectly, since other factors intervened. Geography worked to the advantage of certain states, which could remain outside the main patterns of warfare. Furthermore, diplomacy proved to be an important factor in the survival of smaller states. The fortunes of particular states will be discussed in the next section on the variation between trajectories of state transformation, and in the historical elaboration of the main theoretical arguments. The general trend in warfare worked to the advantage of states that could mobilise their own population in national armies, and extract large amounts of money through taxation. States that combined both activities successfully were the first to develop into full fledged national states. Prime examples are France, to a certain extent England, and Prussia. Other states were either destroyed or transformed into national states. (Tilly 1990)

It is clear that war was a major factor in the transformation of European states, but in the long run the transformation was made possible by the development of capitalism. Armies could only to a certain level be expanded by means of the direct extraction of resources. Beyond this level rulers needed to have access to ready money, which was not easy since late medieval European economies were hardly monetarised. Most trade was local and based on the direct exchange of goods. Patrick O'Brien (1984) has argued that throughout the mercantile era (1492-1789) international transactions formed only a tiny part of the total proportion of trade. He concludes that international trade was not as vital to the European economy as world-system theorists, like Immanuel Wallerstein, would have it. For the economy as a whole this might be true, but in relation to state transformation international trade played a crucial role. The gold and silver that could be extracted in loans and taxation from international transaction provided rulers with the ready money they needed to expand their armies. Furthermore, the import of bullion proved to be significant in the monetarisation of the European economies, which made more regular taxation possible. Of course, this was at first only feasible in the core countries of the world-economy, whose capitals formed the centre of the international financial market.

It is important to see that it is the interaction between war and capitalism that gave European history its dynamic character. Capitalism not only made the growth of armies possible, but was itself in turn reinforced by the expansion of the state apparatus as a result of the developments in warfare. Contrary to some popular beliefs capitalist exchange, like democracy, is not based on a free and open competition. The transformation from markets based on the direct exchange of goods to our modern day markets was facilitated by the monopoly on violence of the state and the systems of laws that were constructed alongside. Moreover, warfare pressured European states into constantly raising taxes. The enforcement of taxation in turn stimulated the monetarisation of the economy and the commercialisation of agriculture, since states pressured their populations into carrying out at least a part of the day to day exchanges through money. The expansion of armies not only forced states to raise more taxes, but also compelled them to spend more money, which led to a further monetarisation of the economy. Finally, the ability of European states to employ violence ever more concentrated and on a grander scale made it possible to tie larger parts of the world in a system of fairly unequal exchange; Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and English merchants could take the lead in international trade, because they simply had more firing-power.

The interaction between war and capitalism transformed a whole variety of late medieval states into national states. City states disappeared in the end because national states had much larger populations at their disposal, which meant that they could also support greater armies. The central aspect that made national states more effective in warfare than tribute-taking empires, which have dominated most of world history, is the transition from indirect to direct rule. Every large European state ruled their subjects before the seventeenth century through intermediaries, which included landlords, the clergy, urban oligarchies, and independent mercenaries. The relative centrality of each of these groups marked alternative systems of indirect rule, and determined the character of the power-sharing arrangements in a region. One of the consequences of systems of indirect rule is that it sets limits to the quantity of resources that can be extracted from the economy. When war demanded greater resources, states started to bypass, suppress, or incorporate old intermediaries, and rule directly on the local level in order to gather the means of war. The first important move from indirect to direct rule happened with the nationalisation of European armies. In the seventeenth century, states moved from mercenary armies to domestically recruited standing armies, which became a part of the administrative structure of the state. Nationalised armies proved in the following century much more effective in warfare. (Tilly 1990)

The displacement of intermediaries by government officials meant that the basis for power-sharing arrangements had disappeared. The national state effectively monopolised violence, taxation and jurisdiction. The ability of the national state to penetrate ever deeper and more directly in the day-to-day-life of people was actually further enhanced in the nineteenth century by the industrialisation of warfare and production7. Particularly the development of the railroad speeded up communication and created for the first time truly national economies. Although important, industrialism cannot be seen as an independent factor in the transformation of European states; it merely marked a new phase in the development of warfare and capitalism. It is in this phase that political decisions taken in the central state directly affected the local level. The consequence was that power actors, who wanted to influence the governance of the realm, had to organise themselves also on a national level. Furthermore, people could no longer direct their demands and grievances to local or regional intermediaries. They had to demand the right to be represented in national government. It is not surprising that democracy became in this period the central subject of political contention.

The transformation of the state created the basis for the construction of liberal democratic political regimes. Of course, even when the structural conditions for democracy were favourable, people still had to demand the right to be represented. In general, new political groups were mobilised throughout Europe as a result of two revolutions: the French and the Industrial Revolution. The French Revolution gave the masses of Europe the language of liberty and democracy which they used in their own struggle for political emancipation. It showed for the first time in history the powers that could be released by the mobilisation of whole populations. Politics became a mass event. It was no longer restricted to a small elite, although the traditional elite still dominated throughout most of the nineteenth century. The French Revolution not only gave Europe the rhetoric of liberty and democracy, it also introduced nationalism as a central political ideology. More specifically, the construction of national identities was initially mainly a reaction against the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars that followed the revolt against the Ancien Regime. At first many people welcomed the invasion of French revolutionary armies, which they saw as liberators from the traditional order. However, after two decades of French dominance people across Europe wanted to determine their own political fate.

The industrialisation of production did not only enhance the ability of the state to penetrate directly on the local level, it also changed the distribution of power resources across a population. It gave larger groups of people the means to organise themselves on a national scale, something which before this period only the elite were able to do. Robert Dahl has given in Polyarchy (1971) a brilliant short analysis on the effects of industrialisation on the distribution of power resources over political actors in a realm. He argues that as a result of industrialisation:

Extreme inequalities in important political resources decline; while this process does not produce equality it does produce greater parity in the distribution of political resources. (Dahl 1971: 86)

Industrialism reduces the concentration of political resources and creates a system of dispersed inequalities. Most people in industrialised societies have, in contrast to peasant societies, access to one kind of political power resource, which can help them in their struggle for political representation. Industrialisation disperses political power resources in various ways. The development of communication and transport technology makes it possible to mobilise people over a larger territory. The spread of the ability to read, and write as a result of more widespread education also makes this task easier. The political organisation of masses was further facilitated by the concentration of the proletariat in large industrial towns. Moreover, the movement from the countryside to the city placed many people outside the direct control of the aristocracy. Finally, industrialisation led to the dispersion of material wealth. (Dahl 1971) Particularly the middle classes profited from this. In the nineteenth century they could replace the aristocracy as the dominant political force opposite the state8.

Whereas the French Revolution established liberalism and nationalism as major political movements, the Industrial Revolution initiated the rise of socialism. The industrialisation of production concentrated a large part of the lower economic classes in the urban areas, which facilitated their political organisation. The autonomous organisation of the lower economic classes had before industrialism always been extremely difficult, because they had been dispersed over the countryside. Moreover, agricultural labourers and peasants were usually subject to aristocratic political control. Although industrialism gave workers the opportunity to organise themselves, this is not to say that they automatically created their own political movements. It is important to keep in mind that there is no self-evident connection between economic class and certain political interests. Many workers did in the course of the nineteenth century support socialist movements, but also many of them became liberals, nationalists or they organised on a religious basis. Neither can it be argued that industrial workers have a necessary interest in democracy, like Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens (1992: 40-63) seem to propose. The same is true for the other economic classes. Throughout nineteenth century Europe there can be found industrial workers, peasants, bourgeois factory owners, middle class state officials, and aristocratic landlords who were enthusiastic supporters of democracy. However, the same economic groups also produced people who rallied against democracy. Only when wealth and social status are directly connected to political power, which has already become quite rare in nineteenth century Europe, is it possible to speak about certain objective political class interests. A clear example of such a self-evident connection is the case of the Eastern and Central European landlords engaged in labour repressive agriculture. They used their politically dominant position to coerce peasants and agricultural labourers into working on their estates. These landlords clearly had an objective interest in the preservation of the status quo, because an extension of the political community would directly threaten their social and economic position.

Every medieval state was in the end destroyed or transformed into the sovereign national state. However, not all states across the continent transformed in the same way; there are major differences between trajectories of state transformation. The differences between trajectories largely influenced the development of regime types. The nature of the transformation of the state was in turn for an important part determined by the interaction between patterns of capitalist development and war. This part of the theoretical framework maps out how the intensification of European warfare and the rise of the international economy have affected the power-sharing institutions and the construction of a national state in the various trajectories of state transformation. Moreover, it analyses the consequences of the presence or absence of the two conditions for the development of democracy in the different parts of Europe. In order to accomplish both tasks the work of Charles Tilly on state transformation, Brian Downing's analysis of warfare and political change, and Herman Schwartz's theory on the development of an international division of labour are combined.

In Coercion, Capital, and European States (1990) Tilly has shown that the specific nature of the transformation of different states can be explained by the accumulation and concentration of capital9 and coercion10 across the various regions of Europe. On the basis of this starting-point he has constructed a state transformation model which distinguishes between three trajectories of state transformation: the capital-intensive, coercion-intensive, and capitalised-coercion path. All late medieval states were either small capital-intensive city-states or large coercion-intensive tribute taking kingdoms or empires. Capitalised-coercion states, in which the holders of capital and the wielders of coercion interacted on a more or less equal basis in the state apparatus, appeared only later. However, both the capital and coercion-intensive trajectories of state transformation in the end converged on the capitalised-coercion path as a result of the international competition in warfare. Only states that successfully combined capital and coercion could survive in the European state system. The national state emerged when the extraction of capital and the means of coercion were fully integrated in the state apparatus.

The first trajectory in Tilly's model is the capital-intensive path, which is characterised by city-states. The primary condition for the construction of a city-state is obviously the high accumulation of capital through trade. Moreover, it is also important that the means of coercion are not concentrated in the hands of one ruler; the autonomy of the city would otherwise be endangered. Historical examples of this path are the Dutch Republic, Venice, Genoa, and the autonomous city-states of the Holy Roman Empire.

The second trajectory of state transformation discussed by Tilly is the coercion-intensive path. Rulers in the coercion-intensive regions, like those in the capital-intensive trajectory, were unable to fully dominate the other power actors in the realm. The states that appeared in this path of state transformation usually had an elective king or emperor, with limited executive powers. Large territorial states could be created in the coercion-intensive regions, because there was a low accumulation of coercion, but a high concentration of available means in the hands of the ruler. When the means of coercion concentrated at any other place the empire or kingdom disintegrated. Interesting examples of this trajectory are the Polish kingdom, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Duchy of Hungary.

Finally, the third path of state transformation in Tilly's model is the capitalised-coercion trajectory, in which the first national states were constructed. Capitalised-coercion states emerged in early modern times from the coercion-intensive path because of the nature of capitalist development in Western Europe. Western Europe formed the centre of the modern world-economy. Rulers of the larger territorial states in the region were able to profit from the accumulation of capital and construct large armies. In order to do so, they had to integrate both finance and coercion in the state structure. The balance between capital and coercion was favourable for the growth of a strong state, like for instance in France and England. It is in this sense not a coincidence that the greatest rulers in European history, like Louis XIV, appeared in these regions. (Tilly 1990)

In The Military Revolution and Political Change (1992) Brian Downing has constructed an interesting theory on the relationship between warfare and the destruction of medieval assemblies and councils. Downing argues that the pressure on rulers to centralise authority in order to gather the means for war, varied across Europe as a result of differences in geographical circumstances and access to financial resources. Geography mattered because it placed certain states outside the main patterns of warfare, which meant that rulers were not pressured as much as in others states to gather the means of war. The consequence was that power-sharing institutions could usually survive, since rulers were not forced to centralise authority at all costs. States that were not directly threatened by destruction in warfare as a result of geographical circumstances are the English kingdom, the Swiss Confederation, and the Scandinavian states. Of course, the survival of power-sharing arrangements cannot fully be ascribed to geography, but it surely weakened the pressures of warfare on the rulers of these states.

Downing asserts that the rulers of states at the centre of European warfare were in a totally different situation; they were constantly pressured for more money. If not enough capital could be raised because intermediaries successfully resisted attempts of the central ruler to gather more taxes, the state was destroyed. (Downing 1992) This is what happened to most states in the capital and coercion-intensive regions. Capital-intensive states were simply to small to field a large army, while rulers in the coercion-intensive regions were too weak to extract enough resources. The weakness of central authority, which for a long time guaranteed the survival of power-sharing, proved in the end to have fatal consequences for the power-sharing arrangements in the capital and coercion-intensive regions. Obviously, the destruction of a state also threatened the power-sharing institutions that had been constructed in its realm. The history of the Polish state in the modern period is a dramatic example of this.

In contrast, states in the capitalised-coercion regions were usually not threatened by destruction in warfare; in fact, they were the main instigators. Rulers had the instruments to successfully centralise authority and gather the means for war. However, this also meant that power-sharing was destroyed, since it set limits to the quantity of resources that could be extracted from the economy. Striking is that the nobility and burgers did not always resist the suppression of power-sharing. A reason for this is that a lot of members of these classes were employed in the expanding state apparatus. (Downing 1992: 74-139; 239-254) The consequence of the destruction of power-sharing was that new social-economic groups could not be integrated in the political community through existing institutions of political participation. Instead they had to wrestle representation directly from the state, which made the development of democracy problematic. Some states were able to successfully resist the attempts of social groups to construct effective political representation. Nineteenth century Prussia and later on the German Empire are important examples of this. It was only after the First World War that authoritarianism could temporarily be broken in Germany. The French case shows that the transition to democracy was never a simple matter even if representation could be directly won from the state through revolution. It took the French almost a century to reach some sort of basic agreement about the rules of the political game, even though the power of the dominant actors of the Ancien Regime had been broken.

The survival of power-sharing institutions as a consequence of either geography or financial wealth was by no means a guarantee for the development of liberal democracy. The character of the power-sharing arrangements determined whether they could be transformed into representative institutions. The nature of power-sharing in the various regions of Europe was in turn shaped by the rise of the world economy. The influence of the expanding world economy on the transformation of states has been theorised by different scholars over the last three decades. Immanuel Wallerstein has performed the most famous and elaborated analysis of the historical development of the European world economy. His world-system theory is, however, in the context of this research project not particularly useful, since its functionalist tendencies lead to a thoroughly mistaken perspective on the state. The transformation of European states is in Wallerstein's model understood as being determined by the development of the international economy. There is not much sensitivity in his theory for the differences between types of states, neither is he aware of the dynamic role of warfare in European history. In order to analyse the influence of the rise of the international economy on the character of power-sharing, a more open theoretical approach is needed, which can be synthesised with other ideas on state transformation.

Herman Schwartz has in States versus Markets (1994) formulated a much less ambitious but effective theory on the rise of the world economy. He argues that the initial growth of the European international economy must be understood as the extension of the agricultural supply zones from Western Europe into new areas via water transport allowing an expansion of the division of labour. As the Western European cities, first on the Iberian peninsula and not much later in the Republic, France and England, outstripped their own micro-economies at the beginning of the sixteenth century, they turned to overseas sources of grain, fish, and other primary products. The Western European cities gained an enormous financial strength around this time, because of the influx of bullion and luxury products from the America's, Africa, and South-east Asia through conquest, plunder and trade. The availability of bullion allowed these cities to draw other regions, particularly in central and Eastern Europe, into a division of labour. (Schwartz 1994: 43-60)

One of the main consequences of the international division of labour and the growing financial strength of Western Europe was that part of the population in this area could be liberated from agriculture and deployed in technically more complicated tasks. It is in this sense that the growth of the international economy made the expansion of the state in certain regions of Western Europe possible. The influence of the expanding international economy on the transformation of the state in the agricultural supply zones of Central and Eastern Europe was almost opposite to the experience of the West. States in Eastern Europe did overall not grow much stronger in early modern times. In fact, the relatively strength of central rulers vis-à-vis the aristocracy did in many parts diminish over this period. However, the strength of states and the character of power-sharing were by no means simply dictated by the development of the international economy. The type of state, either coercion or capital-intensive, which prevailed at the end of the Middle Ages continued to influence the various trajectories of state transformation well into modern times.

The core of the late medieval European economy was formed by politically (semi-) autonomous city-states. The financial strength of the city-states was a guarantee for their independence. They could either buy privileges from larger territorial rulers or hire their own protection. Political autonomy was in general secured as long as a city-state or confederation was positioned at the core of the world economy. When a city lost its central place in the trade network it was immediately threatened by the incorporation by a larger territorial state, which is what eventually happened with many of the Mediterranean city-states. Of course, the political status of a city had important consequences for its power-sharing institutions. Autonomy was a warrant for the survival of power-sharing, since political power was usually dispersed within a city-state.

The survival of power-sharing in the capital-intensive regions of Europe did not automatically lead to an unproblematic development of representative democracy. Power-sharing could only gradually be transformed into representation when the other basic condition for democracy, the construction of a national state before the era of mass politics, was satisfied. In most of the capital-intensive areas this was not the case. The only exception is the Republic that was transformed into a national state at the end of the eighteenth century by French intervention. In the other capital-intensive areas it was precisely the persistence of the fragmentation of sovereignty, which was the foundation of medieval power-sharing, that blocked the construction of representative democracy. When representation and the construction of a national state became simultaneously issues of political struggle, like in Germany and Italy, no gradual transition from power-sharing to representation was possible. The main problem was that the state elite could become rather autonomous vis-à-vis the other power actors, because a national political arena was still under construction. Furthermore, there was no national tradition of power-sharing, and the formation of mass movements was complicated by the question of the legitimacy of the new state. The result was radical political class and nationalist mobilisation, polarisation and (semi-) authoritarianism.

The expansion of the international economy had a somewhat different effect on the transformation of states in the coercion-intensive regions of late medieval Europe. First of all, it is important to realise that most of the European economy was not directly influenced by the growth of intra-continental trade. Large parts of Europe consisted of micro-economies that remained almost completely isolated. The level of transport technology was such that trade in most goods was only profitable when it could be transported by water. This situation changed in the nineteenth century when micro-economies were linked by railways forming national economies. (Schwartz 1994: 11-15) Although isolated, the micro-economies were important in a political sense. It was in the hinterlands of Spain, France, Scandinavia, and large parts of central and Eastern Europe that late medieval power-sharing was preserved on the local level. The state simply did not have the instruments to penetrate these parts. The groups that were dominant at the end of the Middle Ages, the aristocracy or the peasants, remained so up to the modern period. The type of state that confronted them when authority was successfully centralised finally determined the fate of the local power-sharing arrangements in the isolated coercion-intensive regions.

Although most of the coercion-intensive regions remained outside the international economy, states in these areas were heavily affected by changes in the flow of capital and trade. The late medieval coercion-intensive states of Western Europe had because of the movement of the region to the core of the world economy access to loans by independent investment bankers, which allowed them to construct large armies and centralise authority in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. The centralisation of authority refers among other things to the process by which the organisation of violence and finance are incorporated by the state. Some of the larger territorial states of Western Europe, particularly England and France, thus became capitalised-coercion states. Although the expansion of the European economy gave rulers in the region certain opportunities, the centralisation of authority was never an easy task to perform. The rapid disintegration of the Spanish state in the seventeenth century after a long period of economic prosperity and military prominence demonstrates that the availability of large amounts of credit and a large army were not a guarantee for the construction of a strong state.

The relative financial and military independence of territorial rulers in Western Europe posed a serious threat to power-sharing. Medieval estates and assemblies were circumvented or destroyed in France and Spain; even the central political position of the English parliament was under attack for many years during the seventeenth century. The destruction of power-sharing, as has been argued before, made the creation of a stable democratic regime more difficult, because there was no tradition on which could be built. New social groups were forced to wrestle representation directly from the state. Both France and Spain consequently went through political radicalism and revolution11.

When power-sharing survived in a capitalised-coercion state, like in England, the gradual transformation to representation became an option. A gradual transition was possible because of two reasons. First, the construction of a national state was accomplished before representation became an issue. Second, the character of power-sharing was changed as a consequence of capitalist development. Barrington Moore has in Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966) made clear that the commercialisation of agriculture in parts of Western Europe had important consequences for the political and economic position of the aristocracy, which continued to play a central role in all of the capitalised-coercion states. He argues that an aristocracy, which extracts resources from the peasantry by means of coercion, has a strong interest in the maintenance of the legal and political order that makes their privileged position possible. On the other hand, when the extraction of surplus goes through the market, the social and economic position of the aristocracy does not depend on a coercive political and legal order. Both the peasantry and the aristocracy have an interest in the establishment of a legal and political system that promotes the free exchange of goods. Moore makes clear that the integration of larger parts of the population does not in such a situation, directly threaten the privileges of the aristocracy, which means that the transformation from power-sharing to representation is less problematic. (Moore 1966) The traditional elite could consequently in Great Britain, like in the Netherlands, integrate new social groups in the existing political community. No revolutionary class or nationalist mobilisation occurred, and representative democracy was gradually developed in both countries

Part of the coercion-intensive regions in Central and Eastern Europe became raw-material producers for the industrialising west, they moved to the periphery of the world economy. The peripherialisation of Eastern Europe over the early modern period led to the contraction of towns in this area. Eastern European merchants were not able to profit from trade with the west, because Western European traders dealt directly with the local aristocracy. The Eastern European nobility, which like in all coercion-intensive regions at the end of the Middle Ages was dominant, grew even stronger as a result of the trade with the west. It was able to coerce the peasantry into working on their extensive estates. The result of the movement of parts of Eastern Europe to the periphery of the world economy is that authority could not be centralised like in the capitalised-coercion regions. The power-sharing arrangements, which were completely dominated by the aristocracy, were consequently preserved. Eastern European parliaments sometimes even gained the right to elect the central ruler, something unheard of in the larger territorial states of the west.

  In the previous chapter, it was argued that the main relationship between late medieval political actors was one of power-sharing. This analysis contrasts the dominant view in historical sociology as expressed by Brian Downing, who claims that late medieval Europe was characterised by representative institutions. However, representation can only exist when a higher authoritative order is present in which someone can be represented. No such order, which extends over a wider territory, can be found in early modern times. Representation was of course possible within the confinements of a city, village, or church, but not on the level of the larger territorial state. Medieval kings often claimed to represent the population of a territory and were also frequently reminded of this duty by their subjects, but the actual power balance between the king and local chiefs was one of power-sharing. Local power holders, the aristocracy, the church and the cities, could largely act autonomously within their territory; the king was only able to keep up his rule by negotiating with them. To speak about representation suggests a greater correspondence and continuity between medieval co-operative arrangements and modern liberal representative institutions. It obscures the fact that the fragmented sovereignty of the late Middle Ages, which made power-sharing institutions possible in the first place, had to be transformed into sovereign states before representative democracy became an option.

One of the most striking characteristics of Medieval Europe is its political fragmentation. After the disintegration of the Roman Empire, there has never been another empire that was able to dominate the geographical area which we today call Europe. The Roman Catholic Church was the only institute at the time which provided some cultural unity to Western Europe, which distinguished it from the Byzantine, and the Muslim empire (Mann 1986). Important in this respect were the Crusades against the Muslims, which were organised from the eleventh century onwards. The First Crusade to win back the Holy Land was preached in 1095 by Pope Urban II. These Crusades, which went on for two hundred years, had a varying success. Latin Christians occupied parts of Palestine and Syria for a century, but they finally had to withdraw in the thirteenth century and leave the Muslims in possession of these lands. Other crusades had more long-term results. A group of Norman knights won back Sicily from the Arabs in 1100, and the Iberian Christians carried on a reconquista for several centuries against the Moors. By 1250 they had created the Christian kingdoms of Portugal, Castile, Aragon, León, and Valencia, leaving the Muslims only Granada in the south. The crusades were not exclusively organised against the Muslims; European heathens were put down in southern France, and the Teutonic Order brought Christianity by the sword to Prussia and the east Baltic regions. However, Latin Europe not only expanded continuously, but was also driven back by invasions from the Tartars in the thirteenth century, followed by the Ottoman Turks in the fourteenth. The Turks actually kept on pressing upon central Europe up to the twentieth century. Nevertheless, Europe as a whole was already capable of resistance against invaders from the Eurasian landmass towards the later part of the Middle Ages. (Palmer & Colton 1992; Mann 1986)

Latin Europe was, apart from its relative religious conformity, characterised by internal disorder and conflict. War reigned over most of the continent. The kings of England and France were among the few late medieval European rulers, who had subjugated substantial territories to their rule. The other important principalities were Portugal and Spain in the south, the Scandinavian Union in the north, and Hungary and Poland-Litouwen in the east. (Tilly 1990) These were the coercion intensive states of the late Middle Ages. Their names do not sound unfamiliar to our modern ears, but the territorial distinctions do not in any way correspond to the divisions between the national states of the twentieth century. Not only were borders between states not as clearly drawn as they are today, but they also constantly changed. The kings of England and France were extending their rule over an ever larger territory throughout most of the early modern period. The king of Spain did the same thing through strategic marriages, which consequently let to an enormous but politically shattered empire, with rather autonomous dependencies. When the autonomy of these regions was threatened by the Spanish state, they revolted. A prime example of this is the revolt in the Low Countries, which started in 1566, against the attempts of the Spanish king Phillip II to further centralise the rule of the state.

It is important to note that England, France, and Spain are the successful examples of state transformation. The rulers of these states were through the movement of Western Europe to the core of the world economy able to construct large armies, centralise authority and dominate the other state on the continent. Most other states were not as fortunate. The largest part of the states, which were created during the Middle Ages, disappeared for a period of time or even permanently at some point in modern history because of annexation by force or marriage. Important examples of this are Burgundy, Aragon, Naples, Scotland, and Ireland; but also Hungary and Poland belong to this category. Even Spain eventually lost its empire and was for a long period subject to French rule. This makes clear that state transformation was by no means an ongoing linear process towards the national state.

In the year 1000, Europe was still overwhelmingly rural, and nearly everyone lived in villages. In case of an attack by outsiders, every able-bodied person was expected to participate in local defence. With the spread of knighthood from its origins between the Rhine and the Seine, a more effective defence was introduced. This also meant that the responsibility for repelling plunderers was put on the shoulders of a small class of men that was specialised in fighting. The class of knights was necessarily small since the weapons, armour, and horses needed were extremely expensive; besides knights had to be trained in the use of arms from childhood onwards. (McNeill 1982: 63) Of course, the knights were able to exploit the exclusive character of their trade in social and economic terms; they could dominate the countryside by sheer force, and extract rents from the peasant population. This is the basis of the growth of the aristocracy as a distinct higher class.

The strength of the aristocracy vis-à-vis the king and the cities was not everywhere the same throughout late medieval Europe. The differences in the relative strength of the principle political actors proved to be important for the survival and the character of power-sharing in the various regions. This section will concentrate on the large coercion intensive states in which the aristocracy was the dominant force at the end of the Middle Ages. Although similar in many respects, important differences between the large territorial states can already be observed in early modern times. The Latin European kings were relatively the most powerful rulers at the time. They could dominate the other principle actors within their realm on a more permanent basis than any other ruler was able to do. Especially, the kings of France and Spain became prime examples of absolutist rule. It is no surprise that power-sharing was destroyed in both states at an early stage.

The aristocracy was extremely powerful in the Latin part of medieval Europe, but its position would soon be impaired by the rise of absolutism in this area. The ascent of the aristocracy in Latin Europe was due to the economic expansion from the middle of the tenth century up to the early fourteenth century. Land became scarce, which was to the advantage of the aristocracy who could demand higher rents. The opposite process actually occurred in the following century, when the European population was reduced by half as a result of warfare and the arrival of the Black Death. Land became abundant and peasants could demand more freedom from their lords. However, before all this happened the aristocracy across France, Italy, and parts of Iberia was able to profit from the economic prosperity. They started to build castles from the surpluses generated by their estates. The castles, which were constructed with high brick walls, remained an obstacle for attacking armies until the effective introduction of the cannon in the middle of the fifteenth century (McNeill 1982). The castles proved to be an important power resource for the aristocracy, since they were able from these fortifications to impose their will not only upon their own peasants but also upon the other inhabitants of the district. This development marked the destruction in large parts of Latin Europe of the autonomous rural communities. At first the rise of the knighthood also meant the breakdown of central authority, but soon the dominant members of the aristocracy started to extend their territory by military force and became the new rulers. (Ertman 1997)

Latin European states grew from geo-political competition among the aristocracy. The process of state re-formation occurred in France from the mid eleventh century onwards under the guidance of the Carpatians, who operated from the wealthy geographical base of Île de France13. Other durable states were created alongside France during the eleventh and twelfth century in Castile-León, Aragon-Catalonia, Navarra, Portugal, and Sicily. (Ertman 1997) Although the new Latin kings were able to form substantial states, the aristocracy did remain an important counter force against centralisation. The aristocracy often had their own private jurisdictions, and they had the right to tax the population within their territory (Aylmer 1996: 61). The basis of these rights, as discussed before, was the fighting abilities of the aristocracy. Especially the French king depended in warfare on the feudal levy of knights. While in other parts of Europe the pike and bow men became more important, in France the mounted knight remained the centre of the French military. (Downing 1992: 119) In France the negotiations over the means of war took place in the provincial estates and local assemblies, which were completely dominated by the aristocracy, bypassing the Estates General altogether. The Estates General never had any real power. The king made the law, and he was under no obligation to ask for the opinion of the Estates. However, the provincial estates had experienced a revival from about 1420 onwards. In much of France they met frequently, and gained royal recognition for their right to consent to taxation. The estates developed a permanent corps of officials who assessed and levied the taxes they had approved. (Hoffman 1994: 240-241)

The strength of the aristocracy in relation to the king in Latin Europe was maybe most clearly visible in medieval Castile, which was marked by the process of reconquest and settlement that lasted from the eight to the fifteenth century. Along the military frontier great war-lords emerged, who were almost fully autonomous within their territory. Royal power heavily depended on the baronial factions. The aristocracy was only countered by the city-states, which developed in the Reconquista like corporate lordships, dominating subordinated towns and villages. The larger cities could control their own finances and justice. It can be claimed that medieval Castile was because of the Reconquista the freest society of Europe. The danger of liberty did not come from royal power, but from its weakness. The cities defended the king's supremacy, because it was the only guarantee of their independence from baronial domination. (Thompson 1994a: 142 - 143)

The relative power of the aristocracy was the greatest in the eastern part of the continent especially in Poland and Hungary. The Magyars, one of the many armed nomadic tribes who invaded Europe from the Eurasian steppe, formed the Hungarian state. After decades of pillage, they settle in the eleventh century into agriculture inside a territory almost without cities. The agricultural base did not prevent the Hungarian nobility from struggling among themselves over the royal succession. A process similar to that observed in Latin Europe. However, the aristocracy remained relatively more powerful in Eastern Europe. They continued to control the armed forces and were able to drive both slaves and freemen into serfdom. The towns started to prosper as a result of the growth of feudal agriculture, but they kept on being subordinated to the territorial lords. (Tilly 1990) The aristocracy was towards the end of the Middle Ages also able to dominate the king over longer periods. The relationship between the Hungarian king and the nobility in the late Middle Ages was almost one of balance each taking turns dominating the other.

The relationship between the king and the aristocracy in Poland showed great resemblance to the one in Hungary, apart from a few remarkable characteristics of the Polish nobility. One of these singularities was its organisation in clans. It was even a custom for knights to assume as their last name a part of his clan's battle cry (Downing 1992: 141). Also striking was the absence of a hierarchical order within the nobility like in other countries. In theory, all Polish nobles were equal. (Bulst 1996: 50) As in Hungary the king and the aristocracy, the szlachta, were of equal strength, both struggling for dominance. Some kings, like King Jan Olbracht (1492 - 1501), were able to overrule the nobility, because they could draw on the support of the large group of middle-ranking and poor gentry. However, the discussion in the third and fourth chapter will show that the incorporation of parts of Eastern and Central Europe in the periphery of the world economy eventually gave the upper hand to the aristocracy. The weakness of central authority made the preservation of power-sharing possible, but it endangered at the same time the survival of the state itself.

Another region in which the strength of the aristocracy and the king were rather balanced is England, which was at the end of the Middle Ages still a relatively backward coercion-intensive region. Not only was its population relatively small, but it was also one of the least urbanised areas of Europe. England was still an exporter of raw materials, primarily wool. (Smith 1991) There was in contrast to Eastern Europe much more co-operation between the aristocracy and the king. England had therefore from very early on in medieval history a tradition of national taxation. The English considered the king's power to tax as growing from his responsibility for the safety of the realm. According to this principle, it was the duty of the king's subjects to support the defence. However, since the taxes were for the common profit of the domain, a connection could be made between taxation and the redress of grievances. (Sacks 1994: 17) Parliamentary taxation was granted, assessed, and collected by the same people: the prominent gentry in the counties and the members of the local corporations in the towns. Parliamentary laws were enforced in the same fashion. This meant that the government of England depended directly on the willingness of the nobility to participate with the king and his servants. (Sacks 1994: 17)

This section on the capital-intensive regions of late medieval Europe analyses the relevance of Rokan's theory on the relationship between the absence of strong central authority and the high concentration of cities for the state transformation experience in the different regions of Europe. His theory is extremely important because it explains why the formation of a national state occurred very late in certain regions of Europe, which greatly complicated the development of democracy in these parts. The analysis will demonstrate that Rokan's argument was certainly relevant for state transformation in the Low Countries and Northern Italy, but cannot be fully applied to the German lands, which were ruled by the Holy Roman Emperor. The weakness of central authority in the Empire was not only due to the high concentration of cities within its realm, but must also be explained by the strength of the aristocracy in its coercion intensive parts. The Empire was extraordinary in the sense that it combined both capital- and coercion-intensive regions.

Rokan's theory on the relationship between state transformation and urbanisation is based on the presupposition that the city and the more substantial territorial state are two distinctly different forms of social organisation. Cities are conceptualised in this perspective as distribution points for capital, whereas states operated chiefly as containers and deployers of coercive means. (Tilly 1994) Fritz Rorig has made clear that cities should not be seen as small, self-contained units, but in a framework of interrelationships with other towns. Long-distance trade formed the basis on which the network of trading cities throughout Europe could prosper. When a town became isolated from this long distance trade framework, for instance because of the violent intervention of a larger state, the growth of the town stopped and part of the initially won freedom was lost. (Rorig 1969: 181-187) Barcelona is an interesting example in this respect. The city went through a period of great prosperity from 1250 until 1400. Although Barcelona was part of the kingdom of Aragon, it was by no means completely subordinated to royal power. The autonomy of the city was visible in the fact that it had its own fleet, militias, and fiscal apparatus. Barcelona took such an important position in the kingdom that the Crown of Aragon had the marks of a state-city. The governance in the kingdom was based on an alliance between the monarchy and the urban interests. However, when Barcelona lost its important commercial position in the Mediterranean trade after 1400, as a result of civil war and the displacement of trade toward the Atlantic, the political prominence and autonomy of the city also came to an end. Aragon was forced to play a secondary role in relation to the court in Madrid, after the union in 1469 with Castile through the marriage of Isabella and Ferdinand. (Albaladejo 1994:170 - 171)

Trading cities were found all over Europe, an important part of them were situated within the Holy Roman Empire. This very lose over-arching political framework stretched all across central and Western Europe. The cities within the empire were largely autonomous, and were able to form their own political alliances; a famous example is the Hanseatic league. The central and Western European trade network could develop as a result of the extraordinary revival of trade from the eleventh up to the fourteenth century.

In the city-states of northern Italy, the situation was completely different. This area, which was at the origin of the commercial revolution that started in the twelfth century, was the most highly developed urban region in the late Middle Ages. The Italian cities did not in contrast to the other towns in Europe recognise the authority of a territorial overlord. Rokan's argument on the relation between state building and the presence and absence of cities certainly seems applicable to this part of Europe. A unitary Italian state only formed in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Although other factors were involved, the strength of the municipal tradition did unquestionably play an important role in holding back centralising forces. This was especially the case in the later Middle Ages. Not an emperor, king or prince extended his territory, but the cities pursued conquest and state formation. Prime examples are Venice and Florence that used territorial expansion to serve their commercial interests. They conquered the lands along their trading routes, which meant that they also subjugated surrounding cities and villages. The conquests were seen as a means to continue intense commercial activity, but in the end, they also changed the political structure of the cities. The rulers of the cities were by no means trying to construct absolutist political structures, but they used their talents to hold together a shattered and fragile political order14. (Chittolini 1994)

  This chapter shows how the late medieval fragmented sovereignty was changed into a system of national states through the development of warfare and capitalism. In the theoretical framework, it has been argued that the growing scale of warfare between European states necessitated the construction of ever-larger armies. The arms race that resulted from the competition in warfare worked in the end to the advantage of states that could mobilise their own population in national armies, and extract large amounts of money through taxation. States that combined both activities successfully were the first to develop into full-fledged national states. Other states were either destroyed or transformed into national states. The formation of the national state made the transformation from power-sharing to representation possible. Liberal democracy became an option because the development of the national state created a higher authoritative order in which the population at large could be represented. The national state monopolised for the first time in history violence, taxation, and jurisdiction.

In 1494 a French army crossed the Alps and Italy became a subject of contention between the French and Spanish monarchy. The Italian cities were unable to resist the armies of the larger territorial states. Even the Vatican was attacked in 1527 by a Spanish army of mercenaries and foot-loose Italians. The pope was imprisoned, and the cardinals were paraded through the streets facing backward on the back of mules. (Palmer & Colton 1992: 62) The Italian wars of the beginning of the sixteenth century are seen by most historians as the beginning of the military revolution (see Roberts 1995, Parker 1988). Francesco Guicciardini, an Italian soldier, diplomat, and historian wrote in 1509 on this change:

Wars lasted a very long time, and battles ended with very few or no deaths. But the French came upon all this like a sudden tempest which turns everything upside down... Wars became sudden and violent, conquering and capturing a state in less time than it used to take to occupy a village; cities were reduced with great speed, in a matter of days and hours rather than months; battles became savage and bloody in the extreme. (Quoted by Parker 1995b: 341)

When the military revolution ended is a subject of much discussion (see particularly Rogers 1995, Parker 1995b, and Thompson 1995). However, for the present analysis it is important to notice that the period up to the beginning of the nineteenth century was one of almost continuous warfare.

The technical basis for the intensification of warfare was formed by the introduction of gunpowder. Especially effective at the beginning of the sixteenth century was the cannon. The earliest drawings of the cannon already date from 1326 in Europe and 1332 in China. Both drawings portray a vase-shaped vessel, armed with an oversize arrow. The effectiveness of the cannon was first demonstrated in the Hundred Year's War between France and England. In 1450, the French army drove the English out of Normandy and Guienne, by means of heavy artillery. Castle walls were brought down in matters of hours. The cannon also played an important role in the French invasions of Italy in 1494. The Italians were overawed by the efficiency of the new weapons. The overall effect of the introduction of the cannon was that small sovereign entities, like the Italian city-states or individual aristocrats, were reduced to triviality. (McNeill 1982) The massive medieval castle was no longer a sufficient defence against attacking armies. Whereas in fourteenth century France it took years to bring down a uncooperative lord, during the reign of Charles VII in the fifteenth century sixty nobles were pried out their castles in one year. The cannon worked to the advantage of rulers of larger states, because they were the only ones who could afford them. (Smith 1991; Parker 1988, 1995b)

The Italian city-states soon found a remedy against the destructiveness of the cannon. When the Italians had experienced the power of the cannon in the French attack of 1494, they immediately started to search for a solution; even Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo participated in this. The Italians quickly discovered that a wall of loosely compacted earth could absorb the cannon shot harmlessly. This fundamental idea was used in the construction of a totally new type of fortress, called the trace italienne, which by the 1520's was capable of resisting even the heaviest artillery. In Italy, the new technology in defence halted the formation of a larger territorial state for a couple of centuries longer. The trace italienne again favoured the local defences, at least in those regions that could pay the new fortifications, since they were very expensive. Besides the Italian city-states, only the cities in the Low Countries could afford the new fortifications, which played an important role in the Dutch Revolt. The trace italienne turned out to be an insurmountable obstacle for Philip II in 1574, when he tried to suppress the Dutch. Don Luis de Requensèns, the commander of the Spanish forces, had already warned him in advance:

There would not be time or money enough in the world to reduce by force the twenty-four towns which had rebelled in Holland if we are to spend as long in reducing each one of them as we have taken over similar ones so far (quoted by Parker 1995b: 349-350).

In the rest of the world, the trace italienne proved to be beyond the reach of most noblemen and cities alike. In the sixteenth century, this gave Spain and Portugal the opportunity to form large gunpowder empires. Even the once powerful Asian states were subjugated in the end. They only really discovered the discrepancy between their own military skill and that of the Europeans at the end of the seventeenth century. By that time, the gap had become too great to be bridged without first submitting to foreign invasion and conquest. (McNeill 1982 Parker 1988, 1995b)

The military revolution had large consequences for the transformation of European states, since it made war much more expensive. The expenditure of the Spanish treasury for instance multiplied twenty times between the start of the sixteenth and the middle of the seventeenth century, which is approximately four times faster than the general price level (Thompson 1995: 274). Spain is exceptional, but almost all European states did to an extent experience such a rise in budgets associated to war. This was not simply the result of technical innovations or the growth in the size of armies, but the military revolution also initiated the commercialisation of the military enterprise. Mercenaries, who proved to be much effective than the heavy cavalry of the nobility, replaced the feudal levy of the aristocracy. Although the new soldiers were individually much cheaper compared to armoured knights, many more of them were necessary and they had to be paid regularly. (Reinhard 1996: 10) A side effect of this development is that the aristocratic monopoly of armed force was rapidly undermined. Government agents were replacing individual noblemen in the recruitment and control of armies. The private forces that some great lords had maintained in earlier times became outdated. (Scott 1995) However, the principle consequence of the commercialisation of warfare was that it forced rulers to find regular sources of revenue in order to pay mercenaries (McNeill 1982). This led to bureaucratic systems of taxation, and a general growth and centralisation of the state in the various regions of Europe15. The task of co-ordinating ever-larger armies means more complex communication, a greater task of training and disciplination, and of course, a bigger effort to provide the means of war like food, arms, and men (Parker 1995a).

After the introduction of the cannon by the French and the development of new fortifications by the Italians in the sixteenth century, the next important innovation in the art of warfare came in the seventeenth century when the Dutch pioneered improvements in military administration and routine. The main innovator was Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange (1567-1625) and captain-general of Holland and Zealand. Prince Maurits had to fight the Spaniards during the time of his office. He looked to the Roman past for inspiration. Maurits emphasised two things, which had not been common in European armies before this time. One was the spade. Roman soldiers had always fortified their encampments with barriers of earth. By systematically digging ditches and erecting walls, an army could protect itself much better. Maurits' armies as a result suffered fewer casualties from defenders' fire. An additional advantage to the construction of earthen ramparts was that it banished idleness. Prince Maurits highly disapproved of idleness; when his soldiers were not digging, they were kept busy with drilling. The systematic drill was the second innovation introduced by the prince. He compelled his soldiers to endlessly practice the motions required to fire their guns; pikemen had to practice the positions in which pikes should be held when marching in battle. (McNeill 1983; Parker 1988, 1995b)

In the centuries that followed, a whole range of minor innovations was introduced that made warfare more efficient and deadly. However, by the middle of the eighteenth century, four limits in the existing military organisation had become apparent. The first limitation was communication. The co-ordination of armies larger than 50.000 men was based on the level of communication technology of the time impossible. The second bottleneck was the transport of food. The available transport could not concentrate enough foot to support thousands of moving horses and men. Living of the country was possible at appropriate seasons, but risked the loss of control of soldiers who might prefer to plunder instead of fighting an enemy. Besides, a devastated countryside could not pay the taxes, which rulers needed to supply their armies in the first place. The third problem was that armies were still not fully rationalised. The promotion and appointment of personnel still depended on social status and the personal choice of the king. Finally, the last limitation was indirect rule. The indirect extraction of taxes by the aristocracy, who were usually excluded from taxation, confined the amount of money that could be collected. The mass of the population that did pay taxes was on the other hand excluded from any part of politics, which put a ceiling on the level and intensity of war. Both the French and Industrial Revolution discarded these problems. (McNeill 1982)

Warfare has created the modern European State system. This section gives a short overview of the most crucial military encounters, which will be helpful in the understanding of the transformation of individual states. The growth of a single state can not be properly analysed without taking its relationship to other states into account. Two principle developments can be discerned. First, the main topic of European politics changed from the affairs of the Church to the balance of power between sovereign states. This was a clear sign of the growing importance of the state in the day to day life of ordinary people. Second, the account of the most important European wars shows the rise of the capitalised-coercion states. The large territorial states of Western Europe created massive armies through which they could dominate the other states on the continent. The various capital- and coercion-intensive states were consequently destroyed or transformed into capitalised-coercion states. The final section of this chapter on the transition to direct rule will demonstrate that especially Napoleon played a central role in this process.

Particularly significant for early European state transformation was the Thirty Years War. It started in 1618, when the Bohemians fearing the loss of their Protestant liberties threw two agents of the Holy Roman Emperor out of the window of the palace in Prague. Defenestration was a method occasionally used in these parts of Europe. The emperor, Matthias, responded by sending troops to restore his authority. The war that followed became exceedingly complex. It was a German civil war fought over the Catholic Protestant issue. Protestantism was spreading in the north German states, while the Austrian side of the Habsburg family tried to eradicate it in the Holy Roman Empire. The Thirty Years War was also fought over constitutional issues between the Habsburg emperor who tried to centralise authority and the member states, both Protestant and Catholic, struggling to maintain independence. It was a continuation of the wars between France and the Habsburgs, and between

Spain and the Dutch, who had successfully revolted against Spanish rule at the end of the sixteenth century. (Palmer & Colton 1992: 142)

Peace talks began after years of fighting in 1644 in Westphalia, at the two towns of Münster and Osnabrück. Hundreds of diplomats and negotiators were sent to Westphalia. There had been no such European congress since the Council of Constance in 1415, which had dealt with Church matters. The fact that this congress dealt with matters of war and power politics was symbolic for the secularisation of Europe and the growing importance of the state. The most important consequence of the Thirty Years War and the Peace of Westphalia was the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire. The borderlands of the Empire fell away; both the United Provinces and the Swiss Cantons were now recognised in terms of international law as sovereign and independent. The German states became virtually sovereign. Each received the right to make treaties with foreign powers. The Holy Roman emperor could no longer make laws, recruit soldiers, or declare wars without the consent of the imperial estates, made up of three hundred princes, ecclesiastics, and free cities. (Palmer & Colton 1992: 142-149)

After several years of peace a new era of wars came with the reign of Louis XIV, who inherited his throne in 1643 at the age of five. He assumed the personal direction of affairs in 1661 at the age of twenty-three, and reigned for seventy-two years until his death in 1715. Louis XIV made France the strongest country in Europe. His ambition was to rule over the whole of Europe. It was in the resistance against Louis XIV that the concept of the balance of power, which became central to European power politics, was developed. The origins of this concept lay in Italy. Paolo Paruta already asserted in his Discorsi Politici from 1599 that the political stability in the later half of the sixteenth century in Italy had been brought about by the counterpoising of the French and imperial armies. The rather unsuccessful effort of many rulers to combine against Charles V after his victory in 1525 at Pavia over France, is seen as one of the earliest examples to work out a balance of power on a European scale. Until about 1640 there was agreement that it was Spanish power which threatened to overturn the equilibrium that existed in Europe. However, already in the 1640's, German pamphleteers were alleging that France now threatened the freedom of the lesser European states. (Anderson 1993) This threat became clear to everyone, when Louis XIV constructed an extremely large army and started to reveal his ambitions. At this point, the first effective balance of power was engineered by the Dutch prince William III, prince of Orange against the French king.

Both Catholic and Protestant enemies of Louis XIV came together in 1686 in the League of Augsburg, which comprised the Holy Roman Emperor, the kings of Spain and Sweden, the electors of Bavaria, the Dutch Republic, and England. The hostilities cumulated in the War of the Spanish Succession, which lasted eleven years from 1702 to 1713. The two main aspirants to the Spanish inheritance were the king of France and the Holy Roman emperor, each of whom had married a sister of the Spanish king, Charles II, who had no children. The main result of the War of the Spanish Succession was the partitioning of the extensive Spanish kingdom by the Treaty of Utrecht. The Spanish Mediterranean holdings -Milan, Naples, and Sicily- passed to the Austrian Habsburgs, as did the Spanish Netherlands. Spain itself, which was now governed by the grandson of Louis XIV, retained America. The balance of power had been effective; Louis XIV had not succeeded in unifying France and Spain under his rule. Although a French Bourbon did hold the Spanish crown, it was agreed in the Treaty of Utrecht that the French and Spanish state would never be unified. The Treaty of Utrecht meant a confirmation of the international systems of relations. The European state system from now on consisted of sovereign states, which were only connected by free negotiations, war and treaty. (Palmer & Colton 1992: 192-195)

After Louis XIV had failed to construct an extensive empire, the balance of power was not threatened until the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Soon after the French revolutionaries took control of the government in Paris they started to alienate other states by settling international affairs by unilateral action. For example, they annexed Avignon at the request of local revolutionaries but without the consent of its historic sovereign, the pope. Rulers in surrounding states felt threatened by both the resistance in their own dominions, inspired by the French Revolution, and the dangers posed by France itself, which declared itself loyal to revolutionary movements abroad. The king of Prussia and the Habsburg emperor started to negotiate about military steps to restore order in France. In turn, the revolutionaries in France declared on April 20, 1792, war on the Habsburg emperor. The various revolutionary governments that quickly followed each other were all committed to the spreading of the Revolution in the surrounding states. The Girondins, the dominant faction of the Jacobin movement, declared that the Revolution could never be secure in France until it spread to the world. They believed that the peoples of states at war with France would not support their own conservative governments. This was not so strange, since revolutionary elements were already present in both the Dutch and the Austrian Netherlands before the Revolution. (Palmer & Colton 1992)

Despite the overwhelming odds it faced, France was able to neutralise the international coalition that sought to undo the revolution. The revolutionary regime raised a truly popular army of 750 thousand men. (Smith 1991) The Austrian imperial armies were defeated in the southern part of the Netherlands, while the cities of the Dutch Republic welcomed the French like liberators. The arrival of the French armies in northern Italy had much the same result. The European balance of power was immediately threatened. Particularly Napoleon Bonaparte, a young general of the revolutionary army, was able to conquer many neighbouring German, and Italian states. In 1799, when the military advances of France were threatened to be reversed, he was able to take control of France itself. With Napoleon in power France started to dominate most of the continent, many states were conquered and almost all erstwhile enemies were converted into allies. Only England, secure behind the barrier of the Channel, remained at war with France.

By 1813, the alliance that had constituted the French empire fell apart due to rising nationalism in the various regions. In the course of the Napoleonic period, many Europeans felt that the emperor was using them as tools in his struggle for domination of the continent. People grew tired of the wars, the conscription of taxes, and the bureaucratic governance from above. Nationalist movements of protest and independence started to develop across Europe. Nationalism in Europe started for a large part as a reaction against the forcible internationalism of the Napoleonic Empire. Since the international system was essentially French the nationalist movements were anti-French, but they were also anti-autocratic because Napoleon was an autocrat. This lead to a strange mixture of liberalism and conservatism. Conservative nationalists insisted on the value of their own traditional institutions, and customs, they feared the rationalism of the Napoleonic system. The liberal nationalists insisted on more self-determination and more individual freedom against the bureaucratic interference of the state. (Palmer & Colton 1992) Napoleon thus introduced nationalism, conservatism and liberalism as central political ideologies in nineteenth century Europe. Of course, nationalism worked out differently in the various parts of Europe, as will be argued in the final chapter of the thesis.

The Revolutionary and Napoleonic period had greatly transformed European states. The main consequence of the period was the transition from indirect to direct rule in many parts of the continent, which will be discussed in the next section. However, Napoleon not only brought internal change to many states, but he also reorganised the boundaries between them. Particularly central Europe, where the urban belt had always forestalled the centralisation of authority, was affected by French involvement. Bonaparte reorganised the Helvetic Republic, making himself the mediator of the Confederation of Switzerland. He joined the Italian peninsula into an almost continuous kingdom. Napoleon's involvement was most dramatic in the German region, where he closely monitored the rearrangement of the territory by the German princes from 1797 onwards. Consequently, the number of states in the region was greatly reduced. Rulers were literally engaged in a land rush. Most of the ecclesiastical principalities were absorbed by the princely states and forty-five out of the fifty-one free cities disappeared. Prussia, Bavaria, Würtemberg, and Baden consolidated and enlarged themselves, while the Habsburg emperor, Francis II of Austria, saw how the Holy Roman Empire was ruined. (Palmer & Colton 1992)

By the middle of the fifteenth century, the downward economic trend that Europe had experienced for almost two centuries began to reverse itself. Perhaps the most important factor in the economic growth was the combined technology that came from centuries of slow innovation. Apart from several major setbacks, like the economic crisis of the seventeenth century, the general trend was towards more trade and the expansion of the economy.

Especially important for the growth of the European economy were the improvements in agriculture. Yield ratios started to increase as a result of the greater reliance on horses and the use of heavier and more sophisticated plow. The innovations in mining and metallurgy, pioneered by German technicians, made the opening of mines in Eastern Europe possible that could previously not have been exploited. Furthermore, the improvements in water and windmills allowed a more complex civilisation. As a result of the improvement in ship design, which were for a large part copied from the Arabs and Chinese, European ships came to be the best in the world. This is remarkable since seafaring had become an almost forgotten skill in the previous centuries. New designs in sail construction, and the increased knowledge of trigonometric charts opened the high seas for the Europeans. The Portuguese were the first to demonstrate this. The innovations in seafaring in combination with the new developments in weapon technology, discussed in the previous section, proved to have far reaching consequences for the rest of the world. (Smith 1991) Of course, non of these inventions, not even the total sum, provides an explanation for the commercial and military dominance that Europe achieved in the following centuries. The innovations of the fifteenth century were only effective as a result of the dynamics of warfare and capitalism, which had its take-off in the multi-state context of late medieval Europe. There was no over-arching sovereign order like in others parts of the world that could either regulate trade or pacify the various power actors in a region, let alone on the continent as a whole. Europe was a chaotic mass of armed groups that each strove for more power and material gain.

Spanish and Portuguese merchants were the first to explore large parts of the world and open new trade routes. In 1498, the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama rounded Africa and came in the world of Arab commerce. On his second voyage in 1502, he brought a fighting fleet of no less than twenty-one vessels. In 1504, spices could be bought in Lisbon for only a fifth of the price demanded in Venice. Beginning in 1504, only five years after Da Gama's first return, an average of twelve ships a year left Lisbon for the East. (Palmer & Colton 1992: 107-110) Unlike the Portuguese, the Spanish had no history of systematic explorations up to 1492, when the Genoese geographer Christopher Columbus after several requests obtained modest support from the crown to sail westward to Asia. When he returned to Europe, carrying with him captive Indians to demonstrate that he actually found land, the Spanish crown became more interested. (Smith 1991) Columbus never knew that he discovered a new continent. Until his death in 1506, he kept probing about in the Caribbean, hoping to find something that looked like the fabulous East. (Palmer & Colton 1992: 107-110) Only after Magellan's crossing of the Pacific in 1520 was it finally confirmed that Columbus indeed found a new world of which Europe had previously been ignorant.

The New World did at first not live up to the expectations of the Spanish crown. The gold of the Caribbean Islands was soon exposed as being of extremely limited supply; the Indians upon whom the Spanish came to depend, began to die of in large numbers. Many people in Spain considered America as virtually worthless. However, the fortunes of the Spanish soon changed when a expedition of 509 men, led by a freebooter named Hernán Cortés, conquered the Aztec Empire. Even more remarkable was the victory of a force of 168 paraprofessional Spaniards over the Imca Empire in South America. (Smith 1991) Decisive were the superior weapons, training, and the diseases of the Spanish. The consequences of the import of European viruses in the America's were catastrophic. This is for instance very clear in the case of the Aztecs. The population level of central Mexico shrunk from 30 million at the time of the landing of Cortés to about 3 million in 1568 less than fifty years later. (McNeill 1976)

The principle legacy of the Iberian expansion was to bring significant amounts of bullion from the wider world to Europe. In 1545, the silver mountain of Potosi was discovered in Peru, and its bullion began to flow to Spain in the 1560's. In this period, the annual average of world silver production rose from 2,9 million to 10 million ounces. (Kindleberger 1996: 69-72) How the import of bullion affected the European economy has been extensively discussed. Some authors have argued that the import of American silver stimulated the inflation at the end of the sixteenth century, which turned out to be a prelude to the general economic crisis of the seventeenth century. (Smith 1991) However, this is not the place to discuss the complexities of European economic development. More interesting are the consequences of the import of bullion for the growth in the scale of warfare, which was in turn such an important factor in the transformation of European states.

The superior access to credit was one of the major factors that gave the Spanish king the advantage over his international rivals. The leadership of a world empire made it possible for the crown to replace worn out creditors with fresh opportunistic lenders. This was the key to the survival of the Spanish empire during the critical decades of the 1550's and the 1620's. The Germans were substituted by Genoese bankers, who were in turn replaced by Portuguese. However, after the 1640's, the Portuguese were cut off from new capital by the loss to the Dutch of the profits of the Far East and Brazil trade. The subsequent diversion of American silver to Holland and France, together with the separation of Portugal in 1640, meant that Spain was cut out of the international silver circuit. The circuit that once linked Madrid, Lisbon, and Amsterdam ceased to function, and the Spanish Empire collapsed. (Thompson 1994a: 159-160) In the next chapters it demonstrated how the extraordinary wealth of the Spanish king had consequences for the nature of state transformation in the region that reached far beyond the sixteenth and seventeenth century. One of the main results was that power-sharing was destroyed, which greatly complicated the development of democracy.

It is important to keep in mind that only regions which were accessible to water could be linked to the emerging world economy of the early modern period. Transport by water remained the most important until the introduction of railways in the nineteenth century. Up to the nineteenth century, the world economy was characterised by a system of trading cities located near an ocean, sea, or river. By contrast, the major part of the continent was isolated from the world-economy, because profitable trade, except for luxury products, was simply not possible over land. Only the micro-economies that lay very close together traded with each other. No such thing as a national economy existed before the era of canals and railroads. (Schwartz 1994)

Although international trade made up only a small part of the total amount of trade, the ready capital which it generated was crucial for the expansion of armies and the relationship between the principle power actors and the state. Where foreign trade was a significant part of the economy, the cost of measurement and of collection of taxes were low, since trade could only enter through a small number of ports. (North & Thomas 1973) Of course, the amount of capital extracted from the economy always depended on whether or not the state could actually tax the groups that profited from international trade. The Western European states were able to do so, because particularly the trading and financial bourgeoisie profited from the expansion of the world economy. This group did usually not resist taxation, because it benefited from a powerful navy, which could protect its business interests across the globe, and the monopolies enforced by the state. In Eastern Europe, the situation was completely different. This region had become part of the periphery of the world economy at the beginning of the sixteenth century. It was only the land-based aristocracy who profited from the movement to the periphery. On their large estates they produced grain, coal, timber, and other raw materials for the world market. No indigenous trading bourgeoisie developed, because the aristocracy dealt directly with Western European traders. By the middle of the sixteenth century, more than sixteen hundred Dutch ships were in regular service between the Netherlands and the Baltic. (Wallerstein 1974; Smith 1991) The Eastern European aristocracy did not have any interest in a strong state, which would only threaten the dominant position it held and endanger its autonomy. Due to its political strength, the aristocracy was able to resist taxation, and preserve the power-sharing institutions that it completely dominated. States in these parts were weakened as a result and their political independence was threatened.

With all parts of Europe, English trade increased enormously from the middle half of the seventeenth century onwards, but it was not until the beginning of the eighteenth century that it surpassed the Dutch. In the trade with the Far East the Dutch had also remained dominant for a long time. However, by the middle of the eighteenth century the English East India Company had become the largest business concern in Great Britain, and its establishments in India had transformed from the fenceless factories of the seventeenth century into fortresses. The East India Company argued that the fortifications were needed to protect Bengal from French attack. However, in the period that followed the fortifications proved to be very helpful instruments in the English take-over of the entire country.

Around this time the English also won the right to trade with China, although the trade remained highly regulated and restricted. The Chinese emperor only allowed merchants in the port of Canton. The most important commodities that the East India Company exported were silk and tea. The English produced nothing that the Chinese wanted and they had to settle their accounts in silver. The balance of payments could be reversed when the English monopolised the opium trade of Bengal, and started to export this drug to China. (Smith 1991) The success of the English in Asia was duplicated in Africa. England became the largest supplier of slaves to the Americas. The annual exports rose from five thousand at the beginning of the eighteenth century to twenty thousand in the 1740's to almost forty-five thousand by the latter part of the century. (Smith 1991)

For several centuries before the nineteenth, industrial expansion occurred mainly in small towns and rural areas. Small merchants did not work as manufactures in the modern sense of the word, but they gave out work to formally independent groups of workers, most of them organised in households. This changed in the nineteenth century, when capital started to concentrate. Individual capitalists and organised firms began to control much greater productive means than before. Instead of organising manufacturing around supplies of self-sustained labour, merchants increasingly placed production near markets and sources of energy and raw materials. Both production and proletarisation moved therefore from the countryside to the city. Workers migrated from villages and towns to be employed and disciplined by large firms in the new industrial urban areas. The countryside was largely de-industrialised, which accentuated the difference between town and country. (Tilly 1992)

The de-industrialisation of the countryside and the concentration of capital in the cities was facilitated by the mechanisation of production. At the end of the eighteenth and during the nineteenth century, power machinery was introduced into production on a large scale. Suddenly, a task over which an artisan would have laboured for a long time, could be accomplished very quickly by relatively unskilled labour. Indeed, women and children could now do the work. The harnessing of the energy provided by steam was one of the most important technical inventions that made the industrialisation of production possible. A major difference between steam and other inanimate powers, like water or wind, is that it did not depend on the weather and could be deployed almost everywhere. The consequences of the new technical innovation were dramatic. In England, the first region to industrialise, the textile production expanded by geometric proportions. An indication of this growth are provided by statistics for the importation of raw cotton. From 2.5 million pounds in 1760 it rose to 22 million in 1787, and reached 336 million by 1836 (Smith 1991). Steam enhanced productivity and speed also in other areas like metallurgy, mining, and transport. (Smith 1991)

Most central state institutions originated in the household or courts of medieval princes, but later became independent by going out of court. When one institution became too independent to be controlled by the ruler, it was allowed to lead an autonomous existence, but its original functions and position close to the ruler were taken over by a new institution. (Ribalta 1996) The growth of the state in early modern times was driven by the intensification of warfare at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Early modern courts were as a result significantly larger than their medieval and Renaissance predecessors. Besides the expansion of the court, they also became permanently located at one fixed point, rather than being peripatetic. Royal courts came to play an ever-larger role in the life of most of the higher nobility across the continent, particularly in the larger territorial states of Western Europe. In most countries noble courts were a thing of the past. (Scott 1995: 49 - 50)

The transition from a small princely household to a larger state was always a rather ambiguous process. The growing complexity of government in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries made on the one hand the establishment of a more professional co-ordinating institution an absolute necessity. On the other hand, the business of politics still had such an informal character that the new co-ordinators could not be established as an office in the strictest sense, but had to accept a position between court and government. Eventually, the central administrative institutions of Western Europe became completely separated from the court, although in central Europe this process of separation did not start before the fifteenth century. (Ribalta 1996) Wolfgang Reinhard has argued that the expanding state in this period needed additional legitimacy. He maintains that as a result both the Catholic and the Protestant church were subdued and governed by the state in many parts of Europe. (Reinhard 1996) However, the subjection of the church cannot primarily be explained in terms of the lack of legitimacy of the state, but must be understood as part of a much broader process. States not only started to subjugate churches, but did so with all power actors in the modern period; many cities lost their autonomy and the aristocracy was drawn into the state apparatus. All through the Middle Ages, rulers of states had tried to subject the other power actors in their realm, but they had simply lacked the instruments to accomplish this task. Only when states started to monopolise the means of violence were they able to dominate on a more permanent basis. Of course, this process did not take place everywhere in Europe at the same time or to the same extent, as will be demonstrated in the next chapter.

The relationship between the state and the principal power actors, once they were subjugated, was overall one of mutual dependence and necessary co-operation, rather than rivalry and conflict. The aristocracy, the Church, and the cities started to function as intermediaries between the state and the general population. Up to the beginning of the nineteenth century, states were unable to rule without the help of these intermediaries. Although nobles were replaced during the seventeenth and eighteenth century as the main agents of the crown in central government, when new tasks required more education, the aristocracy continued to rule on the local level. The expansion and territorial integration of the early modern state up to the end of the eighteenth century fell far short of the achievements of the national state during the nineteenth century. Early modern states were never fully integrated, they usually consisted of a number of provinces and even semi-independent kingdoms. Land or sea often separated the constituent parts. The slowness and unreliability of communication, and the relative smallness of all administrations at this time, were further barriers to unification. Great nobles continued to exercise their traditional authority in their own regions, where their own kin and clients provided a secure base for political power. One way in which their influence could be exercised was through power-sharing institutions. Membership of such bodies was often an important privilege for the higher nobility. (Scott 1995: 37 - 39)

The replacement of intermediaries by government officials began already in early modern times, but was greatly accelerated during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic period. The French revolutionaries of 1789 were the first to succeed at the implementation of direct rule at the scale of a large state. The revolutionary bureaucracy brought individual citizens face to face with the national state and the Napoleonic regime solidified these revolutionary practices. The French Revolution was unique in the sense of state transformation. However, soon other states underwent their own transitions to direct rule, many of them as a result of the occupation by French revolutionary armies. The replacement of the traditional intermediaries by government officials also entailed the change from reactive to active repression by the state. Violent reactions against rebellion and resistance after it occurred, changed towards active surveillance of the population. (Tilly 1992)

The innovations made in France were especially brought to other countries during the reign of Napoleon. Germans, Italians, Dutch, and Poles worked with the French emperor to introduce the changes that he demanded, and they themselves desired. National states were constructed across the continent as a result. In all of the Napoleonic states the same course of events tended to repeat itself. First came the stage of military conquest and occupation by French troops. Then came the establishment of a native satellite government with the support of local persons who were willing to co-operate with the French. In some regions, like Spain and the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, no more than these two stages occurred. In other parts of Europe, large internal reforms were enforced, derived from the French Revolution. The Netherlands, and the German territories west of the Rhine underwent this process the most thoroughly, since they were annexed to France for twenty years. Italy and the other German parts west of Prussia and Austria also experienced reforms.

The reforms established legal equality of individual persons, and gave states more complete authority over their subjects. The medieval rivals and early modern partners of the state, the nobility, the church and the cities, now all became directly subject to the authority of the state. This effectively destroyed the basis for power-sharing and made the issue of representation a central object of political contention. The nobility lost its privileges in taxation, office-holding and military command. Moreover, legal jurisdiction of the aristocracy over their peasants was taken away. The political authority of the church alongside the state was at the same time attacked. Church courts were abolished or restricted. The state was to be based not on the idea of religious community but of territorial residence. Finally, the special rights of the towns and provinces in the various regions disappeared, and all came under general legislation. The age-old dependence of the state on these intermediaries ended when government officials directly received their salaries from the state. State bureaucracies could now systematically register property, which made the assessment of taxes more easy to co-ordinate. State were able to collect taxes directly, instead of farming them out. The spread of the French Revolution did not exclusively affect the political realm, certain basic measures were also taken to stimulate the development of capitalist society. Guilds were abolished or reduced to empty forms, and the individual right to work proclaimed, internal tariffs removed, and free trade encouraged. (Palmer & Colton 1992)

State transformation occurred rather differently in the capital-intensive regions. A strong central state could only be constructed at a very late stage in modern history, because political power resources were dispersed in the highly urbanised areas. The cities that took a central place in the European trade and financial network were powerful enough to resist the full incorporation in a large territorial state; they could simply buy the mercenary armies and advanced fortifications needed for their own protection. The diffusion of political power in the capital-intensive regions was a guarantee for the survival of power-sharing or at least for the independence of a city-state throughout the early modern period. The development of democracy did, however, remain highly complicated because the construction of a national state took place when politics had already become a mass affair. This was for instance the case in the German and Italian lands. The only instance in the capital-intensive trajectory in which both conditions for democracy were satisfied was the Netherlands. A national state was constructed in the northern part of the Low Countries before the era of mass politics as a result of the intervention by Napoleon.

Social scientists have always perceived the construction of the French state as the ideal typical case of state transformation. The French monarchy was able at a relatively early stage in modern history to consolidate a large territory. Moreover, France was during the nineteenth and twentieth century one of the most centralised states within Europe. However, the conceptualisation of France has undergone significant changes over the last two decades, since social scientists have discovered that European history is not characterised by one path of state transformation, but by a variety of trajectories. The formation of the French state is now understood as an approximation of one ideal type of state transformation, of which England, Spain, and Prussia are other examples.

The ideal image of France is further qualified by more detailed historical studies, which show that the region lacked a developed system of waterways and an inter-linked network of cities, which could for instance be found in the Low Countries. The economy before the eighteenth century resembled a variety of very small markets, each one primitive and isolated. The fragmentation of the kingdom marked the limits of royal political power, which could only be extended by great effort. The king, in order to win the support of the principal power actors within the realm, generously gave away privileges to the nobility and assigned monopolies to municipal guilds. Several state functions were farmed out because it was impossible to organise these tasks from the central level. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, judges and financial officials owned their own offices, which they could sell like private property. The crown's provincial military commanders also wielded considerable power over regional appointment. They could name army officers, and they often pursued their own interest independent of the king. (Hoffman 1994: 226-228)

Although the classical image of France must be modified, the centralisation of authority is still remarkable compared to other early modern states. The specific features of French state transformation must be analysed to understand the political regime changes that took place in the modern period. It has been demonstrated in the previous chapter that the capital that became available as a result of the movement of the Western European region to the core of the world economy allowed the French king to construct a large army. The army grew from 50.000 men during wartime in the sixteenth century up to 150.000 or more in 1630, and up to 400.000 during the reign of Louis XIV (Hoffman 1994). The army gave the monarch the opportunity to subjugate resistant nobles, centralise authority, and play a dominant role in European affairs. However, the French state was as a consequence of the constant state of warfare almost always on the brink of bankruptcy, which greatly complicated the task of extending the authority of the state. The financial difficulties of the crown did up to the seventeenth century work to the advantage of regional estates, which controlled the extraction of taxes. An effective Estates General did not develop up to the time of the Revolution of 1789. The regional estates ruled at the provincial level during the seventeenth and eighteenth century, and thus influenced central policy.

In the seventeenth century, the balance of power between the king and the provincial estates shifted in favour of the former. The crown had more agents to collect taxes and to enforce the royal will than it did in the sixteenth century. More importantly, it could distribute greater resources. All French kings wanted to play a principle role in European politics, and the revenue generated through the estates did not suffice to fully satisfy this ambition. The crown consequently used the expanding bureaucracy to subjugate the estates, which were no longer able to resist its attempts to extract more taxes and enlarge the army at will. Important instruments in the hands of the crown were the intendants. The intendants, which had revocable commissions, possessed extraordinary judicial and executive powers. (Hoffman 1994) Each intendant embodied within his district all aspects of royal government: supervising the flow of taxes, recruiting soldiers, keeping an eye on the local nobility, dealing with towns and guilds, stamping out bandits, smugglers and wolves, policing the marketplaces, watching the local law courts, and often deciding cases himself. (Palmer & Colton 1992) This practice was systematised in the seventeenth century; the intendants became especially effective during the reign of Louis XIV. However, despite the power of the intendants, the crown always had to seek the co-operation of local power holders. The crown depended on these alliances, it could not survive without the support of the great magnates, the good will of the courts or the credit of the financiers. (Hoffman 1994: 248-251) Even Louis XIV always remembered the deathbed advice by his tutor, Cardinal Mazarin, very well: 'The nobility is my right arm. I should support it and treat it with confidence and generosity in all respects'. (cited by Scott 1995: 39)

England and France have often been conceptualised as opposite cases of socio-political development. Whereas France is seen as the prime example of a state dominated society, England provides an example of a society dominating a state. The present analysis shows how the transformation of the state in the two regions led to such different outcomes.

The two areas were at the outset rather similar. A large coercion-intensive state was constructed at an early stage of modern history, and the movement of Western Europe to the core of the world economy subsequent turned both of them into capitalised-coercion states. It has been demonstrated in the previous section how the growth of the world economy gave the French king the opportunity to build a large army, centralise authority and destroy power-sharing. The outcome was an absolutist monarchy. The position at the core of the European economy worked out different in England. The English king could not centralise authority in his own hands like the French monarch, nor was he able to destroy power-sharing. Although the English crown came very close, the other power actors in the realm were powerful enough to resist royal ambitions.

Two principle factors account for the differences between the transformation of the French and English state. First, England unlike France was not directly threatened by continental warfare due to the geographical barrier posed by the Canal. The state only needed a navy to guarantee its own independence, and no great army was required to establish its dominance on the island itself. The English king could never justify the construction of a large army, and the other power actors were always suspicious of any attempts in this direction. In early modern times, the military strength of the nation depended primarily on the private armies of the great landlords, national militia and mercenaries who were paid by tax money. (Sacks 1994) In the absence of a powerful army, the crown lacked the instruments to centralise authority and destroy power-sharing. The second reason why France and England developed in different directions is the greater economic growth in the latter. Sufficient funds could always be extracted through the existing power-sharing institutions. In fact, Parliament granted taxes that were much higher than almost anywhere else in Europe.

The crucial period in the confrontation between the English state and Parliament lies in the seventeenth century, when absolutism was established in France. The king had up to this period always been forced to consult Parliament in order to extract more taxes or issue new laws. Taxation was only effective when the members of the Commons and the local assessors were persuaded of the need. The requesting and granting of consent to laws or taxes was less the striking of a bargain between competing parties or interests than the ritual recognition that a social and political bond held the governed and the governors together for common profit. (Sacks 1994: 47 - 57) In the late 1630's, the king and Parliament did come in conflict with each other. The immediate cause was the Scottish rebellion in Edinburgh against the attempts of the English king, Charles I, to impose the Anglican religion in Scotland. Charles convoked Parliament for the first time in eleven years in order to raise funds to put down the rebellion. However, Parliament proved hostile to the royal intentions. The English civil war followed and Charles was put to death on the scaffold in 1649. (Palmer & Colton 1992)

The death of Charles was not the end of the conflict between the king and Parliament, since royalty was restored in 1660 when Charles II, son of the dead king, became the new monarch. Charles II, who was personally inclined to Catholicism, admired the magnificent monarchy of Louis XIV. (Palmer & Colton 1992) In 1672, Charles II put a stop on the interest payments on debts and advances, which convinced most peers and MP's that the liberty of the nation, as well as the very existence of Parliament were directly threatened. More generally, the war of that year against the Dutch was seen as rather dubious, since it was being fought in alliance with Louis XIV, seen by the English as the model of absolutism. (Jones 1994: 72 -73) Although no new armed conflict developed, Parliament did try to exclude Charles' brother James from the throne. He was due to be the next king, since Charles had no children. James had publicly announced his conversion to Rome, which enraged the Anglican Church and the higher nobility. The aristocracy and the middle classes of London, which were most suspicious of Catholics and Frenchmen, received the nickname of Whigs. The supporters of the king and his brother were popularly called Tories. This group mainly consisted of the lesser aristocracy and gentry, they were especially suspicious of the moneyed interest in London. (Palmer & Colton 1992) James II became king in 1685, despite Whig hostility. He was able in 1686 - '88 to initiate and develop policies that could have made him absolute. The king tried to appeal to the interests of the bourgeoisie in London, the provincial towns, and the industrial villages, in order to free himself from the dependence on the landed nobility, gentry and the Anglican clergy. (Jones 1994) However, he antagonised all parties in the end by his absolutist tendencies. Both the Whigs and the Tories joined in resistance against James and offered the throne to Mary, the grown Protestant daughter of James, who was married to the Dutch prince William III. William and Mary invaded England in 1689 and king James II fled. (Palmer & Colton 1992)

The immediate outcome of the deposition of James and the substitution of William was preservation of power-sharing. A balanced constitution was created, based upon regular meetings of Parliament (Cannon 1995). The consent of Parliament became necessary for the maintenance of the army. The commons now exercised exclusive control over taxation, which is clearly visible in the financial settlement for William and Mary that followed the Revolution. The crown was not voted the customary revenue for life calculated to give the king or queen sufficient income to meet all the ordinary costs of government, including the maintenance of a navy. William and Mary instead received a civil income for life. The wars against Louis XIV that followed the accession of William III and the servicing of the debts incurred during them made the crown totally dependent on Parliament. The ultimate control of the army and navy, in peace and in wartime, had to be shared between the executive and the legislative. Each administration had to submit a detailed 'state' of the army and navy, itemising the number, size, and type of military units and ships for the nest campaign, with costs. (Jones 1994)

The aristocracy dominated parliament, which now effectively ruled Great Britain. The hundred years between the Glorious Revolution and the summons of the Estates-General in France in 1788 were the golden days of the English aristocracy; its supremacy was almost unchallenged. (Cannon 1995: 62) The landed aristocracy and the trading and financial bourgeoisie had during the seventeenth century still been politically divided, each suspicious of the other. However, the extreme capitalist growth at the end of the seventeenth century changed this. The British land-owning class started from this period onwards to diversify their sources of income into mining, real estate development, commercial stock and investment in government. (Jones 1994: 90) This fundamentally changed the character of power-sharing. Though the landed nobility continued to hold enormous power, commercial and business interests were neither excluded nor disregarded. Unlike for instance in Poland where the towns were not represented in the diet until the reforms of 1791, the English cities were present in Parliament. Bankers, brewers, merchants and industrialists took an increasing number of parliamentary seats, either sitting for their local boroughs or using their wealth to buy seats in boroughs which had escaped aristocratic control. (Cannon 1995: 70)

Spanish state transformation does not seem to agree with most historical sociological theories. There is no evolutionary development throughout early modern history towards an ever stronger state, like for instance in France, England, or Prussia; the state grew even weaker over long periods. Neither is it comparable to state transformation in the coercion-intensive regions of Central and Eastern Europe. In fact, the Spanish king was essentially independent from the other power actors in his realm during the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, when for example the Polish and Hungarian monarchy became elective. Both the independence of the crown and the weakness of the state, two seemingly contradictory developments, must be understood in the light of the extensive financial wealth experienced by the Iberian region in the early modern period.

For 150 years, from the early sixteenth to the middle of the seventeenth century, the king of Spain was the most powerful ruler in Europe. He ruled an enormous empire that not only comprised the whole Iberian peninsula, but also at its height the kingdoms of Naples, Sicily, the Holy Roman Empire, and large parts of the Americas. In the section on the development of capitalism, it has been demonstrated that the leadership of a world empire gave the Spanish crown a superior access to credit. The available capital gave the king the opportunity to construct an extremely large army, which was utilised to consolidate and enlarge the empire. It was the key to the survival of the Spanish empire during critical periods. However, the army could not be used to centralise authority within Spain, because it was constantly employed in warfare with other European states. Several Spanish kings tried to take the extraction of taxation into their own hands and limit the power of intermediaries, but they all failed. (Thompson 1994a)

During the sixteenth century, the cities of the Cortes successfully resisted the attempt of both Charles V and Philip II to centralise the collecting of tax. Similar efforts in the Low Countries, Portugal and the Spanish provinces in Italy also utterly failed. The northern Netherlands successfully revolted at the end of the sixteenth century and became an independent republic. Revolts also followed in the course of the next century in the other Spanish dependencies. The royal income could therefore not be directly tied to the growth of the economy within the empire. Spanish monarchs were alternatively forced to borrow on a massive scale on the international market, which had detrimental consequences for power-sharing and eventually led to the bankruptcy of the Spanish state. The king did not directly destroy power-sharing; he did not have the instruments to do so. Instead he simply ignored the Cortes; it was not summoned for long periods. (Thompson 1994a)

Spain is one of the classic examples of imperial over-stretch; the drain of capital halted economic growth, and the state eventually went bankrupt. The downfall of Spain went incredibly fast and was largely due to the geopolitical ambitions of Charles V and Philip II. They produced nothing of value to the region, and sucked most of the productive capital out of the economy. Road construction for example had been neglected and canals never undertaken, making the costs of internal transport extremely high. It was cheaper to transport goods to Seville from the Low Countries than from the Old Castile. The availability of credit had never forced the crown to stimulate its own economy. When loans were no longer available in the seventeenth century, after several defaults of payment and revolts in the dependencies scattered across the continent, Spain had to give up its imperial ambitions. The credit of the crown was de-internationalised; it now had to come from the Spanish economy itself. Since the state never succeeded in centralising authority, taxation became increasingly decentralised. Only by making the local authorities, the lords and the city oligarchies, the axis of royal fiscality, was the crown able to maintain its domestic expenditure. The result was that the local authorities gained the freedom to control and manipulate the local economy and revenues. Although the state became much more dependent on local intermediaries, this did not result in any lasting power-sharing institutions, because the state principally made individual compacts with cities and nobles. (Thompson 1994a; Scott 1995) As the ambassador of Lucca reported in 1674: 'The government has come to be and proceeds more in the manner of a republic than a monarchy' (Thompson 1994b: 217)

Only from the beginning of the eighteenth century onwards did authority become centralised during Bourbon absolutism, which lasted until the twentieth century. With no effective power-sharing tradition, the Bourbon monarchy did not find any major institutional obstacles on its way when it started to monopolise power in the course of the eighteenth century. The main consequence of the monopolisation of power by the crown was the loss of the autonomous position of the aristocracy. The policy of the Bourbons was not to undermine the aristocracy as an estate, but to break their autonomous political power. The aristocracy was brought under the control of the monarch by drawing it into the bureaucracy. The local administrative autonomy of the nobility was also challenged. The Province was developed as the key unit of fiscal administration. Taxes were unified and brought under the direct supervision of intendants. (Thompson 1995; Scott 1995) Instead of separate kingdoms obeying different laws, Spain became one entity in this period. The crown was able to impose direct taxation on the previously exempted aristocracy. (Smith 1991) In the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the aristocracy changed from señor, with private jurisdiction and administration, to landlords, with an interest in trade and production. (Thompson 1995; Scott 1995)

For most of early modern history, Prussia has been part of the Holy Roman Empire; the prince of Prussia was one of the electors of the Holy Roman Emperor. The Prussian prince, like the other territorial princes, grew ever more powerful and autonomous when the empire started to disintegrate. With the dissolution of Poland and the particularly powerful leadership in the central state, Prussia became together with Austria dominant in the German region. In the process, Prussia transformed from a coercion-intensive into a capitalised-coercion state. The leadership of the Hohenzollern monarchy has played an important role in this. It was able to break the autonomy of the aristocracy and integrate both the army and the apparatus for the extraction of taxation in the central state. In the course of the nineteenth century, the Prussian state was able to overpower Austria and create the first relatively centralised German empire.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Hohenzollern monarchy was still territorially fragmented. The geographical core, Brandenburg and Pomerania, formed a contiguous whole, but East-Prussia remained isolated until it was joined to West-Prussia, with the partitioning of Poland. Up to the nineteenth century, Prussia remained a melting pot of populations, languages, cultures and traditions joined under Hohenzollern rule. The Hohenzollerns expanded their territory by means of conquest and dynastic inheritances. At the same time, they were able to centralise authority in contrast to all other rulers in the coercion-intensive regions of Central and Eastern Europe. The Brandenburger nobility had dominated the Prussian state up to the mid-seventeenth century, when the Hohenzollern prince started to break their power. He did so by building up an aristocratic elite that originated largely from outside his own lands. The new elite, like the ruling family, was Calvinist, while the lesser nobility was predominantly Lutheran. The advantage of outsiders was that they were not involved in the local patronage networks, which meant that the prince could build up his own central patronage network. The indigenous aristocracy, the Junkers, were shut out from key positions in the Hohenzollern court, bureaucracy and diplomatic service. The aristocracy remained dominant at the local level. Although the absolutist Hohenzollern rulers were able to curtail the power of the aristocracy, they could never have governed without them. The Hohenzollern's bureaucracy, numbering only several hundred officials, was simply to small to rule the territories at the local or even provincial level. The Junkers continued to have full control over the rural population, like much of the Eastern European aristocracy. The triumph of Hohenzollern absolutism went hand-in-hand with an increase in the power of the nobility at the lower levels of government. (Melton 1995)

The driving force behind the centralisation of authority in the Prussian state was the army. The Prussian army was still quite small at the beginning of the eighteenth century. This changed under Frederick William I, a Hohenzollern prince who expanded the army from 40,000 men in 1713 to 83,000 men in 1740. The expansion of the army opened large career opportunities for the Junkers. Military service was a way of breaking the autonomy of the aristocracy and drawing them into the apparatus of the state. By 1800, nearly three quarters of the Brandenburg and Pomeranian Junkers were active or retired officers. The Prussian army expanded at this time to about 180,000 men. The extraordinary growth of the army was an important factor in the survival of Prussia in the harsh Seven Years War. The prestige of the officers corps was enormous at the time. Ernst Lehndorff wrote in 1776 about Count Dohna, the most prominent aristocrat in East Prussia, but no soldier, the following:

Dohna, who has an income of 15,000 talers from his estates, a lively wife, and nice children, would gladly give it all up just to be a colonel in the king's infantry. (Lehndorff 1921)

As Prussia triumphed in eighteenth century wars, the expanding military administration started to break down regional and local power-sharing arrangements. It literally swallowed regional estates and townships. Administrators were put into uniforms and given a formal rank, they were paid, appointed and dismissed by the monarch. A minister once commented:

'Prussia was not a country with an army, but an army with a country which served as headquarters and food magazine.' (Mann 1993: 449)

After the death in 1800 of Frederick the Great, the grandson of Frederick William I, the centralisation of authority stopped for a period. However, when the Prussian army was defeated in a single battle by Napoleon in 1806, it became clear that new reforms of the state were necessary. A greater part of the population needed to be mobilised in order to make the army more effective, and to stimulate the economy. Apart from the chaos and the terror, the French Revolution had demonstrated that a more powerful state could be built on the mobilisation of masses. Prussia responded to the French challenge by liberalising the restrictions on property. The bourgeoisie were allowed to buy land, which was previously reserved for the aristocracy. The army was also to a certain extent popularised, the middle classes could now serve as officers. In general, the reforms in Prussia somewhat reduced the power of the nobility and placed the mass of the population directly under the authority of the state, which created greater freedom of movement. Market relations replaced a system of relations of production based on political hierarchy. A large part of the peasants lost their status as serfs, and became hired agricultural labourers. (Palmer & Colton 1992)

Another important consequence of the Revolutionary period was the reorganisation of German lands by the territorial princes under the supervision of Napoleon; sixty per cent of the German population consequently changed rulers. Among the most durable political creations of the era were the so-called Mittelstaaten, the medium-size states in south-western Germany that Napoleon assembled from the scattered fragments of the old Empire. The destruction of many small states in the south and west of the German lands ruled out the option of the restoration of the Holy Roman Empire. Prussia and Austria, both anxious to check the power of the other, were compelled to work with the medium-size states Napoleon had created. The only workable form of co-operation in the region was the German Confederation established in 1814-15. Because of the Austrian-Prussian conflict the Confederation, which bound forty-one states together, could not accumulate much authority in the time of its existence. (Breuilly 1992a) Although some more centralised states were now constructed, the German lands as a whole were still characterised by fragmented sovereignty. This situation was the result of the failure of the Holy Roman Emperor to create a strong central state. The centralisation of authority had always been complicated by the particular combination of capital- and coercion-intensive areas within the Empire.

The creation of a national Prussian state which was the result of the reforms of the Napoleonic period and further military innovations, gave this state in the course of the nineteenth century the military advantage over Austria. The Habsburg Emperor could by contrast not implement direct rule throughout his realm. In the 1860's, the Hohenzollerns started to use military force to construct a national state in the German lands. Particularly Otto Von Bismarck, chief minister of the king, played a crucial role in this. Already in 1858 he declared that there was 'nothing more German than Prussian particularism properly understood' (Cited by Carr 1992: 97). In 1866, Bismarck persuaded the king to make a treaty with Italy and invade Austria, which was forced to fight a two front war. The Austrians defeated the Italians, but were devastated by the Prussian army, which was aided in its mobilisation by much better railways. The war was not exclusively fought against Austria but also against the Southern German states, which allied with Austria. After the victory over Austria, the Prussian army also defeated the other states. The result of the war was the annexation of Schleswick-Holstein, the kingdom of Hanover, and the free city of Frankfurt. The German federal union was dissolved. In its place, Bismarck organised in 1867 the North German Confederation, in which the enlarged Prussia joined with twenty-one other states, which it completely dominated. Austria, Bavaria, Baden, and Würtemberg were excluded from the confederation.

The geopolitical situation after the war of 1866 was far from stable. Particularly the French ruler Louis Napoleon was alarmed by the rise of Prussia. Bismarck used the hostilities demonstrated by France in the years after 1866 to win the support of the south German states. When Louis Napoleon declared war in 1870, the German states joined Prussia in the battle. The war was very short; it began on July 19 and on September 2 the principle French army surrendered to the Germans. The French army proved to be technically backward compared with the Prussians. After the successful war against France, the south German states were ready to accept the authority of the king of Prussia, who received the hereditary title of German emperor. On January 18, 1871, Bismarck proclaimed the German Empire.

The history and independence of the Dutch Republic from the late sixteenth century up to the end of the eighteenth century is a demonstration of the power of capitalist development. The Republic could be created as a result of the extensive wealth wielded by the trading cities in the region. They had enough money to construct sophisticated defences and an advanced fleet to resist Spanish attempts to centralise authority. The Revolt was a reversal of the general trend towards greater centralisation that could be observed throughout Europe. The Dutch cities constructed an extremely decentralised state, which for the two centuries of its existence was able to oppose occupation by larger states. Of course, the independence of the Republic cannot be fully attributed to commercial wealth, but must also be understood in the light of the tactics of the balance of power. Whenever a dominant state threatened to occupy the rich region, the other states started to obstruct these attempts in order to preserve the status quo.

In the late Middle Ages, the Low Countries were part of the Holy Roman empire. The cities of the region, which took an important place in the urban network that stretched all the way to the Mediterranean, could function largely autonomous from the empire up to the sixteenth century. The bureaucracy of the emperor was simply too small to exert much direct influence in the region. This changed in the sixteenth when the Spanish king Charles V was elected Holy Roman Emperor. The Spanish kings, Charles V and Philip II, tried to centralise authority in order to extract more taxes from the area for their wars. (Ridder 1996) This proved to be extremely hard to accomplish. The central state officials were not able to extract nearly as much tax as the intermediaries in the region itself. Since the Spanish crown was hard pressed, it proposed in 1542 that the provincial estates of the Low Countries should extract the necessary means in whatever way they thought appropriate. The agents of the emperor consequently became less influential, while the provincial receiver saw increasingly more money passed through his hands. In the end, this shift in the collection of taxes proved to be important, since it laid the foundations of the credit of the provincial estates. While the financial position of the central government in Brussels fell from bad to worse, the position of the estates of Holland slowly became better. (Veenendaal 1994)

The co-operation between the Dutch elite and the Spanish rulers came to an end in the 1560's, when the crown tried to gain more control over the spending and the quantity of the taxes extracted. During the mob revolt of the Calvinists in 1566 against the Spanish inquisition, the higher classes still sided with law and order. However, this changed when the duke of Alba started to demand higher taxes in order to suppress the revolt. Until this time, the estates had always been able in some measure to grant new taxes and to supervise the spending of the collected money. Now they were threatened to be pushed aside by the king and his governor-general, their interests were clearly going to be subordinated to the global interests of the Spanish Empire. (Veenendaal 1994) The northern provinces successfully revolted in the years to follow, and formed in 1579 in the Union of Utrecht the independent Dutch Republic. The southern provinces remained under Spanish rule. The general trend in Europe towards greater centralisation of authority was reversed in the northern Netherlands because of the Revolt.

The Dutch Republic was a very small-decentralised state. The stadholder became the highest central state official, but he had limited powers. The main power source of the stadholders was the traditional office of admiral-general of all the armed forces. Though the stadholder controlled the armed forces, the cities assembled in the Estates General held absolute control over the extraction of revenue for the maintenance of the army and navy. The Estates General, meeting in The Hague since 1588, can be characterised as a congress of delegates from the seven allied provinces. It was not a legislative and executive body like the English Parliament. The real power was situated in the regional estates that ruled on a day to day basis; they extracted taxes, organised justice and together elected the stadholder. The rights of all the provinces were well protected. No one had the authority to decide for the others what matters were to be discussed. The chairmanship of the Estates General rotated among the seven provinces. Furthermore, there was a stipulation in the Union of Utrecht that said that no province could tax the residents of other provinces more heavily than it taxed its own. The Council of State, the chief executive organ under the Estates General, issued each year a general petition in which the provincial estates were requested to pay their share of the total budget. Every province was free to choose its own method of taxation. The money that was collected went straight to the paymasters of the troops that were assigned to the province, bypassing the receiver general of the Council of State, who had little actual money flowing through his hands. (Stuurman 1992; 't Hart 1993; Deursen 1993; Veenendaal 1994) The co-operation in the Dutch Republic between the almost autonomous trading cities is one of the most extreme examples of power-sharing in European history.

The city oligarchies in the western part and the aristocracy in the rest of the area dominated power-sharing in the Dutch Republic. The trading cities won a lot of power after the revolt against the Spanish. In the regional estates of Holland, which was by far the most powerful province, the cities even held eighteen seats against one of the aristocracy. The central position of the cities alongside the aristocracy in the government of the Republic is based on their dominance in the estates of Holland, which generated up to 70 percent of the total tax revenue of the state. The power of the cities was particularly beneficial for the regents, who governed the cities. (Stuurman 1992; 't Hart 1993; Deursen 1993) In the early years after the revolt, the class of regents was still open to newcomers, but in time it grew increasingly exclusive. Nowhere in Europe could such a collective social dictatorship be seen, which was at the same time hostile to dynasticism and autocracy. (Veenendaal 1994) Although power-sharing was restricted to a small elite of regents and nobles, there was no fundamental obstacle for the transformation to representation. The political power of both the regents and the aristocracy was primarily based on wealth instead of status and repression like in Eastern Europe.

Democracy became a central issue of political contention at the end of the eighteenth century when the French occupied the region and created a centralised state. Until this time, there were no internal indications that the decentralised state would be transformed into a national state. Even the last stadholder, William V, was a supporter of the sovereignty of the provincial estates. (Geyl 1975). In the context of European state development, the occupation and transformation of the Dutch state was not at all a surprise. The Republic was already long before the end of the eighteenth century unable to compete in warfare with the other large European states. The difficulties of maintaining a large fleet had forced the Dutch to withdraw from international affairs in the eighteenth century. (Veenendaal 1994)

The great trading cities of the Italian peninsula are the prime example of capital-intensive states that were able to resist the construction of a large territorial state within their realm, until very late in modern history. Local autonomy and fragmented sovereignty persisted in Italy until the nineteenth century. Some Italian cities did eventually lose their political independence because of the evolution of warfare and the movement of the region to the periphery of the European economy, but the dominance of foreign states was neither constant nor complete. The Duchy of Milan was the only city that was continuously subject to foreign rule; from 1535 to 1796, it was part of the Spanish empire. Most other cities were only occupied for part of the period up to the nineteenth century. The Venetian Republic even remained independent until 1795. The consequence of the instability and fragmentation of authority was that no national Italian state was developed before the era of mass politics and neither a central power-sharing tradition. Representation thus had to be constructed from scratch, and the state elite obtained a lot of autonomy. Both factors made the development of democracy extremely difficult.

The financial strength of the Italian city-states, which guaranteed their political independence far into modern history, was a remainder of the core position of the cities in world-economy of the late Middle Ages. Particularly Venice played a central role. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Venetians started to dominate the land-based trade of the Eastern Mediterranean by monopolising the transport of goods within the region. (Smith 1991) Although the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope by the Portuguese posed a challenge to Venice, it was able to make a remarkable adjustment. However, the return to prosperity was short lived. Venice was soon faced with competition from other Italian cities. Moreover the Dutch and English were, in contrast with the Portuguese before them, successful in monopolising the spice trade with the Far East. (Smith 1991) Gradually the entrepôt function of Venice for silk, dyes, cotton, and African gold decayed. Monopolised markets became limited to northern Italy and southern Germany. (Kindleberger 1996)

The rise of Genoa took place somewhat later than that of Venice, and was largely connected to the construction of the Spanish World Empire. The Genoese were especially important as the bankers of the Habsburgs, after the exhaustion of the German Fuggers. The involvement of Genoa with Spain began with Italian ships sailing to England and Flanders, stopping off en route at Barcelona, Sevilla, and Lisbon. The subsequent trade crisis in Genoa came from the loss of its intermediary function between the Mediterranean and the west. In the seventeenth century, ships of Britain, Holland, and France sailed directly to Sicily, Naples and Sardinia with goods that used to be distributed from Genoa. (Kindleberger 1996: 61-62) The decline in the trade of the Mediterranean city-states eventually lead to a movement of the Italian elite away from trade and manufacturing towards the purchase and exploitation of landed estates. (Donati 1996)

Besides the loss of trade to North Western Europe, the development of the Italian city-states was particularly halted by the military involvement of France, Spain and Austria in the region. When the armies of the large monarchical states grew and weapon technology became more advanced, the Italian cities found it ever more difficult to resist the geopolitical pressure exercised by kings and emperors. Fortifications, like for instance the trace italienne, became more expensive and mercenary militias were no match for the mass armies of the territorial states. Although many individual Italian cities lost their political independence at a certain point in modern history, no foreign state was ever able to dominate the whole peninsula. The Spanish Monarchy came very close, until the end of the seventeenth century it directly or indirectly controlled a large part of the main land and the adjacent islands. Spain's own possessions covered almost half of the Italian territories. The rulers of Savoy and Tuscany owed their titles to the Spanish king, and the Italian nobility, with the exception of the Venetian patriciate, derived from Spain the hierarchical system on which the noble class was built. After the War of the Spanish Succession around 1700, Spain's influence was eclipsed by that of France and Austria. (Donati 1996)

Although most of Italy was for over three centuries dominated by foreign states, the traditional elite and the power-sharing arrangements did remain largely in place, because it was simply impossible for an outside state to rule without them. More fundamental territorial and institutional changes occurred when the French revolutionary armies occupied the region at the end of the eighteenth century. The Napoleonic regime, which lasted from 1796 to 1814, broke the habit of loyalty to the large variety of states by which Italy had always been ruled. Napoleon never completely unified Italy, but he assembled it into three large parts, which made the unification of Italy a reasonable option. (Palmer & Colton 1992) Other important changes were the abolishment of corporations, and the creation of a large custom free market in Northern Italy. (Poni & Mori 1996)

After the territorial alterations brought about by Napoleon, the Congress of Vienna again reorganised the states in the realm. In the situation, the north-west was occupied by the kingdom of Piedmont, ruled by the only native Italian dynasty. Venice and Lombardy were since 1814 occupied by the Austrian empire, while the kingdom of Naples, which comprised half of Italy, was since 1735 ruled by a branch of the French Bourbons. Spread across the middle of the peninsula were the Papal States, belonging to the international Roman Catholic Church. The rulers of the various Italian states were generally content with the fragmentation of sovereignty, which gave them their independence. However, various popular nationalist movements were pushing for a liberal national state. Nationalism had become heated at the time of the French Revolution and the occupation of Italy by Napoleon. It was further advanced by the writings of the nationalist philosopher Mazzini.

Although nationalist feelings were rising, the unification of Italy still had to be achieved. The kingdom of Piedmont, which since 1848 was ruled as a constitutional monarchy by king Victor Emmanuel, took the first important steps in this direction. Particularly the prime minister of the Piedmontese government, Camillo di Cavour, played a central role in the process of state transformation. Like Bismarck in Germany, Cavour was faced with the influence of the Austrian Habsburg Empire, which formed a major obstacle for unification. The Austrians had to be expelled from Venice and Lombardy before a national state could be constructed. The main problem of Cavour was that neither Piedmont nor any other Italian state at the time had the resources to accomplish this task. He solved this problem by provoking war with Austria, after assuring himself of French military support. It had not been difficult to win the support of the French ruler, Louis Napoleon, who saw himself as a fighter for modernity against reactionary traditional regimes, like that of the Austrian Habsburgs. The national unification of the Italians was in the mind Louis Napoleon a liberal modern cause.

In contrast to the monarchies of Western Europe, authority could not be centralised in the early modern states of Eastern Europe. A major factor in the sustained weakness of the states in Eastern Europe is the movement of parts of this region to the periphery of the world economy. Capitalist development in early modern times did not favour the construction of a strong central state, but enhanced the powers of the aristocracy. The result was that the king and the nobility in Eastern Europe continued to be rivals. The aristocracy could in many states function almost autonomously, since kings were unable to construct massive armies or monopolise violence. Medieval power-sharing was consequently preserved, but the survival of the state itself became problematic.

One of the most striking characteristics of Polish state formation is the absence of a truly Polish state in the nineteenth and the beginning. The disappearance of Poland because of the military occupation by Prussia, Russia, and Austria in the course of the eighteenth century did not come as a surprise. The Polish state was extremely weak at the time, it was unable to prevent the country from falling into anarchy. The weakness of central authority in the Polish lands has a long history. At the end of the Middle Ages, the king and the aristocracy still held each other in a balance of power, like they did in all of the larger territorial states throughout Europe. This changed in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth century when major parts of Poland were incorporated in the periphery of the expanding world-economy. The result of this development was that the aristocracy became the dominant force in the region. The aristocracy grew richer through the trade in primary goods with Western Europe. The king was unable to profit from the growth in trade, because the aristocracy was largely exempted from taxation. The king could consequently not create an extensive army and centralise authority like his Western European colleagues. In fact, he became increasingly subordinated to parliament.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Polish king was still able to ignore parliament, the Sejm, and the privileges of the aristocracy. This changed in 1572, when king Sigismund Augustus died without leaving a successor. The aristocracy could finally put an end to the absolutist tendencies of the Polish monarchs. It was demanded in the Sejm of 1573 that all the fundamental laws of the kingdom should be written down and submitted to the newly elected monarch. The violation by the king of this principle, which remained in force until the fall of the Polish kingdom at the end of the eighteenth century, authorised disobedience in his subjects. (Uruszczak 1997)

The Sejm that now effectively ruled the state, largely consisted of members of the aristocracy. Cracow, the Polish capital, was the only town that had a deputy in the Sejm. (Bulst 1996: 49 - 50) The king did not stand above parliament, like in the Western European monarchies, but he was one of its estates. Besides his position in effectively the Sejm, the king had hardly any power resources of his own. He had practically no army, no law court, no officials, and no income. The aristocracy could rule their own territories virtually autonomously from parliament. They were largely exempted from taxation, and the armed force was in the hands of a few aristocratic leaders, who also conducted their own foreign policies. The landlords became local monarchs on their manorial estates, and the mass of the population fell into deeper serfdom. (Palmer & Colton 1992: 218-219)

Although the aristocracy ruled the Polish state throughout the early modern period, they were by no means a uniform group. No stable elite could be constructed in the absence of a strong central state. Political success depended more on conflict than on co-operation. No one faction, or coalition of factions, was able to control central politics over longer periods. Although some kings could manoeuvre among the great noble factions, using their control of patronage, they never broke free of reliance upon them. The support of one faction for the king always led to the alienation of its rivals. An additional factor that further complicated the centralisation of authority was the involvement of foreign rulers in Polish politics. Nobles many times asked for foreign support in their struggle with the crown. The result was an anarchic stalemate, the international position of the Commonwealth was ruined, the political system paralysed and its economy wrecked. (Frost 1995)

Particularly the Polish royal elections in the eighteenth century were the subject of international interference. The election of 1733 for instance brought about a European war known as the War of the Polish Succession. Especially Russia was able to exert its influence over the realm in the course of the century. However, both Prussia and Austria feared a disruption of the balance of power in central Europe, and also intervened. The struggles over the dominance of the region finally lead to the partitioning of the Polish-Lithuanian state. By the first partition, in 1772, its outer territories were cut away. Russia took an eastern slice, around the city of Vitebsk, while Austria obtained Galicia. West-Prussia was finally joined with Brandenburg-Pomeria and East-Prussia in one continuous solid block, that reached from the Elbe to the borders of Lithuania. In 1794-95 both the Russian and Prussian armies finally invaded Poland, and divided what remained of the country between themselves and Austria. Poland as a political entity ceased to exist. (Palmer & Colton 1992)

What is especially striking about the partitioning of Poland was that the balance of power, which had historically been invoked to preserve the independence of European states, was now used to destroy the independence of a ancient kingdom. The repression of Polish resistance against foreign rule led to the creation of nationalist movements in the region, which is the first example of modern revolutionary nationalism in Europe. The independence of Poland became in this period a much-favoured cause in Western Europe. On of the people who took up the Polish cause was Napoleon. He created as a strategic move against Russia, Prussia, and Austria the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. He told the Poles that they might win a restored and united Poland if they would fight in his cause. Napoleon thus positively encouraged nationalist feelings among the Poles, who mourned when he was defeated. (Palmer & Colton 1992)

The Holy Roman Empire is the only extensive empire that existed in Europe over several centuries after the dissolution of the Roman Empire. When the Spanish kingdom and the Holy Roman Empire were combined during the rule of Charles V, the Empire occupied almost half of the continent. Although the Holy Roman Emperors, who were always members of the Habsburg family, were certainly among the most powerful rulers of Europe, they were never able to create a powerful central state. The Empire always remained a coercion intensive state with a small bureaucracy that heavily depended on the willingness of intermediaries to co-operate. Since the Empire, which consisted of both capital- and coercion-intensive regions, was so large a whole range of intermediaries were involved in government. The Holy Roman Emperor not only had to make deals with the aristocracy, like the Polish king, but also with city governments, bishops, princes and even a king. The emperor had never been able to dominate all of these intermediaries at the same time. Already from the Middle Ages, had his position been elective, which was in itself an obstacle for the centralisation of authority. Eventually the autonomy of the intermediaries vis-à-vis the emperor grew even larger. The consequence of this development was that smaller more centralised princely states could be created within the Holy Roman Empire.

The rise of the princely states coincided with Reformation, which play an important role in the emancipation of the princes from the emperor. The Protestant princes used the Reformation to gain more authority over their territories. However, the growing power of the princes not only affected the Emperor, but also directly threatened the autonomy of the cities. The princes no longer considered the towns as equals in social status. Before 1500 the free cities had been exempt from taxation, but now they were heavily taxed. The position of the cities was further weakened during The Thirty Years' War, which led to the dissolution of the Empire in politics and international law. (Moraw 1994) Particularly the German princely states became virtually sovereign. Each received the right to make treaties with foreign powers. No laws could be made, no soldiers recruited, no wars declared except with the consent of the imperial estates, made up of three hundred princes, ecclesiastics, and free cities. (Palmer & Colton 1992: 142-149)

The main reason why the Empire never grew into a centralised state was probably that it was too big. A territory as large as the Holy Roman Empire could not be ruled from a central level given the technology of the time. The unity of the empire was always threatened by strong centrifugal forces. Whenever an attempt was made to centralise authority the intermediaries revolted, which immediately endangered the existence of the empire because the emperor lacked the instruments to suppress his powerful subjects. This became very clear when the Catholic Habsburg Emperor and the Protestant princes clashed at the time of the Reformation.

The inability of the Holy Roman Emperor to create a large army and an extensive bureaucratic machine to rule his territory more directly had the same background as in all of the coercion intensive states. Central and Eastern European rulers simply lacked financial resources. Unlike their Western European colleagues they did not have access to favourable loans by independent bankers nor did they have a tax base that was sufficiently monetarised. Labour repressive agriculture remained the main productive activity in the empire until very late in modern history. It was only in the course of the nineteenth century that labour became regulated by the market. The consequence was that not enough taxes could be squeezed out of the peasantry to build up a large state. Neither was it possible to obtain the necessary capital from the land-based aristocracy, because they were largely exempted from taxation. Finally, the imperial cities that were the main source of revenue for the emperor lost their central position in the European trade network due to the many wars in the empire and the diminishing importance of land based trade routes from the Mediterranean.

As the princely states of which Prussia was the most important gained more power the Holy Roman Emperor was forced back to Austria, the core region of the Empire. It was from the Austrian base that the eighteenth century Habsburg rulers tried to save the Holy Roman Empire from its final breakdown. One of them was Maria Theresa (1740-1780). At the time of her accession she was immediately confronted by the attempts of the surrounding powers to dismember the Holy Roman Empire. This resulted in the War of the Austrian succession (1740-1748). As a response to the foreign thread, she reformed the imperial bureaucracy. The Austrian army was professionalised and subordinated to the monarchy. Most high royal officials became salaried, and their pensions were converted into a single pension fund, earlier than elsewhere. Most central state departments, especially the treasury and the core ministries, became bureaucratically organised. Although the efforts of Maria Theresa did have some notable results, the bureaucratisation of the Habsburg Empire had clear limits. It characterised only central government in Vienna. The estates of Austria, Bohemia, and Hungary kept on electing the regional and local administration that effective ruled the empire. Both Maria Theresa and her son, Joseph II, struggled against regionalism, but they were not able to break it. Nobles repeatedly rebelled against the centralisation of authority. (Mann 1993) Often they negotiated with Prussia when Joseph pushed them too far, something that also happened in eighteenth century Poland.

The nobility was throughout the empire able to defend and assert their political interests via their membership of territorial estates. The power of the estates lay in their control over direct taxation. All tax levies by the crown required the approval of the Estates, who in turn supervised their imposition and collection. The diets of the Estates convened regularly to discuss a broad range of matters concerning not only taxation, but also military recruitment, confessional issues, and requests for ennoblement. Because of their fiscal and administrative responsibilities, the Estates had by the eighteenth century developed an exclusive governmental apparatus of their own, paralleling that of the crown. This dual structure remained intact well into the reign of Maria Theresa and did much to preserve the power and influence of the nobility at the territorial level16. (Van Horn Melton 1995)

The central bureaucratic reforms of the Habsburg emperors did to a certain extend reduce the powers of the aristocracy. Nevertheless, as far as the peasantry was concerned the dominant political force even in the nineteenth century remained the nobility and not the Crown. The Lower Austrian peasant leader, Hans Kudlich, noted in his autobiography of 1873:

To the peasant, the State was something as distant and alien as the sense of belonging to a nation. His thoughts and sensibilities were limited to the authority of his immediate lord... Only through the payment of taxes and the army did he have contact with the State. (Cited by Van Horn Melton 1995: 126)

Just as the growth of absolutism entailed an expanded bureaucracy, so did the Austro-Bohemian lords develop a more elaborate administrative apparatus for managing their estates. The aristocracy exercised lordship over large numbers of villages, they delegated judicial authority, appointed priests and schoolmasters, and in general they policed the peasant population. (Van Horn Melton 1995)

The consequence of the weakness of the central state in the Habsburg Empire and the persisting strength of regional autonomy was that power-sharing was preserved. Throughout the nineteenth century, the nobility of the empire could continue to exert its influence through the regional and imperial estates. The Habsburg rulers encountered slogans of 'no taxation without representation' among reactionary nobles dominating the backward provinces and the noble-bourgeois alliances in the advanced areas (Mann 1993: 337). Although the aristocracy used this slogan that was borrowed from the democratic discourse it was by no means interested in a representative system in the modern sense of the word. They simply wanted to hold on to their power by means of the traditional power-sharing institutions. The labour repressive landlords were in fact one of the greatest obstacles for the development of effective representative systems in the region. They ruled autonomously in their territories, wielding paramilitary forces that were both used against the peasantry and Habsburg rulers, who were constantly confronted with virtual civil wars. In order to extract taxes they had to concede particularistic rights to the nobility. (Mann 1993)

This chapter shows how the absence or presence of a national state before the era of national politics and the survival or breakdown of power-sharing influenced the actual development of political regimes in the different European states of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. It is argued that these two conditions greatly affected the specific national types of interaction between the state, the traditional elite, and the new political actors. The interaction between the state elite and the principle political actors in turn determined the chances of liberal democracy.

The previous chapters have demonstrated that the French and the Industrial Revolution initiated the political mobilisation of the masses in Europe. The French Revolution was the final step in the formation of the national state, which was a process that already started at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Only because kings and princes throughout Europe had for centuries struggled to centralised authority in their own hands, did the French Revolution have such an enormous impact. The revolutionaries and particularly Napoleon did introduce some important innovations in state building, but their measures only had a nation wide impact because a centralise state was already present in France. Such an innovative revolution could never have started in a capital-intensive state like the Republic or a coercion-intensive state like Poland. However, soon after the formation of a national state was completed in France were its principles exported to the other European states or copied by them. Authority was thus centralised throughout the continent. States now directly affected the local level, since government officials replaced the old intermediaries. The traditional channels political of patronage were consequently destroyed and people were forced to demand the right to be represented on a national level. Representative democracy became a central issue of political contention from the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards.

The implementation of direct rule as described above was further enhanced by the technical innovations of the Industrial Revolution. The introduction of railways and modern communication technologies not only created national economies, but also facilitated the construction of national political arenas. Furthermore, the concentration of production in urban areas drew the mass of the population out of the direct sphere of influence of the aristocracy and made independent political organisation possible.

The French and Industrial Revolution were not only important on an institutional level, but also had a great ideological impact. The two revolutions gave rise to the most important political movements of nineteenth century Europe: liberalism, nationalism, conservatism and socialism. Religious political movements, which obviously also played an important role in certain European states, were usually created in reaction to political mobilisation of the masses by these movements. Although the same ideological movements can be found throughout Europe, the political mobilisation of a population never occurred in the same way. In each country the various ideologies had a slightly different meaning and impact. The nature of political mass mobilisation was extremely important because it determined the chances of democracy. This chapter will demonstrate how the character of political mass mobilisation was in turn influenced by the presence or absence of the two identified conditions of democracy. The construction of a national state before or after the era of national politics and the survival or destruction of power-sharing set the institutional framework in which politics were made.

Based on the two conditions of democracy, four general types of political development will be distinguished in the various European regions. The conservative, the revolutionary, the reactionary, and the nationalist path of political regime transformation are subsequently analysed. A gradual conservative change towards representation took place, when both power-sharing was preserved and a national state constructed before representation became a central issue of political contention. This path of development is called conservative, because the traditional elite was able to both control the construction of a national state and the political mobilisation of masses. The two examples of this trajectory, which are discussed here, are Great Britain and the Netherlands. The principles of co-operation and negotiations that functioned in these regions from the late Middle Ages onwards were transplanted during the nineteenth century to the modern national political arena. Liberalism became in this process the ideological force through which the traditional elite slowly integrated other social groups in the existing political community.

The revolutionary trajectory of development occurred when a national state had been created before the era of mass politics, but the power-sharing tradition was destroyed. New political groups were in that situation forced to wrestle representation directly from the state through revolution. The state elite was unable to slowly integrate new groups in the political community, because the institutional arrangements to do this were absent. The transition to democracy was in this trajectory always complicated, even when a revolution was successful. Political reformers often found it extremely difficult to re-establish order after they had overthrown the previous authoritarian regime. It proved to be even more difficult to implement in that situation the rules of the democratic political game, because there was no tradition of power-sharing and co-operation on which could be built. The two principle examples of this path of political development are France and Spain, they were during the nineteenth century characterised by revolution and counterrevolution.

When both conditions of democracy were absent, like in nineteenth century Germany and Italy, the result was a reactionary political development. The state elite obtained in the process of state transformation such autonomy opposite the other power actors that it could resist their attempts to establish greater representation. The elite reached an extremely autonomous position, because a large part of the traditional local and regional elite was left out of the national political game. Moreover, the formation of mass movements was complicated by the question of the legitimacy of the new state. Finally, since there was no national tradition of power-sharing the political actors found it hard to co-operate with each other in the quest for greater representation. The result was that authoritarianism persisted into the twentieth century, and that no strong parliamentary tradition could be established.

The analysis in the previous chapters has shown that both power-sharing survived and a national state was constructed before representation became a central political issue. Well into the nineteenth century, power-sharing arrangements kept on functioning in Great Britain. Of course there were groups that argued for the transformation to representation, but the traditional system of intermediaries remained effective until the industrial revolution dramatically changed the social fabric of British society. Serious pressures for the political inclusion of larger parts of the population developed in the new industrial towns, which were outside the traditional system of power-sharing. It is in these places that the aristocracy lost its legitimacy as intermediary between the state and the general population. However, the British state was never seriously threatened by revolution, like for instance the French or Spanish state, because power-sharing kept on functioning perfectly well throughout most of the realm. Protests always stayed local. What is interesting is that politics in Great Britain as a result of the survival of power-sharing and in the absence of social revolution always remained conservative in both an ideological sense and in terms of the pace of the actual changes taking place. This is why the French and not the British produced the universal idiom of democracy. Since there was no fundamental widespread disagreement on the rules of the political game, change was gradual and not revolutionary. Political rhetoric was as a consequence moderate and strategic. Although the state itself was not threatened the mounting social pressures in the Chartist period did necessitate the transformation from power-sharing to representation.

The 'Glorious Revolution' had firmly established a constitutional monarchy in which the authority to make policy rested on the consent of Parliament. It legitimated tax increases, investigated corrupt government officials and debated the management procedures of public departments as well as the swelling stream of petitions submitted to it by citizens. In practice the House of Commons represented the national interests, but was throughout the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth dominated by the aristocracy. The aristocracy and the great merchants controlled Parliament through various devices, such as patronage or the giving of government jobs or having infrequent general elections. The distribution of seats in the Commons bore no relationship to the number of inhabitants in the different parts of England. A town having the right to send members of Parliament was called a 'borough', but no new borough was created until 1832. Localities that had been important in the medieval or Tudor period were represented, but no towns that had recently become big, such as Manchester and Birmingham. (Deane 1996)

At the end of the eighteenth century a parliamentary reform movement started in Great Britain. One of the main figures of this movement was John Wilkes. He had attacked the policies of king George III, and had been expelled from the House of Commons that was dominated by the king's supporters. Wilkes became a hero and was three times re-elected to the House, which refused to seat him. His followers in 1769 founded the 'Supporters of the Bill of Rights', the first organisation dedicated to parliamentary reform. Wilkes himself, in 1776, introduced the first of many reform bills of which none passed over half a century. Other important figures in the reform movement were Major John Cartwright, Richard Price and Joseph Priestley. Cartwright, who has been called the 'father of reform', begun a long series of Pamphlets on the subject of reform. Price denounced in 1776 the fact that only 5723 persons chose half of the members of the House of Commons. Although ineffectual, the reform movement remained strong. Even William Pitt, as Prime minister in the 1780's, gave it his support. At the time of the French Revolution it spread to more popular levels. Men of the skilled artisan class were aroused by both the rhetoric of the American Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution. They demanded a 'more adequate 'representation of the people' in England. (Palmer & Colton: 342-349) Although the French Revolution gave the English working classes the rhetoric of democracy in the end it mainly did some service to the traditional political elite. It brought patriotism to the rescue of the nobility by identifying egalitarianism with the national enemy. The monarchy and the nobility found refreshed roles as leaders of the nation in its desperate struggle. (Cannon 1995)

It would take until 1832 before the first Reform Bill was accepted by the House of Commons. They did so only after years of popular pressure. The king and Parliament finally gave in, when riots in London, and some other large towns in favour of the Reform Bill were threatening to get out of hand. The Reform Bill of 1832, although very important, was not a revolution. The most important thing about the Reform bill was not the increase in the size of the electorate, which only grew from about 500,000 to 813,000, but the reallocation of seats in the House of Commons. A large number of the smallest old boroughs were abolished, and the seats that thus became available were given to the new industrial towns. This change meant that the aristocracy lost an important part of its traditional strongholds, and that the industrial bourgeoisie could now start to take part in national politics.

The parliamentary system of Great Britain was still far removed from full-scale representative democracy, but the Reform Bill of 1832 was the first step on the way of further reform. The incorporation of the industrial bourgeoisie in Parliament opened the way for the political integration of larger parts of the population. After the Reform Bill of 1832, two parties were created, the Liberals and the Conservatives, which alternately dominated parliament. The competition between the two parties eventually led the incorporation of other social groups in the political system. For instance in the 1870's, pacts were made between the Liberal party and the most important working class organisations to press for further extension of the suffrage. This proved to be the first step towards the lib-lab alliance that dominated labour politics up to 1914. The opportunity given to working class men to participate in the existing political system has surely been a major factor in the absence of direct class-based politics in late nineteenth century Britain. It is important to see that the stability of the British parliamentary system and the basic agreement about the rules of the political game made it possible to make alliances that stretched across social and ideological boundaries. Political compromises could be made, because there was confidence that a concession made today would be paid back tomorrow in order to maintain effective political coalitions. (Breuilly 1992: 228-295)

The establishment of representative democracy in the Netherlands did resemble in certain essential aspects that of Great Britain. Both regions had a long unbroken tradition of power-sharing that dates back to the late Middle Ages. The formation of a national state had not destroyed the medieval courts and assemblies, as it did in other parts of Europe. Although, fragmented sovereignty persisted much longer in the Low Countries than it did in England, a national state had been constructed in the Netherlands when it entered the era of mass politics. Since both conditions of democracy were satisfied at the beginning of the nineteenth century, power-sharing could gradually be transformed into representation. The political development was consequently conservative. The traditional political elite was able to control national politics until the end of the nineteenth century.

The construction of a national state at the end of the eighteenth century during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic period, made representative democracy in the Northern part of the Low Countries an option. A higher authoritative order in which people could be represented was created through the centralisation of authority. The first steps in this process were taken by the Batavian revolutionaries, who had assisted the French in the invasion of 1795. They were given a great deal of autonomy to create a new political order. One of the first accomplishments of the Batavians was the construction of a national parliament. It was in this institutional framework that it became possible to speak in practical terms about a new national constitution and the development of representative democracy. In 1798, the radical democratic Batavian reformers established a democratic centralised constitution. The constitution put an end to the local autonomy of the Republic. The Batavian revolution meant a genuine break-through, but like anywhere else, it proved to be hard to consolidate a democratic regime in a radically new political situation. A further problem was that most people did not consider the democratic reforms as a national revolution, but as a foreign intervention.

After several years of instability and coups d'état, a partial restoration took place in 1801 that was inspired by Napoleon who was now in control of the French state. In the restoration of 1801, the power of many of the old regents and aristocrats was restored. It proved to be difficult to rule without them in the absence of a developed national state. The actual centralisation of authority, which created the basis for a national state, took place in the years that followed the restoration. From 1801 until their defeat in 1813, the French carried through many institutional reforms that transformed the fragmented sovereignty of the Republic into a more centralised state. (Roegiers, Van Sas 1993: 219-230) This process was continued by King William I of Orange, who became the constitutional monarch of the Netherlands after Napoleon was defeated in 1813.

The centralisation of authority by the French and the king made the question of representation and the accountability of government an ever more pressing issue. However, the king and the conservative majority in parliament resisted any constitutional change. (Blom 1993: 308-314) It was only in 1848 when revolution broke out in Europe that king William II, who succeeded his father in 1840, allowed for constitutional reform. Although there was hardly any revolutionary threat or activity in the Netherlands, the foreign examples were sufficient to change the king in 'one night from a conservative into a liberal' (William II cited by Blom 1993: 312). The result of this change was a new liberal constitution that determined Dutch politics for the next century. The constitution of 1848 meant a shift of authority from the king to parliament, and a small extension of the suffrage. About 10 percent of the male adult population could now take part in the elections for parliament. (Blom 1993: 308-314)

The reforms of 1848 ended the political monopoly of the traditional political elite and limited the powers of the monarchy. It was the last act in a long series of institutional changes that transformed the decentralised Republic into a national state with a sovereign parliament. Although the Dutch political system after 1848 was still elitist in a social sense, it was no longer particularistic. The small social basis of the political elite could be broadened by an extension of the suffrage, without changing the basic rules of the political game. (Stuurman 1992: 361-367)

A central characteristic of the Dutch transformation from fragmented sovereignty to the national state was the gradual and relatively peaceful manner in which the process took place. A slow and conservative political development was possible in the Netherlands, because the medieval tradition of power-sharing between the major cities and the aristocracy had survived in the region. The traditional political elite had been involved in almost every step in the construction of the national state. Only in the first years of the French occupation had they been excluded from the political community. However, in 1801 they regained their central position in Dutch government. The survival of power-sharing was important, because it set limits to the autonomous power of the central ruler. Furthermore, new groups could be gradually integrated in the political community, which is what happened in 1848, 1887, and 1896. Finally, in 1917 universal male suffrage was established.

The discussion of French state transformation in the previous chapter has demonstrated that medieval power-sharing was destroyed, but that a national state was constructed before the era of mass politics. The construction of a centralised state meant that representative democracy had become a realistic option. However, since no effective power-sharing institutions were present, representation had to be directly wrestled from the state through revolution. The consequence was a political development of revolution and counterrevolution, which highly complicated the creation of representative democracy. It proved to be extremely hard to reach an agreement on the basic rules of the political game between the principal political actors.

The start of the French Revolution was a classic confrontation between the aristocracy and the crown. The king wanted to extract more taxes, but could not do so without the co-operation of the nobility. The aristocracy in turn demanded the restoration of the Estates General, which had not been summoned for over a century and a half. The nobles actually had a liberal program: they demanded constitutional government, guarantees of personal liberty for all, and freedom of speech and press. Many were even prepared to give up their special privileges in taxation. In return, they hoped to become the dominant element in government. It was their idea for France to be governed in all future through the Estates General, divided in three chambers, one for the nobles, one for the clergy, and one for the Third Estates. A dominant position of the aristocracy in the ruling of the state is precisely what the Third Estate wished to avoid. Lawyers, bankers, businessmen, skilled artisans, shopkeepers, and peasants had no desire to be governed by the nobility.

The Third Estate wanted all the estates to sit in one chamber and vote as individuals. This was unacceptable to the other estates; they went a head as planned and the Estates General met in May 1789. The Third Estates reacted to this by declaring itself the 'National Assembly' on June 17 1789. What followed was a series of confrontations between the king, who was pressured by the aristocracy to intervene, and the Third Estate that had the support of large parts of the Parisian population. The Revolution that started in Paris eventually spread through the country as a whole and the National Assembly eventually took control of the state. France was now for the first time in history ruled by a popular government. There seemed to no more obstacles for the development of a representative democratic political regime.

At first the French revolutionary state seemed to be moving in the direction of democracy. An important step was taken in the constitution of 1791, which stipulated that the sovereign power of the national state was to be exercised by a unicameral elected assembly that was called the Legislative Assembly. About half of the adult male population had the right to vote for this assembly. However, the new representative system never functioned. The revolutionaries were in the absence of a tradition of negotiations and co-operation unable to establish a stable consensus about the rules of the political game. Moreover, the mobilisation of large parts of the population in the Revolution constantly threatened to destabilise the political system. Revolutionary leaders used the masses against each other in order to gain control over the state.

In 1792, a long period of anarchy and terror was initiated when war broke out with Prussia and Austria. Masses of French people roused by Jacobine leaders, notably Robespierre and Danton, burst out in patriotic excitement. They turned against the king, who had become the prisoner of the Revolutionary government, and other people that were suspected of counter-revolutionary sympathies. Thousands of people were executed at the height of the Revolution. Among the principle victims were the king Louis XVI, and his wife Marie Antoinette. Many priests and nobles were executed, but also Girondin revolutionary leaders of the first hour. Neither were the peasants and the labouring classes excluded. The aim of the Jacobines was democracy, however the consequence was terror. The period of terror finally came to an end with the execution of Robespierre himself, after he had antagonised all significant parties. The government that ruled after the Robespierre period did remain faithful to the Revolution. It produced a new constitution that formally established the first French Republic, which lasted for four years. However, the Republic did not function either. A consensus among the different revolutionary groups could still not be reached; both the Left and the Right revolted from time to time. (Palmer & Colton 1992: 361-402)

The revolutionary years had made clear that the development of democracy was extremely difficult, without an established tradition of power-sharing and negotiation between the principle power actors. Moreover there were at the time no examples available of a functioning democracy. The French revolutionaries had to invent the rules of modern politics in a national political arena on the spot. The result was anarchy and chaos. No monopoly of violence and taxation, which is the basis of a democratic system, could be created. It took a general to finally realise many of the ideals of the Revolution.

When general Napoleon Bonaparte took control, the French state was on the point of total collapse. Popular government had failed and the country was at war with several European states. Napoleon was able to restore internal order by means of a powerful and centralised administrative machine. His rule was highly effective, but authoritarian. Bonaparte enforced a national state with a modern legal system, something the revolutionaries were never able to do. Authority was effectively centralised, and executed by paid government agents. There were no more estates, legal classes, privileges, local liberties, hereditary offices, guilds or manors. Qualification for a position in the government apparatus came to depend increasingly on education. The secondary and higher schools were reorganised in these years. Central to all of the changes that took place during the Napoleonic period was the reform of the legal system. France became legally and judicially uniform. All French citizens had the same civil rights. A legal framework for an economy of private enterprise was created. The state structure constructed by Napoleon basically survived through the whole nineteenth century. It gave the state bureaucracy an enormous autonomy vis-à-vis parliament, and the government of the day. The power of the technocrats in the French state was independent from the type of government that was in control. (Skocpol 1979: 202-205; Palmer & Colton 1992: 417-431)

After the turmoil of the Revolution and the Napoleonic wars it took the French another half a century of uprisings and coups d'états to create a basic consensus on the rules of the political game. The accession of Louis XVIII after the defeat of Napoleon meant a restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. Although the king granted an amnesty to the revolutionaries of the 1790's, French politics quickly polarised again. Royalist counterrevolutionaries started to murder republicans and Bonapartists. The king could not control the 'white terror'. The situation became only worse when Louis XVIII died in 1824 and was succeeded by his brother Charles X, who for thirty years had been the acknowledged leader of the counterrevolution. He regarded himself as a hereditary absolute monarch by the grace of God, he proceeded to stamp out not only revolutionary republicanism but liberalism and constitutionalism as well. His rule initiated the July Revolution of 1830. Revolutionary workers and intellectuals again threw up barricades in the streets of Paris. Charles, who did not want to be made captive by a revolution, flew for England. The radical republicans immediately proclaim popular democracy.

The Revolution of 1789 seemed to reoccur all over again. However, the political liberals, consisting of bankers, industrialists, and various intellectuals, had other ideas. The liberals were still satisfied with the constitutional monarchy of 1814, they had only objected to policies and person of Charles X. The political liberals won over the radical republicans and the constitutional monarchy was restored with the accession of the Duke of Orleans, who as a young man had served in the republican army of 1792. He reigned, until 1848, under the title of Louis Phillippe. Although the constitution remained substantially what it had been in 1814, a small step was taken in the direction of democracy. The Chamber of Peers ceased to be hereditary, to the disappointment of the aristocracy. Moreover, the Chamber of Deputies was to be elected by a somewhat larger body of voters. An enlargement was made from 100,000 to 200,000 voters after 1830. The right to vote was still based on the ownership of a considerable quantity of real estate. About one thirtieth of the male adult population now elected the Chamber of Deputies. The beneficiaries were the upper bourgeoisie, the bankers, merchants, and industrialists. (Palmer & Colton 1992: 485-531; Mann 1993)

In 1848, the discussion for the extension of representation again came to a crisis, like it did in many other places in Europe. The radicals pressed for universal suffrage and a Republic, while the liberals only asked for a broadening of the voting rights within the existing constitutional monarchy. The king, Louis Philippe, than made a large tactical mistake. Instead of allying with the liberals against the radicals, he opposed any change whatsoever. Again revolution broke out in Paris, and the king fled for England. Like before in 1789 and 1830, the revolutionaries found it hard to reach an agreement about basic rules of the political game. The struggles finally came to an apocalypse in an all out war between 20.000 workers and the army in the streets of Paris. The three 'Bloody June Days', as they have come to be called, resulted in the death of about ten thousand people.

After the 'Bloody June Days' a liberal coalition set about drafting a new republican constitution, with strong executive powers in the hands of the president to be elected by universal male suffrage. Finally, it seemed that representative democracy was established. However, democracy still proved to be rather unstable in France. The elections in 1848 were won by Louis Napoleon, the nephew of the great Napoleon. Like his uncle, he was not a great fan of democracy. Not long after he gained power he crushed parliament and made himself Emperor of the French with the title Napoleon III. For the first time since 1815 there was no significant parliamentary life.

Only one of the two conditions of democracy was satisfied when the Spanish state entered the nineteenth century. Authority had been effectively centralised in the course of the eighteenth century during Bourbon rule. The establishment of a central state made representative democracy an issue of political contention at the beginning of the nineteenth century. However, the actual development of representation proved in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth century extremely difficult, because the medieval tradition of power-sharing had been broken. Spanish democratic reformers were forced to wrestle representation directly from the state, like their colleagues in France. The result was a political development of revolution and counterrevolution that lasted until the fascists took control in the 1930's.

The Napoleonic period was an important break in Spain's constitutional history, like it has been in most European countries. The Spanish Bourbon Monarchy had in its effort to survive, allied with Napoleon. This alliance was successful until 1808 when Napoleon sent French troops into Spain and forced the Spanish king Ferdinand VII to abdicated in favour of Joseph, the emperor's brother. Anti-French sentiments became very strong in Spain in the years to follow. The Spanish did not see the French invasion as a liberation from the Ancien Regime, but as a foreign occupation. Already in the summer of 1808, a national revolution broke out in the name of Ferdinand who was now a captive in France. The revolution was successful at first, and Joseph was forced to withdraw from Madrid. A provisional government was set up, which consisted of a conglomeration of city-states and autonomous provinces. However, with the invasion of Napoleon that followed the revolution this government collapsed and was pushed back to Cadiz, where it survived surrounded by a French army. (Palmer & Colton 1992: 422-439)

The Spanish resistance against Napoleon was split into two parts. The patriot government that resided in Cadiz consisted mainly of liberals, who saw it as their duty to create a new constitution that would lead Spain into a new era. The liberals wanted to limit the despotism of the monarchy, which had ended with the French invasion. They believed that men who had fought as soldiers must be rewarded as citizens. Spain had to become a constitutional monarchy once it was liberated. The other part of the resistance, the conservatives, held a somewhat different opinion. They argued that the old laws and institutions were the only valid constitution. The resistance was to limit itself to expelling the French army. The liberal constitution, which was drawn up in the Cortes of Cadiz in the period between 1810 and 1813, was therefore in the eyes of the conservatives the work of a radical minority. To them, the War of Independence was fought in defence of the old constitution, the absolutist monarchy and the Church. (Carr 1966: 79-80)

When the Ferdinand VII returned to Spain after the defeat of the French by the English armies led by Wellington, he immediately denounced the liberal constitution on the advice of the conservatives. The king was able to do so because he had not only the backing of the conservatives, but also of a large part of the army. The liberal reformers were consequently forced to go into exile. The exiles of 1814 were the first representatives in nineteenth century Spain of a phenomenon typical for a state that lacked an established tradition of power-sharing. New regimes were always established by the total rejection of the previous regime, sending the supporters of that regime into exile. The only option for the opponents of the absolutist monarchy was revolution.

Already in 1820, the first liberal revolution occurred. It started by an army revolt that was backed by a provincial rising and was finally certified by change a change of the constitution. This scheme became the 'Spanish method of making a revolution' it was repeated in 1854 and 1868 (Carr 1966: 129). The revolutionaries tried to accomplish two things. First, they had to master urban and military radicalism that had made the revolution possible. The danger of anarchy was great, since Spain was in the first months after the revolution ruled by provincial and town committees. The second objective of the revolutionaries was to hold Ferdinand VII to the constitution of 1812 and out of the hands of a conservative royalist reaction. However, the revolution had very little chance to succeed. To appease the different radically polarised groups and reach an agreement on the rules of the political game was virtually impossible in a very short time span. Once in power, the liberal movement itself split apart into moderates and radicals. The country consequently fell into anarchy. The revolution was finally lost in 1823 when the French armies invaded Spain in order to restore the monarchy. The generals of the army, which had made the revolution, now deserted the liberal constitution in an effort to secure their own position. Ferdinand took again control of the state as an enlightened absolutist king. (Carr 1966: 120-154)

Although the supporters of liberalism were able to install a constitutional monarchy in the years after the death of Ferdinand in 1833, no liberal regime proved to be stable in the end. Nineteenth century Spain was characterised by revolution and civil war. The death of Ferdinand VII immediately threw the country in a civil war. The war was fought between the supporters of the king's brother, Don Carlos, and the defenders of the throne of queen Isabella. The war that lasted for seven years started as a struggle between two versions of absolute monarchy, but it ended as battle between liberalism and reactionary conservatism. The supporters of Don Carlos, called the Carlists, were an anti-revolutionary movement, they wanted to defeat the liberals once and for all. The queen chose the side of the moderate liberals in order to gain the support of the middle classes and part of the aristocracy. Spain consequently became a constitutional monarchy. Although a small step forwards, the constitution of 1834 was still far away from anything that resembled an effective representative system. The crown continued to have strong executive powers and the Cortes was summoned and dismissed by the queen with no right to initiate legislation. In the end, the precise nature of the constitution did not make much difference, because government was severely destabilised by the civil war and revolutionary uprisings by radical liberals, who claimed that the moderate liberals had sold out. The failure of the constitutional monarchy to protect the higher classes against these revolutionary outbursts did for a long period work to the advantage of the Carlists. However, the Carlist bid for power eventually failed, because they could not secure the support of the army. (Carr 1966: 155-256)

The main problem of German democratic reformers at the end of the nineteenth century was the autonomy of the state. This autonomy was the result of the late formation of a national state in the region. The German national state was constructed through warfare by the Prussian rulers. The state elite reached an extremely autonomous position vis-à-vis the other power actors, because a national political arena was still in construction when they started rule united German lands. There was no national tradition of power-sharing on which representation could be built. A large part of the traditional regional elite was left out of the political game. Furthermore, the formation of mass movements was complicated by the question of the legitimacy of the new state. The consequence was that liberalism could not function as central integrating force, like it for instance did in Great Britain and eventually also in France. The Prussian rulers played the various popular political movements against each other, and completely excluded some of them from the decision making process. The consequence was a reactionary political development. Radical polarisation on the basis of class, national, and religious issues occurred between the principle political actors. It created a situation in which it became extremely difficult to construct a stable representative democracy.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the German lands were still characterised by fragmented sovereignty. Although German nationalism was stirred in the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon, the Congress of Vienna united the German speaking people only in a loose federation. This was mainly to the satisfaction of the territorial princes who were in this way able to hold on to their autonomous position. The first German nationalists were consequently turned against the regional particularism and authoritarian rule of the princes. Most national ideas, which were especially strong in the universities, carried with them a kind of liberal democratic opposition to aristocrats, princes and kings. (Palmer & Colton 1992)

Democratic liberalism grew up in Germany as a nationalist movement that aimed at creating constitutional government through the unification of the German lands in a national state. Until such a state was constructed, the liberals had to focus on the particular problems within the various princely states, which in turn weakened their organisation on a national level. German liberalism was thus caught in a tension between national aspirations and local interests. Particularly the liberals of the smaller German states were divided over this issue. For Prussian and Austrian liberals the situation was different. The Austrian liberals were especially after 1848 against national German unification, because it would destroy the Habsburg Empire. Instead they focused their attention upon modernising reform within the Habsburg empire. The Prussia liberals were in a totally different situation, since their state was already for a century on its way to become a major international power. The rise to power of the Prussian state brought as a result the construction of an ever larger German state. They Prussian liberals could see Prussia as the base upon which a more national as well as a liberal Germany could be formed. (Breuilly 1992a: 228-295; Breuilly 1992b: 1-27)

The problems of German liberalism became clearly visible in the popular revolutions of 1848. The debates of the revolutionaries in the Frankfurt Parliament were completely stalemated by the disagreement over the path to unification. This prevented a coherent reform program from emerging. The revolutions of 1848 worked in the end to the advantage of the Prussian state, because the princes of the smaller German states were unable to repress the popular revolts by themselves and had to ask for the help of the Prussian army. They were now indebted to the Prussian rulers. (Mann 1993) Moreover, the revolution in 1848 had discredited much of the radical ideology in the eyes of many middle-class liberals.

Although the revolutions of 1848 did not much good for the liberal democratic cause in the long run, the direct consequence was that a weak parliamentary system was established in Prussia. The aim was to win back the support of the Bildungdbeamten, teachers and civil servants, which had played a prominent role in the revolutionary events. Parliament was established on the understanding that more radical movements would be suppressed. Moreover, the king continued to command the army, and he could freely appoint and dismiss ministers, officials, judges, and members of the upper house. (Mann 1993) The Prussian structure of government would later on be transplanted to the German Empire.

The division within liberalism over the road to unification grew after 1848 only stronger. State transformation in the German regions called into question every political alignment. Perhaps if the national question could have been 'solved in a gradualist and peaceful manner it would not have had such an unsettling affect on the political community. However, the national question was resolved by means of war and annexation. (Breuilly 1992a: 238-270)

The annexation by Prussia in 1866-67 of 21 smaller German states shattered all the existing political alignments. The German liberals were divided on the issue whether to accept what Bismarck had created as the basis of future political action or to reject it because of the manner of its creation and the many illiberal features of the new state. Democratic liberalism became more and more bound with the individual states, because it now seemed that German unification would only make the establishment of representative democracy more difficult. The pro-Prussian liberals on the other hand proceeded to organise themselves on a wider basis. Even though liberals in Prussia were able to dominate parliament, this did not mean control of government. The officials of the state wielded the real power. German liberalism was consequently apart from its internal division not very attractive for various social and religious groups as a vehicle to political power and participation. Labour therefore needed its own independent programme and a way to present that program to a mass electorate. It is in this context that class proved to be a very effective rhetoric tool in German politics. Liberalism quickly lost its universal appeal and became a middle class affair. (Breuilly 1992a: 228-295; Breuilly 1992b: 1-27)

In 1871, the formation of the national state was finally completed and the Prussian political structure was extended to the German Reich as a whole. It was a federal constitution, with routine administration, including police, justice, and education, in the hands of the individual states. The raising of taxes was shared with the princes and representatives of the states. The weighted class suffrage, as described before, was abandoned in the Reichstag, but retained in the Prussian parliament. Although universal male suffrage was now achieved, parliament was not sovereign. The Reichstag could not appoint ministers and had no right to debate foreign policy. The army was not responsible to a minister, but directly to the Kaiser. The Prussian rulers used the autonomy of the state to systematically destroy political power organisations that were in the way of state policy. The socialist, Catholic, and also the national liberal movements were subsequently attacked. (Mann 1993) It would take until the end of the First World War before the authoritarian imperial government was overthrown, and a first attempt could be made to establish representative democracy.

The political development of nineteenth century Italy and Germany shows some very clear similarities. The two basic conditions of democracy were absent in both regions, which highly complicated the construction of a stable and effective representative political regime. The late formation of a national state and the absence of a central power-sharing tradition created a political system in which the state elite had a particularly autonomous position vis-à-vis the other power actors. Another similarity between the two states is their military origin that played an important role long after unification had been completed. In the period in which the Prussian rulers created the German Empire, the Piedmontese state and its army were busy constructing the Italian kingdom. Like in Germany a division could be made between routine day to day government that was largely left to the regional representatives in parliament and the high politics of warfare, internal control, administration, and foreign affairs that revolved around the Crown and his military advisers (Clark 1996: 44).

Both the German Empire and the Italian kingdom had a legitimacy problem in the first decades of their existence, because they were constructed by military force. However, a major difference between the two was that the German Empire had emerged as one of the great powers within Europe, while the Italian state only played a secondary role in international affairs. This difference did not merely have important implication for the position of the two states on an international level, but it also affected internal relationships. The German emperor and his bureaucracy were able to pursue a course of radical nationalism and militarism to ensure popular support. This was not a realistic scenario for the Italian state that remained rather unpopular until the fascists took control of the state in the 1920's.

An additional factor that strengthened the resentment of many Italians against the central state was that at least until the end of the nineteenth century all of the top positions in government were occupied by the Piedmontese elite. The Crown, army generals, ministers, deputies, civil servants, judges and academics all came from the liberal Piedmontese establishment. The uniformity of the political elite did not make the task of creating a national state much easier. Government was constantly confronted with regional revolts. The Piedmontese rulers tried although never succeeded to remedy this by setting up strong central authority modelled after the Franco-Napoleonic example. (Putnam 1992: 18-20) The Italian state established a system of prefects, who provided the link between national and local government. The Prefect acted as a spokesman for his province in Rome, and he supported the local élite in their dealings with the central civil service. His primary function was not to control local notables, but to ensure their support. (Clark 1996: 58-61)

The nineteenth century Italian state did to a certain extend still resemble a system of indirect rule. The Piedmontese central government simply did not have enough personnel to rule locally, they had to rely on notables to run local government, and they interfered as little as possible. Especially in the south this led to the omnipotent power of certain great landlords. These lords could create whole networks of client individuals or families, who stood in a personal relationship of obligation to them. This culture of patronage and personal obligation that has characterised at least southern Italian politics up to the present day, is in fact a common feature of most systems of indirect rule. What is so peculiar about the Italian state is that it has only a very late stage been able to fully implement direct rule throughout its realm. The persistence of regional power blocks was a major obstacle for the development of representative democracy, because they constantly destabilised the political system. There was always the threat that the Italian state would fall apart again into smaller regions.

The fact that the Italian state survived was for a large part due to the army that played a central role in politics. The army was a highly effective instrument in the hands in the hands of the Piedmontese rulers, to which it was extremely loyal. The main function of the army was not to defend Italy against foreign powers -the Italian army engaged in no military campaigns between 1870 and 1911 expect from small expeditions in Africa and China- but to defend the state internally. In the 1860's the army restored order in the South by ruthless repression. The army also had to cope with riots, illegal assemblies, strikes, and demonstrations. 'States of siege', which meant military rule and martial law, were proclaimed ten times between 1861 and 1922, whenever there was serious riot. Although the army prevented the national state from falling back into fragmented sovereignty and anarchy, it created in itself a major obstacle for democracy. The army gave the central state elite such autonomous powers that it could simply ignore or repress popular demands for greater influence on government policy. Although universal suffrage was brought about in 1912, this did not result in a stable and effective parliamentary rule. Italians were still treated by the state as subjects instead of citizens. (Clark 1996: 64)

After the final partitioning of 1795 by Russia, Austria, and Prussia the Polish state disappeared for over a century until the end of World War I. The Poles were during this period subject to the governments of the states that occupied the Polish lands. The destruction of the Polish kingdom was in itself by not a special event; most medieval European states disappeared in the end. However, the destruction of Poland took place at a time at which nationalism was born in Europe. The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic period gave rise to nationalist feelings all across the continent, and particularly in the Polish lands. Napoleon highly stimulated the national consciousness of the Poles, because he could use it for his own purposes. His defeat was deeply regretted, but this did certainly not mean the end of their national aspiration. Many Polish radical nationalist movements were created in the course of the nineteenth; especially by the aristocracy that saw its autonomous power taken away by the partitioning powers. The noblemen of Poland-Lithuania had once felt justified in their frequent resort to arms against their own state, now they saw even more justice in their struggle against foreign states.

An important consequence of the radical revolutionary activity of the Poles was that representation in the states that actually governed them became a secondary cause. When the suffrage for the parliaments in the partitioning states was extended at the end of the century, some Polish deputies did make their appearance. However, the Polish involvement in the various parliaments, that overall had very little influence, was often more of a source of frustration than that it led to any real advances. The main result was that it made the nationalist movement more determined. (Davies 1984) Only when the national state was created in 1921 could the Poles begin at establishing a representative democratic regime. However, this proved to be extremely difficult in the absence of a tradition of negotiations and co-operation.

In the absence of a national state, Polish national consciousness drew on three fundamental sources of inspiration: Church, language, and history. The Polish clergy frequently shared the radical ideas of national reformers. The low clergy in particular, who knew the troubles of the common people, professed a nationalist brand of Catholicism. A problem for the Polish Catholic Church was that the Vatican always condemned the connection of Catholicism to the national cause. The Polish bishops were therefore trapped between the ultra-conservative stance of the Vatican and the radical tendencies of the lower clergy. The use of the Polish language for the national cause was less problematic. An important change in the role of the Polish language occurred with the partitioning of 1795. The nobility had before this time cultivated the Latin language as a means of setting themselves apart from the Polish speaking peasantry. However, the partitioning powers removed Latin as the official language, and tried to impose Russian or German. Polish could become in this situation the great force of unity between the aristocracy and the peasantry, pushing them together towards a common cultural heritage. It provided the gateway to unofficial literature and to independent interpretations of history. Polish history enjoyed its greatest success in artistic and imaginative forms. In the idealised history, both the peasants and the nobility were made heroes. (Davies 1981)

The willingness of the partitioning powers to grant a measure of autonomy to their Polish provinces declined steadily after the Congress of Vienna. As a result, the politically conscious Pole was in a difficult position. If he loyally agreed with the policies of his government, he was tempted to surrender his Polish nationality in favour of the official nationalism of the imperial regime. By pursuing a career in the Tsarist, Prussian, or Austrian imperial service, the chances are that he would adopt the culture and the outlook of the ruling élite, and would come to think of himself not as a Pole but as a Russian, German, or Austrian. In the context of authoritarian regimes, where pluralist political aims were not permitted there was no middle way, no concept of loyal opposition existed. In the eyes of authority, one was a faithful subject, or an unfaithful one. Those Poles that refused to work with the state authorities were immediately thrown into the world of conspiracy and terrorism. Those who chose to work with the authorities were obliged to adopt a deferential posture towards powerful officials. (Davies 1981)

There were certainly revolts against foreign rule, but none of them succeeded. The November Rising of 1830-31 that was triggered by the July Revolution in Paris was one of the biggest, but it also had the most tragic consequences. It meant the end of Polish autonomy in the Russian part of the former kingdom. The Russian army invaded and crushed the army of Congress Poland that was created by the Congress of Vienna. (Palmer & Colton 1992: 488) The Russian rulers were merciless. All rebels and their families were condemned to penal servitude in Russia. About 80,000 Poles thus walked in irons to Siberia. Thousands more fled into exile in Western Europe. The revolutionary aspirations of the Poles were, however, not broken. The events of 1830-31 inaugurated a revolutionary period that lasted for thirty years. Plot followed plot, as each insurrection was followed by harsher and harsher repression by the Russian authorities. (Davies 1984: 166)

The Poles were somewhat better of in Prussia, although like in the Russian Empire they had little hope for independence. The progress of urbanisation and industrialisation in Prussia seemed to Germanise the Polish population in a natural way. However, Bismarck's Kulturkampf of 1872 radically blocked this process. The Kulturkampf was originally directed against the German Catholics of the Rhineland and Bavaria, but it turned many Polish Catholics of Posnania and Silesia into potential rebels. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Polish peasantry of Prussia, mobilised by the militant Catholic clergy, was determined to defend its Polish identity. (Davies 1984)

The Austrian rulers had in contrast to the Germans and the Russians no desire to culturally unify their whole realm, which would have been an almost impossible task to accomplish. The Habsburgs had abandoned the idea of a unified Empire, and were content to win the support of their Polish subjects by granting them regional autonomy. Galicia was by far the poorest of the three partitions, with little industry and overpopulation in the countryside. Moreover, it was controlled by the most conservative landowners, which granted their peasants little personal freedom. Nevertheless, the autonomy provided by Austria created the space for cultural enterprise, which could not be found anywhere else in the Polish lands. For this reason, Galicia has been labelled Poland's 'Piedmont' (Davies 1984: 172).

It was only because of the outbreak of the First World War that an independent Polish state could be constructed. As long as the empires of Eastern Europe had been at peace, they had a common interest in suppressing the Polish issue; as soon as they were at war, they were compelled to compete with each other for Polish sympathies. After a few months of war the first proposal for Polish autonomy was raised by Russians whose commander on the Eastern Front, the Grand Duke Nicholas, promised the abolition of existing frontiers and the creation of a reborn Poland. After the German's and Austrians had conquered the Polish lands, they also declared that a Polish Kingdom was to be restored. Finally, President Wilson demanded in 1918 in the name of the Western Allied powers:

A united, independent, and autonomous Poland, with free, unrestricted access to the sea (Cited by Davies 1984: 111).

Neither of the two conditions for democracy was fully satisfied in the nineteenth century Habsburg Empire. No national state was created. Fragmented sovereignty persisted until World War I, and the state still largely ruled indirectly. The aristocratic intermediaries of the Habsburg state were able to rule virtually autonomously within their territories. The monarch could not centralise authority, because the great landlords wielded their own private armies. Moreover, through the regional estates they controlled the extraction of taxes, and often they held full jurisdiction in their own territories. Since the state was unable to monopolise violence, taxation, and jurisdiction, representative democracy was out of the question. Another consequence of the weakness of central authority was that the medieval tradition of power-sharing did survive in the Austro-Hungarian regions of the old Holy Roman Empire. However, the power-sharing arrangements in the Habsburg lands could certainly not provide the basis for representation. The main obstacle for the extension of the political community was again the extremely conservative aristocracy that controlled the regional estates. They were fundamentally turned against the development of representation, because this would not only threaten their political power but also their social economic position that was directly connected to the control of local and regional government. Finally the development of a more centralised representative state was further impeded by the national aspirations of the various language and ethnic based groups. Many Poles, Italians, Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs, Magyars, Hungarians, and Germans within the Habsburg Empire were striving for national self-determination.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, national self-determination was not yet a problem within the Habsburg lands. In Bohemia, for example there was little sense of overall Czech or German ethnic identities. German was the language of public space -of administration, law, education, and commerce- Czech of the life of most families. (Mann 1993: 337) However, this situation changed very soon, when the Habsburg state tried to centralise authority in mid nineteenth century. Metternich (1773-1859), who was effectively running the Habsburg state at the time, once argued that:

Only by centralising the various branches of authority is it possible to establish its unity and hence its force. Power distributed is no longer power. (Cited by Mann 1993: 339)

The reaction from the different regions against centralisation was massive resistance. The resistance coincided with the international revolution of 1848. It was at this time that ethnic nationalism started to develop, which became interweaved with the resistance of the nobility against central government.

Revolution broke out everywhere in the Habsburg Empire. However, as quickly as they came they also died out. The Magyar nationalist party that had taken control of the Hungarian part of the empire put up the strongest resistance against the counter-revolution. About half of the population of the region were Magyars. It soon turned out that they were the only ones that profited from the new Hungarian state. The other half of Hungary, Slovaks, Romanians, Germans, Serbs and Croats, started to resist against the dominance of the Magyars, they looked to the Habsburgs to protect them. The revolution in Hungary was finally subdued by the intervention of the Russian army after the new Habsburg ruler Franz Joseph had invited Tsar Nicholas to intervene. (Palmer & Colton 1992: 512)

Although many revolts and insurrections followed the revolution of 1848, the Habsburg Empire did survive up to the end of World War I. This was in itself quite astonishing, given the fact that the state was constantly subject to strong centrifugal forces and that it was several times smashed in warfare by other states. After the break-up of 1848, it was attacked in 1859 by France and in 1866 by Prussia, which led to the creation of both the German Empire and the Italian kingdom. However, most of the Great Powers in Europe had an interest in the survival of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, because its dissolution might destroy the balance of power that was constructed in 1814 at the Congress of Vienna. Another key to the fact that the empire survived is that most nationalists, except for a few extreme radicals, did not wish to destroy it. The weakness of the central states allowed many people a great deal of autonomy that they might not have experienced when subjected to another state. The Magyar state during the revolution of 1848 had made this very clear.

Albaladejo, Pablo, 1994 'Cities and the State in Spain' in Blockmans & Tilly ed. Cities & The rise of states in Europe, AD 1000 to 1800. Boulder: Westview Press

Allmand, Christopher, 1995 'New weapons, new tactics 1300 - 1500' in G. Parker ed. The Cambridge Illustrated history of Warfare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Anderson, M.S., 1993 The rise of modern diplomacy. Harlow: Longman Press

Aylmer, Gerald, 1996 'Centre and locality: the nature of power elites' in W. Reinhard ed. Power elites and state building. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Blickle, Peter & Ellis, Steven & Österberg, Eva, 1997 'The commons and the state: representation, influence, and the legislative process' in P. Blickle ed. Resistance, Representation and Community. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Blockmans, Wim & Brady, Thomas & Dilcher, Gerhard & Isaacs, Ann & Musi, Aurelio & Nierop, Henk van, 1997 ' The urban belt and the emerging modern state' in P. Blickle ed. Resistance, Representation and Community. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Blom, J.C.H., 1993 'Nederland sinds 1830' in J.C.H. Blom & E. Lamberts ed. Geschiedenis van de Nederlanden. Rijswijk: Universitaire Pers Rotterdam.

Breuilly, John, 1992a Labour and Liberalism in Nineteenth century Europe. Essay in Comparative History. Manchester

Breuilly, John, 1992b 'The national idea in Modern German history' in J. Breuilly ed. The state of Germany. London: Longman.

O'Brien, Patrick , 1984 'Europe in the World Economy' in H. Bull & A. Watson ed. The expansion of the international society. Oxford: Warendon Press.

Bull, George, 1992 'Introduction' in N. Machiavelli The Prince. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Bulst, Neithard, 1996 'Rulers, Representative Institutions, and their Member as Power Elites: Rivals or Partners?' in W. Reinhard ed. Power Elites and State Building. Oxford: Clarendon Press

Cannon, John, 1995 'The British Nobility, 1600 - 1800' in H.M. Scott ed. The European Nobility in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Western Europe. Volume one. London: Longman

Carr, Raymond, 1966 Spain 1808-1939 Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Carr, William, 1992 'The unification of Germany' in J. Breuilly ed. The state of Germany. London: Longman.

Carsten, F., 1964, The Origins of Prussia. Oxford: Clarendon Press

Chittolini, Giorgio, 1994 'Cities, "City-States," and Regional States in North-Central Italy' in Blockmans & Tilly ed. Cities & The rise of states in Europe, AD 1000 to 1800. Boulder: Westview Press

Clark, Martin, 1996, Modern Italy 1871-1995, London: Longman.

O'Connor, Bernard, 1698 History of Poland in Several Letters to Persons of Quality. London

Dahl, Robert, 1971 Polyarchy. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press

Davies, Norman, 1981 God's playground: a history of Poland vol. II. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Davies, Norman, 1984 Heart of Europe: a short history of Poland. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Deane, Phyllis, 1996 'The British Industrial Revolution' in M. Teich & R. Porter ed. The Industrial Revolution in national context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Descimon, Robert, 1996 'Power elites and the prince: the state as enterprise' in W. Reinhard ed. Power elites and state building. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Deursen, A. Th., van, 1993, De Republiek der Zeven Verenigde Nederlanden (1588 - 1780), in: Blom, J.C.H. & Lamberts, E., Geschiedenis van de Nederlanden, Rijswijk: Universitaire Pers Rotterdam.

Donati, Claudio, 1995 'The Italian nobilities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries' in H.M. Scott ed. The European Nobility in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Western Europe. Volume one. London: Longman

O'Donnell, Guillermo, Schmitter, Philippe & Whitehead, Laurence, eds., 1986 Transitions from Authoritarian Rule. Comparative Perspectives. Baltimore:

Downing, Brian M., 1992 The Military Revolution and Political Change. Origins of Democracy and Autocracy in Early Modern Europe. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Elias, Norbert, 1982 The Civilizing Process. New York: Pantheon

Elliott, J.H., 1961 'The decline of Spain' in Past and Present, 20.

Ellis, Steven, 1997 'Commentary from a British Perspective' in P. Blickle ed. Resistance, Representation and Community. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Ertman, Thomas, 1997 Birth of the Leviathan, Building states and regimes in medieval and early modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Evans, Peter, Rueschemeyer, Dietrich and Skocpol, Theda, eds. 1985 Bringing the State Back in. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Frost, Robert, 1995 'The nobility of Poland - Lithuania, 1569 - 1795' in H.M. Scott ed. The European Nobility in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Northern, central and Eastern Europe. Volume two. London: Longman

Geyl, P., 1975, 'De Bataafse revolutie' from Studies en strijdschriften, Groningen: 1958, pag. 235 - 257.

Giddens, Anthony, 1982 Profiles and Critiques in Social Theory. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Giddens, Anthony, 1984 The Constitution of Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Giddens, Anthony, 1985 The Nation-State and Violence. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Guilmartin, John, 1995 'The Military Revolution: Origins and the First Tests Abroad' in C.J. Rogers ed. The Military Revolution Debate. Boulder: Westview Press.

Guttmann, Myron, 1988 Towards the Modern Economy: Early Industry in Europe, 1500 - 1800. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Hale, J.R., 1990 'Machiavelli and the self-sufficient state' in D. Thompson ed. Political Ideas. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Hart, M. 't, 1993, The making of a bourgeois state: War, politics and finance during the Dutch revolt, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

't Hart, Marjolein, 1994 'The making of the Dutch State' in Blockmans & Tilly ed. Cities & The rise of states in Europe, AD 1000 to 1800. Boulder: Westview Press

Hespanha, Antonio, 1994 'Cities and the State in Portugal' in Blockmans & Tilly ed. Cities & The rise of states in Europe, AD 1000 to 1800. Boulder: Westview Press

Hoffman, Philip, 1994, 'Early modern France, 1450 - 1700' in P.T. Hoffman & K. Norberg ed. Fiscal Crises, Liberty, and Representative Government 1450 -1789. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Hohenberg, Paul & Hollen Lees, Lynn, 1985 The Making of Urban Europe 1000 - 1950. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Isaacs, Ann Katherine & Prak, Maarten, 1996 'Cities, bourgeoisie, and states' in W. Reinhard ed. Power elites and state building. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Jones, J.R., 1994 'Fiscal policies, liberty, and representative government during the reigns of the last Stuarts' in P.T. Hoffman & K. Norberg ed. Fiscal Crises, Liberty, and Representative Government 1450 -1789. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Kinder, Hermann & Hilgemann, Werner, 1974 The Anchor Atlas of World History vol.1. New York: Anchor Press.

Kindleberger, Charles, 1996 Worlds Economic Primacy 1500-1990. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kossmann, E.H., 1995, 1787. De ineenstorting van de Patriottenbeweging en het probleem van Nederlands verval, in Kossmann, E.H., Vergankelijkheid en continuïteit: opstellen over de geschiedenis, Amsterdam: Bert Bakker.

Lehndorf, Ernst, 1921 Tagebücher des Reichsgrafen Ernst Ahasversus Heinrich Lehndorff nach seiner Kammerherrzeit. Gotha.

Levy, Jack, 1983 War in the Modern Great Power System, 1495 - 1975. Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky.

Lynn, John, 1995 'The trace itallienne and the Growth of Armies: The French Case' in C.J. Rogers ed. The Military Revolution Debate. Boulder Westview Press.

Luethy, Herbert, 1955 France against Herself. New York: Praeger.

Maczak, Antoni, 1996 'The nobility -state relationship' in W. Reinhard ed. Power elites and state building. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Magocsi, Paul, 1993 Historical Atlas of East Central Europe. Seattle: University of Warshington Press.

Mann, Michael, 1986 The Sources of Social Power I. a History of Power from the beginning to A.D. 1760. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mann, Michael, 1993 The Sources of Social Power II. The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760-1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

McNeill, William, 1974 The Shape of European History. New York: Oxford University Press.

McNeill, William, 1976 Plagues and peoples. New York: Anchor Press.

McNeill, William, 1983 The Pursuit of Power. Oxford: Blackwell

Melton, Edgar, 1995 'The Prussian Junkers, 1600 - 1786' in H.M. Scott ed. The European Nobility in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Northern, central and Eastern Europe. Volume two. London: Longman

Millet, Hélène & Moraw, Peter, 1996 'Clerics in the state' in W. Reinhard ed. Power elites and state building. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Moore, Barrington, 1966 Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Lord and Peasant in the making of the Modern World. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Nicolas, Jean & Valdeón Baruque, Julio & Vilfan, Sergij, 1997 'The Monarchic State and Resistance in Spain, France, and the Old Provinces of the Habsburgs, 1400-1800' in P. Blickle ed. Resistance, Representation and Community. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Nierop, Henk van, 1993 The nobility of Holland: from knights to regents 1500 - 1650. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Norberg, Kathryn, 1994 'The French fiscal crisis of 1788 and the financial origins of the Revolution of 1789' in P.T. Hoffman & K. Norberg ed. Fiscal Crises, Liberty, and Representative Government 1450 -1789. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

North, Douglas & Thomas, Robert, 1973 The rise of the western world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Parker, Geoffrey, 1988 The Military Revolution. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Parker, Geoffrey, 1995a 'The Military Revolution, '1560-1660'- A Myth?' in C.J. Rogers ed. The Military Revolution Debate. Boulder: Westview Press.

Parker, Geoffrey, 1995b 'In defence of the Military revolution, ' in C.J. Rogers ed. The Military Revolution Debate. Boulder: Westview Press.

Poni, Carlo & Mori, Giorgio, 1996 'Italy in the Longue Durée' in M. Teich & R. Porter ed. The Industrial Revolution in national context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pounds, Norman, 1979 An historical geography of Europe 1500 - 1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Pounds, Norman, 1985 An historical Geography of Europe 1800 - 1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Price, J.L., 1995 'The Dutch nobility in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries' in H.M. Scott ed. The European Nobility in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Western Europe. Volume one. London: Longman

Reinhard, Wolfgang, 1996 'Power elites, state servants, ruling classes, and the growth of state power' in W. Reinhard ed. Power elites and state building. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Ribalta, Pere Molas, 1996 'The impact of central institutions' in W. Reinhard ed. Power elites and state building. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Ridder-Symoens, Hilde de, 1996 'Training and professionalization' in W. Reinhard ed. Power elites and state building. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Robert, Michael, 1995 'The Military Revolution, 1560-1660' in C.J. Rogers ed. The Military Revolution Debate. Boulder: Westview Press.

Roegiers, J., Sas van N.C.F., 1993 'Revolutie in Noord en Zuid (1780-1830) in J.C.H. Blom & E. Lamberts ed. Geschiedenis van de Nederlanden. Rijswijk: Universitaire Pers Rotterdam.

Rogers, Clifford, 1995 'Military Revolutions of the Hundred Years War' in C.J. Rogers ed. The Military Revolution Debate. Boulder: Westview Press.

Rokkan, Stein, 1975 'Dimensions of State Formation and Nation-Building: A Possible Paradigm for Research on Variations within Europe' in C. Tilly ea. ed. The Formation of National States in Western Europe. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Rörig, Fritz, 1969 The Medieval Town. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, Stephens, John, Huber Stephens, Evelyne, 1992 Capitalist Development and Democracy. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Sacks, David, 1994 'The paradox of taxation: Fiscal crises, parliament, and liberty in England, 1450 - 1640' in P.T. Hoffman & K. Norberg ed. Fiscal Crises, Liberty, and Representative Government 1450 -1789. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Schimert, Peter, 1995 'The Hungarian nobility in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries' in H.M. Scott ed. The European Nobility in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Northern, central and Eastern Europe. Volume two. London: Longman

Schwartz, Herman, 1994 States Versus Markets. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Scott, H.M. & Storrs, Christopher, 1995 'The consolidation of noble power in Europe' in H.M. Scott ed. The European Nobility in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Western Europe. Volume one. London: Longman

Scott, H.M., 1995 'Serfdom and service nobility' in H.M. Scott ed. The European Nobility in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Northern, central and Eastern Europe. Volume two. London: Longman

Singer, David & Small, Melvin, 1972 The Wages of War, 1816 - 1965: A Statistical Handbook. New York: Wiley.

Skocpol, Theda, 1977 'Wallerstein's world capitalist system: a theoretical and historical critique', American Journal of Sociology, 82, 5, pp. 1075 - 90.

Skocpol, Theda, 1979. States and Social Revolutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Smith, Alan, 1991 Creating a world economy. Boulder: Westview Press.

Smith, Dennis, 1991 The Rise of Historical Sociology. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Stearns, Peter, 1993 The Industrial Revolution in World History. Boulder: Westview Press.

Stuurman, S., 1992 Wacht op onze daden: Het liberalisme en de vernieuwing van de Nederlandse staat, Amsterdam: Bert Bakker.

Stuurman, Siep, 1995 Staatsvorming en politieke theorie. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker.

Thompson, E.P., 1963 The Making of the English Working Class. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Thompson, I.A.A., 1994a 'Castile: polity, fiscality, and fiscal crises' in P.T. Hoffman & K. Norberg ed. Fiscal Crises, Liberty, and Representative Government 1450 -1789. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Thompson, I.A.A., 1994b 'Castile: absolutism, constitutionalism, and liberty' in P.T. Hoffman & K. Norberg ed. Fiscal Crises, Liberty, and Representative Government 1450 -1789. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Thompson, I.A.A., 1995 '"Money, Money, and Yet More Money!" Finance, the Fiscal-State, and the Military Revolution: Spain 1500-1650' in C.J. Rogers ed. The Military Revolution Debate. Boulder: Westview Press.

Thompson, I.A.A., 1995 'The nobility in Spain, 1600 - 1800' in H.M. Scott ed. The European Nobility in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Western Europe. Volume one. London: Longman

Tierney, Brian, 1982 Religion, law, and the growth of constitutional thought 1150 - 1650. New York: Cambridge University Press

Tilly, Charles (a.o), 1975 The formation of National States in Western Europe. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press

Tilly, Charles, 1981 As Sociology meets History. New York: Academic Press.

Tilly, Charles, 1984 Big Structures, large Processes, Huge Comparisons. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Tilly, Charles, 1986 The Contentious French. Four Centuries of Popular Struggle. Harvard: Harvard University Press.

Tilly, Charles, 1990 Coercion, Capital, and European States, ad 990-1992. Cambridge MA: Blackwell.

Tilly, Charles, 1992 ' Social change in modern Europe: the big picture,' in L.R. Berlanstein ed. The industrial revolution and work in nineteenth century Europe. London: Routledge.

Tilly, Charles, 1992 Of Oilfields, Lakes, and Democracy, working paper 152, Centre for Studies of Social Change, New School for Social Research.

Tilly, Charles, 1994 "Entanglements of European Cities and States," in Blockmans & Tilly ed. Cities & The rise of states in Europe, A.D. 1000 to 1800. Boulder: Westview Press.

Tilly, Charles, 1997 "Means and Ends of Comparison in Macro-sociology", Comparative Social Research, vol 16, p. 47 - 57.

Tilly, Richard, 1996 'German Industrialisation' in M. Teich & R. Porter ed. The Industrial Revolution in national context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tortella. Gabriel, 1996 'The modernisation of the Spanish economy' in M. Teich & R. Porter ed. The Industrial Revolution in national context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Turner, Bryan, 1990 'Max Weber's Historical Sociology: a bibliographical essay', Journal of Historical Sociology, 3, 2.

Tuttle, Herbert, 1884 History of Prussia to the Accession of Frederic the Great, 1134-1740. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Uruszczak, Waclaw, 1997 'Constitutional devices implementing state power, 1300 - 1700' in A. Padoa-Schioppa ed. Legislation and Justice. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Van Horn Melton, James, 1995 'The Nobility in the Bohemian and Astrian Lands' in H.M. Scott ed. The European Nobility in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Northern, central and Eastern Europe. Volume two. London: Longman

Veenendaal, Augustus, 1994 ' Fiscal crises and constitutional freedom in the Netherlands, 1450 - 1795' in P.T. Hoffman & K. Norberg ed. Fiscal Crises, Liberty, and Representative Government 1450 -1789. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Wallerstein, Immanuel, 1974 The Modern World-System. Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press

Weber, Max, 1976 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: Allen & Unwin.

Weber, Max, 1968 Economy and Society: an outline of interpretative sociology. New York: Bedminster Press

Zanden, J.L. van, 1996 'Industrialisation in the Netherlands' in M. Teich & R. Porter ed. The Industrial Revolution in national context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

1 Democracy is conceptualised according to the minimal institutional definition offered by Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens. Their definition is one of the most uncontroversial in the social scientific field. They describe democracy as:

First, regular, free and fair elections of representatives with universal and equal suffrage, second, responsibility of the state apparatus to the elected parliament (possibly complemented by direct elections of the head of the executive), and third, the freedoms of expression and association as well as the protection of individual rights against arbitrary state action. (Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens 1992: 43)

This minimal institutional definition, as opposed to an extensive material definition, is the most appropriate in this research project on the historical development of democracy. A material definition becomes interesting when established democratic systems are compared. Since this study is focussed on the development of democracy, authoritarianism can be defined as its opposite. Authoritarianism is a political regime in which there are no free and fair elections, the state apparatus has no responsibility to a directly elected parliament, there is no freedom of expression or association, and no protection of individual rights against arbitrary actions of the state. Both democracy and authoritarianism are understood in this analysis as ideal types, with no historical examples. The labels authoritarian and democratic must therefore be qualified and will remain somewhat abstract values.

2 A distinction is made in this study between the national states and other types of states. A useful general description of the state is offered by Tilly, who defines states as:

Coercion-wielding organisations that are distinct from households and kinship groups and exercise clear priority in some respects over all other organisations within substantial territories. The term therefore includes city-states, empires, theocracies, and many other forms of government, but excludes tribe lineages, firms, and churches as such. (Tilly 1992: 1-2)

The national state can be defined as an organisation with a monopoly over the means of violence, taxation, and jurisdiction. It is sovereign in its international relations, connected only to other national states by free negotiation, war, and treaty. Furthermore, national states are characterised by a powerful, centralised, and differentiated bureaucracy, whose functionaries execute the regulations and policies of the state directly within its territory.

3 To prevent any misunderstanding, it is not argued that representative institutions are completely absent from medieval Europe. Unambiguous explicit and implicit representative arrangements can be found within the ranks of each of the different power actors. The point is that the open competition for power must first be regularised and pacified within the framework of a higher authoritative order before we can speak about representation in a larger territorial state.

4 Dankward Rustow and other authors in the transition school have made a similar claim. Although their perspective on this problem is very different from Elias'. One of the main interests of the transition theorists is the way in which power actors, who are in an open competition for power, decide through negotiations to accept the democratic procedures. However, in the end this comes down to the same thing; the competing power actors give up the use of violence, and the monopoly of violence is put in the hands of the democratic state.

5 Jack Levi offers a useful definition of war, which distinguishes between interstate war and a civil war. His definition is particularly strong in this context, because it does not restrict war to conflict between modern national states. Levi defines war as 'a substantial armed conflict between the organised military forces of independent political units' (Levi 1983: 51). The question, however, remains what counts as a 'substantial armed conflict'. To distinguish war from border incidents or the strategic movement of troops with little actual fighting, a minimum threshold has to be set. Levi follows Singer and Small's (1972) criterion at this point, who require a 1000 annual battle-death minimum before a conflict is considered as an interstate war. Finally, there is one more problem to solve. How is it possible to decide whether a state is a participant in a war or not? The number of casualties of each state cannot account for this, because there have obviously been wars where a state was deeply involved, but which did not have a lot of casualties. Singer and Small provide the criterion of a 'minimum of 1000 armed personnel engaged in active combat within the war theatre', (Singer & Small 1972: 37) which makes it possible to identify the participants in an interstate war. The conclusion is that war is a is an armed conflict, which results in at least a 1000 casualties in battle between the organised military forces of states, which have each at least 1000 armed personnel engaged in active combat.

6 A simple and open definition of capitalism is offered by Max Weber, who describes it as any type of economic action undertaken in the anticipation of achieving profit through exchange (Weber 1976: 17). Weber makes clear that capitalism in this sense has existed all over the world for thousands of years wherever the possibilities of exchange and money economy, and money financing, have been present (Weber 1968: 165). This includes the simple selling of goods, but also different ways to extend credit and speculation in different currencies. These activities can be analytically separated from obtaining profit through political or military organisation. It is clear that capitalism even in its most simple definition is a specific source of dynamics. This dynamic is described very adequately by Giddens:

Capitalist enterprise involves the pursuit of profit through the production of commodities for sale on the market; the perceived need to achieve profits sufficient to guarantee an adequate return on investment generates a chronic impetus towards economic transformation and expansion (Giddens 1985: 140).

Weber's definition of capitalism obviously does not capture any of the characteristics, which makes the modern capitalist state such a distinctly different kind of state than any pre-existing state. But the development of these characteristics, like the institutional separation between the political and economic sphere, the institutionalisation of private property or the process of commodification, and the large influence of the economy on the nature of government, is precisely what has to be explained. The minimal definition of capitalism is especially powerful because it leaves open the possibility to make an analytical separation between the capitalist world economy and the modern capitalist society. The development of the modern European capitalist world economy is the process by which more and more regions of the world have become increasingly connected and dependent on each other through the exchange of commodities with the objective to make profit. Virtually every region of the twentieth century world has been an intrinsic part of this world-economy, even the communist states. An approximation of the ideal type of the modern capitalist state, on the other hand, could for the most part of this century only be found in Western Europe, the United States, Japan and Australia.

7 Anthony Giddens in his book Violence and the Nation State offers a useful definition of industrialism. It consists of four main points:

First, the use of inanimate sources of material power in production or circulation of commodities... Second, the mechanisation of production and other economic processes... Third, prevalence of manufacturing production, combining the first two points in regularised fashion. Four, a centralised work place. (Giddens 1985: 138 - 139)

Of course, industrialism must be understood in connection to the interaction between warfare and capitalism. Note that industrialism is not only a result of these two processes, but that it also in turn radically changes their character. Industrialism fundamentally transforms the connections between social life and the material world. This is especially clear in change from the traditional city into the created environment of modern urbanism.

8 Of course, the middle class is by no means inherently more or less democratic than the aristocracy or the working class. Crucial about industrialism is not the creation of a strong middle class or working class, but the distribution of power resources across a larger number of social groups, which made the extension of the political community more likely.

9 Tilly defines capital as: any tangible mobile resources, and enforceable claims on such resources (Tilly 1992: 17).

10 Tilly defines coercion as: all concerted application, threatened or actual, of action that commonly causes loss or damage to the persons or possessions of individuals or groups who are aware of both the action and the potential damage (Tilly 1992: 19).

11 The complications experienced by these countries in the transition to democracy clearly show similarities to the political problems in late nineteenth century Germany and Italy. However, the two trajectories are in one respect fundamentally different. The German and Italian state elite were able to obtain greater autonomy vis-à-vis the other power actors than their French and Spanish colleagues, because they could act in the absence of a fully developed national political arena. Although, the traditional political elite was several times overthrown by revolution in both France and Spain, in the long run it remained extremely influential. The power of the traditional elite in Germany and Italy was by contrast primarily located at the local and regional level, which meant that the central rulers had a lot of freedom of movement at the national level.

12 It is important to realise that this is an ideal typical description of late Medieval Europe. Obviously, it is not always possible to identify the burgers, church, aristocracy or even the crown as clearly distinct and collective actors. However, it is impossible in this text to go into the problems of collective and institutional action.

13 Norbert Elias has done in The Civilising Process (1982) an interesting analysis of this process. He shows how the Carpatian and Valois houses succeeded in forming a state by subjecting the independent duchies and counties. The original part of the analysis is when he connects the different stages of state transformation to the history of mentalities. Elias argues that the expression of very strong emotions was much more common in a situation of fragmented sovereignty, like medieval France, since there were no strong lines of interdependency which extended over the population as a whole. People were organised in tribes, which meant that they only depended on the members of their group. Such a situation promoted extreme rivalry, hatred, and perhaps fatal love stories. Could a play like Romeo and Juliet ever have been set in a peaceful world, in which everyone is happily co-operating?

14 The constant political struggle between the city-states, and the invasions of the kingdoms of France and Spain after 1500 necessitated screwed leadership. It is not surprising that the renaissance Italians were besides great artists and smart merchants also highly innovative in the fields of finance, law, and diplomacy. It is in this context that Machiavelli wrote The Prince, which sums up the prerequisites for the survival of the city-state in a highly competitive environment. Machiavelli gained the experience to write this book in his position as employee of the Florentine chancellery. He was sent to the courts of Louis XII of France, the Habsburg emperor Maximilian, and Cesare Borgia. Cesare later became the model for The Prince. Machiavelli admired him because he was able, starting from scratch, to carve out a state in the middle of Italy. Cesare did this with an enormous willpower, and not to forget the backing of his father, Pope Alexander VI. A famous example of the ruthless leadership of Cesare Borgia is the 'massacre of Senigallia'. Machiavelli was there when Cesare invited four of his least reliable captains to a banquet of apparent reconciliation; he killed two on the spot and sent the others off to be killed elsewhere. This operation restored, according to Machiavelli, Cesare's authority and enabled him to get on with his work of constructing a firmly governed state. (Hale 1990; Bull 1961)

15 This connection is obviously not as straight forward as presented here. European armies did before 1800 provided for a large part in their own means of existence through plunder and extortion. Furthermore, armies were not necessarily part of the apparatus of the state before the development of the national state. Cities or the nobility also raised them, which was for instance the case in Spain and Poland. Both private contracting and local forms of extraction reduced the need for an extensive apparatus of state bureaucracy and finance. (Thompson 1995)

This research project aims to account for the variation between national states in liberal democratic and authoritarian political regimes in nineteenth century Europe. Furthermore, it explains why democracy became a central issue of political contention in most European countries in the course of the nineteenth century and not before this period. The basic assumption is that both problems can be resolved by an analysis of the transformation of European states from the beginning of the sixteenth up to the twentieth century.

The development of representative democracy in nineteenth century Europe has often been characterised as a unique event in world history that cannot be repeated anywhere else in the same fashion. This thesis shows that two conditions made the relatively peaceful and gradual transition to democracy possible. First, the late medieval tradition of power-sharing, co-operation, and negotiations provided the basis on which democratic regimes could gradually be constructed. Second, representation in the modern sense of the word became an option when the national state monopolised violence, taxation and jurisdiction. The analysis at hand will in addition demonstrate that these two conditions were only met in a few European states. In the rest of Europe, the transition to democracy was just as much a struggle as it has been anywhere else in the world.

The first condition for the development of democracy, a tradition of power-sharing, originated from the fragmented sovereignty of late medieval Europe. Medieval states were not able to monopolise power on a permanent basis, as the national state does today. Governance was only possible through the co-operation between the king and the other power actors, the aristocracy, the cities, and the Church. When co-operation became more permanent, power sharing institutions, law, and systems of thought were created that later formed the basis for democracy.

The construction of a national state, which is the second condition for democracy, was the result of the interaction between warfare and capitalist development. The international competition in war, in which European states were engaged from about 1500 onwards, functioned like a selection mechanism in early modern times. Solely national states were able to survive in the European state system. Other states were either transformed into national states or they were destroyed. War was the main source of transformation of European states, however, capitalism provided in the end the means to mobilise larger armies and expand the state apparatus.

Although power-sharing institutions were created throughout most of late medieval Europe and the entire continent was eventually ruled by national states, the transition to democracy was almost everywhere a rather complicated task. The main problem was caused by the fact that the two conditions for the development of democracy, power-sharing and a national state, are based on conflicting principles. Power-sharing originates from the fragmentation of sovereignty, while the national state is constructed through the monopolisation of authority. It was only in a few areas that power-sharing was preserved and a national state created.

Whether the two conditions for democracy were actually satisfied, depended on the character of state transformation in a region. Three paths of state transformation are distinguished, the capital-intensive, the coercion intensive, and the capitalised coercion mode. The capital-intensive trajectory was characterised by small city-states, the coercion-intensive mode by large tribute taking empires and the capitalised coercion path by middle size kingdoms with relatively strong central authority. At the end of the Middle Ages, only the first two types of states existed. It was through the interaction between war and capitalism that both city-states and tribute taking empires were either destroyed or transformed into capitalised coercion states. However, not everywhere in Europe did this process take place at the same time or in the same fashion. The variation in state transformation can be explained by the position of a state in the European system of warfare and the expanding world economy.

A great part of the capital-intensive states was incorporated through warfare by larger territorial states at an early stage of modern history. Only in a few areas, like Italy, the Low Countries, and parts of the German Empire, were cities able to resist the centralisation of authority for a few more centuries; their central position in the European economy gave them enough financial strength to buy protection and privileges. The result was that fragmented sovereignty persisted in these regions, when national states were already established elsewhere. State transformation proceeded differently in the coercion intensive states of Western Europe, which were transformed into capitalised coercion states through the movement of this region to the core of the world economy. Western European kings could obtain the necessary financial resources to create large armies, centralise authority, and construct powerful states. An important consequence of the centralisation of authority was that power-sharing was destroyed in some of these capitalised coercion states in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Power-sharing was not destroyed in the coercion intensive regions of Central and Eastern Europe; in fact, it grew even stronger. The incorporation of parts of Eastern Europe in the periphery of the international economy worked to the advantage of the land-based aristocracy. Rulers were unable to centralise authority or construct a large army, which meant that fragmented sovereignty persisted until the nineteenth century.

The character of state transformation determined whether the two conditions of democracy were met in the various regions of Europe. Based on the absence and presence of the two conditions, four general types of political development can be distinguished in the various European regions. First of all, the conservative path in which a gradual and relatively peaceful transition to democracy took place. This trajectory of political change occurred when both power-sharing was preserved and a national state constructed before representation became a central issue of political contention. It is conservative, because the traditional elite was able to both control the construction of a national state and the political mobilisation of masses. The two examples of this trajectory are Great Britain and the Netherlands. The principles of co-operation and negotiations that functioned in these regions from the late Middle Ages onwards were transplanted during the nineteenth century to the modern national political arena. Liberalism became in this process the ideological force through which the traditional elite slowly integrated other social groups in the existing political community.

The revolutionary trajectory, the second path of political development, took place when a national state had been created before the era of mass politics and the power-sharing tradition was destroyed. New political groups were in that situation forced to wrestle representation directly from the state through revolution. The state elite was unable to slowly integrate new groups in the political community, because the institutional arrangements to do so were absent. The transition to democracy was in this trajectory always complicated, even when a revolution was successful. Political reformers often found it extremely difficult to re-establish order after they had overthrown the previous authoritarian regime. It proved to be even more complex to implement in such a situation the rules of the democratic game, because there was no tradition of power-sharing and co-operation on which could be built. The two principle examples of this path of political development are France and Spain; they were during the nineteenth century characterised by revolution and counterrevolution.

When both conditions of democracy were absent, like in nineteenth century Germany and Italy, the result was a reactionary political development. The state elite obtained in the process of state transformation such autonomy opposite the other power actors that it could resist their attempts to establish greater representation. The elite reached an extremely autonomous position, because a large part of the traditional local and regional elite was left out of the national political game. Moreover, the formation of mass movements was complicated by the question of the legitimacy of the new state. Furthermore, since there was no national tradition of power-sharing the political actors found it hard to co-operate with each other in the quest for greater representation. The result was that authoritarianism persisted into the twentieth century, and that no strong parliamentary tradition could be established.