knowing anything about existing or previously existing indigenous tribal boundaries or polities (Davidson, 1992) and unaware of its urban past (Davidson, 1987). The story of state making is in the case of Europe indige- nous; in the case of much of the rest of the world, at first sight it appears simply imposed.
this happened, but it is not our intention to summarize scholarly debates, so here it is worthwhile to mention at least one explanation that is less common than other explanations. In a recent article Andreas Wimmer and Yuval Feinstein provided an overview of the literature concerning why the nation-state (as they call it) proliferated across the globe. While so far we assumed that this happened because of colonization, that is, one of the traditional explanations, they find that the nation-state spread across the globe because of contagion: nation-state development in one area spilled over to adjacent areas (2010, p. 770). It is thus that they conclude upon careful quantitative analyses of various factors that “the almost universal adoption of the nation-state form . . . emerges from local and regional processes that are not coordinated or causally produced by global social forces.”(Wimmer and Feinstein, 2010, p. 785) Wefind this conclu- sion all the more important in light of the argument we made in Chapter 2.
We can infer from the discussion in Section 2 that state making is a process that has international and domestic dimensions. State making is also a process with exogenous and endogenous dimensions (see Table 4.1).
Exogenous models of state making concern political centralization, the process whereby the political power within one territory is concentrated in the hands of one person and/or one body (such as governing institutions).
Power in society is initially exogenous to government, and the process of concentrating that power into the hands and offices of actors clearly defined as governmental is slow but inescapable. Consider the case of medieval France. The king as overlord had little political power over the regional dukes. They had political power in their own right. Once the
TABLE 4.1. PATTERNS OF STATE-MAKING (ADAPTED FROM RAADSCHELDERS, 2003, P. 144)
Exogenous: Political Centralization
Endogenous:
Administrative Centralization International Sovereignty; independence
vis-à-vis other states
Declining independence;
loss of sovereignty;
integration of states Domestic Relation between state and
government on the one hand and society on the other
Primacy of politics;
political-administrative relations
French kings succeeded in subordinating the regional political powers under their crown, we can say that political power has centralized. The international dimension is that the political institutions of the territory of that state are acknowledged as authoritative by peers. When political actors of a state are not regarded as authoritative, which is usually because of crimes against humanity or extreme despotism, then the international community may look for another set of actors. Domestically a state must be accepted as the only actor that can make binding decisions on behalf of all people living in its borders, and that includes expatriates (those working in the foreign service) as well as people with a foreign nationality (e.g., resident aliens, for instance, in the United States).
There are two types of exogenous models. The English-French pattern is characterized by early unification of the territory under one ruler whose authority is slowly expanded from one center outward. Political centraliza- tion is easier when the territory is well defined in terms of physical boundaries such as seas or mountain ranges. The German pattern is one of late unification, mainly because of great diversity of landscape and societies. The German lands had been ruled by hundreds of states since the Middle Ages, but because of conquest, marriage, and consolidation, there were about 300 left in 1800, loosely held together by the Holy Roman Empire. At the Vienna Conference in 1815 that empire was dissolved and replaced by a German Confederacy of 39 states. Fifty-six years later the German Empire was created out of 27 constituent territories. Earlier we saw that this pattern is also characteristic for Italy.
Endogenous models are focused on administrative centralization, the process through which all administrative activity is subjected to the political authority of one person or body. We call these models endogenous because administration in government is subjected to institutional and/or individ- ual actors who are invested with political power. Thus, administration is internal to government. The core domestic feature of endogenous models is that of the primacy of politics over administration. The international dimension is somewhat awkward, in that increased intertwinement of states results in loss of independence and sovereignty to some degree. Also, even though political officeholders still are“on top,”in the international arena expert civil servants increasingly participate in policy and decision making.
This is especially clear in the European Union.
As with the exogenous models, there are two types of endogenous models.
In the English model state making proceeds on the basis of a unified yet decentralized structure that operates on the basis of a strong and cooperative local government. It also features a tradition of amateur government, which is
a government that is run by gentlemen and does not require many experts.
Given the fairly substantial autonomy of subnational jurisdictions, most of these amateurs are recruited from among the local or regional landed elites.
This pattern is also found in the Dutch Republic up to the late eighteenth century. A tradition of amateur government in England actually lasted until the 1960s, given the Oxbridge background (history, philosophy, languages) that Whitehall civil servants were expected to have. Wefind a tradition of amateur government also in the United States up to the late nineteenth century. However, this characterization is somewhat stereotypical and depends too much on the contrast between the English and American experience on the one hand and the French and German experience on the other. English administrators were not that amateurish, and neither were their American brethren (Fischer and Lundgreen, 1975, p. 460; Cook, 2012).
The German-French pattern is one with a unified and centralized adminis- trative structure, a subordinate subnational government, and a class of civil servants trained in specific administrative skills. This model emerged in the second half of the seventeenth century, and the publication of the first handbooks of public administration and the creation of university chairs in public administration illustrate this development. In fact, public adminis- tration as a pursuit and study becomes more and more secular in orientation and clearly linked to the state. To understand how this came about we need a brief excursion into the separation of church and state.