The Sovereign State And Its Competitors

Download or read book The Sovereign State and Its Competitors written by Hendrik Spruyt and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present international system, composed for the most part of sovereign, territorial states, is often viewed as the inevitable outcome of historical development. Hendrik Spruyt argues that there was nothing inevitable about the rise of the state system, however. Examining the competing institutions that arose during the decline of feudalism--among them urban leagues, independent communes, city states, and sovereign monarchies--Spruyt disposes of the familiar claim that the superior size and war-making ability of the sovereign nation-state made it the natural successor to the feudal system. The author argues that feudalism did not give way to any single successor institution in simple linear fashion. Instead, individuals created a variety of institutional forms, such as the sovereign, territorial state in France, the Hanseatic League, and the Italian city-states, in reaction to a dramatic change in the medieval economic environment. Only in a subsequent selective phase of institutional evolution did sovereign, territorial authority prove to have significant institutional advantages over its rivals. Sovereign authority proved to be more successful in organizing domestic society and structuring external affairs. Spruyt's interdisciplinary approach not only has important implications for change in the state system in our time, but also presents a novel analysis of the general dynamics of institutional change.

Download or read book The Sovereign State and Its Competitors written by Hendrik Spruyt and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: . Spruyt's interdisciplinary approach not only has important implications for change in the state system in our time, but also presents a novel analysis of the dynamics of institutional change.

Download or read book Contracting States written by Alexander Cooley and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-04-20 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Increasingly today nation-states are entering into agreements that involve the sharing or surrendering of parts of their sovereign powers and often leave the cession of authority incomplete or vague. But until now, we have known surprisingly little about how international actors design and implement these mixed-sovereignty arrangements. Contracting States uses the concept of "incomplete contracts"--agreements that are intentionally ambiguous and subject to future renegotiation--to explain how states divide and transfer their sovereign territory and functions, and demonstrate why some of these arrangements offer stable and lasting solutions while others ultimately collapse. Building on important advances in economics and law, Alexander Cooley and Hendrik Spruyt develop a highly original, interdisciplinary approach and apply it to a broad range of cases involving international sovereign political integration and disintegration. The authors reveal the importance of incomplete contracting in the decolonization of territories once held by Europe and the Soviet Union; U.S. overseas military basing agreements with host countries; and in regional economic-integration agreements such as the European Union. Cooley and Spruyt examine contemporary problems such as the Arab-Israeli dispute over water resources, and show why the international community inadequately prepared for Kosovo's independence. Contracting States provides guidance to international policymakers about how states with equally legitimate claims on the same territory or asset can create flexible, durable solutions and avoid violent conflict.

Download or read book The Sovereignty Cartel written by J. Samuel Barkin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-12 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sovereignty is the subject of many debates in international relations. Is it the source of state authority or a description of it? What is its history? Is it strengthening or weakening? Is it changing, and how? This book addresses these questions, but focuses on one less frequently addressed: what makes state sovereignty possible? The Sovereignty Cartel argues that sovereignty is built on state collusion – states work together to privilege sovereignty in global politics, because they benefit from sovereignty's exclusivity. This book explores this collusive behavior in international law, international political economy, international security, and migration and citizenship. In all these areas, states accord rights to other states, regardless of relative power, relative wealth, or relative position. Sovereignty, as a (changing) set of property rights for which states collude, accounts for this behavior not as anomaly (as other theories would) but instead as fundamental to the sovereign states system.

Download or read book An Essay on the Modern State written by Christopher W. Morris and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-07-29 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This important book is the first serious philosophical examination of the modern state. It inquires into the justification of this particular form of political society. It asks whether all states are "nation-states," what are the alternative ways of organizing society, and which conditions make a state legitimate. The author concludes that, while states can be legitimate, they typically fail to have the powers (e.g. sovereignity) that they claim. Christopher Morris has written a book that will command the attention of political philosophers, political scientists, legal theorists, and specialists in international relations.

Download or read book War and the Rise of the State written by Bruce D. Porter and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2002-02-01 with total page 663 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: States make war, but war also makes states. As Publishers Weekly notes, “Porter, a political scientist at Brigham Young University, demonstrates that wars have been catalysts for increasing the size and power of Western governments since the Renaissance. The state’s monopoly of effective violence has diminished not only individual rights and liberties, but also the ability of local communities and private associates to challenge the centralization of authority. Porter’s originality lies in his thesis that war, breaking down barriers of class, gender, ethnicity, and ideology, also contributes to meritocracy, mobility, and, above all, democratization. Porter also posits the emergence of the “Scientific Warfare State,” a political system in which advanced technology would render obsolete mass participation in war. This provocative study merits wide circulation and serious discussion.”

Download or read book The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe written by Daniel H. Nexon and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-03-31 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars have long argued over whether the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which ended more than a century of religious conflict arising from the Protestant Reformations, inaugurated the modern sovereign-state system. But they largely ignore a more fundamental question: why did the emergence of new forms of religious heterodoxy during the Reformations spark such violent upheaval and nearly topple the old political order? In this book, Daniel Nexon demonstrates that the answer lies in understanding how the mobilization of transnational religious movements intersects with--and can destabilize--imperial forms of rule. Taking a fresh look at the pivotal events of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--including the Schmalkaldic War, the Dutch Revolt, and the Thirty Years' War--Nexon argues that early modern "composite" political communities had more in common with empires than with modern states, and introduces a theory of imperial dynamics that explains how religious movements altered Europe's balance of power. He shows how the Reformations gave rise to crosscutting religious networks that undermined the ability of early modern European rulers to divide and contain local resistance to their authority. In doing so, the Reformations produced a series of crises in the European order and crippled the Habsburg bid for hegemony. Nexon's account of these processes provides a theoretical and analytic framework that not only challenges the way international relations scholars think about state formation and international change, but enables us to better understand global politics today.