Frontier Justice

by Andy Lamey

  By the beginning of the fourteenth century, France and England were home to recognizably sovereign states. Of the two, France’s road to sovereignty was more gradual, and so more typical of how states would arise elsewhere. In France, the process began in the tenth century, when Hugh Capet was chosen by a group of powerful nobles to occupy a precarious kingship, one that in geographic terms amounted to little more than a dot on the map outside Paris. Three centuries later, after a protracted civil war and much political manoeuvring, Capet’s descendants had vanquished the dukes, expelled the English from most of France and forced a reluctant church to recognize the supremacy of the crown. That supremacy was now based on written Roman law, which had fallen out of use under feudalism. This shift transformed the king into a new type of ruler: one whose authority was partly based on his status as representative of the interests of the realm as a whole. This meant that obedience to the king was no longer based primarily on personal ties. Nor did he make claims to authority beyond France’s borders. Of course, there would still be disputes as to where precisely those borders should be drawn and many other issues. Nevertheless, the foundations of a territorial state had been laid. As Spruyt writes, “The first notions of sovereign authority develop in this period. The French king was regarded as emperor in his own kingdom.”

  Looking back from the perspective of today on the spread of a territorially sovereign government across France, it is tempting to see the new principle of organization as an inevitable response to the chaos and confusion of feudalism. But there was nothing inevitable about it. The rise and spread of sovereign states was not a matter of a new form of political organization springing up and immediately displacing feudalism. It was a contested and long-term process, one with many ups and downs, sudden expansions and dramatic setbacks. This is evident in the fact that just as France was evolving into a sovereign state, other parts of Europe were giving rise to two other forms of political organization, both of which existed alongside sovereign states for hundreds of years.

  The first was the city state, which existed in Italy between the tenth and sixteenth centuries. Historians have long pointed out that, despite the name, city states were not just smaller versions of sovereign states. When a city state conquered a smaller town, it would often allow the annexed region to maintain some independence (if only because the town’s occupants resented being taken over). As a result, there was no mutually agreed-upon single source of authority.

  But an even more important contrast comes to light when we recall that the French king gradually spread his authority over his rivals, and eventually came to represent the interests of the kingdom itself. He was in a sense above politics, in that he could mediate disputes among his subjects. This never happened in city states such as Venice or Milan, where political life was defined by constant factionalism. Rival noble families, made up of both biological relations and people who adopted a family name for political reasons, would form armed guards known as consorterie to do battle with one another. An entire family would live in adjoining houses around a tower, into which they would retreat when attacked, and from which they would launch projectiles onto invaders below. Blood feuds between families were frequent, a feature of city-state life Shakespeare immortalized in Romeo and Juliet, with its depiction of Montagues and Capulets fighting in the streets of Verona. When one family obtained the political upper hand, its rivals would regard it as a temporary setback and continue to scheme. Thus, when one faction came into power, it was always at the expense of another, unlike in France, where the king occupied an independent office above factional interests. In the city states, with their constant disputes over authority, an echo of feudalism always remained.

  A political institution even more different from the sovereign state was the city league, which arose in the twelfth century around the North and Baltic seas. Merchant seamen from what are now Germany and Scandinavia found it easier to ward off pirates by sailing in convoys, and when they arrived in foreign ports they would work together in order to receive better treatment from customs agents and other authorities. The same merchants were often politically influential in their hometowns, and when they returned home the guild-like organization they used at sea became a new form of government on dry land. A group of towns would band together by pledging to come to each other’s aid and by electing a league council to make collective decisions.

  City leagues could grow to become quite powerful. In 1385, for example, the Swabian-Rhenish League was capable of mustering an army of ten thousand soldiers. More powerful still was the Hanseatic League, which eventually swelled to include almost two hundred towns. It was strong enough not only to control Baltic and North Sea trade but to depose a foreign king when it had to. As in other city leagues, Hanseatic laws often reflected the monopoly-seeking interests of merchants. Any citizen of a Hanse town who struck up a business venture with a non-member, for example, would lose two fingers for the privilege of doing so.

  The Hanseatic League did many of the things we now associate with national governments. It signed treaties, collected revenues, raised an army, passed laws and regulated social life. Yet it was not organized around a single supreme authority. Although member towns deferred to the league council on many matters, they could act independently when it came to local affairs. (In practice this meant that some towns were autonomous while others were under the partial control of a larger town from the same league, or of a local lord.) Moreover, city leagues had no borders. Member towns were often separated by large tracts of land that were not subject to their control, an arrangement that has caused them to be termed “islands of urban law in a feudal sea.” Towns that displeased the league council could also be threatened with expulsion, while others might be invited to join. This made the leagues in some ways similar to empires, in that they acknowledged no formal limits on how much they might expand.

  Chronicling the rise of the state system as a whole would require recounting the history of many different states and the influence of everything from broad historical trends such as the rise of Protestantism to the particular decisions of individual rulers. That is not a story I can do justice to here. Instead, I will merely note that in addition to all the historical contingencies that brought an international system of states into being, there were two general considerations that help explain why sovereign states squeezed out both non-territorial forms of organization, such as feudalism and city leagues, and the territorially based but fractured form of authority represented by city states.

  The first consideration has to do with life inside a sovereign state. Take something as seemingly unremarkable as weights and measures. If John Toul ever travelled outside his home region, he could expect to encounter hundreds of different types of measurement with thousands of local variations. All across Europe, units of measurement were set by local lords, who did so as both a form of social control and a money-maker. (Among other perks, lords could charge for the use of the right scales.) The result was that every town had its own way of measuring and weighing goods, based on countless different criteria: human body parts such as the foot, the size of a barrel or even the space between the knees of a statue outside a town hall. This chaotic arrangement was typical of medieval life as a whole, during which local authorities minted their own coins, imposed their own tolls and administered their own (often idiosyncratic) laws. Among other problems, the lack of standardization was a nightmare for travelling merchants, who were easily cheated in every new town.

  A major advantage of living in a sovereign state was that it brought an end to the chaos of localism. As far back as the thirteenth century in France, Louis IX decreed that royal coins would be good throughout his realm. After that only a few powerful nobles continued to produce their own currencies, which were now confined to their own lands and had to be equal in value to royal tender. French kings also gradually made the law less arbitrary. Louis IX, for example, abolished trial by combat, and his successors began to enforce written property r
ights. The spread of uniform weights and measures took longer, but by the time of the French Revolution, although localism still ruled the countryside, standardization had caught on in towns. Slowly, local customs and tolls also began to disappear, as the kings developed a centralized system of tax collection. The result was that domestic and foreign merchants knew what to expect across France. The interests of kings and merchants formed a virtuous circle: as the crown’s authority spread, it made commercial life more predictable and profitable, which increased taxes and contributed to the king’s coffers.

  This never happened in city states or city leagues. In Italy, conquest by larger cities meant that the two to three hundred city states that existed in the thirteenth century had shrunk to a dozen by the fifteenth. A powerful city like Venice would treat its conquered regions as a resource to be plundered rather than a fully integrated territory. The hinterlands resented the authority of the Dominante, or dominant city, and this made it impossible to standardize laws or anything else. Moreover, whenever a new faction of nobles came to power in the dominant city, they would issue decrees designed to advance their own short-term interests rather than that of the city state as a whole—regulations that would stay in effect only until the next family took over. Similar problems were evident in the Hanseatic League, whose member towns continued to apply their own measurements and laws. If the league council wanted to introduce uniform standards, they would need to be enforced by the same town councils that were dominated by local merchants—the group that often gained the most from localism and so had the least incentive to change.

  This, then, was a major reason sovereign states gradually displaced other forms of government: on both a political and economic level, they represented a more efficient form of internal organization. As these benefits became clear over time, it provided people living outside sovereign states with a model to imitate. Why put up with the confusion of localism when there was new way of doing things emanating from the neighbouring kingdom? The appeal of sovereignty was obvious to merchants who did business over long distances, and who became one of sovereignty’s early constituencies. They were hardly the only ones to note sovereignty’s advantages, however. So did political elites across Europe. “Political entrepreneurs copy institutions they perceive to be successful,” Spruyt notes. “Copying thus increases one’s chances at relative success. It also enables such elites to be recognized as equals with the state system.” As these groups and others became aware of the potential benefits, the principle of state sovereignty slowly began to spread across the continent.

  But there was a second factor behind the rise of a system of sovereign states. It had to do with the way sovereign states related to other states. Crucially, sovereign states have always found it easiest to conduct foreign relations with other sovereign states.

  The reason for this preference can be seen by recalling what it was like to sign a treaty with a city league. Because member towns had so much autonomy, it was often difficult for a central council to enforce its decisions. A particular town might not honour a pledge to send troops, or ignore a league decree concerning trade, or even go so far as to negotiate its own treaty with a foreign commercial power such as England. The constant threat of individual towns disregarding league decisions meant that just who the Hanseatic League represented eventually became something of a mystery. In the sixteenth century, for example, England repeatedly demanded a list of Hansa cities so it could know which ships were entitled to special customs duties in English ports. The league refused to supply the list, because it feared the English government would seek out its own arrangements with individual towns. Needless to say, this hurt the league’s ability to function as a cohesive unit. A different version of the same problem occurred when league towns eventually came to occupy territory inside sovereign states. After some Hanse towns came to be part of Denmark, for example, it only exacerbated the inability of the Hanseatic council to make Danish member towns obey its decrees.

  Signing a treaty with a sovereign state was a dream by comparison. For starters, representatives of foreign governments knew who to negotiate with, namely, the sovereign, and did not need to worry about side deals with sub-national entities. Moreover, because states had set borders, it was clear where the treaty would apply. But perhaps the biggest advantage was that sovereign states had the power to domestically enforce the treaties they signed. Although individual states would sometimes fail to honour a treaty, in general they were more stable and reliable partners to negotiate with compared with feudal lords, city leagues or even city states. Sovereign states thus preferred to deal with other sovereign states, resulting in what has been called a “process of mutual empowerment,” as states reciprocally recognized each other’s sovereignty while withholding recognition from non-states.

  The external recognition that early states bestowed on one another is worth stressing, as there is a natural temptation to associate the rise of states with the triumph of military might. But that is not really why they triumphed. At different times city leagues and city states were capable of mustering armies more powerful than those of contemporaneous countries. Moreover, there has always been wide variation in the size and power of states, evident today in the vastly different resources of China and Liechtenstein. Entry into the state system is based on a sovereign government’s recognized ability to exercise authority over a particular territory, regardless of that territory’s size, and whether or not that government can crush its neighbours on the battlefield.

  It has long been common to point to a single year, 1648, as the key turning point in the rise of the modern state system. This was when European diplomats signed two treaties collectively known as the Peace of Westphalia, which brought an end to the Thirty Years War, one of the most devastating European conflicts of all time. Before Westphalia, England, France and Sweden already functioned as sovereign states, and the Peace contributed to Denmark and Switzerland’s soon achieving the same status. Westphalia is significant because it was the first time states recognized each other as formal equals. In so doing, they brought an end to the constant religious interference and war that had long occurred between Catholic and Protestant rulers (war between Christians and Muslims, as we know all too well, would prove to be a different story). This more or less marked the beginning of international relations as we understand it today, as a sphere in which political power is exercised by territorially autonomous governments.

  The flip side of Westphalia’s significance is that it marked the beginning of the end for non-state entities. This was perhaps clearest in the case of the Holy Roman Empire. Although the empire was not formally abolished until 1806, for practical purposes, Westphalia marked its epitaph. As historian John Gagliardo has observed, “The empire after 1648 was never again to function to any significant extent as a real supraterritorial government.” When the treaty’s negotiators refused to recognize the political authority of the church, it caused the pope to angrily denounce the Peace as “null, void, invalid, iniquitous, unjust, damnable, reprobate, inane, empty of meaning and effect for all time”—but all to no effect. As for the Hanseatic League, its entreaties to be recognized as an equal at Westphalia were simply ignored (as one diplomat sniffed, “One does not really know what the Hansa in essence is”). German princes, sensing the dawn of a new order, soon began to present themselves not as feudal lords, but as rulers of tiny sovereign principalities.

  The international lawyer Leo Gross once described Westphalia as “the end of an epoch and the opening of another. It represents the majestic portal which leads from the old world into the new world.” Such a high-flown description is misleading if we take it to suggest that the theory and practice of sovereign statehood arrived simultaneously. In reality, the lawyers and ambassadors who negotiated the Peace did not so much consciously design a system of sovereign states as stumble into one. Their treaties never mention sovereignty as a general principle, and instead consist of a long series of settlements regarding the ri
ghts of religious minorities, various territorial squabbles and other issues of local concern. This gradually led to a change in the practice of politics that was given theoretical expression only much later, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when philosophers such as Emeric de Vattel began to put forward non-intervention and the equality of states as principles of international relations.

  At a practical level, moreover, there also continued to be considerable variation in how sovereignty was implemented after Westphalia. It was not until the nineteenth century, for example, that European states formally recognized the sovereignty of a non-Christian entity, the Ottoman Empire. There would also be new forms of government still to come that defied the logic of sovereignty. During the era of colonialism, parts of Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere became “protectorates” of European powers, which would control the colony’s foreign, but not domestic, policy. This was a break from sovereignty in that authority was divided between two equally ultimate sources. Although other colonies, those that were not protectorates, technically upheld the logic of sovereignty in that they were under the control of one (overseas) authority, it was not until the 1960s and the rise of decolonization that sovereignty really became a global institution. Only now sovereignty’s trappings were enjoyed not merely by white Europeans and their descendants and neighbours but by the peoples of Africa and Asia as well.