The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems Change.

• Author: Bouckaert, Boudewijn

By Hendrik Spruyt Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994. Pp. 288. $16.95.

Globalization, the "G" word of this decade, raises many challenges to the international system of nation-states. It opens the possibility--if not in political reality; then at least in our imaginations--that this network of institutions populated by national politicians, bureaucrats, warriors, and judges will gradually become less important relative to the transnational institutions and elites of the global economy.

Viewed from this globalist perspective, Hendrik Spruyt's book constitutes an intellectual "scoop," for it provides us with penetrating insights into the emergence of the nation-state and the international system of which it forms the unit. If globalization is not a mere fantasy--and there are grounds for thinking it is not; some economists have expressed strong doubts about the future of the nation-state--then it is certainly useful to understand the processes by which the system whose virtual disappearance we are now contemplating became established initially.

Spruyt's book covers the evolution of domestic and international political institutions and relations in Europe from the late Middle Ages until the seventeenth century. His analysis is quite original in at least three ways.

First, Spruyt rejects the dominant two-stage view of the emergence of the nation-state. According to this view, the nation-state emerged from feudalism either because it benefited from economics of scale in warfare, as the neorealists suppose, or because it permitted the creation of larger markets for the bourgeoisie, as the Marxists suppose. In such a view the nation-state appears as the only feasible outcome in the institutional evolution of the Middle Ages; hence historians of that epoch concentrate on finding the causal antecedents of nation-states. Spruyt argues convincingly against the narrowing character of this approach. He maintains that in the late Middle Ages (the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) three viable nonfeudal institutional alternatives presented themselves: nation-states (especially France), city leagues (especially the Hanseatic League), and city-states (especially those in Italy). Full recognition of late-medieval institutional pluralism fundamentally changes the question of the emergence of the nation-state. No longer does one ask why the nation-state succeeded feudalism. Instead, one asks why the nation-state rather than one of the alternatives proved a more stable successor to feudalism.

Second, in his analysis Spruyt links the domestic and international dimensions of politics. Because of the compartmentalization of the social sciences, these dimensions often receive separate study. Spruyt emphasizes that the predominance of the nation-state arose not only from the independent evolution in several territories but also from the development of a system of states throughout Europe. Once some nation states had become firmly established, they developed a system of treaties and characteristics (e.g., diplomats and fixed borders) from which nonstate organizations were gradually weeded out because their structures were more (as with the city leagues) or less (as with the city-states) incompatible with the "game" among the nation-states. This insight is crucial to understanding why the "nationalization" of politics in Europe gained increasing momentum after the fifteenth century, ultimately establishing itself as the single mode of politics in the nineteenth century Once some identically structured partners had emerged, relationships between them became easier, placing pressure on the nonstate areas to adopt similar structures in order to "sit at...