CIAO DATE: 6/99

Westphalia and China

Charles Tilly

Contentious Politics Series
July 11, 1998

Lazarsfeld Center at Columbia University

At Eurasia’s eastern end, the 1640s brought political upheaval. In 1635 and 1636 bellicose Jurchen khan Hung Taiji of Manchuria had renamed his people Manchus and declared his regime to be the Qing empire. Hung continued his conquests as China’s Ming empire, to Manchuria’s southwest, was facing multiple rebellions from within. Hung died in 1643, but his younger brother Dorgon continued the march on China. When Ming generals called Dorgon to their aid, the Manchus began their conquest of China. In1644, Manchu troops and their Ming allies retook the capital, Beijing, from rebel leader Li Zicheng. Seeing immediately that barbarian Manchus would henceforth dominate his regime, the Ming emperor went to a tree on the slope of Prospect Hill in the Forbidden City, took out a silk scarf, and hanged himself. Troops under Manchu leadership soon began advancing toward Burma, Annam, and the South China Sea. Their masters in Beijing adopted and fortified essentials of the Ming governmental system.

Although Manchu survived as an elite language of ritual and intrigue, the Qing became thoroughly Chinese. The new empire endured through rebellions, wars, and momentous political transformations until revolution toppled it in 1911. For much of that time it was the world’s most influential single political entity, and drew on the world’s richest economy. Only during the nineteenth century, as the long age of contiguous empires gave way to the much briefer era of colonial empires and consolidated states, did Chinese power and well-being fall significantly behind that of Western Europe. Even that recession, we now begin to see, may well have been quite temporary.

What of Europe in the 1640s? At Eurasia’s western end, European armies were devastating each other and the civilian population during the closing phases of what people later called the Thirty Years War. It was, of course, a tangle of many wars: Protestants against Catholics, France against Spain, Habsburgs against their nominal subjects, mercenaries against princes, and a dozen other combinations. The protracted negotiations that 1648 concluded in Münster and Osnabrück reflected the complexity of Europe’s military struggles, and the stakes behind them. The treaties of Westphalia not only settled most of those wars but also locked into place a very different European state system than had preceded it.

Among Europe’s war-weary potentates, only the pope — his authority damaged by concessions to Protestant power — openly rejected the Westphalian settlement. At that moment, the Swiss federation, Transylvania, and the Dutch Republic all received their first international recognition as distinct political actors, as what later generations would call sovereign states. Transylvanian independence did not last long in the face of aggressive Ottoman expansion, but the sort of political entity that sent delegates to Westphalia soon came to predominate in place of the empires, city-states, commercial federations, and other composite forms of previous eras.

Not that Europe settled into stable peace. Suppose we travel the continent in 1650, just two years after the conclusion of Westphalia’s treaties. Spurred by the long continental war’s fiscal and political consequences, Europe has plunged into one of its greatest bursts of civil strife. Touring the British Isles in 1650, we discover a Scotland rebelling openly against English hegemony, and a Scottish military force in northern England backing Charles Stuart’s claim to succeed his father Charles I; just last year, England’s contentious revolutionaries united temporarily to decapitate the elder king Charles. In Ireland, Catholic leaders are battling not only each other but also the English invading force of Oliver Cromwell. (Somehow we are not very surprised to learn that Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, with its eloquent nostalgia for stable authority, is on its way to publication next year).

Nor do we find peace across the Channel this year, what with the newly-recognized Dutch Republic in disaggregation as William II fails in a bid for national power. We find France in the midst of its Fronde as the Prince of Condé and Cardinal Mazarin seek to eliminate each other from the national scene while all sorts of local people rebel against the growing demands of a war-making state. At the same time Catalonia and Portugal enter their eleventh year of open revolt against Castilian power, Savoy trembles in the grip of Waldensian uprisings, Poland and Russia fall prey to multiple rebellions by Cossacks and other inhabitants of their frontier regions, the Ottoman empire writhes in anarchy, and — despite the Treaties of Westphalia — small-scale interstate wars ravage many parts of the continent. Outside of Europe itself, furthermore, Dutch and Portuguese forces are battling fiercely for control over sea lanes and trade in the Indian Ocean. Where sharp splits in polities do not prevail, on the whole, some form of tyranny does. If 1648 marks Europe’s entry into a new era, it is not an era of peace and good government.

Yet epochal 1648 splits Europe’s 700 years between 1298 and 1998 into two instructively contrasting periods of 350 years each. We can imagine that seven-century span as a teeter-totter whose long plank pivots on Westphalia. Differences between the two halves stemmed from changes in the connections that linked Europe with the rest of the globe. The three and a half centuries before 1648 witnessed an enormous increase in the internal integration of European economic, political, and social life as well as the first serious entry of Europeans onto the world stage as traders, conquerors, and colonizers. In that time, Europe started forming a set of states well connected by war and diplomacy, an extensive commercial network, and a significant array of relations outside the continent. After 1648, European industrial, commercial, and colonial expansion temporarily displaced East Asia as the Eurasian pivot. Although Japan’s Edo still probably topped the list of the world’s largest cities in 1700, for example, for the first time in history three of the world’s ten biggest metropolises — Istanbul, London, and Paris — then lay in Europe.

Three hundred and fifty years after Westphalia’s treaties, we find ourselves at the other side of momentous transformations: an unprecedented worldwide burst of urbanization and industrialization, consolidation of almost the entire world’s settled land surface into fewer than two hundred bounded, recognized states, and integration of Europe into a worldwide economy within which the Americas and East Asia now challenge any priority that Europe might once have claimed. Victorious visions of Europe as a self-propelled, rising force do not capture the alterations of global relations that interacted with localized European experiences throughout the seven centuries in question.

Beyond the effects of military struggle as such, war settlements often shape subsequent history. They do not merely ratify the status quo as hostilities cease, but effect a partial dissolution of the participants’ sovereignty — especially when it comes to losers. They engage non-belligerents in a process of rewriting, then confirming, boundaries and rightful rulers. Within Europe, the Congress of Vienna (1814-15) created the Kingdom of the Netherlands, the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont, the Kingdom of Hanover, and a number of other new political entities while redrawing boundaries among all the belligerents. From the Treaty of Versailles and related settlements (1919-20) sprang independent Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Yugoslavia as well as the League of Nations, not to mention the closely related fragmentation of the Russian and Ottoman empires. Westphalia’s treaties of 1648 certainly rival, and may well surpass, Vienna and Versailles in long-term effects.

How can we specify those effects? Let us try a perverse but valuable thought experiment: imagine how else Europe might have changed after 1648, and why it did not proceed in one of those other directions. Let us, that is, construct a counterfactual Europe. Then we can see to what extent the comparison of factual and counterfactual implies strong effects of the Thirty Years War and its settlement on the course of European political history.

Although we could search for our counterfactual in Europe’s byways, failed doctrines, or previous history, why not follow the silken road eastward to China? After all, in land area and population China has long resembled Europe as a whole, China and Europe have been influencing each other actively for a millennium, and the thought experiment will shake us out of the western propensity to think of China as part of a traditional world that changed little until western accomplishments showed China the way to advancement. As Bin Wong declares, “Sustained comparison of Chinese and European patterns of economic development, state formation, and social protest can suggest ways of interpreting historical change in both parts of the world, identify those subjects on which additional historical research may be especially useful, and contribute to the construction of social theory grounded not only in the European historical past but that of other regions as well” (Wong 1997: 7). We can only try.

The counterfactual challenge is serious. In his superb posthumous treatise on all the world’s major polities, Samuel Finer describes China this way:

This polity is completely foreign to anything in the Western tradition since the Greeks. Indeed, it is antithetical. This polity, the prevalent belief systems, and the social structure all came to support one another as never since the high days of Mesopotamian and Egyptian government and emphatically as never in the West. Hence the stability and duration of the Chinese social and political system and the restlessness and lability of the West. Where the latter reposed on freely acting and personally responsible individuals, China reposed on collectivities, where all were responsible for the misdeeds of one another. Where the former conceived of citizens, the Chinese state knew only subjects. The Western tradition embodied the notion of human equality before the law and in the sight of God, and so forth. The Chinese state started from the exactly opposite viewpoint. It postulated, ab initio, that the young deferred to the old, women to men, men to their fathers, fathers to their ancestors, all to the emperor (Finer 1997: I, 442).

Like Romans in Europe, Normans in England, and Ottomans in the Balkans, Chinese potentates built their successive empires through military conquest and response to armed rebellion or external invasion. Europeans, however, generally left much of the military armature in place, either by integrating the conquering organization directly into subsequent civil administration, or by conceding great autonomy to dukes, lieutenants-general, or voivodes within their territories in exchange for tribute, military support, and guarantees of compliance by the subject population.

Chinese rulers did not, on the whole, erect their states around existing frames of military organizations. From about 200 BC Chinese conquerors created empires that accomplished the triple organizational miracle of separating military from civil administration, forming a loyal, competent civilian bureaucracy, and exercising great power over vast territories containing large, heterogeneous populations for centuries at a stretch. The frequency of external attacks, peripheral rebellions, and interstitial banditry only underscore the immensity of Chinese imperial accomplishment.

During the eighteenth century, the Chinese emperor and his entourage ruled some 300 million people through perhaps 20 thousand civil servants, only two thousand of whom worked outside of Beijing (Finer 1997: III, 1149). Chinese rulers created nothing that Europeans would recognize as nation-states, citizenship, or consultation of the governed. We begin to see elements of a counterfactual: a Europe that instead of turning away from empire consolidated into a single massive state. At a time when the European Union and NATO gesture indecisively toward continental unification, the Chinese counterfactual glimmers with interest.

Let us be modest and clear. All we are undertaking is to specify ways that Europe after the 1640s might have moved closer to Chinese forms of politics, rather than farther away, as actually happened. Under what conditions and by what processes would post-Westphalian Europe have moved toward:

• domination by a single encompassing state?
• exclusion of the vast bulk of the population from direct participation in public politics?
• organization of state policy around rigorous but ethically informed collective paternalism?
• political subordination and segmentation of military forces?

To make the exercise sufficiently demanding and useful, we forbid ourselves to invoke any condition or process for which some part of Europe does not provide a substantial precedent between the 1640s and the present. At its worst, the exercise will emphasize the historical distinctiveness of Europe’s paths since 1648. At its best, the exercise will clarify what was at stake in Westphalia during those parlous years of negotiation.

In truth, all four of the crucial tendencies — toward state domination, toward political exclusion, toward collective paternalism, and toward military subordination — occurred repeatedly in different parts of Europe at various times both before and after 1648. Like their Chinese counterparts, Russian emperors from Ivan the Great (1462-1505) onward increased state power by trading confiscated land for military and political support from great landlords, eventually creating armies and service nobilities that depended directly on the tsar’s favor. As in China, military threats to the Russian crown then clustered chiefly around times of royal succession and concentrated at the empire’s geographic periphery. In recognizable parallels to Chinese practice, underpaid state officials augmented their incomes by charging fees for whatever services — or rackets — they could monopolize. Nor was Russia unique in these regards; we can see similar expansions of central power in most of Europe’s great states during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Exclusion of the population from public politics? Despite today’s retrospective accounts of inevitable democratic advance, Europe’s centralizing states regularly suppressed local and regional deliberative assemblies where they found them, and radically restricted political participation at a national scale (te Brake 1998, Prak 1998, Scott 1998). Only popular political struggles of the nineteenth century reversed that trend in such countries as France and Prussia.

Organization of state policy around collective paternalism? Here we are dealing with a rarer commodity in European politics. Rarer, but not absent: nineteenth century Prussian and Austrian regimes, for example, preempted working class bids for power by instituting extensive welfare systems. European state churches commonly dispensed a thin sort of paternalism to those who met their standards of comportment. Although they sometimes generated battles over popular rights, even successive English Poor Laws exuded an odor of paternalism. Most obviously, the consistent exclusion of women from European public politics at a national scale until the twentieth century reveals both literal and figurative paternalism at work.

Political subordination and segmentation of military forces? In this regard, European regimes varied enormously. Military forces continued to play significant independent roles in Iberia and the Balkans until recently, while the last time their autonomous action made a large difference in English domestic politics was during England’s successive seventeenth century revolutions. While military figures such as generals Macmahon, Boulanger, Pétain, and de Gaulle have repeatedly loomed up as possible saviors for French regimes, from Napoleon’s final defeat onward France has generally maintained extensive civilian control over military forces.

We could, of course, restore China’s uniqueness by making all four elements — state domination, political exclusion, collective paternalism, and military subordination — matters of degree and scale. Among European regimes, not even the Roman Empire approached the mass and longevity of Chinese empires. Even Europe’s most authoritarian regimes conceded more rights to the bulk of their citizens than the average Chinese government did. From a European perspective, Chinese imposition of granaries, canals, and mutual surveillance systems at a national scale appear equally astonishing for their presumption and effectiveness. In a country that remained forever at risk to invaders from beyond frontiers and to armed rebels from inside the borders, China’s subordination of state military forces to imperial will has no European parallel. Nevertheless, thinner versions of Chinese political processes did occur in Europe repeatedly after 1298, and even after 1648. To construct our counterfactual, that is all we need.

To make our counterfactual work, we must reverse the Westphalian process, and therefore perhaps the course of the Thirty Years War. We must suppress historically nurtured disbelief. We must construct a Holy Roman Empire that emerged from the war not only dominant within its scattered lands but territorially contiguous and formidable along its frontiers. We must conjure up a sufficiently forceful Habsburg monarch — Philip IV, Ferdinand III, or perhaps even Maximilian I of Bavaria — to ally with the pope in uniting Catholic Europe and reconstructing the empire as its bulwark. We must manage more defeats for Gustavus Adolphus and more victories for Wallenstein as well as my non-ancestor Tilly.

Have I strained your imagination enough? The point is not that all these reversals of seventeenth-century history could easily have happened, much less that Europe’s not becoming like Qing China resulted entirely from mercenaries’ relative prowess between 1618 and 1648. I claim only this:

• Europe shared many political processes with China, but put them together in different sequences, combinations, and environments, with dramatically different consequences.

• Although China stands out historically for the scale and effectiveness of its imperial structure, over the 10,000 years that states of some kind have flourished in our world the sorts of sovereign states westerners now take as natural have been extremely rare and vulnerable, while empires have run much of the earth.

• Behind the Europe that actually emerged from Westphalia we can see shadows of another possible Europe that would have resembled China much more greatly, giving a much longer lease on life to contiguous empires and much less scope to compact sovereign states.

• To some extent, how much Europe as a whole would consolidate in states resembling England, France, or Sweden rather than the Habsburg family domains remained at issue in the time of Westphalia. Only retrospective reasoning makes the sort of state system that Europeans eventually exported to most of the world seem inevitable.

As we reflect on Europe’s future, and the world’s, counterfactual reasoning will help us to see more clearly.

References

Asch, Ronald G. (1997): The Thirty Years War. The Holy Roman Empire and Europe, 1618-48. New York: St. Martin’s.

Bai, Shouyi (1988): ed., Précis d’histoire de Chine. Paris: Economica. 2d edn. Barfield, Thomas J. (1989): The Perilous Frontier. Nomadic Empires and China. New York: Blackwell.

te Brake, Wayne (1998): Shaping History. Ordinary People in European Politics 1500-1700. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Bünger, Karl (1987): “Concluding Remarks on Two Aspects of the Chinese Unitary State as Compared with the European State System,” in Stuart Schram, ed., Foundations and Limits of State Power in China. Published for European Science Foundation by School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London and the Chinese University Press of Hong Kong.

Buoye, Thomas (1993): “From Patrimony to Commodity: Changing Concepts of Land and Social Conflict in Guangdong Province during the Qianlong Reign (1736-1795),” Late Imperial China 14: 33-59.

Crossley, Pamela Kyle (1997): The Manchus. Oxford: Blackwell.

Elvin, Mark (1970): The Pattern of the Chinese Past. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Finer, S.E. (1997): The History of Government from the Earliest Times. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 3 vols.

Goldstone, Jack A. (1991): Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hsiao, Kung-Chuan (1960): Rural China: Imperial Control in the Nineteenth Century. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Huang, Ray (1997): China. A Macro History. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.

Kiser, Edgar & Xiaxi Tong (1992): “Determinants of the Amount and Type of Corruption in State Fiscal Bureaucracies: An Analysis of Late Imperial China,” Comparative Political Studies 25: 300-331.

Lupher, Mark (1996): Power Restructuring in China and Russia. Boulder: Westview.

Mamdani, Mahmood (1996): Citizen and Subject. Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Parker, Geoffrey (1997): ed., The Thirty Years’ War. London: Routledge. 2d edn.

Perry, Elizabeth (1981): Rebels and Revolutionaries in North China, 1848-1948. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Prak, Maarten (1998): “Burghers into Citizens: Urban and National Citizenship in the Netherlands during the Revolutionary Era (c. 1800),” in Michael P. Hanagan & Charles Tilly, eds., Expanding Citizenship, Reconfiguring States. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield.

Ringmar, Erik (1996): Identity, Interest and Action. A Cultural Explanation of Sweden’s Intervention in the Thirty Years War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rosenberg, William G. & Marilyn B. Young (1982): Transforming Russia and China. Revolutionary Struggles in the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press.

Scott, James C. (1998): Seeing Like a State. How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Shue, Vivienne (1988): The Reach of the State. Sketches of the Chinese Body Politic. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Skinner, G. William (1964): “Marketing and Social Structure in Rural China,” Journal of Asian Studies 24: 3-43. (1985): “The Structure of Chinese History,” Journal of Asian Studies 44: 271-292.

Tetlock, Philip E. & Aaron Belkin (1996): eds., Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Wakeman, Frederick Jr. (1966): Strangers at the Gate: Social Disorder in South China, 1839-1861. Berkeley: University of California Press. (1985): The Great Enterprise. The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in Seventeenth-Century China. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2 vols.

Walder, Andrew G. (1986): Communist Neo-Traditionalism. Work and Authority in Chinese Industry. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Whitney, Joseph B.R. (1970): China: Area, Administration, and Nation Building. Chicago: Department of Geography, University of Chicago. Research Paper 123.

Will, Pierre-Étienne & R. Bing Wong (1991): Nourish the People. The State Civilian Granary System in China, 1650-1850. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Wong, R. Bin (1997): China Transformed. Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. (1998): “Citizenship in Chinese History,” in Michael P. Hanagan & Charles Tilly, eds., Expanding Citizenship, Reconfiguring States. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield.