Power Politics And State Formation In The Twentieth Century

From Kurdistan to Somaliland, Xinjiang to South Yemen, all secessionist movements hope to secure newly independent states of their own. Most will not prevail. The existing scholarly wisdom provides one explanation for success, based on authority and control within the nascent states. With the aid of an expansive new dataset and detailed case studies, this book provides an alternative account. It argues that the strongest members of the international community have a decisive influence over whether today's secessionists become countries tomorrow and that, most often, their support is conditioned on parochial political considerations.

"Highly readable, vastly informative, and richly illustrated from the first page to the last"--Booklist. From the Boer War to the Russian Revolution, from the Great Depression to the atomic bomb, from the start of the Cold War to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the full sweep of twentieth-century political history spills from the pages of this lavishly illustrated volume. Written and edited by some of the finest historians of our times (including William McNeill and Paul Kennedy), this colorful, oversized volume recounts the events of our century in a narrative that is both readable and intelligent. Each chapter covers approximately a decade and a half and features a time chart of events the world over; boxed special focus sections that address key topics (such as the Marshall Plan and the Kennedy assassination); datafiles with graphs and charts of important statistics; and clear, enjoyable discussions of the major international developments.

Neoliberalism has been the reigning ideology of our era. For the past four decades, almost every real-world event of any consequence has been traced to the supposedly omnipresent influence of neoliberalism. Instead, this book argues that states across the world have actually grown in scope and reach. The authors in this volume contest the view that the past three decades have been marked by the diminution of the state in the face of neoliberalism. They argue instead that we are witnessing a new phase of state formation, which revolves around hybrid rule—that is, a more expansive form of state formation that works through privatization and seeks pacification and depoliticization as instrumental to enhancing state power. Contributors argue that that the process of hybridization, and hybrid rule point towards a convergence on a more authoritarian capitalist regime type, possibly, but not necessarily, more closely aligned with the Beijing model—one toward which even the United States, with its penchant for surveillance and discipline, appears to be moving. This volume will shed new light on evolving public-private relations, and the changing nature of power and political authority in the 21st century and will be of interest to students and scholars of IPE, international relations and political theory.

Winner of the American Sociological Association PEWS Award (1995) for Distinguished Scholarship The Long Twentieth Century traces the epochal shifts in the relationship between capital accumulation and state formation over a 700-year period. Giovanni Arrighi masterfully synthesizes social theory, comparative history and historical narrative in this account of the structures and agencies which have shaped the course of world history over the millennium. Borrowing from Braudel, Arrighi argues that the history of capitalism has unfolded as a succession of "long centuries"—ages during which a hegemonic power deploying a novel combination of economic and political networks secured control over an expanding world-economic space. The modest beginnings, rise and violent unravel-ing of the links forged between capital, state power, and geopolitics by hegemonic classes and states are explored with dramatic intensity. From this perspective, Arrighi explains the changing fortunes of Florentine, Venetian, Genoese, Dutch, English, and finally American capitalism. The book concludes with an examination of the forces which have shaped and are now poised to undermine America's world power.

Looking at the Latin American liberal project during the century of postindependence, this collection of original essays draws attention to an underappreciated dilemma confronting liberals: idealistic visions and fiscal restraints. Liberals, Politics, and Power focuses on the inventiveness of nineteenth-century Latin Americans who applied liberal ideology to the founding and maintenance of new states. The impact of liberalism in Latin America, the contributors show, is best understood against the larger backdrop of struggles that pitted regional demands against the pressures of foreign finance, a powerful church against a decentralized state, and aristocratic desire to retain privilege against rising demands for social mobility. Moving beyond the traditional historiographical division between Eurocentric and dependency theories, the essays attempt to account for a uniquely Latin American liberal ideology and politics by exploring the political dynamics of such countries as Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, and Peru. Contributors discuss liberal efforts to build a viable legal order through elections and to implement a means of public finance that could fund the states' operations. Essays that span the entire century address issues such as the emergence of caudillos, the role of artisans, and popular participation in elections in light of fiscal, and other, impediments to progress. In their introduction, Vincent C. Peloso and Barbara A. Tenenbaum provide a hemispheric overview of liberalism that illustrates its similarities across Latin America. By exploring the liberal constitutional and economic order lying beneath apparently dictatorial states, this pathbreaking volume underlines the importance of fiscal policy in the fashioning of state power. Liberals, Politics, and Power serves not only as a guide to the liberal principles and practices that governed state formation in nineteenth-century Latin America but also as a means to evaluate the complex relationship between ideas and practical politics.

Featuring a sweeping array of essays from scholars of state formation and development, this book presents an overview of approaches to studying the history of the state. Focusing on the question of state formation, this volume takes a particular look at the beginnings, structures, and constant reforming of state power. Not only do the contributors draw upon both modernist and postmodernist theoretical perspectives, they also address the topic from a global standpoint, examining states from all areas of the world. In their diverse and thorough exploration of state building, the authors cross the theoretical, geographic, and chronological boundaries that traditionally shape this field in order to rethink the customary macro and micro approaches to the study of state building and make the case for global histories of both pre-modern and modern state formations.

The international relations of the Middle East have long been dominated by uncertainty and conflict. External intervention, interstate war, political upheaval and interethnic violence are compounded by the vagaries of oil prices and the claims of military, nationalist and religious movements. The purpose of this book is to set this region and its conflicts in context, providing on the one hand a historical introduction to its character and problems, and on the other a reasoned analysis of its politics. In an engagement with both the study of the Middle East and the theoretical analysis of international relations, the author, who is one of the best known and most authoritative scholars writing on the region today, offers a compelling and original interpretation. Written in a clear, accessible and interactive style, the book is designed for students, policymakers, and the general reader.

Everyday Forms of State Formation is the first book to systematically examine the relationship between popular cultures and state formation in revolutionary and post-revolutionary Mexico. While most accounts have emphasized either the role of peasants and peasant rebellions or that of state formation in Mexico's past, these original essays reveal the state's day-to-day engagement with grassroots society by examining popular cultures and forms of the state simultaneously and in relation to one another. Structured in the form of a dialogue between a distinguished array of Mexicanists and comparative social theorists, this volume boldly reassesses past analyses of the Mexican revolution and suggests new directions for future study. Showcasing a wealth of original archival and ethnographic research, this collection provides a new and deeper understanding of Mexico's revolutionary experience. It also speaks more broadly to a problem of extraordinary contemporary relevance: the manner in which local societies and self-proclaimed "revolutionary" states are articulated historically. The result is a unique collection bridging social history, anthropology, historical sociology, and cultural studies in its formulation of new approaches for rethinking the multifaceted relationship between power, culture, and resistance. Contributors. Ana María Alonso, Armando Bartra, Marjorie Becker, Barry Carr, Philip Corrigan, Romana Falcón, Gilbert M. Joseph, Alan Knight, Florencia E. Mallon, Daniel Nugent, Elsie Rockwell, William Roseberry, Jan Rus, Derek Sayer, James C. Scott

This is a history of power politics from the construction of the German battlefleet to Gorbachev's new thinking. The unwillingness of all the Great Powers to recognize that war, in Ivan Bloch's 1899 phrase, had become impossible except at the price of suicide, resulted in two unprecedentedly great wars. These in turn gave impetus to a decline of power politics which gathered pace after 1945. Nuclear weapons imposed a straitjacket which Soviet revisionism was unable to break out of. Moral revulsion, technological advance and economic growth facilitated the emergence of a normbased accomodatory culture, which now offers a basis for a wider post-Cold War order.

This re-issued work, first published in 1959, is a collection of essays by British historian Max Beloff, designed to help us to understand and interpret the political problems of the twentieth century. The essays are divided into three key areas: the challenges and limitations of interpretation from a historian's perspective, the appropriate scale for political activity and organisation in the modern world, and the emergence of the United States of America as the most powerful nation on the planet.