Category Archives: State Formation

Empires versus Nation-States

16 Sunday Jan 2022

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What’s the difference between a country and an empire?

It depends. Annoyingly, “empire” is one of those terms that picks up several different meanings, and gets used in different contexts. So first we have to decide, “Why do we want to know?”

In this blog, we focus on worldbuilding for fiction writers. So to me, “empire” is useful as a concept when it helps you think about complex ideas in a straightforward way, and make cooler invented worlds. Let’s talk, therefore, about three lenses through which we can think about an “empire” compared to a “state”: indirect versus direct control; multi-national populations versus a single nation; or rule for the benefit of the imperial class/caste at the expense of the subject peoples, versus rule for the (nominal) benefit of all subjects.

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One way you can think about an empire is that it controls a bunch of smaller cities or even states, but not directly. Instead of levying taxes on individuals, an empire might levy tribute on an entire town, or even a whole region or state. How the tribute is collected, and how its burdens are allocated between people or social classes, is not the empire’s concern; these decisions are usually made by local authorities from the native population. Similarly, law and order might still be run by the natives, subject to the dictates of the empire; if matters are getting out of hand, an imperial legion might sweep through to put some heads on spikes, pour encourager les autres, and perhaps replace the local leadership with more cooperative local personnel. But usually, the empire doesn’t want to be bothered, beyond a necessary minimum.

By contrast, a state (in this lens) has direct control over its populace, applying taxes and laws on a more granular basis. Where an empire wants most of the benefits of dominating people without having to worry about controlling them, and having a large staff of functionaries, the state exerts more control, with a more developed staff of bureaucrats and enforcers to do the controlling.

This is just one way to think about empires. But if this is the distinction you are looking for, you now have terminology to express what you mean.

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Another way to think about an empire is in contrast to the nation-state: where the state is inhabited predominantly by people who are part of a single nation, with a shared history and culture and often a shared language. The state is seen as the agent of the nation; the role of the government is to see to the nation’s welfare. The state of Japan is made up of the Japanese nation, for example; people from other nations might be allowed to live in Japan (if they behave themselves), but can’t really become Japanese. And the role of the state is to defend the Japanese people and further its goals. Nearly the same could be said about Finland, or Nepal, or many other states.

An empire, by contrast (in this lens), is multi-national. Think of the Hapsburg Empire (AKA Austro-Hungary), a royal dynasty ruling over several different nations (which typically despised each other). The Roman Empire, too, ruled over many different peoples, using the carrot of Roman citizenship and the stick of the Legions to keep the whole thing together. If an empire of this type is to justify itself, it cannot be with reference to nations; perhaps the empire will claim some sort of functional value, or a unifying mission like the Pax Romana, or (like the Hapsburgs) it might simply claim to exist from the privileges of the ruling family at its head.

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In the third lens, what makes an empire is that it dominates other peoples for the benefit of the original people who formed the empire, whether or not the other peoples benefit as well. If taxes, slaves, and commerce are drained toward the imperial homeland, while the welfare of the conquered peoples is neglected or seen as an afterthought, we have an empire in this sense.

A clear example is the Congo Free State. Massive amounts of natural resources (primarily rubber) were shipped from the Congo back to Europe, and rivers of native blood were shed in the process, often with very little purpose. (The Belgian Parliament concluded in its investigation that the native population had been cut in half during the Free State period.) The Force Publique did build roads and other infrastructure, but only where it was necessary to improve resource extraction. They largely did not train native officials or improve native health or education.

By contrast, a state (at least ostensibly) cares about the welfare of all its citizens. This may not hold in practice—favored ethnic groups or social classes, or particular provinces or cities, might get the lion’s share of state largesse—but this would be seen as a deficiency in the state, a failure to carry out its duties to the citizenry. A Nazi official would laugh if you suggested that he ought to care about conquered French or Poles or Ukrainians as much as he cares about Germans; but even during the darkest days of Jim Crow in the United States, segregation was justified as being ultimately for the benefit of the oppressed black community (however absurd an argument this was). Supporters of segregation could not baldly state that they wanted to keep blacks as an underclass, at least not in public, because the United States is formally based on the equality of citizens.

An empire dispenses with such hypocrisy, at least to some degree. The conquered peoples are seen as livestock to be farmed by the empire, and little more. The British Empire at least had pretensions to benefit the locals, a bit; the Spanish Empire scarcely bothered.

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You’ll notice that these lenses need not all be true at the same time. Many empires did not levy tribute on cities or provinces, but collected taxes from individuals; similarly, even some states would levy taxes on a whole city or village. Many states are not nation-states, like the United States or Canada, and some combine several distinct nations, like Switzerland or Belgium. And some empires act on behalf of a single nation, such as the German Reich. And whether a state acts for the benefit of all its citizens is always a fraught question.

But now you have a rich series of concepts you can apply in your worldbuilding. You can pick and choose to express what you want your setting to look like, how you want your empires and states to act, and where you want the conflicts to be.

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned second book in this series, working title Tyranny for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

Unity, Division, and State Formation

08 Saturday Jan 2022

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One of the tricky things about recognizing a country that is becoming dysfunctional or tyrannical is that many tyrannical practices are the same as the normal practices one would find in a “healthy” country, but amplified to unhealthy levels.

A key example is patriotism/nationalism on one hand, and conflict between groups on the other.

For a community to work, its members need to feel a sense of shared fate. A selfish attitude of “I got mine, you can go to Hell” must be seen not only as immoral, but actually against your interests—because if members of the community are harmed, the community as a whole is harmed as well, and therefore the community is less able to advance the interests of any of its members.

A state, trying to create a sense of political community among many, many people who have never even met, does this by fostering patriotism. That is, the welfare of other Americans (for example) would be important to me because they are Americans, even if they are richer than me or poorer than me or a different skin color or a different religion. To create a sense of patriotism usually requires creating a national myth (loosely based on the truth) about our shared mission on the planet, our creed, the heroic circumstances of our founding. Citizens must be proud of the nation before they can be proud of the state, which (ideally) is an expression of the political values of that nation.

But a national myth fostering patriotism can very easily shade into a state ideology justifying compliance, and finally become sheer propaganda justifying whatever acts of tyranny the state chooses to carry out.

One waypoint in this direction is when political disagreement with the ruling ideology is condemned as disloyalty to the nation. This might not be tyrannical, depending on the nature of the disagreement (anyone agitating for blacks to be returned to slavery, for example, gets little sympathy from me if the cops break down his door), but it should perk up one’s ears at the very least. Political opponents can be reasoned with, bargained with, compromised with. Traitors are hanged.

For a nation to avoid tyranny, it must preserve the ability of its members to disagree about political things, without jeopardizing the larger sense of shared fate that unites them. This is tricky, since we have a tendency for policy disputes to become partisan chasms. Seymour Lipset argued that for a democracy to work well, it must feature cross-cutting cleavages: the same people who disagree with each other on Issue A might be allies on Issue B, and so continue to see each other as people and potential comrades. By contrast, for every dispute to map itself along an existing party cleavage was extremely dangerous, as political disputes harden into cultural enmities. (Obvious analogies to the present situation omitted.) (See a fairly abstract discussion here.)

On the other hand, if political disputes rage without end or without moderating tendencies, to the point that the sense of shared fate is lost or never existed, this can also lead to a form of tyranny that has become proverbial: divide and conquer. In short, if a state rules over a collection of groups in endless conflict with each other (policy conflict, ethnic conflict, etc.), then it can credibly claim that only the power of the state can protect each group from the others. Thus, the people must acquiesce to whatever injustices the state chooses to perpetrate, because facing the wrath of their neighbors without the state’s protection would be worse. Yugoslavia, before its catastrophic breakup, would be a good example of this.

More diabolical would be for the state to deliberately encourage conflicts between its communities, to encourage dependency on itself and make a broad alliance of oppressed peoples unlikely. In then-Zaire, for example, Mobutu put in place policies designed to foment conflict within each province between its “autochthons” (so-called indigenous peoples) and those other communities arbitrarily decided to be foreign intruders. Those policies allowed Mobutu to maintain his grip on power, but after his eventual overthrow they culminated in horrible civil wars.

(Relatedly, a political leader might foment conflict between two communities even if he only leads one of them, in order to make cooperation impossible or even to drive the other community away and thus ensure that no one can challenge his power.)

Worst of all, perhaps, would be a state that manages to do both: enforce a suffocating official ideology, while at the same time turning all of its people against each other. The Soviet Union is probably the most terrible example we have of this so far; children were turned against parents, neighbors gleefully betrayed each other for a better apartment, and preserving one’s ethnic and religious identities was made tantamount to treason.

A tyrant might demand conformity and compliance. But the tyrant might also turn neighbors into enemies, cynically using social conflict as a lever to maintain power. Or both. As citizens and authors both, we should keep this in mind. Political conflict needs a way to be concluded, and for opponents to reconcile, or the social fabric will fray.

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned second book in this series, working title Tyranny for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

Turning People into Power Resources

07 Friday Jan 2022

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Any state regime needs resources to function. At the most basic level, the state needs manpower; in ancient times, it was common for states to literally draft the populace for occasional terms to work on public projects such as city walls or irrigation channels (this was called corvée labor). Many states still do this for their militaries. In modern times, the state typically raises money instead through taxation or some sort of state industry, and then spends money on salaries and such. Law, too, is a resource for getting people to do what you want (provided that enough people obey the law).

Regardless of form, the state still needs to generate resources. Some states are in the happy position of being able to exploit outsiders rather than their own populaces—levying tolls on international trade routes, or selling commodities such as salt, olive oil, or petroleum, or else having regular programs of state piracy or conquest to seize plunder. But for most states, the resources they need are largely generated from the people they rule.

How does this work?

As James C. Scott teaches us, to levy taxes or otherwise extract resources, the state needs to make sure that the resources, and the people who provide them, are accessible. One of the key activities of states, therefore, is to actively change the way people behave to make their resources more easily collectable. For example, in southeast Asian statelets, it was common for rulers to force their peasants at spearpoint to live in the capital city, and work on farms that were adjacent to it, so that the rice grown could be easily assessed by tax collectors. By contrast, growing root vegetables was often forbidden, seen as a means of tax evasion because they were easy to hide.

Banking systems are a frequent tool for resource mobilization, because they literally gather money together so it can be used. Alexander Gerschenkron famously argued that the best way for a state to escape “economic backwardness” was to have a strong state banking system, so that capital could be mobilized for big infrastructure projects. Essentially, people’s savings would be borrowed by the state and used to accomplish state goals.

(Today, we see how states are struggling to respond to the growth of cryptocurrencies, which provide a serious alternative to the banking system for people who want to evade government scrutiny of their money. In the US, some regulators are agitating for stablecoin funds to be regulated like banks—which is a ridiculous idea, but I digress.)

States can also force their citizens to become more productive, in specific ways. This can range from vagrancy laws that force people to work, to mandatory public education or civil service exams, to laws mandating that all farmers must practice archery on Sundays. Head taxes too have this function; if you require people to pay 50 ducats per year each, whether or not they have the money to pay, you force them to spend at least some of their time earning ducats, rather than simply engaging in subsistence gathering or barter (which is harder for the state to benefit from).

States can also encourage or direct their subjects to directly accomplish state goals through nominally private action. For example, if the Duke of Rotherheim offers a bounty of ten gold pieces for each elf ear turned in, bounty hunters will scour the land to wipe out elves without any need for the Duke to hire them formally. In the modern world, “private” financial institutions like banks are subject to a vast range of government rules and reporting requirements, which they must comply with or else lose their licenses. For many purposes, the banks are agents of government policy when it comes to detecting money laundering or other financial crime (to say nothing of economic policy).

Essentially, a crucial part of the art of rule is how to mold the people into cash cows—taking unruly individuals who pass through life in many different ways, and turning them into resources that can serve the state. This is not always bad—having a military draft, for instance, may be inescapable for a country surrounded by enemies. But it shapes people’s lives in fundamental ways that often we don’t even see. And those who resist the system become outcasts, living on the edge of society without documents, or even without homes.

There are stories to be written about all of this. And a good way to start, when considering your fictional kingdom, is to ask: how, exactly, does the regime get its money or other resources?

(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned second book in this series, working title Tyranny for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

What is the Function of a State?

25 Sunday Jul 2021

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When doing worldbuilding, many authors or game designers assume as a matter of course that most of the peoples in their world will be part of an organized state (roughly meaning a defined territory ruled by a centralized government, in the sense of Louis XIV’s “L’etat, c’est moi”). Any “barbarian” lands lacking organized states might be dominated by roving nomadic bandits, or some other uncultured society; and in any event these would be rare curiosities, and most of the land mass would be controlled by one state or another.

That assumption is understandable, given that almost all people alive today live in consolidated states (indeed, any regions lacking a state are today declared “failed states,” rather than simply stateless). But it should not be the default for authors. In fact, for most of human history, the majority of people lived outside of states. Organized states only tended to control cities and their immediate surroundings, with most people living in tribal or clan-based societies in lands outside of the city’s reach. And for most of human history, one’s average life expectancy was actually lower as the subject of a state than otherwise.

Even as organized governments in general gained power, the modern “Westphalian” state (one that claimed unchallenged rule over a defined territory extending well beyond city walls) was not the only way to run things. The city-state was a perfectly reasonable way to organize political life, and persisted well into the 19th century in Italy. Similarly, the Hanseatic League was a loose collection of city-states allied with each other for mutual protection and benefit, but otherwise largely self-governing.

Why then have states at all? What advantages did they have, if any? For whom? What allowed the Westphalian state to eventually take over the globe? And how can we use these concepts in our fiction?

Generally, the state is built from three things: military force, bureaucracy (or some other way to enforce laws and collect taxes), and a source of legitimacy (an ideological framework justifying the demand of the state that its subjects serve loyally—religion, or patriotism, or similar). But these need not all emerge in the same order, and the initial character of the regime may vary as a result.

What happens if the military comes first? Then you have the state as a “stationary bandit,” essentially where some thug with an army gathers a group of people under his rule, and provides some of the trappings of civilized life in exchange for squeezing them for all the taxes he can get. This might not be all bad; a smart bandit can sometimes provide a better quality of life for people under her rule than what they had before, for the selfish purpose of generating more economic growth and therefore taxable wealth. But when push comes to shove, the entire purpose of the bandit state is to aggrandize and enrich the ruler, not to benefit the ruled. Slavery is frequent, taxation is heavy, the army is frequently used to squeeze the people even harder, and the desires of the people are only an annoying consideration to be managed.

What if administration comes first? You might suppose that a self-governing community, perhaps husbanding a common-pool resource, has to deal with increasingly complex problems of project planning and resource allocation; the community develops an organized bureaucracy in response, with codified laws. Then, as the community is threatened by invaders, the community raises an army for its defense (or maybe they feel like invading their neighbors!). Then it decides that keeping the army is a good idea, and becomes a state. In such a case, most of the state’s activity will initially still be focused on resource allocation and maintenance of social order, rather than sheer coercive extraction. Ancient Egypt might be a good case of this.

What if the community’s framework for legitimacy came first? For example, in the Bible, the Israelites had lived in a stateless society for centuries, but found themselves unable to repel invading powers like the Philistines. So the people approached the prophet Samuel and demanded a king “that we also may be like all the nations; and that our king may judge us, and go out before us, and fight our battles.” Yet that king was (initially) constrained by the cultural and religious expectations that the people already had. In such a case, one might expect the king to be relatively weaker than the other cases, at least initially, and not to diverge too strongly from communal expectations.

As time passes, any state will develop aspects of all three of the above aspects. The exact mix between them will vary; and in your own fiction project, you can of course emphasize the angle that works best for your story. But states tend to develop more rapidly, and to end up exerting more power over their societies, if the nation is under persistent military threat.

So far so good; but then why the modern Westphalian state? Why bother claiming all the territory in your neighborhood, and claim the power to control the behavior of the people living in it, when it might be too expensive and troublesome to control the “badlands”? Why not exist as a city-state, and simply trade for resources with the stateless peoples living outside your grasp (as was the model for most of history)?

In part, this becomes more of a factor when international diplomacy becomes more important. If other states want to make agreements with your state, they expect you to be able to fulfill your end of the bargain; that will force you to try to control “your” territory in response. If Florin makes a peace treaty with Guilder, it would be highly embarrassing if Florinian bandits start raiding Guilder territory. Florin will have to work harder to impose law and order in “its” territory, or no other state will trust its word.

If a state is less concerned with controlling its entire territory, and only with maximizing its tax revenue, it would tend to default to a city-state model, or perhaps a network of cities dotting a largely ungoverned landscape—cities are far more efficient to control. The same would be true if the state simply lacks the power to dominate the countryside. The countryside, meanwhile, would be largely self-governing by small communities of farmers or foragers, or perhaps dominated by local gentry, crime bosses, or warlords.

In your own stories, remember that the Westphalian state is not the only model you need follow, nor is it always the best one for your story. A world of uncertain political control can be really fun to explore.

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. I am now moving my attention to the planned second book in this series, working title Tyranny for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

Writing exercises for regime types: the Palace

22 Monday Apr 2019

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series.)

This series of exercises refers back to this post on “The Palace,” a regime type where power is centralized in a single autocratic figure like a dictator, a powerful king, or other ruler. If you like these exercises, first go back to the above-linked post and read it, then come back and work on the exercises.

  1. Thinking about your ruler, what is the source of his/her power?
  2. What claim justifies the ruler’s legitimacy? Why do the ruler’s followers obey? (Examples: is the ruler thought to be a god? Or anointed by God? Is the ruler part of a special bloodline? Or the victor in a ritual combat over the succession? Does the ruler have the most stock shares in the corporation? Is the ruler simply the richest or most powerful figure?) How does that claim to legitimacy exclude the possibility of popular sovereignty or other forms of rule?
  3. Does the specific form of legitimacy claimed by the ruler imply certain restraints on the ruler’s behavior? Must the ruler spend time propitiating the ancestral spirits, or delivering shareholder reports, or meditating and generating magical power?
  4. Who are the members of Palace “court”? How might their power or influence be dependent on the Palace? What privileges do “courtiers” have because of their proximity to the Palace?
  5. How might the Palace prevent the growth of independent powerful figures (“nobles”)?
  6. How can the courtiers influence the ruler?
  7. If the ruler is feckless or incapacitated, which courtiers might usurp effective (but not de jure) power?
  8. How might the ruler be overthrown? Is such an overthrow consistent with the existing ruling ideology, or would it need to put forward a new ideology?
  9. Looking back over all the ideas you’ve written down, which have the most resonance for your story?

Writing Exercises on “Keeping Power”

18 Thursday Apr 2019

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series.)

This exercise is meant to apply to concepts of this post, which discusses a flexible model for quickly sketching out the key political conflicts in your setting—focusing on who the ruler must keep happy in order to stay in power. If you like the exercises below and want to use them, first read the linked post and then come back.

  1. Spend five minutes thinking about your setting, then list all the kinds of people who have any influence at all on who the leader is. Are they powerful generals? Wealthy merchants? Priests? Voters in a democracy? Voters in an oligarchy or stratified society? Nobles? Regional governors? Board directors or shareholders of a corporation? This is the selectorate.
  2. Of all those people, what is the minimum level of support a leader would need to stay in power? How many different ways are there to put together such a support coalition?
  3. What could a leader offer his/her coalition members to keep them loyal? How could the leader threaten them?
  4. If a coalition member is disloyal, how easily could the member be replaced by the leader with another member of the selectorate?
  1. If the selectorate is unhappy with the leader, how easily could a new support coalition be built behind someone else?
  2. How might policies that favor the support coalition harm people outside of it? (For example, taxing the populace and giving a subsidy to coalition members.) How might potential policies to benefit outsiders harm members of the coalition, and thus be rejected? (For example, building a port that would make grain cheaper, when your supporters are rich landowners who sell grain.)
  3. How could new classes of people join the selectorate? (For example, women gaining the right to vote.) Who would benefit from such a change?
  4. How could existing classes of people lose their place in the selectorate? (For example, a democracy becoming a dictatorship; or powerful religious leaders being displaced by a religious purge.) Who would benefit from such a change?
  5. What might change to allow the leader to need fewer supporters, or to force the leader to seek more supporters?
  6. Looking at all the possibilities for conflict that you listed above, which has the most resonance for the story you want to tell?

Writing Exercises for Social Orders

07 Thursday Mar 2019

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This exercise is meant to apply the concepts from this post, which discusses the tensions between wealth and power and how they end up shaping the entire structure of society. If you like the exercises below and want to use them, read the linked post first and then come back.

  1. Spend five minutes and list all the forms of power—loosely defined, for our purposes, as both the ability to harm people and break things, and the ability to force other people to do what you want—in your setting. Fighting ability, magical power, or command over a band of robbers count; what else?
  2. Spend five minutes and list all desirable goods in your setting. Money or valuables count, but so would fame, social status, immortality, attractive romantic partners, et cetera.
  3. For our purposes, let’s define all of the above as “wealth.” For each relevant type of wealth, how might someone use different forms of power to get more wealth? List as many possibilities as you can.
  4. Likewise, for each type of power, how might someone translate different forms of wealth into more power?
  5. Now, imagine that centuries pass in which powerful people try to gain wealth, and wealthy people try to gain power. List at least five scenarios for how the society might end up looking. If a given group of people became stronger over time, who else would be threatened? How might they react? Who would win? Imagine as many possible social conflicts that you can, vary the outcomes, and list them all.
  6. Of all the ideas you’ve listed, which have the most resonance for the story you want to tell?

Warlords and Frontiers

17 Sunday Feb 2019

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series.)

We’ve previously discussed how a government’s control over territory is not a given; states have to spend great effort to project power and build institutions of rule. Frequently, a state’s rule is not absolute; far from the core of its power, state control diminishes even in areas that are nominally under its rule. In border areas, the reality of daily life might involve balancing off the claims of two states, neither of which can fully enforce its authority.

That does not necessarily mean that no one rules. Politics abhors a vacuum. Often, the true authority in a contested or peripheral area might be a criminal boss, or a local bandit, or warlord. Crime bosses and bandits are common fare in fiction, of course. Less frequently discussed, but potentially more interesting, is the warlord.

What do I mean by “warlord”? Let me answer with an example:

During the continuing civil wars in the Congo, the Kivu region of the country was wracked by violence and a severe breakdown in civil control. Instead, political power often devolved to the closest military force, whether government, rebel, or local militia. A typical brigade commander in FARDC, the Congolese military, had the benefit of military rank, which entitled him to a salary, logistical support from the capital Kinshasa, and formal legitimacy; but he would also have informal status in the local power relationships of his area, having de facto control over the local bureaucracy, extracting extra taxes from the hapless civilians, and using military force to control rich resources like bauxite mines or logging operations.

His loyalty would be very much for sale, notwithstanding being an officer for the government; he often collaborates with local criminal networks or directs them himself, using his troops and their logistical abilities to solve problems for the criminals. He will often play both sides in the civil wars, throwing in with one or another of the feuding insurgent groups, often with the full knowledge of Kinshasa. However, the central government puts up with the commander’s unreliability, because even when he is enriching himself and building his own independent power base, his troops still keep the local violence tamped down—and the government lacks the power to replace him or his men with someone more loyal. The status quo is bad, but it would be far worse if the commander were to openly break with Kinshasa and become a direct threat.

What distinguishes the warlord is a combination of three things. The first two are capacity for violence, and the claim to politically represent some constituency. A mafia boss uses coercion, but generally for economic goals; corrupt politicians may seek power and status, but generally within the existing formal framework of their state. But if we look at our Congolese example, we see a third element as well: nominal submission to a distant authority along with practical local autonomy. Warlords exploit gaps in official control to gain power and status, and then use that status strategically to cement their power.

I’m using the term “warlord” in a particular way here, following after Ahram/King 2012. They define a warlord as someone who stands at the intersection of legal and illegal, or of two state or cultural regimes. From this position, they can arbitrage between the advantages of each side, in a way that someone fully committed to one side cannot. 

They cite as an example the Shan warlord Khun Sa, who began as a militia leader for the Kuomintang on the border between Burma and Thailand in the 1950s, but later broke free from them as his forces grew in power. He branched out into opium production, and secured semi-official status from the local government by fighting his fellow Shan rebels.

Khun Sa repeatedly switched sides over the next decades, sometimes calling himself a Shan nationalist, sometimes working with the Burmese government against local competitors; and he often sought Thai patronage as well (and gave hefty bribes to Thai politicians), as the political winds shifted and his opium operation grew. (At his height, Khun Sa controlled some 70% of the heroin production in Burma, with an army of over 20,000 armed men.) In addition, the Thai government tolerated Khun Sa because his forces controlled over a hundred miles of the volatile border region, and served as a buffer against revolutionary forces operating from Laos and Burma. In 1987, when the Burmese were taking American money for “anti-drug” efforts against Khun Sa, the warlord was actually cooperating with both Burma and Thailand to build a major highway through his territory. Later in life, he “surrendered” to the Burmese and disbanded his army, and in exchange was allowed to transform his wealth into legitimate businesses such as real estate and ruby mining.

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The concept of a warlord can be incredibly fruitful in fiction. A warlord character can play the role of ambiguous obstacle and sometime ally of your heroes; often such characters become fan favorites. More generally, the warlord is the natural consequence of settings where government control is tenuous; the presence of a warlord highlights the limits of official control. Questions to ask: What specific, local advantage does the warlord have over the government, and over rival warlords? What resources does the warlord control, and what relationships protect those resources? What would induce the warlord to change sides?

Control, Capital, and Political Bargains

05 Sunday Aug 2018

Posted by in Better Fantasy, Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series.)

We’ve talked before about how states need to control their people, and so structure their very environments to make that easier (making them legible, for one thing). We’ve also talked about how states need to do the same thing with production and wealth, in order to collect taxes. When states are less able to extract taxes directly, they may have to rely on indirect means such as tax farming, which are less efficient and may cause other problems.

In a way, these are two examples of the same problem: states need to control resources, and different types of resources are easier or harder to control. Farmland is easy to tax: it can’t be hidden, and its production is fairly easy to monitor. An international merchant is much harder to tax: his goods may be anywhere in the world, or hidden in a bank vault somewhere, or converted into precious gems and sewn into his clothing. Factories are easy to tax, or even to confiscate entirely: they represent a massive upfront investment that is hard to move, and their production is easy to monitor. People can be easy or hard to tax (or conscript, or otherwise control), depending on how easily they can move from place to place, or hide from the local taxman.

To take a more fantastical example, magic might be easy or hard to control, depending on how magical power is accumulated and used. For example, some Polynesian societies believed that the brightly-colored feathers of certain birds conveyed magical power, or mana, and chiefs would have their subjects scour the islands to find such feathers. Individual feathers gave little power, and it was not worth the ire of your chief to withhold a handful of them; but the chiefs, sitting at the top of their societies, could accumulate thousands or tens of thousands of such feathers, which would be made into beautiful ceremonial mantles or coats.

If a state is lucky, it will control rich resources that are easy to tax, such as travel on a busy overland trade route, or oil wells or gold mines, or a large population of unarmed people in a confined area. With such a bounty, the state will have less need to worry about gaining the cooperation of its (other) people, and can be fairly hands-off. However, what if the available wealth is hard to tax? What if there are few people and lots of land for them to escape to, as in the African plains or the Russian steppes? What if your economy is built on ship-based trade and banking, as with the Dutch?

Generally, the state (or anyone, really) can respond in two ways: with overwhelming coercion, or with some kind of political bargain—sharing power or granting civil rights in exchange for cooperation. Russia imposed serfdom on most of its populace, tying them to specific wealthy landowners; in much of Africa, likewise, rulers used sophisticated strategies of control and coercion, including slavery, to keep their subject peoples under control. Colonial powers often imposed a head-tax on native peoples, extracting taxes without needing to worry if the poor individuals could actually afford them.

The Dutch, on the other hand, incorporated their merchant class into the government; Italian city-states often structured their taxes as a kind of forced loan, paying interest on their “debts” and turning taxpayers into investors. Famously, the American colonists declared “No taxation without representation!” And the link between these two things is quite strong: the earliest parliaments had power against their monarchs because (and only because) they had direct control over taxation.

Athens and Sparta combined both approaches: a large population of slaves or helots, over which was a broad ruling class with a say in government, whether through actual democratic voting or other means. The difference was that citizens were armed; they were both necessary for civil defense (or conquest), and very hard to tyrannize.

Rulers faced with difficult problems of resource control can either choose to use coercion in response, or to strike a bargain and share power or create political rights. Though some social scientists claim that granting rights is more likely, the truth is that it is merely more effective; short-sighted rulers often use coercion even when it fails, as we see today in places like Venezuela.

This is good news for authors, as we can present political problems to our invented societies and have them respond in the most convenient manner for the plot. Other useful questions: what resources are most difficult for the rulers to control? Are they dangerous in the wrong hands? Could a new kind of power or wealth or magic, or a new population of people, upset the existing calculus of control? What are the costs to the rulers for relying on indirect strategies like tax farming or delegating power to local lords? Might a farsighted politico realize that a different form of control, or a new political bargain, would yield better results?

Rebellion, Part Two

29 Sunday Jul 2018

Posted by in Politics for Worldbuilders, Revolution, State Formation, War, Writing

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series.)

In our earlier discussion of different kinds of rebellions (and why worldbuilders may benefit from expanding their mental models of rebellions beyond Robin Hood and Parisian riots), we arbitrarily defined four types: violent contention, secession, coups, and revolutions. We then briefly discussed the first two. Now, let’s finish our list by talking about coups and revolutions.

Neither violent contention nor secession intends to totally overthrow the existing government (necessarily); the rebels want to better their own condition or to break away, but to leave the rest of the society more or less as it was. In coups and revolutions, on the other hand, the point is indeed to overthrow the ruler. The difference between them lies in who is doing the overthrowing, and whether they mean simply to take control of the regime or to demolish it and put some other regime in its place.

We’ve discussed before the selectorate model of regimes, in which a subset of the populace is the selectorate, meaning that they could possibly be part of the ruling coalition. In a coup, members of the selectorate decide to replace the current ruler with another one better to their liking, usually so that they themselves have more power within the new ruling coalition. However, they typically do not want to destroy the structures of the government in their coup; rather, coups typically happen swiftly, aiming to paralyze the ruler’s supporters long enough for the plotters to seize the ruler’s person, and then declare their victory a fait accompli. (This is why in most modern coups, the coup plotters will try to capture the country’s media stations—both to present the impression of overwhelming control, and to prevent regime loyalists from coordinating a response.) Then, after a bit of reshuffling and the odd loyalty purge, the bureaucracy and the army are meant to fall in line, and life will go on.

For a coup to work, the ruler and perhaps large parts of his ruling coalition would have to have weak legitimacy and little loyalty among the military; that way, few will object too much if they are replaced. However, the selectorate itself should either still have prestige in society or at the very least enough raw power to stay on top. So for example, if King Gunther the Mad were quietly removed to an asylum by a cabal of noblemen, and replaced by his infant son Rudolph the Tiny (with Chancellor Grise acting as regent, of course!), the plotters might settle scores with a few of Gunther’s supporters; but fundamentally, they do not challenge the idea that noblemen should rule society. Why would they? They are noblemen themselves!

In a coup, the government might change, but the regime persists—the system of elites and state institutions that sustains the power of the government. This is not the case in a revolution. Here, the regime itself has decayed so badly that a broad popular uprising is able to sweep it away entirely. Old elites are dispossessed or killed, old justifications for state power become obsolete; a new group of elites arises at the head of the revolutionary mass, claiming power. 

In a revolution, the old selectorate is replaced by a new selectorate, justified by a new principle of legitimacy (the new selectorate might nevertheless include some of the same people as the old one, but not always). All the old relations between classes and social groups are upended, and new relations form. This is the distinguishing mark of a revolution in the comparative-politics sense. (Which is part of why I prefer to think of the American Revolution as more of a secession; yes, the idea of breaking free of the king was fairly novel, but within American society it was the existing elites who took over.)

For a revolution to succeed, the entire elite stratum has to be losing its grip. In pre-revolutionary France, for example, the French monarchy was deeply in debt and had ceded much of its authority to tax farmers, who harshly oppressed the populace. Worse, the nobility had largely retreated into decadence instead of paying attention to the society around them, where dangerous new ideas about democracy and enlightenment (not to mention the execrable Rousseau, whose philosophy set the stage for modern totalitarianism) were taking hold among the growing middle class, inspired by the example of the United States. A few nobles even became important revolutionaries, such as the lamented “Philippe Égalité,” otherwise known as Louis Philippe II, Due d’Orleans. (This is a common pattern in revolutions: their leaders are often part of the old elite, usually embittered with the old regime and upholding new ideals, or marginalized and seeking more power or personal meaning as part of a revolutionary vanguard.)

Importantly, because the regime is falling apart, several different types of revolutionaries usually spring up to fill the void—and they may not like each other much. In the 1979 Iranian Revolution, not only Khomeinist Islamists rose up but also communists, trade unions, liberals, and business groups. Indeed, Khomeini’s faction seemed to be among the weaker ones, and few expected that they would end up taking power. However, if all of the state’s institutions crumble, power ends up in the hands of whoever is most ruthless. The initial hopes of a new age of Persian freedom were dashed by the rise of Khomeini, who quickly massacred the non-Islamist revolutionaries and imposed a brutal theocracy.

Similarly, the initial group of humanists and liberals who led the French Revolution were quickly displaced by vicious absolutists like Robespierre, driven by fantastic visions of a perfect society and willing to spill rivers of blood to get there. Before long, the overthrow of the monarchy, the nobility, and the Church (the old elites) became only the first stage of a ruthless war by the new French state against its own citizens, where today’s ruling clique became tomorrow’s victims of the guillotine. (You can read a fascinating account of one dimension of the revolutionary madness in the free book Fiat Money Inflation in France—which is also interesting in its own right because of when it was written, when it was republished, by whom, and in what context. But I digress.)

Revolutions usually end badly, because the idealists who begin them are usually replaced by ruthless murderers who smell the chance for power and take it. A similar process, although slower, can happen in the course of some longer revolts such as secessions or violent contention; the history of the Autodefensa movement in Mexico is a good example. (In the famous phrase of Eric Hoffer, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”) To me, it seems that the only way to reliably defend against the ascension of the vicious is for the rebels to build strong institutions of governance early, and to sustain them over the course of the revolt. This, I think, is the main reason that the American Revolution was so successful in the long run: because the colonial legislatures had a long heritage and political tradition that could resist the rise of extremism. Gestures toward a true revolution such as Shays’ Rebellion never got past the stage of violent contention, and were quickly put down.

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Authors can consider questions such as: What is the goal of the rebels? Is the regime stable enough to defend itself? Are things likely to snowball out of control and become much larger? Who among the rebels is most ruthless, and would they impose themselves on the others? Is this revolt a contest between different groups of elites, or between the elites and groups out of power? Do any of the elites join the rebels anyway? Do the rebels have a competing political principle to justify their rule instead of the existing regime, or several conflicting principles?