Tag Archives: State Formation

Different Types of Federalism

31 Thursday Jul 2025

Posted by in Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , ,

Modern fantasy/scifi seems to not feature many federal countries (or as we will call them, “federations”)—that is, countries made up of several subunits such as states or provinces, each with certain powers that are distinct from those of the central government. (If a central government has total control over a country, and its subunits or provinces are merely administrative tools of the central government, this is called a “unitary state.” The “districts” in The Hunger Games come to mind.) Yet a federal design gives worldbuilders lots of opportunities for cool setting details and plot conflict.

I live in the United States, and some of my fellow Americans might assume that federations pretty much work the way things do in the U.S.: the states join together as co-equal partners under the federal government, with the same privileges and rights (that is, our federalism is symmetrical), initially for the sake of mutual defense against an outside threat and later to participate in the growing power of the strong federal government. (Alfred Stepan calls this “coming-together federalism.”) In fact, only a handful of federations were formed via coming-together federalism: the United States and Switzerland (which predated the French Revolution), and New Zealand (which did not last long as a federation).

William Riker argued that federations with a weak central government tended not to last long. They would be preyed upon by external enemies, lose internal cohesion as the subunits pull away from the central government and each other, or else decide to strengthen their central government in response—as the U.S. did, when we replaced the Articles of Confederation (which featured a weak central government heavily dependent on the states for its revenue) with the Constitution (featuring a much stronger Federal government with its own taxing power and laws).

(We can see some of these tensions working in real time in Europe, as the E.U. attempts to increase its control over member states and some states resist bitterly, with the U.K. leaving the E.U. altogether.)

If a federation has a strong central government, meanwhile, the central government tends to accumulate more power over time. As Riker put it, “If a federalism is centralized, then the ruler(s) of the federation have and are understood to have greater influence over what happens in the society as a whole than do all the rulers of the subordinate governments. And, having this influence, they tend to acquire more.” Eventually, it might dispense with the federal form altogether and restructure as a unitary state, as New Zealand did.

(This is comparable to the dynamic between a Palace ruler and a Nobility in the model of Samuel Finer, which I wrote about in my first worldbuilding book.)

But that is only one way to do things. (Which is great news for worldbuilders, because it means we have a great set of flexible concepts to make interesting settings with.) Following Stepan, we can actually talk about three ways in which a federation might form:

  • Coming-together federalism;
  • Holding-together federalism; and
  • Putting-together federalism.

Moreover, there are many other possible federal or quasi-federal arrangements other than the symmetrical model. Daniel Elazar lists several, which we will discuss a bit later. First, let’s look at the different ways a federation might form.

Coming-Together Federalism

Riker argues that when a federation is formed among formerly independent states, it only remains a federation if it’s in the interest of both the political organizers and of the states. On the side of the organizers, they should want to expand their power over the states (perhaps over the other states, if the federation is spearheaded by one or two of the stronger states), but not be strong enough to do so by force. If they were strong enough, they would simply conquer or annex the states and form an empire, with a unitary government. (Stepan partly disagrees, as we will note below.)

On the part of the states, they need to have a sense of their own independent identities (or they would simply join into a larger empire), but should want the benefits of federation more than they want to remain independent. Most frequently, this includes protection from external attack, but also the opportunity to benefit from the federation’s increased power—especially the power to invade foreign neighbors!

If the federation ceases to be in the interest of the organizers, or of the constituent states, Riker says, then the federation eventually collapses—either because the states pull away, or because the central government breaks the federal bargain and becomes a unitary state.

Holding-Together Federalism

In another pattern pointed out by Stepan, a formerly unitary country may decide that some sort of federal structure is needed to prevent the country from breaking apart altogether. This could happen if the state is made up of several ethnic or linguistic groups in tension with each other—whether they have coexisted in one country for centuries, as with Belgium, or were more recently glued together, as with India. To preserve the country as a whole, the political regime is willing to transfer some of its power to the subunits (even if it has to create the subunits from scratch, as India frequently does).

Stepan points out that federalism seems to be the government structure best able to preserve the stability of a multinational country, because it best allows smaller communities to exercise their rights as communities. “In fact, every single longstanding democracy in a territorially based multilingual and multinational polity is a federal state. . . . [S]ome groups may be able to participate fully as individual citizens only if they acquire, as a group, the right to have schooling, mass media, and religious or even legal structures that correspond to their language and culture. Some of these rights may be described as group-specific collective rights. Many thinkers in the liberal tradition assume that all rights are individual and universal and view any deviation from individualism and universalism with suspicion, but this assumption is open to question.”

Putting-Together Federalism

Contrary to Riker, Stepan notes that some nondemocratic states, seeking to expand their power over their neighbors or actually conquering them, will preserve the conquered states in a federal arrangement. This is especially likely when the conquered states have their own durable national identities, similar to the holding-together model. Preservation of the federal subunits often allows for smoother administration of the absorbed territories, and makes submission to the conquerer somewhat more palatable to the conquered. Thus, federation can be a type of empire-building strategy.

The most prominent example was the Soviet Union, through which communist Russia dominated the formerly independent states that had broken away from the collapsing Russian Empire. The USSR recognized the linguistic and ethnic pluralism of its vast territories via the separate socialist “republics,” though Russia was unquestionably the top dog and extracted much wealth and resources from the peripheral republics.

(This model is partly replicated within modern-day Russia as well. Moscow treats Russia’s outlying provinces effectively as conquered territory, sucking up their wealth and manpower to benefit the elites.)

Different Varieties of Federalism

We mentioned above that not all federations are symmetrical—not all of the subunits have the same powers and privileges as each other. This is where we have tremendous scope to be creative.

Daniel Elazar noted, “The simplest possible definition [of federalism] is self-rule plus shared rule. Federalism thus defined involves some kind of contractual linkage of a presumably permanent character that (1) provides for power sharing, (2) cuts around the issue of sovereignty, and (3) supplements but does not seek to replace or diminish prior organic ties where they exist.” He lists several types of federal associations between states, aside from the symmetrical federation:

Before the United States Constitution introduced the modern style of federalism, Europe only knew of the confederation. In a confederation, the constituent states still mostly govern themselves, joining together only for limited purposes (usually mutual defense and foreign policy).

In more recent times, new flavors have developed. In a federacy, a larger and smaller power join together in an asymmetric relationship. The smaller power has more autonomy from the federal arrangement than the larger power, or existing subunits of the larger power if there are any; in return, it also has less influence over the governance of the larger power. Real-life examples include Arab Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan, Serbia and Kosovo, or the United States and Puerto Rico.

An associated state arrangement (also called a “compact of free association”) is similar to a federacy, except that either member can unilaterally decide to pull out of the arrangement (rather than needing mutual agreement). Consequently, the member states have even less influence on each other than under a federacy. Examples include the United States and Micronesia, and (for a time, until they withdrew) the U.K. and several of its former possessions in the Caribbean.

Common markets are confederations that focus on economic cooperation, rather than broader political cooperation—such as the Caribbean common market, CARICOM. That said, a common market can sometimes act as a precursor to broader political unions, with the key example being the European Economic Community’s transmogrification into the European Union.

We can also usefully compare federalism with a different political model, the consociation, in which a country is divided not into territorial subunits, but into religious, cultural, ethnic, or ideological groupings, each with its own privileges. Elazar comments, “It is generally agreed that consociational regimes are based on the agreement of elites, each of which must be capable of maintaining control over its own segment in the grand coalition. Thus the segments have to be organized internally on hierarchical lines but governed by the people selected to be at the top.” This is a common strategy where a country is subject to dangerous tensions between communities that must nevertheless figure out how to coexist.

For example, Lebanon features a power-sharing agreement between its Sunni, Shia, and Maronite Christian communities, under which all three must agree on major policies and the appointment of political leaders. Moreover, it has been agreed that the president must be Maronite, the prime minister must be Sunni, and the speaker of parliament a Shia. Consociational arrangements are often more fragile than federal ones, as the Lebanese example shows; but that is often more the fault of the existing tensions between communities that consociationalism is meant to manage.

****

Summing up, we have a whole range of ways in which political units can associate with each other. We can also imagine ways in which the federation members might come into conflict. Subunits might demand more autonomy, or one subunit might block a national policy that other subunits might want, or vice versa. Independence movements might strengthen in a subunit based on linguistic or national identity, if the larger federation does not adequately respect the community’s desires. And on and on.

As a worldbuilder, can you think of ways to use these concepts to make your story conflicts more compelling?

Cities, Money, Power, and Political Bargains

20 Thursday Jul 2023

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , ,

For most of post-Roman, premodern history, Europe was hardly the most powerful region in the world. China and Japan were in many ways far more powerful than any European power and had more advanced technology. Africa too featured sprawling empires, such as that of Mali. Europe, by contrast, was something of a backwater, struggling with depressed trade, frequent war, limited education, and disease among other obstacles. And yet starting only a few hundred years ago, strong states emerged in Europe that were able to mobilize vast wealth and military strength sufficient to subdue most of the globe.

The question that scholars have grappled with is how this happened. The “state-formation” literature is generally more applicable to the discussion of state capacity (a topic to be covered in Book 3 of my series) rather than the economy per se; but it is still useful to us as we discuss worldbuilding models of the economy, because in one of the leading theories of state formation, economic development—and the growth of cities in particular—plays a central role.

In Charles Tilly’s Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1992, he argued that European cities played a key role in the development of strong states because of their role in concentrating and deploying capital. While many states (such as Russia) were heavily coercion-intensive, states that featured a large amount of capital (such as the Netherlands) eventually found that they could mobilize more of that capital by sharing political rights with the merchant class. As a result, high-capital states that made political bargains with their populace were eventually able to build more powerful militaries than predominantly coercive states, and that particular model of state structure became common.

(It is worth pointing out that Tilly explicitly limited the scope of his theory to Europe due to the unusual concentration of urban cities and high populations found there, and did not apply the theory to other regions. For a while, there was a thriving literature arguing that Tilly’s argument failed in various other regions, or that it did not account for various factors even in the European experience. When the dust died down, I think the best evaluation is that Tilly’s basic thesis holds true even outside of Europe where its necessary conditions hold, such as in China. And where it does not hold, scholars trying to explain why have enriched the general theory by discussing the differing conditions that resulted in other outcomes, such as Jeffrey Herbst’s work on African state-building.)

Fundamentally, the driving force behind the development of strong states was the need to prepare for war. The first states were formed by men seeking to extend their control over others, and the states with the most power would extend their control as far out as it could go, stopping only when they reached the limit of their ability to project power—whether because of the limitations of available transportation technology, geographical barriers, or the opposition of other states. As a result, in each region, the most powerful state set the terms of coexistence—neighboring weaker states could either submit to vassalage or outright conquest, or else spend disproportionate resources on their defense. As Tilly puts it, “[M]ost rulers settled for a combination of conquest, protection against powerful rivals, and coexistence with cooperative neighbors.”

Within the constraints imposed by powerful rivals, states had to build structures to efficiently extract resources from their populations (or other populations forced to pay tribute or subject to plundering) and then translate those resources into military power. Tilly zeroes in on four variables to explain the variable success of a European state in doing so:

  • its concentration of capital,
  • its concentration of coercive power,
  • its need, and ability, to prepare for war, and
  • its position within the regional or international state system.

For Tilly, the key difference was between capital-intensive and coercion-intensive regions. In short, coercion-intensive states were able to mobilize larger armies, at least initially; but their advantage was nullified when warfare changed to require more and more money, to pay for professionalized troops, new weapons, and regularized logistics, and coercion-intensive states tended to have stunted economies as a result. Meanwhile, capital-intensive city-states had skilled professional armies, but small ones; they had not enough population to compete effectively with national states in the long run. The sweet spot was occupied by national states built around large, capital-intensive cities so that their political institutions tended to grant rights to the holders of capital. As a result, they could access large national populations and the money needed to fuel powerful armies.

Coercion

Tilly describes three kinds of European states during the period under discussion:

  • Tribute-taking empires tended to have relatively low accumulations of coercive power, but high concentration—that is, they might have had one or two armies that periodically swept through their vassal territories, demanding resources at swordpoint and punishing rebellions. Such empires were relatively fragile; if an adversary managed to accumulate significant coercive power, the empire’s ability to extract tribute might collapse entirely.
  • Systems of fragmented sovereignty typically included city-states as well as urban federations such as the Hanseatic League or the early Netherlands, which featured several loci of political power without a single clear sovereign. Such systems tended to have high accumulations of coercive power (usually because each of the constituent cities or other units was rich enough to afford its own army). This is almost true by definition; if a fragmented system were not able to accumulate a lot of coercive power, it would have been swallowed up by a competitor. However, such systems usually featured low coercive concentration, as the cities often cooperated poorly on defense and rarely subordinated their forces to a unified command.
  • Finally, national states were in the middle: featuring a high concentration of strong coercive power, but forced to bargain with their populations for their cooperation—typically by granting them political rights or participation of one kind or another.

Capital

Whether capital is concentrated or not depends heavily on the available technologies, and whether they tend to encourage distributed or centralized production.

In a subsistence economy, there is practically no capital at all as we are used to thinking of it. Even if there are a small handful of nobles living in castles, and merchants living in sturdy houses, most people have absolutely nothing to their names. Fernand Braudel (The Structures of Everyday Life, p. 282), writing of the centuries before the eighteenth century in Europe, notes that official inventories of possessions of the deceased almost invariably were restricted to “only a few old clothes, a stool, a table, a bench, the planks of a bed, sacks filled with straw.” That was all that most people had. Capital as we know it was the province of a very few people who engaged in large-scale trade or taxation. Labor-saving devices were few, even including such things as plows (many farmers were forced to use spades and dig by hand). The most readily available form of capital was living beings: livestock, slaves, professional hirelings, or peasants drafted for periodic corvée labor. (That is, the analytical distinction between capital and labor essentially breaks down.) As a result, to accumulate useful capital you had to command the labor of people, which is why rulers were often forced to rely on local landlords to muster their peasants.

In the “protoindustrialization” era of cottage industries, the available technology made production suddenly more efficient, but did not produce large economies of scale—at a time when the roads were just good enough for finished goods to be cost-effectively sent to markets, but not good enough for raw material and workers to routinely travel to centralized production. Capital flowed to labor, in smaller-scale workshops dispersed through cities and their surroundings or out in the countryside. This was the time of the putting-out system, of small workshops and manufacturies built around windmills and watermills, of largely local production. As a result, there was prodigious accumulation of capital compared to what had come before, but it was not excessively concentrated and was spread around relatively evenly. Still, cities served as nexuses for trade, and represented the most available “containers” for capital. City-based merchants and burghers became politically important, because they had the money that rulers needed to pay for their armies. (And sometimes, as in the case of the Hanseatic League, the burghers became rulers themselves.)

By contrast, industrialization featured massive centralized factories, encouraged by the coal boiler and the huge returns to scale that it created. Workers came to capital, concentrating themselves in the cities. The rewards of production became concentrated in relatively few hands and places, which consequently made it easier for governments to make bargains with such capitalists and appropriate some of that wealth in exchange for political privileges.

Effects on State Power

Tilly notes, “Two factors shape the process by which states acquire resources, and strongly affect the organization that results from the process: the character of the bottom-up hierarchy of capital [that emerges naturally from trade and exchange], and the place within that hierarchy of any location from which a state’s agents try to extract resources.” In other words, for a state to be capable of taxing individual incomes requires far more institutional capacity than a state that can only tax salt entering at a single port, for example. And conversely, a state that is dependent on a few sources of tax income must be more solicitous to the interests of the relatively few, relatively wealthy taxpayers.

As a result, states that emerged gradually during the early modern era developed in a clear pattern. The biggest cities with a lot of commercial activity and wealth often became their own city-states (such as in Italy and pre-Bismarck Germany). The regimes in these city-states were often thinly structured, able to easily collect customs duties and borrow money from bankers without large coercive bureaucracies. That, in turn, tended to discourage coercive government policies on the margin. Somewhat less powerful cities were typically incorporated into national states, but were able to negotiate political bargains with the developing state in exchange for their tax revenue (as in France).

By contrast, regions that were relatively poorer and had relatively few cities with weak commercial links with the hinterlands around them often were subject to straight coercion by the ruler, in states that covered a larger geographic area but a relatively dispersed and poor populace (such as Russia). Tilly writes, “In broadly similar ways, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Serbian, and Brandenburger states formed on the basis of strong alliances between warmaking princes and armed landlords, large concessions of governmental power to nobles and gentry, joint exploitation of the peasantry, and restricted scope for merchant capital. Repeatedly, leaders of conquering forces who lacked capital offered their followers booty and land, only to face the problem of containing the great warrior-landlords they thereby created.” The only feasible solution was to rely on extensive force, which became less and less effective as the coercive states fell behind their neighbors on economy.

******

This has gotten quite long and somewhat disorganized, but the key ideas are still useful in your worldbuilding. States need to survive in a dangerous world, and need money and power to do so. In poor settings, highly coercive states have an advantage; but as capital accumulates, richer societies that made political bargains with their populaces end up pulling ahead. (On average!)

*****

(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 will show up in the planned second and third books in this series, working titles Wealth for Worldbuilders and Tyranny for Worldbuilders respectively. No idea when they will be finished, but they should be fun!)

Building a Worldbuilding Model for Military Effectiveness

17 Friday Feb 2023

Posted by in Politics for Worldbuilders, War, Writing

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , ,

Worldbuilders who plan for their stories to feature wars as a key plot conflict face a fundamental tension: the “bad guys” must be powerful enough to pose a serious threat, yet must still lose (usually!). How this happens is often fertile ground for stories.

A common fictional pattern is for the enemy to have overwhelming force, but be fundamentally stupid—tactically incompetent, strategically myopic, prone to getting distracted by personal feuds and such. I would tend to view such stories as being far too convenient and even a sign of lazy writing, but the current invasion of Ukraine shows that this can actually happen in real life.

Still, fiction has the burden of needing to make sense. How then should worldbuilders proceed? Essentially, if you want your enemies to have an exploitable military weakness, you should be able to justify it.

This post will not give you an entire theory for doing so (I plan to spend about half of Book 4 in my “Politics for Worldbuilders” series on that topic), but it will lay out a high-level framework. Essentially, you can view military effectiveness as a product of the state structures (or societal structures, in societies without strong states) built to support the military. Those structures, in turn, were created (in part) because the ruling regime (or ruling elites, or dominant societal ethos, or whatever) decided on specific political-military objectives and then decided to devote resources and create structures to achieve those objectives.

Hence:

  • Political-military objectives come first, and lead to
  • Strategic and organizational decisions for how to create a military that can achieve the objectives.
  • This leads to the creation of structures for generating and supporting the military, such as recruiting capacity, manufacturing base, logistics, scientific research, the development of doctrine, and the cultivation of a particular military mindset.
  • These then condition military success on the battlefield.

All of these can be discussed in great detail, and I plan to. Moreover, the arrow of causation isn’t in one direction. As Donald Rumsfeld famously said, “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish you had at a later time.” So political decisions might be constrained by existing military weakness or institutional flaws.

But for a quick example, we can see how the political decision by the Russian regime to try and rush tactical success in Ukraine, as well as the long-standing policy of treating the infantry as a potential political threat that needs to be weakened and held in check, has led to drafted Russian soldiers being insufficiently trained. This means that they cannot execute complex tactics and are instead being thrown into the meat grinder in human wave attacks. So the seeming stupidity of Russian tactics is in fact rooted in a coherent (if equally stupid) set of political decisions.

For another example, the famed English longbowmen didn’t spring from the ground fully formed. English bowmen were required by law to spend their whole lives practicing; the English kings decided on this policy even though it made the peasantry more of a threat to the elites, while other states chose to disarm their peasants and rely on professional soldiers.

My aspiration is to give worldbuilders a clear structure that they can use to explain why their invented militaries look the way they do, think the way they do, and fight the way they do. In the interim, you can use the above model as a way to organize your thinking.

******

(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 will end up in the planned fourth book in this series, working title War for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

Turning People into Power Resources

07 Friday Jan 2022

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , ,

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!)

Writing Exercises for Social Orders

07 Thursday Mar 2019

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , ,

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

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , ,

(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.

****

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , ,

(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?

Before the State: Egalitarian Bands

18 Wednesday Jul 2018

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

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , ,

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

The very earliest groups of people in prehistory, as far as we can surmise, were small bands of nomadic foragers. Such bands have continued to exist down to the present day, though they are becoming increasingly hemmed in by powerful states who prefer people to be stationary, formally employed, and taxable. Still, many of our social intuitions were formed in an ancestral environment of such nomadic bands, so we should discuss them first and foremost.

Assuming that a band does not possess livestock, its members can only own what they can carry. As a result, the social structure is relatively flat; there are no wide class distinctions as are typical in “civilization.” (Civilization does have its advantages, of course, but that is not our present topic.) That is not to say that people are equal; all primates are acutely sensitive to status distinctions, humans included, and any social group will have its pecking order. More successful hunters or warriors will accumulate trophies, jewelry, or marks of prestige, and probably higher-status mates as well. Still, compared to more complex societies, we can still describe such bands as broadly egalitarian.

That doesn’t guarantee that they will stay that way. Commonly, such bands will have a leader or big man (as the anthropologists would call him—and barring magic or some other equalizer of the sexes, he will almost certainly be a man), who has the respect of the others even without having formal authority or privileges. Over time, a canny big man can formalize his position and even pass it on to his sons, becoming a true chief. Initially, the chief or big man would be expected to use his power to redistribute possessions among the band, rather than enriching himself; but with enough political skill, a chief can build a cadre of supporters who will back him as he does in fact become more wealthy (as will they!). Thus does an egalitarian band develop political structures and social classes.

Those bands that remain egalitarian usually manage the feat because of an explicit aversion to hierarchy. To prevent hierarchies from emerging, or to constrain nascent hierarchies as they form, egalitarian bands often discourage inequality with several strategies. The first is an overwhelming social environment of envy. Anyone becoming conspicuous by gaining social power or wealth could expect to be the subject of malicious gossip, petty acts of uncooperation (in James C. Scott’s term, “weapons of the weak”), and later, public disapproval, political opposition, and even magical curses or physical violence. Attempting to dominate an egalitarian band is a risky business.

Second is expecting those with many possessions to be generous with them. This could be through public feasting, or socially required gifts to others, or sacrifices to the gods. (The anthropologist David Graeber has a long and amusing discussion of such mandatory gift-giving.)

This expectation persists even in a hierarchical setting. In most societies, the wealthy and powerful are expected to foster patron-client relationships, in which the powerful patron is served by the weaker clients, and in return the client can expect the patron’s support and protection. You can think of feudalism as a formalized patron-client relationship; the vassals owe taxes and service to their lords, but the lords are expected to defend the rights of the vassals in return. Another example would be large landowners in places like precolonial Southeast Asia; the landowners often took very high percentages of the crop from their sharecropper farmers, but if times were bad, the farmers would expect the landowners to give them food from their storehouses (or risk getting lynched!).

Third, if conditions within a band became intolerable for some of its members, they would simply leave. The band could split, with the dissidents moving somewhere else and leaving any would-be strongman with a vastly diminished pool of manpower. (In the literature, this is called fission.) Obviously, this would be traumatic to the people involved, and would only be a last resort; but the threat of fission does much to keep ambitious leaders in check.

It is no accident that developed states often arose in cramped geographic areas that made it hard to escape, or else at a time when the society was facing outside invasion, which would likewise make it difficult (practically as well as morally) to simply leave. Mobility gives choices; choices constrain political domination. The lack of choice means that band members have little recourse when their chief decides to cement his power. (This concept is applicable even within developed states; the American West played the role of an escape valve for the urban centers of the Northeast, threatening a population drain in response to the more obnoxious schemes of politicians. See James C. Scott for more examples, in Southeast Asia and elsewhere.)

The concepts here offer much to authors. Here are a few thought-provoking questions, in building your setting: What social expectations does your society place on the wealthy? How far are they tolerated, before risking violence from those with less? If the society is egalitarian, how does it stay that way? What role do gossip, threats of violence, or malicious charms and curses play in keeping powerful figures in check? Do political leaders risk driving off their populace if their policies are too harsh, or foolish? Did your protagonists come from somewhere else, and if so, why did they leave? What attitudes or personality traits does that convey, or were taught to them by their experience?

Who Rules? Part Three—The Forum

03 Tuesday Jul 2018

Posted by in History, Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation, Writing

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , ,

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

Some time ago, we mentioned the four potential ruling groups laid out by Samuel Finer, and discussed the Palace Polity; in the second post in this set, we discussed the Nobility and our first hybrid polity, Palace/Nobility. Now, let’s add the Forum into the mix, along with the Palace/Forum.

While in the Palace it is the autocrat who rules, and in the Nobility autonomous aristocrats hold power and scheme jealously against each other, in the Forum, power is vested in the people. In earlier posts, we have briefly noted egalitarian societies in which no true state exists, in which the people of the society share a voice in the major decisions of that society. In the Forum, the rule of the people is explicit and formalized. State institutions exist to carry out the needs of society, but they are subject to the people and depend on it for their orders. Formal mechanisms such as voting, written law and public law courts, and public debate translate the opinions of individuals into a collective imperative, that is sovereign over the government administrators.

Forums can take several forms, of which democracy is only one—and they need not include everyone in the population. In Greek democracy, for example, the vote was restricted to free males who were heads of their households, and often who met certain criteria of wealth. Most of the time, fewer than 10% of the residents of ancient Athens were eligible to vote. But for Finer, that is sufficient, because the franchise was broad enough to go beyond a narrow aristocracy or oligarchy, broad enough to include significant parts of the people itself in its self-rule.

Ancient Israel, which Finer believes was the very first Forum state in history, was not a democracy; but it was a tribal society in which decisions were made by a consensus of elders, until the rise of the monarchy—and even then, the kings had to be careful not to ignore public opinion or the tribal leadership, as could be seen by Ahab’s hesitance to simply confiscate the land of Naboth, or the secession of the northern tribes from the obnoxious rule of Rehovoam, successor to King Solomon.

In both cases, and in pretty much every durable Forum, the political power of the people rested on a foundation of popular military participation. Usually, a Forum was made up of a nation in arms. One of Finer’s main arguments is that political power tends to correspond to the distribution of military force. In early pre-state societies, all able-bodied men (and occasionally women) were considered warriors. Weapons tended to be simple and were widely available, so that the distribution of power between people was fairly even. This is one of the factors sustaining an egalitarian social structure. (By contrast, one of the key processes involved in the emergence of Danish chiefs, over a society that had previously been egalitarian, was the chiefs’ strategic control over the new technology of iron swords, and their careful distribution of swords to their favored supporters.)

Popular military power was true of the Greek polis, where to be qualified for citizenship you had to be able to serve as a hoplite, a spearman in the famous Greek phalanxes. But it was also true of the tribal confederation of ancient Israel. In its earliest, pre-kingly phase, the Israelites served in the popular militias, largely on foot and without heavy armor. (Thus, in the Biblical account of Deborah’s war against the Canaanite general Sisera, the Canaanites possess heavy chariots which the Israelites could not match. They therefore forced battle in the hill country, where the light infantry of the Israelite militia could negate the Canaanites’ advantage.)

The power of the popular militia restrained the growth of centralized political structures in Israel, for a time. Later, the arrival of heavy armor, chariots, cavalry, and foreign mercenaries provided increased military power to those wealthy enough to afford them, creating the basis for a ruling class; the first monarchy emerged shortly after. (I discuss the social effects of weapons technology in a bit more detail here.) But even during the time of the monarchy, Israel was unique among any polity for over a thousand years in that the Forum remained important. The king was the first limited monarch in history; he was subject to the Divine law, and was not its author or above it in any way.

More recently, the Forum polity of the United States was founded on the colonists’ successful rebellion against the British, made possible by the widespread ownership of firearms; the French Revolution, too, was sustained by the invention of the “citizen’s army,” which resisted the combined invasions of the other major powers of Europe. But wait—the French Revolution was hardly a Forum, you may say. It was a cruel totalitarian regime, soon overthrown by self-styled “Emperor” Napoleon! So why include it here?

The French Revolution may not have been a pure Forum, but it was a classic example of a very important hybrid type: the Palace/Forum. In this regime, though most power resides in the Palace, the legitimating ideology is very different. While a pure Palace draws legitimacy from itself or from the gods, the Palace/Forum claims the right to rule on behalf of the people. In principle, the autocrat is simply a trustee of the people, rather than its master. In practice, this might even be true; the modern United States is effectively a Palace/Forum that, even though imperfect, is far better at actual representation (for now) than are other Palace/Forums such as Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, or any one of a dozen caudillo rulers in South America. But as my examples make clear, even nominally democratic Palace/Forums need not remain so for long, if too much power accretes in the hands of the Palace. As long as the Palace claims legitimacy as a trustee of the Forum, its behavior will be markedly different from a pure Palace. (But not necessarily better.)

(On a related note, popular legislatures today are a poor protector of the rights of the Forum. In the early history of legislatures, the rulers had to pay attention to them because it was the legislatures who collected taxes. Ignore the legislature, and the ruler went broke. But ever since rulers have been able to build their own tax-collection machinery, the “power of the purse” in legislatures has become more and more attenuated.)

Rebellion, Part One

25 Monday Jun 2018

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

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, ,

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

Many fictional stories are built around rebellions against some sort of tyrannical overlord. Such stories provide readymade underdogs to root for and compelling conflict with high stakes; they also mesh well with American culture, and the cultural memory of any society that has ever broken free from external rule (which is most of them, these days).

But as I’ve noted before, these stories often have very little to do with how rebellions actually work. That’s not necessarily a problem, per se; good fiction does not require realism. But it does require a consistent internal logic, and some stories violate their own rules when discussing rebellions, simply because the author had a particular mental model for how rebellions are “supposed” to work that was a poor fit for the story.

Again, the purpose of studying real rebellion is to allow you to tell more stories, broadening your range. If it also dissuades you from writing wildly unrealistic rebellion stories, I’d take that as a win; but that’s because I’m a polisci nerd, so don’t worry about it overmuch.

First, let’s arbitrarily distinguish between four types of rebellions, each with very different goals. These are: violent contention, secession, government overthrow, and revolution.

In violent contention, as I’m using the term, the initial goal is not necessarily to overthrow the government, or to create your own country (although these things could become goals later). Instead, all the rebels want is to improve their own condition. It could be a peasant movement groaning under the tax burden, or agitating for a cancellation of debts, or simply desperate for food which the regime is keeping for itself; it could be a local militia that wants official recognition and a royal salary. It could be the local longshoreman’s union trying to get more sick days.

Such outbreaks of violence could be planned in advance; the Zapatista rebellion in Mexico would be a good example, or any number of large-scale mutinies in the Congo—led by generals who want a government ministry or a promotion. Or, the rebels could coalesce spontaneously, without prior planning or even intent; riots often start this way. The key point is that the initial goal is not to break free of the government or overthrow it, but simply to improve your own condition.

Think of it as a form of bargaining. If the regime or the local moneylenders are oppressing you and refuse to listen to your appeals, you might decide that violence is the only way to get their attention. By taking up arms, you give the regime the choice between meeting your demands, or incurring the costs necessary to put down the rebellion.

Consider the situation in the American Colonies before the Battle of Lexington. Most of the colonists did not want a full-blown war; the very idea was novel. For a colony to break free of its mother country entirely was almost unprecedented in history. (And when Carthage broke free from Tyre, it was because Alexander the Great had wiped Tyre out—not because the Carthaginians had rebelled.) But the colonies had over a hundred years of precedent for small-scale rebellions against the royal governors, launched by people suffering from mistreatment such as dispossessed farmers and slaves. (Few people are taught of these episodes, but you can find a good discussion of them in Murray Rothbard’s “Conceived in Liberty,” starting with Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676.)

So the colonists used violence to make their case. They had very specific grievances they wanted addressed by King George: taxation without representation, arbitrary rule by military officials, restraints on trade, et cetera. Had Britain developed some way to include the Americas in Parliament, it is possible that America would have remained part of the British Empire for centuries to come.

But Britain did not compromise, and instead declared the Colonies to be in rebellion, to be crushed by force. At this point, the rebels faced a decision: either they accept defeat, submit, and try to avoid punishment (the fate of many episodes of violent contention), they continue their relatively low-level campaign of violence and hope that Britain reconsiders, or they broaden their goals into a true rebellion. To take this last option, the rebels typically would need to be strong enough and well enough organized to have hope, however faint, for victory—which the Americans were.

Thus, we come to the second type of rebellion, secession. I call the American Revolution a secession because its goal was not to overthrow King George, or to conquer Britain itself, but merely to break free of it and form a new country. Secession is the kind of full-scale rebellion we see the most of in the real world, probably. And it is the one that best illustrates a key feature of rebellions: they often take the form of competitive state-formation.

What does this mean? In rebellions, each side is trying to project power over a given populace. Both sides want to collect taxes, to control behavior, to deny resources and free movement to the enemy, and to recruit soldiers and inspire loyalty. In short, rebellions feature all the usual problems of wielding political power, but magnified and sharpened because you are competing against an enemy that is trying to do the same thing, to the same populace. Battles and strategies are important, of course, but for a rebellion to even get that far, it must first have managed to build competing state institutions, with all that implies, to raise and support its army. That whole process is what usually gets called “insurgency.”

Secessions usually take place in a peripheral part of the state, where the regime’s control is weak; this gives the insurgents the opportunity to build institutions of their own. And the populace is faced with two would-be rulers, each of which wants to be obeyed; setting aside ideology or ethnic ties, individuals will tend to listen to whichever side offers the more compelling mix of threats and benefits. Assuming of course that the individuals don’t try to play one side off against the other for personal benefit!

Rebellion and Authority by Leites and Wolf is a fantastic, free examination of insurgencies and counterinsurgencies, written by scholars at the RAND Corporation during the Vietnam War; they thus had strong incentives to get their analysis right, and the resulting study is fascinating. Authors will find it invaluable for the richness of detail it provides; definitely check it out.

Later, we will discuss government overthrows and revolutions.