Tilly Tally: War-Making and State-Making in the Contemporary Third World

Brian D. Taylor and Roxana Botea 2008

Tilly - war made the state, and the state made war - true in TW? Controversial outside
Europe - is it the same, or has the international political system changed too much.

Not enough attention on effects of actual wars on specific states?

Afghanistan (78-present day, Vietnam (1946-89). Two instances in TW which saw
significant war. Usually compared in terms of superpower relations - Afghanistan =
USSRs Vietnam - but overlooks the differences betwen the two conflicts. Not same scale
as Tillys wars, but useful points of comparison.

Three mechanisms of how war contributes to state formation:

- development of administrative/revenue extracting capacity - raising money
- creation of coercive agencies, esp. militaries - building armies
- forging of strong national identities - making nations

How war paid for, fought - effects on national identity.

War can make states, but only under specific conditions - present in Vietnam, not in
Afghanistan.

- presence of core ethnic group that had previously served as basis for political
community.
- combination of war and revolution - promulgation of unifying ideology combinind
nationalism w/political ideology.

for war to strengthen contemporary developing world states, have to have some degree of
political/national coherence created as a consequence of war in Europe.

Instead:

the state made war, and war made the state.

Key element not colonialism, but raw materials for creating a state that can receive intl
lgal recognition, as well as governance.

Tilly -

war -> extraction -> repression -> state formation.

Bruce Porter - war can disintegrate states, too. Miguel Centeno - high levels of social
Darwinism in the war-centric account of state development.

BELLICIST THEORY OF STATE DEVELOPMENT

Some move outside Europe - Herbst in Africa (low population density, inhospitable
territories - African states dont have security imperative to defend hinsterlands from
neighbours), Centeno (limited war in South America - limited states, not embedded in
societies)



Ian Lustick - Middle East - no great powers in region because powerful/consolidated
European states prevented state-building wars, that blocked potential regional hegemons
e.g. Egypt.

Less war/less intense war - weaker states.Still functions? Desch, Mgidal, agree - general
absence of external war in developing world -> weak states. Strong states (S Korea,
Israel) strong because of past experience of warfare.

Youssef Cohen, Brian R. Brown, AFK Organski - TW states on same primitive
accumulation of power trajectory, In general, Thies (2004:54) endorses the bellicist
approach and concludes that the same processes that ultimately led to strong states in
Europe may be at work in their early phases in the postcolonial developing world. Ay- oob
(1995:32) also suggests that if Third World states had more time that coer- cion employed
by states within their borders might create more stable authority, but that they face a
ridiculously short timetable.

Tilly, others - sceptical. William Reno - African warlod politics - local strongmen try to weaken
states coercive capacity, rely on international capital/nonstate coercive groups in their patronage
networks. Very different international context.

Also changes the impact of internal wars - are civil wars still helpful? Some say no, but Rosemary
OKane - civil war contributes to state formation. State terror in Iran, Ethiopia. Revolution, not civil
war, that does most of the work?

Different intl economic system. Anna Leander - while in Tillys favourite European era, it was
domestic capital, in 20th/21st century, its access to internationl capital, from international financial
institutions/states.

Leander - Decentralisation of means of coercion - prominence of irregular armed forces, blurring of
boundary between legal and illegal violence. Is this necessarily that different from Europe, though -
Michael Mann - in their ineffectual violence, the warlords of Somalia, Liberia, or Zaire
resemble the vast majority of political regimes throughout premodern history. They are not
monsters but reflections of our own past.

Barnett - can go one way or another.

Considerable disagreement about bellicism.

-Look at actual wars

Three causal mechanisms -
- raising money. the effort to build armed forces and wage war was the largest and most persistent
stimulus to state able to tax their people.
- raising armies. Howard - wars of knights -> mercenaries -> professionals -> nations.
- making nations/nationalism. e.g. Napoleon - creating a sense of French we-nessBarnett,
Centano, Herbst - absence of warfare hinders development of strong national identities in Latin
America, Africa.

Ethnicity and revolution



Ethnically homogeneous states often more successful than diverse ones - can lead to disintegration
of multinational states without a core ethnie - Anthony Smith.

Tilly - close process-tracing. Largely absent from TW study.

Using WB measurements (questionable) - fairly clear inverse relationship between ethnic
fractionalisation and state strength. Vietnam,Mozambique - unusually strong state for
fractionalisation.

Increased state capacity following revolution - declines over time? Soviet state - weakens for a
number of reasons, waning ideological commitment, socio-economic change.

Construction of ethnicity (e.g. Rwanda) - how does this change over time? KANCHAN
CHANDRA.

War and state-making in Vietnam -

Initially, colonial state - Viet Minh extracted money/fighters from newly conquered areas. Capacity
only increased after 1954 Geneva Accords. Foreign aid - part of its success, but much more
important - domestic resources. Appeal to nationalism, ability to frame the war as a conflict
between Vietnamese and foreigners - French, Chinese, American, Cambodian - further bolsters
standing.

US - financial support of South, but not much through tax collection system. North - wide variety of
income-raising.

Sizable economic, military aid on both sides. But - Ilya Gaiduk - N. Vietnam had to have an
effective home front, robust extractive techniques.

Dramatic increase in government extraction of resources.

Army - initially conscripts, under French, but power limited - paramilitary forces.

Making nations - coherent political community 10th century (at latest), when Chinese pull out. Fend
off multiple attempts at Chinese domination.

Long history of resistance and conquest - Vietnamese protonationalism, just as old as Western
Europe. Could use this later - Ho Chi Minh.

Summary - war clearly contributes to state-making in Vietnam. Strong evidence that Tillyian
mechanisms still at work. Core ethnie, long history of political community, conjunction of
revolution and war. Creation of state apparatus.

Afghanistan - Taliban, limited administrative structures. Same with post 9/11 Afghanistan.

Very low tax efforts - most revenue from export taxes, natural gas sales, foreign aid. 75% of taxes
were customs duties. Then - Soviet foreign aid, $1.8 billion by 1986. 75% of revenue from gas
wells etc., run by Russian experts. War - ability to tax population decreases further. Russian
withdrawal leads to fiscal crisis.



Mujahidin, unlike Viet Cong, reliant largely on external support- USA ($2-3 billion in aid, $5
billion to Pakistan), Muslim states - $1-3 billion), Muslim countries - private donation - $300
million.
By 1992 - Afghanistan barely a state any more, very little - mostly claimed by local power groups.
No interest in developing effective state financial/administrative structures - most money from drug
running, etc.

Low fiscal capacity before 1978 - completely destroyed by 30 years of war.

Building armies - Amanullah tried to modernise, but returned to universal indirect conscription.
1978-9 - army collapses. 110,000 troops to 20,000-40,000. Factional, ethnic differences - lots and
lots of desertions. Strong-arm tactics to get people to sign up - inducements. But not very effective.

Mujahidin - extremely fragmented, different backers, etc. Never more than 30,000 troops at most,
although, with some Pakistani support, did manage to become fairly sophisticated - armour,
artillery, small air force.

Some success in creating internal order forces - religious police force. Did establish basic order, but
fairly tenous.

making nations - much less coherent political community. Ethnically/linguistically fragmented.
Borderland between empires. After independence - Rubin - a Pashtun ruler using external
resources to reign over an ethnically heterogeneous society.

Tribal breakdown of society.

Summary
Nearly 30 years of war-making have undermined completely the Afghani state, which was
already very weak before conflict began. The Soviet occupation, rather than rallying the
country against a common enemy, destroyed the states admin- istrative structures and
divided the people against each other. The exigencies of war forced efforts to raise money
and build armies, but these efforts were almost always self-weakening. The most
coercive means of raising money and building armiesdirect taxes and conscription
consistently failed, and conflicting parties found it easier to rely on external support than to
build the administrative struc- tures of a modern state. Although the raw materials for state-
building in Afghani- stan were always poorchallenging geography, an underdeveloped
economy, and high cultural heterogeneitywar has made things worse.

War in Vietnam - state-building, war in Afghanistan - state destroying. Three
mechanisms - can either contribute to state-building, or state-destroying.

No different from European perspecitve, but failed states preserved/continue to exist.

Vietnam - cultural homogeneity, nationalism/revolutionary/communist/state-building
movement -> strong state, internal/external opponents.

Taliban - no core ethnic group, no national/state revolutionary ideology, Taliban not
effective at combining religious identity with national identity.



Religious homogeneity not effective unifying force in the face of ethnic/national
heterogeneity.

Afghan case more common? Many warring states today - internally fragmented,
dependent on external support. E.g. DRC, where wars (over lootable commodities) lead to
further state decay.

Five important issues for Bellicist literature:

1 variation in the strength of war-prone states
2 within-region differences in the effects of warfare on state capacity
3 the durability of increases or decreases in state strength caused by war
4 the relationship between external (military) and internal (police) coercive agencies
5 the relative weight of raw materials, such as ethnicity and geography,
versus contingent factors, such as leadership
Further research -

Variation in strengths of war-torn states. Several outliers - why?

- Regime type
- level of development
- cleavages of other types than just ethnic ones.

More geographically specific research.


How long-lasting are the changes brought about by war - e.g. Soviet Union, waning of a
revolutionary partys combat task.

Less structural factors - role of leadership (Sorenson) - Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam vs.
Najibullah/Mullah Omar in Afghanistan. Can stretch constraints - advance state-building
in the face of adverse factors.

Afghanistan, DRC - dont give war a chance, though - likely to cause huge suffering/need
to keep rest of world (great powers, igos, ngos, capital) out, let states die.

Tillys mechanisms continue, but the world they described is gone.