Anthropology and the Nation: Character and Climate in the Seventeenth Century

Summary

The geopolitical state and the rise of systematics

In medieval statecraft, the realm was largely an abstract principle: the reach, or sphere of influence, as it were, of a ruler's power (potestas,imperium). Towards the end of the Middle Ages the monarch increasingly becomes the sole focus of a state's unity; a position he gains in a power struggle from his feudal nobles. Once the feudal disparateness of lordships under local noblemen has become centralized under an effective kingship with a growing bureaucratic state apparatus, the realization also takes hold that the realm is not just the reach of royal power and charisma, but a territorially discrete area cordoned off from its neighbours.

This process takes shape in different modes and at different times throughout Europe. The emergence of the Tudor dynasty establishes a centralized monarchical state in England and Wales; Philip II consolidates a Spanish centralist monarchy, and Louis XIV's surmounting of the fronde does the same for France. Compared to England, Spain or France, the German Empire remains diffracted. Emperor Maximilian I’s attempt, as part of the 1495 Reichsreform, to establish a Perpetual Public Peace (ewiger Landfriede) throughout the empire, may be seen as a first, unsuccessful attempt to concentrate the right of using violence and of conducting warfare in the state rather than in the nobility. Kings and princes sometimes confront the self-government of cities, sometimes the ambitions of local noblemen; but disparate as the process is, in all cases the end result is that a king embodies his country and governs it through ministers and courtiers rather than through a feudal system of satellite lordships.

This process also signals the birth of geopolitics. The principle of a rounded-off territorial contiguity seems to assert itself. Whereas the map of Europe in the later Middle Ages resembles a game of Monopoly, with players trying to obtain titles and lands wherever these become available, a territorial rationalization takes places over the centuries. The English crown abandons its claims on French territories, the various branches of the Habsburg dynasty withdraw to their own corners, and under Louis XIV France consolidates its hexagonal shape.