| Inhalt |
Course description (summary or contents, approx. 200-300 words):
This seminar examines the diverse historical trajectories that produced modern statehood across Europe and their lasting consequences for contemporary politics and governance. By combining foundational theories from political science, sociology, and international relations with comparative historical analysis, the course investigates how European states acquired capacity, legitimacy, and authority from the late-medieval period through to the present day.
The course is organized into two intensive weekend blocks. The first block introduces major theoretical traditions and historical processes of European state-building, focusing on war-making, diplomacy, bureaucratic development, fiscal capacity, nationhood, and the welfare state. Through interactive lectures and structured discussions, the course develops analytical frameworks for understanding how different historical paths created the variety of centralized, federal, and multi-level state forms visible across Europe today.
The second block examines contemporary consequences and transformations of these state-building legacies. Sessions address colonialism and imperialism, gender and reproduction, cultural and educational power, science and governance, territorial design and regional autonomy, and European integration. Student presentations anchor each thematic session, analyzing how state power operates across different domains and policy areas (of their choice).
Throughout the seminar, students explore enduring questions: What is the state? What is it for and why does it operate as it does? What can and cannot it do? How have different historical experiences produced diverse state forms? The course equips students with conceptual tools to connect historical state-building processes to contemporary European challenges in welfare provision, multi-level governance, legitimacy, and political authority. |
| Literatur |
Incomplete provisional list organized around the themes of the course
Background recommended readings
• Hall, John A., and G. John Ikenberry (1989). Concepts in Social Thought: The State. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Hall, John A., ed. (1986). States in History. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
• Mason, D. S. (2022). A concise history of modern Europe: liberty, equality, solidarity. Rowman & Littlefield, Ch. 1-3, pp. 13-51. (This book also provides a detailed timeline of events in the introduction for students wishing to remind themselves of the history of the 18th-20th centuries).
1: A narrow history of state-building
• Becker, S. O., Ferrara, A., Melander, E., & Pascali, L. (2025). Wars, taxation and representation: Evidence from five centuries of German history. Journal of the European Economic Association.
• Croxton, D. (1999). The Peace of Westphalia of 1648 and the Origins of Sovereignty. The international history review, 21(3), 569-591.
• Leander, Anna (2004). “War and the Un-Making of States: Taking Tilly Seriously in the Contemporary World.” In Contemporary Security Analysis and Copenhagen Peace Research, edited by Stefano Guzzini and Dietrich Jung, 69-80. London, New York: Routledge.
• Roberts, Darryl (1991). “War and the Historical Formation of States: Evidence of Things Unseen.” In State and Society in International Relations, edited by Michael Banks and Martin Shaw, 137-68. New York, London et al.: Harvester/Wheatsheaf
• Tilly, C. (2017). War making and state making as organized crime. In Collective violence, contentious politics, and social change (pp. 121-139). Routledge.
2: Recognition and Diplomacy: From Westphalia to the Concert of Europe
• Biersteker, Thomas J., and Cynthia Weber, eds. (1996). State Sovereignty as a Social Construct. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Elias, N. (1983). The Court Society (E. Jephcott, Trans.). Pantheon Books. (Original work published 1969; revised and enlarged version of his Habilitationsschrift from 1933).
• Grzybowski, Janis (2019). “The Paradox of State Identification: De Facto States, Recognition, and the (Re-)Production of the International.” International Theory 11 (3): 241-63.
• Neumann, I. B. (2005). To be a diplomat. International studies perspectives, 6(1), 72-93.
• Weber, Cynthia (1995). Simulating Sovereignty: Intervention, the State and Symbolic Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Weber, Cynthia (1998). “Performative States.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 27 (1): 77-95.
3: Fiscal and war-making powers and the transformation of society
• Albion, R. G. (1952). The timber problem of the Royal Navy, 1652–1862. The Mariner's Mirror, 38(1), 4-22.
• Schumpeter, J. A. (1991). The crisis of the tax state. The economics and sociology of capitalism.
• Strayer, J. R. (2011). On the medieval origins of the modern state. Princeton University Press.
4: The Bureaucratic State
• Morcillo Laiz, Álvaro, and Klaus Schlichte (2016). “Another Weber: State, Associations and Domination in International Relations.” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 29 (4): 1448-66.
• Weber, M. (1946). From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (H. H. Gerth & C. Wright Mills, Eds. & Trans.). Oxford University Press.
• Weber, M. (1978). Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (G. Roth & C. Wittich, Eds.; E. Fischoff, et al., Trans.). University of California Press. (Original work published 1922).
5: Nationhood and Territoriality
• Anderson, B. (2020). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. In The new social theory reader. Routledge.
• Cassirer, Ernst (1946). The Myth of the State. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
• Flora, Peter, Stein Kuhnle, and Derek Urwin (eds), 'The Territorial Structuring of Europe', in Peter Flora, Stein Kuhnle, and Derek Urwin (eds), State Formation, Nation-Building, and Mass Politics in Europe: The Theory of Stein Rokkan (Oxford, 1999; online edn, Oxford Academic, 31 Oct. 2023)
• Giddens, Anthony (1985). The Nation-State and Violence. Cambridge: Polity Press.
6: Society, Economy, and State Legitimacy
• de Carvalho, Benjamin, and Iver B. Neumann, eds. (2015). Small State Status Seeking: Norway's Quest for International Standing. Abingdon: Routledge.
• Elster, J. (1985). Making sense of Marx (Vol. 4). Cambridge University Press, pp. 409-437.
• Skocpol, T. (1979). States and Social Revolutions. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ch. 1.
7: Colonialism and Imperialism
• Andersen, Morten Skumsrud (2012). “Legitimacy in State-Building: A Review of the IR Literature.” International Political Sociology 6 (2): 205-19.
• Badie, Bertrand (various works, e.g., L’État importé and Les deux États; English versions available on imported states and dual statehood).
• Bilgin, Pinar, and Adam David Morton (2002). “Historicising Representations of ‘Failed States’: Beyond the Cold War Annexation of the Social Sciences?” Third World Quarterly 23 (1): 55-80.
• Migdal, Joel S. (2001). State in Society: Studying How States and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Thomson, Janice (1994). Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns: State-Building and Extra-Territorial Violence in Early Modern Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
8: Gender and the State
• Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the Witch. Autonomedia.
• Pateman, C. (2016). Sexual contract. The Wiley Blackwell encyclopedia of gender and sexuality studies.
• Randall, V., & Waylen, G. (Eds.). (1998). Gender, politics and the state (p. 185). London: Routledge.
• Scott, J. W. (1986). Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis. The American Historical Review, 91(5), 1053–1075. https://doi.org/10.2307/1864376
9: State, Society, and Culture
• Bourdieu, P. (2014). Lecture of 31 January 1991. In P. Champagne, R. Lenoir, F. Poupeau, & M.-C. Rivière (Eds.), On the State: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1989–1992 (D. Fernbach, Trans., pp. 150–161). Polity. (Specifically, sections: ‘bureaucracy and cultural integration’ and ‘national unification and cultural domination’, pp. 156-161).
• Illich, I. (1973). Deschooling society. Harmondsworth, Middlesex.
• Gorski, P. S. (2003). The disciplinary revolution: Calvinism and the rise of the state in early modern Europe. University of Chicago Press.
10: Science and the State
• Porter, T. M. (1995). Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life, Princeton University Press.
• Scott, J. C. (2020). Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. Yale University Press. Ch. 1, 9.
11: Territoriality and Multi-Level Statehood
• Börzel, T. A. (2012). How much statehood does it take and what for?.
• L. Hooghe., & G. Marks. (2003). Unraveling the central state, but how? Types of multi-level governance. American political science review, 97(2), 233-243.
• Zürn, M. (2000). Democratic governance beyond the nation-state: The EU and other international institutions. European journal of international relations, 6(2), 183-221.
12: Regional Integration and the European State
• Bickerton, C. J. (2012). European integration: From nation-states to member states. Oxford University Press. Ch 1-2.
• Kelemen, R. D., & McNamara, K. R. (2021). State-building and the European Union: Markets, War, and Europe’s Uneven Political Development. Comparative Political Studies, 55(6), 963-991. https://doi.org/10.1177/00104140211047393
• Milward, A. (1999). The European rescue of the nation state. Routledge. Ch 1-2.
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