2009

From Hierarchy to Anarchy Territory and Politics before

Westphalia

jeremy Larkins

pal grave macmillan

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

Contents

1 Introduction: Territoriality, Westphalia, and International Relations

2 International Relations, Political Theory, and the Territorial State

3 Theorizing Territoriality: Discourse, Culture, History

4 Hierarchy, Order, and Space in the Medieval World

5 Christendom, Hierarchy, and Medieval Political Discourse

6 The Renaissance Critique of Hierarchy

7 Machiavelli, Territoriality, and Lo Stato

8 Picturing Renaissance Territoriality

9 The Renaissance Territorialization of International Society

10 Conclusion: Territoriality, the Renaissance, and International Relations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ix

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Illustrations

5.1 The Skrzicziek Miniature, in Gratian of Bologna, Decretum: Distinctiones 9, Pars 1, c.1140. Archives of the Prague Castle, Prague, Czech Republic. Archives

5.2

8.1

8.2

8.3

8.4

of the Prague Castle. The Emperor in Majesty, c. 975 (vellum) by German school (tenth century). Aachen Cathedral, Aachen, Germany. Bildarchiv Foto Marburg/The Bridgeman Art Library. German. Out of copyright. View of an Ideal City, 1490-1500 (oil on panel) by Italian School (fifteenth century). Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, USA/The Bridgeman Art Library. Portraits of Duke Federico da Montefeltro (1422-82) and Battista Sforza, c.1465 (tempera on panel) by Francesca, Piero della (c.1415-92). Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Italy/The Bridgeman Art Library. Italian. Out of copyright. The Triumphs of Duke Federico da Montefeltro (1422-82) and Battista Sforza, c.1465 (tempera on panel) by Francesca, Piero della (c.1415-92). Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Italy/The Bridgeman Art Library. Italian. Out of copyright. Arrival of Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga, greeted by his father Marchese Ludovico Gonzaga III (reigned 1444-78) and his brothers, from the Camera degli Sposi or Camera Picta, 1465-74 (fresco) by Mantegna, Andrea (1431-1506). Palazzo Ducale, Mantua, Italy/The Bridgeman Art Library. Italian. Out of copyright.

75

86

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x Illustrations

8.5

8.6

9.1

9.2

Map of the world, based on descriptions and coordinates given in "Geographia," by Ptolemy (Claudius Ptolemaeus of Alexandria) {c.90-168 AD), published in Ulm, Germany, 1486 {color engraving) by German School {fifteenth century). British Library, London, UK/ British Library Board. All Rights Reserved/The Bridgeman Art Library. German. Out of copyright. Carta della Catena, 1490 {Detail) by Italian School {fifteenth century). Museo de Firenze Com'era, Florence, Italy/The Bridgeman Art Library. Italian. Out of copyright. Columbus at Hispaniola, from "The Narrative and Critical History of America," edited by Justin Winsor, London, 1886 {engraving) by Bry, Theodore de (1528-98) {after). Private Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library. Flemish. Out of copyright. Credit: Copy of Monumenta Cartographia, 1502 {color litho) by Royal Geographical Society, London, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library.

164

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191

Acknowledgments

T his book has taken far too long to reach completion and in the pro-cess I have incurred a considerable number of debts. Some of the ideas presented here first saw the light of day during my graduate

studies at the London School of Economics. During the enjoyable years I spent at the LSE many people contributed to my intellectual journey. My greatest debt is to my teacher and supervisor Mr. Michael Banks who encouraged my forays into pastures new while reigning in some of my wil-der impulses. Several other members of the department of International Relations at the LSE also offered valuable support and encouragement. In particular I would like to mention Chris Coker, Mark Hoffman, Justin Rosenberg, and Hayo Krombach. My examiners David Campbell and Chris Brown provided many insightful comments and criticisms that have been incorporated into the present work. The graduate community at the LSE in the mid-1990s was remarkable in many ways and Molly Cochrane, Joal de Almeida, Eddie Keene, Bernice Lee, Mairi Johnson, Bice Maiguashca, and Agostinho Zacarias were sources of inspiration and friendship.

In recent years colleagues in several institutions have made me feel welcome. Despite our differences over the nature of research methods, Yossi Mekelberg at Regents' College has been instrumental in my return to teaching. I also appre-ciate the warmth shown to me by the members of Department of Politics at Goldsmiths, in particular fromJasna Dragovic-Soso, Richard Greyson, Branwen Gruffydd Jones, Gonzo Pozzo, and Sanjay Seth. My future research ambitions have in no small way been inspired by the department's intellectual ethos. Within the broader International Relations community, Mats Berdal, Stephen Chan, James Der Derian, Mervyn Frost, Nick Renegger, Hidemi Suganami, and Rob Walker have all contributed in various ways to the project. I would also like to thank the members of the Warburg Institute of the University of London for allowing me to use their wonderful library.

xii Acknowledgments

At Palgrave Macmillan several people have played important roles in nur-turing this project. I am particularly indebted to Peter Wilson the editor of the "History oflnternational Thought Series" for expressing an interest in my work and encouraging me to submit a manuscript for consideration. This series is an important outlet for those of us who think that the history of ideas matters. Farideh Koohi-Kamali, Toby Wahl, and Asa Johnson have all provided a pub-lishing novice with invaluable support and advice. I would also like to thank Victoria Hogarth at Bridgeman Art Library and Marek Suchy at the Archives of the Prague Castle for their help with obtaining the images. The external review-er's comments were extremely insightful and I am very grateful for their close reading of my manuscript. I have incorporated many of the reviewer's valuable suggestions and believe that the final text is considerably improved as a result. Finally many thanks to Philip Davis for his diligent work compiling the index and reading the proofs.

Emotional and psychological support on what has sometimes been a diffi-cult journey has come from many people. Professor Valerie Cowie provided not only valuable professional assistance but also hours of stimulating conversation. I am grateful for the, often bemused, understanding and patience shown by Zoe Rahman and Zaklina Manevska-Hamilton. One could not wish for better friends than Spyros Economides and Katerina Dalacoura who have picked up the pieces on more than one occasion. My parents Fay and Gordon, my sister and brother, Frances and Matthew, and their families, have all been sources of kindnesses beyond the call of family duty.

I have dedicated this book to Oominique Jacquin-Berdal. Dominique's tragic death in early 2006 not only robbed the International Relations community in Britain of one of its brightest prospects and Africa of one of its most passionate advocates but also many of us of a dear friend. Dominique was an unfailing source of wisdom, generosity, and kindness and I consider myself blessed to have been able to count her among my dearest friends.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Territoriality, Westphalia, and International Relations

International Relations and the Territorial State The sine qua non of modern International Relations theory has been the idea of an international system comprised of independent political communities or states. Since this representation of the international system has no place for an overarching Leviathan or hegemon it is generally assumed that the relations between states are structured by anarchy. International theorists, perhaps mind-ful of Kenneth Waltz's caution against reductionist explanations of interna-tional processes and outcomes, have tended to leave the task of theorizing the state to political theorists.1 Nevertheless, even those theories of International Relations that explicitly eschew the business of state theory implicitly endorse certain assumptions about the nature and character of the states that make up the international system.

Mainstream theories of international relations have been particularly well served by Max Weber's famous account of the state as a human community that "claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory."2 Violence, legitimacy, and territory define the Weberian state. In International Relations the themes of violence and legitimacy have been sub-ject to much debate and discussion. Most attention has focused on the idea of legal domination, which for Weber distinguished modern from traditional or charismatic forms of state domination. Legal domination in international political theory is rewritten as the principle of sovereignty, which, it is claimed, is the constitutive principle of the Westphalian international system. However, the territorial aspect of the state, the fact of the state's physical presence in space-which for Weber, writing in a culture dominated by geopolitics, seemed

2 From Hierarchy to Anarchy

self-evident-has not received equivalent critical consideration in International Relations.

Indeed, it would be fair to say that, for most international political thought the claim that the state has a territory or is in some sense territorial has assumed the status of a common-sensical, self-evident truth. All states, regardless of his-torical and geographical variables, are assumed to have some physical extension in space, to occupy an identifiable place on the surface of the earth, to have borders that clearly distinguish inside from outside and self from others. As Stephen Krasner writes "[t]he assertion of final authority within a given terri-tory is the core element in any definition of sovereignty," the only alternatives being "either a world in which there are no clear boundaries or a world in which there is no final authority within a given territory."3 This final authority is not just derived from the internal monopoly of violence but also comes from the constitutive principle of the state system "that political life must be territorially organized with one final authority within a given territory.'"~ Following Kant I identify this essentialist account of the relationship between the state and ter-ritory as the "territorial a priori." In Kant's Newtonian framework space and time were universal a priori conditions for knowledge. However, the intellec-tual revolution associated with the early twentieth century sciences of relativity forced a paradigm shift in understandings of space and time and showed that the Newtonian-Kantian categories were not universal but particular, the prod-ucts of historically specific knowledge. This book will make a similar claim with respect to the territorial a priori of International Relations. It will suggest that the idea of the territorial state is neither universal nor immutable but contingent and historical. It is a modern cultural representation, a discursive construct, with a complex history whose origins lie in the Renaissance transformation of man's understanding of his being-in-space.

Contemporary Neorealists are unlikely to be unduly disturbed by the asser-tion that the territorial state has a history. After all they deny that differences in the nature of the units that make up any international system have any causal impact on the dynamics of war and the balance of power. However, their Classical Realists predecessors, whose Realism was more imbued with history and polit-ical theory, recognised that the modern state's territoriality was a fundamental factor in the emergence of the modern international system. Hans Morgenthau stated clearly that an international system composed of sovereign territorial states only emerged in the period after the end of the Thirty Years War. Sovereignty or supreme power over a particular territory became the determinant political fact of early modern Europe only once it reflected the new social reality derived from the double victory of the territorial princes: externally over the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope, and internally over local barons. For Morgenthau the legal doctrine of territorial sovereignty formulated by the jurists and lawyers of

Introduction 3

the later sixteenth century was a response to the emergence of the "new phenom-enon of the territorial state. It referred in legal terms to the elemental political fact ofthat age-the appearance of a centralized power that exercised its lawmaking and law-enforcing authority within a certain territory."5

The Westphalia Narrative Morgenthau's claim that the sovereign territorial state emerged out of the tur-moil of the religious wars of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is one account of the Westphalia 'myth', according to which the agreements reached at the Congresses of Munster (1644-48) and Osnabriick (1645-48) and subsequently ratified by the Treaties of Westphalia (1648) gave birth to the modern states-system. According to this narrative ever since Westphalia the international system has been a territorial order whose actors, sovereign states, have been coterminous with bounded, compartmentalized, spaces.6 Although the International Relations 'myth' ofWestphalia is often at odds with the histor-ical events and social and political conditions of the time, the aura ofWestphalia remains largely undiminished; not least because Westphalia has a significance that goes beyond the immediate concerns oflnternational Relations.? For many it connotes the moment when politics, having spent several centuries in the darkened caves of medieval Christianity, emerged blinking into the daylight of modern rationality and reason. Westphalia symbolized a transformation from a system .of political rule based in the hierarchical structures of medieval Christianity to one ordered in terms of independent sovereign territorial states: a transition from hierarchy to anarchy.

For Leo Gross, the Homer of the Westphalia myth, this structural transfor-mation is precisely what made Westphalia so significant: it "marks the end of an epoch and the opening of another. It represents the majestic portal which leads from the old into the new world."8 Westphalia represented the victory of centrifugal forces, empowered by the rising sense of individualism promoted by the Renaissance and Reformation, over the Papacy and Empire upon which the hierarchies of the Christian medieval world had been centered. It "marked man's abandonment of the idea of a hierarchical structure of society and his option for a new system characterized by the co-existence of a multiplicity of states, each sovereign within its territory, equal to one another, and free from any external earthly authority."9 In the Westphalian international system, com-posed of independent sovereign territorial states, the structure of authority is horizontal: there is no Leviathan or transcendental authority figure dictating how states should relate to each other.

This structural transformation in the nature of political authority from medieval hierarchy to modern anarchy both enabled and required a profound

4 From Hierarchy to Anarchy

alteration in man's conception of his political being-in-space or his territoriality. The transition from a vertical to a horizontal political cosmology is, suggests Michael Shapiro, captured in Aldous Huxley's novel Grey Eminence in which Cardinal Richelieu and his foreign emissary Father James embody, respectively, aspects of the modern and medieval spatial imaginaries. In Father James's medi-eval cosmology the world appears as a vertical set of spaces organized into a mundane present and a transcendental eternity, whereas for Richelieu the hier-archies of the Christian order have given way to the modern geopolitical hori-zontal of sovereign states. The novel can thus be read as

a chronicle of the waning of the medieval and the waxing of the modern spatialization of the world, an effect so powerful that, ever since, people pur-suing statecraft have been able to subjugate and direct ecclesiastical author-ity on behalf of policy that unfolds within a horizontal, desacralized world. Indeed, much of the subsequent history of world politics involves the demise of the authorities connected to a vertical world and the ascension of those connected to a horizontal, geopolitical one.10

Shapiro's observations raise two fundamental questions. First, under what cir-cumstances, within what set of intellectual and cultural conditions could this transition from a hierarchical to an anarchical territorial order be conceived and represented? Second, when did this transformation occur? With respect to the first question, one of the working premises of this book is that, contrary to the implicit claim of the territorial a priori, ideas of sovereign-territoriality are not universal, fixed and objective, but particular, transitory and subjective; they are embedded in a culture's collective imagination and become manifest in its representations of its being-in-space. The transformation from hierarchy to anarchy was, maintains Shapiro, primarily derived from changes in the way that the relationship between space and politics was imagined: "the separation of the world into kinds of space is perhaps the most significant kind of practice for establishing the systems of intelligibility within which understandings of global politics are forged." 11 How we imagine our being-in-space has consequences for politics and vice-versa. Concepts of space and political ideologies combine in practices of representation, made manifest in texts and images, which do not simply reproduce the truths of some pre-existing reality. They are discourses understood not as "groups of signs (signifying elements referring to contents or representations)" but in Michel Foucault's sense as "practices that systemat-ically form the objects of which they speak."12 Thus when we examine texts or images that convey, implicitly or explicitly, particular notions of territoriality we must, as David Campbell warns, be mindful of the political consequences of "adopting one mode of representation over another."13 Thus territory must

Introduction 5

be addressed as an object or an idea that is produced by discourse. This book's insistence on the notion of the territorial imaginary seeks to posit an alterna-tive to the territorial a priori in which territory is synonymous with extension in physical space. The territorial imaginary reminds us that in any culture or society assumptions about man's political being-in-space are "constituted by the ensemble of representations which extend beyond the limit imposed by the facts of experience and the deductive conclusions authorized by them."14

As far as the historical purview of this work is concerned one can begin by reiterating Donald J. Puchala's statement that "[t]here were, of course, interna-tional relations before 1648."15 Commenting on the various dates put forward to signify the birth of the modern states-system, Martin Wight has observed that they tend to derive less from balanced assessments of historical data than from scholars' personal value systems and ideological biases. Thus, if one's pri-ority is to emphasize the legal recognition of independent sovereign states then Westphalia is an appropriate date. However, if one thinks that an operative balance of power is a necessary requirement for an international system then the 1713 Treaty ofUtrecht might be more attractive.16 Yet, notes Wight, even if we identify Utrecht a~> the coming-of-age of the modern states-system, we must recognize that it was preceded by a long period of gestation, which began in the fourteenth century.

The real break, prepared through the fourteenth century, becomes manifest in the fifteenth. In the fifteenth century the old constitution of the Respublica Christiana finally breaks down. The attempt at its constitutional reform in the Conciliar Movement is a failure. The papacy is transformed from an ecu-menical theocracy into an Italian great power. The assertion of sovereignty by the secular powers, growing since the thirteenth century, becomes nor-mal. The first lamentations about international anarchy are heard. To miti-gate the anarchy, the first attempts at collective security are made. To assist them, the new invention of reciprocal resident embassies becomes general. As collective security proves itself unworkable, because demanding too much, the simpler system of a balance of power grows up. 17

Despite Wight's insistence that institutional developments in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries established the conditions of possibility for the emergence of a distinctly modern form of international relations it is notable that this period of European history, the Renaissance, has received remarkably little scholarly atten-tion within the discipline oflnternational Relations. Of course, this is primarily a consequence of the Westphalian narrative that has drawn a deep, if arbitrary, line across the historical record. Ironically, the discipline's foundational histor-ical myth requires that earlier events and ideas are themselves mythologized;

6 From Hierarchy to Anarchy

presented as curios that serve to illustrate the distance that the civilized mod-ern world, imbued with Enlightenment ideals, has taken from the passions and doxas of medieval Christendom. As Wight observes "[t]he Westphalian inter-pretation of the history of the states-system fits in with the doctrine that the Scientific Revolution marks a more important epoch in the general history of Europe than does the Renaissance."18 Of course history is rarely so neat. As Krasner points out both the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire remained sig-nificant international actors after 1648, and several medieval political entities (the independent city states of northern Italy, the realm of England and some German city states) were de facto if not de jure sovereign institutions with effec-tive control over their territories from as early as 1300.19

In many ways the Westphalian narrative dovetails with the ideal of moder-nity as Cosmopolis. As described by Steven Toulmin, Cosmopolis was the uto-pia of seventeenth century rationalists, an order combining nature (cosmos) and human society (polis) in which the perceived structure of nature reinforced a rational social order according to the dictates of reason. 20 The intellectual archi-tects of Cosmopolis, motivated by faith in science and the dictates of natural phi-losophy, set out to distance their society from the values, principles, and ideals of an earlier Renaissance humanist tradition of modernity. Toulmin, however, makes too much of the Renaissance/Cosmopolis distinction. Not all Renaissance thought was as open-minded and as 'sceptically tolerant' of plurality and ambi-guity as his reading of Montaigne, Rabelais, Shakespeare, and Erasmus implies. Conversely, many Classical minds were opposed to the rationalist architectonic projects of Galileo, Descartes, and Newton. Indeed, with respect to space and territoriality the conditions of possibility for a Cosmopolitan imaginary in which space could be known rationally, ordered systematically and rendered the object of man's desires, was established during the European Renaissance of the fif-teenth and early sixteenth centuries. Renaissance texts and images reveal that in terms of space and territoriality it was during this period and not during Cosmopolis that the rupture or break with the medieval territorial imaginary was initiated. It was during the Renaissance that the hierarchical arrangement of medieval culture, structured by the prevalent spatial figure of above and below, was undermined. The medieval mind conceived of sovereign-territoriality through a prism in which order was determined by rigid perpendicular chains of being. The multiple overlapping jurisdictions and allegiances of the medi-eval political world were structured vertically through hierarchies of political authority that extended up far beyond the temporal authorities of Emperor and Papacy to culminate in the ethereal realm of the Civitas Dei. This whole edifice was destabilized by the Renaissance re-imagining and reconstituting of the rela-tionship between man and his being-in-space. In terms of political territoriality this resulted in the gradual delegitimization of any claims to sovereignty located

Introduction 7

above the state. The Renaissance established the modern territorial imaginary in which territorial sovereignty is parceled out over a horizontal plane and the dominant spatial motif opposes inside and outside. This transformation from a medieval to modern political cosmology, from a vertical and hierarchical order of sovereign-territoriality to a horizontal and anarchic order, is the subject of this book.

International Relations and the Renaissance The dichotomy between medieval and modern international systems is less neat than the Westphalia narrative presumes. This has been acknowledged by those few International Relations scholars who have incorporated aspects of the Renaissance-a period of European history that bridged "the medieval" and "the modern" while simultaneously bringing both into question-within their histories of international relations. International Relations scholarship on the Renaissance tends to focus on three issue areas: the political philosophy of Machiavelli and other humanists; the Renaissance contribution to modern diplo-macy; and the social relations leading to the institutional rise of the sovereign state. The remainder of this introduction will briefly consider their work, both to situate the present study and to indicate how its arguments extend beyond existing discussions of the Renaissance irt international political thought.

Scholars of political philosophy often remark that the efflorescence of polit-ical theory associated with Renaissance humanism is not matched by equiv-alent advances in thinking about international politics. Torbj0rn L. Knutsen argues that although Machiavelli's writings on self-interest and raison d'etat anticipated some of the concerns of modern international political theory, The Prince is primarily concerned with domestic politics and is not a modern treatise since it continues to articulate power politics in terms of the classical categories of virtu and fortuna. 21 Indeed, for Knutsen, the closest the Renaissance came to developing a theory of international relations is Guicciardini's adaptation of Thucydides' balance of power theory to describe Lorenzo de Medici's for-eign policy. David Boucher, who unlike Knutsen does not limit himself to The Prince, agrees that Machiavelli did not entertain the concept of a balance of power, but maintains that the Florentine did have a distinctive view of interna-tional relations: "Machiavelli's view of human nature and the subordination of morality to politics postulates a dynamic view of the relations among nations, each of which has its own common good which it is prepared to enhance at the expense of others."22 Since it is human nature to always desire more, in the competitive environment of international relations, all states, even those that seek only to maintain the status quo, will be threatened by others, a threat that will spur their own desire and need for conquest. Both Knutsen and Boucher,

8 From Hierarchy to Anarchy

highlighting a theme that will be discussed extensively throughout this work, acknowledge that even if Renaissance political thought articulated little by way of explicit international relations theory, the humanist critique of medieval scholasticism did pave the way for the subsequent development of modern sec-ular political and international theory. Machiavelli and Guicciardini's descrip-tive realism, which described and explained politics in terms of human nature, the exercise of free will and rationality, isolated politics from the normative prescriptions of Christian theological discourse. Renaissance political theorists were no longer compelled to frame their discussions of the state in terms of its relations to either celestial or temporal Christian authorities, but rather depicted it as a human creation that needed constant vigilance in order to be sustained. Boucher and Knutsen treat this theme, which Boucher neatly terms "the prior-ity of the secular," largely through an explication of Machiavellian statecraft and raison d'etat as adumbrated within the concepts of necessita, virtu, and fortuna. Important as these concepts are to understanding Renaissance political theory, neither study provides an extensive discussion of how the state was understood during the Renaissance. Thus in chapter 4 a close textual reading of Machiavelli will explore how humanist political thought conceived of lo stato and how that conception played out in terms of a territorial imaginary.

If the Renaissance lacked a general theory of international relations, its con-tribution to the theory and practice of diplomacy is well acknowledged. In his classic Renaissance Diplomacy, Garrett Mattingly argues that modern diplomacy began with the exchange of permanent resident embassies between the principal courts of Renaissance Italy during the period of the Milanese wars (1444-54).23 Drawing on Jacob Burckhardt's characterization of political life in Renaissance Italy as illegitimate and requiring permanent vigilance, Mattingly claims that the resident ambassadors were simultaneously "the agents and the symbols of continuous system of diplomatic pressures."24 During the remainder of the fif-teenth century the machinery of Renaissance diplomacy was gradually refined and the rights and duties of diplomats were clarified. The heyday of Renaissance diplomacy was brought to a close by the French invasion of 1494 and the ensu-ing struggles between the Valois and Hapsburg dynasties for hegemony over the peninsula. However, because the northern powers adopted the Italian dip-lomatic model it became the European standard, even surviving the Counter-Reformation wars of religion. Renaissance Diplomacy remains a valuable work if only for its insistence that the period between 1420 and 1530 was significant in the history of international relations. Yet, Mattingly's claim that modern diplo-matic practice emerged during the Renaissance has been challenged. For James Der Derian Mattingly's text shares two of the characteristic flaws of the classi-cal tradition of diplomatic studies. First, by narrowly conceiving of diplomacy as "an exchange of accredited envoys by states, and as a valuable norm for the

Introduction 9

international order" it serves to "reinforce if not reify ... a status quo diplomatic system.'25 Second, it reinforces this tradition's evolutionist historical narrative that records the gradual refinement and improvement of diplomatic practice. Nevertheless, Der Derian agrees that the establishment of permanent residences during the Italian Renaissance was an important innovation, especially in the context of the humanist revival of the classical doctrine of raison d'etat. Just as Meinecke's diplomat was "the discoverer of the interests of states" so Machiavelli posited raison d'etat as the state's "intelligence," which allowed it to form an objective awareness of its environment.26 However, for Der Derian neither Machiavellian raison d'etat nor the institution of permanent residences qualify as instances of "diplomacy" understood as the "mediation of mutual estrange-ments between states."27 Renaissance practice "corresponded to an extreme state of anarchy and estrangement of the city states from hegemonic empires' and is thus a manifestation of "proto-diplomacy" or a one sided mediation, whose genealogy can be traced back to St. Augustine. 28 Although for Der Derian the gaze of Renaissance is primarily directed to the past, occasionally it glimpses the future. For, like Boucher and Knutsen, he credits Machiavelli with sweeping away "the remnants of a mythical Christian unity to open the way for a system of diplomacy based on states' interests."29 This work will share Der Derian's suspicion of evolutionist narratives, but whereas for Der Derian the Renaissance is still predominantly an expression of medieval thought and practice, I shall contend that the modern territorial imaginary had its genesis during this trans-formational epoch in European cultural history.

DerDerian's refusal to enfold Renaissance diplomacy within an evolution-ist historical narrative is echoed in Christian Reus-Smit's comparative study of international societies in The Moral Purpose of the State.3 For Reus-Smit the primary institutions of international society are historically and culturally contingent. Their differences are derived from the fundamental set of core val-ues or constitutional structures that the states that comprise each international society look to when justifying their right to exist and act as sovereign entities. International society is ordered by these "coherent ensembles of intersubjective beliefs, principles, and norms" because they determine which actors are legiti-mately recognized as states and the limits to their actions. 31 Of these, the moral purpose of the state is the fundamental normative criterion: it determines the basis upon which sovereign rights are established, the organizing principle of sovereignty, the norm of procedural justice, and ultimately the nature of an international society. Reus-Smit argues that the social structure of Renaissance Italy was constituted by patronage, which had arisen as a response to the anx-ieties generated by the erosion of guild-based corporate structures and the retreat of papal and imperial sources of authority. Relations of patronage bound "patrons and clients in a web of mutual obligations, established and maintained

1 0 From Hierarchy to Anarchy

through rhetorical speech and ritual gesture."32 All authority claims were grounded in "appeals to honorific grandeur," which engendered a specific ratio-nal for sovereignty-"the pursuit of civic glory, or grandezza, was celebrated as the city-state's primary raison d'etre."33 The realization of grandezza, required the nurturing of concordia whereby individuals would place the common good before their own self interest or factional advantage. Although the humanists promoted concordia as substantive justice, rewarding virtue and rectifying vice, in practice the values of patronage prevailed in "the ritual enactment of virtue, through ceremonial rhetoric and gesture, determining patterns of social and political interaction, individual worth and entitlement, and the distribution of social goods."34 In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as city states moved to seigniorial or oligarchic rule, these ritual norms and practices not only shaped relations between individuals but also came to determine those between rulers and subjects and were adopted by political elites "to establish the social identity, legitimacy and status of their city states within the interstate system, and when courting cooperative relations with other states."35 Thus resident ambassadors served as the conduits for "oratorical diplomacy" or the presentation and pro-motion of civic grandeur as a key element of a state's identity and an essential element in the balance of power.

Reus-Smit makes an important claim, one fully endorsed here, that the political institutions of the Renaissance need to be understood within a broader matrix of social relations and normative values. This contextual approach has some affinity with historical sociological studies of the development of the mod-ern states-system, such as Justin Rosenberg's historical-materialist critique of Realism's "transhistorical theory of states-systems sui generis" in The Empire of Civil Society. 36 For Rosenberg because Realists isolate geopolitical structures from the social relations within which they are embedded, they reify what are historically specific social forms of sovereignty and anarchy and reduce interna-tional history to recurrent power struggles between sovereign states operating within anarchy. This impoverished historical imagination occludes the differ-ences between different historical state systems and could be enriched by adopt-ing a historical-materialist method that recognises how the prevailing forms of the relations of production constitute social and political institutions, includ-ing those underpinning the international system. Since relations of production change across time so do political structures and the nature of the relations between them. Thus with respect to the Renaissance, Rosenberg takes issue with Mattingly's assertion that "Italy first found the system of organising interstate relationship[s] which Europe later adopted, because Italy, towards the end of the Middle Ages, was already becoming what later all Europe would become."37 Mattingly fails to acknowledge that the autonomous political institutions of the Italian city-state arose as particular responses to "a radical institutional

Introduction 11

separation of politics and economics premised upon a form of material repro-duction dominated by exchange relations, itself contingent upon a structural location within feudal Europe which enabled the cornering of such flows suf-ficient to support them."38 The Communes' ability to isolate themselves from private individual power so prevalent in feudal Europe and so reconstitute an autonomous public sphere of political life-characterized by the institutions of the poderteria and capitaneria-was derived from their unique role in the feudal economy: their control of East-West trade, their production of manu-factures such as textiles, and the presence of colonies of Italian merchants in various European cities. Rosenberg's argument is persuasive if one accepts his economic determinism, but from the perspective of discourse analysis it is too restrictive. There are surely limitations to any discussion of the Renaissance, which if it was anything was a cultural and intellectual movement that eschews any consideration of ideas and art. This may be a consequence of Rosenberg's idiosyncratic dating of the Renaissance to the emergence of the Communes in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. However, few intellectual or cultural histo-rians would accept that Renaissance culture in any meaningful sense existed before the late thirteenth century when it erupted in Florence with the writ-ings of Dante Alighieri and Francesco Petrarch and the painting of Giotto di Bondone. Rosenberg's chronology merely serves to efface an important distinc-tion between medieval and Renaissance cultures that in terms of their different territorial imaginaries is profound.

The Westphalian narrative of the modern states-system is also contested in Hendrik Spruyt's institutional historical sociology.39 The processes of evolu-tion and change underlying the transformation from a feudal system to one of sovereign territorial states are not, he suggests, satisfactorily explained by N eo-Marxist, Neo-Durkheimian or Neo-Weberian "unilinear explanations" that highlight one explanatory variable-the economic contradiction in feudalism, changes in dynamic density, or an instrumentally rational formal organization. These functionalist and teleological explanations cannot account for the even-tual triumph of the sovereign state as the dominant political institution of Early Modern Europe for there was "nothing inevitable about the emergence of the sovereign, territorial state.'>4 Spruyt's nonlinear view of institutional evolution, derived from Fernand Braude! and Stephen Jay Gould, argues that the political landscape of Late Medieval Europe was profoundly altered by the expansion of trade and the growth of towns. Neither the conflict-ridden feudal institutions of lordship nor the universal Church or Holy Roman Empire were unable to take advantage of these developments. By contrast, the emergent institutions of the sovereign territorial state, city-league, and city-state, embodied in Capetian France, the Hanseatic League and Italian city-states, were able to bolster and legitimize their political authority by means of effective alliance formations

12 From Hierarchy to Anarchy

with the new urban configurations of social and economic power. The ulti-mate victory of the sovereign state was not due to superior war-making as many historical sociologists have contended. For although the Hanseatic League and Italian city-states had effective command of money, warfare and security, it was the ability of the larger territorial states to deploy their superior organiza-tional capabilities to provide the higher degree of standardization and certitude required for the expansion of commerce that secured their victory. As regards Italy, Spruyt shares Rosenberg's interest with the emergence of the two to three hundred independent communes that dominated Italy around 1200. By 1450, however, this political landscape had changed profoundly for the ascent of the signoria, tougher market conditions and foreign interventions had reduced their number to a handful of territorial city states that in many ways "resembled the sovereign, territorial state. Like the French monarchy, the city-state had devel-oped notions of sovereignty and the public realm. Roman law figured predom-inantly. And like the sovereign state, the city state had territorial parameters.'>41 However, the Italian city-states cannot be considered as fully fledged sovereign territories because many of the previously independent towns within their ter-ritories retained considerable degrees of independence and factional struggles within the cities prevented the emergence of a sovereign authority analogous to the French king. Spruyt is correct that Renaissance city-state territoriality was structured in terms of centers and peripheries. However, this did not pre-clude Renaissance political thinkers like Machiavelli from articulating an idea of sovereign territoriality that, while it may have been a more apt description of the northern states at the time, did nevertheless establish the conceptual and ideological premises underlying the modern discourse of sovereign territoriality. Since Spruyt, like Rosenberg, favors a methodology that tends to pass over pri-mary source material in favor of secondary interpretations, these expressions of the modern territorial imaginary in Renaissance discourse are overlooked.

Chapter Outlines The next chapter, "International Relations, Political Theory, and the Territorial State," considers the place and role of the territorial a priori in International Relations theory. It argues that International Relations theory, from Realism to Constructivism and from Liberal Institutionalism to International Society, implicitly endorses an ideal of the territorial a priori that is derived from an "absolutist" tradition of political theory reaching from Hobbes to Hegel. Since Max Weber's theory of the state established the paradigm of the mod-ern territorial a priori and its attendant geopolitical sensitivity it is discussed in detail. Finally, the poststructuralist critics of the "sovereignty problematic" in International Relations is considered as a starting point for further investigation

Introduction 13

into the workings and provenance of the modern territorial imaginary. Building on this discussion of post-structuralism, chapter 3, "Theorizing Territoriality: Discourse, Culture, History," establishes the theoretical or methodological premises that underpin the subsequent inquiry into the cultural history of space and territoriality. Drawing on a wide body of work that has addressed the intel-lectual, social, cultural, and political nature of space, the chapter defines three aspects of the "territorial imaginary" that serves as the primary heuristic concept used throughout this work. First, the "territorial imaginary" recognizes that the idea of state territoriality is a representation of space, a product of various discourses of knowledge and power that order political space. Second, the con-cept of the "territorial imaginary" alert us to the fact that political discourses of sovereign territoriality are informed by a broad matrix of ideas and practices that together constitute a society's culture of space. This culture, comprising various discourses of space, determines the epistemic field of possibility within which representations of territoriality come to have meaning and value. Third, the "territorial imaginary" refuses the claim that territoriality is a primordial or transcendent feature of all human social formations. Territorial imaginaries are historically and culturally contingent. New configurations of spatial discourse and practice produce new frameworks for understanding man's being-in-space.

With the theoretical framework in place, the next two chapters move to the historical account of the transformation of the European territorial imagi-nary. The medieval culture of space was dominated by the episteme of hierar-chy. Chapter 4 begins by outlining the writings of Diortysius the Areophagite on the celestial and ecclesiastical hierarchies, for they established the para-digm of hierarchy within which the medieval understanding of man's political being-in-space was articulated. The Dionysian hierarchical order of space was made manifest in medieval society through the structures of feudalism, notably vassalage and fief-holding, in the codes of chivalry and, in particular, in feudal-ism's legitimizing "mental representation" of the three orders. Dante's Divine Comedy is read to demonstrate how the medieval culture of space interwove physical and political cosmology within a shared spatial episteme determined by the figure of above and below. Scholastic theological discourse, which rein-forced the hierarchical structure of being, also impacted on medieval geogra-phy. In the famous T-0 maps, the earth's spaces were not, as in modern maps, defined in terms of abstract mathem~tical coordinates, but were distributed in places that were allocated different values according to hierarchical principles. Chapter 5, "Christanitas, Hierarchy, and Medieval Political Discourse," builds on this general account of the medieval culture of space to argue that its hierar-chical architectonics determined the possibilities for thinking about territorial-ity within medieval political discourse. This claim is made with reference to the tripartite power struggle between Papacy, Empire, and Monarchy that defined

14 From Hierarchy to Anarchy

medieval international relations. At stake was not only the right to rule over but the ability to determine the nature of European political society. However, the differences between the ideals of Ecclesia or Christianitas promoted by the papal doctrine of plenitudo potestatis, Dante's imperial ideal of humana civilitas, or John of Paris's Capetian-sponsored advocacy of civitas were less significant than their shared territorial imaginary. All were premised on the understanding that sovereign-territoriality was not restricted to the horizontal plane of the earth's surface but was structured hierarchically, extending from the Civitas Terrena to the Civitas Dei, the divine font of sovereignty. The spaces of the medieval world, including its territorial imaginary, were structured according to the episteme of hierarchy.

Chapter 6, "The Renaissance Critique of Hierarchy," begins the task of iden-tifying in the Renaissance culture of space those ideas that would challenge the hierarchies of the medieval order. The meaning of the Renaissance is conten-tious and the chapter begins by acknowledging the difficulties in defining its contours and determining its relationship to medieval and modern cultures. An important challenge to the medieval episteme of hierarchy was mounted in the Renaissance cosmologies of Ficino and Pica della Mirandola that devel-oped a recognizably modern notion of sovereign identity. Their promotion of the "dignity of man" not only released man from his lowly fixed position in the cosmos and thereby destroyed the pivotal foundation of the hierarchical universe, but also asserted that man as self-fashioner was capable of shaping and ordering nature and its spaces, rather than being shaped and ordered by them. Machiavelli's realism also assisted in dismantling the hierarchies of the medieval political cosmos. Machiavelli not only situated politics within a new conception of time, but also resited politics in the space of modern territorial sovereignty. In maintaining that religion had no purpose other than to cement solidarity within political society and by castigating Christianity as an espe-cially ineffective form of state religion, Machiavelli brought down territorial sovereignty from the celestial spaces of the Civitas Dei to the mundane world of terrestrial politics. Machiavelli is also the main subject of the next chap-ter, "Machiavelli, Territoriality, and Lo Stato", which explores the modernity of Machiavelli's territorial imaginary in terms of his promotion of the secular state. Starting with a consideration of the various meanings of lo stato in Renaissance political discourse, the chapter then identifies in Machiavelli's discussion of the state in The Prince and The Discourses three elements of the modern territo-rial imaginary. First, Machiavelli's emphasis on the legal concept of dominion embodies a distinct sense of sovereignty as the extension of political authority over a defined territory. Second, Machiavelli's distinction between the internal and external exercise of political violence legitimizes the spatial figure of inside/ outside. Finally, Machiavelli's evocation of italianita, articulated in terms of

Introduction 15

an opposition to the barbarian other, expresses the modern desire to ground national identity on the territory of the state.

Chapter 8, "Picturing Renaissance Territoriality," moves to the representa-tion of sovereign territoriality in Renaissance art. A particular concern is the effect that the technique of perspective had in transforming man's relationship to space. The basic principles of perspective construction are introduced with reference to the rules laid out by Alberti and their use in painting by Piero della Francesca. Perspective is also addressed as a discourse of power/knowledge that not only objectified space but also constituted man's subjectivity in space. The chapter considers how Renaissance paintings of principalities (as represented by Piero della Francesca's diptych of Federico da Montelfeltro and Battista Sforza) and city states (as depicted in the ideal cityscapes of the Urbino, Baltimore, and Berlin panels) endorsed the values of an emerging modern territorial order of sovereignty, politics and space. Perspective was also instrumental in promot-ing a cartographic sensibility that allowed the territorial boundaries between Renaissance kingdoms to be drawn on topographical and regional maps.

Moving from the internal projections of Renaissance territoriality, chapter 9, "The Renaissance Territorialization of International Society" looks outward to the territorialization of the "new world." The "invention of America" and the epistemological revolution derived from the voyages of discovery radically altered man's perception of his being-in-the-world, not least in freeing him from the confines of the medieval Christian geographical imaginary. The discovery of the "new world" shattered the medieval view of the world as a cosmic jail and freed man from the confines of the Orbis Terrarum. These transforma-tions went hand in hand with more explicitly political territorializations of the new spaces of international society. The famous papal demarcation line of the Inter caetera bulls and the division of the new world agreed to at the Treaty of Tordesillas reflected, at the level of high politics, strategies of territoriali-zation on the ground. These processes, which reflected the complex interplay between the drives to conquest and conversion, were legitimized through texts and images. Accounts of the naming and possession of territories in the jour-nals ofColumbus and Vespucci and the cartographic representation of the "new world" on maps like the Miller Atlas and the Cantino Planisphere were instru-mental in the production of territorialized spaces that constituted the new reach of Renaissance International Society.

CHAPTER 2

International Relations, Political Theory, and the Territorial State

M artin Wight established a famous dichotomy between, on the one hand, the tradition of political theory that since Plato and Aristotle has sought to establish the conditions by which mankind might pro-

gress to some ideal of the "good life" within the state and, on the other hand, international theory, which focusing on relations between states, that amounts to little more than a depressing account of the eternal recurrence of war and the balance of power.1 Whereas students of domestic politics assume the presence of some sort of governmental system in which law and institutions override the naked struggle for power, students of international politics presume that gov-ernment in any meaningful sense is absent and those laws and institutions that do exist are always vulnerable to the machinations of power politics. 2 Although Wight was personally attuned to the tragic nature of international politics, this dichotomy has served to legitimize International Relations as an academic dis-cipline in so far as study of the anarchic relations between states has become its sole preserve. Yet, as Justin Rosenberg observes, this disciplinary identity is secure only as long as the idea of the sovereign state retains its legitimacy: "the same absolute character of the sovereignty of the modern state that is the foun-dation of order within national boundaries simultaneously dictates the persis-tence of an external condition of anarchy among states."3 One important feature of this dichotomy between sovereignty and anarchy is that it is inscribed in space: "[t]he borders and landscape of this environment are set and policed by the twin concepts of sovereignty and anarchy.'>4 This chapter will explore how the modern ideal of political space, as embodied in the idea of the territorial state, has served to maintain these dichotomies.

18 From Hierarchy to Anarchy

The first section looks at state theory in International Relations and argues that it tends to be underpinned by, what I term, the territorial a priori. The second section will trace the emergence of the idea of the territorial state in an absolutist tradition of political theory that, reaching from Hobbes to Hegel, reaches its apotheosis in Weber's famous definition of the modern state as an institution laying legitimate claim to the means of violence within a defined territory. Section three frames this paradigm of state territoriality within the Cosmopolitan tradition of modernity. Finally, I shall discuss how the poststruc-turalist critique of the "sovereignty problematic" in International Relations unsettles the assumptions that underpin the idea of the territorial state.

The Territorial a Priori of International Theory In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant asserts that space and time "are the pure forms of sensible intuition, and are so what make a priori synthetic propositions possible."5 This statement refers back to some of the basic elements of Kant's critical project. Thought is in immediate relation to objects through intuition. Intuition requires that we receive representations of objects through the capac-ity of sensibility: "Objects are given to us by means of sensibility, and it alone yields us intuitions; they are thought through the understanding and from the understanding arise concepts."6 The effect of an object upon the faculty of repre-sentation Kant terms sensation. Sensation produces empirical intuitions whose undetermined object is appearance. The appearance that corresponds to sen-sation is matter, but Kant is interested in that which "so determines the man-ifold of appearance that it allows of being ordered" or the form of appearance. While matter is given to us a posteriori only (as empirical knowledge possible only through experience) form must "lie ready for the sensations" a priori in the mind-a priori knowledge being absolutely independent of all experience.

The critique's necessary first step is the constitution of the transcendental aesthetic that identifies the pure forms of sensible intuition. These pure forms are space and time and they serve as the principles of a priori knowledge. In the eighteenth century there were two competing conceptions of space. The dominant paradigm was Newton's in which space was conceived of as absolute pure entity, the same throughout and immovable, and which existed in and of itself without any relation to anything external to it. The secondary paradigm, associated with Leibniz, conceived of space like time as a relative quality, as "an order of co-existences as time is an order of successions."7 Kant proposes four postulates about space that reveals his affinity with the Newtonians. First, space is not an empirical concept derived from outer experience, for any representa-tion of an object as being outside of oneself, or as different from other objects, presupposes the representation of space. Second,

IR, Political Theory, Territorial State 19

[s]pace is a necessary a priori representation, which underlies all outer intu-itions. We can never represent to ourselves the absence of space, though we can quite well think it as empty of objects. It must therefore be regarded as the condition of the possibility of appearances, and not as a determina-tion dependent upon them. It is an a priori representation, which necessarily underlies outer appearances. 8

Third, because we can only represent one space to ourselves "space is essentially one" rather than multiple. It is pure intuition rather than a general concept that requires thought to impose limitations on it. Finally, space is represented as an "infinite given magnitude" containing an infinite number of representa-tions within it.9 Space then in Kant's idealist framework is an a priori intuition located within the subject. It precedes objects and allows the concept of the object to be determined a priori. 10

I shall return to Kant presently, but at this stage I want to advance the prop-osition that territory in international theory has a status analogous to space in Kant's transcendental aesthetic. Just as for Kant space is the condition of possibility for sensible intuition of the world, so territory serves as an a priori condition underpinning state theory in International Relations. The territorial a priori takes many different forms in International Relations theory ranging from crude associations with some physical or material reality to more pro-found, but nonetheless still unsatisfactory, attempts to understand territory in terms of the institutional determinants of sovereignty.

The most explicitly materialist statements of state territoriality tend to be made by Classical Realists who argue that the power of the state is dependent on the material resources at its disposal.U According to John Herz the modern nation-state has an underlying essence that is found "in its physical, corporeal capacity: as an expanse of territory encircled for its identification and its defense by a 'hard shell' of fortifications." 12 Reflecting on the state of the state at the beginning of the Cold War, Herz forecast the "passing of the age of territoriality" as the state's space became penetrated by economic forces and by psychological, air, and nuclear warfare. However, ten years later, he expressed renewed confi-dence in the ability of the territorial state to survive. The "new or neo-territorial" state was now capable of resisting both nuclear attack and the forces of transna-tionalism.13 Herz also maintained that the state's territorial impermeability was the underlying foundation of the classical system of international relations and its institutions of international law, the balance of power, and war. Accordingly, now that the state's territorial integrity was guaranteed he did not foresee any imminent structural changes to the contemporary states-system. 14 Raymond Aron also emphasized the material reality of the state's territory, claiming that a state's authority was dependent on its possession of "a fragment of the earth's

20 From Hierarchy to Anarchy

crust, with the men and objects thereon." 15 Because the space or milieu a state occupies is an important source of its power-it provides the resources and manpower required for defense-it is in the interests of states to increase their space. Thus the history of the international system has been driven by conflict over space, as states, seeking to increase their power, dispute the territories occu-pied by some and desired by others. The consequence of this Darwinian strug-gle for possession of the earth's physical space is that "[e]very international order, down to our own day, has been essentially territorial. It represents an agreement among sovereignties, the compartmentalization of space."16

In Kenneth Waltz's structural neorealism the territorial a priori is less explicit. For Waltz, who resists any reductionist explanations of the international system in terms of the nature of the units that make it up, the question of state terri-toriality takes a back seat.17 Because all international systems are structured by anarchy the actors are logically undifferentiated and functionally equivalent, meaning that the only significant variable of concern to international theory is the distribution of power. Analysis of international politics must "abstract from every attribute of states except their capabilities." Territory is simply a compo-nent of a state's material power resource or capability. States can thus be ranked according to "how they score on all the following items: size of population and territory, resource endowment, economic capability, military strength, political stability, and competence."18 In contrast to Waltz, Robert Gilpin offers a more rigorous and historically sensitive neorealist account of state territoriality. Gilpin acknowledges that the state has taken on many different forms in practice and that only the modern state embodies complex class and social structures, asserts a claim to national identity, and exercises a distinctive means of controlling its territory. 19 The modern state is the only state form characterized by "a strong central authority that is differentiated from other social organizations" and is capable of exercising "control over a well-defined and contiguous territory."20 For Gilpin a state's territoriality has a functional role similar to that of property rights in the domestic realm. Resources in international politics are distributed in terms of relative territorial extension and just as the redistribution and redef-inition of property rights signals fundamental transformations in domestic pol-itics, so the redistribution of territory following major wars indicates significant transformation in the realm of international politics. 21

Contemporary realism has adopted some of the theoretical premises of con-structivism. Alexander Wendt rejects both the neorealist insistence that anarchy forces states into self-interested behavior resulting in conflict, and the neoliberal hypothesis that states in anarchy can learn to cooperate with one another in the pursuit of absolute gains. For Wendt anarchy is a fluid concept determined by the "inter-subjectively constituted structure of identities and interests in the system."22 Anarchy is the product of the practices of state interaction. Although

IR, Political Theory, Territorial State 21

Wendt denies any fixed essential meaning to anarchy, he nevertheless privileges the state as actor on the grounds that "states are ontologically prior to the states system."23 Despite its changing identities and interests "the essential state is an organizational actor embedded in an institutional-legal order that constitutes it with sovereignty and a monopoly on the legitimate use of organized violence over a society in a territory."24 Territory is one of the properties of the state and quite possibly the most important: "No territory, no state." For Wendt the rela-tionship between the state and its territory is evident from the Latin etymology that combines "terra ('earth' or 'land') to torium ('belonging to' or 'surround-ing,' presumably the state.)"25 It is precisely its exercise of authority over territory that distinguishes the state from other institutional actors such as the church or firms. To be fair, Wendt does admit that the assumption of International Relations states-system theory that territory is an exogenous given is problem-atic. The historical record demonstrates, first, that territorial boundaries tend to be flexible and shifting rather than rigid and fixed, and second, that national interests and identities are rarely coterminous with the boundaries of the state. Yet, if we are to successfully develop a social theory of the states system such anomalies must be put aside. It is not the task ofinternational Relations scholars to write a "'biology' of the state" that seeks to "problematise territory 'all the way down'."26 Ideas all the way down then; at least until one collides with the hard material shell of territory.

Wendt makes an analytical distinction between sovereignty and territory, which he discusses as two distinct and not necessarily related properties of the state. By contrast, in Stephen Krasner's theory of sovereignty as an institu-tional structure that conditions, to varying degrees, the interests, capabilities and actions of states in foreign affairs, the relationship between sovereignty and territory is rather more complex. Krasner identifies four possible meanings of sovereignty. Two of these, "domestic sovereignty" that refers to the organization and effectiveness of public authority within a state, and "interdependence sov-ereignty" that denotes the ability of public authorities to control trans-border movements, are only implicitly connected to territory. However, the other two meanings of sovereignty are explicitly grounded in the principle of territoriality. "International legal sovereignty" attests to states' mutual recognition of each other as the only legitimate participants in international relations. Such recog-nition is only extended to "entities, states, with territoriality and formal juridical autonomy."27 Finally, "Westphalian sovereignty" is an institutional arrange-ment for organizing political life based on the principles of territoriality and independence from external intervention in the exercise of domestic authority. Westphalian sovereignty is symbolized by the norm of non-intervention formal-ized by Wolff and Vattel at the end of the eighteenth century. However, endemic violation of this norm by states means that the institution of sovereignty amounts

22 From Hierarchy to Anarchy

to little more than a form of organized hypocrisy. 28 Although Krasner posits territory as an a priori reality underpinning the various permutations of sover-eignty, he avoids crude materialism and recognizes that territorial-sovereignty is constituted through a permanent exchange between knowledge and practice. Territory in not simply synonymous with physical space but is embodied in the principle of territoriality. It is an institution or idea that is not anterior to but produced in practice.

The English School or International Society approach also acknowledges a mutually constitutive relationship between territory and sovereignty. Rejecting the structural determinism of neorealism, English School scholars maintain that states accept, or at least pay lip service to, the rules and institutions of interna-tional society because they promote their common interests and values. Mutual recognition of each other's sovereignty is the ground rule of international society and confirms membership of the society of states. However, in order to gain access to this club, prospective members must possess a territory. Hedley Bull defines states as "independent political communities" that "possess a govern-ment and assert their sovereignty in relation to a particular portion of the earth's surface and a particular segment of the human population."29 Similarly Alan James asserts that since each of the member states of international society exclu-sively represents a distinct "physical sector of the land mass of the globe", so the landscape of international society is "divided into states by frontiers rather as a farm is into fields by fences and walls."30 Now that international society has expanded globally "almost every square kilometer of the earth's land sur-face" has been allocated to "one sovereign state or another, with virtually all frontiers being tidily delineated or clearly demarcated."31 English School think-ers also endorse the institutionalist assumption that the inside/outside spatial distinction between domestic and international politics is primarily articulated in terms of sovereignty. Bull, for example, distinguishes the exercise of internal sovereignty (which gives a state supremacy over all other authorities within a territory and over a population) from external sovereignty (which denotes inde-pendence from outside authorities).32 Again the underlying assumption here is that territory exists a priori and is something onto which sovereignty is some-how fixed. English School emphasis on the importance of international law has lead many of its advocates to endorse the idea of the state as a Rechstaat, that is, as the embodiment of the collective agency of social power through represen-tative institutions, created by laws, customs, and practices. However, even the Rechstaat resides upori the territorial a priori. As Cornelia Navari defines it, the Rechstaat is "a particular kind of political community, one that is territorially located, with a more or less delimited set of persons distinguished from the citizenry by the name of government, and that is conceived as law maker."33 English School theories of international relations that emphasize the state's

IR, Political Theory, Territorial State 23

entrapment within webs of legal constraints thus fail to offer an alternative to the territorial a priori of the Classical realists.34 Certainly classical international law offers a standard account of the state's relation to its territory. As defined by Hans Kelson, territory is

that space within which, in principle, one state, the state to which the ter-ritory belongs, is entitled to carry our coercive acts, a space from which all the other states are excluded. It is the space for which, according to general international law, only one definite national legal order is authorized to pre-scribe coercive acts, the space within which only the coercive acts stipulated by chis order tnay be executed. It is the space within the so-called boundaries of the state. 35

In sum we can endorse John Agnew and Stuart Corbridge's observation that international theory, or at least states-system theory, is floundering in a "terri-torial trap." They argue that International Relations' geographical imaginary divides the world up into mutually exclusive territorial states, thereby restricting the discipline's potential field of enquiry. This territorial trap is set by three related intellectual dispositions. First, the assumption that state territoriality is always and everywhere coterminous with state sovereignty has the effect of sanctifying the sovereign territorial state as a "sacred unit beyond historical time."36 The second presumption, derived from the mercantilist subordination of economics to politics, posits territorial states as the primary nodes of interna-tional economic exchange. Finally, the social is subsumed within the political in so far as the only social groups (nations) viewed as being significant are those coterminous with the boundaries of the territorial state. Unable to see beyond the walls and bars of the architecture of its incarceration, mainstream theory is, they argue, unable to account for the emergent phenomena of globalization such as population movements, capital mobility, environmental insecurities and the chronopolitics of the modern military: "(s]ocial, economic and political life cannot be ontologically contained within the territorial boundaries of states through the methodological assumption of'timeless space'."37

The Territorial Legacy: Political Theory from Hobbes to Hegel International theory is far from being the only body of thought to have stum-bled into the territorial trap. Indeed International Relations theorists might, with some justification, claim that the theory of the state they draw on has a venerable ancestry reaching back to Hobbes, if not further. Navari points out that Hobbes' political philosophy reflects the discursive strategy, ' implicit in much political discourse of his time, to establish the identity of the modern state

24 From Hierarchy to Anarchy

by opposing it to the state of nature represented as its other. The architects of the new sovereign state presented it in its modernity. It was bounded, abstract, insti-tutional, demythologized, and secular. 38 At the same time "a number of princes sitting in a field uttering the words, cuius regia, eius religio" invented interna-tional relations as a state of nature. 39 Many of these princes represented the emerging absolutist states, the archetypal political projects of Cosmopolis. For Zygmunt Bauman the absolutist state, with its projection of an image of order and security, offered a palliative to the pervasive sense ofinsecurity and fear that swept though early modern culture as the theocratic hierarchies of the medie-val world were swept away by the new spirit of rationalism. The Cosmopolitan search for order manifested itself in spatial projects that sought to substitute the chaotic and disorderly space of the medieval town for the linear purity and per-fect order embodied by Versailles.40 This new order was designed, created and legitimized by a modern "space-managing state" that set about "landscaping the wasteland ... subjecting all local features to one unifying homogenizing princi-ple of harmony.'>41

The Cosmopolitan opposition between the absolutist state and the state of nature replicates the inside/outside dichotomy characteristic of modern political discourse. Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan neatly sets up the opposition between the state of nature and the sovereign state.42 Rob Walker argues that Hobbes's political theory is infused with a desire to overcome the temporal and contin-gent nature of politics by fixing it to a secure and permanent space.43 Hobbes believed that through the application of science and geometry to politics "man could construct a political order as timeless as a Euclidean theorem.'>44 Nevertheless, Leviathan does not contain an explicit statement of modern sover-eign territoriality. The Common-wealth's territoriality is only addressed in the context of a discussion of the rights that the European Commonwealths have over their colonies. Since God allocated raw materials to different parts of the earth Commonwealths must by necessity trade with one another. These bodies are partially distinguished by their dominion over different territories: "[t]his Matter, commonly called Commodities, is partly Native, and partly Forraign: Native, that which is to be had within the Territory of the Common-wealth: Forraign, that which is imported from without.'>45 Perhaps the most striking representation of sovereign territoriality in the Leviathan is the famous image adorning the frontispiece. Here the Leviathan, made up of the members of the commonwealth and brandishing a scepter of justice and a sword, towers over the city and its surrounding countryside that he both protects and controls.

A more direct engagement with the spatial aspect of politics can be found in Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Following Aristotle, Rousseau in the Social Contract seeks to establish the optimum size for a state. A successful political community must maintain an appropriate balance between the size of its territory and the

IR, Political Theory, Territorial State 25

number of people that inhabit it. Men "make up the State and the land feeds the men.'>46 Rousseau's admiration for the ancient polis and the Renaissance city-state led him to conclude that social harmony is to be found in small com-munities and to doubt the benefits of expansionist policies. The larger a state grows the more protracted the social bond becomes and the greater the chance of" deficient government" and the suppression of freedom.47 Further, the social contract is forged in a bond that unites individual private property with state territory. In order to establish a political community each individual must give himself, "his force and possession," to it. "Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will; and in a body we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole. 4B Under such an arrange-ment it is understandable

how the combined and contiguous lands of private individuals become pub-lic territory, and how the right of sovereignty, extending from the subjects to the ground they occupy, comes to include both property and persons, which places those who possess land in a greater dependency and turns even their force into a guarantee of their loyalty. This advantage does not appear to have been well understood by ancient monarchs who, only calling them-selves Kings of the Persians, the Scythians, the Macedonians, seem to have considered themselves leaders of men rather than masters of the country. Today's kings more cleverly call themselves Kings of France, Spain, England, etc. By thus holding the land, they are quite sure to hold its inhabitants.49

With respect to colonial territories, Rousseau argues that the European powers do not have the right to dispossess the indigenous inhabitants of their lands even if these people have no recognizable state institutions. The inhabitants of a land are protected by the right of first occupant secured through private property. However, certain conditions must be met for this right to be rec-ognized: the first inhabitants must only occupy previously uninhabited land, they may only take the amount ofland required for subsistence, and possession must be taken by labor and cultivation rather than by "vain ceremony.'' From these premises Rousseau, with an eye to the exclusion of the French from the conquest of South America, criticizes the territorial claims of the European colonial powers.

How can a man or a people seize an immense territory and deprive the whole human race of it except through punishable usurpation, since this act takes away from the remaining men the dwelling place and foods that nature gives them in common? When Nunez Balboa, standing on the shore, took posses-sion of the South Sea and all of South America in the name of the crown of

26 From Hierarchy to Anarchy

Castile, was this enough to dispossess all the inhabitants and exclude all the Princes of the world?5

By the time Immanuel Kant published Perpetual Peace the idea of the terri-torial state was firmly established in European political thought.51 Kant, like Rousseau, accepted that the legitimate actors of international politics were inde-pendent sovereign territorial states. Yet he considered the Ancien Regime practice of acquiring states by "inheritance, exchange, purchase, or gift" to be illegiti-mate because

a state, unlike the ground upon which it is based, is not a possession (patri-monium). It is a society of men, which no-one other than itself can command or dispose of. Like a tree, it has its own roots, and to graft it on to another state as if it were a shoot is to terminate its existence as a moral personality and make it into a commodity.52

Anticipating the English School requirement that the members of interna-tional society must be territorial states, Kant declares that in order for the republican states to combine successfully in a pacific federation they must first have established control over their own territories. Once accepted as members of the federation they will retain their territorial integrity. Kant does not desire the borderless space of a universal state. Indeed, international justice requires the "separate existence of many independent adjoining states." Although such a divided territorial order can nevet fully eradicate the threat of war, reason shows that it is to be preferred to "an amalgamation of the separate nations under a single power which has overruled the rest and created a universal monarchy."53 Kant also holds territorial differentiation to be a necessary condition for the cos-mopolitan right to universal hospitality, which requires that the "stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives on someone else's territory." 54 While the stranger may be turned away, as long as he behaves in a peaceable manner he must not be treated with enmity.55

In Hegel's philosophy of right the state is the arena in which subjectivity and expressive unity, the necessary conditions of freedom in modernity, come together. The state is the place where Spirit achieves its most elevated politi-cal being.56 It is an absolute rational being where the ethical idea achieves its highest mode of expression. Thus attributes such as power, wealth and spatial extension are contingent facts of external appearance, historical variables that are not consequential for understanding its essential being.57 However, asserts Henri Lefebvre, Hegel was instrumental in inscribing modern politics within space. With Hegel historical time gives birth to the space that the state occu-pies and rules over; "[f]or Hegel space brought historical time to an end and

IR, Political Theory, Territorial State 27

the master of space was the state. Space perfected the rational and the real-simultaneously."58 Certainly in his writings on international law, Hegel affirms the individual subjectivity ofindependent territorial states. In order to be auton-omous they can and should meet their needs within their own borders.59 The individual state, like the individual human being, is a subject to the extent that it is aware of its own existence "as a unit in sharp distinction from others. It manifests itself here in the state as a relation to other states, each of which is autonomous vis-a-vis the others."60

Max Weber and the Modern Territorial State If the territorial a priori was implicit rather than explicit in political philosophy from Hobbes to Hegel, Max Weber would bring it centre stage.

[A] state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Note that "territory" is one of the characteristics of the state .... The state is considered the sole source of the "right" to use violence.61

Weber emphasizes the state's territoriality as a consequence of his realist politi-cal ontology that stresses domination and coercion rather than cooperation and negotiation.

A "ruling or dominating {Herrschaftverband) organization" will be called "political" insofar as its existence and order is continuously safeguarded within a given territorial area by the threat and application of physical force on the part of the administrative staf A compulsory political organization with continuous organizations (politischer Anstaltbetrieb) will be called a "state" insofar as its administrative staff successfully upholds the claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order.62

The particular potency of the modern territorial state derives from its capac-ity to command the forces of rationalization, nationalism and geopolitics. In modernity the eclipse of value rationality by purposeful rationality, evident from the scientific mastery of nature to the bureaucratic control of society, make most human life, motivated only by instrumental goals, drearily pre-dictable.63 An important aspect of bureaucratic rationalization was the use of discipline or "the consistently rationalized, methodically trained and exact exe-cution of the received order, in which all personal criticism is unconditionally suspended and the actor is unswervingly and exclusively set for carrying out the

28 From Hierarchy to Anarchy

command," to regulate the body's location in space and movement in time.64 The modern state is able to coerce its subject population not only because it has access to the means of physical violence but, equally importantly, because it has a vast bureaucratic machinery at its disposal through which it disciplines everyday activity. However, there is a price to pay, for the bureaucratic state is in danger of becoming a "frozen spirit" or a "living machine" that "[t]ogether with the dead machine (in the factories) ... is in the process of erecting the scaffolding of that future subjection or enslavement."65 In developing Weber's concepts of rationalization and discipline, Anthony Giddens argues that the modern state's administrative capability is defined by a potent form of surveil-lance, which combines the collection and organization of information stored by agencies used to monitor the activities of an administered population with the direct supervision of the activities of subordinates by superiors in a partic-ular organization.66 Together they form the basis of an administrative power that controls the timing and spacing of human activity. All states utilize sur-veillance to some degree but only the modern nation state has the necessary technologies to effectively police the codes of criminal law and to control devi-ance across its entire territory. 67

Another aspect of state territoriality explored by Weber is the mapping of national identity onto territory. State legitimacy per se depends on the justifica-tion of the claim to the monopoly of violence within a defined territory. While other states looked to tradition or charismatic leadership to ground this claim, the modern state appeals to legal rational authority or the de focto legality of rules and the right of those who enact those rules to do so. 68 However, in a dis-enchanted world modern states faced a "legitimacy deficit" for the procedural criteria of legal and political legitimacy could not secure political commitment to the state. What was required was an appeal to nationalism or those "irra-tional political instincts in the masses towards the nation-state."69 For Weber nationalism was simultaneously subjective-a nation exists where a people have a sense of belonging to a "community of sentiment" -and objective--' the subjective sense of solidarity is based in objective factors such as common race, language, religion, customs and political experience. To qualify as a nation a group must meet three criteria: there must be an objective common factor between the people that differentiates them from others; this common factor must be considered as a source of value able to produce "a feeling of solidarity against outsiders"; and this feeling of solidarity must be expressed in autono-mous political institutions coextensive with the community.7 A nation's iden-tity is secured through its Kulture or "those particular values which distinguish a group or society from others ... and which are given self-conscious formation, typically in the art or literature of the society."71 Where national Kulture cor-responds with the boundaries of the state a mutually reinforcing relationship

IR, Political Theory, Territorial State 29

develops between state and nation. The state provides the protection necessary for safeguarding Kulture, while national communities generate the feelings of solidarity that reinforce the state's legitimacy. Howev