Medieval Roots of the Modern State: The Conditional Effects of Geopolitical Pressure on Early Modern State Building

The modern state arose in Western Europe and was transplanted to European settler colonies. The question about why Western Europe developed high-capacity states bound by the rule of law remains a core concern of modern social science. Prior scholarship dealing with this issue has generally favored different variants of a war-and-state-making perspective. However, generalized geopolitical pressure does little to explain why the modern state arose in Europe and not in other historical multistate systems. This article argues that the European outcome was conditional on the prior existence of “medieval communalism,” that is, on strong norms and institutions of communal representation, based on units such as parishes and towns. It was due to these initial conditions that geopolitical pressure facilitated not only a strengthening of state capacity but also the development of checks on state power in the form of the rule of law. This argument is first theorized and then illustrated empirically using a number of examples from both within and beyond Europe. Against this backdrop, the implications for present-day state building are briefly discussed.