War and the Power of Warmakers in Western Europe and Elsewhere, 1600-1980

Abstract

The twentieth century compounded the paradox. On one side, open military conquest of one government by another declined. Conquest created government, and armed might held it in place. Once, armed conquerors personally ran almost every government worthy of the name anywhere in the world. After World War II, the great Western powers became more and more heavily involved in shipping arms to the new states, in training their armies, and in influencing their military policies. By 1700, most of the map of Western Europe showed bounded, contiguous territories within which a single relatively centralized, differentiated, and autonomous organization controlled the principal concentrated means of coercion. After 1648, with the settlement of the Thirty Years' War, all effective European states coalesced temporarily to settle on the boundaries and rulers of the recent belligerents—especially the losers when one state clearly had defeated another.

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