Name: Benjamin RufinSeminar Tudor: Jeremy Green
Unit: POLII11103Word count: 1739

Comparative Government Essay:

In what ways does War drive Political Change?

“There was never a good war” (Brands, 2000). This quote from Benjamin Franklin explains well the general opinion that we have on the idea of war today. War is immoral, irrational and only brings destruction to anyone who takes part in it but if we are to debate it, we must understand it first. War can be defined as a conflict carried out between parties within a nation or between nations themselves by force of arms. It is characterised by the importance of the organisations or coalitions of organisations that take part and the consequential collective aggression. Hence why we see it as such a negative notion, yet our world's history is filled with long, horrible and devastating wars and they are still going on today. These wars are not, as one might think, forgotten but remembered because wars are just a huge part of our past. This essay will try to grasp the changes that war brings to society and how from a political point of view. In general politics can be described as the exercise of power by individuals and institutions. However, in a context of political change brought by war, politics would be the concept of how states function ergo a transformation of the set of formal legal institutions. Thus political change could be the adoption of a new law or even the creation of a state or a nation. Taking all that into account we can wonder how a warfare conflict would lead to such a development in a country. In order to answer that question we will analyse the correlation between war making and state making and finally we will study how war has actually been a good thing for mankind if you study its political impact.

To know if war was an independent variable to the creation of states in the eighteenth and nineteenth century we will take a structuralist approach. This is because, when it comes to state making, studying the past events that lead to it and the environment at the time is the best way to understand how much war affected the process. Indeed, state making is a gradual and macro-level process.
In contrast to war making, state making has often been seen as something good so how can they be related? Well the reality is quite different than you'd expect, as explained by P.B Evans, D. Rueschemeyer and T.Skocpol (1985) state making originally started as large scale organised crime. Taking in account that a national state can be defined as a centralised organisation that has the most powerful claim over the means of violence in a delimited territory within a population then the creation of a state would be a group of people acquiring a monopole over the means of violence and who have an organised tax collection (Wyatt, 2014). In the sixteenth century, armies would act under the rule of the state and in exchange they would obtain their payment from the population of that same state because they were the main threat of violence. Be that as it may this was far from a perfect system so the elite that came to acquire the means of violence would offer the population security to the population and in exchange the people would pay taxes (also called protection rent). By the late eighteenth century, you could say that dominant groups or classes in Europe had acquired the means of violence in the different countries by having eliminated the rival centres of authority.
The question now is why did these dominant groups form and more importantly why did they yolo swag