Tilly's Article

Tilly argues that we can compare states to organised crime groups. We can draw this analogy because organised crime groups 'protect' people for a profit and at the same time engineer the threat. States, like organised crime, use physical violence to make a profit - they cash in on a market for 'protection'. At the same time, however, they create part of the market for protection. As he says, states are racketeers as they produce both the protection and the price. (Do they set the price? surely this is negotiated and there are different 'markets' for protection). Governments threaten their own populations with war abroad and repression if they don't pay up. (171). Tilly also subscribes to the view that a legitimate government is one that can make a credible threat to its population - "legitimacy is the probability that other authorities will act to confirm the decisions of a particular authority". (171)

Tilly then discusses the rise of European states and the central role played by war in this process. To summarize the argument briefly, states expanded their monopoly of violence by making war against internal and external groups (the line was blurred). The eradicated competitors in the market for violence and established physical control over territories. He uses France and Britain as examples - the Tudor's ability to crush the autonomous power of the Churches was an important step towards the monopolization of organised violence in the English state. Eventually territorial states competed with one another and the common institution of inter-state conflict developed and intensified the war-making impulse. To make war, states needed to extract revenues and to do this they created bureaucracies able to continuously tax populations.

Another important way in which states resembled organised crime groups was the protection they offered key capital producing enterprises. By allowing some wealthy sections of the population to profit from peaceable order and the suppression of competitors, states were able to access finance and credit, which substantially improved their war-making ability. Heavy borrowing was usually followed by the expansion of the extractive apparatus to repay those loans. Access to credit and regular taxation were processes that followed one another. As he says, "In the long run the quest [for power] inevitable involved them [states] in establishing regular access to capitalists who could supply and arrange credit and imposing one form or another of regular taxation on the people and activities within their spheres of control". (172). And: "War, state apparatus, taxation and borrowing advanced in tight cadence" (180).

So War-Making stimulated State-making are interdependent. Tilly makes an interesting argument at the end of the paper. In many third world states, the nexus between war making and state making has been broken. States can obtain the means for war-maing from outside through arms transfers and economic aid - meaning that they same negotiations between citizenry and state over the right 'price' for protection did not occur. Third World States can repress their population with greater impunity as they are less dependent upon the revenues generated by their populations for war-making potential.

There is another implicit argument here about why states are so similar. Many institutional experiments in Europe perished (Hanseatic League) because they could not raise the revenue to fight wars and survive. The bureaucratic territorial state proved especially effective at raising war-making potential (assisted by changes in military technology) and to survive, other entities were forces to emulate this institutional arrangement. "European States built up their military apparatuses through sustained struggles with their subject populations and by means of selective extension of protection to different classes within those populations". (186).