Theoretical perspectives

This chapter is an attempt to explain the overall relations between geopolitics and capitalism through the “long nineteenth century.” Yet it also weaves a third term into the equation: European (becoming Western) civilization. Europe had long been a multi-power-actor civilization embodying an inherent contradiction: geopolitically highly competitive unto war, yet regulated by common norms. Eighteenth-century war became more destructive and costly, yet also more profitable for the Great Powers and also partly regulated by transnational institutions and by multistate diplomacy. Society had two levels, of the state and of Europe. The enormous surge in collective power generated by capitalism and industrialism burst into this half-regulated, two-level world, carrying contradictory transnational, national, and nationalist implications.

1. Revolutions in ideological and economic power relations boosted a partly transnational civil society (as Chapter 2 notes). Networks of discursive, moralizing literacy penetrated state boundaries; private-property rights were institutionalized throughout Europe, largely autonomous of states. Thus capitalist expansion might blow away state rivalries. Europe might industrialize transnationally to become the core of a global economy and society, as most nineteenth-century writers expected.

We can separate “strong” and “weak” versions. The strong version would predict the virtual demise of states. Transnational classes would be pacific. Universal peace might ensue, hoped liberals from Kant to John Stuart Mill. State infrastructures might remain to aid capitalist development, but the old military states would be swept away.