(Page 5 of 41) - War Makes the State, but Not As It Pleases: Homeland Security and American Anti-Statism authored by Kroenig, Matthew.

Lopez-Alvez has similarly argued that, despite much conflict, war has not made the state
in Latin American. Geographic features such as jungles, mountain ranges, deserts, and
rivers, have impeded interstate war. Natural boundaries have not prevented domestic
guerrilla wars, but internal conflicts in Latin America have served to raze the state, not
build it.

These scholars focus on structural variables such as demography and

geography, but ignore the important role of domestic political institutions.

States enter wars with a historically determined set of institutions. Other branches of
political science have captured the important role institutions have in transforming
international forces into domestic outcomes. Students of political economy initially
predicted that globalization would lead to a “race to the bottom” as national governments
adopted liberal policies to compete in an international marketplace.

This early second

image reversed scholarship was soon challenged by institutionalists who demonstrated
that states with varied political and economic institutions process international challenges
in very different ways.

Specialists in American politics have also argued that domestic political crises in the
United States have tended to provoke a growth in the size and authority of the federal
government.

But, students of American politics have also recognized that America’s

decentralized domestic structure tends to favor society in crisis-induced battles between
state and society over the proper scope of state power.

While, other branches of political science have long understood that variation among pre-
existing state institutions vary and serve as a filter through which external shocks are
channeled before affecting domestic political outcomes, the literature on war and state
building has yet to adequately conceptualize domestic political structure as an intervening
variable linking international forces with domestic political outcomes.

International crises do empower states to seek greater power, but power seeking states
also engender resistance and the institutional arena in which the political struggle plays
out varies cross-nationally. In the United States, a liberal institutional structure tilted in
society’s favor curtailed state expansion after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The separation of
powers, interest group access, and well-positioned bureaucratic actors were all
institutional mechanisms preventing the excessive growth of state power.

This paper will draw on the American case to argue that domestic political structure can
be usefully incorporated into our theoretical understanding of the relationship between
war and state building. In the American case, a fragmented institutional structure
dissipated the energy of war before it could be fully converted into state power.

Fernando Lopez-Alves, “The Transatlantic Bridge: Mirrors, Charles Tilly, and State Formation in the

River Plate,” in The Other Mirror: Grand Theory through the Lens of Latin America, eds. Miguel Angel
Centeno and Fernando López-Alves (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

Dani Rodrik, Has Globalization Gone Too Far? (Washington DC: Institute for International Economics,

1997).

Peter A. Hall and David W Soskice. eds., Varieties of Capitalism: the Institutional Foundation of

Comparative Advantage (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Steven Vogel, Freer Markets, More
Rules: Regulatory Reform in Advanced Industrial Democracies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998).

Higgs, Crisis and Leviathon.

Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative

Capacities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982).