제주평화연구원

This essay examined the relationship between war as an external threat and its effects on state consolidation. Most of the scholars who analyzed European history support the thesis that war played an important role in state-making (as we can see through Huntington, Tilly, Giddens, Migdal, Herbst, Hall and Mann). It is hard to flatly deny Tilly’s conclusion that “war made the state, and the state made the war.” Mostly, war as a great external threat promoted national unity, restrained the internal resistance to increased extraction, helped capitalist development, and eventually consolidated the state and the system of the nation-state in the modern world.

I. Introduction II. War, Militarization, State Consolidation and Capitalism III. War and its Ambivalent effects IV. Summary and Conclusion