The modern state system emerged in Europe between the start of the 12th

century and the end of the 17th. States began to replace existing forms of
political organization in the late Middle Ages in Europe when key actors,
responding to a diverse set of political and economic incentives, formed
coalitions that undermined one set of political arrangements, feudalism, and
gradually replaced it with another, the sovereign state. The state was not the only
available alternative to feudalism; and it took centuries for the state to emerge as
the winning alternative.
 The political arrangements in feudalism were very different from the modern
state system. Feudal arrangements were personal commitments by individual
lords and vassals. Public power and authority – including the military – were held
by private individuals. Because feudal arrangements were not based on
territorially defined political boundaries, the modern distinction between domestic
and international politics has little meaning in a feudal context. During the Middle
Ages most of the key actors in Europe thought of themselves as part of a single
society defined by their allegiance to the Catholic Church and a shared heritage
dating back to the Roman Empire. The close connections between the Church
and the secular nobility further increased the cross-territorial nature of political
institutions in the Middle Ages and greatly complicated the structure of medieval
linkage politics.
 Two internal sources of pressure destabilized the feudal system. The first was
a centuries-long conflict between the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor, which
exhausted the only two claimants to universal authority in medieval Europe. The
second was a large and sustained increase in trade, which led to an increase in
the number of new actors: the merchants and craftsmen who made up the
burghers. They had both the ability and the desire to seek coalition partners who
could help them challenge existing political and economic arrangements.
 The large territorial state won as the successor to feudalism because it was
better than the two other principal alternatives to feudalism – city leagues and
city states – at organizing the economy, mobilizing internal resources in support
of preferred policy outcomes, and creating a set of mutually acceptable, long-
term relationships that could manage how the political units in Europe interacted
with each other.
 The first European states emerged during the Renaissance. Initially there
were no agreed-upon norms that could legitimize either their domestic political
arrangements or the relationships among states. The conflicts produced by the
Reformation (the Protestant challenge to the hegemony of the Catholic Church)
and the Counter-Reformation (the Catholic attempt to reassert the Church's
dominant position) greatly worsened this problem, producing a century of war
from the mid-1500s to the mid-1600s.
 In 1648, the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years’ War,
created a set of agreed-upon principles for legitimate rule that provided the first
normative basis for the modern state system. War would continue, but (with one
major exception) it was war for incremental advantage within a system, not war
about the system. As a result, wars were usually fought for limited aims, and
treaties were negotiated with an eye toward compromise and jointly acceptable
outcomes that would last over a long period of time.
 The classical balance of power system (c.1648-c.1789) had a simple goal: to
preserve the independence of the key states by preventing any one state from
becoming so powerful militarily that it could dominate all the others. Wars of
containment were a central mechanism for achieving that goal. Classical balance
of power principles called for defeated states to be rehabilitated, not destroyed,
so that they would be available as potential alliance partners against any new
threats in the future. There were supposed to be no permanent friends or
enemies; all the major powers had to be available as potential alliance partners
for one another. The small states, including especially the many principalities in
central Europe, were considered expendable.
 All of the prerequisites for an effective balance-of-power system that existed
between the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 and the French Revolution of 1789
gradually disappeared under the combined pressures of the Industrial
Revolution, the growth of nationalism, and the demand for democratic
governments. The French Revolution signaled the beginning of the end of the
classical balance of power system. The Westphalian norm that sanctioned
dynastic rule was directly threatened not only by the demand for democratic
representation that was at the center of the French Revolution but also by the
nationalism it unleashed. The French Revolution also generated a drive for
preponderance, thereby directly attacking one of the most cherished goals of
classical balance of power.
 The Concert of Europe, the diplomatic coalition of major powers established
after the Napoleonic wars, was an effort to restore the old order and the balance-
of-power system. It was simultaneously innovative and profoundly conservative.
The innovations were in the international arena, where the major powers (with
the exception of Great Britain) replaced the decentralized approach of classical
balance of power with a standing alliance designed to enable them to act in
concert. The conservative dimensions of the Concert were in the domestic arena,
where monarchs tried to save the legitimizing principles of the old order by
suppressing domestic coalitions that supported social and political change.
 The efforts by the states in the Concert of Europe to restore the old order
failed, largely because the legitimizing principles established at Westphalia – and
the goals and methods of the classical balance of power – were incompatible
with fundamental economic, political, and social changes.
 Between 1863 and 1890, Bismarck demolished what remained of the
balance-of-power system. After exploiting German nationalism to unify the
German states in a series of three wars, he scrapped the idea in the Westphalian
system that a regime's legitimacy was based on interstate agreements ratified by
treaty. He then built a network of alliances that were qualitatively different from
those in the balance-of-power system. The Bismarckian security system was a
complex web of alliances designed to deter the strong and restrain the weak. It
was also designed to prevent the creation of reinforcing grievances and
antagonistic blocs while simultaneously isolating France and preserving German
preeminence on the European continent.
 Bismarck’s post-unification alliance system was designed to preserve the
status quo. After 1890, his successors’ decision to use power politics to demand
a global role for Germany led to the collapse of Bismarck's intricate web of
alliances and the diplomatic encirclement of Germany by Britain, France, and
Russia. In response, German policy makers developed a defense strategy –
called the Schlieffen Plan – that was designed to win a two-front war.
Unfortunately, the only way they could see to do that required starting a war as
soon as any of their neighbors mobilized their armies. That put the German
military on a hair trigger in any crisis.