European state development is often used as a model for the emergence of modern nation-states and the international state system. Yet despite many accounts seeking to explain how the European state developed, there is disagreement about fundamental concepts, including what counts as “Europe” and which polities qualify as “states.” This paper examines the implications of different definitions of the European state for our understanding of political development. We give special consideration to political fragmentation, long viewed as a critical prerequisite for Europe’s development of pro-democratic and growth-promoting political institutions. We find that the distinct measures lead to very different conclusions, undermining the idea of European state formation as a uniform process.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Anna Grzymała-Busse is a professor in the Department of Political Science, the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of International Studies, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and the director of The Europe Center. Her research interests include political parties, state development and transformation, informal political institutions, religion and politics, and post-communist politics.

In her first book, Redeeming the Communist Past, she examined the paradox of the communist successor parties in East Central Europe: incompetent as authoritarian rulers of the communist party-state, several then succeeded as democratic competitors after the collapse of these communist regimes in 1989.

Rebuilding Leviathan, her second book project, investigated the role of political parties and party competition in the reconstruction of the post-communist state. Unless checked by a robust competition, democratic governing parties simultaneously rebuilt the state and ensured their own survival by building in enormous discretion into new state institutions.

Anna's third book, Nations Under God, examines why some churches have been able to wield enormous policy influence. Others have failed to do so, even in very religious countries. Where religious and national identities have historically fused, churches gained great moral authority, and subsequently covert and direct access to state institutions. It was this institutional access, rather than either partisan coalitions or electoral mobilization, that allowed some churches to become so powerful.