Making
War to Make the State
Review
by David R. Mares
Miguel
Angel Centeno. Blood and Debt: War and the
Nation-State in Latin America. University
Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press,
2002, 329 pp. $45.00 cloth.
Centeno
tackles an old theme in international relations: the relationship between
war and state capacity, or state-building. Thucydides gave us an answer
in Pericles’ funeral oration: Athens
was strong and the envy of others because she was powerful in war, and
she was powerful in war because her citizens understood that they were
better off if Athens was
strong. Centeno provides an updated version
of this answer by critiquing the argument that war makes the state.
Along the way he addresses the developmental failure of Latin American
states and the "Long Peace" in Latin America’s
international relations. The book questions the bellicose model of state
development. The bellicose model, built upon a stylized model of European
state-building, argues that the demands of fighting total war produce
states that are capable of extracting resources from society to fight.
States unable to generate the resources to fight are eliminated along
the way. As a byproduct of making war, states wind up providing the
public goods required for social and economic development. Jackson and
Rosberg used the African case to demonstrate
the importance of historical circumstances in understanding the link
between war and state-building. An international system that delegitimized
conquest made it too costly for African powers to dismantle each other,
while colonial borders that were incongruent with tribal borders made
leaders of these new states reluctant to question the territorial integrity
of neighbors lest their own minority tribes raise the same issues at
home. The consequence was an absence of war and the survival of states
incapable of providing the context for development and stability. Centeno
adds the Latin American case (excluding Central America
and the Caribbean) to this literature.
Centeno
is at his best in the historical analysis of the dynamics of nation
and citizen-making in Latin America (Chapters
4 and 5, respectively). He weaves in and out of intra-elite conflict…
David
R. Mares is Professor of Political Science and Director of Graduate
Studies at the University of California, San Diego.
