The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change

by Daniel H. Nexon

Scholars have long argued over whether the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which ended more than a century of religious conflict arising from the Protestant Reformations, inaugurated the modern sovereign-state system. But they largely ignore a more fundamental why did the emergence of new forms of religious heterodoxy during the Reformations spark such violent upheaval and nearly topple the old political order? In this book, Daniel Nexon demonstrates that the answer lies in understanding how the mobilization of transnational religious movements intersects with--and can destabilize--imperial forms of rule.


Taking a fresh look at the pivotal events of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--including the Schmalkaldic War, the Dutch Revolt, and the Thirty Years' War--Nexon argues that early modern "composite" political communities had more in common with empires than with modern states, and introduces a theory of imperial dynamics that explains how religious movements altered Europe's balance of power. He shows how the Reformations gave rise to crosscutting religious networks that undermined the ability of early modern European rulers to divide and contain local resistance to their authority. In doing so, the Reformations produced a series of crises in the European order and crippled the Habsburg bid for hegemony.


Nexon's account of these processes provides a theoretical and analytic framework that not only challenges the way international relations scholars think about state formation and international change, but enables us to better understand global politics today.

Genres: History, Politics, Religion, European History, International Relations, Political Science

408 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Joey · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is a little much international relations scholar jargon here for a casual reader like myself. In typical academic fashion, Nexon deconstructs relatively simple concepts into vastly complex messes of bizarre terms and archane arguments that only a handful of scholars will actually understand. True, Nexon probably is aiming this book primarily at that handful of scholars, and I doubt that he cares much whether a casual reader grasps the details of his arguments. Still, I've read other works that I feel adequately contribute to scholarly debate while remaining accessible to lay readers.

On the positive side, I learned a lot about early modern Europe, which was my chief motivation for picking this book up in the first place. I had to spend a lot of time in Wikipedia to look up people and events that Nexon assumes readers already know a great deal about, but I enjoyed that.

[Mackenzie Moyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book gave me a fresh perspective on the international politics/geopolitics of our modern world and provided me with a framed reference of the early modern ages in Europe.

[Sam Schulman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I hate theory - how useless it is. And this book's historical bits are interlarded with fatty theory. So for those of us who were looking for a revelation of the Westphalian system - we must keep looking.