Samuel Finer’s History of Government (1997) distinguishes four main actors that may rule alone or in various combinations: Palace, Church, Nobility, and Forum. We generalize these terms to Regulators (R), Talkers (T), Doers (D), and Followers (F), shown visually in a flattened R-TDF tetrahedron. As types of rulers, absolute monarchy appears as just R, while ideal democracy is F→R and Egypt 2025 might be R↔D. Disproving various other criteria offered, we conclude that a tribe or chiefdom turns into a state when all three RTD functions occupy some people full time, supported by taxation power. This chapter further reviews critically major inventions in statecraft, as proposed by Finer (1997)..

Over 5000 years, the world population has grown from 10 million to 8 billion. This has taken place in two distinct phases that begin with steeper-than-exponential growth due to the population–technology interaction but later came to a halt, blocked by limits in Earth’s carrying capacity. These two phases stand out when data are graphed in a novel way, with time as well as population on logarithmic scales. Each phase can be fitted using a novel “tamed quasi-hyperbolic” T-function. The ancient phase reached a population of 220 million by year 1, dropping to 190 million by year 400. The present phase slowly picked up speed, reaching its maximal relative (percent) growth rate around 1970 and absolute (in million) around 2010. It projects to a population maximum of 11 billion. The entire process conforms to a “PCT model”: population–carrying capacity–technology interaction. Population growth comes from population itself, as long as population is smaller than capacity. Capacity growth comes from increase in technology, as long as capacity falls short of an ultimate carrying capacity. Technology growth comes from technology itself but also from population.

While worldwide population density increased, that of the of most populous states stubbornly remained between 5 and 10 persons per square kilometer, from 3000 BCE to 500 CE. Expansion into less densely inhabited regions may not have paid off. The range has widened since. In hemmed-in India, density approaches 500 per square kilometer, while the largest empire, Russia, remains at 9, far below the world average of 60. It is not certain that imperial peace outweighs imperial taxes so as to boost population and hence, presumably, wellbeing. The evidence is mixed. Inexplicably, the population share of the most populous empire kept increasing proportional to the square root of world population from 3000 BCE to 1800 CE, but since then it has been decreasing. At the same time, the area share of the most populous empire kept increasing proportional to world population, and it also has been decreasing since 1800. In a crowded world, some five-millennia regularities are breaking down. We live in interesting times.

The world population growth curve shows a kink from 100 BCE to 200 CE. It occurs in all major populated regions: China, Mesopotamia, Mediterranean, and (least of all) in India. Graphing of population doubling times over time shows utter discontinuity. It looks as if Earth’s carrying capacity for humans reached a limit that no increase in technology could overcome, but by 400 CE a unique breakthrough occurred. An exponent value in “T-function” fits to population data before and after the kink shifts in a way that suggests a crucial change in innovation practices. From isolated innovators, humankind shifted to moderate interaction over space and time, due to literacy. A sudden increase around 400 CE in ability to make use of written records is implausible, yet it remains the only conceivable way to explain the kink in world population growth curve.

A graph superimposes the growth–decline curves of major Runner Empires, from 3000 to 600 BCE. The Egyptian Old, Middle,and New Kingdoms dominate this period. Egypt’s sheltered location ensured stability, then suffocation. Mesopotamian states remained small, forming a mutual fighting community, until the brief rise of Akkad and Assyria. The Xia–Shang–Zhou empire took off only after 1500 BCE, and in a surprisingly northern location. It’s as if state formation in the west had begun on the Danube instead of Nile. Egypt came closest to the oikos model (state as the ruler’s household), with 90% of produce flown in and out of state storage. It might have been 83% in Sumerian city-states. This aspect of human self-domestication may have begun to retreat with the Hittite empire, and even Assyria. While the Hyksos surprised Egypt with chariots as early as around 1650 BCE, the Assyrians complemented chariots with cavalry only by 665 BCE. The era of Rider Empires was approaching.

This chapter introduces the National Security Institutions Data Set, an original cross-national resource offering the first systematic measurement of national security decision-making and coordination bodies across the globe from 1946 to 2015. The chapter leverages these data to probe the theory quantitatively, yielding three findings that are consistent with the theory’s propositions. First, it shows that national security institutions are more malleable than previous scholarship has suggested. Second, it finds that integrated institutions tend to perform better than institutional alternatives. Third, it shows that institutional change is associated with domestic environments in which leaders have political incentives to weaken the bureaucracy.

This chapter examines the origins and consequences of national security institutions in the United States during the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations. It explains the political logic shaping continuity and change in institutional design. The limited threat of bureaucratic punishment during Eisenhower and Kennedy prompted both to maintain integrated institutions through most of their presidencies. In contrast, fears that bureaucratic leaks would derail passage of his transformative social and economic legislation led Lyndon Johnson to adopt fragmented institutions. These fragmented institutions came at a cost: They degraded the quality of information that the bureaucracy provided. As a result, Johnson based the most consequential foreign policy choice of his presidency – the escalation in Vietnam – on incomplete and biased information. The analysis suggests that the costliest American foreign policy miscalculation of the Cold War was in part a tragic consequence of how Johnson resolved the trade-off between good information and political security.

Why do states start wars that they ultimately lose? Why do leaders often possess inaccurate expectations of their prospects for victory? The central argument of this book is that institutional variation in how political leaders and bureaucracies relate to one another shapes the propensity for miscalculation at the onset of international conflict. The same institutions that provide the best information also empower the bureaucracy to punish the leader. Thus, miscalculation on the road to war is often the tragic consequence of how leaders resolve the trade-off between good information and political security. This chapter provides an overview of central concepts, briefly summarizes the argument, discusses the contributions of the theory and findings to the field, and details a roadmap of the remainder of the book.

Norman analyzes Swedish social democratic thinking in the 1930s and the form that Weimar lessons took there. Focusing on the writings of Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, both enormously influential intellectual figures for social democracy during this period, it traces how the re-evaluation of democratic politics informed by Weimar’s collapse that occurred elsewhere shaped Swedish social democracy. From the analysis of social democratic thought in Sweden emerges a more general point regarding analogical reasoning and lesson-drawing in politics. The Swedish self-image as an avant-garde in rational social reform provided a degree of blindness that reduced the scope for critical self-reflection. Its unique position in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s allowed social democracy to play out unbounded in its self-perceived rationality in what could be achieved through state intervention, allowing for both highly progressive reforms and more troubling and intrusive aspects of social programs.

Why, to what extent, and under what conditions are states more or less likely to comply with international law? No overarching state compels compliance. Compared to domestic law, the international institutional context is thin; courts and tribunals are limited in their jurisdiction and relatively uncoordinated. International law, moreover, is plagued by ambiguity. Treaties may be the most certain source of international law rules because they are in writing, but the language of treaties is not always clear and can be purposefully vague, giving states discretion in applying them. Non-treaty norms are even more subject to ambiguity. Why, indeed, should states ever comply? Yet they seem to, much of the time. How do we explain this behavior?

By way of conclusion, this chapter seeks to provide an overall assessment of what draws the Court and the Commission together, and of the impact that their “special relationship” has produced. In pulling the threads together, it explains that the interaction between the two organs has turned out differently to that which was originally envisaged, and that the great weight accorded by each of them to the work of the other has challenged the exclusive basis of State consent for international law’s validity. In a legal system that remains heavily dependent on unwritten rules of customary international law that require authoritative determination, the ultimate result has been that the Court and the Commission together assume a public order role not foreseen for either of them by their founders.

This chapter analyzes why the SPD failed to stop the collapse of the Weimar Republic and whether it could have averted this outcome, discusses the lessons that German Social Democrats drew from this failure, and assesses to what extent the history of Weimar democracy and its collapse is relevant for analyzing the threat or reality of democratic breakdown in the contemporary world. The SPD leadership decided not to initiate any direct protest action to oppose the Nazi takeover. The chapter argues that any such action, if it had been undertaken, would very likely have been crushed and proven ineffective. There is no imminent threat of democratic breakdown in contemporary Germany or Western Europe. However, the Nazi takeover was the culmination of a process of executive aggrandizement that characterizes many contemporary cases of democratic decline and breakdown. Champions of democracy must combat this process from the outset – before it is too late.

Caldwell focuses on how the experience of the Weimar Republic’s failure influenced the formation of Germany’s second democracy, the Federal Republic of Germany. It highlights how the actors who shaped the Bonn Republic actively compared Weimar and Bonn: The “Weimar analogy” here was not an abstraction, but highly present both as a lesson and as a trauma. “Bonn’s Weimar” demonstrates how a historical analogy may work in practice and it proceeds to make several general arguments about the way the analogies work. In particular, the chapter shows that there was never one Weimar analogy but that it is mobilized in different ways, by different actors, to make sense of democracy’s failure.

Introduction

One of the major shifts that the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi intended to make after taking power in 2014 was to empower India's states in the centre's foreign policy decision-making. This revision was ideally suited for the government's ‘Look West’ policy, with Modi's outreach to West Asia, particularly the Gulf, perhaps uncharacteristically being the single largest success story over the past six years.

The initial posture to empower Indian states more from within the federal structure as far as foreign policy goes seems to have been a non-starter. The idea behind empowering states to have a say in India's foreign policy in a framework of institutionalized sub-national exchanges to promote trade, culture, tourism, and people-to-people ties required both political vision and realpolitik zeal. However, in the times of multilateral dysfunctions and traditions of global diplomacy being potentially re-written by changing polities, citizenry, and more particularly the ecosystem and infrastructures designed around our current understanding of globalization and the world order, paradiplomacy conceptually would need to evolve.

India, the Gulf, and Iran have had historic and civilization ties. Currently, nearly 10 million Indians live and work in the larger West Asian region, and more than USD 50 billion annually are sent into the Indian economy by this diaspora as remittances. Indian states such as Kerala, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, and others have had close connections with countries such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia. With over 200 million Muslims, India's outreach to West Asia till an extent has a natural existence, with state policies only following and attempting to incentivize existing connections by tapping into the principles of paradiplomacy. From a policy perspective, thinking about a controlled democratizing process for states to engage with sovereign states with a degree of autonomy is inviting on paper and challenging in practice despite intent at the highest levels.

In this chapter, we will look at the issue and potential of the sub-national approach of diplomacy beyond the charters of a sovereign state's relations with another on the same level from two practical approaches. First is the Indian state of Kerala, which provides a unique perspective by heavily relying on migration and employment in the Gulf States for its local economy and the Gulf's direct outreach to the state during the 2018 floods amidst a row between the state government and the centre.

This chapter provides a detailed account of the impact that the Commission’s work has had in shaping the Court’s case-law. In addition to surveying and classifying all those instances in which the Court has to date been ready to refer expressly to the Commission’s output, the chapter demonstrates that reliance on the Commission’s work has often been more implicit. The question is then posed as to the basis for such recourse and the advantage afforded by it.