The Foreign Politics of State-Making: Endogenous Power Shifts and the Logic of External Influence
Published:
Under what conditions do early states form? Existing theories argue that states develop through domestic contracts or external war. This paper shows how both mechanisms can instead produce weaker states. I conceptualize institutions as constraints on bargaining, which allows me to distinguish between temporary and durable concessions. Building on this, I develop a two-period, three-player formal model in which a foreign sponsor empowers either the ruler or the elite. Because the sponsor’s interference is strategic and predictable, it creates windows of opportunity for domestic actors. When elites are temporarily empowered, rulers often take steps after bargaining that erode institutions. Thus, agreements that appear beneficial to domestic audiences may prove temporary and weaken the state. Likewise, when domestic war is harmful to the state, a foreign sponsor may strategically empower one side precisely to trigger conflict. The model advances scholarship on state building in three ways. First, it provides new scope conditions for contract and bellicist theories. Second, it incorporates common patterns of third-party interference, such as the role of the church (Gryzmala-Busse 2024). Third, it offers a formal explanation for why Europe remained territorially fragmented until the early modern period.