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

Political scientists’ presentist and teleological focus on the early modern period as a stepping stone to the sovereign nation-state has long frustrated historians, since it requires a painful simplification of early modern institutional structures and a blatant misreading of early modern forms of political development. In this book, however, Nexton does a splendid job of marrying historical insights to international-relations theory, thereby enriching the former while correcting the flaws of the latter. This combination might not please political scientists, but historians will surely cheer.

Nexton argues that international-relations scholars have erred either by placing too much emphasis on the question of the emergence of the modern state system, or, in the case of the realist school, by using the early modern period merely to bolster their theories of “hegemonic overextension or the workings of the balance-of-power mechanism” (12). Instead, the interesting question—and the main topic of this book—is why the Reformation precipitated such an enormous political crisis in Europe. In addition, he posits two secondary goals—“to assess the status of the early modern period as a case of international change” and “to specify precisely such an analytic framework for the study of international continuity and change” (4).

Nexton first attacks these issues by discussing the current major schools of international-relations theory and analyzing how these theories fail when looking at early modern Europe. He introduces an alternative theoretical framework, which he calls “relational institutionalism” and which focuses on the role of institutions and structures as “networks composed of social transactions” (14). “We can think about any corporate actor in international politics,” he argues, “in terms of its constituent social ties and categorical identities” and view “international politics as nested configurations of categorical identities and social networks” (25, 28). Key to this approach is Nexton’s welcome appreciation for the complexity of the early modern political scene, which was dominated by dynastic agglomerations and other forms of composite states, and his willingness to allow for the role of historical contingency within a larger generalized framework. His points are compelling, and even though international-relations jargon abounds, his careful definition of terms and his use of illustrations make this section fully comprehensible to non-specialists.

In the second half of the book, Nexton presents as case studies a number of historical episodes—the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain, the reign of Charles V, the history of Spain under Philip II and Philip III, the French Wars of Religion, and finally the Thirty Years’ War and Peace of Westphalia—to prove that the Reformation led to a political crisis because it “exacerbated all of the problems inherent in dynastic states” and provided new pathways for “significant collective resistance to dynastic authority” (129, 265). He elaborates this point throughout the later chapters, using it to make some intriguing arguments about the comparative development of such states as France and the Holy Roman Empire. It also informs his analysis of international change. He argues that the Peace of Westphalia and the Reformation in general were more consequential than political scientists have appreciated, since they ushered in “significant changes in the texture of international politics” and dramatically altered “the balance of power among and within political communities,” and at the same time less consequential, since the Peace of Westphalia was neither the end of religious and dynastic war in Europe nor a watershed event in the development of the sovereign state (287). Thus, Nexton directly challenges not just current international-relations theory but also the popular historical theory of “confessionalization,” for he argues that the Reformation was in many ways merely “an interruption in longer-term processes of state and system formation” (287; emphasis in original). Such challenging ideas appear throughout this valuable and impressive work, which will surely spark a great deal of discussion among scholars of early modern politics and...