This is the second of a planned three posts outlining why I use the term international relations when talking about my work in the early medieval world. Last time I talked about the idea of relations between nations in the early Middle Ages. This post shifts the subject to the question of the state. I’d like to start with a quote from Andrew Gillett’s Envoys and Political Communication in the Late Antique West, 411–533 (Cambridge: 2003). Here he is explaining phenomena missing from his period of study:
These instruments and conventions include foreign policy formulated by centralised national governments, bureaucratic control of foreign affairs, permanent overseas consulates, career diplomats, international conventions, and diplomatic recognition as an exclusive acknowledgement of sovereignty. (p. 5)
In the absence of these, he does not use the term international relations when discussing his subject, preferring ‘political communication.’ Gillett’s book is very good, showing a great sensitivity to his sources and their context, and I’ve used it throughout my academic career. His concerns therefore carry weight with me.
In his list of defining characteristics, Gillett doesn’t use the word state. But most of his difficulties emerge from the absence of structures of the state – centralised government, extensive bureaucracies, trained public servants and sovereignty over a defined and exclusive territory. I think this underlies much of the scepticism of the idea of early medieval international relations. In an age of tribes, warlords, dynasties and ecclesiastical polities, where do any of the features which the scholar of international relations looks for to identify their subject appear?
I’m going to approach this problem from two directions. First, I’m going to suggest that many of the major political entities of the period look a lot more like states than is generally appreciated by non-specialists. Second, and more importantly, I argue that the study of modern international relations is actually quite capable of including non-state entities in its purview. Before we do that, we need to think a little bit about what a state is.
The classic definition of the state comes from Max Weber: ‘a community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’. While this all appeals to my inner Augustinian, I think this is less helpful than often assumed. For a start it tends to be used as a convenient thought-terminating cliché rather than an invitation to consider further. In practical terms I suspect that we would struggle to find many polities that fit this description before about 1750 and that it would render much of the world stateless before the twentieth century, something that IR theorists who draw on Thucydides and Machiavelli might find difficult.
Weber’s formulation also raises the question: legitimate according to who? It’s not obvious that we should take the state’s word that it is the arbiter of what is legitimate. Vigilantes who commit violent acts may be breaking the law and thus engaged in illegitimate violence, but depending on their target they may also have considerable popular support, allowing them to thwart state investigation. Turning the subject around, successful states, particularly in the pre-modern world, work with the grain of the social and legal norms of the people they rule. The state might make claims about what sorts of violence are legitimate and illegitimate, but they come downstream of accepted cultural practice rather than as a consequence of the state enforcing them.
Instead, I’d rather think of a state as a set of institutions that claims political jurisdiction over a territory intended to last longer than a generation. This is similar to Weber, but emphasises the impersonal organisation of the polity rather than its effective control of violence. With that in mind, let’s turn to the early medieval world.
The Early Medieval State
An envoy sent to the caliph from a distant land in the ninth century would have been able to avail themselves of a postal network with over nine hundred and thirty stations administered by appointed officials. Their entrance into the caliphate was monitored, with letters of safe conduct being issued by the local administrator at their point of arrival and reports being sent to a central bureaucracy at the capital. Upon reaching the court, any message or gifts they brought would be examined by the offices of the vizier and the chamberlain before they got anywhere near the caliph and any response would be drafted by one of the trained secretaries permanently employed by the administration in consultation with a more senior official. Recurring agreements, such as prisoner swaps with the Byzantine empire, were abetted by agents with experience in that specific arrangement. Should relations break down and things get unpleasant, any subsequent war would be prosecuted by a professional standing army paid for in wages by coins from official mints from revenue raised by taxation (although that starts breaking down over the course of the century). The ʿAbbasids very rarely had a true monopoly of violence, legitimate or otherwise, but I’m fairly relaxed about calling them a state.
That’s at the top end of state organisation, but we can see something similar in Byzantium. Diplomacy there was in the hands of the magister officiorum, in addition to running the official arms factories, the palace guard and an office of bureaucrats for handling legal questions. The magister took care of visiting diplomats and had a permanent team of interpreters and accountants translating for them and managing expenditure. They also ran the rather shadowy agentes in rebus who provided intelligence. At some point in the eighth century, effective management of this task was taken over by the logothetes tou dromou, who also had responsibility for the public post. They are also known to have a staff of interpreters as well as hostels for the accommodation of envoys. That this was formalised is suggested by the protocols outlined in Constantine VII’s De ceremoniis, which indicate long established procedures for the reception of diplomats. This looks pretty statelike to me.
Even where the organisation of diplomacy is less clear, we can find states. England in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, with its network of shires and hides and its ability to raise major tax revenue looks a lot like a state. Beyond the reach of the written word, the building and subsequent maintenance of major structures such as the Danevirke in what is now Schleswig-Holstein is suggestive of political organisation beyond the personal charisma of one leader. Not every polity in the early medieval world was a state. But some were, and they represent a large enough proportion of the population and resources of the period that I think they are worth taking seriously. If these entities are not states, then I can’t imagine any premodern polity west of China qualifying. Any claim that international relations were impossible in the early middle ages because of the absence of the state is based on a deep misunderstanding of the period.
IR and the State
But I don’t want to restrict myself just to entities that are clearly states. That would be to miss at least half the activity underway in the early medieval world. The kings of Ireland engaged in complex relations with each other based on longstanding legal conventions and specialist intermediaries, but I’m not sure I’d happily call their túatha states. The early medieval period was filled with mobile armies such as the Gothic host of Alaric or the viking Great Army which retained an identity over multiple decades and negotiated and renegotiated with monarchs on equal terms.
The other part of the problem here is that reading modern IR as fundamentally concerned with relations between states misses a huge amount of what the field does. I discussed the early institutional history of the discipline in the last post, arguing that the emphasis on nations was a consequence of the atmosphere of the 1920s. I think something similar took place with the importance laid on the state. Many of the key figures in the study of the field such as Hans Morgenthau, George F. Kennan and Henry Kissinger worked for or advised state governments. It doesn’t help that many of the most important works on diplomacy were written by professional diplomats like Harold Nicolson, who naturally emphasised the role of trained specialists like themselves.
But autonomous political actors are not limited to states. This is something that specialists in IR have become increasingly interested in since about 1990, when the collapse of the Soviet Union made interstate Great Power competition less pressing as a topic (sadly in the 2020s it now seems considerably more relevant). The challenges presented by civil war and international terrorism, and the rise of organisations such as the European Union, encouraged scholars to think about international relations. (I’ve discussed some of these trends in the context of the New Diplomatic History here). While the period that began in 1990 was in many ways distinctive, the questions it prompted can also be applied to earlier ages.
We might want to think about leagues of states. Historically these have often been made up of city-states such as the Achaean League or the Hanseatic League. Today, the more obvious analogy is something like the European Union. Although made up of states that retain considerable freedom of movement, put together the logic of the league creates a foreign policy of its own. Doing business with the Hansa or Brussels is not the same thing as doing business with Lübeck or Belgium and requires its own approach, but nonetheless comfortably falls into the sphere of IR. We could also include leagues of peoples such as the Iroquois Confederacy, undoubtedly a great power which conducted complex foreign relations, but questionably a state.
Likewise, corporations can be considered as international actors. This is most obviously the case with imperial enterprises such as the East India Companies (available in Dutch and English flavours depending on what language you prefer your genocide). But we might want to think about the power of modern corporations such as United Fruit in the twentieth century or the rivalry between Boeing and Airbus. Institutions can wield power on the world stage as well. The papacy offers an example of one such where religious authority allows the occupant of the Apostolic Palace influence well beyond that tiny extent of the Vatican City. The International Monetary Fund is a classic example of an institution which routinely negotiates with states on an equal footing. More sinisterly, we can include military organisations such as the Houthis of Yemen or the RSF in Sudan. While these may aspire to statehood, they can act as independent operators for extended periods of time. Terrorist groups fall into a similar niche. Some of the dynamics of an early medieval army on the move or organised pirate fleets feel very applicable.
All these entities and their dealings with external groups fall under the purview of modern IR despite not necessarily involving states. Many of the trappings that states bring with them, such as bureaucracies and professional diplomats, are just that, trappings. Although these are important phenomena that are very worthy of study, they do not in themselves constitute international relations. Their presence probably indicates that we are in the world of international relations, but their absence does not exclude it.
In the next post in this series I will talk about why I care so much about using the term international relations and the ways in which I think it can help us understand the early medieval world.
The Historian's Sketchpad 
I have to say that I’ve always found Max Weber’s definition of the state to be one that creates more problems than it solves. As you say, its almost impossible to find any European empire, kingdom, principality or republic that successfully claimed a monopoly on the legitimate use of force before the eighteenth century, and for most of the rest of the world you’d have to wait until even later. And even in the contemporary world its still not entirely accurate. You’ve pointed to the counter-example of vigilantes, but you could also point to countries where citizens are allowed by law to own weapons or have the right to resist a government who uses its coercive power in an unconstitutional manner.
My own definition of the state is a hierarchical political entity controlling a territory which claims ultimate authority over justice, public order and military defence in said territory, has organised and systematic ways of gaining the revenues and resources it needs to survive and has institutions that outlast the people who occupied them at any one time. I think that it would be madness to deny that the later Roman Empire, its continuation in the east (what we call Byzantium), the Abbasid Caliphate, Tang China and the national monarchies of late medieval and early modern Europe (England, France, Spain, Hungary, Denmark etc) were states. Obviously, the kingdoms of Western Europe between about 600 and 1200 are a different matter, and some would argue that even by my definition they wouldn’t qualify as states – I’m thinking in particular of the arguments of Matthew Innes and Guy Halsall. But I do think there are good grounds for seeing Carolingian Francia and late Anglo-Saxon England as states. Like when looking at Edict of Pitres in 864 or the vast revenues that Aethelred II was able to raise from his kingdom, I’m ultimately convinced that I’m dealing with states there.
I also find it strange that medievalists get themselves so tied up in knots over whether or not the polities they deal with can be called states, whereas ancient historians, early modernists or people working on non-European medieval areas don’t do so as much or seldom ever.
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