Authors

Claudiu Craciun¹;  ¹ National School of Political and Administrative Studies, Romania

Discussion

The paper reconstructs a more comprehensive image of the processes of state-building in Europe, by integrating previously unrelated research agendas and offering a more central place to actors and processes usually marginal or absent. The canonical view on state-building is that its institutional core, the military-fiscal power nexus (central in the so-called bellicist perspective), was created in response to a competitive international context. Since its formulation by Charles Tilly and his colleagues in 1975, it has been reviewed, nuanced and ultimately questioned on several grounds. Sinisa Malesevic used Tilly’s framework to analyze the Balkans and argued for its relevance but limited application: war, of rather small intensity in the region, did not make (strong) states, and neither nationalism understood in Gellner’s terms. The paper recasts the state-building process in the region by focusing on a set of interlinking environmental, economic, social and technological variables - agroecology, and moving the attention from state-building elites to state-building subject, mainly peasants, and to their interaction rather than focusing on inter-state competition and inter-elite cooperation. Recent contributions in understanding active and passive resistance to , peasant and non-peasant alike, and a growing literature on environmental and economic history, invites further reflection.