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50 J. Common Mkt. Stud. 1 (2012)

handle is hein.journals/jcmks50 and id is 1 raw text is: JCMS 2012 Volume 50. Number 1. pp. 1-20 JCMS Annual Lecture 2011 Europe and Its Empires: From Rome to the European Union* GARY MARKS University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill/Free University of Amsterdam Abstract This article claims that the territorial structure of government results from a tension between scale and community. The benefits of scale arise from the nature of public goods, and include economic exchange, political power and protection against external shocks. Communities are double-edged in that they are characterized by parochial altruism. Altruism and social solidarity facilitate government within communities, but parochial attachments constrain government among commu- nities. Scale and community, as theorized here, provide a setting for strategic choice. Both are in flux as patterns of human interaction change, and government itself shapes those patterns. Evidence is drawn from the five largest polities in the history of western Europe: the Roman Empire, the Frankish Empire, Napoleonic France, the Third Reich and the European Union. Introduction Five large polities have existed in the forests, mountains, valleys and islands that lie north of the Mediterranean and west of what is now Russia (Figure 1). By 'large', I mean having a land area no less than one-fifth of the west European landmass of 6 million km2. By 'polity', I mean a government having a reasonable probability of implementing authori- tative decisions for the population living in its territory. The five polities are those of Rome, the Franks, Napoleonic France, Nazi Germany and the European Union (EU).1 These may be conceived as empires in the Roman sense of exerting imperium (power, authority) over a great territory containing diverse communities. Each of them subordinates formerly independent units in a composite polity. Each combines direct and indirect rule. And each uses pre-existing structures and local elites to do so.2 Empires have a flexible, mosaic quality. They encompass, but do not homogenize, populations with diverse histo- ries, languages and religions, and they adopt a mix of strategies to impose their rule. * JCMS plenary lecture at the Biennial Conference of the European Union Studies Association, Boston, MA, March 2011. This article was written when I was a fellow at the Kolleg-forschergruppe on the transformative power of Europe, Free University of Berlin. Drafts were presented as a keynote speech at the ECSA Young European Integration Researchers Interdisciplinary Conference, Berlin, February 2011; at 'The EU toward a Federation?', Charles University, Prague, May 2011; at the University of Toronto; and as my Alexander-von-Humboldt prize lecture at the Free University of Berlin, October 2011. I would like to thank Harold Bathelt, David Banerjee, Richard Corbett, Sebastian Conrad, Lawrence Ezrow, Philipp Genschel, Edgar Grande, Seva Gunitskiy, John Hall, Markus Jachtenfuchs, Peter Katzenstein, Hans-Dieter Klinge- mann, Christiane Lemke, Benjamin Nendorfer, Lenka Rovna, J6r~me Schifer, Frank Schimmelfennig, Sid Tarrow, Zavis Zeman, participants in the Free University of Amsterdam/Amsterdam University discussion group, and three anonymous reviewers for comments. I am indebted to Liesbet Hooghe for discussing and framing the ideas found here over many years. ' The purpose of these criteria is to frame a diverse but manageable set of cases for comparative analysis. I exclude the Habsburg Empire because it does not meet the size criterion and the Soviet and Ottoman empires because they are located chiefly outside western Europe. 2 These core characteristics feature prominently in the vast literature on the topic (Doyle, 1986, p. 45; Eisenstadt, 1963, pp. 22-3; Motyl, 2001, pp. 4, 21; Mtinkler, 2005, pp. 4ff.; Tilly, 1997, p. 3). C 2011 The Author(s) JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies C 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-5965.2011.02218.x

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