Power and the Politics of Extraction

The capacity of the state to mobilize resources is a key determinant of national power. It also has direct implications for a central concern of the arms race literature: the effect of growing domestic political pressure on the probability of war. However, to date political scientists have had little success in predicting either the ease with which the state could make peace-time increases in the level of extraction or the flexibility with which the executive could allocate revenue in support of foreign and defense policies. In this paper a theoretical approach designed to address these questions is presented and then applied to British, French, and German policy making in the 35 years before World War I. During this period the traditional methods and levels of extraction were manifestly incapable of meeting both the demands for new social welfare programs and the increased foreign expenditures generated by colonial expansion and recurring arms races. The theoretical approach presented here offers an interpretation of the origins of the controversies that ensued and their differing outcomes. It also provides a means for assessing the relative ability of the British, French, and German governments to sustain the domestic political price of the arms race before World War I. This assessment is substantially different from one widely held in the arms race literature on the period. The approach here offers, moreover, an avenue for improving our understanding of the relationship between domestic and international politics and developing a more theoretically sophisticated measure of intergovernmental power.