sult in total state power. There are numerous examples in Western history of military mobilization leading to increased civil liberties and even more democratic societies. The mobilization needed by the central government often gives various elements of society more leverage for demanding concessions from the central government. For example, the English Parliament evolved largely as the outcome of the right of medieval estates to give consent on matters of war and taxation. The rise of the mass army in Napoleonic France led to the establishment of popular sovereignty in that country in the Nineteenth Century. The expansion of suffrage in the United States and several European countries occurred mainly after wars. In fact, the early rise of universal manhood suffrage in Switzerland was largely the result of the Swiss Confederation requiring active military service of all adult males. The First World War ironically catalyzed the Allied governments to implement large-scale social, labor, and welfare reforms in order to keep the factories operating (Porter, 1994, pp. xvii-xviii).
Porter organizes his thesis into three categories concerning the relationship between war and the state: (1) the role of war in the origin of the modern state; (2) the influence of war on the evolution of states after their formation; and (3) the impact of war on the power of states with regard to their own societies. Porter notes that most of the European states were born at the end of the medieval period and during the Renaissance, a time of unprecedented chaos and violence, leading up to the Protestant Reformation. Recent historians have labeled this period as a time of military revolution, during which the size of armies, the cost of warfare, and the firepower of military technology advanced at an astounding rate. At the end of this period, the feudal society of aristocratic estates, independent towns, small principalities, and religious estates ce...