Few political scientists in the early 1980s would have thought that the relationship between central and local government had much to do with understanding the relationship between domestic and international politics. But in conceiving of the subject as ‘territorial politics’ and giving the relationship between the domestic politics and the external world a prime place in his analysis, Jim Bulpitt was able to reshape the way scholars have since thought about the internal politics of the United Kingdom (UK) and to provide an analytical framework that can be used to understand other states' politics too.
His crucial insight was to start with the way that politics confronts those who participate in it. This meant understanding political actors' particular interests, beliefs and purposes, and how they think about the contingent political circumstances in which they find themselves. These circumstances have to be understood as a whole. Politics, Bulpitt understood, can not be separated into discrete policy areas that can be understood within their own terms of reference. Politics is just not experienced by politicians in power in that way. There are always multiple things happening at the same time, and because any one of them has the capacity to inflict damage on, or offer opportunities to, a government while another is having an adjacent effect, politicians have to think about these issues in relation to each other. When political things happen, whatever else is happening at the same time is, Bulpitt insisted, fundamental to political explanation. For example, in thinking about how to approach local government in the autumn of 1981, Thatcher and her Cabinet colleagues were the same people confronting the political fallout of the ruins of their initial macro-economic policy and the fact that the Reagan administration in the USA was making decisions that left little room for further monetary and fiscal manoeuvre. If we do not recognize those circumstances, which were not of themselves anything to do with local government, the content of the government's 1981 Local Government Finance Bill makes little sense.Footnote 1
Crucially, temporal political circumstances, for Bulpitt, were international as well as domestic. To take an example from Bulpitt's narrative history of the UK's territorial politics, how the English government handled the Scottish problem after the Scottish Parliament passed the 1704 Act of Security, which set out Scottish terms for succession to the Crown, might not seem to require an explanation involving foreign policy. Yet, as Bulpitt shows, it does: at the moment when the Scottish Parliament threatened to withhold taxes and withdraw Scottish troops from the army fighting the Seven Years' War unless the Act was accepted, the Duke of Marlborough's army appeared to be ‘marching to its doom down the Danube valley’.Footnote 2 Consequently, whether Queen Anne's submission to the Scottish Parliament would have been necessary if the timeline had been somewhat different – such that the victory at Blenheim came earlier – must remain open to question.
In conceptualizing the relationship between the external world and domestic politics, Bulpitt's decisive move was to give analytical primacy to the political judgement of the actors at the centre in a territorial entity and reconstruct that judgement as a response to domestic and external political circumstances in light of their political purposes.Footnote 3 How the centre strategically and tactically acted in the face of the complexity of particular circumstances was for Bulpitt statecraft. To return to the Scottish problem in the early eighteenth century, Anne's ministers decided how to deal with the threat posed by the Scottish Parliament on their understanding of the external situation as it confronted them at the moment they judged they had to decide. It was not a structural external weakness in the English state that directly brought about the prelude to the Anglo-Scottish Union but a judgement at the centre about a particular weakness at a crucial moment.
Bulpitt conceived most politicians at the centre in most states as political agents seeking to construct what he called ‘an external support system’ designed to ‘attempt to minimise the impact of external forces on domestic politics, or ensure that these forces are favourable to the maintenance of domestic tranquillity’.Footnote 4 In constructing such an external support system the centre will confront a host of contingencies that change over time. Once such a system was in place, Bulpitt argued, maintaining it to allow ‘effective internal management’ is fraught with danger precisely because it risks becoming an end in itself that distracts the politicians at the centre from their fundamental domestic purposes.Footnote 5 Put differently, the risk for politicians in constructing an external support system as part of their domestic statecraft is that it distorts their political judgement.
In the remainder of this article, I wish to do two things. First, I will draw out the particular argument Bulpitt made in Territory and Power about the relationship between the external world and domestic politics to explain the historical development of the UK's territorial politics. In doing so, I will flesh out Bulpitt's own account, which at times relies on considerable prior knowledge of the historical junctures in question, with more empirical detail and integrate arguments from his later work on the Thatcher governments into his analysis of where the UK's territorial politics went after the early 1980s. Second, I will show how Bulpitt's analytical framework about the external–domestic political relationship can help us make sense of another state's territorial politics at a crucial historical moment. Here I shall consider the case of Weimar Germany and the Bavarian problem between 1919 and 1924.
THE EXTERNAL WORLD AND DOMESTIC POLITICS IN TERRITORY AND POWER
Much of Bulpitt's argument about external–domestic relationships that shaped the UK's territorial politics turned on a comparative understanding of just what kind of polities first England and the UK were. He began his historical account with some of the problems that other states had and the English did not in this regard, and some of the advantages the English had that others did not. England in the early middle ages was comparatively easy to rule because it was a relatively small territorial entity with a modest and relatively homogeneous population on an island without powerful neighbours. Yet precisely because it could be organized from the centre, it was more vulnerable to a successful bid from the periphery to grab power in London, and because it was part of an island it was open to naval attack from any quarter – a problem that was compounded by the separate existence of Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Any monarch confronting an external enemy allied either to the northern periphery of England or one of the states that would later form the Union of the UK was particularly vulnerable to usurpation.Footnote 6
Bulpitt's analysis showed that a serious external threat runs through the three territorial unions that over three centuries created the UK as a political entity. By establishing the contingency over time of the centre's response to external threats, he demolished the whole argument that had prevailed in so much of the earlier literature on the UK's territorial development: that the emergence of the UK was an historical inevitability.Footnote 7 In the case of Wales, a radical assertion of external autonomy led to a problem in the centre's hitherto informal rule over Wales because the legal external autonomy claimed by the English state in the 1533 Act of Appeals weakened English power abroad by creating enemies of staunchly Catholic states and left Wales, which hitherto had not been under the jurisdiction of the English Parliament, outside the ‘empire’ that was declaring independence from Rome. If a legally independent England were not to have a territorial neighbour where the Reformation did not apply at a moment of external threat, then Wales had to be made subject to the English state.Footnote 8 In the case of Scotland, the arrival of William and Mary had pushed the English state to become more interventionist in continental wars and, in the immediate years preceding the Scottish Union, England was embroiled in the Seven Years' War. The prelude to the crisis of Anglo-Scottish relations that produced the 1707 Union – Anne's acquiescence to the Scottish Act of Security – was precipitated by the threat from the Scottish Parliament to jeopardize English military power at a moment of perceived external weakness.Footnote 9
In the case of Ireland, the relationship between the centre's perception of external conditions and its assessment of the ensuing risks to domestic political stability was overt. The 30 years preceding this Union were marked by a succession of serious external problems as the British state accumulated new external commitments, some of which, as in North America, proved impossible to defend. When the government in London looked to a volunteer militia force to defend Ireland from an attack by the Americans' European ally, France, the Protestant Irish Parliament demanded more autonomy in return. The short-term effect was to weaken the grip of the British state on the periphery, not just in Ireland but within the existing union too. But the more that politicians in the periphery looked to exploit the external threats confronting the British state, the more the government in London countered with centralizing solutions. The wars with revolutionary France brought the interaction between the centre's territorial statecraft and its external strategy into even sharper focus. The conjunction of war with a revolutionary French regime bent on European conquest with the mobilization of Catholic rebels in Ireland – who were looking to France to provide direct military support for armed rebellion – eventually made the centre's support for the Irish Parliament impossible. If it were to leave an untrammelled Protestant ascendancy in place in Dublin, the centre risked leaving an exposed western flank for the French to exploit at the same time as it had to commit to permanent large-scale coercion to suppress Catholic dissent. To avoid that outcome, the centre pushed through what from its point of view was a reluctant Union.Footnote 10
With each of the unions, we can see counterfactually from Bulpitt's analysis that, without the Crown or the ministers at the centre making the judgements they did about the likely impact of externalhappenings on domestic politics, the unions might well not have occurred. An English state that had remained Catholic, and in so doing was without the external enemies the Reformation produced, would not have needed to establish direct rule over Wales. An English state that had remained less interventionist in European affairs – as it might have done if the resolution of the 1688 crisis had not been William and Mary's ascendancy to the throne – would not have found the Scottish Parliament so troublesome. And a British state that had not overcommitted itself in North America and then become embroiled in a large-scale war with a new kind of regime in France might have been able to leave the Protestant Irish Parliament to its own devices. In practice, each crisis exposed the vulnerability of using informal, collaborative arrangements with local elites in the lands and island adjacent to England in a world in which the potential opportunities offered by these lands to other European states always required attention. When practical external autonomy deteriorated, whether as a consequence of England's own actions as in the 1530s or as a result of a bid for power by one of the other European states as in the 1790s, the centre could not afford to allow so much domestic autonomy in the periphery.
The establishment of the UK created a new set of domestic problems that interacted with the external world as it changed over the next century, which Bulpitt could explain using the same analytical framework. Since the centre appeared to have neither the will nor the coercive and ideological means to engage in large-scale nation-building to try to eliminate the particular Celtic identities that had developed under the earlier territorial politics, the populations of the different parts of the Union remained politically heterogeneous over time.Footnote 11 Eschewing an expansion of the administrative and political reach of the state, much of the pre-Union mode of informal rule endured.Footnote 12 Above all, the centre looked for ‘relative autonomy’ from the periphery and trusted local elites there to manage much of their own domestic affairs so long as the outcome was ‘quiet subordination’.Footnote 13 Consequently, some of the old dilemmas around the relationship between territorial politics and external conditions endured into the nineteenth century.
The post-1800 situation survived relatively unscathed until the 1860s, in large part because, after the end of the Napoleonic wars, the centre constructed an external support system – economically, diplomatically and militarily – that produced considerable autonomy for the centre from external forces and in so doing insulated the centre from affairs in the periphery.Footnote 14 From the 1870s, economic and military competition from Germany, the USA and Russia weakened the UK's external power and did so at the same time as the centre was forced to grapple with the social and political fallout of the rise of democratic demands and the unionization of much of the labour force, not least in the periphery.Footnote 15 The centre's grip on Ireland suffered the most. Between 1885 and 1914 Irish demand for Home Rule consumed copious amounts of the centre's time and inflicted huge damage on successive Liberal governments that tried to secure autonomy for Ireland.Footnote 16 Those who opposed Home Rule did so in part because they could not accept the external security and trade implications of an Ireland that would in large part have been free to govern itself.Footnote 17 When then divisions over how to deal with the shift of the UK's economic competitors away from free trade ended almost 20 years of Conservative rule, the Liberals found themselves back in power. But by 1910 the Liberal government was dependent on the votes of the Irish Nationalists and had once again to offer Ireland Home Rule.Footnote 18
The advent of the First World War saved the Union from the ensuing crisis, but the centre's problems in managing the war ultimately destroyed it. In the early summer of 1914, Ireland stood on the precipice of civil war, with Protestant Ulster and the leader of the Conservative Party threatening to arm and organize militias if the government used the army to enforce the 1914 Home Rule Act. For two years, the war allowed Asquith to secure the Irish Parliamentary Party's support both for fighting the war and suspending the implementation of Home Rule for at least a year. But the Easter Uprising, led by those Irish nationalists opposed to the war effort, reignited the whole territorial problem at a moment of external crisis, and it was made possible by the difficulties the UK government faced in fighting the overseas war.Footnote 19 When the German Spring Offensive of March 1918 inflicted massive damage on the British army, Lloyd George's government sought to tie the implementation of Home Rule to Irish conscription. In the wake of the Easter Uprising, this was a political disaster. It united the Irish nationalists at Westminster in opposition to the government and provoked a general strike. Most importantly, in hugely strengthening Sinn Féin, it reduced the centre's options in dealing with the Irish issue, paving the way for the eventual secession and partition of Ireland in 1921–22.
By the middle of the 1920s, Bulpitt argued, what remained of the Union was surprisingly secure. The turbulence produced by Home Rule for Ireland had dampened such support as there was among politicians at the centre for home rule for Scotland and Wales. Meanwhile the Labour Party had abandoned its early strategy of poplarism and replaced it with an approach premised on winning power directly at Westminster, and the Conservative Party, the strongest party defenders of the territorial union, was strengthened by the exit of the Irish nationalists from UK politics.Footnote 20 Nonetheless, Bulpitt insisted, the Union could not have been maintained on its old basis of the autonomy of the centre from politics in the periphery and the ‘quiet subordination’ from the periphery without a new external support system. Although Bulpitt did not stress this point, this clearly had to be of a different kind than that developed before 1914 because of the fundamental change in the UK's position in the international economy wrought by the First World War. The UK was now a debtor state, subordinate in monetary policy to the USA, and able to maintain the international value of its currency only at the expense of the domestic industrial economy. Consequently, there were now overwhelming economic limits to the UK's capacity to exercise military power abroad unless aided by others. Recognizing that weakness, the centre had to construct an external support structure that would compensate for industrial decline, create diplomatic and military alliances and provide access when possible to American credit. Between 1926 and the early 1960s, Bulpitt argued, protecting the external support system that the centre crafted became the consuming obsession of high politics.Footnote 21 The imperial economic bloc in the 1930s and then the American alliance, particularly as manifested in the Bretton Woods order and NATO, were the foundations of that evolving external support system.Footnote 22 The first limited the economic consequences of the end of the post-1914 international economy, particularly in comparison to what happened elsewhere – not just in Europe but the United States too. The second made the welfare state possible and helped the UK to retain some form of great power status as the empire disappeared. Together, they helped to prevent a crisis of representative democracy and produced 30 years of perhaps unprecedented political stability.Footnote 23 Territorially, the UK worked during these decades as what Bulpitt termed a ‘dual polity’, where, in his words, ‘the degree of political interpenetration between Centre and periphery was low.’Footnote 24 Although some of the cost of maintaining the external support structure that made the dual polity possible – not least on the domestic industrial economy – hurt various political constituencies in the periphery, neither national party looked to mobilize peripheral dissidence in areas of industrial decline and the local parties lacked the organizational capacity to challenge the centre.Footnote 25
Territorial politics in the UK, at least in Scotland and Wales, reignited in the 1960s, Bulpitt argued, in the interaction between the collapse of the centre's external support system and the rise of new political forces in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. By the early 1970s the post-imperial external support system had been reinvented during the Second World War and the early years of the Cold War was weak in every respect. The military dependency inherent to the relationship with the USA had been exposed first by Suez and then the issue of the UK's national nuclear deterrent. Even more significantly perhaps, the Nixon administration had effectively terminated the Bretton Woods order. Since, given its domestic commitments to the welfare state, the UK could by then no longer afford to offer a military commitment east of Suez to the Americans, Washington no longer had the incentive to help the UK government prop up sterling as it had done through the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s. Without such help, all the frailties of an economy with a weak currency and a significant trade deficit became manifest in an international economy in which short-term capital could flow with greater ease. The result was rising inflation and unemployment. The centre's response to these new external circumstances, Bulpitt argued, mattered for territorial politics in two ways. First, the question of how to deal with external economic weakness bred divisions within, and between, the parties at the centre that damaged their electoral performance, creating a political space for territorially defined parties in the periphery.Footnote 26 Second, the policies pursued by the centre to deal with the problem of inflation and the trade deficit under the guise of ‘modernization’ seriously impinged on de facto periphery autonomy and collapsed the distinction between high and low politics on which the centre's post-1926 statecraft in territorial politics depended.Footnote 27 The clearest examples of this were the income policies that both parties in government used in the 1960s and the 1970s.
Of course, the particular relationship between the centre's response to the collapse of the external support system obsessively cultivated over the previous few decades and the trajectories of peripheral dissidence across the UK is nowhere near a sufficient explanation for the resurgence of territorial politics in the UK in the 1970s. But Bulpitt's account makes a very strong case that it was a necessary one. While the centre would have had to deal with the return to violence in Northern Ireland regardless of the problems of inflation and unemployment the UK faced in the changed international economy of the 1970s, the rise of the Scottish and Welsh nationalist parties in the 1974 elections cannot be separated from the overt economic difficulties that began in the late 1960s. The politicians at the centre would also have had an easier time politically containing the problems they faced in the periphery if they had not needed to cut public expenditure and change the behaviour of various economic and political agents in the periphery to curtail inflation.
In the final, and necessarily more preliminary, part of Bulpitt's argument, which began to analyse the impact of the first Thatcher government on the territorial politics of the UK, the relationship between the centre's understanding of external conditions and their domestic political purposes plays a less explicit role. Nonetheless, Bulpitt said enough to show how such an argument might go, and in his later writing on the Thatcher governments, Thatcher and her ministers' approach to external affairs is crucial.Footnote 28 The story here begins with the paradoxical outcome of the territorial challenge posed to the centre in the mid-1970s. While the collapse of the old external support structure and the centre's response to that was a central part of the threat posed by the periphery to the centre's authority, ultimately the very external weakness that ensued acted as a new support structure. This, Bulpitt argued, was already becoming clear by the last few years of the Labour government. In particular the 1976 sterling crisis and the subsequent International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan with its tough conditionality provided a politically viable justification for reducing the state's economic commitments, and in so doing limiting the political fallout of the relatively poor performance of the domestic economy.Footnote 29 At the same time, the 1976 crisis demonstrated that other states, not least the USA, were still willing to provide some kind of external financial support for the British economy, if only because the interdependence of floating exchange rates and Washington's embrace of financial liberalization meant that other rich states had to pay a serious price for sterling's weakness.Footnote 30 In one of its more decisive acts in its first years in government, the Thatcher government embraced external economic openness by abolishing capital and exchange controls. This put macro-economic management at the mercy of the vagaries of the foreign exchange markets. The initial domestic consequences of this were disastrous because Thatcher and Geoffrey Howe did not appear to understand just what would ensue from marrying financial liberalization with domestic money supply targets. When one was jettisoned, however, it was monetarism. Thereafter, the government ran macro-economic policy around a commitment to exchange rate stability, albeit at times rather haphazardly and incompetently.Footnote 31 Yet even as inflation rose to more than 20 per cent and unemployment hurtled to 3 million, this new economic statecraft had one overriding advantage for the centre's approach to territorial politics: it reinserted macro-economic policy as a matter of high politics and reduced the need for collaboration with economic agents in the periphery.Footnote 32
This did not mean, however, that the Thatcher government succeeded in re-establishing the centre's relative autonomy from the periphery on the same terms that had prevailed between 1926 and 1961. The primary problem was local government and what it spent. This became particularly important once, after the 1981 budget, the government switched the burden of its attempts to reduce inflation from monetary to fiscal policy, which meant more public expenditure cuts.Footnote 33 By the autumn of 1981, it was also clear that the 1980 Local Government Act had failed to control local government expenditure.Footnote 34 In early 1982 the government put forward another bill on local government in an attempt to address this problem, but its proposals prompted a furious response across local government and dissent within the Conservative Party; the bill was dropped. On local government, Bulpitt argued, the Thatcher government was caught by the very statecraft it sought to reinvent in light of the external economic circumstances of the early 1980s. It wanted to re-establish the contours of high politics, but it could neither allow local councils the financial autonomy practised under the old dual polity because of the fiscal constraints imposed by the revamped external support structure nor control their expenditure because the old dual polity had eschewed any administrative apparatus with a reach over local government finance.Footnote 35
If we try to think about the period from the creation of the UK in the 1800s to the 1980s as a whole, it is the Irish problem in its pre-1921 form that stands out as the most complex territorial problem that the centre faced. Bulpitt's analysis shows that it was the conjunction of the problem of securing Irish consent to the Union as the Union constitutionally existed with the need to mobilize sufficient resources to meet the UK's external commitments and fight wars that ultimately made the Union with Ireland untenable. The centre failed in its efforts to preserve the old Union because the Irish nationalists were able to turn the territorial management of Ireland into a significant external liability. In understanding just how that political dilemma played out, Bulpitt once again gave weight to the political judgement of the centre in navigating the interaction of the external and the domestic. With the conscription crisis, the centre prioritized the UK's external needs and in so doing misjudged its capacity to exercise authoritative rule over Ireland. Since conscription was not implemented, this judgement produced an outcome that did nothing for British military power and destroyed Catholic support for a devolved union.
The dual polity did not have this kind of external–domestic vulnerability. At least in part, this was because the dual polity depended on an external support structure that provided considerable military and economic resources from abroad, first through the empire and the commonwealth and then the USA. Yet one might also argue that the breakdown of the economic side of this external support structure in the first part of the 1970s mattered as much as it did precisely because the domestic territorial disengagement that the dual polity achieved meant that the British domestic economy was too weak to weather the storm of the end of Bretton Woods, the oil price shock and the beginnings of financial liberalization. States that were rather more interventionist in local economic matters, such as West Germany and Japan, suffered far less economically during the same period. When the Callaghan and Thatcher governments turned external economic weakness into a new kind of support structure for domestic political containment, this problem endured. The centre lacked the organizational capacity to use economic success to bolster the territorial settlement of the Union. Consequently, when Scottish nationalism later resurfaced, economic nation-building to re-establish acquiescence to a unified state was not an option open to the centre. Here we might say that the external strategy adopted by one set of politicians at the centre reduced the latitude for judgement of a later set of politicians. Most notably, when Tony Blair was confronted with the problem of the penetration of the parliamentary Labour Party by pro-devolution Scottish and Welsh MPs, he had to accept their demands because during the period of opposition when the contours of the Thatcher government's economic policies were accepted by the Labour leadership nobody within the party appeared to have conceived a serious alternative approach premised on a more unified and interventionist union.Footnote 36 The particular way that the centre in the UK had constructed and used an external support structure to help manage domestic territorial politics at previous moments in time had created constraints for future politicians at the centre, in this case perhaps pushing the first Blair government into a decision that may yet unravel the Union with Scotland.
THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC AND THE BAVARIAN PROBLEM
Bulpitt's analytical framework for thinking about the relationship between external and domestic politics easily lends itself to making comparisons, especially between the territorial politics of states operating at a particular historical juncture under the same international political constellation. Here, I shall take one example of a state dealing with a serious territorial problem with the potential for secession at a moment when it lacked the capacity to construct an external support structure. By using Bulpitt's analytical language to look at the early years of the Weimar Republic and the problem of Bavaria, we can see just what an analytical focus on the interaction between domestic and external politics through the eyes of the centre can illuminate.
Germany had been created in 1871 as a federal state, which gave the constituent states power in the Bundesrat, and some states, including Bavaria, their own military administration and the discretion to resist an emergency decree or declaration of war from the Reich.Footnote 37 This, however, was a lopsided federal state that Prussia dominated. Prussia's dominance produced particular resentment in Catholic Bavaria. The First World War, especially once the military effectively took power in Berlin in 1916, ignited the territorial fault-lines in the German state. By 1917, there were political forces in Bavaria lashing out at the Reich and the High Command, protesting that the war was Berlin's war and a pretext for centralizing power and that Bavarian troops were a disproportionate burden of the casualties.Footnote 38 Germany's defeat in the autumn of 1918 produced a new republican German state, but the Bavarian problem remained. Although a Jewish Berliner, Kurt Eisner, led the new Bavarian republic, the post-war Bavarian government still wanted to contest the Reich's authority in foreign policy and tried to engineer a separate peace settlement with the Allies by placing the blame for the war squarely on Prussia.Footnote 39 The Allies were not willing to accept this Bavarian bid for autonomy, but their whole approach to the post-war peace at Versailles ensured that the centre in Germany could not construct any external support structure for the territorial authority of the new post-war German state. Indeed, in their post-war actions the Allies bequeathed the German state a fundamentally debilitating problem. The Allies stripped the German state of part of its external sovereignty. They limited the state's authority over the Saar, demilitarized and occupied the Rhineland, reduced the German army to a small voluntary force, restricted its navy and stripped the state of the economic resource of its colonies. They then imposed open-ended reparations while curtailing the export capacity of the German economy on which foreign currency payments depended.
The centre's opportunity to create new authority for the Reich was consequently dependent on Bavaria's weakness in 1919. Although the Bavarian government was able to resist the first draft of the Weimar constitution that reduced the constituent states to regions, the ongoing contest for power in Bavaria between revolutionary and counter-revolutionary forces strengthened the centre's hand. After Eisner's assassination in February 1921, Bavaria moved into a situation of near civil war. When the final draft constitution was laid before the Constituent Assembly, the Bavarian government was in exile after the Communists and Anarchists had seized power in Munich, and Bavaria was under the direct rule of the Reich. While the Weimar constitution did give the periphery some substantive autonomy, the centre now had more power and there were no reserved rights for the southern German states. The centre had secured a Weimar state that stripped power from Bavaria without having to procure Bavaria's consent to it.Footnote 40
The subsequent territorial politics of the German state was shaped by the interaction of the domestic politics of the Bavarian problem and the problems the centre faced in dealing with the external burdens placed on the German state by the Allies. Domestically, Bavaria posed a twofold problem to the centre. It was a site of secessionist passions and interests, and it was home to an array of potential destroyers of the democratic Weimar state in Communist and Anarchist revolutionary forces, conservative monarchists and what would become the Nazi movement. Externally, the terms of Versailles compounded this problem. Most political groups in Bavaria were outraged by the peace settlement and feared that the burden of reparations in kind would fall disproportionately on Bavaria with its more agricultural economy. Putting these problems together, the centre lacked the practical capacity to create an economic and social base in Bavaria for a centralized state and it did not possess the coercive means to quell a rebellion in Bavaria of a kind made highly likely by the economic burdens and military restrictions imposed on the Weimar state by external forces at Versailles.
Between 1919 and 1923 a succession of crises did ensue, of which the two most significant arose out of the interaction between domestic and external politics. Versailles had limited the German army to 100,000 men, but this was compromised by the existence of the Free Corps and the Home Guards that had formed in various German states, including Bavaria. In July 1920 the Allies demanded the dissolution of these groups. The Weimar government did not want to impose this external order on Bavaria because it feared that to do so would precipitate a crisis of the Reich's authority. But when the Allies then said that they would send troops to Germany unless action was taken, the centre had to confront Bavaria, and threatened occupation unless the Bavarian government disarmed the Home Guard. Although in this instance the Bavarian government retreated, in the aftermath of the crisis secessionist and anti-republican opinion in Bavaria was strengthened.Footnote 41
The centre's authority reached breaking point in the aftermath of the 1923 Ruhr crisis. By the time the French occupied the Ruhr, the centre faced two different problems coming out of Bavaria: the government was in the hands of conservative monarchists who wanted at least more autonomy for Bavaria and possibly secession; and Hitler was plotting to use Bavarian grievances to seize power in Berlin. Meanwhile, the centre's territorial problems in other parts of the periphery were mounting. France was supporting secessionist groups in the Ruhr and the Rhineland in the hope that a buffer state between France and Germany might be created, various states were threatening to introduce their own currencies in the wake of hyperinflation and the revolutionary left was gathering strength in Saxony and Thuringia. Gustav Stresemann became chancellor in August 1923 and concluded that the centre had to end passive resistance in the Ruhr because Germany had to have a new currency, but he knew that surrendering to the French was likely to precipitate a revolt in Bavaria.Footnote 42 When the Bavarian government did indeed respond to the termination of the conflict in the Ruhr by declaring a state of emergency, the government in Weimar responded by imposing martial law across the country. The centre appeared to have moved to a strategy that it could not implement because, due to the external restrictions of Versailles, it did not have the military means to subjugate Bavaria.Footnote 43 In doing so, it placed the Reich at risk of being taken over by anti-Weimar rebels in the periphery.
Stresemann, however, conceived a way out of the crisis. He gambled that he could use Anglo-American pressure on France to construct a new external support structure for Weimar while using a show of power against Saxony and Thuringia to procure some support from the more moderate forces in Bavaria and secure the Reichswehr's loyalty. The price of this was sacrificing the Social Democrats from the governing coalition.Footnote 44 Initially this new strategy appeared not to be working, and the Bavarian premier obtained an oath of allegiance to the Bavarian state from the division of the Reichswehr stationed in Bavaria. But the centre was soon saved by Hitler's aborted putsch in Munich, which ultimately divided those conservative forces looking for more Bavarian autonomy from those like the Nazis, who were looking for a route to power at the centre via Munich, and destroyed the credibility of the conservative monarchists who were holding office in Bavaria. With the putsch and its failure went both the notion that Bavaria could assume the power of the Reich for itself and Bavarian hopes for more autonomy.
Whether Bavaria's newfound acquiescence to the Weimar state would have continued without the centre's construction of an external support structure via the Dawes Plan must, however, remain open to question. The events of 1923 had demonstrated to Washington and London just how precarious the Weimar state was, and this gave the centre its opportunity. Stresemann's government and its successor were able to stabilize the new currency because in the Dawes Plan the USA offered the centre an economic lifeline, one which it used to procure credit for the individual states to finance housing and transport infrastructure.Footnote 45 Weimar's experience with Bavaria shows very clearly the consequences of external weakness for the centre in any state in territorial politics, going well beyond the opportunity such weakness creates for rebels in the periphery to look for external alliances. Here it placed limits on the centre's ability to use the coercive power of the state to procure acquiescence to its authority. It also made any collaborative strategy more difficult because the whole manner of handling external affairs was, because of that weakness, a matter of the legitimacy of the state. Perceived external failure was an immediate pretext for rebellion. This created a permanent vulnerability in the state's territorial politics which a state that had had the advantage of an external support structure would not have had to face. The centre got its chance to reconstruct the state when an opportunity to establish external support emerged. That it took that opportunity was not given, but a contingent strategic judgement made by those who exercised the centre's power. When, several years later, that external support structure collapsed, the centre, as constituted by Weimar's supporters, was fatally weakened and usurped by one set of the forces in the periphery that it had defeated in 1923.
CONCLUSIONS
Bulpitt got to his understanding of the nature of the interactive relationship between international and domestic politics because of his historical awareness and knowledge about politics in a range of different places over time. This allowed him to see how certain aspects of the relationship tend to recur in history, but do so in ways that are particular to contingent circumstances. He used his historical knowledge to make arguments that were empirically plausible, but he believed that if they were to go beyond narrative and the outcome of contingencies and explain motivation, they had to make use of explicitly political analytical concepts. This meant recognizing the things about the nature of politics that endure over time: issues of authority and power, and the need for those who act in politics – if they are to succeed in their purposes – to cultivate the skill of political judgement. Such judgement is a way of thinking politically that exists in a space beyond ideology or ethics as understood in much modern political parlance, especially that which has come out of the different versions of twentieth-century liberalism. Without getting to grips with it properly, political explanations, Bulpitt understood, were impossible.
If we ignore or sideline the centrality of political judgement to his approach, we might erroneously conclude that some of what Bulpitt did in Territory and Power in using an interactive relationship between the domestic and the international to explain domestic political outcomes has become commonplace. For example, scholars engaged over the last two decades in the study of the territorial politics of regions or sub-national units tend now to start from the premise that they must take account of what goes on beyond the nation-state.Footnote 46 But Bulpitt's analytical framework produced more richer and more precise explanations than arguments that have come out of theoretical paradigms such as globalization and Europeanization, which tend to treat abstractions as causal agents. It is so because he saw the external world as something that explains because of the way that it shapes the choices that are open to those who are trying to act as purposeful political agents in domestic politics and not as a general force, like globalization, acting as a causal agent on domestic politics in its own right. It was because he placed political judgement at the centre of the relationship between the domestic and the international that he was able to offer explanations that matched narrative accuracy with conceptual rigour and to provide an analytical framework that can be used to look at territorial politics comparatively.
