I. The shock of the new? Change and continuity in the ‘Age of Terror’

Taken together, four macro-processes currently manifest in world politics – and which have been foregrounded by the ongoing ‘war on terror’ – may be invoked to support transformationalist claims regarding the future of the Westphalian state system. The first of these is the dissonance between the formal universalisation of state sovereignty and the anaemic institutional capacity of many post-colonial ‘quasi-states’. In the post-war era, the ethical imperative of granting national self-determination to colonised peoples triggered the rapid dissolution of Europe's maritime empires, resulting in the nation-state's universalisation as the world's dominant form of political community.Footnote ⁴ Although few have mourned the death of European imperialism, the precipitate globalisation of the nation-state yielded a large number of ‘quasi-states’ that have proven incapable of providing their citizens with fundamental political goods such as basic physical security or effective economic management.Footnote ⁵ Domestically, the poor governance record of these quasi-states has left many incumbent regimes bereft of popular legitimacy, providing a permissive environment for the development of anti-systemic ideologies such as Salafi-jihadism.Footnote ⁶ Internationally, meanwhile, the low institutional capacity of many quasi-states has gravely compromised collective efforts to manage transnational threats ranging from terrorism and WMD proliferation, through to the management of international financial crises and the containment of global pandemics.Footnote ⁷

To the state system's inherent fragility as a result of the prevalence of weak and failing post-colonial states must be added the altered balance of power between state and non-state actors that has been induced by globalisation. The jihadists' ability to wage a prolonged campaign against the world's only superpower is a testament to the expanded political opportunity structures afforded to transnational non-state actors by globalisation. As Fiona Adamson has noted, the increased mobility of goods, people, capital and ideas attendant to globalisation has provided non-state actors with both transnational constituencies to mobilise and transnational resource pools to draw upon.Footnote ⁸ Accelerated global economic integration has facilitated the diffusion of mobilisation capacities and destructive capabilities to a plethora of non-state actors. This has left insurgent groups less dependent upon the sympathy or support of local populations, as they draw instead on a globally dispersed supportive infrastructure of personnel, money, and materiel to sustain their struggles against beleaguered and institutionally fragile post-colonial states.Footnote ⁹

Post-colonial state weakness and the empowerment of transnational non-state actors consequent to globalisation provides the structural context for the third transformationalist trend, specifically the global growth of private international violence and asymmetric warfare.Footnote ¹⁰ The 9/11 attacks and subsequent mass casualty attacks in Western capitals can be said to represent only the most conspicuous recent examples of ‘bond-relationship targeting’, whereby a militarily weaker actor employs mass casualty attacks in the hopes of breaking the political will of target populations and thereby destroying the social bonds uniting its adversaries.Footnote ¹¹ In a unipolar era in which America's conventional military might is unassailable, Al-Qaeda has employed asymmetric tactics in the hope of severing the bond between the ‘far enemy’ (the US) and the ‘near enemy’ (authoritarian and ‘apostate’ Middle Eastern regimes), thereby leaving the latter without US support and thus exposed to the prospect of revolution.Footnote ¹² Seen through a transformationalist lens, attacks such as 9/11 and the Madrid and London bombings can be construed as a manifestation of a radically changing security environment, in which states must increasingly contend with networked non-state adversaries employing asymmetric tactics to realise anti-systemic goals.

The final supposedly transformationalist tendency that is foregrounded by the ‘war on terror’ is the global growth of religious fundamentalism. The discrediting of secular ideologies such as nationalism and socialism in many weak post-colonial polities has nurtured the rise of politically engaged religious fundamentalism. This phenomenon is observable particularly (but by no means exclusively) within Muslim-majority states.Footnote ¹³ Although most Islamists have reconciled themselves to the existence of the nation-state, a minority have embraced an anti-systemic ideology that challenges the nation-state at two levels. Where the nation-state is sustained by notions of popular sovereignty, Salafi-jihadists conversely stress that sovereignty lies with God alone, thereby necessitating popular submission to God's laws as revealed to the Prophet and codified in sharia law.Footnote ¹⁴ Similarly, where the nation-state rests on the division of the world into mutually exclusive national jurisdictions, jihadists emphasise the artificiality of the nation-state, decrying it as a Western imposition designed to fragment the global community of believers (the ummah).Footnote ¹⁵ In transformationalist lights, Salafi-jihadism can be read as symptomatic of a post-colonial ‘revolt against the West’ fuelled by the perceived failures of the nation-state in the developing world, and underpinned by a principled repudiation of the division between the sacred and the secular that has informed European international society from the Peace of Westphalia.Footnote ¹⁶

The foregoing comments suggest that it is certainly possible to see the jihadist challenge to world order as being symptomatic of deeper structural changes threatening the state system in its present form. Nevertheless, it is equally possible to construct a persuasive counter-narrative emphasising the state system's long-term durability in the face of such challenges. While the weakness of many post-colonial polities cannot be denied, the ‘war on terror’ has starkly illuminated the negative global security externalities flowing from peripheral state weakness. Although failing states' control over organised violence remains far from assured, the state's authority as the rightful monopolist of organised violence within its borders has been vocally re-affirmed by the international community in the course of the war on terrorism.Footnote ¹⁷ Strong states such as America have sought to strengthen client polities through intelligence sharing and the provision of enhanced financial and military assistance, while the war has also seen an intensified commitment to Third World state-building as a prophylaxis against transnational security threats.Footnote ¹⁸ Prior historical examples of states' collaborative suppression of private international violence, whereby international norms against non-state violence were invoked to extend states' powers of surveillance and control over their respective societies, further attest to the state system's regenerative capacities in the face of non-state challengers.Footnote ¹⁹

Sceptics may also question the transformative significance of globalisation and its empowerment of non-state actors at the expense of sovereign states. Globalisation may have enhanced the mobilisational and destructive capabilities of non-state actors. But insurgents' use of transnational support networks is not new, with organisations such as the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) drawing upon extensive trans-Atlantic diaspora networks to sustain their struggle against Great Britain as far back as the nineteenth century.Footnote ²⁰ Admittedly, the global flows upon which contemporary insurgents depend are far more intensive than those that sustained their historical forebears during the belle époque. Additionally, the destructive capabilities available to earlier insurgents pale into insignificance compared to those afforded to Al-Qaeda and its affiliates. But if the violence interaction capacity of the state system has definitively increased, it has done so off the back of global flows that are enabled by the liberalising measures of sovereign states, and that are consequently at least partially reversible.Footnote ²¹ Moreover, even in instances where states lack the will or the capacity to constrict the flows upon which transnational actors depend, the raw fact remains that even weak states stand as more formidable loci of administrative and coercive power than even the most sophisticated violent non-state actors.

The transformative significance of the growth of asymmetric warfare can also be questioned. That anti-systemic forces are compelled to resort to asymmetric terror tactics, as opposed to conventional warfare or even mass-based guerrilla insurgencies, is reflective of the limited material power and popular support they enjoy vis-à-vis national governments. While Al-Qaeda was capable of inflicting major psychological shock and egregious human losses on the US on 9/11, it has subsequently been unable to translate this tactical triumph into the strategic victory of compelling a complete US withdrawal from the Middle East, much less precipitate the collapse of America's allies in the region. This failure is a testament to the weaknesses inherent in networked forms of adversary – while their networked organisational structure confers major defensive advantages, groups such as Al-Qaeda are generally incapable of launching a sustained ‘pulsing’ series of attacks of the severity and frequency necessary to compel target states to compromise vital interests.Footnote ²² In light of such observations, the growth of asymmetric warfare arguably at best complicates the contemporary security environment rather than fundamentally transforming it.Footnote ²³

Finally, the marginality of transnational jihadists within the Islamic world substantially qualifies the import of Salafi-jihadist terrorism as a normative challenge to Westphalian international society.Footnote ²⁴ The significance of the Salafi-jihadist challenge is immediately undercut once one acknowledges the extent to which Muslims have internalised national subjectivities, even while becoming more self-conscious about their identity as members of the global ummah.Footnote ²⁵ Setting aside this crucial disconnect between jihadist ideology and popular sentiments within the Islamic world, the attacks of 9/11 further had the unintended side-effect of estranging Al-Qaeda from national jihadist organisations, who opposed bin Laden's escalation of hostilities with America and resort to mass casualty terrorism on both principled and pragmatic grounds.Footnote ²⁶ Without diminishing its incompatibility with Westphalian international society, jihadism when viewed through a sceptical lens would appear to present no more of a threat to the state system in the long term than the ideology that informed nineteenth century anarchist terrorism, and would certainly not be expected to exert any enduring effects on Westphalian international society.

The point of the preceding analysis is not to pass judgement in favour of either transformationalist or sceptical positions on systems change. Instead, I have simply sought to illustrate the empirical complexity and indeterminacy of the current situation, and the futility of making definitive assessments either way in the absence of a comparison with prior transformative episodes in the history of the state system. In what follows, I seek to demonstrate the value of a comparative historical approach to systems change by contrasting international society's current struggle against jihadist terrorism with European rulers' contests against transnational networks of confessional militants over the course of the Reformation.

II. Confessional networks, religious conflict, and the origins of the modern state system

From 1562 to 1598, France – along with Habsburg Spain one of sixteenth century Europe's two superpowers – was wracked by no less than eight different wars of religion between Catholics and their Calvinist Huguenot rivals. While never constituting more than 10 per cent of the French population, the Huguenot rebels were capable of waging a prolonged campaign of armed resistance against the crown for almost four decades, eventually compelling the king to grant the Huguenots limited toleration through the Edict of Nantes. The Huguenots' resilience in the face of pogroms, royal oppression and Spain's intermittent attempts to aid the suppression of heresy in France are a testament to the transnational character of the resistance movement, recognition of which invites parallels with the contemporary jihadist insurgency.

The Huguenot insurgency's transnational character is evident through a consideration of its ideology, leadership, organisation, and sources of material support. Ideologically, foremost emphasis must be placed on the influence of Jean Calvin, the French Protestant pastor who formulated the Huguenots' theology from exile in Geneva. While radical in its theological implications, Calvinism was initially politically quiescent, reiterating the Pauline injunction that the established authorities are divinely ordained and thus owed unconditional obedience by Christian subjects.Footnote ²⁷ Nevertheless, Calvin's rejection of traditional Church practices as idolatrous, his denial of the doctrine of transubstantiation (and with it, of the Church's claims to exercise a monopoly on the means of salvation) and his insistence on the doctrine of predestination each explicitly challenged the normative foundations of Catholic France.Footnote ²⁸ Had Calvin's influence been limited to Geneva, his ideas would have constituted a heretical but remote threat to the French monarchy. However, Calvin's life-long vocation was the evangelisation of his French homeland, and in this project he was aided by the existence of precociously well-developed printing industries in Geneva and Berne. With the aid of Swiss printing presses, Calvin and his successors were able to direct a constant stream of Calvinist theology and propaganda into France, and eventually also into the Spanish Netherlands, England, Scotland, and the Empire.Footnote ²⁹ At the outset of France's religious wars, Geneva thus served as Calvinism's intellectual epicentre, an incubator of religious heresy – and later, of theories of resistance that explicitly sanctified as a divine imperative armed revolt against the French crown – that remained obstinately beyond the grasp of the Valois dynasty.

In addition to providing the ideas that fuelled the Huguenot insurgency, Calvin's Geneva also supplied much of the ecclesiastical and intellectual leadership for the rebellion. In France as elsewhere, the military leadership of insurgency networks derived from the higher nobility.Footnote ³⁰ As part of a conscious strategy of proselytisation, the Genevan Academy had targeted the higher nobility for conversion, in the understanding that through the operation of the extensive clientage networks maintained by the nobility, conversion of one noble would normally bring with it his entire network of dependents.Footnote ³¹ So successful was this strategy that at its high tide, an estimated 40 per cent of the higher nobility had converted to the Huguenot cause.Footnote ³² While aristocratic conversions provided Calvinism with a potential military base, Geneva trained and dispatched the missionaries who supplied the ecclesiastical (and later, diplomatic) leadership for the Protestant cause in France.Footnote ³³ The remarkable consistency of Huguenot theology and rites of worship across France's Calvinist communities was directly attributable to the centrally administered, standardised, methodical training of missionaries undertaken at the Genevan academy, a consistency that continued even after sister academies were later established on French soil.Footnote ³⁴

The Huguenots thus synthesised the strengths and social power resources of two core leadership groups, specifically the military power of the higher nobility and the intellectual and ideological power of an internationally trained cadre of Calvinist missionaries. This dualism expressed itself also in the organisational form of Calvinist networks. The elaborate patron-client networks and kinship ties linking the Huguenot higher nobility provided a powerful latent source of social capital and court influence that could be activated at the prospect of official attacks on Huguenot communities. Overlaying these informal networks was a hierarchical and richly articulated structure of church government that provided a national co-ordinating structure for Huguenot worship in times of peace, as well as a powerful mobilisational infrastructure in times of war. From 1559 onwards, again under Geneva's guidance, France's scattered Huguenot communities were organised under a governance structure comprised of a national synod, provincial synods, regional colloquys of pastors, and local churches with accompanying consistories.Footnote ³⁵ As the prospect of civil war beckoned in 1560–61, these local consistories, penetrating the lowest reaches of social organisation, were employed as recruitment vehicles for Calvinist militants organising for the defence of their faith.Footnote ³⁶ The availability of this infrastructure enabled Prince Condé, the Huguenot leader for France's first three religious wars, to field a far larger force in 1562 than the crown could possibly have anticipated, thereby preserving the Huguenot cause and ensuring a decades-long prolongation of France's religious wars.Footnote ³⁷

By 1562, a profoundly heretical movement had thus become deeply entrenched in the country, drawing missionaries and ideas from neighbouring Geneva to establish a nation-wide ecclesiastical infrastructure capable of co-ordinating and sustaining a prolonged religious insurgency against the crown. Huguenot confessional networks combined the strength and resilience of affective bonds derived from aristocratic kinship and patron-client ties with the command and control capabilities of a rationally organised church bureaucracy to establish a highly effective form of insurgent organisation. To these inherent strengths of the Huguenot networks was added the sponsorship and occasionally even the direct military assistance of confessional allies beyond France. From the 1570s onwards, Huguenot rebels enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with Dutch Calvinist rebels revolting against Philip II in the neighbouring Spanish Netherlands, while both Huguenots and Dutch rebels also enjoyed intermittent assistance from Elizabethan England and the Palatinate.Footnote ³⁸ Such state-sponsored assistance as was provided to the Huguenots was neither as comprehensive as devout Calvinists would have wished, nor was it provided purely in the spirit of confessional solidarity, with reasons of state playing at least as significant a role in Elizabeth's assistance to the Huguenots as enthusiasm for the Protestant cause.Footnote ³⁹ These qualifications notwithstanding, international assistance in the form of soldiers, subsidies, sanctuary for exiles, and occasionally even direct military support was far from insignificant, and served to further fortify Huguenot resolve in the face of royal power.

The foregoing comments highlight the inherently transnational character of sectarian conflict in early modern Europe, as well as illuminating the centrality of a transnationally organised supportive infrastructure for the survival of the Huguenot cause in sixteenth century France. It must be noted that the transnational characteristics of the Huguenot resistance movement were far from unique to it, finding their orthodox answer in the militant Catholic League organised around the house of Guise, spiritually inspired by Rome, and dependent upon Spain and Savoy for material support.Footnote ⁴⁰ Beyond France, internationally connected insurgency networks also played vital roles in both the Dutch Revolt and the Thirty Years' war.Footnote ⁴¹ Nevertheless, and in spite of their military and political effectiveness, early modern insurgency networks did not endure as distinct organisational forms, being typically dismantled by their aristocratic leaders when the political goals of their sponsors had been realised, or alternatively when the conflicting political aspirations of their aristocratic and bourgeois elements forced the networks' premature dissolution.Footnote ⁴² In the absence of a direct organisational legacy, the significance of confessional insurgency networks was therefore indirect, and can be observed in its effects on the course of the Wars of Religion, as well as on the polity forms and systemic organising principles that emerged in the seventeenth century as the remedy for Europe's cataclysmic religious conflicts.

In the specific instance of the French Wars of Religion, transnational confessional insurgent networks played a crucial role in prolonging, intensifying, and internationalising the conflict. The survival of Huguenot resistance, even following the extermination of their higher echelon leadership in the Saint Bartholomew's day massacre, testifies to the insurgency's regenerative capacities, which derived at least partially from the Huguenots' ability to draw upon international networks of sympathy and support to sustain their struggle over a prolonged period. In addition to prolonging the war, confessional networks also aggregated the social grievances of their constituents and re-framed them around questions of religious identity. In mobilising popular support on the basis of religion, confessional networks were able to forge coalitions of unprecedented breadth that transcended the established class and occupational divisions characteristic of a rigidly stratified social order.Footnote ⁴³ However, the consequence of re-framing diverse social and factional grievances as essentially religious disputes was to radically intensify the conflict, leaving minimal room for compromise from either party. The routine ferocity of religious riots and acts of desecration perpetrated by Catholic and Huguenot mobs cannot be explained by reference to a bare strategic logic, but is explicable only through a recognition of the cultural frameworks – sponsored and circulated by confessional networks – that mandated religious violence as imperative for the task of purging the body social of spiritual pollutants.Footnote ⁴⁴ Finally, the transnational character of confessional networks internationalised the French civil wars, drawing foreign parties – both rulers and non-state co-religionists – inexorably into the fray. Their historical rivalry notwithstanding, both the French Valois rulers and the Spanish Habsburgs could find common cause in suppressing heresy in an environment in which routine collaboration and armed support linked Huguenot and Dutch rebels in common cause against Catholic monarchies. Conversely, the extensive links between the Huguenots and transnational networks of Calvinist missionaries and merchants provided a crucial influence vector in galvanising neighbouring Protestant states to support the Huguenot cause following the Saint Bartholomew's day massacre.

The transnational character of religious insurgency in Reformation Europe thus had decisive effects for the course of the French Wars of Religion, enabling an armed minority to ensnare one of Europe's contemporary superpowers in a decades-long struggle, as well as enabling that same minority to extract significant (if ultimately revocable) concessions from the crown following a peace of mutual exhaustion. Much more significant than these immediate effects, however, were the long term structural effects of the Reformation and the ensuing Wars of Religion on the evolution of polity forms in early modern Europe. For while it proved profoundly subversive of the authority claims of transnational bodies such as Church and Empire, Protestantism in its varied incarnations also provided Christendom's kings and princes with vital cultural resources with which to undertake projects of early modern state-building. Both the Lutheran identification of the law with the will of the ruler and the Calvinist creation of the disciplined ecclesial community rested on theologies positing a sharp conceptual differentiation between the ‘invisible’ community of the faithful and the visible community of the polity. Paradoxically, however, the effect of both confessions was to catalyse an institutional de-differentiation of ecclesial and secular authority structures, a development that manifested itself also (albeit with some modifications) in polities where the post-Tridentine Church continued to hold sway.Footnote ⁴⁵ The resulting processes of confessionalisation – entailing the centralisation of political power, the codification and rationalisation of religious belief systems, enhanced cultural standardisation, and the intensified disciplining of individuals and communities – dramatically strengthened the power of temporal rulers by involving them far more directly in their subjects' spiritual indoctrination and moral education than had previously been the case.Footnote ⁴⁶ Simultaneously, however, the very existence of confessional minorities, led by indigenous aristocratic warlords and capable of accessing transnational networks of sympathetic co-religionists, ensured that projects of forced confessional homogenisation were typically met with violent resistance. It was precisely out of such confrontations that the ordering ideology of Absolutism was spawned.

In its original formulation, Lutheranism had counselled popular political passivity on the basis of the Pauline injunction that the powers that be are ordained of God.Footnote ⁴⁷ Jean Calvin and his followers re-affirmed the divinely ordained character of the civil power, but opened up new possibilities for rebellion by broadening the definition of divinely ordained powers to include the lower magistrates, dispersing responsibility for enforcing God's commands between rulers and the upper echelons of the ruled.Footnote ⁴⁸ To this innovation, Calvinists added the incendiary idea that all godly individuals were covenanted with God to uphold His laws, a duty that extended to resisting or even removing idolatrous or tyrannical rulers that failed to govern in a God-pleasing manner.Footnote ⁴⁹ In sixteenth century France, the Huguenots' status as a confessional minority precluded them from justifying resistance to royal authority in these terms, thereby compelling them to camouflage this argument with a more ecumenical constitutionalist gloss.Footnote ⁵⁰ Nevertheless, it was precisely in response to Huguenot theories of resistance that Jean Bodin developed the intellectual framework for royal Absolutism. In identifying legislative authority as the essential mark of sovereign power, and in further advancing the notion that the sovereign received his powers directly from God (rather than via delegation from the Church), Bodin built upon ideas previously advanced by both Protestant thinkers and Roman legalists.Footnote ⁵¹ But in insisting on sovereignty's unitary and indivisible character, Bodin expressly repudiated Calvinist qua constitutionalist arguments that dispersed sovereignty between the ruler and the lower magistrates, and that thereby provided the latter with a license for rebellion.

The ideology of Absolutism thus emerged as a direct riposte to the theories of resistance formulated during the Wars of Religion, and specifically sought to repudiate the rationales for rebellion advanced by the Huguenot rebels in their struggle for recognition from the French monarchy. Absolutism answered the popular yearning for order engendered by the chaos of confessional warfare by insisting on the monarch's indispensable function as the central ordering mechanism holding a multitude of wills together within a divinely ordained and organically conceived social order.Footnote ⁵² Although later theorists such as Hobbes would come to reject religious justifications for absolute rule in favour of conceptions of the state as a contractually articulated human artifice, both Hobbesian and earlier Bodinian Absolutist ideologies lent their support to rulers' growing monopolisation of the use of organised violence from the mid-seventeenth century onwards.Footnote ⁵³ The exchange of popular obedience in return for protection from foreign invasion and civil strife became crucial to the legitimation of political authority in early modern Europe, and found its institutional expression in the establishment of permanent standing armies and powers of taxation throughout post-Westphalian Europe.Footnote ⁵⁴ The Wars of Religion also begat a dramatic increase in patterns of cultural standardisation across Europe – while the goal of confessional uniformity proved elusive for many states, a long-term effect of Europe's religious wars was the de jure or de facto nationalisation of religious authority, involving rulers much more directly in the moral supervision and enculturation of their subjects than had hitherto been the case.Footnote ⁵⁵

In both the processes of confessionalisation that it precipitated and the Absolutist counter-reaction that it inspired, the Reformation thus helped to lay the institutional and normative foundations of the modern state. Protestant claims concerning both the singular legislative authority of temporal rulers and the divinely appointed character of the civil power were initially deployed to discredit and delegitimise the Church's claims to exercise jurisdictional powers throughout Christendom.Footnote ⁵⁶ But by implication these ideas also dramatically extended the authoritative scope of the civil power, while also buttressing temporal rulers with a modicum of religious legitimacy that was unqualified by the intercessionary authority of the Church. The resulting institutional de-differentiation of spiritual and temporal power unquestionably exercised profoundly destabilising effects in the multi-confessional composite monarchies that predominated in early modern Europe. This observation obtained particularly in polities such as Valois France, where Calvinist notions concerning the authority of the lower magistrates and the duty of covenanted peoples to resist idolatrous rulers had found wide purchase. However, in the polity that would come to serve as the exemplar for aspiring state-builders in the seventeenth century, Huguenot resistance theories also generated a qualitatively new conception of sovereignty and political obligation in the construct of Absolutism. In assigning sovereignty exclusively to the monarch, in delegitimising rights of rebellion (whether justified on religious or constitutional grounds), and in subordinating all other goals – including the enforcement of religious conformity – to the objective of preserving the civil order, Bodin's construct of Absolutism provided the ideological trellis around which state power could subsequently cohere in the decades following the Peace of Westphalia.

Finally, at the international level, the European Wars of Religion accelerated the development of principles of sovereignty and non-intervention, articulated in embryonic form at Westphalia and subsequently systematically developed as part of a corpus of naturalist international law binding international society together. The Westphalian settlement provided a collective shield behind which rulers could engage in state-building projects without fear of interference by their neighbours. Transnational insurgency networks – as mechanisms of conflict escalation and contagion – had operated in an environment in which elaborate ties of genealogy linked Europe's ruling houses, and in which modern distinctions between the domestic and the international did not exist.Footnote ⁵⁷ What made the Westphalian settlement possible was rulers' collective recognition of the intractability of sectarian conflict within such an environment, and its inherently destabilising potential for established rulers.Footnote ⁵⁸ By articulating and organising principles of sovereignty and non-intervention alongside binding principles of religious toleration (at least for the polities of the Holy Roman Empire), Europe's rulers institutionalised barriers to the transnational spread of religious conflict. Admittedly, the Peace of Westphalia failed to expunge proprietary dynasticism as a feature the early modern European state system, and the full articulation of sovereign-territorial inside/outside distinctions would evolve only incrementally during the state-building wars of territorial consolidation that punctuated the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This observation notwithstanding, the Westphalian settlement nevertheless began the process of cordoning off of Europe's rulers within mutually exclusive jurisdictions, thus enabling the subsequent enclosure of social power within a sovereign-territorial framework that was progressively accomplished by rulers during the Age of Absolutism.

Before turning to the contemporary jihadist challenge to the global state system, let me clarify that the foregoing comments are not intended to provide a self-sufficient account of the origins of the modern state system. Both the Reformation and the emergence of Absolutism entailed fundamental transformations in the nature of dominant authority claims within early modern Europe, with temporal rulers asserting their autonomy from the decaying structures of Church and Empire, and their jurisdictional supremacy vis-à-vis their own subjects. These transformations in authority claims were vitally important in structuring the order that emerged from Christendom's ashes, and were by their very nature ideational in character. However, these ideas acquired an enduring purchase only via their mediation through distinctly configured networks of social power, which structured the possibilities for transnational military mobilisation in particular ways. The Reformation crystallised in a particular structural context, in which Europe's composite monarchies were laterally enmeshed in criss-crossing bundles of aristocratic genealogical ties, and in which aristocrats retained the ability to independently tap into their own vertically integrated networks of patronage when given cause to contest monarchical power. It was this pattern of lateral enmeshment and vertical segmentation that accounted for both the fragility of Europe's composite monarchies, as well as helping to explain the protracted and irrepressibly contagious character of conflicts such as the French Wars of Religion. Material processes, such as the advent of commercial capitalism and the onset of an early modern ‘military revolution’, provided rebels and rulers alike with additional resources with which to prosecute their struggles against one another, and also provided the raw materials out of which the ‘hard-shell rimmed’ modern state would eventually be hewn.Footnote ⁵⁹ But it was the pervasive chaos of Europe's Wars of Religion that catalysed the genesis of identifiably modern conceptions of Absolutist sovereignty. This chaos was in turn engendered through the explosive intersection of processes of confessionalisation with processes of transnational military mobilisation, processes which were themselves mediated via the insurgency networks of the confessional age.

III. The transnational Salafi-jihadist challenge to the modern state system

Just as the modern state system was forged out of the crucible of Europe's Wars of Religion, so too are its ordering principles now being tested by transnational religious insurgents fighting under the banner of the global jihadist movement. Salafi-jihadism originates from a broader movement calling for the regeneration of Islamic societies through a return to the form of Islam supposedly practiced by the companions (salaf) of the Prophet.Footnote ⁶⁰ Salafism embraces a literalist interpretation of the Koran, and calls for the purging of innovations in religious practice introduced into Islam over subsequent generations.Footnote ⁶¹ Salafis are particularly critical of innovations introduced into Islamic societies from the West. Two innovations that are vociferously opposed are the distinction between the secular and the sacred – which contradicts Salafis' emphasis on the ‘Unity of God’ – and the division of the Muslim world into separate nation-states, nationalism being regarded as a form of idolatry that artificially divides the Islamic community.Footnote ⁶² Salafis compare the contemporary period with the jahiliyya, the time of ignorance in the Arab world before the coming of Islam, and call for the establishment of sharia law and the dissolution of nation-states in favour of an Islamic Caliphate as remedies to the spiritual and moral malaise they see gripping the Islamic world.Footnote ⁶³

A violent offshoot of Salafism, Salafi-jihadism endorses Salafist theology and further claims that it is the permanent and individual duty of all Muslims to engage in perpetual holy war against Islam's enemies.Footnote ⁶⁴ Salafi-jihadists distinguish between the ‘near enemy’, comprised of apostate rulers in the Muslim world, and the ‘far enemy’, consisting of non-Muslim powers that provide apostate rulers with the military and financial wherewithal necessary to sustain themselves in power.Footnote ⁶⁵ In the absence of a Caliph to unite the Islamic world and command its armies, Salafi-jihadists argue that it is incumbent upon all Muslims to wage ceaseless struggle against Islam's enemies, asserting (contrary to Islamic orthodoxy) that this obligation constitutes the sixth pillar of Islam, as binding on all Muslims as the five recognised pillars of profession of faith, prayer, fasting, alms-giving, and pilgrimage.Footnote ⁶⁶

Ideologically, the contradiction between Salafi-jihadism and the present world order is clearly evident. The separation between the sacred and the secular; the principle of popular sovereignty as realised in the institutional form of the nation-state; even the monopolisation of legitimate violence by sovereign states – each of these principles are explicitly repudiated by the jihadists.Footnote ⁶⁷ Similarly, jihadist actions – in the form of mass casualty terrorism – directly compromise the Hobbesian social contract of protection in exchange for obedience that has legitimised the modern state since the Peace of Westphalia. The organisational vehicle through which the jihadist challenge has been directed is a diffuse global coalition of militant networks, of which Al-Qaeda forms merely a part. Nevertheless, given its prominence among transnational jihadists, the analysis below concentrates on Al-Qaeda as a contemporary example of a religious transnational insurgency network.

Al-Qaeda's origins can be traced to Abdullah Azzam's establishment of the Services Bureau, an information clearing-house on the status and whereabouts of Arab volunteers waging jihad against the Red Army following the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan.Footnote ⁶⁸ On the eve of the Soviets' defeat in Afghanistan, Azzam and bin Laden established Al-Qaeda (Arabic: the base) to serve as a database of jihadists who could potentially be mobilised to wage jihad against Islam's enemies in future conflicts.Footnote ⁶⁹Al-Qaeda's subsequent evolution has been chronicled elsewhere and will not be recapitulated here, save to observe that Al-Qaeda has from the beginning consisted of a network of networks, with jihadists from Morocco to Malaysia being bonded through their common commitment to jihadist ideology, and also in their shared experiences waging jihad in Afghanistan.Footnote ⁷⁰ With the 1998 merger between Ayman al-Zawahiri's Egyptian Islamic Jihad and bin Laden's organisation, Al-Qaeda assumed its pre-9/11 form as a coalition of allied jihadist networks, with a core leadership group co-ordinating and directing cells in the commissioning of major attacks such as the 1998 African embassy bombings, the attack on the USS Cole, and of course September 11. Following 9/11 and under the impact of intensified international counter-terrorism efforts, Al-Qaeda has morphed from a hub-and-spokes network to a much more loosely organised chain network, in which connections between individual cells have become more attenuated, and in which the central leadership's capacity to organise and coordinate large-scale attacks has been significantly – perhaps fatally – degraded.Footnote ⁷¹ Conversely, this setback has been partially offset by Al-Qaeda's enhanced post 9/11 capacity to inspire dispersed autonomous jihadist cells to perpetrate atrocities such as the Madrid and London bombings.

Writing on the dynamics of emergent power agglomerations, Michael Mann observes: ‘When an independent source of power it emerges, it is promiscuous in relation to “factors”, gathering them from all crannies of social life, giving them only a distinctive organisational configuration.’Footnote ⁷² This observation relates particularly well to Al-Qaeda, which has drawn from global flows of people, capital, ideas and materiel to forge a unique form of globalised insurgency, more analogous to a transnational social movement than to a guerrilla organisation. Where Calvinist networks in Reformation Europe exploited the propagandistic and mobilisational opportunities provided by the printing press, Al-Qaeda and its affiliates have masterfully exploited the information technology revolution to propagate the message of jihad and glorify the deeds of jihadist martyrs.Footnote ⁷³ Unlike its Reformation counterparts, Al-Qaeda has not been able to rely on the direct military or economic assistance of state actors. Al-Qaeda has nevertheless been able to tap into various global financial flows, ranging from funds diverted from Islamic charities to profits garnered from the sale of African conflict diamonds, to finance the global jihad.Footnote ⁷⁴ Finally, the accelerated global diffusion of dual-use technologies and the post-Cold War glut in the small arms market have significantly increased the pool of military resources and disruptive capabilities available to non-state actors, providing ample materiel with which to arm a jihadist community already battle-hardened from experience in the anti-Soviet jihad and now, presumably also, from experience in the anti-Coalition Iraqi jihad.

Today's transnational jihadists enjoy a geographical reach and destructive capabilities that far surpass that possessed by Europe's confessional militants. Nevertheless, the jihadists are unlikely to have equivalent transformative effects as did their early modern counterparts. Recall that the Huguenots were able to synthesise the strengths of aristocratic patronage and kinship networks with a nation-wide bureaucratic church hierarchy to create an insurgent apparatus of exceptional resilience and strength. The ties linking Huguenots to a transnational supportive infrastructure were critical in sustaining their struggle and internationalising the conflict, but these linkages empowered a movement that was already deeply embedded in France's social fabric. Conversely, Al-Qaeda does not possess a bureaucratically governed and hierarchically organised religious infrastructure upon which to piggy-back when mobilising its military power, and, even if it did, such an infrastructure would likely be rapidly detected and dismembered by the international community. It is true that Al-Qaeda and affiliated jihadist organisations have derived strength from pre-existing social and kinship networks – witness for example the importance of the Ngruki network of pesantren alumni in forming the core personnel of Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), as well as the self-conscious strategy of network preservation through the inter-marriage of jihadist families pursued by both Al-Qaeda and JI.Footnote ⁷⁵ But such linkages pale in comparison with the size and sophistication of the patronage and kinship networks of the Huguenot nobility, networks that yoked fanatical religious commitment together with the affective ties of kinship to produce a deeply rooted structure of resistance to central authority.

Whereas Huguenot networks were deeply embedded in French society in addition to being plugged into a dispersed transnational supportive infrastructure, Al-Qaeda's social penetration of host societies is generally shallow, with the possible exceptions of southern Afghanistan and the adjoining tribal border provinces of Pakistan.Footnote ⁷⁶ The network has at its core a ‘jihad jet set’ of nomadic leaders radicalised by their experience of the Afghan jihad, while its foot-soldiers have been disproportionately drawn from socially marginalised first or second generation immigrants living in Western Europe and North America.Footnote ⁷⁷ In this respect, the network's form is analogous to that of rhizomic plants such as creeping ivy, which spread rapidly but are only shallowly embedded in the top-soil through thousands of tiny shoots. Like a rhizomic plant, Al-Qaeda possesses a powerful regenerative capacity, with its chain-like network structure ensuring that the elimination of a large number of independent cells will not lead to the network's collapse. However, partially off-setting this advantage is the network's shallow penetration of host societies, a structural defect that has severely limited the effectiveness of Al-Qaeda's outreach activities to local militants in host societies.

One of the greatest strengths of the transnationally connected but socially embedded Huguenot networks resided in their capacity to mobilise a popular base in defence of their faith. The networks accomplished this task by aggregating the diverse social and factional grievances of a wide range of actors and re-framing these grievances as being essentially and irreducibly religious in character.Footnote ⁷⁸ In an effort to broaden its popular base, Al-Qaeda has also tried to insinuate itself into local conflicts involving Muslims, with a view towards re-framing these struggles as part of a global jihad against Islam's enemies.Footnote ⁷⁹ However, from Bosnia to Iraq, Muslim nationalists have accepted Al-Qaeda's offers of men and materiel without embracing their cause of global jihad.Footnote ⁸⁰Al-Qaeda's failure to win more than a minority of converts in war-torn societies can be credited to its socially disembedded character, along with its uncompromising intolerance of any interpretations of Islam that differ from its own. Across a range of theatres, jihadists have alienated themselves from host societies by denouncing indigenous folk religious practices as un-Islamic.Footnote ⁸¹ The hostilities in Iraq in Anbar province between Al-Qaeda foreign fighters and indigenous Iraqi insurgents constitute merely the most acute example of Al-Qaeda's political ineptitude, with its unwillingness to tolerate religious dissent estranging it from actors with whom it shares the goal of expelling Coalition forces from Iraq.Footnote ⁸² Paradoxically, the same features of Salafi-jihadism that make it attractive to de-territorialised and deracinated migrants and exiles (for example, its dogmatic repudiation of all religious innovations that have accumulated since the Prophet's time) make it unappealing to most Muslims, thereby limiting its potential to broaden its appeal and thus pose a genuine threat to incumbent rulers.Footnote ⁸³

The limited threat posed by Al-Qaeda to the state system is further illustrated through a comparison of the relationship between religious insurgency and state failure in the early modern and contemporary contexts. In Valois France, the weakening of centralised political power was very much the consequence of religious radicalism and the withdrawal of support for the monarchy by Huguenot converts among the higher nobility. In France as throughout Reformation Europe, comprehensive bureaucracies had yet to be established, forcing rulers to rely on the higher nobility to govern in territories beyond the crown's direct grasp.Footnote ⁸⁴ This patrimonial form of government ensured a dramatic involution of state power upon the outbreak of religious war in all areas where Huguenot conversion amongst the nobility was high. Across the ‘Huguenot crescent’ in southern and western France, the crown's influence evaporated on the initiation of religious hostilities as noble office-holders simply redirected the machinery of local and provincial government in support of the rebellion.Footnote ⁸⁵ Conversely, jihadism has not by itself been the cause of post-colonial state failure. Rather, jihadists have simply exploited already pre-existing power vacuums in weak and failing states for their own purposes – their activities have thus been a symptom of deeper structural problems within the state system rather than being their underlying cause.

Finally, jihadism's revolutionary potential is constrained by the deeply internalised and comprehensively institutionalised character of the state system itself. Put bluntly, jihadist aspirations to overthrow the state system are fanciful. The material strength of even the brittle and unpopular authoritarian regimes of the Middle East far exceeds that of the jihadists. This is evidenced in the fact that the jihad against apostate rulers went global precisely because groups like Egyptian Islamic Jihad were unable to overthrow these rulers through resort to conventional strategies of revolutionary mobilisation, guerrilla warfare and urban terrorism.Footnote ⁸⁶ The military defeat of Islamists in Algeria and Egypt in the late 1990s may have convinced jihadist ideologues of the virtues of re-directing their energies towards the ‘far enemy’, but it simultaneously demonstrated jihadists' powerlessness vis-à-vis their state adversaries.Footnote ⁸⁷ Perhaps even more important than this imbalance of material capabilities, however, are the systemic normative obstacles to the spread of jihadism. Whereas early modern confessional networks augmented their military capabilities by tapping an unregulated international market for mercenaries, this option has been foreclosed for contemporary insurgents following the nineteenth century growth of republican government and the ensuing delegitimation and elimination of mercenarism.Footnote ⁸⁸ More broadly, principles of popular sovereignty and republican government that are anathema to Salafi-jihadism have become institutionalised globally through the UN system, and at a unit level through the generalisation of the nation-state as the world's dominant form of political community. Rather than displacing the nation as an object of popular loyalty, the growth of transnational Islamic solidarity has occurred in tandem with the consolidation of national subjectivities in many parts of the Muslim world, further diminishing the prospects of a global Caliphate rising phoenix-like from the ashes of the Middle East's secular autocracies.Footnote ⁸⁹ For all its fragility, the global state system is thus sufficiently institutionalised and internalised as to make its direct overthrow by the jihadists a remote possibility.

IV. Transnational religious insurgencies compared – Calvinism, jihadism, and the dynamics of international systems change

The confessional networks of Reformation Europe and today's jihadist networks emerged in vastly different circumstances. Consequently, attempts to compare these cases for the purposes of better understanding the dynamics of international systems change must be undertaken with great caution. This caveat aside, some provisional conclusions concerning processes of international systems change can be derived from this comparison. Specifically, I maintain that the superior ideological appeal of Calvinism, the greater mobilisational opportunities available to early modern confessional militants, and the qualitatively greater vulnerability of sixteenth century Christendom to subversion together account for the increased transformative potential of transnational insurgency in Reformation Europe. Conversely, jihadism's narrow ideological appeal, together with jihadists' inability to exploit the mobilisational capacity of existing transnational religious networks, fatally constrains their potential to exploit existing vulnerabilities within the global state system. Such observations do not discount the possibility that jihadist violence may indirectly provoke states into over-reacting in ways that threaten the global state system's constitutional principles, but they nevertheless suggest that the direct transformative potential of transnational religious insurgency in the contemporary period is significantly less now than it has been in earlier historical epochs.

One of the main factors accounting for the intensity and longevity of Europe's Wars of Religion was the extent to which insurgent belief systems acquired popular support among a broad range of social groups, who were then prepared to mobilise militarily in defence of their newly adopted confessions. For all of its iconoclastic fury, the austere and ascetic form of devotion that defined Calvinism tapped into genuine popular longings for a more intense and unmediated experience of the divine. The political authority Calvinism accorded to the lower magistrates additionally enhanced Calvinism's appeal among Europe's notoriously independent nobility, providing them with an ennobling rationale for rebellion against over-reaching monarchs. Paradoxically, however, the Calvinist ideal of the disciplined ecclesial community also supplied a valuable template to early modern state builders, while broader Protestant beliefs concerning the divinely delegated character of civil power and the centrality of law-making as a function of rule also facilitated the construction of enduring structures of political authority in the wake of Europe's religious wars.Footnote ⁹⁰

Conversely, jihadism's ideological appeal is far more limited, as is its capacity to serve as a basis for an alternative political order. Undoubtedly, the growing popularity of ascetic forms of devotion among the devout middle classes in many Muslim communities in recent decades suggests muted parallels with the much-noted affinity between Protestantism and the merchant classes in early modern Europe.Footnote ⁹¹ But the dramatic growth of moderate Islamist movements must be distinguished from the specific ideology of Salafi-jihadism, which in its elevation of violent jihad as the defining expression of religious piety will only ever appeal to a tiny minority. The literalist, de-territorialised brand of Islam favoured by jihadists deliberately denudes the faith of many of the traditions, rites and practices that render it such a powerful source of identity and ontological security for many Muslims, thereby limiting its ability to acquire a broad basis of popular support. More problematic even than this, however, is jihadism's limited scope to sustain a coherent alternative order to the current state system. For all of his antipathy towards the Catholic hierarchy, Calvin recognised the need to confine the interpretation of Scripture to officers of the Reformed Church, if only to preserve a uniform public truth against the centrifugal effects of private religious visions.Footnote ⁹² Calvinism delegitimised and displaced the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, but it also provided a detailed institutional blueprint for the hierarchical order that was to succeed it. Jihadist propagandists have by contrast failed to articulate such a vision, instead insisting that legislative sovereignty lies solely with Allah, and that sharia constitutes the self-sufficient legal code by which human societies must be governed. The example of the Taliban's rule in Afghanistan, in which no legislation was passed, and the key institutions of the state were largely dismantled, is suggestive of jihadism's sterility as a resource for would-be state-builders.Footnote ⁹³ Where the Protestant ethic enjoyed an elective affinity with the forms of rational-bureaucratic domination characteristic of the modern state, the spirit of jihadism remains defiantly charismatic in its essential nature, a feature that precludes it from following Calvinism as the begetter of a new political order.

In addition to jihadism's self-limiting character as an insurgent ideology, today's jihadists are unable to access and mobilise social networks for the purposes of transnational religious insurgency with nearly the same ease as their Calvinist predecessors. In Reformation Europe, social ties built around the institutions of aristocratic kinship and patronage were deeply interwoven into the constitutional architecture of early modern composite monarchies, providing confessional rebels with a scope for subversion and destabilisation that finds few structural analogues in the modern state system. Today, many polities are extensively permeated by transnational religious networks, including Tablighi Jamaat and various Sufi brotherhoods, which could conceivably provide the mobilisational resources for mounting localised challenges to incumbent regimes.Footnote ⁹⁴ But such networks are not threaded through governance structures in nearly the same way as were the kinship and patronage networks that the Huguenots harnessed in mobilising to confront the Valois monarchy. Additionally, the jihadists' extreme doctrinal exclusivity precludes any opportunities for effectively penetrating (much less co-opting for subversive purposes) either Tablighi Jamaat or the Sufi brotherhoods, thereby further inhibiting the their abilities to mobilise transnationally to subvert the global state system.

For an international order to be transformed, it is necessary for there to be available agents of transformation, imbued with an appealing ideology and capable of accessing available social networks to mobilise against the old order. Additionally, for anti-systemic agents to be successful, the existing order must also be weak enough to give them adequate opportunities to exploit its structural vulnerabilities to full effect. As the sixteenth century confessional militants demonstrated, Christendom was eminently susceptible to subversion. Given their internal weaknesses and longstanding rivalry, neither Church nor Empire proved capable of collaborating to suppress Protestantism before it had become indelibly entrenched as a feature of Europe's political and religious landscape. Moreover, in the absence of institutionalised norms of sovereignty and non-intervention, Europe's rulers were unable to resist the possibilities for predation and intervention presented by the eruption of heresy and rebellion among neighbouring rivals. Between the Peace of Augsburg and the Peace of Westphalia, Europe's polities dwelled in a state of ‘immature anarchy’, marked by the absence of viable ordering institutions, and by the persistence of endemic wars fed by a combination of dynastic ambition and bitter sectarian conflict.Footnote ⁹⁵ It was within this fluid institutional environment that Europe's militant confessional networks flourished, contributing in both the ideas that they directly propagated and the Absolutist counter-reaction that they inspired to the formation of the modern state system.

Today's global jihadists conversely find themselves in an international environment that is far more densely institutionalised than the one that prevailed in Reformation Europe. During the Wars of Religion, rulers routinely exploited the inter-connected character of Europe's composite monarchies to foment rebellion and support co-religionists in neighbouring polities. Such practices were part of the natural practice of early modern statecraft, but they nevertheless proved mutually enfeebling in the long term. Conversely, one of the great strengths of the Westphalian state system is its mutually empowering character, a feature that has been no more evident than in the aggressive mobilisation of inter-state cooperation to suppress jihadist terrorism since 9/11.Footnote ⁹⁶ Unlike the tottering order of Christendom, which rested upon religious foundations and which thus crumbled once its spiritual unity was undermined, the global state system is a reflexively monitored social institution that finds its raison d'etre in the ecumenical goals of promoting popular eudemonism and national self-determination. Consequently, and precisely because its animating purposes are not anchored in any particular religious vision, the state system's ordering mechanisms have not been paralysed by the emergence of a religiously inspired challenge. This has enabled states to mobilise against a movement that threatens their monopoly on violence, and thus challenges their ability to provide for the physical security of their citizens. Moreover, whereas the European economy in the sixteenth century was predominantly localised and non-monetised, and was arguably more resilient in the face of protracted periods of disorder, the ordering requirements of the contemporary global capitalist economy are by contrast infinitely more demanding, providing an additional incentive for states to mount a robust defence against jihadist terrorism.Footnote ⁹⁷ In both the threat it has posed to the state system's legitimacy and its proper functioning, and in the indirect challenge it has by implication presented to the undisturbed operation of the global capitalist economy, jihadism has thus inspired a vigorous counter-mobilisation by the international community that has dramatically weakened its capacity to subvert the prevailing order.