this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2023
58 points (98.3% liked)
askchapo
22652 readers
318 users here now
Ask Hexbear is the place to ask and answer ~~thought-provoking~~ questions.
Rules:
-
Posts must ask a question.
-
If the question asked is serious, answer seriously.
-
Questions where you want to learn more about socialism are allowed, but questions in bad faith are not.
-
Try [email protected] if you're having questions about regarding moderation, site policy, the site itself, development, volunteering or the mod team.
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm a fan of the Matt Christman take. I may be roughing this up pretty badly but: it's got a lot to do with European geography having enough natural borders to create small individual states, but not sturdy enough natural borders to prevent conflict. You end up with a shitton of small-ish states in a perpetual arms race, which means they'll be looking for every advantage possible. Even if it comes at a cost to the stability of the existing order writ large, they'll take it because losing in the arms race is a much more immediate existential threat to the individual states. China had those warring states, but the natural borders were weak enough that they eventually settled into a single state. There's a thousand other factors, too, but I hadn't seen this mentioned from skimming the top few comments in this thread.
I don't know if I buy the geography take, the European plain is fairly wide open from France to the Caucuses (excluding the Alps basically). From what I've read Europe rushing military tech was because they didn't have valuable enough goods to trade, so they had to use violence to open up markets for them.
The core reason is you have many small to medium sized states in constant competition. Geography is a factor but its not the entire picture. They militarized first, then they colonized. But they did not militarized for the sake of opening markets. They opened markets so they could continue militarizing.