Scholar Traces Western Exceptionalism To Worms Concordat (1122), 900 Years Ago Today.

Enterprise Tech Scholar Traces Western Exceptionalism To Worms Concordat (1122), 900 Years Ago Today. Roslyn Layton Senior Contributor Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. International Tech Policy Following New! Follow this author to stay notified about their latest stories.

Got it! Sep 23, 2022, 03:29am EDT | New! Click on the conversation bubble to join the conversation Got it! Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Bueno de Mesquita’s “Invention of Power” charts rise and prevalence of Europe and its offshoots to . . .

[+] the Concordat of Worms in 1122, an agreement which created institutional competition for political control between Church and state. PublicAffairs What does a little known agreement signed by Pope Callixtus II and Holy Roman Emperor Henry V in Worms (near Frankfurt, Germany) on September 23, 1122 have to do with the quality of life today? Pretty much everything, according to leading political scientist and Stanford University fellow Bruce Beuno de Mesquita. As he details in this new book The Invention of Power: Popes, Kings and the Birth of the West , the Concordat established the fundament of competing authority for political control, what Americans colloquially call separation of Church and state.

To understand why the “West” is more prosperous, innovative, freer, and more tolerant than much of the world, Bueno de Mesquita turned his attention to the regulated, institutionalized competition between Church and state that the Concordat of Worms and its precursors set in motion. The Concordat of Worms stipulated that only the Church had the right to appoint religious office holders, ending the practice of kings installing their preferred bishops. In return, the emperor could attend canonical elections and intervene in cases of disputed outcomes.

The agreement created imperial incentives to encourage wealth creation for the people of the given realm. The richer the people grew, the more power that accrued to the monarch relative to the church and other regions. Improved productivity was achieved through the granting of incremental rights and with it, representative government emerged.

As the state competed for secular goods, the Church was stimulated to compete on the meaningful good of the divine. The book offers a detailed statistical investigation of nations over the last 900 years, comparing the regions and bishoprics which signed the accords versus those which did not. The analysis is expanded further to nations beyond Europe.

Importantly, Bueno de Mesquita observes that communist, authoritative societies (e. g. USSR and PRC) which lack institutional competition for political control fall short on delivering meaningful and equitable social goods.

Of course many factors shaped differences within Europe and also between Europe and the rest of the world. While some systematic and some idiosyncratic developments helped shape the West’s “exceptionalism,” the Concordats of the twelfth century are greatly under-estimated as a component behind Western prosperity, innovation, freedom, and tolerance. The book is framed around misguided and dangerous misconceptions about Western exceptionalism while, at the same time, endorsing the idea that there is much that is exceptional about Western Europe and its settler offshoots.

Certainly they are exceptional in terms of the quality of life of their subjects. Hence, understanding what made them so and how what made them so teach important lessons for today. MORE FOR YOU The 5 Biggest Technology Trends In 2022 ‘Enthusiastic Entrepreneurs’: Pre-IPO Statements On Profitability Prove To Be Larger Than Real Life The 7 Biggest Artificial Intelligence (AI) Trends In 2022 Bueno de Mesquita answers my questions below.

1. Can the struggle for civil/human rights be described within the framework of the Concordat of Worms because it established competing authorities which had to be responsible to the people? I believe the answer to this question is “YES. ” Certainly no king and no pope in the twelfth century had civil rights in mind when they signed onto or lived within the rules put in place by the Concordats of London and Paris (1107) or Worms (1122).

But, as the book explains, the new, regulated and institutionalized competition for political control that the Concordats stimulated gave secular rulers new incentives to promote economic growth. At the same time, the terms of the Concordats incentivized the Catholic Church to try to limit growth in the parts of Europe where the agreements left it with greater sway. Under the terms of the Concordats, kings had new reasons to encourage local lords and their subjects to improve economic productivity as a pathway to greater wealth and power for the king vis-à-vis the Church.

To advance that goal, signatories granted new rights to local lords, merchants, farmers, and even workers through the creation of meaningful parliaments. These parliaments, and other institutional innovations, translated into political advantages for some of “the people” as well as for their rulers. Hence, the dissemination of and the beginning of respect for rights for “the people” went hand-in-hand with the advancement of monarchic and nascent state interests in competition with the Church.

We can see one possible manifestation of the effects of the Concordats by looking at variation across Europe today in terms of respect for civil liberties and political rights. For instance, standard estimates of civil liberties and political rights, such as those by Freedom House, show us that today’s European countries whose territory was subject to one of the twelfth century Concordats are doing better on these rights than is true for those countries in Europe that were not subject to such terms. 2.

What lessons we might take about China from The Invention of Power? An essential lesson for today when comparing Europe to other parts of the world is that free, institutionalized competition, such as was established by the Concordats, is a fundamental contributor to national success if success is defined in terms of the quality of life for the vast majority of people in a society rather than for just its leaders and their inner circle. One advantage conferred on governments that were subject to a Concordat, especially if they were far from the reach of the pope, was, as noted earlier, rulers could become more powerful by stimulating their subjects to work harder and increase wealth. One way this was achieved was by making kings more accountable to a larger portion of their population through parliaments that had teeth.

Many today look at China as a model of economic success, a view that I believe is misguided. China has the world’s second largest economy today. It was, as well, arguably the second largest economy in the world back in 1890.

However, on a per capita basis it is only a mid-level economy today (we have to go back to around the years 1000 to 1500 for China to be above average in per capita income) and its 40 year run of exceptional growth is on the decline. Why? I believe the answers provided by The Invention of Power (and, more directly, by my book with Alastair Smith, The Dictator’s Handbook ) help illuminate what China’s government has done right and what it has done wrong. Historically and still today, China lacks multiple power centers that foster effective, substantial competition for the ruling elite.

It certainly does not have a parliament with teeth. Instead, China’s government depends on a very small inner circle, a “winning coalition” whose support is essential to keep the Chinese Communist Party in power. The members of that inner circle do fabulously well while the average citizen does much less well.

China’s policies limit innovation in ideas that might stimulate political competition. The signatories to the Concordats, surely unwittingly, were rewarded for promoting just such competition – and compromise – over ideas. While economic success is never anathema to a government, when it reflects a tradeoff between centralized power or dispersed power, leaders try to implement centralized power.

The Concordats stimulated more dispersed power by compelling bargaining and compromise between Europe’s Catholic Church and the signatory-monarchies. China’s resistance to such competition strengthens political control but diminishes its people’s longer-term prospects. 3.

Do countries like Sweden or Denmark, both with a state religion, comply with the Invention of Power thesis? England is another example of a European country with a state religion but also with religious freedom today. A key to my thesis is that people are free to have and act on ideas that differ from those held by the state’s authorities or some other source of power over people, such as religious authorities. Here we might see an important distinction between, for instance, places in Europe with a state religion but with freedom to dissent from it and places elsewhere in the world, such as in parts of the Middle East, where some states have an official, institutionalized religion and people are not free to dissent from its tenets.

The institutionalized incentives for competition over power and ideas, whether political, economic, or religious, is central to the structure set in motion by the Concordats. The countries of Scandinavia have, of course, done very well in terms of quality of life indicators although they were not signatories to any of the twelfth century Concordats. Does that mean they contradict the thesis? I believe the answer is “probably not” for two reasons.

First, the thesis does not claim that being subject to the terms of a Concordat was required for success. Rather, my claim is that the odds of success were greatly increased for those governments that were subject to the terms of a Concordat and were positioned to exploit its opportunities. Any government that experienced the institutionalization of orderly competition, bargaining and compromise across power centers could promote “exceptionalism.

” Scandinavia, to its governments’ credit, gradually adopted such practices perhaps along the model of their neighboring German competitors. Second, my thesis highlights the tradeoff between wealth and power, constrained by the deterrent effects of punishment. As The Invention of Power notes, the ability of popes and the Church to credibly inflict punishment waned the farther one got from Rome.

Fewer (but still some) heretics, for instance, were burned at the stake when they were far from Rome than when they were close to Rome. The countries of Scandinavia were/are, of course, very far from Rome. Hence, they were less subject to domination and punishment by the Church than, for instance, Italian dioceses.

Thus, they lacked the bargaining incentives of the Concordats but their leaders enjoyed the latitude to make choices that deviated from Church orthodoxy. So, in that sense, their experience illustrates how others today can borrow from the central lessons of The Invention of Power ; that is, that regulated, orderly, institutionalized competition across ideas is (unremarkably) the path to success, a path initiated and institutionalized by the Concordats but capable of replication in contemporary settings without the religious backdrop of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn .

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