Elias's exploration of the course of the civilizing process was principally focused on explaining long-run developments within the leading European societies but, as this chapter explains, his inquiry also encompassed relations between states with their monopoly control of the instruments of violence. As noted in the Introduction, Elias was rare among sociologists of his generation in firmly rejecting any investigations of social processes that neglected inter-societal relations. Throughout his writings – and often in unexpected places, including works on modern attitudes to dying and death and on the sociology of knowledge – Elias returned to a discussion of the impact of relations between states on the formation and transformation of human societies (see Elias 2007, 2010). He argued that the analysis of the inseparability of intra-and inter-state ‘lines of development’ represented a major advance beyond the dominant iterations of the classical sociological tradition (see p. 262, note 2).

Why did Elias accord the international domain such prominence in the study of the civilizing process? The answer is that the modern European states which had been the crucible in which civilized practices developed were also one of the main threats to their survival. Elias (2010: 5) referred to the ‘Janus-faced’ nature of state-formation to describe the recurrent feature of human history in which ‘internal pacification’ has coexisted with ‘outward threat’ and with permanent readiness for war. The most recent centuries reflected that longstanding condition. Achievements in pacifying modern societies facilitated the creation of complex social interconnections and interwoven assumptions about the nature of civil or civilized relations. But the same states were entangled in competitive relations that often ended in devastating violence. They had repeatedly displayed the willingness to cause levels of human suffering in military conflicts that clashed with professed civilized standards of behaviour. Moreover, stable state-organized societies with high levels of domestic support and considerable fiscal reserves that were the result of the monopoly control of public taxation had accumulated military capabilities without precedent. Modern peoples could pride themselves in the relative freedom from the danger of violence in everyday public encounters in their respective societies.