Antiquated before they can ossify (1): states that fail before they form.
Author | Anderson, Lisa |
"Today, the international community has the best chance since the rise of the nation-state in the seventeenth century to build a world where great powers compete in peace instead of continually prepare for war. Today, the world's great powers find ourselves on the same side--united by common dangers of terrorist violence and chaos."
--National Security Strategy of the United States, 2002
"The danger is that a global universally interrelated civilization may produce barbarians from its own midst by forcing millions of people into conditions which, despite all appearances, are the conditions of savages."
--Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1948
The 21st century opened with a great deal of debate about the merits and prospects of the state, but there was very little discussion about the worlds in which the state is absent or about the value and purposes of any of the alternatives. Yet the state is not the natural, default organizational structure of human community. It is a distinct and particular institution with a number of historical and contemporary competitors. This essay is an effort to restore the horse to the front of the cart, and to examine states from a historical perspective that reveals something about the nature of the alternatives. Those competitors are solutions to problems, just as the state and the state system were originally a response to specific needs. Only if we understand how the state came to encompass the peoples and lands of the entire world, and what it supplanted or distorted in doing so, will we understand the profound costs of both its construction and its absence.
For decades there have been challenges to the state from a variety of quarters. From above, the European Union appeared to signal the waning of the sovereignty of its members and international organizations, from the United Nations to the World Trade Organization, seemed to infringe on the sovereignty of their constituents more often and more assertively. From below, the shattering of large states--the collapse of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, and the continuing challenges posed by separatist movements from Quebec to East Timor--raised questions about the viability of states around the world. In addition, non-state actors seemed to be proliferating, from nongovernmental organizations like Human Rights Watch and multinational corporations like ExxonMobil to criminal organizations like the drug cartels of Latin America and the terrorist networks of Al-Qaeda--and all contributed in their own ways to testing the prerogatives of the state. As Jessica Matthews put it, "A novel redistribution of power among states, markets and civil society is underway, ending the steady accumulation of power in the hands of the state that began with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648." (2)
In some political circles, this challenge to the state had been welcomed and even advocated. The state was derided by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in their "Washington Consensus" as a bloated and hapless institution, as well as by leaders across the political spectrum, including Ronald Reagan in the US, Margaret Thatcher in the UK, and Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union. Whether considering the industrialized world's stagflation in the 1970s, the need for perestroika in the Soviet Union or the sluggish performance of developing countries, the state was the culprit and far more of a problem than a solution. Smaller public sectors, unleashed markets and unrestrained civil societies were the policy prescription for virtually all political ailments. Indeed, President George W. Bush came into office in the United States in 2000, determined to privatize much of the activity of the US federal government at home and openly contemptuous of efforts to build states abroad. (3)
Although there had been increasing concern in academic circles that failing states might prove dangerous, particularly after the end of the Cold War, it was not until September 11, 2001, that the importance of states--or more precisely, the dangers of weak states--became clear even to policymakers. (4) As the Bush Administration explained in the National Security Strategy issued the following year,
For most of the twentieth century, the world was divided by a great struggle over ideas: destructive totalitarian visions versus freedom and equality. That great struggle is over.... America is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones. We are menaced less by fleets and armies than by catastrophic technologies in the bands of the embittered few. (5) For the authors of this strategy, and for most citizens in the industrialized West today, the state--whether conquering or failing--is the default political institution, the only imaginable way to organize communal life peaceably. Over the course of the last four centuries, this mechanism spread across the globe, seeming to ensure the only alternative to the anarchy of a state of nature where, as Hobbes famously put it, there are "no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death: And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short." (6)
Although seemingly ubiquitous, the state is a relatively new feature of the political landscape. Moreover, most of human history was not characterized by Hobbes's perennial "Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man." Human history is full of complex and orderly communities, tribes, chivalric orders, churches, empires, trade federations, aristocracies, religious brotherhoods and other expressions of human ingenuity. A wide variety of political orders and institutions have kept the peace, fostered arts and letters and otherwise provided some measure of culture and prosperity, and, at the very least, suppressed "continuall feare and danger of violent death." (7)
Yet, for most citizens of established states, particularly in Europe and North America, these alternatives to the state have been dispatched to the curiosity shops of history or relegated to the private lives of citizens. Virtually the only occasions in which these sorts of communities--families, coreligionists, business networks, secret societies--arise in serious political analysis are as sources of corruption or perversion of the state. However, they served for millennia as vehicles for regulating societal interaction, fortifying human bonds, organizing economic production and exchange and assuring security in the absence of what we know as the state--and in many places, they still do.
In many parts of the world today, the institutions associated with the domestic operation of states--civil and common law systems, public bureaucracies, police forces, fiscal administrations, legislatures, judiciaries and the like--exist only as cosmetic artifacts of a fast-fading imperial era. The formal expressions of statehood, including territorial boundaries, standing armies and international sovereignty, are eroding in favor of alternative definitions of, and organizational structures for, community and identity. Some of these alternatives supplement and extend citizenship in existing states, such as communities built around common international norms and purposes (human rights advocacy, for example). In the absence of enforcement mechanisms, however, the alternatives often represent unattainable dreams, taunting promises of rights that will never actually be realized. Many of these alternatives, vast religious and ethnic networks for example, compete with the state and while they may convey fewer rights than established states, they often protect those rights they do extend far more effectively.
Our failure to appreciate the historical specificity and novel capabilities of this institution we call the state distorts both analysis and prescription. Yet we must take seriously the nature and power of the alternatives if we are to assess the challenges they pose to states and the state system.
DEFINING THE STATE IN EUROPE
We can begin an exploration of these questions with the classic Weberian definition of the state. For Max Weber, the state is not necessarily the instrument of a ruling class, as Marxists would have it, nor is it merely an arena for societal competition, as liberal theorists usually assume. Rather, it is something more specific and more complex. It is
a compulsory political association with continuous organization whose administrative staff successfully upholds a claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of force in enforcement of its order in a given territorial unit. (8) For Weber, a state must have a permanent administration, a military establishment that successfully maintains law and order and a financial and tax collection apparatus that provides the wherewithal to support the administration and military. Although those features of political life may seem unremarkably self-evident, whether they actually exist and how strong they are cannot be assumed but rather must be established. One thing is certain: For Weber, this political device of the modern state was not a reflection of the natural order of things. On the contrary, Weber took great pains to describe the state's unique features as the political expression of modern bureaucratic organization. To this he contrasted various kinds of traditional authority--patrimonial, patriarchal, feudal, sultanistic--as well as the charismatic authority often associated with religious enthusiasms. (9)
The state Weber described arose in Europe in the 16th century as rivalries developed between emerging monarchies in Western and Northern Europe, and in the ruins of feudalism and the Holy Roman Empire. The state's triumph over alternative arrangements--kinship-based aristocracies, feudal arrangements, trade networks, even the Church itself--was implicitly acknowledged in the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which is commonly cited as the origin of today's interstate system...
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