The Nation-State and Global Order: A Historical Introduction to Contemporary Politics, by Walter C. Opello Jr. and Stephen J. Rosow

 

Introduction: The State and the Study of Politics

 

A thousand years scarce serve to form a state; An hour may lay it in the dust: and when Can Man its shattered splendour renovate, Recall its virtues back, and vanquish Time and Fate?

—Lord Byron, from “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”

No society is possible in which power and compulsion are absent, nor a world in which force has no function.

—Karl Polanyi, from The Great Transformation

 

With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the belief that a new democratic age has dawned is widespread. Paradoxically, however, many people are skeptical and cynical about the ability of government, even a democratic one, to provide peace and prosperity. This paradox is reflected in two common, but divergent, responses. While some people are embracing a world of multicultural connections by throwing off national identities in favor of global ones, ₁   others are retreating into more and more privatized worlds in which they cut themselves off as much as possible from people different from themselves. ₂

Despite these simultaneous celebrations of globalism and retreats from public life, states still persist in capturing the political imaginations and allegiances of vast numbers of people around the world. States continue to collect taxes, manage economies, organize collective identities, and make war. War, in fact, undoubtedly accounts for much of the state’s endurance. Despite humankind’s best efforts over the past three hundred or so years to eliminate it, war is still a global scourge, as devastating, if not more devastating, than ever! Moreover, it is still primarily states, or groups aspiring to form states, that make war, although in important ways this is no longer exclusively the case.

States, in significant and troubling ways, are also expanding their powers of surveillance and coercion. Some categories of people are being imprisoned by the states in which they live at ever-increasing rates. ₃   In many, censorship is on the rise, private communications are being monitored more frequently, and deviance from the “mainstream” is becoming more and more suspect and subject to interrogation. In spite of the end of the Cold War, the military budgets of the major protagonists have not fallen dramatically. The “peace dividend” many expected has not been realized. States continue to represent the world to their citizens as a dangerous place requiring a strong national defense and “the next generation” of advanced weaponry. States continue to exaggerate and fabricate external threats in order to present others as “enemies.” Nationalism and patriotism show few signs of abatement.

What is a state? This is a difficult question to answer because the idea of the state conjures multiple meanings and associations. Sometimes the state refers primarily to an institutional apparatus: bureaucracies, armies, ministries, police, legislatures, political parties, and the like. At other times it signifies something broader, more in keeping with its reference to a territorial entity, such as the state of France. At still other times it refers to its legal and symbolic character as sovereign power. Defining the state in terms of any one of these alone—institutionality, sovereignty, territoriality—would be a mistake. Moreover, the history of the state is not a simple or linear process. Its development has been rather messy and unpredictable, complex and open to a multiplicity of possible trajectories. This book presents a historical approach that interprets how these different meanings of the state are constructed and interpenetrate to constitute the abstraction referred to as the state.

 

History, Sovereignty, And The State

Why take a historical approach to understanding the state? History is important because only by examining the state in historical perspective can it be shown that the state is not universal and given, not an immanent part of human nature. A history of the state reveals how it was created by people acting within the boundaries of the understandings and structures of their time and place, as well as through contingent conditions and circumstances. The state is an effect of the way peoples live. ₄   A historical approach reveals, for example, that sovereignty, although a crucial component of states, is not identical to the state. Sovereignty is instituted, as Hobbes said, not by states as if states preexisted sovereignty and took possession of it, but as part of the state’s development. Therefore, the historical specificity of sovereignty—the way it is formed, instituted, and reproduced at particular times and places—is important to an account of the state.

Other important benefits of a historical approach are, first, that social constructions that appear to be universal, fixed, or given, such as the distinction between state and society, the relationship between domestic (inside) and international (outside) politics, the connection between institutions and ideology, and the separation of public and private, can be shown to be creations of particular historical state-sovereignty formations. Second, a historical approach also permits the inclusion of insights drawn from areas usually understood as outside the theory of the state, such as international relations and feminist theory. Third, a historical approach also allows the examination of the mutual embeddedness of the state in economies, religions, and everyday traditions, without collapsing the state into any one of these. As one scholar has put it:

A construct like the state occurs not merely as a subjective belief, incorporated in the thinking and action of individuals. It is represented and reproduced in visible, everyday forms, such as the language of legal practice, the architecture of public buildings, the wearing of military uniforms, or the marking out and policing of frontiers. The cultural forms of the state are an empirical phenomenon, as solid and discernible as a legal structure or a party system. ₅

The historical treatment of the state presented in this book pays attention both to continuities and discontinuities over time. It will show that the sovereign, territorial nation-state is a fundamentally different ensemble of governing practices from city-states and traditional imperial states. The city-state is a territorially small, independent urban conurbation that constitutes an autonomous political entity. It represented itself within an ensemble of governing practices that involved an intensive logic of place. That is, its representations of power and authority invoked a history and mythology of its distinctive place. The best historical examples of such entities are the city-states of ancient Greece (Athens, Sparta, etc.), the cities of the Hanseatic League along the coast of what is today northern Germany (Bremen, Hamburg, Danzig, etc.), and the republican cities in what is now northern Italy (Venice, Genoa, Pisa, etc.) during the early Renaissance. A contemporary city-state is Singapore, which occupies only 641 square kilometers, an area smaller than New York City.

The modern nation-state is also different from the traditional imperial state. The central government of traditional empires, such as the Roman, Chinese, Inca, Syrian, and Zulu, had only limited, sustained authority over the extensive territory of the empire, which was internally fragmented and ethnically heterogeneous, being composed of numerous culturally distinct tribal societies. Empires governed through a representation of space as extending out from the center, not necessarily the same in all areas of the empire. Because the central government did not have a monopoly of coercive force, it required its army to take the field regularly against local warlords, armed tribesmen, and bandits. Ordinary people within such empires had very little contact with imperial officials, except at taxpaying time. By and large, these empires did not interfere in economic life, although there were important exceptions. They did not exhibit a sense of what today would be called “nationalism.” The frontiers of traditional empires were not internationally recognized as boundaries are today. Boundaries were simply the limits of military expansion that could be moved outward at will through additional conquests. Thus, there was no recognition of “interimperial” rights or law, that is, no globalized system of empires. ₆

The modern nation-state is a unique creation of specific historical, political, social, and economic circumstances. It is different from city-states and traditional empires in that the nation-state claims sovereignty over a fixed territory, both attributes being recognized, in principle, by other nation-states that are members of a globalized system of nation-states. Nation-states represent territory as an empty space to be filled in by the representations of the state’s power and authority. Through their governing practices and artifacts, nation-states diffuse a singular identity within the bounded space their borders arbitrarily but legally enclose. ₇   The sovereign territoriality of a state is represented by a capital city, a flag, an anthem, a passport, a currency, armed forces, national museums and libraries, embassies in other sovereign states, and usually a seat in the United Nations. Today’s global order comprises about 203 recognized nation-states. ₈

As the sovereign territorial state is a historical creation, theories to explain its existence as well as the way it functions are themselves part of the history of the state. The connection between the history of the state and theories of the state will be explored in detail in the body of the text. What follows is a brief outline designed to distinguish our approach from others.

 

Politics And The Theory Of The State

Throughout the nineteenth and into the early twentieth century the state received much scholarly attention. It was something that needed to be explained by political science, and the disciplines of history, law, and philosophy in which political science was then contained. After World War II, however, the state came to be taken for granted. Although the state’s existence continued to be felt through the actions of its military apparatus, its bureaucracy, its ministries, and its police, its presence seemed unproblematic, routine, clear, and, above all, necessary and laudable, in no need of questioning. It was as if, at least in the United States, everyone knew what the state was supposed to do—reconstruct Europe, stop communist “expansionism,” manage the liberal capitalist economy to prevent another depression, and provide welfare.

Two approaches came to dominate political science during the post–World War II years: functionalism and pluralism. Functionalism emphasized how social roles, norms, and individual psychology functioned to create social and political order. Pluralism sought out the ways in which the diversity of social interests, organized into pressure groups, could produce an ordered and fair distribution of collective goods and services. Both viewed the “state” as too ambiguous a concept for political science because it could not be defined in a way that eliminated all value judgments and, hence, could not be studied empirically. Moreover, both approaches assumed that society was separate from the state and established society as the primary focus. States did what societies wanted or pressured them to do. In short, politics was to be explained by what happened in “society,” not the state.

The focus on “society” and individual psychology was connected to the extension of American power after World War II. Political scientists in the United States sought to generalize the Western liberal democratic model of state and society, especially the U.S. version, to newly independent states. In this way, new states could be more easily incorporated into a world order in which U.S. interests and values would prevail, and communism would be unable to gain a foothold in the non-European world. In order to project the Western, liberal democratic model of state and society, U.S. political scientists sought a “general” theory to explain how societies, no matter where they were, could function smoothly, if their economies, politics, and social structure were integrated and balanced. “Disequilibri-um” among these balanced parts, it was feared, would create an instability that could be exploited by leftist groups in their bids for power and, thus, increase the influence of the Soviet Union. ₉

Ironically, the disinterest of the discipline of political science in the state was, in part, a product of the state’s success. In the advanced capitalist states, such as the United States, Japan, and the states of Western Europe, the state more or less successfully managed increasing economic prosperity and steady advances in the welfare of their subject populations. Public policies considered “socialistic” when initially proposed, such as social security, health care for the poor and aged, unemployment insurance, and the minimum wage, became staples of these states. The “welfare state” did not need serious analytic attention from political scientists because it seemed to provide a common good that few questioned. This positive view was reinforced by the fact that Western European states and the Japanese state had successfully transformed war-ravaged economies into prosperous, dynamic capitalist powerhouses.

By the early 1970s, however, all was not well and the state came under intellectual scrutiny and political challenge. Among mainstream political scientists a new subfield of the discipline called policy analysis arose out of new bureaucratic politics models of government and a new interest in decisionmaking. Policy analysis had two concerns in the United States. One was to explain how the United States became embroiled in the Vietnam War in spite of widespread domestic dissent and expert advice that the war could not be won. The hope was that models of bureaucratic politics would shed light on how foreign policy decisions could be better made to prevent future Vietnams.

The second concern was the search for answers to the vexing question of how state programs could be more efficiently managed in the face of challenges by those who deemed them wasteful. While not reviving an interest in the state per se, and while accepting the prevailing individualism and rationalism of pluralist and functionalist political science, the policy analysis approach did refocus on the activities of government bureaucracies. Eschewing a concept of the state, policy analysis drew on theories of organizational behavior and decisionmaking that, in turn, were drawn from mathematics (game theory), social psychology, and cybernetic engineering. As with functionalism and pluralism, the implicit normative emphasis of policy analysis was on promoting order, routine, and efficiency against the messy indeterminacy and contingency of politics.

The first political and social scientists to renew an interest in the state were crisis theorists, many drawing on various Marxist traditions. ₁₀   Crisis theories sought to explain why the welfare state seemed no longer able to sustain the prosperity and security of the postwar era. Many of these theories were inspired by Marx and traced the failures of the state to its inability to extract sufficient resources or to maintain its legitimacy in the context of a capitalist economy. Some argued, on the one hand, that the state could not take in enough money to pay for all its programs, along with Cold War military budgets (which were seen as necessary to ensure foreign outlets for capital and sources of raw materials); and some, on the other hand, argued that the legitimacy of the state, which rested on its promotion of equality, could not overcome the class inequality produced by capitalism. ₁₁

Increasingly, in reaction to both functionalism, pluralism, policy analysis, and crisis theory, some political scientists began to focus explicitly and look more favorably upon the state. These scholars examined how the state had functioned historically both as an organization of domination and as a promoter of reforms that might make good on the promises of the welfare state. ₁₂   This effort to “bring the state back in” was critical of the way the state had been subordinated to society and the economy by the functionalists and neo-Marxist crisis theorists. ₁₃   Instead, these scholars began to look at how state institutions made decisions, under what influences, and with what effects. These statist theories viewed the state as an agent in itself, as an autonomous entity in the sense of being institutionally separate from society, which could take independent action, even against society’s wishes. Statist theories have led to fruitful studies of particular states by integrating historical sociology and political science. However, while statists have been attuned to the historical nature of particular states, they have assumed an ahistorical and reified concept of the state; states are historical but the state is not. ₁₄

For the most part, these theorists have largely ignored international politics, although some crisis theorists did locate the state in the world capitalist economy. ₁₅   Also, functionalism had international parallels in functionalist theories of integration, which sought to identify those behavioral principles of social integration among states and international organizations capable of producing international peace. ₁₆   The statist theories that did introduce the international dimension into a theory of the state were not very successful because of their ahistorical concept of the state. Eventually, these theories accepted the point of view of realist international relations, that is, all states were, conceptually, the same; each sought to maintain sovereign territoriality against others in a systematic balance of power. Just as the state was seen domestically as autonomous because it was institutionally separate from the economy and society, the same was assumed to follow for the states-system. That is, states somehow existed autonomously from their societies, on the one hand, and from the global system of states on the other. ₁₇

In the 1980s and 1990s several critical theories developed, which have contributed to a more thoroughly historical account of the state.18 These theories have explored how aspects of the state that pluralist, functionalist, and statist theories largely take for granted and do not explain historically are themselves historical constructs, especially the two primary aspects of the modern state: territoriality and sovereignty. These critical theories have also shown how war and violence constitute the state, and cannot be analyzed simply as resources or tools used by states, as well as how the distinction between the domestic “inside” of the state (a presumed sphere of order and law) and the international “outside” (a sphere of presumed anarchy and war) are not given ontological categories but are historically constituted of and by states.

 

The Approach Of The Book

The approach to the state taken in the book is inspired by these critical theories. Therefore, it examines the formation of the modern sovereign territorial state critically and historically. It constitutes an archaeology of the transformations that led to the modern way of imagining and understanding political life (also called the modern imaginary) and to the imposition across the globe of the sovereign territorial state as its central political form. The book does not follow a linear history, but rather focuses on the development of the institutions, ideologies, and governing practices of modern territorial states. It includes brief case studies that show the importance of contingent “conditions and circumstances” in the histories of particular states. It addresses the state as a form of rule or governance that becomes institutionalized in particular places at particular times. We respect the diversity of state formations in the past and in the current world, and seek out the ways those different forms are interrelated.

Part 1 describes the emergence of early forms of the state from Roman to medieval forms. Part 2 describes how the major institutions, ideologies, and governing practices of territorial states developed in the context of European modernity. Part 3 discusses how the territorial state became a global phenomenon by both imposing the European state form as hegemonic throughout the world and generating hybrid varieties in areas in which it was reflexively adapted by nationalist elites seeking independence from European domination and the international discipline of the U.S.-led post–World War II global order. Part 4, which concludes the book, focuses on current challenges to the territorial state and the politics flowing from them.

 

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Endnotes

Note 1: See Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995).  Back.

Note 2: The latter reaction has spread most widely in the United States. See Evan McKenzie, Privatopia: Homeowner Associations and the Rise of Residential Private Government (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994).  Back.

Note 3: In the United States, which has the largest prison system on the globe, one in every 25 African American males is in jail. See Elliot Currie, Crime and Punishment in America (New York: Holt/Metropolitan, 1998).  Back.

Note 4: For a similar argument see Timothy Mitchell, “The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches,” American Political Science Review 85: 1 (1991): 77–96.  Back.

Note 5: Ibid., p. 81. See also the “Introduction” to David Held, Political Theory and the Modern State (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989) for a somewhat different view of the embeddedness of the state in economic and social networks.  Back.

Note 6: Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1985), 49–60.  Back.

Note 7: See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, rev. ed. (London and New York: Verso Press, 1991).  Back.

Note 8: Anthony D. Smith, “State-Making and Nation-Building,” in John A. Hall, ed., States in History (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 228–263.  Back.

Note 9: Mitchell, “The Limits of the State.”  Back.

Note 10: A useful review of Marxist theories of the state as they revived in the 1960s, largely in France and Britain, and then entered American political science is Clyde W. Barrow, Critical Theories of the State (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993). More sophisticated is Bob Jessop, The Capitalist State (New York and London: New York University Press, 1982).  Back.

Note 11: See especially James O’Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973), Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), and Claus Offe, “The Theory of the Capitalist State and the Problem of Policy Formation,” in L. Lindberg et al., eds., Stress and Contradiction in Modern Capitalism (Lexington, MA: D. H. Heath, 1975).  Back.

Note 12: See especially Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975).  Back.

Note 13: Theda Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research,” in Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).  Back.

Note 14: For a more detailed critique of this type, see Mitchell, “The Limits of the State,” 78–81.  Back.

Note 15: Most notable are Marxist theories of capitalist imperialism and dependency, as well as Immanuel Wallerstein’s “world systems theory.” See his The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974).  Back.

Note 16: See, for example, Ernest B. Haas, The Uniting of Europe: Political, Social, and Economic Forces, 1950–1957 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958).  Back.

Note 17: The most famous rendering of this was Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State, and War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954). For a critique of realist international relations theory, which connects its disdain for theories of the state to its ahistorical positivism, see Richard K. Ashley, “The Poverty of Neorealism,” International Organization 38:2 (spring 1984): 225–286.  Back.

Note 18: Two forms of critical international theory prevail, a neo-Gramscian approach following Robert Cox, and a postmodernist approach following the work of Richard Ashley, R. B. J. Walker, Michael Shapiro, and James Der Derian, although these categories hardly account for the diversity of recent approaches to international relations and political economy. For a useful review see Scott Burchill, Andrew Linkleter, et al., Theories of International Relations (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996).  Back.

The Nation-State and Global Order: A Historical Introduction to Contemporary Politics