The Nation-State and Global Order: Chapter 6

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

6. The Antiliberal State

In this chapter the emergence of antiliberal states during the twentieth century is discussed. The focus is on the dilemma faced by liberal states as their economies became increasingly industrialized. In certain states, such as the United States and Britain, where liberals came to power with little difficulty, and where liberalism heavily influenced the organization and governing practices of the state, a form of the state has emerged in the twentieth century in which the distinctions between state and civil society are maintained but combine in subtle ways to manage jointly the social, economic, and political life within it. This “managerial” state will be the subject of Chapter 7. In other states, especially those with a long history of monarchical absolutism, such as Russia and Germany, two distinct varieties of the antiliberal state emerged: the progressively centralized communist state, which abolished the distinction between state and civil society, and the “reactionary modernist” fascist state, which combined capitalist modernization (i.e., belief in technological and scientific progress linked to utilitarian goals of organization, efficiency and productivity) with a reactionary imaginary of the volk, or “people,” as constituting a historically homogeneous and “pure” nation.

Industrializaton, Modernity, And The Crisis Of Liberalism

Remember that one aspect of liberal thought was a belief in progress, especially scientific progress. Liberals believed that science was based on a system of truth that would transform the world for the better by producing new technologies to make life more comfortable. Liberals also believed that science would perfect human morals and social life by providing a critique of all irrational belief systems and by eliminating all arbitrary power. The transformation of the world for the better through science was to be realized by giving free rein to individual initiative and acquisitiveness in civil society and by rationalizing the state, that is, subordinating government to the rule of law and reducing politics to administration. ₁

The tremendous increases in industrial production and trade that took place from the middle to late nineteenth century appeared to liberals to be the realization and validation of human ingenuity and rationality. Liberals tended to attribute such progress to individuals, rather than to the state, which they tended to view as a neutral protector of the private sphere of individuals rather than as a progressive force.

Industrialization was, however, a double-edged sword. On the one side, it produced an abundance of material goods, while on the other, it produced profound misery. One economist and social theorist, in summarizing the impact of the Industrial Revolution, puts the problem thus: “There was an almost miraculous improvement in the tools of production, which was accompanied by a catastrophic dislocation of the lives of the common people.” ₂ Catastrophic dislocation was widely evident in the cities in which much industrial production took place, and to which increasing numbers of people looking for work moved. Cities were dark, dirty, dangerous, and congested. The living and working conditions of the proletariat, the label given to the working class in the nineteenth century (from the Latin, meaning the lowest economic class), were extremely bad. Workers, including children, were paid very low wages and were compelled to work long days, often 15 hours or more. They lived in crowded, dilapidated housing without heat or plumbing. Their food was extremely poor; this, together with the long hours of work in unhealthy conditions, made them susceptible to debilitating, chronic illnesses for which medical care was scarce and expensive, if available at all. Women were placed in especially difficult circumstances. After working in factories or doing “piece work” (i.e., work paid by the piece, not by the hour) at home to supplement their husband’s or father’s inadequate pay, they, and their unmarried daughters, had to perform hours of backbreaking household work for which they were not compensated.

Eventually, workers began to demand a living wage and better working conditions as well as a share of political power. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the protest of the proletariat was manifested in a more or less militant campaign for the right to vote, which would give the proletariat some measure of indirect control over industrial capitalism by allowing it a voice in the affairs of the state. Early suffragette and feminist groups often took a leading role in such campaigns. ₃ Workers supported liberalism’s commitment to individual equality and its emphasis on procedural democracy. Early feminists, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, were drawn to its emphases on individual merit and universal education; they argued that these were the prerequisites for the emancipation of both women and men.

Nevertheless, liberal parties and politicians tended to become more apologetic of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century and unwilling to go beyond modest political reforms. Liberalism came to understand industrialization in exclusively economic terms. That is, liberals thought that the free market would solve all the social problems created by industrialization. They assumed that the horrendous social dislocation, gross inequalities of wealth, and urban squalor that it produced would be dealt with by the “trickle-down” effect, which would spread wealth from the wealthy through the middle class to the poor, and through the judicious application of minimally intrusive reforms. They also thought that the market would create a harmony of interests among all peoples engaged in global trade, which would put an end to war. For liberals, the state’s role was limited to facilitating the workings of the free market by providing the people with the education they needed to make the industrial market economy prosper, guaranteeing the individual the right to accumulate private property, and encouraging economic competition by preventing monopolies. This way of thinking, which is known as a form of economism, failed to address the social and political concerns of workers, and liberals began loosing their support.

Feminists also turned away from liberalism because the men who controlled liberal parties generally refused to extend to women the individual rights and respect their ideology promised. Feminist theories came to emphasize instead the cultural customs, traditions, and institutions (such as the nuclear family) that reinforced even liberal men’s sense of their superiority over women.

Radical Working-Class Movements

By the end of the nineteenth century the proletariat turned to movements that sought to take direct control over industrial capitalism by overthrowing the liberal state and making all industry, business, and agriculture the property of the proletariat rather than the original owners. These movements were animated by ideologies, such as socialism, anarchism, and utopianism, that rejected, in often provocative ways, the managerial and rationalized forms of industrial capitalism. Anarchists, such as Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876) and Pierre-Josèphe Proudhon (1809–1865), called for direct action to violently disrupt the social and political processes of industrialization. The Luddites, a semiorganized group of workers opposed to the way industrialization continually put workers out of work, broke into factories and smashed machines.

Various humanistic utopian socialists, most significantly Comte de Saint Simon (1760–1825), Francois-Charles Fourier (1772–1837), and Robert Owen (1771–1858), developed socialist and communal alternatives to industrial life, sometimes creating experimental communities based on Christian or humanitarian values. The latter were often romanticist attempts to return to a pure, pristine, and humane human essence in harmony with nature and now obscured by industrialization.

By far the most influential radical theory was that of Karl Marx (1818– 1883), a German economist, journalist, and political organizer. Modern capitalist economies, he argued, forced the majority of the population to live under conditions in which they were powerless. Factory owners and finance capitalists owned the means of production, and workers had nothing but their bodies to sell. Wages were set by a market over which capitalists had complete power. Marx described the social effects of the production and consumption cycle of industrial capitalism as alienation, a process in which “the worker becomes a slave of the object” he or she produces. Specifically, “the object produced by labour, its product, now stands opposed to it as an alien being, as a power independent of the producer.” ₄ More generally, in his Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx characterized the general effects of the rapid changes brought about by industrial capitalism in the following way:

Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. ₅

To Marx, the dependence of life on the circulation of commodities meant a life of enormous uncertainty, dizzying speeds of change, and the extreme exploitation of workers by owners of capital. But, in Marx’s interpretation, industrial capitalism also opened up the possibility for people to organize and take control of the changes occurring in the areas that mattered most—the productive relations that, Marx argued, in reality governed their lives.

Marx’s critique of industrial capitalism was powerfully attractive to industrial workers because it blamed their economic plight not on themselves as individuals, as did the liberals, but on the capitalist mode of production. It appealed to some feminists because it traced the patriarchal domination of men over women to the structures of industrial capitalism, and promised that with the overthrow of capitalism, men and women would not just be politically equal, as liberal feminists argued, but equal in all aspects of life. ₆

The role of the state posed difficult questions for Marx’s analysis. Although he never wrote a systematic treatise on the state, Marx began to develop an account of the capitalist state through his criticism of the idealist German philosopher, Georg Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). Hegel had posed fundamental criticisms of the liberal conceptions of man and state. Unlike liberals, Hegel saw the state as an active agent of change; indeed, he saw the state as the supreme agent of rational transformation of human societies. For Hegel, the state embodied the spirit of human history and the realization of a rational society. He argued that liberalism’s belief that separate, abstract individuals using only their own initiative could produce a rational and just society was mistaken. Civil society, the sphere of individualistic economic interaction and voluntary social organizations, Hegel argued, realized only a truncated version of human reason, one based on instrumental calculations of self-interest and the alienation of men from other men. A fuller realization of reason was embodied in a modern state in which men gave self-conscious direction to the organization of their shared ethical and social life. The state, to Hegel, represented an ethical unity; sovereignty became the medium between particular human communities and the universality of the human spirit. Therefore, the realization of human freedom was to be found in the struggles among sovereign states, leading eventually to the victory of the sovereign power that represented the most free and rational ethical life, that is, the state in which all forms of arbitrary power had been eliminated. Such a state was, for Hegel, the parliamentary state with a highly developed professional bureaucracy that administered justice fairly and universally.

Although Marx shared Hegel’s rejection of liberalism’s idea that the individual in civil society was the agent of human progress, he rejected Hegel’s idealist view of the state, and with it Hegel’s entire conception of, and allegiance to, state sovereignty. For Marx, the agent of historical change was class conflict, not the conflict between sovereign states, as it was for Hegel. Marx argued that the political order was a reflection of the class holding power. Under capitalism, the bourgeoisie created a state that promoted its needs and power. Police power kept the subordinate class of workers in check and was needed to keep order in the context of the misery and destitution caused by capitalism; the state’s economic agencies ministered to the capitalist order, providing necessary infrastructure; its judicial system secured the rights not of everyone but of property owners; its wars opened markets and secured investments abroad. In a communist system, Marx argued, the state would become unnecessary: eliminate class conflict and the need for a coercive apparatus would likewise disappear. Sovereignty, then, for Marx was a myth, a form of false consciousness; that is, it led people to believe their society was rational, fair, and free when it was in reality a historical creation that served the particular interests of the capital-owning class.

Antiliberal And Antisocialist Ideologies

The first to resist liberalism’s individualism and progressive rationalism were conservatives, that is, those who defended the monarchical state, the aristocracy, and the established church. In Britain, conservatives rallied behind Edmund Burke (1729–1797), whose Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) defended the principle of monarchy in general and the British monarchy in particular against the excesses of the French revolution. ₇ In France, as was discussed in Chapter 5, royalists sought to resurrect the monarchy and to restore the privileged position of the Catholic Church, which they were able to do from 1815 until 1871, except for the brief period of the Second Republic (1848–1851). In the German-speaking kingdoms and principalities, conservatives came to see the state itself as the embodiment of national culture and tradition. ₈ Conservatives were no better than the liberals at dealing with the dislocations and social miseries of industrial capitalism.

Conservatives and some workers began to turn to fascist movements, which had arisen in the 1920s in many European states that were suffering the dislocations of capitalist industrialization. Fascism, a word coined from the imperial Roman symbol of authority (a bundle of sticks bound around two axes, or fasces ), arose as an ideological antidote to the class warfare called for by socialism. It rejected liberalism because it thought that rational individualism and bourgeois civil society weakened the state. Fascists accepted industrialization and used science and technology to serve the needs of state power. ₉ It appealed to those of the population who felt left out and exploited by rapid industrialization: the small farmer, shopkeepers, and some elements of the proletariat. It also drew support from the owners of big businesses and industrialists who were seeking a way to control the proletariat. It called for the creation of a single movement led by a single, charismatic leader possessed of natural gifts of “body and spirit . . . believed to be supernatural, not accessible to everybody.” ₁₀

Varieties Of Antiliberal States

Industrial capitalism conditioned the organization and governing practices of states in the twentieth century. All twentieth-century states became more highly centralized and organized, using science to rationalize administration and intensify their role in social control. The organizational form a particular state took depended on its history, especially the way in which challenges emerged to absolutism and liberalism. Two prominent states in the twentieth century explicitly rejected liberalism and dissolved the distinction between the state and civil society; these were the Soviet communist state in Russia and the fascist state in Germany. Our consideration of these two states as antiliberal states takes issue with accounts of “totalitarianism,” which ignore how the particular histories of Russian and German state-making have influenced twentieth-century forms of these states. ₁₁

Russia: A Soviet Communist State

Russia’s absolutist past set the conditions that allowed the emergence of the antiliberal Soviet communist state. An absolutist monarchical state had developed around the principality of Muscovy (Moscow), which, with the help of the Orthodox Church, was able to gain independence from the Tartars by the fourteenth century. During the principate of Ivan III the Great (r. 1462–1505), Moscow gained control over the neighboring Russian-speaking principalities, as well as its own nobility, and formed a powerful absolutist state. ₁₂ Centralization continued under Ivan IV, the Terrible (r. 1533–1584), who first used the title czar (Russian for Caesar ), and Czar Alexei (r. 1645–1676), who enserfed the Russian peasantry. ₁₃ Peter the Great (r. 1689–1725), an energetic, ruthless, and cruel czar, strengthened Russia’s army and navy by borrowing military technology from European states, especially Sweden, Holland, Britain, and France, and by employing western European technical experts in various departments of government. During Peter’s reign, the bureaucracy was streamlined and the Orthodox Church was subordinated to the authority of the crown by making it into a governmental department. The state promoted trade, education, literature, science, and the arts. Peter also conquered Ukraine and acquired a stretch of the Baltic coast, where he built his capital city, Sankt Petersburg (St. Petersburg; later Petrograd, then Leningrad in 1924, and back to Sankt Petersburg in 1991).

Russian absolutism was eventually challenged by an emerging intelligentsia, which thought the monarchy stifled creativity, and pushed for a liberal constitutional monarchy. This challenge was encouraged by Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War (1853–1856), which undermined the position of those who argued that a tyrannical absolutism was the key to Russia’s military successes and future survivability as a state.

In response to this agitation and Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War, Czar Alexander II (r. 1855–1881) introduced a number of reforms that he hoped would satisfy the demands of the intellectuals. Alexander abolished serfdom and initiated a system of local self-government under assemblies (zemstvos) chosen by a restricted franchise with limited powers at the provincial and municipal levels. He also reformed the judiciary to make it more independent of the crown, and expanded the freedom of the press and that of academic inquiry at the universities. At the same time, however, the czar’s agents prevented Russian workers from creating unions, and ruthlessly crushed strikes. This attempt to impose liberalism from above by an absolutist monarchy collapsed when terrorist activities by revolutionary groups persisted. The czar responded by rolling back his reforms, censoring the press, and clamping down on the universities. These repressive measures only served to antagonize his opponents, who increased their terroristic activities. In 1881 the czar himself was killed by a bomb thrown under his carriage by a group who opposed absolutism. ₁₄

The Expansion of Russia, 1462–1796

Alexander III (r. 1881–1894), Russia’s penultimate czar, believed that more repression was the monarchy’s only salvation. Therefore, he clamped down on the discontented even harder than had his father. When he died of natural causes in 1894, he bequeathed to his son, Nicholas II (r. 1894–1917), the most repressive and absolute monarchy in Europe. Industrial development lagged behind the economic powerhouses of Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan. Much of Russian industry was controlled by foreigners, under contracts with the monarchy, and Russian capitalists often invested their profits abroad. Together, these limited the development of the bourgeoisie, who were portrayed as being in league with the czar as agents of foreign powers. Owing to the ruthlessness of the czar’s regime, and the negative view held by many workers and peasants of the bourgeoisie, antiliberal political programs had gained considerable room for development. Thus, the particular version of absolutism that grew in Russia established the conditions that made the experiment with a progressively centralized, communist state possible.

The Soviet communist state emerged in the context of World War I (1914–1918) and on the heels of failed attempts to transform a ruthless absolutist state into a liberal state in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The war devastated Russia, as it did other states in Europe. During 1914–1916, over two million Russian soldiers were killed or wounded. The war imposed a heavy strain on the economy, which was industrially weak compared with other major powers in Europe. The economy eventually collapsed, and strikes broke out in Petrograd in 1916. Troops sent by the czar refused to suppress the strikers, and Nicholas abdicated on March 15, 1917.

To develop war industries and to fight the war, much of the population had been mobilized, either as soldiers or as workers in the heavy industries necessary for the war effort. This politicized the population, especially the urban working classes, which increased in size and importance as elements of the rural peasantry moved to the cities to take industrial jobs.

The absolutist monarchy could not sustain itself in the context of an increasingly politicized population that demanded justification for state policies and even a say in governing. Indeed, after defeat in the Russo-Japanese War (1905), the czar experimented with a parliament, called the Duma, which failed. With the Duma, the czar attempted to mediate the maintenance of the old régime with the new demands of middle-class bourgeoisie and the working classes, both of which became mobilized in political parties. Although the Duma was divided into two houses—an upper house appointed by the czar from the nobility, the Orthodox Church, universities, and provincial councils, and a lower house elected from a fairly broad franchise—it failed to contain the political energies provoked by Russia’s military losses and an industrializing economy.

The Bolsheviks (meaning majority in Russian), one of the working-class parties led by Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (later known by his revolutionary pseudonym Lenin, 1870–1924), took power on November 6, 1917, after a brief attempt by liberals and social democrats to establish a government. Their support came in part from radicals in the working class in important cities such as Moscow and Petrograd. But they drew more general support from other sectors of the population by promising, and delivering, a separate peace with Germany, thus ending Russia’s involvement in World War I. The Bolsheviks called for a social and political revolution that would create a society based on equality through collective and national ownership and direction of the economy. All citizens were to have jobs; the nobility was to be abolished and land given to those who worked it; private ownership of industry was to be eliminated along with the vast inequalities of wealth, status, and influence it had produced.

In part to respond to counterrevolutionary activity, in part to consolidate power against rival liberal and left factions, and in part to defend against invasions from outside powers (the United States, with British backing, invaded Siberia in 1919), the Bolsheviks established a political structure that consolidated power in the party leadership. The strategy was to penetrate the state apparatus, one of the defining features of the absolutist state, with loyal members of the party. The party was built on the soviets (committees in Russian), ad hoc groups that sprang up in 1917 in order to coordinate the strikes of the workers, soldiers, and peasants. The Soviets elected representatives to the national councils, which would elect party leadership and set and oversee state policy.

The second national congress in January 1918 established the Central Committee of the Communist Party as the state’s chief executive body and promised an impressive list of political and social rights, which were extended only to the working class. ₁₅ In January 1924, after their victory in the civil war and the reconquest of territory originally comprising the Russian Empire, a new constitution was promulgated that extended this state structure into a federal Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The supreme governing body was the Congress of Soviets, which was divided into a Council of the Union chosen on the basis of population, and a Council of Nationalities, composed of delegates from each union, autonomous republic, and province. The Congress of Soviets selected a Presidium, which handled its business between sessions, and a Central Committee, which directed the activities of the federal ministries. Despite having created a formal state structure, real decisional power rested with the Communist Party, especially the Politburo and Central Committee. Decisions were taken according to a procedure known as democratic centralism, which allowed for full discussion of an issue but required absolute obedience to the decision once taken.

Democratic centralism established a strategy of state construction that was modernist, that is, based on the same progressive character of science, technology, and rationalism that lay behind industrialization. Modernists sought a vantage point and vision from which they could see and understand the entire social world as a whole, and put tremendous faith in large-scale organization directed from a central point to manage and coordinate the social world. Rather than persist in situating the agent of progress and modernity in civil society, as twentieth-century states influenced by liberalism did, the Soviet communist state located it in the state apparatus itself. The state would manage progress—scientific, economic, political, social, and moral—directly rather than relying on an independent civil society.

Therefore, the entire Soviet economy, except for individual households, was directed and administered by the State Planning Commission for the USSR (GOSPLAN). GOSPLAN determined production targets, wages, and prices. It determined what consumer goods (refrigerators, cars, clothes, etc.) would be produced, and where they would be produced. The goods produced were sold in state-run stores at prices fixed by the plan. These stores were often out of stock because GOSPLAN emphasized heavy industry and military production at the expense of consumer goods for the individual Soviet citizen. The state also provided a vast array of social and medical services. From the 1920s, Soviet citizens were guaranteed unemployment insurance, free medical care in state-run clinics and hospitals, old-age pensions, and disability pay. Housing, although often in short supply and poorly constructed, was provided at low rents.

The political structure of the state together with the modernist ideology allowed the general secretary of the Communist Party to adopt extraordinary power. Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (later known by his revolutionary pseudonym Joseph Stalin, 1879–1953), who became secretary-general in a power struggle after Lenin’s death in 1924 and held this position until his own death in 1952, ruled the Soviet state with a ruthless despotism reminiscent of the czars. In 1934, after the assassination of his likely successor, he unleashed a reign of terror over the Soviet Union, lasting until 1938, during which time he purged the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and the army of “unreliable” elements and arrested ordinary citizens for “anti-state” activities. The state secret police became omnipresent. Millions lost their lives by execution or overwork in labor camps in Siberia. ₁₆

Stalin was followed in 1953 by Nikita Krushchev (1894–1971), a reformer who appealed to the humanitarian aims of communism. He was ousted by conservatives in the top organs of the party in 1964 because of his disclosures about Stalin’s reign of terror, his pro-consumer, antimilitary policies, and the humiliation caused by his retreat during the Cuban missile crisis. This ushered in approximately 20 years of conservative, bureaucratic rule. Leonid Brezhnev (1906–1982) was designated secretary-general in 1965 and ruled the Soviet Union until his death in 1982. Brezhnev was cautious and conservative and governed in a consensus-building bureaucratic style. During his years as secretary-general the Soviet state became increasingly corrupt, the activities of its political class resembling those of the Mafia. He was replaced in 1982 by Yuri Andropov (1914–1984), who died the following year of cancer. Andropov was followed by Konstantin Chernyenko (1911–1985), who died from emphysema in 1985. In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev (b. 1931) became what subsequent events would prove to be the Soviet Union’s last secretary-general.

Gorbachev, who was influenced by the reforms of the Khrushchev years, instituted a comprehensive reform program that included democratization, public openness ( glasnost ), and restructuring ( perestroika ). Restructuring involved a radical decentralization of control and management of the economy to the level of factories and limited private ownership of retail stores and services. By democratization, Gorbachev meant reducing the monopoly over political power held by the CPSU, which involved the introduction, in 1989, of free elections for some seats in a new national legislature called the All-Union Congress of Peoples’ Deputies. Public openness meant ending censorship of the media and arts. ₁₇ His strategy was to introduce a civil society independent of the state while maintaining the political monopoly of the CPSU.

This strategy unleashed powerful social forces that ripped the Soviet state apart in 1991. Disengaging civil society from the party apparatus left the way open for numerous possibilities. One was a nonstatist form of socialism, which anti-Soviet radicals in Eastern Germany and (in the mid-1960s) Czechoslovakia had explored. The Czechoslovakia experiments under Alexander Dubcek (1921–1992) were ruthlessly suppressed by Soviet armies in 1968. Western European and, especially, U.S. intervention in post-Soviet Russia has led to another possible trajectory: a liberal state with a civil society dominated by a capitalist economy fed largely by foreign capital and directed by international financial organizations. It is certainly possible that others will emerge.

Germany: A Fascist State

Although Germany developed an antiliberal state in the twentieth century, it did so out of a very different geostrategic position and according to a different history of state formation from that of Russia. However, several similarities exist: both states absorbed civil society and in both the state came to be identified with a single political party. Also, both committed unspeakable cruelties against their subject populations and those in neighboring territories whom they defined as enemies. But the German fascist state embodied a personalized rule driven by an ideology of ethnic purity and exclusion, which looked to the past for its identity and glory. The fascists rejected the present in favor of an eternal past, whereas the Bolsheviks tried to remake the present into a more rational and egalitarian future.

The particular history of absolutism and liberalism in the formation of the German state set the terms for the emergence of the fascist state in the 1930s. Most important was the dominance of Brandenburg-Prussia, one of a multiplicity of small city-states, minor kingdoms, duchies, and principalities that had come into existence in the German-speaking area of Europe since the time of Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire. By the seventeenth century, Prussia, under the leadership of a powerful monarchy descended from the last grand master of the Teutonic Knights, Albrecht von Hohenzollern, and a landowning military aristocracy called the Junkers, became dominant by building a powerful absolutist state. In Prussia, like nowhere else in Europe, war made the territorial state and the state, once formed, made war. ₁₈

Prussia, a German-speaking tribal area that had been forcibly Christianized by the Teutonic Knights, did not evolve as England had into a state dominated by its parliament. Surrounded by strong neighbors—Sweden to the north, Russia to the east, and France to the southwest—and lacking protective geographical features such as mountain ranges, marshlands, or open ocean, the Prussians built an efficient military machine in support of a strong, centralized state. The relation of the landed nobility to the state also made possible their unconditional military service. As one historian put it: “Nowhere did the cult of mechanical military obedience . . . so come to permeate the landowning class.” ₁₉

The first attempt to build such a state was taken during the Thirty Years’ War when Friedrich Wilhelm, the Great Elector (r. 1640–1688), imposed a tax to support a small army without the approval of the Ständestaat. Members of the Ständestaat, the Prussian estates, who disapproved, were arrested and imprisoned. After the war, such draconian measures were abandoned and feudal constitutionalism reasserted itself. The second attempt, and the decisive one, was taken during the First Northern War (1655–1660), which involved Poland, Sweden, and Prussia, when Friedrich Wilhelm was able to persuade the Ständestaat to agree to a standing army. As the war progressed, he proclaimed his right to raise taxes without the approval of the Ständestaat and to use his army to collect them. Under Friedrich III (r. 1688–1713) and Friedrich Wilhelm I (r. 1713–1740), known as the drillmaster of Europe, the crown continued to strengthen itself against the Ständestaat, which declined in power and importance.

The Hanseatic League and the Teutonic Knights

The decline of the Ständestaat was paralleled by the rise of the king’s bureaucracy and increased centralization. The major institution in this process of centralization was the Generalkriegskommissariat, or General War Commission, which came to control all aspects of the recruitment and maintenance of the army. It created a three-tiered administrative structure that penetrated local government and was run from a central office in Berlin, the capital of Prussia. It collected taxes, administered justice, and controlled the police. Under the Generalkriegskommissariat, Prussia was gradually militarized. The Junkers formed the officer class and their peasants were forced into the army. The harshness of the state-building process in Prussia was aggravated because the region was economically backward and the population small. The economy was one of large estates owned by the Junker aristocracy upon which a multitude of landless peasants scratched a living from very poor soils. There was almost no bourgeoisie. Unity and identity with the state were fostered through respect for military virtues: obedience, discipline, and heroism. Victories in battle justified continued heavy taxation to support a strong military. ₂₀

The building of a strong, centralized, militarized state and the concomitant glorification of martial values inclined Prussia toward aggressive actions against surrounding states. Under Friedrich the Great (r. 1740– 1786), the Prussian state fought and defeated the Austrians, Poles, Czechs, and the Russians. In 1806 Napoleon invaded the German-speaking kingdoms and principalities. He defeated the Austrians at Austerlitz (1805) and the Prussians at Jena (1806). Within 18 months, all the other smaller German principalities were defeated and occupied by French troops.

The French Revolution had stimulated the development of liberalism in Germany, and, at first, many intellectuals and liberals welcomed Napoléon’s invasion, which they viewed as an agent of progress against the absolutist regime. Note, however, that German liberalism was distinctive, and critical of its British and French versions. As was the case with British and French liberals, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), the most important German philosopher of the Enlightenment, opposed the absolutist state, but in a way that argued for a cosmopolitan republican state governed by the rule of law. Kant viewed reason as dictating moral imperatives and laws to men and women rather than seeing it as primarily the instrumental calculation of self-interests. For Kant, reason did not guarantee that states would be governed by the rule of law and would eschew arbitrary power, but it opened the possibility of a state that would function positively within a moral society. Therefore, Kant’s liberalism was more sensitive to the role of the state in modern life, even if it considered the state as something of a Faustian bargain (i.e., a pact with the devil). ₂₁

Brandenburg-Prussia, 1440–1806

The defeat and six-year occupation of the German states by the French stimulated the creation in 1815 of a confederation of 39 of these entities. It was reasoned that defeat and occupation by a foreign power could be avoided if German states were united into a single state. The idea of a unified German state was also fed by the historical and political philosophy that developed in Enlightenment Germany. Having rejected the individualism of English and French liberalism, German political philosophy contained a strong romanticist streak in which the social order was viewed as a living, organic unity in time and space that fed on a common language and common folk traditions, as in the work of Johann Gottfried von Herder (1774–1803), who propounded the idea that different cultures provided different answers to life’s central questions. Herder taught that the desire to belong to a culture was a basic human need. ₂₂ Over the next century, the German state came to be associated with its own unique German kultur, or culture. Liberalism was associated by many Germans with foreign states, especially Britain and France, and was seen as having been imposed on German culture.

During the 1840s, the demand for more than a confederation was raised by German liberals, who were increasingly supported by the bourgeoisie. The overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of the Second French Republic (1848–1851) by French liberals touched off popular disturbances in Vienna, the capital of Austria, and Berlin, as well as in other German cities. Too weak to suppress these uprisings, the rulers of these states agreed to the liberals’ demand for the election of a constituent assembly, which was given the task of writing a constitution for a unified German state. This effort eventually failed because of disputes about which German-speaking entities were to be included.

Prussian victories in wars against Denmark (1864), Austria (1866), and France (1870–1871) assured Prussia’s status as the most powerful German-speaking state. Prussia forcefully brought together less powerful German-speaking states into an empire led by Wilhelm I (r. 1861–1888) of Prussia, who proclaimed himself its kaiser (Caesar in German), or emperor. Although the empire-wide parliament, called the Reichstag, was elected on the basis of universal male suffrage, placating the liberal demand for representation, the real decisions affecting the functioning of the empire were made in the Bundesrat, which was composed of delegates from the länd (state) governments and presided over by the chancellor. The Reichstag was limited to dealing with nonessentials. ₂₃

The creation of universal male suffrage stimulated the development of German political parties. The first party to appear was the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which was founded in 1875 and became officially socialist in 1891. The SPD grew very rapidly. In 1877 it received nine percent of the vote cast for the Reichstag; by 1890 its share of the vote was 20 percent; and by 1903 it had soared to 32 percent, which made it the largest party in the German Empire. By 1907, the SPD counted over one million dues-paying members and had a close relationship with Germany’s trade unions, whose leaders had assumed key positions within the party.

Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898), chancellor of Prussia from 1862 and the empire’s chancellor under Wilhelm, attempted to suppress the party, though without success owing to the party’s disciplined political organization and its strong support among the proletariat. Therefore, he attempted to attract workers away from the SPD by passing a series of laws that met the SPD’s demands for the health, safety, and retirement of workers. In 1883 he passed a law that insured workers against sickness; in 1884 a law was passed that insured against accidents; and in 1889 a law provided for disability insurance and old-age pensions. Bismarck’s strategy did not work, however, and workers continued to flock to the SPD. ₂₄

The German Empire created by Bismarck was defeated in World War I, which led to the transformation of Germany into a liberal constitutional state called the Weimar Republic (1919–1936). The Weimar Republic was imposed by the Allies upon a Germany that was deeply divided between liberals and socialists, who supported it, and conservatives, who preferred the old imperial state. This division made it difficult for the Weimar Republic to govern effectively and prevented it from dealing with the serious economic problems Germany began to experience in the 1920s: soaring inflation and massive unemployment brought on by the excessive war reparations that had been imposed on Germany by the Allies, and the worldwide economic depression. Saddled with an alien state, Germans began to be drawn in large numbers to parties that sought to destroy the Weimar Republic. One of these parties was the German Communist Party, which had been formed in 1919 by radical members of the SPD who supported the Russian Revolution and favored a dictatorship of the proletariat. The other was the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) or Nazi Party, led by Adolf Hitler (1889–1945), which was a virulently racist and anti-Semitic fascist party.

In the 1932 elections the Nazis became the largest party in the Reichstag. The Nazis and the Communists, who had come in third, formed an anti–Weimar Republic majority, which made it impossible for the pro-republic parties to form a stable government. As Germany’s economic crisis continued, widespread rioting and street clashes between Nazis and Communists became a regular occurrence. Encouraged by conservative parties and many agrarian and industrial leaders, the president of the republic, Paul von Hindenburg (1925–1934), named Adolf Hitler chancellor on January 30, 1933.

Once in power, Hitler proceeded to overthrow the Weimar Republic from within and erect in its stead an antiliberal and antisocialist state (the Third Reich ) ruled by a “Master Race” of Aryans, united by its love for the Fatherland, who promised to protect Germany from the evil machinations of “lesser” races (especially Jews), “decadent” Western democracies, and “subhuman” Marxists. The Nazi Party did not recognize the constitution or any law save the will of the Führer. The Nazis destroyed the federal structure of the Weimar Republic and centralized all political and administrative power in Berlin, the capital of the Third Reich. Jews were expelled from the civil service and Nazi Party members were placed in key administrative positions. The Reichtag was abolished and land governments were merged with national ministries. The governors of the länder, which were now, in effect, administrative units of the central state, were Nazi gauleiters (party leaders) appointed by Hitler. The judiciary was purged of “non-Aryan” judges and centralized under the Reich ministry of justice. Special People’s Courts, dominated by Nazi Party members, were established to try those accused of political crimes. A vast secret police network, which included the Geheimestaatspolizei (GESTAPO) and the Schutzstaffel (SS), was created. ₂₅

Under the Nazis, the state massively intervened into civil society. Hitler developed numerous public works projects in order to create jobs and achieve full employment; married couples with children were given family allowances; free holidays were provided for low-paid workers at state-run resorts; and factories were placed under state direction, if not ownership, as was agriculture. As fascism considered the economy to be at the service of the state, workers and employers were required to join a single corporation called the National Labor Front, controlled by the Nazi Party, which regulated working conditions and wages. Independent unions were abolished, and strikes were outlawed. Professionals, such as lawyers and doctors, were required to join guildlike organizations under Nazi Party control. ₂₆

In order to create the “Master Race,” the Nazis instituted a policy of sterilization and extermination of what they considered to be undesirable elements of the German population: the incurably ill, the feebleminded, homosexuals, Gypsies, and especially Jews. Jews and others were systematically rounded up and put into work or extermination camps, where millions died, subjected to scientifically sophisticated techniques of mass murder and genocide. The roundups and exterminations were so routinized and bureaucratized that they appeared to the participants as “normal.” In her famous accounts of the trial of Adolph Eichmann (1906–1962), a former camp commandant who escaped justice until 1963, Hannah Arendt described the process as the “banality of evil.” ₂₇

Hitler’s belief that Germany needed Lebensraum (living space), which he sought to get from, in his view, the “racially inferior” Slavic peoples to the east, proved to be the Nazi state’s undoing. In 1939 Hitler invaded Poland, an act of aggression that started World War II. Germany’s defeat by the Allies in 1945 brought an end to the Nazi fascist state. After the war Germany was occupied and partitioned by the victors into zones controlled by the United States, France, Britain, and the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was given land from Polish territory in the east for which Poland was compensated by giving it German territory, and from which Germans were expelled. Berlin, which was well within the Soviet zone, was itself divided into United States, French, British, and Soviet zones of occupation. In 1949, the British, French, and U.S. occupiers merged their zones into a new liberal democratic state, the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), with its capital in Bonn. In response, the Soviets transformed their zone of occupation into a new communist state called the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), with its capital in East Berlin. Thus, two rival German states existed until 1990, when the German Democratic Republic was absorbed by the Federal Republic and a single German state was created.

Summary

In the nineteenth century the relationship of the state to key features of modernity, especially industrialization, came under question. The traditional ways in which absolutism and liberalism had institutionalized sovereignty did not permit the newly industrialized state to play the role it was increasingly called upon to play. In this chapter, we discussed the emergence of antiliberal forms of the modern territorial state that abolished civil society in order to help the state meet the challenges posed by industrialization. The next chapter examines the emergence of another form of state, the managerial state, which sought to relegitimate liberalism and capitalism in light of the increasing role of the state in modern life.

Endnotes

Note 1: Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Boston: Little, Brown, 1961). Back.

Note 2: Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 33. Emphasis added. Back.

Note 3: Heinz Lubasz, ed., The Development of the Modern State (New York: Macmillan, 1964), 8–9. Back.

Note 4: Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, in T. B. Bottomore, ed. and trans., Karl Marx: Early Writings (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 122–123. Emphasis in the original. Back.

Note 5: Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, 2d ed. (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1978), 476. Back.

Note 6: The implications of Marx’s theory for feminism were developed by his collaborator, Frederick Engels, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (New York: International, 1942). Originally published in 1884. Back.

Note 7: On Burke, see Stephen White, Edmund Burke (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1994). Back.

Note 8: On conservatism in general, see the classic essay: Karl Manheim, “Conservative Thought,” in Kurt H. Wolff, ed., From Karl Manheim (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 132–222. Back.

Note 9: See Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Back.

Note 10: Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 245. Back.

Note 11: Perhaps most influential of these was Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965). Back.

Note 12: Hugh Seton-Watson, Nations and States (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1977), 79–80. Back.

Note 13: Ibid., 80. Back.

Note 14: Stanley Rothman, European Society and Politics (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), 99. Back.

Note 15: These and the following details on the organization of the Soviet state and the Communist Party are from Rothman, European Society and Politics, 416–434 and 557–566. Back.

Note 16: Alexander Solzhenitzen, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956 (New York: Harper & Row, 1975). Back.

Note 17: Jorgen S. Rasmussen and Joel C. Moses, Major European Governments, 9th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1995), 485–499. Back.

Note 18: This and the following paragraphs on the case of Prussia follow Brian M. Downing, The Military Revolution and Political Change: Origins of Democracy and Autocracy in Early Modern Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), chap. 6. Back.

Note 19: Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: New Left Books, 1974), 227. Back.

Note 20: Downing, The Military Revolution and Political Change, chap. 6. Back.

Note 21: Hans Reiss, ed., Kant’s Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge +University Press, 1970). Back.

Note 22: See Robert T. Clark, Jr., Herder: His Life and Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1969). Back.

Note 23: Arnold J. Heidenheimer and Donald P. Kommers, The Governments of Germany, 4th ed. (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1975), 12. Back.

Note 24: Ernest Barker, The Development of Public Services in Western Europe 1660–1930 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1966), 75–76. Back.

Note 25: Rothman, European Society and Politics, 695, 737. Back.

Note 26: Heidenheimer and Kommers, The Governments of Germany, 23. Back.

Note 27: Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 1963). Back.

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