States and Power E-Book

Richard Lachmann

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: PPSS - Polity Political Sociology series
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 424

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

States over the past 500 years have become the dominant institutions on Earth, exercising vast and varied authority over the economic well-being, health, welfare, and very lives of their citizens. This concise and engaging book explains how power became centralized in states at the expense of the myriad of other polities that had battled one another over previous millennia.

Richard Lachmann traces the contested and historically contingent struggles by which subjects began to see themselves as citizens of nations and came to associate their interests and identities with states, and explains why the civil rights and benefits they achieved, and the taxes and military service they in turn rendered to their nations, varied so much. Looking forward, Lachmann examines the future in store for states: will they gain or lose strength as they are buffeted by globalization, terrorism, economic crisis and environmental disaster?

This stimulating book offers a comprehensive evaluation of the social science literature that addresses these issues and situates the state at the center of the world history of capitalism, nationalism and democracy. It will be essential reading for scholars and students across the social and political sciences.

Leseprobe

States and Power

Dedicated to the memory of my sisterSusan Margaret Lachmann Humphrey

States and Power

Richard Lachmann

polity

Copyright © Richard Lachmann 2010

The right of Richard Lachmann to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2010 by Polity Press

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5901-5

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typeset in 11 on 13 pt Sabonby Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, CheshirePrinted and bound by MPG Books Group, UK

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Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

1

Before States

2

The Origins of States

3

Nations and Citizens

4

States and Capitalist Development

5

Democracy, Civil Rights, and Social Benefits

6

State Breakdowns

7

The Future

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

This is a book about power: the power to tax, the power to build public works and to deploy thousands or millions of workers, the power to make soldiers fight and die in wars, even the power to make children sit in rooms for years and listen to teachers. It is also about the power of citizens to demand services from their government and to replace a government they don’t like with a new one.

Power, as Max Weber wrote, is the ability to make others do what you want them to do and what they wouldn’t do otherwise. Parents can exercise such power over children, as can criminals with guns over passers-by, and cult leaders through force of personality over their disciples. Those sorts of power are worthy subjects, but they are not what I will discuss here. Instead, I will focus on how enormous organizations claimed ever stronger and more varied power over all the people in a territory and how subjects and citizens pushed back either to weaken that power or to exert collective counter-power against state rulers.

State power is a relatively recent human creation. Humans first appeared on Earth no more than 200,000 years ago. Agriculture, which made possible the first sedentary societies larger than a few hundred people, began 10,000 years ago. The first written records are 6,000 years old. The first empires appeared in the Middle East 5,500 years ago. Few states existed until 500 years ago. It is only in the twentieth century that virtually every territory on Earth (except for Antarctica) became an independent state, replacing the empires, city-states, tribes, and theocracies that once ruled most humans and the lands on which they lived.

All of you reading this book, and your parents, and probably your grandparents as well, have spent your entire lives as citizens of a state. Moreover, you also have spent your lives in a world in which everyone you could ever meet also is a citizen of a state (or a refugee from a state). If we want to think about states sociologically, that is, as creations of humans who both are shaped by and in turn remake the institutions in which we interact, we first must be able to envision a world in which states do not exist. That act of imagination is easy because until 500 years ago states did not exist in most of the world; indeed, had never existed. As we recover the historical world of tribes, city-states, empires, and theocracies we will be able to see states for what they are: a relatively recent European creation that simultaneously with capitalism has come to dominate the world.

Only when we see states as neither natural/inevitable nor static can we ask the critical questions that this book seeks to answer. Only when we realize that states have not always existed can we realistically analyze whether states will continue to dominate the field of power in the future and to consider which other institutions and forces actually might rival or supplant states.

Chapter 1 asks: what is a state and how does it differ from the political forms that existed until 500 years ago? In order to understand how unusually dynamic and powerful states became, we need to see why the other, long-enduring forms of power, from tribes to empires, had such limited influence on the ways in which their subjects lived, worked, and thought.

The second chapter begins by asking why Europe was the place where this new form of state power first developed and supplanted rival institutions of power. The process of state formation is a much studied and debated topic, and this chapter is where I will review the range of existing explanations and show the insights and limitations of each. My goal is not to hand out kudos and criticism to various scholars. Rather, I will mine these theories and the debates surrounding them to formulate the best synthetic explanation for the emergence of states that I can derive from our current store of historical understanding.

Once states gain monopolies on the means of coercion within their territories, they deepen the control they exert over their citizens’ bodies, minds, and property. Chapter 3 catalogues the range of capacities states have amassed over centuries. I am concerned in that chapter with explaining how states sought to achieve control in four domains: the appropriation of resources through taxation, the conscription of citizens into the military and the targeting of enemy nations’ citizens in wars, the creation of national identity among its citizens, and the development of national cultures. The timing and dimensions of state capacity in each domain were the combined products of officials’ ambitions and of citizens who variously resisted and collaborated with the state.

States dominated Europe and then the world at precisely the same time as capitalism supplanted all other modes of production. Chapter 4 looks at the role states have played in capitalist development. I begin by looking at the mercantilist strategies early modern European states adopted in varying forms, and then at post-colonial states’ attempts to develop their economies. I am concerned both with how state officials formulated policies and the extent to which they had to respond to demands from domestic capitalists, foreign powers, and popular forces within their own nations. I also consider why some developmental policies were effective and others less so, and finally why, in recent years, many states have moved away from efforts to shape their economies directly in favor of neoliberalism, and why some states have resisted that trend.

Elections and other forms of democratic politics restrain many states, their rulers, and their capitalist allies who would like to make policy without popular interference. Chapter 5 examines the reasons for the spread of democracy in a series of waves beginning in the late eighteenth century and continuing to the present, and for countervailing waves of dictatorship in the decades before and after World War II. It is important to go beyond the mere existence of elections and examine the extent to which classes and other groups in civil society are able to affect state policies through electoral and non-electoral means. I do that in chapter 5 by focusing on social benefits and exploring how mass mobilization, through electoral and other means, has affected the variations in social policies over time and among nations. I explore the reasons why the United States, a leader in social benefits before World War II, has fallen far behind other wealthy nations, and why in recent decades so many nations have embraced neoliberal revisions of social benefits to a greater or lesser extent.

The growth of state power and capacity has been challenged, blocked, and reversed in some parts of the globe. Chapter 6 looks at the consequences of revolutions, colonialism, and military defeats on states, and why in recent decades some states, mainly in Africa, have become so vulnerable to disintegration.

Recently, it has appeared that state power is weakening, being displaced by the reach of multinational corporations, the anonymous workings of global financial markets, or the dictates of international organizations including the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization. The seventh and concluding chapter of this book assesses the future of states. I ask whether the US’s loss of economic and geopolitical dominance is inevitable, and if China or another power will replace the US as hegemon, or if the world will, for the first time in 500 years, enter an era with no hegemon. I explore how other states would be affected by a world with no hegemon, and if competition among powers would cause a world or regional wars. Finally, I consider how states will respond to environmental disaster and resource shortage, and how citizens can influence state policies under those conditions.

As I wrote this book in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the power of the state was demonstrated anew to those of us who are citizens of the United States as well as to those affected by American policies elsewhere in the world. A president, chosen by a minority of the popular vote and only after the unprecedented intervention of the US Supreme Court, quickly convinced Congress to enact the largest tax cuts in the country’s history, which had the effect of transferring hundreds of billions of dollars to the richest citizens. On the basis of fraudulent intelligence, he was able to commit the United States to an invasion of Iraq, which, by the end of his presidency, had resulted in the deaths of almost a million Iraqis. In that same decade, the United States has stood alone among the major industrialized nations in refusing to ratify or implement the Kyoto Protocol, and has used its full diplomatic weight to stymie efforts to negotiate a successor treaty to prevent global climate change. Ultimately, that decade-long delay in reducing carbon emissions almost certainly will result in more deaths than the war in Iraq. The tax cuts and Iraq war would not have occurred if the 2000 election had gone the other way, while the Bush Administration’s rejection of Kyoto merely reinforced an existing Washington consensus, reflected in a unanimous 1997 Senate resolution in opposition to that Protocol. More recently, governments around the world have intervened to counteract the effects of the 2008 financial crisis with as yet undetermined consequences for the banking, automobile and other industries, and perhaps for the distribution of wealth and power in those societies.

The United States, as we will see, is not unique in the power it exerts over its citizens, even as its power to affect world events remains unparalleled. As I finished this book in 2009, President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe had just secured another term in office through a fraudulent election and open attacks on the opposition party. No other government intervened, and the citizens of that nation, despite the highest inflation and unemployment rates in the world, have not attempted to overthrow the Mugabe regime.

Citizenship remains one of the most important determinants of someone’s life chances. Stand at the US–Mexican border, at the wall dividing Israel and the Palestinian territories, or on the beaches of the European islands in the Mediterranean to see what efforts governments make to secure their borders and the risks non-citizens take to pass through those divides. Jobs, civil rights, social benefits, physical security, and even water are kept on one side of those borders. More than 30 million humans today are refugees, fleeing from one country to another in an effort to survive.

States and their futures matter because, at the outset of the twenty-first century, they remain, by far, the most significant repositories of power and resources in the world. The vast majority of violent deaths are caused by wars between states, by states’ violence against their own subjects, and by armed attempts to seize state power.

Politics is almost entirely about states. People mobilize to influence state policies, and to gain control of states through elections or with violence. Where states are weak, as in much of Africa, citizens’ life chances and life spans are drastically reduced. Every realistic plan for economic growth, for reductions in poverty, hunger, disease, and environmental degradation, and to slow or reverse global warming depends largely on initiatives that are directed by governments alone or in concert.

At the same time as recent events demonstrate state power, the importance of citizenship, and the vulnerability of state rulers to voters at some moments and their vast autonomy in other instances, a chorus of recent commentators has claimed that states and political ideologies no longer matter and that the world is flat (i.e., without meaningful borders). Nations and their governments, in this view, must submit to the inexorable dictates of technological innovation, the global economy, and universal desires for more material goods.

Francis Fukuyama (1992) claims that since the fall of the Soviet Union no ideology or political movement offers a credible challenge to liberal democracy and consumerist market economies. Communism is discredited, as are fascism and fundamentalist religion. Governments that cling to religious, socialist, or authoritarian ideologies are condemning their citizens to repression and economic backwardness. Liberal democracy, in Fukuyama’s depiction, is not a program of social reform or even a basis for collective decision-making but merely a framework to allow the pursuit of profit by corporations and consumer spending by individuals. Fukuyama’s book, which provides a veneer of Hegelian analysis to American triumphalism, merely asserts the ideological consensus around liberalism and offers no historical account or causal analysis for why competing ideologies and social systems declined in some places but not others, nor for how bastions of fundamentalism and state economies will convert to liberalism.

Political actors are almost entirely absent in Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat (2005). Instead, he identifies ten “flatteners” that allow and force all individuals, firms, and states to compete in a global economy. Only one, the fall of the Berlin Wall, is a political development. The other nine are technological or organizational innovations to which all must adapt if they are to avoid bankruptcy or poverty. Like Margaret Thatcher, Friedman is convinced that “There Is No Alternative” to neoliberal market economies. He asserts that, with the demise of the Soviet Bloc, states no longer are capable of shielding themselves and their citizens from competition. State policy now can be effective only at producing educated citizens and infrastructure, the inputs that will attract investment from globalized firms.

Fukuyama and Friedman reflect, as they provide intellectual pillars for, a consensus in the United States and increasingly elsewhere. In this view, politicians are helpless to control events and so are citizens. Elections and protests are virtually meaningless. These premises justify a journalistic approach to politics that largely ignores issues and presents those who seek public office as motivated by a corrupt desire to enrich themselves or by an obsession with fame. Too much writing about politics has become gossip and biography instead of historically grounded analysis.

I have written this book in part to address the widening divergence in journalistic and academic analyses of politics. This reflects an academic’s usual disgust that thinly researched and theoretically untenable works receive such wide and respectful attention merely because they reach politically convenient conclusions. The proper response is not for academics to join the game of political posturing in the guise of public intellectuals. Rather, I hope that by offering an account of what historians and social scientists know about states, I can provide the basis for a counter-analysis to the ahistorical and confused thinking that passes for profundity in many journalistic and governmental circles. Only when we are aware of and have gained intellectual command over the existing base of historical knowledge and the techniques for analyzing states can we understand the actual choices open to officials and citizens. There are alternatives. We have the theoretical bases to figure out what those are and in that way to determine when, where, and how citizens can become public actors in the making of their political world.

Acknowledgments

One of the pleasures of writing a synthetic work like this is that it allows me to recall advice, insights, and suggestions for reading from many teachers and colleagues over decades. Their assistance is reflected throughout this book in my arguments and citations, many of which build on their own innovative work. Several friends offered specific advice on this manuscript. I am pleased to acknowledge Georgi Derluguian, who read the entire manuscript, and Denis O’Hearn and Sam Cohn, who commented on chapter 4. Jonathan Skerrett and Emma Longstaff at Polity Press guided me from proposal to finished manuscript.

 1 

Before States

A state is a claim and the power to make that claim a reality. States, in Weber’s ([1922] 1978: 54) definition, claim a “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order,” to which Mann adds the crucial qualifier, “in a territorially demarcated area, over which it claims a monopoly of binding and permanent rule-making” (1986: 37). The key words in those phrases are “legitimate” and “monopoly.”

States are mechanisms for the definition and generation of legitimacy as well as organizations that accumulate resources to enforce those claims of legitimacy. States claim the authority to define all rights, and each individual’s rights are defined in relation to the state itself. That is a claim broader and more fundamental than those contained in either Weber or Mann’s definitions. States don’t just use violence and make rules, and they don’t just aspire to monopolies in both realms. States seek to create a social reality in which each subject’s property claims and their civil rights and liberties, including their very right to life, exist only in the context of their legal status in a particular state. Successful states have the force, the organizational reach, and the ideological hegemony to enforce those claims upon all who live within its territory.

States do not have to treat all of their subjects equally. For Carl Schmitt [1922] 1985, the state or “sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” In other words, states have the power to define certain individuals or categories of people as outside the law, and certain periods of time as emergencies when normal laws don’t apply. The US Constitution explicitly defined slaves as property rather than citizens, a categorization reaffirmed by the Supreme Court in its 1856 Dred Scott decision which denied slaves the standing to bring suit in a Federal court even if they were brought by their owners or had escaped to a “free” state. Slaves were and remained the exception to US citizenship rights until the post-Civil War Constitutional Amendments. In 1944, the Supreme Court ruled in Korematsu v. United States that citizens of Japanese descent could be interned. That latter decision justified the government’s racial distinction by drawing a temporal distinction between wartime emergency and normal times of peace. Giorgio Agambem, in (2005), argues that the Third Reich was a regime that declared a state of exception, an emergency that lasted from its first day of power to its last, and which allowed the regime to legally define whole categories of citizens as without rights and deserving of extermination. More recently, Agambem finds that George W. Bush’s “war on terror” is a new attempt to establish a long-term state of emergency that allows the state to override “enemy combatants’” civil rights under the US Constitution and their rights as prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions. Most states in their histories have declared that some times are exceptional and therefore some of their citizens fall outside the rules and rights the state confers in normal times.