- •4’Th Lecture
- •In our last lecture on features of nation I told you a one view, and did not tell another one. According to this alternative view nation is both cultural, historical and political.
- •3.1 The state as an apparatus of control
- •3.2 The state as an international actor
- •3.3 The state as an abstract concept
3.2 The state as an international actor
This follows from the assertion of state sovereignty (see Chapter 25). In its relations with the outside world with other states sovereignty means the capacity of a state to maintain its integrity by ensuring that its frontiers and its nationals are respected by other states. Indeed, a state only becomes one when it is recognised as such by other states and, today, by the United Nations Organisation. The sovereignty of a state may be impaired when another state has military installations on its territory, or by another state dominating economic investment within its borders. Very small states can scarcely feel they possess sovereignty when, like Honduras or Liberia, they have a large multinational corporation within their borders employing a large part of the national labour force.
States are quick to protest when their sovereignty is under threat. They like to preserve the myth that being a state implies 100 per cent sovereignty, and this may be important in international law. But in practice the world today is so interdependent that no state has 100 per cent sovereignty. A complete absence of relationships with other states would be disastrous.
3.3 The state as an abstract concept
3.3.1 Classical perceptions of the state
This was the province of legal theorists and philosophers before political science existed as a discipline. Their central concern was with the
relationship between human beings and political authority (see Chapter 1). Early precursors of the term state came from Aristotle (384-322 BC) who used the term polis meaning both a city and a form of society and Cicero (106-43 BC) who spoke of res publica (public affairs) in which he believed there was a mixture of populo (the people), the source of power, and auctoritas (authority) which stemmed from the Senate, the ruling body of the Roman republic. Usually, however, it is Machiavelli (1469-1527)who is credited with the first use of the term 'state' in his work, The Prince. Although he is only writing about the small Italian states, he uses the term in its recognised modern sense to describe a political authority with the monopoly of ultimate coercion within a territory with defined borders. Clever diplomacy and statecraft were necessary to sustain a state and morality was not a consideration. He first used the phrase 'reason of state'. 3 |
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The idea of independent, autonomous territories with governments with supreme power over their peoples and single sources of law was widely recognised towards the end of the Middle Ages. Bodin (1529-96) called this characteristic 'sovereignty'. Without sovereignty there is no power and without power there can be no state. Laws are the emanation of the sovereign state and to maintain the laws sanctions are neededpenalties for those breaking laws. Sovereignty also means complete independence in the international context. Hence with Machiavelli and Bodin there develops the concept of the state as a political association different in its nature from other forms of organisation in society. |
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By the seventeenth century political philosophers for the first time were beginning to consider the impact of the individual upon the state. Hobbes conceived the state as made by men through fear of themselves. Because all men sought to gratify their desires they were aggressive and destructive, yet for that reason fearful. Recognising their nature they made a compact and set up Leviathan, a ruler to ensure compliance. John Locke (1632-1704) asserted that individuals had basic rights which could be enshrined in a contract with the state. These rights were broadly expressed in the American Declaration of Independence of 1776 as 'Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness'. It went on to proclaim 'That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.' The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens 1789, promulgated by the new National Assembly, similarly declared 'Men are born and always continue free and equal in respect of their rights', and 'The end of all political associations is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man.' |
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The American and French Revolutions cast the problem of the state |
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capacity to mobilise is easily surpassed by that of the capitalist class. |
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6. Some neo-Marxists, especially those from the developing world, argue that the class division is between the people of the underprivileged countries and the opulent advanced industrialised states. The cleavage is between 'North and South'. This application of the writings of Hobson, Hilferding and Lenin 7 has been much extended by the threat of crises in globalised capitalism in which the developing countries will suffer most. |
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7. The dual state thesis perceived the main opportunities for working-class assertion and eventual power lying in local government. This was derived especially from the success of left-wing parties in retaining control for long periods in large cities such as Bologna. Local government was a key part of the capitalist state because it provided the services which helped to reproduce the labour force. Thus the duality consisted of local government being concerned with consumption and central government with production. |
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Pluralist perceptions |
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A pluralist society is usually regarded as a natural consequence of democracy (see Chapter 4). Freedom of association is one of its necessary conditions. The right of collective organisation allows voluntary associations to form. These can be seen as counterbalancing state power, or balancing one another and so preserving a social equilibrium. In the nineteenth century it was de Tocqueville who extolled the virtues of a system of diverse local pluralism such as he found in the USA. He saw it as an important check on centralised power supported by democratic majorities, the consequence of revolution in his native France. At the beginning of the twentieth century Bentley argued that the study of groups should be the basis of a scientific study of politics.8 Empirical investigation, for example Dahl's analysis of power in New Haven, confirmed that oligarchy was not present. In democracies power might not be divided equally, but it was not concentrated. Dahl called this system polyarchy.9 It left open the position of the central power apparatus, but it did appear that the state was merely a player in the game, though perhaps sometimes a 'dirty player'. |
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Dunleavy and O'Leary in their comprehensive survey depict three models of the democratic state.10 |
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1. The 'weathervane' model perceives the state as responding to the direction of the political wind, that is to the balance of pressures |
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'votes count: resources decide' 12 (see Chapter 4) The fact is that all the liberal corporatist arrangements suffered great shocks in the 1980s including, most dramatically, the Swedish national lock-out in 1980.13 |
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To sum up: the relationships between the democratic state and interest groups are likely to be intermittent and temporary, however permanent they may appear to be in certain periods. Incumbent governments will think more about numerical democracy when elections approach and subsequent events may result in movement between all these models. The assumption that all groups have equal powernever really crediblegave way among later pluralists (neopluralists), to the view that corporate capital was the most powerful group. In consequence they formed links with the neo-Marxists. Hence we may conclude that the models are aids to understanding different patterns of modern pluralist society-state relationships, not definitive systems of rule. |
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The idea at the crux of pluralism was that there are many power centres beyond that of the state, especially in democracies. Yet this is no indication that governments will deal with them. The realisation gradually sank in that constraints on governments are great and are imposed not only by electorates, but also by the economy and, increasingly, by the world economy. |
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Bringing the state back in |
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There was also questioning among social scientists about the concentration of group power. The historian Otto Hintze argued that the nature of any state's power was dependent on its history of internal class conflicts and its strategic scope and positioning in the world. To understand how a state developed one has to know its social and military history. 14 |
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Foremost among such commentators was Theda Skocpol who asserted that states were unique structures with their own histories.15 The pluralists were in error in thinking of the state as a black box into which inputs went and out of which outputs came, or as an arena in which contests between social and political groups were staged. Each state was an administrative and coercive apparatus extracting resources from society and deploying them as it thought fit. In her analysis of revolutionary changes to states she begins with the Chinese Empire, before 1911 ruled by about 40,000 officials whose overriding attachment was to maintain the irrigation system, and continues with the imperial bureaucracies of France and Russia. |
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Wallerstein's contribution to state theory was to emphasise how state |
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sovereignty had been compromised by links with other states in the world economy. 16 The globalisation of world markets by the GATT agreements makes this point especially apposite. It is argued that the nation-state is being hollowed out by the growing strength of international organisations and the increasing regulatory power of confederations like the European Union. Is the decline of the nation-state unstoppable? |
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Notes |
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1. Quoted in M. G. Schmidt, 'The growth of the tax state' in C. L. Taylor (ed.), Why Governments Grow (London: Sage, 1983), p. 262f. |
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2. S. E. Finer, A Primer of Public Administration (London: F. Muller, 1950), p. 35. |
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3. A. P. D'Entrèves, The Notion of the State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967). |
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4. For example, seeJ. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker & Warburg, 1952). |
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5. K. Dyson, The State Tradition in Western Europe (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1980). |
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6. H. von Treitschke, Selections from his Lectures on Politics trans. A. L. Gowans (London: Gordons & Gray, 1914), p. 23. |
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7. J. A. Hobson, Imperialism (London: Allen & Unwin, 1902); R. Hilferding, Finance Capital: a Study in the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development (London: Routledge, 1910); V. I. Lenin, Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1916). |
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8. A. F. Bentley, The Group Theory of Politics (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1908). |
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9. R. A. Dahl, Polyarchy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1971). |
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10. P. Dunleavy and B. O'Leary, Theories of the State (London: Macmillan, 1987), p. 43f. |
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11. P. Schmitter, 'Still the century of corporatism', Review of Politics, vol. 36, 1974, p. 93f. |
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12. S. Rokkan, 'Numberical democracy and corporate pluralism', in R. A. Dahl (ed.), Political Oppositions in Western Democracies (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966). |
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13. W. Korpi, The Democratic Class Struggle (London: Routledge, 1983), p. 159. See also F. W. Bealey, Democracy in the Contemporary State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 180f. |
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14. See F. Gilbert (ed.), The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). |
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15. T. Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). |
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16. I. Wallerstein, The Modern World System (New York: Academic Press, 1974). |
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Questions |
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1. To what degree is it realistic to study the relationship between the individual and the state? |
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2. What are the problems of the democratic state in dealing with interest groups? |
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