The State Hinders Understanding

The State Hinders Understanding

An interesting Symposium has been published on 'Concepts that Hinder Understanding... and What to Do About Them' . Nineteen colleagues submit to critical scrutiny concepts such as 'clientelism', 'corruption', 'democracy', 'parties as electoral actors', 'ethnicity', etcetera.
See the current issue of the Comparative Politics Section Newsletter of the American Political Science Association.

This is my contribution:

State

Nowadays political studies are too state-centered. I am referring to “state” as a form of polity, which is different from other classic forms, mainly “city,” “empire” and “federation,” which have been largely neglected. A single analytical category such as “state” cannot account satisfactorily for disparate political communities that, like elephants and mosquitoes, have population and area sizes more than one hundred thousand times higher than others, from China and India to Nauru or Vanuatu. In contrast to other forms of polity, the state is defined for its sovereignty, which implies a single source of legitimacy over a population within a fixed territory with stable borders. In this sense, the form “state” has existed in Western Europe within a historical period that began only about 300 years ago and is today essentially finished. The rest of the world has been unacquainted with the Westphalian notion of sovereign states. Russia and most of Asia have been durably organized as empires. In North America a federation was built from previously independent states. In former European colonies in Hispanic America and Africa there are many failed states. In the Middle East nation-state building is not succeeding due to local ethnic conflicts and for a lack of greater areas of economic and security cooperation. Actually, the West European states were able to survive as independent polities in the international arena only thanks to having colonial empires. When these disappeared, they began to create a new imperial-size area of economic and security cooperation among themselves – the European Union – which has reduced the relevance of the notion of state even where the original experience took place. It’s time to bring the city, the empire, and the federation back in.

For CP-APSA members the Symposium is available at http://www.apsanet.org/


COMMENTS

Jean Léca said...

Dear Josep,

You are quite right, at least on one count: the state has never covered and does not cover all the conceivable polities. I think that the European Union can be a federation or an empire (yet not both), but not a state. However, I beg to differ on the following points
1/ To state that Western European States survived in the international arena thanks to their colonial empires is somewhat exaggerated. Let's suppose that Germany was an empire under Bismarck (most of the specialists in federalism hold that it evolved into a full fledged sovereign state). How about Sweden, Denmark, Norway? As for Turkey, it became a state when it was relieved of the Ottoman empire.
2/ The US are no longer a federation but a (federal) State (I am using the "French" capital letter on purpose). Federation implies that member states stand on an equal footing with the federal state since the sovereignty is divided (on this point see Olivier Beaud, "Théorie de la fédération", 2007 who states that in a federation, there are "co-member" states, the "federal state" included). It has no longer been the case since the New Deal and possibly the first Roosevelt's era. Oh! and the US did not have and still have not a colonial empire unless one considers the conquest of the West as an empire analogous to the conquest of Siberia by Russia.
3/ By the way, the concept of federation needs the concept of state (with a small "s") that is a co-sovereign political unit, whether it is itself centralized or decentralized, entitled to claim the monopoly of legitimate physical violence.
4/ You seem to overlook the implications of the "Welfare state" which, more often than not, is linked to the concept of state (from T.H. Marshall to Claus Offe, this opinion is widely shared)
5/ Last but by no means the least: you do not take into account the "legal" facts and first and foremost the United Nations Charter and its article 2 (I think) on the "sovereign equality" of states. True, "legal" constructs are necessary "fictions" and legal language is not scientific language since it is performative, whatever the status we choose to give to "scientific". But, as legal constructs they become social facts, or at least social phenomena, and we have, qua social scientists, to take into account those special empirical "facts". So, the question becomes: how to reconcile what the lawyers call "a state" today (it is possible that this use appeared only with Machiavelli if Skinner is to be believed and certainly with Bodin) and what the scientists call "a state"? "Social nature" is not "physical nature", it speaks! "To speak or not to speak is not the question"...Unless we decide, following the hard liners of "Law and economics", that what the lawyers call "public law" is not law at all and that the International Court of Justice is a bunch of romantics.

Best,

Jean Léca
Paris