ANTI-STATE
Woodrow Wilson said, "The only brief and adequate definition
of the State that I have been able to find, is that which describes
it as a 'people organized for law within a definite territory.'
" 58 The definition is helpful, but it raises and leaves
unanswered several very important questions. What constitutes
a people? Who has the right to organize them and determine the
law under which they will live? Who determines which territory
belongs to which people?
Instead, "We should conceptualize the state as simply the
bureaucratic apparatus which claims ultimate administrative, policing,
and military authority within a specific jurisdiction..."
59 The state is a mechanism, not a personality. It has characteristics
in accordance with its structure and bureaucratic components,
but it is only a tool for enacting someone's will, not the source
of that will. The actual rulers of the state may not hold any
official position at all.
The world with which we are most familiar is divided into sovereign
states, tempting us to think: "That is the way it is everywhere.
That is the way it has always been. That is the way it will always
be." It is a mistake to yield to the temptation.
State sovereignty is a concept that belongs to a particular, fairly
recent, Western political tradition. "Sovereignty is a legal
fiction that continues to evolve. It is not an immutable feature
of the human condition: the family, the tribe, and the city functioned
quite well without it." 60
Not only did the family, the tribe, and the city function quite
well without the fiction of sovereignty, in many cases they functioned
much better without it. They saw no reason to enthrone the state,
giving it power over them. "Societal groups vigorously resisted
state-builders' drive to monopolize political authority and the
coercion on which it ultimately rested." 61
The rise of the state in Western Europe came about as "small
groups of power-hungry men fought off numerous rivals and great
popular resistance in the pursuit of their own ends, and inadvertently
promoted the formation of national states." 62 They wanted
to enrich themselves, they wanted to control others, and they
needed a mechanism for doing it.
They claimed a right to do whatever they wanted to do. They destroyed
those who stood in their way, and claimed that no one had the
right to resist them. "Early state-builders' use of violence
was not viewed as legitimate by the majority of the people who
for centuries resisted their drive for control." 63
The problems of greed, arrogance, and violence did not arise with
the creation of the nation state. The state merely served as an
efficient means for feeding the desires of those who controlled
it.
Socrates said that those who want to rule are the least fit to
do so. "[T]he truth is surely this: that city in which those
who are going to rule are least eager to rule is necessarily governed
in the way that is best and freest from faction, while the one
that gets the opposite kind of rulers is governed in the opposite
way." 64 Those who are eager to rule will create the worst
possible government.
Good men do not want to rule over others. "The good aren't
willing to rule for the sake of money or honor.... For it is likely
that if a city of good men came to be, there would be a fight
over not ruling, just as there is now over ruling; and there it
would become manifest that a true ruler really does not naturally
consider his own advantage but rather that of the one who is ruled."
65
Rulers always profess their own goodness, but it is often difficult
for those over whom they rule to see it, somewhat like the emperor's
new clothes. As Machiavelli surveyed the political landscape,
he saw clearly that, "The wearisome search for abstract right
was largely impotent before concrete power and grasping ambition."
66 Abstract right does not fear concrete power. Its enemy is grasping
ambition, which uses concrete power to get its own way..
Harold Laski concluded that, "Historically, we always find
that any system of government is dominated by those who, at the
time, wield economic power; and what they mean by 'good' is, for
the most part, the preservation of their own interests."
67 What's good for General Motors is good for General Motors.
Again, this is not a problem that appeared for the first time
with the creation of the nation state, but the form and compelling
force of the state offered increased opportunity for manipulation.
In the early years of the state, the Dutch East India Company
had a special relationship with the state leaders that worked
to the advantage of both. "It was this relationship between
the company's directors and the political leaders that was 'the
chief reason why they (the directors) were able to sidetrack or
to ignore criticism of their own position as a self-perpetuating
oligarchy accountable to nobody.'" 68
In England, it was the same. "The Royal Navy captains who
seized vessels engaged in illegal trade shared a portion of the
auctioned value of the seized ship and its cargo with the chartered
company. Indeed, the British Fleet's primary day-to-day business
in Indian waters was its patrol to check for 'illegal practices.'
Thus, the 'nation' was paying the Royal Navy to enforce the company's
monopoly, with the naval officers and the company sharing the
prize money." 69
The power of the state was at the disposal of those who could
afford it. They increased their wealth and power at the expense
of the people. "At this time individuals had particularly
good reasons for resisting the nascent European national state.
The judicial system was rapidly turning into a mechanism for defending
property and for producing and disciplining labor....France applied
the death penalty to almost any form of larceny, while in England
the number of crimes punishable by death increased from fifty
in 1689 to two hundred in 1800. Again, these crimes were mostly
some form of theft." 70
Against the theft performed by the wealthy and the powerful, the
judicial system was not much help. As one pirate captain complained,
"They villify us, the scoundrels so, when there is only this
difference: they rob the poor under the cover of law, forsooth,
and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage."
71
For years, those who controlled the state profitted from the activities
of the pirates they commissioned, but eventually found that even
these privateers were not always willing to submit to the state.
Why should they? What was the state to them or to the independent
pirates? As one independent pirate captain declared: "I am
a free prince and have as much authority to make war on the whole
world as he who has a hundred sail of ships and an army of a hundred
thousand men in the field." 72
Today, the state has a monopoly on many different kinds of power,
but it was not always so. The rulers of the state used their guns
to establish their control. "The state's monopoly on external
violence came very late and through a process spanning several
centuries. For three hundred years nonstate violence was a legitimate
practice in the European state system." 73
What made violence or justice or anything else ordered by one
group of people legitimate, and that ordered by another group
illegitimate? Ultimately it was power that enforced obedience,
both within borders and outside.
Controlling the state became the way to bestow legitimacy, but
not all people recognized that legitimacy. For example, among
the early twentieth century Irish immigrants to America, according
to Daniel Moynihan, "'There was an indifference to Yankee
proprieties,' deriving no doubt from an earlier contempt for English
pretensions; there was 'a settled tradition of regarding the formal
government as illegitimate, and the informal one as bearing the
true impress of popular sovereignty.'" 74 The same was, and
is, true of other groups.
In American cities, "Governmental efforts to control the
[drug] traffic are treated as externalities to the market process,
ultimately little different from the response of the Southern
California petroleum industries to governmental environmental
regulation...
"The motives for achievement within these groups are little
different from those of their international financial counterparts:
power, wealth and the life-styles which money can buy.'"
75 Alcohol is legal, but cocaine is not. Some people have the
right to traffic in weapons, others do not.
Does legitimacy only exist in the eye of the beholder? Were the
bosses and the political machines that ruled many U.S. cities
legitimate authorities or not? What right does one group of people,
be it a government or a gang, have to control the property and
lives of others?
It is clear that the state is increasingly presented internally
as the only legitimate and legitimizing authority. All things,
even the family, exist only at the pleasure of the state. "Political
life is organized almost exclusively around the capture of state
power, with the capacity to exercise the claim to universality
within the state...In the end, the conviction that political life
is about taking the center is the fundamental guarantee that one's
politics are serious and realistic." 76
Though multitudes have genuinely benefitted from some actions
of some states at some times, those who rule have always made
choices they think will benefit themselves. Laski pointed to one
of the innate shortcomings of Rousseau-like theories: "The
modern state must confide its governance to relatively few hands.
The prevailing will is therefore, and inevitably, no more than
a random sample of that congery of wills of which it is composed."
77 Actually, it is not a random sample, but the aggregate will
of those who are most eager to control and decide for others.
"Burke was right. The general will in which Rousseau put
his confidence is impossible of discovery outside the parish."
78
Most people find their time filled with trying to earn a livelihood
and build a life. To say that one might have an influence on the
political system if he devotes all his time and resources to that
end is to affirm that most people normally have no influence at
all. Most people do not want to devote all their time and resources
to gaining political power.
"Thus, the creative social activity in which ordinary people
are most likely to be engaged appears beyond or outside politics.
In the political sphere proper (as in governmental sphere) the
important activities demand expertise, and afford opportunitites
for creative action only to the elite. 'The people' are just the
chorus and audience - and the beast without." 79
Even in the most representative of states, the vast majority of
people have little or no say in the major decisions that establish
parameters for their lives. The state is not a person, though
those who control it have found it convenient to mandate the legality
of the fiction that says it is.
If the people once had sovereignty, they do not now. This is somewhat
problematic. "Indeed, it suggests that, insofar as political
theory has become the theory of the state, it serves as a legitimating
ideology that obscures the very possibility of politics of, by,
and for the people." 80
Even at its best, the sovereign state has serious defects as a
means for ordering life on the earth. The state and the system
of states developed after the Reformation to define the common
ground of Western Europe. They were built on a foundation of values
and assumptions that were not and are not universally shared.
"The state is not a fact of nature, however, but the solution
to a problem - a modern and Western solution, recently generalized
to the rest of the world, which is, in its turn, itself a source
of problems." 81
The modern state claims a monopoly on legitimacy, a monopoly that
ignores and excludes the historical customs and beliefs of most
of the world. "A significant aspect of the post-colonial
structures of knowledge in the Third World is a peculiar form
of imperialism of categories. Under such imperialism, a conceptual
domain is sometimes hegemonized by a concept produced and honed
in the West, hegemonized so effectively that the original domain
vanishes from our awareness." 82
Ashis Nandy has observed the effect on South Asia of "...the
globally dominant language of the nation-state... This language,
whatever may have been its positive contributions to humane governance
and to religious tolerance in the past, increasingly has become
a cover for the complicity of modern intellectuals and the modernizing
middle classes of South Asia in the new forms of religious violence."
83
"Much of the fanaticism and violence associated with religion
comes today from the sense of defeat of the believers, from their
feelings of impotency, and from their free-floating anger and
self-hatred while facing a world which is increasingly secular
and de-sacralized." 84 In a world witnessing mighty religious
movements - Buddhist revival, Hindu revival, Islamic revival,
Jewish revival, and Christian revival - the secularist-controlled
state repeats to all faiths the ominous second-century declaration
of the Roman Empire to the early Christians: "You have no
right to exist."
When statists monopolize the political discourse and power, they
disenfranchise those who disagree with them. It is true that the
disenfranchised often have the right to vote for different candidates
who demean the traditional beliefs and values of the people, but
that is hardly a suitable tradeoff for being relegated to a political
Limbo or Purgatory - a fate from which only recantation and repentance
will set them free. Marginalized believers sometimes respond with
their own forms of violence as the only means of having their
beliefs and identity taken seriously.
Republicanism was the political plague confronting the rulers
of the early 1800s. Religious fundamentalism and ethnonationalism
confront today's rulers. "There are in 1990 more than eight
hundred nationalist movements in the world, and fewer than two
hundred states." 85
"We are encountering today an ever more widespread belief
that a world map composed of sovereign states no longer provides
- if indeed it ever did - a useful conception of how the world
as a whole is constituted....Territorial states remain the predominant
political actors in our world, even if their interactions are
becoming bewilderingly complex and increasingly extraterritorial
in their operational reach, and despite the fact that their capacity
for autonomy is being multiplied and cumulatively eroded."
86
The state is an idea, useful to some people in some circumstances.
Those who profit from it claim that it is indispensable for ordering
the lives of everyone. In some places, the idea has been rejected.
"What we witness in Somalia is the extreme case of a purely
notional country - a place on the map - that lacks even the appearance
of a national government with which foreign powers and other international
agents can deal. But they insist on pretending that Somalia still
exists, because that is the norm they must observe." 87
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(go back)
What is National Sovereignty?
Where Does Sovereignty Come From?
Hobbes Reconsidered
Realpolitik Morality
Anti-State
Revolt
Intervention
One World, One Sovereign
Notes & Bibliography