THE STATE AND THEY POWER THEY HAVE OVER YOU
The State
In this interesting book, Philip Pettit offers a compelling study of the state and brings it back to the centre of scholarship debates in political theory. Now, some people might find this a bold claim as, admittedly, the state has never been in question as the main political entity of our world.
But it is also key to note that, probably because of that, the state has also never been the subject of a profound and rigorous study in contemporary political theory such as the one the author presents. For the last half-century, at least, political theorists rarely mentioned the state and mostly assumed that it was an immutable and inert reality that existed in our world, without really delving into why it exists, or how best to approach its potential uses.
Pettit shows that the state is the centrepiece of political theory, and for good reason. The author starts with a thought experiment in order to determine the main function of a hypothetical state and why would it come to exist.
The result is the ‘nomothetic function’, or capacity to dictate political norms that go beyond mere conventions and are actually enforceable by established officials, in order to provide internal and external security to the citizenry. A further evolution of this primitive entity, as the author explains, is an incorporated polity, in which a common voice and a certain regularity in actions are expected, in order to avoid arbitrariness.
In addition to incorporation, decentralization also comes as a further possible improvement of the polity, again making arbitrary misuse of the state apparatus much harder. Sovereignty, the author argues, is not affected by this decentralization, as it remains in the polity as such. Thus, Pettit argues, while there is no concrete entity that can be sovereign, the powers of sovereignty rest upon the state, rather than any specific institution within the state, such as the government.
Further remarks show how a properly functional state, as described in the requisites of incorporation and decentralization, can act in a decisive way in matters of political justice such as the protection of the individual rights of citizens and the intervention in a market economy.
Globalisation
But the convulsions in national politics are not confined to the west. Exhaustion, hopelessness, the dwindling effectiveness of old ways: these are the themes of politics all across the world. This is why energetic authoritarian “solutions” are currently so popular: distraction by war (Russia, Turkey); ethno-religious “purification” (India, Hungary, Myanmar); the magnification of presidential powers and the corresponding abandonment of civil rights and the rule of law (China, Rwanda, Venezuela, Thailand, the Philippines and many more).
What is the relationship between these various upheavals? We tend to regard them as entirely separate – for, in political life, national solipsism is the rule. In each country, the tendency is to blame “our” history, “our” populists, “our” media, “our” institutions, “our” lousy politicians. And this is understandable, since the organs of modern political consciousness – public education and mass media – emerged in the 19th century from a globe-conquering ideology of unique national destinies. When we discuss “politics”, we refer to what goes on inside sovereign states; everything else is “foreign affairs” or “international relations” – even in this era of global financial and technological integration. We may buy the same products in every country of the world, we may all use Google and Facebook, but political life, curiously, is made of separate stuff and keeps the antique faith of borders.
One World?
Yes, there is awareness that similar varieties of populism are erupting in many countries. Several have noted the parallels in style and substance between leaders such as Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi, Viktor Orbán and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
There is a sense that something is in the air – some coincidence of feeling between places. But this does not get close enough. For there is no coincidence. All countries are today embedded in the same system, which subjects them all to the same pressures: and it is these that are squeezing and warping national political life everywhere.
And their effect is quite the opposite – despite the desperate flag-waving – of the oft-remarked “resurgence of the nation state”.
The most momentous development of our era, precisely, is the waning of the nation state: its inability to withstand countervailing 21st-century forces, and its calamitous loss of influence over human circumstance.
National political authority is in decline, and, since we do not know any other sort, it feels like the end of the world. This is why a strange brand of apocalyptic nationalism is so widely in vogue. But the current appeal of machismo as political style, the wall-building and xenophobia, the mythology and race theory, the fantastical promises of national restoration – these are not cures, but symptoms of what is slowly revealing itself to all: nation states everywhere are in an advanced state of political and moral decay from which they cannot individually extricate themselves.
Crisis Within The Crisis
The crisis was not wholly inevitable. Since 1945, we have actively reduced our world political system to a dangerous mockery of what was designed by US president Woodrow Wilson and many others after the cataclysm of the first world war, and now we are facing the consequences. But we should not leap too quickly into renovation.
This system has done far less to deliver human security and dignity than we imagine – in some ways, it has been a colossal failure – and there are good reasons why it is ageing so much more quickly than the empires it replaced.
Even if we wanted to restore what we once had, that moment is gone. The reason the nation state was able to deliver what achievements it did – and in some places they were spectacular – was that there was, for much of the 20th century, an authentic “fit” between politics, economy and information, all of which were organised at a national scale.
National governments possessed actual powers to manage modern economic and ideological energies, and to turn them towards human – sometimes almost utopian – ends. But that era is over.
After so many decades of globalisation, economics and information have successfully grown beyond the authority of national governments. Today, the distribution of planetary wealth and resources is largely uncontested by any political mechanism
Power
All this comes to show precisely why the state is the centrepiece of political theory across all possible topics. There is no talk of rights, sovereignty and decentralization, or even of political justice, without first assuming, and understanding, the state – how it comes to be and how best to use it and adapt it to our political preferences.
In this sense, Pettit’s work represents a milestone as a serious attempt to understand and conceptualize the main entity that political theorists (and, arguably, political scientists) deal with. However, Pettit’s account still presents some flaws that are not new to his political tradition.
The first is the author’s attempt to rescue sovereignty, thus clinging to a concept that his own argumentation seemed to be doing away with. By his own account, ‘There really must be a sovereign in every state’ (148), reintroducing a problem for which he provides no reasonable answer.
By accepting the absolutist and divinely inspired concept of sovereignty, the author fails, as it is inevitable, to find a proper place for it in his account of a polycentric, decentralized state.
The result is that sovereignty is allocated either in the polity understood as an abstract entity, either in the people when it exercises constituent powers.
Had the author been able to recognize in federalism a genuinely post-sovereignist theory, and had he fully endorsed it, his argument would have been much stronger. Instead, he hints at federalist theory as ignoring the problem rather than addressing it (161), showing that he is unwilling to conceive a state model that does away with such a problematic concept.
By leaving the door open to sovereignty and by its later unclear allocation, Pettit falls, as many other great authors have before, into a sort of ‘nationality trap’. For, if sovereignty is accepted as a political principle, where does it come from? If the answer is, as it is hinted, ‘the people’, then the obvious question is: what people?
Catalan people
Pettit talks unambiguously about the American people exercising its constituent powers, for instance, but most cases are not as clear-cut as it seems to be implied by this example. It is not far-fetched, for instance, to assume that the Catalan people, as a separate entity from the Spanish people, would also have a claim to exercise its constituent powers.
Thus, the acknowledgement of sovereignty, aided by the author’s implicit view of states as they are, that is, with their current borders and their internal national pluralism, begs, at least, one obvious question: do stateless peoples have a right to constitute their own states? If the answer is affirmative, we would still need to discuss under what conditions.
If the answer is negative, there remains the question of why some national communities can have a state of their own (with all that this implies) while others cannot.
In conclusion, Pettit’s work is innovative and illuminating about a topic long ignored in political theory.
Its main shortcoming, though, remains a classical, unaddressed objection to mainstream liberal and republican theory: the problems regarding the evident partiality when dealing with concepts such as sovereignty, borders, and self-determination. Pettit writes in a clever, but almost surgically isolated way about the state. I cannot help but ask: what about the nation?
National or Patriot?
Why is this happening? In brief, 20th-century political structures are drowning in a 21st-century ocean of deregulated finance, autonomous technology, religious militancy and great-power rivalry.
Meanwhile, the suppressed consequences of 20th-century recklessness in the once-colonised world are erupting, cracking nations into fragments and forcing populations into post-national solidarities: roving tribal militias, ethnic and religious sub-states and super-states.
Finally, the old superpowers’ demolition of old ideas of international society – ideas of the “society of nations” that were essential to the way the new world order was envisioned after 1918 – has turned the nation-state system into a lawless gangland; and this is now producing a nihilistic backlash from the ones who have been most terrorised and despoiled.
The result? For increasing numbers of people, our nations and the system of which they are a part now appear unable to offer a plausible, viable future. This is particularly the case as they watch financial elites – and their wealth – increasingly escaping national allegiances altogether. Today’s failure of national political authority, after all, derives in large part from the loss of control over money flows. At the most obvious level, money is being transferred out of national space altogether, into a booming “offshore” zone.
These fleeing trillions undermine national communities in real and symbolic ways. They are a cause of national decay, but they are also a result: for nation states have lost their moral aura, which is one of the reasons tax evasion has become an accepted fundament of 21st-century commerce.
More dramatically, great numbers of people are losing all semblance of a national home, and finding themselves pitched into a particular kind of contemporary hell. Seven years after the fall of Gaddafi’s dictatorship, Libya is controlled by two rival governments, each with its own parliament, and by several militia groups fighting to control oil wealth. But Libya is only one of many countries that appear whole only on maps.
Since 1989, barely 5% of the world’s wars have taken place between states: national breakdown, not foreign invasion, has caused the vast majority of the 9 million war deaths in that time. And, as we know from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Syria, the ensuing vacuum can suck in firepower from all over the world, destroying conditions for life and spewing shell-shocked refugees in every direction.
Nothing advertises the crisis of our nation-state system so well, in fact, as its 65 million refugees – a “new normal” far greater than the “old emergency” (in 1945) of 40 million. The unwillingness even to acknowledge this crisis, meanwhile, is appropriately captured by the contempt for refugees that now drives so much of politics in the rich world.
