The Idea of the State PDF

# 3 The idea of the state (Thomas Paine, _The Rights of Man_, 1791) ## The concept of the state - States and the idea of the state have traditionally formed the cornerstone of political geography, providing the key terms of reference for explaining the distribution and exercise of political power...

# 3 The idea of the state (Thomas Paine, _The Rights of Man_, 1791) ## The concept of the state - States and the idea of the state have traditionally formed the cornerstone of political geography, providing the key terms of reference for explaining the distribution and exercise of political power. - Even though their continuing relevance has been increasingly questioned in recent years as regional and global institutions have begun to evolve, states remain central to understanding the social and economic dynamics of the political landscape. - Natural rights cannot be guaranteed by individuals on their own; they require the support of a collective, civil, authority if they are to be a reality. - State identity being invested exclusively in the person of a monarch, or some other absolute ruler, was crumbling in the face of the rise of capitalism, the spreading urbanisation of the population, and the popular demand for the people to have a greater direct say in government. - The role of the state, or more precisely its more confined antecedent the city state, was articulated by the philosopher Aristotle in ancient Greece in the third century BC (Nicholson, 1984), but it is only since the advent of the new economic order based on capitalism and industrialisation at the end of the eighteenth century that states have become established in anything approaching their present form (Box 3.1). ## Process and patterns - In pre-agrarian societies, few of which still function as such in the modern world, tribal loyalties were the main force for social cohesion. - Groups of nomadic hunters and gatherers were too small, scattered, and ephemeral to have the time or the need to develop formal political institutions, though complex, sophisticated, and rigidly enforced codes of behaviour invariably underpinned the stability of daily life (Cohen, 1978). ### Aristotle's city state (Box 3.1) - The Greek philosopher Aristotle developed his theory of the city state in about 350 BC in his book, _Politics_. - Based on his experience of life and government in Athens, he argued that a natural logic dictated that societies should have government, or political rule, and that government, in its turn, led inevitably to the emergence of the city state. - He demonstrated, in terms that would be highly contested today, how city states gradually grew out of much simpler communities. - First, individual humans combined in pairs because they could not survive alone: men and women came together to reproduce; the master and slave stayed together for mutual self-preservation. - The master used his intellect to rule, while the uneducated slave used his physical strength to labour. - Second, the household unit arose naturally out of these primitive communities to serve domestic and economic needs. - Third, groups of households quickly combined to serve higher order needs, resulting in villages. - Finally, villages inevitably merged to form city states, complete and self-sufficient communities, which originated as the logical culmination of a natural order, but which survived because they are the best guarantee of a good life for citizens. - The settled agrarian societies that followed by contrast rapidly developed a need for institutional coherence and organization to sustain their more elaborate social order. - Coherent and defined territories became essential and the production and marketing of agricultural, and other, surpluses were a measure of their success. - This in turn presupposed the emergence of literate and educated elites to manage the more complicated social and economic relations, both within the society and with the wider world beyond, which led inexorably to a greater division of labour and to hierarchical social structures. - Access to territory and the ability to exercise exclusive control over it also became increasingly important issues, leading inevitably to conflict, attempts at conquest and, in extreme situations, war. ### The English Reformation (Box 3.2) - The Protestant Reformation only gathered ground slowly in England in comparison with some other European countries, such as Germany and Switzerland. - Somewhat ironically, it did eventually begin to gain ground during the rule of King Henry VIII, a very strong defender of Roman Catholicism during the early years of his reign, when the Pope actually bestowed on him the coveted title, Defender of the Faith. - It was his increasingly desperate determination to be rid his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, that drove Henry VIII to decide to split away from Rome, which refused to countenance divorce. - In 1532, legislation was passed through Parliament limiting the influence of the papacy in England and making the monarch the Supreme Head of the Church. - Once having successfully effected his divorce, Henry VIII went much further and took control of the majority of the property of the Church through the dissolution of the monasteries. - There was little popular enthusiasm for the change in religious allegiance, but for the most part, people acquiesced, in some cases encouraged by the redistribution of Church property in the wake of the confiscation of monastic lands. - However, after the death of Henry VIII in 1547, more active steps were taken to consolidate the position of the new Protestant Church. - The regency government representing his under-age successor, Edward VI, set in train a determined programme of reform, resulting in a new Prayer Book and a new order of service, as well as the removal of most of the physical artefacts of Catholicism from the England's churches. - After only six years on the throne, Edward VI died and was succeeded by Mary I, who, in her reign between 1553 and 1558, effectively reversed the whole Reformation, returning England to Catholicism. - Her successor, Elizabeth I, then determinedly set about re-establishing Protestantism and gradually, during her long reign, the new religion took an increasingly firm hold. - When she died, childless, in 1603, the dominant position of Protestantism was further secured when the throne passed to King James VI of Scotland, who became James I of England as well, creating for the first time a joint Protestant kingdom across the two countries. - The modern state is a product of the post-feudal order, in which the state gradually took over increasing responsibility for managing the process of socialisation. - The origins of this fundamental change in Europe date back to the Reformation in the mid-fifteenth century, when the monolithic ecclesiastical hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church began to break down, to be replaced by more localised and independent Protestant alternatives. - In England, the rupture was also closely identified with the state, in that the monarch, Henry VIII, was the driving force behind the break with Rome and the establishment of the overtly national Church of England (Box 3.2). - It meant that for the first time in the modern period church and state were explicitly brought together in a unified entity, with the monarch, the head of state, also leader of the official national church. - It was, however, the establishment of capitalism as the dominant form of economic organisation three hundred years later, alongside industrialisation, which really heralded the emergence of the intricate patchwork of independent states that now characterise the world political map (Hobsbawm, 1990). - Urban-industrial society encouraged an ever more sophisticated division of labour and a growing dependence on technologically advanced communications systems to link the varied industrial skills into a coherent and viable national economic whole (Harvey, 1982 and 1985). - The actual production of goods and services became increasingly separate from the means of production by the commodification of the workforce. - Labour became just another tradable element in the marketplace, rather than being ineluctably tied into a rigid feudal system. - In theory, workers were able to sell their skills wherever they liked, to the highest bidder, even though in practice, of course, all kinds of constraints, such as tied company housing, ensured that the market in labour was far from free for many. - Nevertheless, there was a new flexibility that would have been unthinkable within the more rigid framework of pre-industrial agrarian society. - Also, the competition between employers at all levels helped prevent, though not totally eliminate, the creation of exclusive monopolies. - Although many major industrial cities in North America and Europe were dominated for many years by a single employer, such as Pittsbugh and the US Steel Corporation, Essen in Germany and Krupp A.G., which effectively nullified the advantages of a commodified labour market, over time these monopolies loosened their grip, as the cities grew and the employment market diversified through the influx of new firms and companies, all competing for labour. - An important feature of the urban-industrial, capitalist environment was the fiction it created that the economic and political environments were separate, the market supposedly ensuring that economic interests were fully engaged competing with each other, leaving states to provide the political shell within which the economy functioned. - It was a fiction because the supposed separation was demonstrably false. - Economic leaders always sought to manipulate the political system to further their own interests and, to this end, spent much of their time and energy trying to establish themselves in positions of political power and influence. - Equally, the state had a quite legitimate interest in ensuring that its economic infrastructure flourished, not least in a highly competitive international environment. - Indeed, one of the most serious criticisms levelled against the capitalist system has been that, after a period of sustained success in expanding world trade throughout the greater part of the nineteenth century, it failed to control competition between states and establish a stable international order capable of preventing two world wars (Carr, 1968). - At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is now under attack from a different direction, for failing to prevent the development of a global trade system that is manifestly unfair, consigning the bulk of the global population to a life of poverty (see Chapter 11). ### The Iron Curtain (Box 3.3) - The Iron Curtain was the dividing line between Soviet Communist-controlled Central and Eastern Europe and Western democratic Europe for more than four decades in the mid-twentieth century. - The term was first coined by the British wartime Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill, in a speech on 5 March 1946 at Fulton, Missouri in the USA - He defined the Iron Curtain as a line running from Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic. - He pointed out that a host of European capital cities were now firmly within the Soviet sphere of influence: Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, and Sofia. - The clear implication was that Europe was severely diminished as a result. - Subsequently, the definition of the Iron Curtain was modified to represent the whole of the dividing line between the Communist and free worlds in Europe, from the Northern Cape on the Norwegian-Finnish border in the north to the Greek and Turkish frontiers with Communist-controlled Yugoslavia and Bulgaria in the south. - The Iron Curtain has been described as 'one of the most powerful geographical barriers in continental Europe' (Blacksell, 1981, p. 15) - It provided a most durable political dividing line until the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1989/90. - Since then, the Iron Curtain has become a historical curiosity and increasingly irrelevant to the geography of Europe. - All vestiges of its former significance disappeared with the expansion of the EU to include eight former Communist states in 2004. ## The age of mercantilism - In 1800, nation states barely existed in the form they are recognised today and the few that did were almost exclusively concentrated in Europe. - Nominally, the bulk of the globe was encompassed politically by mercantilist empires, with the land held in the name of some far-off monarch, or some other absolute feudal ruler. - In reality though, these were often little more than a European conceit, consisting of scattered coastal trading posts, with only intermittent and nominal links to their European sponsors. - The largest of these, both territorially and in terms of the scale of trade, was the British Empire (Figure 3.1), ranging over much of North America, the Indian subcontinent, and Australia, but other European states, including Denmark, France, Portugal, and Spain; also had substantial overseas territories over which they claimed sovereignty, with all its associated exclusive rights. - The reality everywhere, however, was that imperial control was for the most part nominal and the indigenous peoples were largely unaffected and able to continue their lives much as they did before the coming of the European enlightenment. - The imperial model was not exclusively European. - The Ottoman Empire, with its heart in the west of modern-day Turkey, covered large parts of north Africa and Asia Minor (now more usually incorporated into the wider region of the Middle East), as well as extending deep into the Balkan peninsula in south-east Europe. - The Russian Empire covered most of northern Asia and extended across the Bering Sea into North America in the east, as well as encompassing most of the Caucasus in the west, thus giving Russia too a toehold in Europe. - The Chinese Empire already formed a monolithic bloc, covering the greater part of the south-east Asian mainland, much as it still does today. - The USA was beginning its dramatic westward expansion across the central part of North America. ## The tide of nationalism - The latter part of the eighteenth century witnessed a fundamental change in popular attitudes to government. - Across the world there was a growing restlessness and resentment against feudal absolutism, especially when it was exercised from a faraway continent in little more than name. - In North America, a quarter of a century of struggle to oust British rule culminated in the establishment of the USA in 1783. - In Europe, the huge upheaval of the French Revolution took proper root in 1789, presaging more than two decades of war, bloodshed, and change, which completely recast the political landscape of the continent. - Everywhere the overt goal was for more representative government, which would be responsive to the emergent tide of nationalism, as discussed at the beginning of this chapter (see also ‘Nationalism and self-determination’ in Chapter 5). - Somewhat surprisingly, the temporal sequence for the founding of the newly independent states that emerged as a result of the massive outbreaks of revolutionary zeal did not quite mirror the fervour of the revolutions themselves, especially in Europe. - It was in the Americas where a new order first became firmly established. - Following its success in establishing itself as a republic, the USA was eager to see an end to European colonial rule throughout the whole of both North and South America. - For their part, the European colonial powers, Spain, France, Portugal, and Britain, were unable to sustain simultaneous wars on either side of the Atlantic, especially as the internal political structure of their pre-revolutionary states was being completely recast. - From the beginning of the nineteenth century, France; Portugal, and Spain all began a rapid withdrawal to their European heartlands, following in the wake of the British after the American Revolution. - After Mexico became a republic in 1823, republican fervour swept across the greater part of the Americas throughout the rest of the century. - In some cases, the newly established republics were relatively short lived, being incorporated into larger neighbours after a relatively short interval. - The State of Texas, for instance, fought a 10-year intermittent war to separate itself from Mexico, finally becoming independent in 1836. - However, a growing stream of European immigrants from the north promoted ever closer ties with the USA and, in 1845, Texas became another state in the growing American Union. - The republican movement proved irresistible across the Americas and by the turn of the twentieth century, virtually the whole of Central and South America was governed by nineteen independent republican states. - There is no doubt that this avalanche of state-building was much encouraged by the distraction of the former European colonial powers and a determination on the part of the USA to allow them no opportunity to re-establish a colonial foothold in the Americas. - Under the terms of the Monroe Doctrine (see Chapter 9), it committed itself to providing naval protection against any threat to the independence of the newly founded republics. - Ironically, the only major area that has remained untouched by the republican tide is Canada, which shares a 5,000-km long border with the USA and still retains the British monarch as its nominal head of state, a final remnant of the traditional colonial era. - In Europe, nationalist fervour was translated into new republics rather more slowly. - The Congress of Vienna was first convened in 1814 to re-establish political order after the Napoleonic Wars, and the participants ( the four major victors, Britain, Russia, Prussia, and Austria, together with defeated France) were certainly not in any mood to adopt the populist ethos of the French Revolution. - The decisions made by the Congress actually put the clock back, because of the reactionary way in which they tried to revive Europe’s traditional attachment to monarchy, rather than embracing the new republicanism (Davies, 1996, p. 762) (see Chapter 9). - Although the deliberations led to the outlines of the modern political structure of the Low Countries and Scandinavia, as well as Switzerland, they also resulted in the imposition of a string of new, or resurrected, monarchies. - The most notable example was the Kingdom of the Netherlands (covering both the modern-day Netherlands and Belgium), but in the future unified states of Germany and Italy there also remained a plethora of kingdoms, duchies, principalities, and papal states whose government was far removed from the popular aspirations of the revolution. - Nevertheless, the revolutionary zeal was only temporarily quelled and soon began to reassert itself. - By the middle of the nineteenth century, programmes of political reform, both with and without accompanying revolutions, were widespread across Europe. - In Great Britain and Ireland, the changes were internal and largely peaceful with the Reform Act (1832) initiating what was to become a fundamental redistribution of political power away from the monarch and a landed elite to the people as a whole. - Elsewhere, territorial redistribution and wholesale political change were required, though it mostly amounted to a severe curtailment in the powers of hereditary rulers rather than in their wholesale replacement by republics. - The patchwork of political units in both Germany and Italy was gradually merged, so that by 1870 it formed two somewhat precariously unified political entities, one led by an emperor, the other by a king. - Spain survived the loss of the greater part of its empire in South America and the Pacific to remain an independent kingdom, even if one riven by regional discord. - The Netherlands and Belgium, united under a single monarch in 1815, became two separate monarchies in 1830. - The most radical changes in Europe occurred in the Balkan peninsula, where the Turkish Ottoman Empire progressively disintegrated throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Glenny, 1999). - The volatile mix of different religions and languages ensured that the whole process of change, undoing more than three centuries of Turkish rule, was both violent and chaotic, creating an unstable mixture of mostly small monarchies, which struggled to produce any real sense of national unity. - Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzogovina, Albania, and Turkey itself all trace their modern roots back to this era and all have experienced substantial change in the process, many seeing their monarchies dismantled to make way for republics. - With the exceptions of Greece, Turkey, and Albania, these in turn were enveloped by Soviet Communism during the Cold War, between 1947 and 1990, losing most of their effective political independence, only to re-emerge after varying degrees of further inter-ethnic bloodshed in 1989, after the collapse of the Soviet Union (see ‘Managing difference’ in Chapter 5). - The spread of states - At the beginning of the third millennium, the world political map comprises some 180 independent states, varying hugely in both area and population. - The most extensive is the Russian Federation, covering 17,075,400 sq km; the most populous the People's Republic of China, with an estimated 1,400 million inhabitants; and the smallest, in terms of both area and population, the state of the Vatican City, a micro-state located entirely within the Italian city of Rome, covering 0.44 sq km and with only just over 1,000 inhabitants. - This complex network embraces the land masses of all the continents with the exception of Antarctica, as well as incorporating increasingly large tracts of the oceans; yet it is almost entirely a product of the past two centuries. ## The age of mercantilism - In 1800, nation states barely existed in the form they are recognised today and the few that did were almost exclusively concentrated in Europe. - Nominally, the bulk of the globe was encompassed politically by mercantilist empires, with the land held in the name of some far-off monarch, or some other absolute feudal ruler. - In reality though, these were often little more than a European conceit, consisting of scattered coastal trading posts, with only intermittent and nominal links to their European sponsors. - The largest of these, both territorially and in terms of the scale of trade, was the British Empire (Figure 3.1), ranging over much of North America, the Indian subcontinent, and Australia, but other European states, including Denmark, France, Portugal, and Spain; also had substantial overseas territories over which they claimed sovereignty, with all its associated exclusive rights. - The reality everywhere, however, was that imperial control was for the most part nominal and the indigenous peoples were largely unaffected and able to continue their lives much as they did before the coming of the European enlightenment. - The imperial model was not exclusively European. - The Ottoman Empire, with its heart in the west of modern-day Turkey, covered large parts of north Africa and Asia Minor (now more usually incorporated into the wider region of the Middle East), as well as extending deep into the Balkan peninsula in south-east Europe. - The Russian Empire covered most of northern Asia and extended across the Bering Sea into North America in the east, as well as encompassing most of the Caucasus in the west, thus giving Russia too a toehold in Europe. - The Chinese Empire already formed a monolithic bloc, covering the greater part of the south-east Asian mainland, much as it still does today. - The USA was beginning its dramatic westward. expansion across the central part of North America. ## The tide of nationalism - The latter part of the eighteenth century witnessed a fundamental change in popular attitudes to government. - Across the world there was a growing restlessness and resentment against feudal absolutism, especially when it was exercised from a faraway continent in little more than name. - In North America, a quarter of a century of struggle to oust British rule culminated in the establishment of the USA in 1783. - In Europe, the huge upheaval of the French Revolution took proper root in 1789, presaging more than two decades of war, bloodshed, and change, which completely recast the political landscape of the continent. - Everywhere the overt goal was for more representative government, which would be responsive to the emergent tide of nationalism, as discussed at the beginning of this chapter (see also ‘Nationalism and self-determination’ in Chapter 5). - Somewhat surprisingly, the temporal sequence for the founding of the newly independent states that emerged as a result of the massive outbreaks of revolutionary zeal did not quite mirror the fervour of the revolutions themselves, especially in Europe. - It was in the Americas where a new order first became firmly established. - Following its success in establishing itself as a republic, the USA was eager to see an end to European colonial rule throughout the whole of both North and South America. - For their part, the European colonial powers, Spain, France, Portugal, and Britain, were unable to sustain simultaneous wars on either side of the Atlantic, especially as the internal political structure of their pre-revolutionary states was being completely recast. - From the beginning of the nineteenth century, France; Portugal, and Spain all began a rapid withdrawal to their European heartlands, following in the wake of the British after the American Revolution. - After Mexico became a republic in 1823, republican fervour swept across the greater part of the Americas throughout the rest of the century. - In some cases, the newly established republics were relatively short lived, being incorporated into larger neighbours after a relatively short interval. - The State of Texas, for instance, fought a 10-year intermittent war to separate itself from Mexico, finally becoming independent in 1836. - However, a growing stream of European immigrants from the north promoted ever closer ties with the USA and, in 1845, Texas became another state in the growing American Union. - The republican movement proved irresistible across the Americas and by the turn of the twentieth century, virtually the whole of Central and South America was governed by nineteen independent republican states. - There is no doubt that this avalanche of state-building was much encouraged by the distraction of the former European colonial powers and a determination on the part of the USA to allow them no opportunity to re-establish a colonial foothold in the Americas. - Under the terms of the Monroe Doctrine (see Chapter 9), it committed itself to providing naval protection against any threat to the independence of the newly founded republics. - Ironically, the only major area that has remained untouched by the republican tide is Canada, which shares a 5,000-km long border with the USA and still retains the British monarch as its nominal head of state, a final remnant of the traditional colonial era. - In Europe, nationalist fervour was translated into new republics rather more slowly. - The Congress of Vienna was first convened in 1814 to re-establish political order after the Napoleonic Wars, and the participants ( the four major victors, Britain, Russia, Prussia, and Austria, together with defeated France) were certainly not in any mood to adopt the populist ethos of the French Revolution. - The decisions made by the Congress actually put the clock back, because of the reactionary way in which they tried to revive Europe’s traditional attachment to monarchy, rather than embracing the new republicanism (Davies, 1996, p. 762) (see Chapter 9). - Although the deliberations led to the outlines of the modern political structure of the Low Countries and Scandinavia, as well as Switzerland, they also resulted in the imposition of a string of new, or resurrected, monarchies. - The most notable example was the Kingdom of the Netherlands (covering both the modern-day Netherlands and Belgium), but in the future unified states of Germany and Italy there also remained a plethora of kingdoms, duchies, principalities, and papal states whose government was far removed from the popular aspirations of the revolution. - Nevertheless, the revolutionary zeal was only temporarily quelled and soon began to reassert itself. - By the middle of the nineteenth century, programmes of political reform, both with and without accompanying revolutions, were widespread across Europe. - In Great Britain and Ireland, the changes were internal and largely peaceful with the Reform Act (1832) initiating what was to become a fundamental redistribution of political power away from the monarch and a landed elite to the people as a whole. - Elsewhere, territorial redistribution and wholesale political change were required, though it mostly amounted to a severe curtailment in the powers of hereditary rulers rather than in their wholesale replacement by republics. - The patchwork of political units in both Germany and Italy was gradually merged, so that by 1870 it formed two somewhat precariously unified political entities, one led by an emperor, the other by a king. - Spain survived the loss of the greater part of its empire in South America and the Pacific to remain an independent kingdom, even if one riven by regional discord. - The Netherlands and Belgium, united under a single monarch in 1815, became two separate monarchies in 1830. - The most radical changes in Europe occurred in the Balkan peninsula, where the Turkish Ottoman Empire progressively disintegrated throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Glenny, 1999). - The volatile mix of different religions and languages ensured that the whole process of change, undoing more than three centuries of Turkish rule, was both violent and chaotic, creating an unstable mixture of mostly small monarchies, which struggled to produce any real sense of national unity. - Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzogovina, Albania, and Turkey itself all trace their modern roots back to this era and all have experienced substantial change in the process, many seeing their monarchies dismantled to make way for republics. - With the exceptions of Greece, Turkey, and Albania, these in turn were enveloped by Soviet Communism during the Cold War, between 1947 and 1990, losing most of their effective political independence, only to re-emerge after varying degrees of further inter-ethnic bloodshed in 1989, after the collapse of the Soviet Union (see ‘Managing difference’ in Chapter 5). - The spread of states - At the beginning of the third millennium, the world political map comprises some 180 independent states, varying hugely in both area and population. - The most extensive is the Russian Federation, covering 17,075,400 sq km; the most populous the People’s Republic of China, with an estimated 1,400 million inhabitants; and the smallest, in terms of both area and population, the state of the Vatican City, a micro-state located entirely within the Italian city of Rome, covering 0.44 sq km and with only just over 1,000 inhabitants. - This complex network embraces the land masses of all the continents with the exception of Antarctica, as well as incorporating increasingly large tracts of the oceans; yet it is almost entirely a product of the past two centuries.