Ingy Higazy
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz
Lamented by many as the reason behind the collapse of multiculturalism and the freedom of mobility, the emergence of the modern state has restructured—and continues to restructure—social life for many around the world. For several communities, associating the state and its emergence with violence, wars, and, in some cases, genocide is not uncommon. Whether in the First and Second World Wars, the Algerian War of Independence, or the Rwandan Genocide, the state has been a central contentious actor: it waged war, it occupied other states, and it furthered narrow ethnic agendas. For other communities, however, the state has been a guarantor of rights and freedoms, and the provider of educational, health, and other social services. Yet, what exactly is the modern state? How is the state both a maker of war and a guarantor of social provisions? What is modern about it? And how does it differ from the forms of political organization, mainly empires and dynasties, that preceded it?
The textbook definition of the modern state conceives of the state as a territorially defined space, with a population, a central or federal government, and a common language or shared heritage and/or ethnicity. Thus, implied in the definition, and in fact in the very construction, of the modern state is the role of nationalism. In this regard, modern states are mostly nation-states (see Anderson 1983). The Oxford Dictionary defines the state as a political community. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the state is the central subject of study of the discipline of Political Science, as well as the fields of Political Theory and Critical Social Theory. Accordingly, both when and how the modern state emerged have been key questions in guiding the work of political theorists, historians, and sociologists alike. Nevertheless, the person to begin with would be a prolific theorist and philosopher whose thinking and writing about the state predate the disciplinary divisions of the Social Sciences and Humanities: Karl Marx.
Marx specifically wrote about the state form under capitalism. Marx theorized the state as the apparatus of the bourgeoisie, specifically writing with Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto (1848) that the “executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” For Marx, therefore, the state form is the expression of the capitalist mode of production and the circulation of value, and, as such, the class struggle (Harvey 2017, 13-14). As David Harvey, in Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason (2017), explains, the state appropriates surplus value in the form of taxes (15). The state also issues and circulates money. Thus, not only is the state party to the social relations of (re)production, but it is “an active agent and element in securing the further circulation of capital” (15). In doing so, as Harvey aptly writes, the “state exercises considerable influence by way of the effective demand it commands in seeking to procure military equipment, all sorts of means of surveillance, management and bureaucratic administration” (16, see also 41-42). In this regard, Marx and Marxian thinking enable us to find an answer to what is modern about the modern state: precisely its political economic function.
Thinkers like Antonio Gramsci were directly influenced by Marx’s thinking and writings about the state. Gramsci, writing in Italy in the 1930s, sought to theorize the triumph of capitalism through his theory of hegemony (see Bates 1975). In so doing, Gramsci thought about variants of the capitalist state form. Additionally, line of thinking about the state has been further developed in what is referred to as structural Marxian thought—most notable in this regard being the French thinker Louis Althusser. Althusser in particular developed his theory of the capitalist state by distinguishing between the ideological state apparatus (ISA) and the repressive state apparatus (RSA) (see Althusser 2014). Althusser thus furthered a Marxian reading of the modern state—though not immune to criticism, particularly by the emergence of French post-structural thinking in the 1970s and 80s, whose focus was more on the minute processes of capitalism, as opposed to the grand narratives. Finally, among the most influential and formative debates within Marxian thought on the nature of the state is that between the British sociologist Ralph Miliband. and the French-Greek sociologist Nicos Poulantzas, beginning in 1969 (see Barrow 2002).
In non-Marxian traditions, the German theorist and sociologist Max Weber, considered to be among the ‘founders’ of the discipline of Sociology, distinguished the modern state from preceding forms of political organization by capitalizing on its functions and bureaucracies, which unfolded on unprecedented scales. For Weber, the modern state is modern in the sense that it has a monopoly over the use of legitimate force (Adair-Toteff 2014). This also renders the modern state a sovereign state, with legitimate claim to the use of force and law within its defined and bordered territory. The centrality of violence to the trajectory of the modern state is also observable in the work of the late prominent sociologist Charles Tilly. Tilly theorized state formation as a process intimately bound to processes of war, organized violence, and taxation, which all combined elicited the organization of mass bureaucracies that later became characteristic features and functions of modern states. In his seminal Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1992 (1990), Tilly famously argues that “states made war and war made states” (Tilly quoted in Gongora 1997, 323). Finally, critiques of colonialism yielded their own theoretical understandings of the modern state, as much as colonialism yielded a colonial state formation. Postcolonial theorists in particular have reckoned with the trials and tribulations of the colonial state(s) and the postcolonial states that followed. Among the earliest postcolonial thinkers of the state is the Martinican thinker Frantz Fanon, which he most famously penned in his last and seminal work, The Wretched of the Earth (1963). In this regard, it is important to note that the settler-colonial state also bears its own particular genealogy, whose foremost theorist is the late Patrick Wolfe.
Finally, perhaps one of the most striking and troublesome features of the modern state is its borders. Borders are central to both the functioning of states, and, accordingly, to their study. With respect to the state’s political-economic functions, borders are crucial, as the mobility of labor is conditioned, managed, and policed by border regimes. Genevieve LeBaron and Nicola Phillips, in “States and the Political Economy of Unfree Labour” (2018), give credence to the role of states and their militarized borders in creating exploitative labor conditions, primarily for migrant workers across the globe. Focusing their study on North America, and particularly on the borders of the United States, LeBaron and Phillips argue that neoliberal globalization has restructured state-capital-labor relations, which in turn had its expression in increased militarization of border zones and the rapid devaluation of (even legal) migrant workers (LeBaron and Phillips 2018, 16). In doing so, both LeBaron and Phillips are keen on proving that neoliberal globalization has not, in fact, ushered in the end of the state, but that in fact the state was a central architect of neoliberal capitalism. This line of inquiry has been particularly growing, especially with the onset and intensity of the so-called European refugee crisis. Works such as Reece Jones’ Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move (2016) interrogate the proliferation of border regimes as an inherently violent process, that while sometimes territorially transcending the state, still resides at the heart of its functions and its logics of containment and control. In this regard, states continue to shape global politics in our contemporary moment. And for this very reason, theoretically engaging the state has, and continues to be, a timely and generative endeavor.
(See CAPITALIST STATE, GEOPOLITICS, LIBERALISM)
Bibliography
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