- This article discusses states as sovereign political entities. For other meanings, see state (disambiguation).
A state is an organized political community occupying a definite territory, having an organized government, and possessing internal and external sovereignty. Recognition of the state's claim to independence by other states, enabling it to enter into international agreements, is often important to the establishment of its statehood, although some theories do not make this a requirement - for instance, the Montevideo Convention. The "state" can also be defined in terms of domestic conditions, specifically the monopolization of the legitimate use of force within a country.
The word "state" in contemporary parlance often means the "Westphalian state", in reference to the Peace of Westphalia of 1648. In this sense, the modern state is an entity that enjoys extensive autonomy in its domestic economic and social policy, largely free from interference from other states and powers. A number of modern commentators have claimed the decline of the Westphalian state as the principal actor of the international system, pointing to economic, cultural, political, and technological changes in the world, such as globalization and the emergence of regional and supernational groupings such as the European Union.
The term is also used to describe subnational territorial divisions within a federal system, such as the fifty U.S. states. See state (law) and state (non-sovereign).
The terms country, nation, state and land are casually used as synonyms, but in a more strict usage they are distinguished:
- country is the geographical area
- nation designates a people, however national and international both confusingly refer as well to matters pertaining to what are strictly states, as in national capital, international law
- state is about government, and an entity in international law
- land may be used for "a country and its people" but also thought of as country belonging to a nation or a monarch
Currently, the entire land surface of the Earth is divided among the territories of the roughly two hundred states now existing, with the special case of Antarctica and a variety of disputed territories.
Etymology
The word "state" originates from the medieval state or regal chair upon which the head of state (usually a monarch) would sit. By process of metonymy, the word state became used to refer to both the head of state and the power entity he represented (though the former meaning has fallen out of use). A similar association of terms can today be seen in the practice of referring to government buildings as having authority, for example "The White House today released a press statement..."
Formation of the state
In Europe, the state was first philosophized about in a systematic way by Plato; however, his concept of the ‘state’ was essentially theoretical and was primarily intended for the Greeks and their system of city-states.
The fall of the Roman Empire and the Great Migrations changed the character of European politics. The barbarian kingdoms and chieftains that followed the Roman Empire were ephemeral and transitory and bore little resemblance to the modern state. Even the kingdom of Charlemagne was fleeting; without the tradition of primogeniture, it dissolved into three smaller kingdoms with the Treaty of Verdun in 843. Instead, these kingdoms were treated more as land holdings by the royalty that ruled them.
The lack of a real successor to the Roman Empire in Western Europe created a power vacuum. The kingdoms of Western Europe were besieged by invaders on the frontiers - first, the Muslim invasions from the south, then a series of new migrations from the east and finally the Viking invasions from the north. The solution that evolved out of this affairs was decidedly opposed to the system of independent states and temporary alliances that dominate the modern international system. Religion, which had rarely been a factor in the power calculations of Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire, became the cornerstone of an extremely loose pan-European defensive bloc under the aegis of the Catholic Church. This system produced an extensive framework of institutions - feudalism - that regulated internal conflict but enabled Western Europe to confront exterior threats, even while no individual secular entity was truly independent in the sense of the modern state. This system asserted itself abroad in the form of the Crusades as the Middle Ages progress. In 1302, Pope Boniface VIII stated that the political powers of Christendom exercised their prerogatives “at the command and sufferance of the priest.” This limited the power of kings, who were obliged to pledge their ultimate allegance to the Pope.
The Holy Roman Empire, one of the strongest medieval authorities, emerged as a competitor to Papal power under Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, who invaded Italy to press his claims to secular authority in the mid-12th century. The weakening of the papacy was a major theme of the Middle Ages; the Western Schism in the later 14th century, a dispute over papal succession, was exploited by secular authorities and contributed to their growing power. The emergence of large, stable land holdings by single dynasties - for instance, Spain, France, and Castile - enabled them to take a more active and independent role than their traditionally subsidiary role in the earlier middle ages.
This shift to more independent, more secular actors would become a major point of controversy in Early Modern Europe. The great dynasties of Europe dramatically consolidated power by the beginning of the 16th century; additionally, the external threats to Europe had considerably lessened. The Reformation was to have a powerful impact on the structure of European politics; the dispute was not only theological, but also threatened the very fabric of the ancient political institutions of feudalism. The bloody conflicts that followed, blending the religious and political, pitted those who asserted the authority of the Pope (and in Germany, the Holy Roman Emperor) against those who asserted the authority of secular authorities and their sovereign ability to make internal policy, particularly when that policy reflected religious affiliation, Roman Catholic or Protestant.
These conflicts culminated in the Thirty Years' War of the 17th century. In 1648, the powers of Europe signed the Treaty of Westphalia which ended the religious violence for purely political motives and the Church was stripped of temporal power and replaced with the divine right of kings. The principle of "cuius regio, eius religio" established at Westphalia and previously in the Peace of Augsburg set a precedent of noninterference in other states' internal affairs that was key in the evolution of the modern state. In Germany, the office of the Holy Roman Emperor, the most prominent symbol of lingering institutions of feudalism, was emasculated as a secular authority in favor of the constituent elements of the Holy Roman Empire. The modern 'state' was born.
The state continued to develop as monarchs brought nobles and free towns into line and amassed spectacular resources and prestige. The growing numbers of household servants eventually became known as the bureaucracy after the elevation of the Republican ideal.
Nearly a century and a half after the Peace of Westphalia, the state came into its full existence through the French Revolution. Claiming 'national will' as its justification, Napoleon and the Grande Armee of France annihilated their enemies. In response, conquered and neighboring principalities discarded their old systems and adopted the national model. Concurrently, the state-led nations subjugated the globe and the rest of the world attempted to mimic the structures of the West. These endeavors met with varying degrees of success leading to the geopolitical situation prevalent in the 20th century.
International point of view
The legal criteria for statehood are not obvious. A document that is often quoted on the matter is the Montevideo Convention from 1933, the first article of which states:
- The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: (a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states.
Also, in article 3 it very clearly states that statehood is independent of recognition by other states. This is the declarative theory of statehood. While the Montevideo is a regional American convention and has no legal effect outside the Americas, some have nonetheless seen it as an accurate statement of customary international law.
On the other hand, article 3 of the convention is attacked by the advocates of the constitutive theory of statehood, where a state exists only insofar as it is recognized by other states. Which theory is correct is a controversial issue in international law. An example in practice was the collapse of central government in Somalia in the early 1990s: the Montevideo convention would imply that the state of Somalia no longer existed, and the subsequently declared republic of Somaliland (comprising part of the so-called "former" Somalia) may meet the criteria for statehood. However the self-declared republic has not achieved recognition by other states.
Article 1 of the convention is also attacked by those who claim that it fails to take into account the complicated situations of military occupation, territorial cession, and governments in exile. Richard W. Hartzell is a leading proponent of this view, and stresses that the four criteria of article 1 need to be expanded to nine. See The Montevideo Convention and Military Occupation.
The domestic point of view
Looked at from the point of view of an individual nation, the state is a centralized organization of the whole country. Those studying this dimension emphasize the relationship between the state and its people. The English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued that in order to avoid a multi-sided civil war, in which life was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short", individuals must necessarily surrender many of their rights -- including that of attacking each other -- to the "Leviathan", a unified and centralized state. In this tradition, Max Weber and Norbert Elias defined the state as an organization of people that has a monopoly on legitimate violence in a particular geographic area. Also in this tradition, the state differs from the "government": the latter refers to the group of people who make decisions for the state.
For Weber, this was an "ideal type" or model or pure case of the state. Many institutions that have been called "states" do not live up to this definition. For example, a country such as Iraq (as of April 2005) would not be seen as truly having a state since the ability to use violence was shared between the U.S. occupiers and a variety of independent or insurgent militias (plus "terrorist" groups), while order and security were not maintained. The official Iraqi government had very limited military or police power of its own. The official Iraqi government also lacked sovereignty because of the role of U.S. domination. In fact, it might be said that while the Iraqis have a government, it is the U.S. military occupiers (and their allies, the U.K., etc.) that constitute the state. Even that state has so far not succeeded in monopolizing the legitimate use of force in Iraq and so represents a "failed state".
Other countries, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (the former Zaire), suffer from having a "failed state", where civil war continues to this day.
One of the most basic characteristics of a state is regulation of property rights, investment, trade and the commodity markets (in food, fuel, etc.) typically using its own currency. Although many states (by their own decision) increasingly cede these powers to trade bloc entities, e.g. North American Free Trade Agreement, European Union, it is always controversial to do so, and opens the question of whether these blocs are in fact simply larger states. The study of political economy, which evolved into the modern study of economics, deals with these specific questions in more detail.
However, although states are often influenced in this way, they are nonetheless much stronger in relation to international organizations or to other states than lower (substate) political subdivisions normally are. But the trend at the moment is for the power of superstate levels of governance to increase, and there is no sign of this increase abating. Many (especially those who favour constitutional theories of international law) therefore reject as outdated the idea of sovereignty, and view the state as just the chief political subdivision of the planet.
Philosophies of the state
Different political philosophies have distinct opinions concerning the state as a domestic organization monopolizing force. In the modern era, these philosophies emerged with the rise of capitalism, which coincided with the (re)emergence of the state as a separate and centralized sector of society. Philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau pondered issues concerning the ideal and actual roles of the state. Recent philosophers like John Rawls and Robert Nozick were more concerned with distributive justice and the morality of exercising political power.
There are four theories about the origin (and indirectly the justification) of the state. They are:
- Supernatural ("Divine Right of Kings") - E.g. Medieval European monarchies, Oriental despotisms.
- Consensual (state evolves from society) - John Locke, social contract, 'consent of the governed'
- Internal conflict (class warfare) - Marx's class conflict rooted in the relation between necessary product and surplus product mediated by a bureaucracy.
- Conquest (external conflict) - conquering race, nomads plundering farmers
The first two are based on consent, the last two on conflict. Nowadays, there are four major philosophies of the state: liberalism, conservatism, Marxism, and anarchism. Liberalism is based on the consensual theory; Marxism on the internal conflict theory; anarchism and some forms of libertarianism are based on the conquest theory.
In broadly-defined liberal thinking, the state should express the public interest, the interests of the whole society, and to reconcile that with those of individuals. (This job seems best performed by a democratically-controlled state, but different types of liberalism put different meanings on the word "democracy".) The state provides public goods and other kinds of collective consumption, while preventing individuals from free-riding (taking advantage of collective consumption without paying) by forcing them to pay taxes.
Within this school, there is a wide variety of differences of opinion, varying from free-market libertarianism to modern, New Deal, or social liberalism. The main debate along this line concerns the ideal size and role of the state. Libertarians argue for a small or "minimal" state, which simply protects property rights and enforces individual contracts. They see State redistribution of wealth as plunder on a grand scale, and note the many examples of government failure. On the other hand, the New Deal liberals (social democrats) argue that the state has a greater positive role to play, given the problems of market failure and gross inequalities in the distribution of income and wealth in a capitalist system. (See social democrats and democratic socialists.) In general, almost no liberals see the state as currently living up to the philosophical ideal, and therefore argue for change in one direction or another.
In the Marxist school of thought, the core role of the state in practice is to enforce the existing system of property and personal rights, class domination, and exploitation. It also mediates in all types of social conflicts, and supplies necessary social-infrastructural conditions for society as a whole. Under such systems as feudalism, the lords used their own military force to exploit their vassals. Under capitalism, Marxists say, the use of force is centralized in a specialized organization which protects the capitalists' class monopoly of ownership of the means of production, allowing the exploitation of those without such ownership. In modern Marxian theory, such class domination can coincide with other forms of domination (such as patriarchy and ethnic hierarchies).
Further, in Marxist theory, classes and other forms of exploitation should be abolished by establishing a socialist system, which initially requires a dictatorship of the proletariat. According to Marxist theory, the state ought subsequently to slowly "wither away" as the dictatorship devolves more and more power "to the people" in new systems of organisation, and complements representative democracy with direct democracy. Once the process is complete, the communist social order has been achieved and the state would no longer exists as an entity separate from the people. Thus, the ideal condition of the state in Marxist theory is the same as in anarchist theory: ideally, the state would not exist at all.
In some conservative thinking, the existing structure of traditions and hierarchies (of class, patriarchy, ethnic dominance, etc.) are seen as benefiting society overall. Thus, in a way, these conservatives accept some ideas from both the Marxist and the liberal schools of thought, but view them in a different light: the state forces people to accept class and other kinds of domination, but this is seen as being for their own good. This perspective posits that, in general, current traditions only exist because they have been demonstrably successful in the past. Further, as with the liberals, the state is seen as always existing and/or "natural". "Withering away" will never happen.
In anarchist thinking, the state is nothing but an unnecessary and exploitative segment of society. Totally rejecting the Hobbesian notion that only a State can prevent chaos, anarchists argue that if the state and its restrictions on individual freedom were abolished, people could figure out how to work together peacefully and individual creativity would be unleashed. Contrary to the Marxist perspective, the anarchists see the State as an unnecessary evil, rather than a tool to be used in the class struggle. One of the most extreme forms of the anti-state anarchist and libertarian perspectives is anarcho-capitalism, in which individuals enter into voluntary contracts for the provision of all social services, including arbitration and police services.
See also
References
- Cassirer, Ernst (1955) The Myth of the State, Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books. ISBN 0313237905
- Van Creveld, Martin (1999) The Rise and Decline of the State, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 052165629X
- McNeill, William H. (1991) The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226561410
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