Whether organized religion and the notion of fixed, unchanging moral law have or have not lost some of their power as social regulators, the state, the third great historic agent of social order, at first sight seems to have kept its end up much better. It has never been so widely taken for granted. There are more states - recognized, geographically defined political units claiming legislative sovereignty and a monopoly of the use of force within their own borders - than ever before. More people than ever before look to government as their best chance of securing well-being rather than as their inevitable enemy. Politics as a contest to capture state power has at times apparently replaced religion (sometimes even appearing to eclipse market economics) as the focus of faith that can move mountains.
One of the most visible institutional marks left by Europe on world history has been the reorganization of international life as basically a matter of sovereign (and now, in name at least, often republican and usually national) states. Beginning in the seventeenth century, this was already in the nineteenth century beginning to look a possible global outcome, and the process was virtually completed in the twentieth century. With it went the diffusion of similar forms of state machinery, sometimes through adoption, sometimes through imposition first by imperial rulers. This was assumed to be a concomitant of modernization. The sovereign state is now taken for granted, as in many places it still was not even a century ago. This has been largely a mechanical consequence of a slow demolition of empires. That new states should come into being to replace them was scarcely questioned at any stage. With the collapse of the USSR almost a half-century after the dissolution of other empires, the global generalization of the constitutional language of the sovereignty of the people, representative institutions and the separation of powers reached its greatest extent.
The aggrandizement of the state - if we may so put it - thus long met with little effective resistance. Even in countries where governments have traditionally been distrusted or where institutions exist to check them, people tend now to feel that they are much less resistible than even a few years ago. The strongest checks on the abuse of power remain those of habit and assumption; so long as electorates in liberal states can assume that governments will not quickly fall back on the use of force, they do not feel very alarmed. But the cause of liberal democracy worldwide does not always look very hopeful; there are now more authoritarian political regimes in the world than in 1939 (though, since changes in Greece, Portugal and Spain in the 1970s, and later in eastern European countries, few in Europe). This is a measure of the narrowing base of what was once thought to be the cause of the future, but seemed to turn out to be only that of a few advanced societies of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, the forms of liberal politics have, indeed, in one sense prospered, for democracy and constitutionalism are more talked about and nationalism is stronger than ever. Yet the substantial freedoms once associated with these ideas are often non-existent or conspicuously in danger and even if most states now claim to be democratic, the lack of any but historical and circumstantial connections between nationalism and liberalism is more obvious than ever.
One reason for this is that those ideas have been exported to contexts inimical to them. It is unhistorical to deplore the outcome; as Burke pointed out long ago, political principles always take their colour from circumstances. Often in the last half-century it has been shown that representative institutions and democratic forms cannot work properly in societies lacking solid foundations in habits coherent with them, or where powerful divisive influences are at work. In such circumstances, the imposition of an authoritarian style of government has often been the best way of resisting social fragmentation once the discipline imposed by a colonial power is withdrawn. Only too obviously, this has not meant great freedom in most post-colonial countries. Whether greater happiness has followed may be more debatable, but cannot be assumed.
The role played by the urge to modernize in strengthening the state - something prefigured long ago outside Europe in a Mehemet Ali or a Kemal - was an indication of new sources from which the state increasingly drew its moral authority. Instead of relying on personal loyalty to a dynasty or a supernatural sanction, it has come to rely increasingly on the democratic and utilitarian argument that it is able to satisfy collective desires. Usually these were for material improvement, but sometimes not; now, they appear often to be for greater equality.
If one value more than any other legitimizes state authority today it is in fact nationalism, still the motive and fragmenting force of much of world politics and paradoxically often the enemy of many particular states in the past. Nationalism has been successful in mobilizing allegiance as no other force has been able to do; the forces working the other way, to integrate the world as one political system, have been circumstantial and material, rather than comparably powerful moral ideas or mythologies. Nationalism was also the greatest single force in the politics of history’s most revolutionary century, engaging for most of it with multinational empires as its main opponents. Now, though, it is more often engaged with rival nationalisms and with them continues to express itself in violent and destructive struggles.
When in conflict with nationalism, admittedly, the state often came off badly even when, to all appearances, enormous power had been concentrated in its apparatus. Buttressed by the traditions of communist centralization though they were, both the USSR and Yugoslavia have now disintegrated into national units. Quebecois still talk of separating from Canada. There are many other instances of disturbingly violent potential. Yet nationalism has also greatly reinforced the power of government and extended its real scope, and politicians in many countries are hard at work fostering new nationalisms where they do not exist in order to bolster shaky structures that have emerged from decolonization.
Nationalism, too, has gone on underwriting the moral authority of states, by claiming to deliver collective good, if only in the minimal form of order. Even when their is disagreement or debate about exactly what benefits the state should provide in specific instances, modern justifications of government rest at least implicitly on its claim to be able to provide them, and so to protect national interests. Whether states actually did deliver any such good at all, has, of course, often been disputed. Marxist orthodoxy used to argue, and in a few places still does, that the state was a machine for ensuring the domination of a class and, as such, would disappear when overtaken by the march of History. Even Marxist regimes, though, have not always behaved as if that were true. As for the idea that a state might be a private possession of a dynasty or an individual serving private interests, it is now everywhere formally disavowed, whatever the reality in many places.
Some states now participate to a degree far surpassing any of their predecessors in elaborate systems, connections and organizations for purposes going well beyond those of simple alliance and requiring concessions of sovereignty. Some are groupings to undertake specific activities in common, some give new opportunities to those who belong to them, while others consciously restrict state power. They differ greatly in their structures and their impact on international behaviour.
The United Nations is made up of sovereign states, but it has organized or authorized collective action against an individual member as the League of Nations or earlier associations never did. On a smaller, but important scale, regional groupings have emerged, requiring the observance of common disciplines. Some, like those of eastern Europe, have proved evanescent, but the European Union, even if many of the visions that attended its birth remain unrealized, inches forward. On 1 January 2002 a new common currency was introduced among twelve of its member states and 300 million people. Nor are formal organizations the whole story. There are some unorganized or only vestigially organized supranational realities that from time to time appear to eclipse the freedom of individual states. Islam has at times been feared or welcomed as such a force, and perhaps the racialist consciousness of pan-Africanism, or of what is called nigritude, inhibits some nations’ actions. The spread of this luxuriant undergrowth to international affairs must make obsolete the old notion that the world consists of independent and autonomous players operating without restraint except that of individual interest. Paradoxically, the first substantial interstate structures emerged from a century in which more blood was shed by states in quarrels with one another than ever before.
International law, too, now aspires to greater practical control of states’ behaviour than previously despite all the notorious examples that remain of failure to comply with it. In part this is a matter of slow and still sporadic change in the climate of opinion. Uncivilized and barbarous regimes go on behaving in uncivilized and barbarous ways, but decency has won its victories, too. The shock of uncovering in 1945 realities of the Nazi regime in wartime Europe meant that great evils cannot now be launched and carried through without concealment, denial or attempts at plausible justification. In July 1998, representatives of 120 nations - although those of the United States were not among them - agreed to set up a permanent international court to try war crimes and crimes against humanity. In the following year, the highest of the British courts of justice ruled, unprecedentedly, that a former head of state was liable to extradition to another country to answer there charges of crimes alleged against him. In 2001, the former president of Serbia was surrendered by his countrymen to an international court and appeared there in the dock.
It is important not to exaggerate. Hundreds, if not thousands, of wicked men continue to practise around the world brutalities and cruelties for which there is little practical hope at present of holding them to account. International criminality is a concept that infringes state sovereignty and the United States is not likely under any conceivable presidency to admit the jurisdiction of an international court over its own citizens. But the United States itself also explicitly adopted revolutionary foreign policy goals for quasi-moral ends in the 1990s in seeking to overthrow the governments of Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic and it is now concerned with the organization of efforts against terrorism which must imply some further interference with others’ sovereignty.
Nevertheless, at home, governments have for two or three hundred years enjoyed more and more power to do what was asked of them. Lately, economic distress in the 1930s and great wars required huge mobilization of resources and new extensions of governmental power. To such forces have also been added demands that governments indirectly promote the welfare of their subjects and undertake the provisions of services either unknown hitherto or left in the past to individuals or such ‘natural’ units as families and villages. The welfare state was a reality in Germany and Great Britain before 1914. In the last fifty years, the share of GDP taken by the state has shot up almost everywhere. There has also been the urge to modernize. Few countries outside Europe achieved this without direction from above and even in Europe some countries have owed most of their modernization to government. The twentieth century’s outstanding examples were Russia and China, two great agrarian societies that sought and achieved modernization through state power. Finally, technology, through better communications, more powerful weapons and more comprehensive information systems, has advantaged those who could spend most on it: governments.
Once, and not long ago, even the greatest of European monarchies could not carry out a census or create a unified internal market. Now, the state has a virtual monopoly of the main instruments of physical control. Even a hundred years ago, the police and armed forces of governments unshaken by war or uncorrupted by sedition gave them a security; technology has only increased their near-certainty. New repressive techniques and weapons, though, are now only a small part of the story. State intervention in the economy, through its power as consumer, investor or planner, and the improvement of mass communications in a form that leaves access to them highly centralized all matter immensely. Hitler and Roosevelt made great use of radio (though for very different ends); and attempts to regulate economic life are as old as government itself.
None the less, governments in most countries have had to grapple more obviously in recent times with a new integration of the world economy and, consequently, less freedom in running their own economic affairs. This goes beyond the operation of supranational institutions like the World Bank or IMF; it is a function of a long-visible tendency, often now called ‘globalization’, in its latest manifestations. Sometimes institutionalized by international agreement or by the simple economic growth of large companies, but driven by rising expectations everywhere, it is a phenomenon that often dashes the hopes of politicians seeking to direct the societies over which they are expected to preside. Economic and political independence can be hugely infringed by unregulated global financial flows, and even by the operations of great companies, some of which can call on resources far larger than those of many small states. Paradoxically, complaints about the curbing of state independence to which globalization can give rise are sometimes voiced most loudly by those who would urge even more vigorous interference with sovereignty in cases of, for example, abuse of human rights.
The play of such forces is discernible in the pages that follow. Perhaps they are bringing about some reduction in state power, while leaving forms largely intact as power accumulates elsewhere. This is at least more probable than that radical forces will succeed in destroying the state. Such forces exist, and at times they draw strength from and appear to prosper in new causes - ecology, feminism and a generalized anti-nuclear and ‘peace’ movement have all patronized them. But in forty years of activity they have only been successful when they have been able to influence and shape state policy, bringing changes in the law and the setting up of new institutions. The idea that major amelioration can be achieved by altogether bypassing so dominant an institution still seems as unrealistic as it was in the days of the anarchistic and utopian movements of the nineteenth century.