The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (261 page)
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stare decisis
Latin phrase, meaning ‘stand by past decisions’. Foundation of legal application of precedent, where a judicial decision on one case applies to all cases with similar principles.
START
(Strategic Arms Reduction Talks)
(Strategic Arms Reduction Talks)
Negotiations to succeed the flawed
SALT
process, initiated by President Reagan in 1981. The talks made no progress in the atmosphere of the New Cold War, were abandoned in 1983 and resumed in 1985 as President Reagan and General Secretary Mihkail Gorbachev re-established better relations.
The first START treaty concluded in July 1991 between Presidents Bush and Gorbachev reduced each state's longrange launchers to 1,600 and warheads to 6,000, including further important limitations, especially on land-based missiles. In December 1992 Bush and President Yeltsin of Russia signed a second START treaty to reduce each side to about 3,500 warheads, including only 500 land-based missiles each restricted to only one warhead.
START 2 probably marks the end of the nuclear arms race between the superpowers. Belarus and Kazakhstan had agreed by that time to hand over their former Soviet weapons to Russia, and by 1994 Ukraine had promised to trade its ex-Soviet weapons for Western assistance.
PBy
SALT
process, initiated by President Reagan in 1981. The talks made no progress in the atmosphere of the New Cold War, were abandoned in 1983 and resumed in 1985 as President Reagan and General Secretary Mihkail Gorbachev re-established better relations.
The first START treaty concluded in July 1991 between Presidents Bush and Gorbachev reduced each state's longrange launchers to 1,600 and warheads to 6,000, including further important limitations, especially on land-based missiles. In December 1992 Bush and President Yeltsin of Russia signed a second START treaty to reduce each side to about 3,500 warheads, including only 500 land-based missiles each restricted to only one warhead.
START 2 probably marks the end of the nuclear arms race between the superpowers. Belarus and Kazakhstan had agreed by that time to hand over their former Soviet weapons to Russia, and by 1994 Ukraine had promised to trade its ex-Soviet weapons for Western assistance.
PBy
state
A distinct set of political institutions whose specific concern is with the organization of domination, in the name of the common interest, within a delimited territory. The state is arguably the most central concept in the study of politics and its definition is therefore the object of intense scholarly contestation. Marxists, political sociologists, and political anthropologists usually favour a broad definition which draws attention to the role of coercion-wielding organizations who exercise clear priority in decision making and claim paramountcy in the application of naked force to social problems within territorial boundaries. By this standard, archeological remains signal the existence of states from 6000 BC, with written or pictorial records testifying to their presence from 4000 BC.
Within Western Europe a number of state forms can be identified corresponding to historical epochs. In the slave—economies of antiquity, the state—in this context the instrument of the collective property-owners—existed either in the shape of a Hellenistic king and his henchmen or a Roman emperor and the imperial aristocracy. The high period of the Greek city-states can be dated from 800 BCto 320 BC. Within these states, once the rule of the ‘tyrants’ had been overthrown, free members of society were granted citizenship rights. However, the democracy of the city-states was increasingly undermined by territorial colonization and conquest, leading to rule by royal succession by the time of Alexander the Great. In contrast, Rome did not introduce direct democracy but developed from a monarchy into a republic (Latin
res publica,
‘the things pertaining to the public realm’), governed by a senate dominated by the Roman aristocracy. The Greek citystates bequeathed direct democracy whilst Rome's contribution to the development of the modern state lies in
Roman law
, and its clear distinction between the public and the private.
The dissolution of the Roman empire saw the fragmentation of the imperial state into the hands of private lords whose political, juridical, and military roles were at the same time the instruments of private appropriation and the organization of production. In early medieval Western Europe state power was not only divided up but also privatized, through local private proprietors whose property—gained from oaths of fealty, and which served as the basic economic unit of society—simultaneously endowed them with political authority. In these conditions, as Marx puts it tersely, their estate was their state. The feudal ‘state-system’ was an unstable amalgam of suzerains and anointed kings. A monarch, formally at the head of a hierarchy of sovereignties, could not impose decrees at will. Relations between lords and monarch are best seen in terms of mutual dependence, with the monarch an orchestrator rather than an absolute power. The lapse of universal taxation (central to the Roman empire) ensured that each ruler needed to obtain the ‘consent’ of each estate of the realm. The legal assumptions underpinning the feudal organization of society, and the Church's claim to act as a lawmaking power coeval with rather than subordinate to the secular authorities ( see
medieval political thought
), show that a modern conception of the state is inappropriate as a basis for understanding politics in medieval feudalism.
The development of the modern form of the state, as a public power separate from the monarch and the ruled, and constituting the supreme political authority within a defined territory, is associated with the slow institutional differentiation of the ‘political’ and the ‘economic’ related to the growth of the centralized absolutist state and the spread of commodity production. Absolutist states arose in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Western Europe under the Tudors in England, the Habsburgs in Spain, and the Bourbons in France. These European dynastic states exhibited many of the institutional features which characterize modern states. The introduction of a standing army, a centralized bureaucracy, a central taxation system, diplomatic relations with permanent embassies, and the development of the economic doctrine of mercantilism informing state trade policy, all date from this period. It is at this point that the term ‘the state’ is first introduced into political discourse. Although its derivation is disputed,
Machiavelli
is often credited with first using the concept of state to refer to a territorial sovereign government in the widely circulated manuscript of the ‘Prince’ completed in 1513 and published in 1532. It is not, however, until the time of
Bodin
and Sir Thomas Smith that a full account of the ‘marks of sovereignty’ is produced, and later modified by Sir Walter Raleigh ,
Hobbes
, and
Locke
.
The most influential definition of the modern state is that provided by
Weber
in
Politics as a Vocation
. Weber emphasizes three aspects of the modern state: its territoriality; its monopoly of the means of physical violence; and its legitimacy. Without social institutions claiming a monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a given territory, Weber argues, a condition of anarchy would quickly ensue. In raising the question of why the dominated obey, Weber draws our attention to a fundamental activity of the state, the attempt to legitimate the structure of domination. Whilst he supplied the categories of ‘traditional’, ‘charismatic’, and ‘legal’ pure types of legitimation of obedience, historical sociologists have recently drawn on
Durkheim
and
Foucault
to extend our understanding of legitimacy as state power which ‘works within us’. An emphasis is thus placed upon the violent establishment and continuous regulation of ‘consent’ orchestrated by that organization which has abrogated to itself the ‘right’ to use physical force (and to determine the conditions under which other institutions/individuals have that right) in society. Whilst, for Foucault, the state is the form in which the bourgeoisie organizes its social power, that power does not simply reside in the external repression meted out by ‘special bodies of armed men having prisons, etc., at their command’ (
Lenin
,
State and Revolution
). Rather, state forms must also be understood as cultural forms, as cultural revolution and imagery continually and extensively state-regulated. Attention is thereby broadened beyond the usual focus on what the state does (defence of property rights, regulation of monopolies), to the equally important question of how the state acts, how it projects certain forms of organization on our daily activity. Studies of the administration of welfare emphasize this point showing how although claimants receive ‘benefits’ this is always bound up with submission to supervision and control.
There are three main traditions within political science which inform ‘theories of the state’: the pluralist, the Marxist, and the statist traditions. Robert Dahl and Nelson Polsby within the pluralist framework see the state as either a neutral arena for contending interests or its agencies as simply another set of interest groups. With power competitively arranged in society, state policy is the product of recurrent bargaining and although Dahl recognizes the existence of inequality, he maintains that in principle all groups have an opportunity to pressure the state. The pluralist approach to economic policy suggests that the state's actions are the result of pressures applied from both ‘
polyarchy
’ and organized interests. A series of pressure groups compete and state policy reflects the ascendancy of a particularly well-articulated interest. This approach is often criticized for its overt empiricism. It is argued that the attempt to explain state policy in terms of the ascendancy of pressure group interests introduces a pattern of circular reasoning.
Modern Marxist accounts begin with Miliband (
The State in Capitalist Society
) who offers an instrumentalist view of the state. Miliband attempts a literal interpretation of Marx's infamous statement that the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie (
The Communist Manifesto
). Instrumentalists argue that the ruling class uses the state as its instrument to dominate society by virtue of the interpersonal ties between, and social composition of, state officials and economic élites. In an equally famous reply, Nicos
Poulantzas
isolated the main defects of this approach, in particular its subjectivist view of the state and its unintended reliance on pluralist élite theory. The instrumentalist position has also been criticized empirically by case studies of the New Deal and industrial politics in the United States and by studies of nationalization and the labour process in Britain. For Poulantzas, the state is a regional sector of the capitalist structure, and is understood to have a
relative autonomy
from capital: ‘the capitalist state best serves the interests of the capitalist class only when the… ruling class is not the politically governing class’ (
Political Power and Social Classes
). In addition to the problems of
structural functionalism
introduced by Poulantzas , the concept of relative autonomy is often criticized as a hopeless catch-all which is used in a circular fashion to explain apparent dysfunctions in state activity after the event.
The realization that the internal structures of states differ has been the dynamic behind the development of post-Marxist approaches to state theory. Whereas there is no uniform agreement on what constitutes Marxian orthodoxy, post-Marxism argues against derivationism and essentialism (the state is not an instrument and does not ‘function’ unambiguously or relatively autonomously in the interests of a single class). This has led many Gramscian approaches to stress the importance of interposing
civil society
between the economy and the state to explain variation in state forms.
Empirical studies of the role of the state in foreign economic policymaking, and the theoretical critiques developed by post-Marxists, have led to the development of statist theories which conclude that states pursue goals which cannot be derived from interest group bargaining or from the class structure of capitalist societies. A focus has emerged on states as distinctive structures with their own specific histories, operating in a sphere of real autonomy. Writers influenced by this tradition (which claims allegiance to
Weber
and Otto Hintze ) often utilize the distinction between ‘strong states’ and ‘weak states’, claiming that the degree of effective autonomy from societal demands determines the power of a state. This position has found favour in
international political economy
. Recently, radical feminist writers, and those whose work is rooted in the analysis of racism, have questioned the assumptions of the pluralist, Marxist, and statist approaches arguing that the modern Western state has institutionalized and legitimized patriarchy and racism.
All states embedded in an international system face internal and external security and legitimation dilemmas. International relations theorists have traditionally posited the existence of an international system, when states take into account the behaviour of other ‘like-units’ when making their own calculations. Recently the notion of international society (a society of states) has been developed to refer to a group of states who by dialogue and common consent have established rules, procedures, and institutions for the conduct of their relations. In this way the foundation has been laid for international law, diplomacy, regimes, and organizations. Since the absolutist period, states have predominantly been organized on a national basis. The concept of national state is not, however, synonymous with nation-state. Even in the most ethnically ‘homogenous’ societies there is necessarily a mismatch between the state and the nation—hence the active role undertaken by the state to create national identity (
nationalism
) through an emphasis on shared symbols and representations of reality.
PBm
Within Western Europe a number of state forms can be identified corresponding to historical epochs. In the slave—economies of antiquity, the state—in this context the instrument of the collective property-owners—existed either in the shape of a Hellenistic king and his henchmen or a Roman emperor and the imperial aristocracy. The high period of the Greek city-states can be dated from 800 BCto 320 BC. Within these states, once the rule of the ‘tyrants’ had been overthrown, free members of society were granted citizenship rights. However, the democracy of the city-states was increasingly undermined by territorial colonization and conquest, leading to rule by royal succession by the time of Alexander the Great. In contrast, Rome did not introduce direct democracy but developed from a monarchy into a republic (Latin
res publica,
‘the things pertaining to the public realm’), governed by a senate dominated by the Roman aristocracy. The Greek citystates bequeathed direct democracy whilst Rome's contribution to the development of the modern state lies in
Roman law
, and its clear distinction between the public and the private.
The dissolution of the Roman empire saw the fragmentation of the imperial state into the hands of private lords whose political, juridical, and military roles were at the same time the instruments of private appropriation and the organization of production. In early medieval Western Europe state power was not only divided up but also privatized, through local private proprietors whose property—gained from oaths of fealty, and which served as the basic economic unit of society—simultaneously endowed them with political authority. In these conditions, as Marx puts it tersely, their estate was their state. The feudal ‘state-system’ was an unstable amalgam of suzerains and anointed kings. A monarch, formally at the head of a hierarchy of sovereignties, could not impose decrees at will. Relations between lords and monarch are best seen in terms of mutual dependence, with the monarch an orchestrator rather than an absolute power. The lapse of universal taxation (central to the Roman empire) ensured that each ruler needed to obtain the ‘consent’ of each estate of the realm. The legal assumptions underpinning the feudal organization of society, and the Church's claim to act as a lawmaking power coeval with rather than subordinate to the secular authorities ( see
medieval political thought
), show that a modern conception of the state is inappropriate as a basis for understanding politics in medieval feudalism.
The development of the modern form of the state, as a public power separate from the monarch and the ruled, and constituting the supreme political authority within a defined territory, is associated with the slow institutional differentiation of the ‘political’ and the ‘economic’ related to the growth of the centralized absolutist state and the spread of commodity production. Absolutist states arose in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Western Europe under the Tudors in England, the Habsburgs in Spain, and the Bourbons in France. These European dynastic states exhibited many of the institutional features which characterize modern states. The introduction of a standing army, a centralized bureaucracy, a central taxation system, diplomatic relations with permanent embassies, and the development of the economic doctrine of mercantilism informing state trade policy, all date from this period. It is at this point that the term ‘the state’ is first introduced into political discourse. Although its derivation is disputed,
Machiavelli
is often credited with first using the concept of state to refer to a territorial sovereign government in the widely circulated manuscript of the ‘Prince’ completed in 1513 and published in 1532. It is not, however, until the time of
Bodin
and Sir Thomas Smith that a full account of the ‘marks of sovereignty’ is produced, and later modified by Sir Walter Raleigh ,
Hobbes
, and
Locke
.
The most influential definition of the modern state is that provided by
Weber
in
Politics as a Vocation
. Weber emphasizes three aspects of the modern state: its territoriality; its monopoly of the means of physical violence; and its legitimacy. Without social institutions claiming a monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a given territory, Weber argues, a condition of anarchy would quickly ensue. In raising the question of why the dominated obey, Weber draws our attention to a fundamental activity of the state, the attempt to legitimate the structure of domination. Whilst he supplied the categories of ‘traditional’, ‘charismatic’, and ‘legal’ pure types of legitimation of obedience, historical sociologists have recently drawn on
Durkheim
and
Foucault
to extend our understanding of legitimacy as state power which ‘works within us’. An emphasis is thus placed upon the violent establishment and continuous regulation of ‘consent’ orchestrated by that organization which has abrogated to itself the ‘right’ to use physical force (and to determine the conditions under which other institutions/individuals have that right) in society. Whilst, for Foucault, the state is the form in which the bourgeoisie organizes its social power, that power does not simply reside in the external repression meted out by ‘special bodies of armed men having prisons, etc., at their command’ (
Lenin
,
State and Revolution
). Rather, state forms must also be understood as cultural forms, as cultural revolution and imagery continually and extensively state-regulated. Attention is thereby broadened beyond the usual focus on what the state does (defence of property rights, regulation of monopolies), to the equally important question of how the state acts, how it projects certain forms of organization on our daily activity. Studies of the administration of welfare emphasize this point showing how although claimants receive ‘benefits’ this is always bound up with submission to supervision and control.
There are three main traditions within political science which inform ‘theories of the state’: the pluralist, the Marxist, and the statist traditions. Robert Dahl and Nelson Polsby within the pluralist framework see the state as either a neutral arena for contending interests or its agencies as simply another set of interest groups. With power competitively arranged in society, state policy is the product of recurrent bargaining and although Dahl recognizes the existence of inequality, he maintains that in principle all groups have an opportunity to pressure the state. The pluralist approach to economic policy suggests that the state's actions are the result of pressures applied from both ‘
polyarchy
’ and organized interests. A series of pressure groups compete and state policy reflects the ascendancy of a particularly well-articulated interest. This approach is often criticized for its overt empiricism. It is argued that the attempt to explain state policy in terms of the ascendancy of pressure group interests introduces a pattern of circular reasoning.
Modern Marxist accounts begin with Miliband (
The State in Capitalist Society
) who offers an instrumentalist view of the state. Miliband attempts a literal interpretation of Marx's infamous statement that the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie (
The Communist Manifesto
). Instrumentalists argue that the ruling class uses the state as its instrument to dominate society by virtue of the interpersonal ties between, and social composition of, state officials and economic élites. In an equally famous reply, Nicos
Poulantzas
isolated the main defects of this approach, in particular its subjectivist view of the state and its unintended reliance on pluralist élite theory. The instrumentalist position has also been criticized empirically by case studies of the New Deal and industrial politics in the United States and by studies of nationalization and the labour process in Britain. For Poulantzas, the state is a regional sector of the capitalist structure, and is understood to have a
relative autonomy
from capital: ‘the capitalist state best serves the interests of the capitalist class only when the… ruling class is not the politically governing class’ (
Political Power and Social Classes
). In addition to the problems of
structural functionalism
introduced by Poulantzas , the concept of relative autonomy is often criticized as a hopeless catch-all which is used in a circular fashion to explain apparent dysfunctions in state activity after the event.
The realization that the internal structures of states differ has been the dynamic behind the development of post-Marxist approaches to state theory. Whereas there is no uniform agreement on what constitutes Marxian orthodoxy, post-Marxism argues against derivationism and essentialism (the state is not an instrument and does not ‘function’ unambiguously or relatively autonomously in the interests of a single class). This has led many Gramscian approaches to stress the importance of interposing
civil society
between the economy and the state to explain variation in state forms.
Empirical studies of the role of the state in foreign economic policymaking, and the theoretical critiques developed by post-Marxists, have led to the development of statist theories which conclude that states pursue goals which cannot be derived from interest group bargaining or from the class structure of capitalist societies. A focus has emerged on states as distinctive structures with their own specific histories, operating in a sphere of real autonomy. Writers influenced by this tradition (which claims allegiance to
Weber
and Otto Hintze ) often utilize the distinction between ‘strong states’ and ‘weak states’, claiming that the degree of effective autonomy from societal demands determines the power of a state. This position has found favour in
international political economy
. Recently, radical feminist writers, and those whose work is rooted in the analysis of racism, have questioned the assumptions of the pluralist, Marxist, and statist approaches arguing that the modern Western state has institutionalized and legitimized patriarchy and racism.
All states embedded in an international system face internal and external security and legitimation dilemmas. International relations theorists have traditionally posited the existence of an international system, when states take into account the behaviour of other ‘like-units’ when making their own calculations. Recently the notion of international society (a society of states) has been developed to refer to a group of states who by dialogue and common consent have established rules, procedures, and institutions for the conduct of their relations. In this way the foundation has been laid for international law, diplomacy, regimes, and organizations. Since the absolutist period, states have predominantly been organized on a national basis. The concept of national state is not, however, synonymous with nation-state. Even in the most ethnically ‘homogenous’ societies there is necessarily a mismatch between the state and the nation—hence the active role undertaken by the state to create national identity (
nationalism
) through an emphasis on shared symbols and representations of reality.
PBm
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