The Transformation of the World (125 page)

Differentiation and Simplification

In the history of the organization of political power, the nineteenth century thus represents a transitional stage of differentiation and renewed simplification. It was also the starting point for four major trends that would come into their own globally in the course of the twentieth century: nation building, bureaucratization, democratization, and the rise of the welfare state. From the vantage point of post–World War I Europe, the nineteenth century must have appeared as the veritable golden age of the state. In that epoch, the American and French revolutions had associated the state with the principles of citizenship and the common good. Both moderate participation of the populace and the capacity to maintain the law in a just and equal way seemed to have found a fruitful balance. Moreover, until 1914 the European state even kept its dangerously growing military potential under control. In short: the state had steered clear of the twin political extremes of despotism and anarchy.

Let us take a closer look. The following were the main developmental tendencies of the state in the nineteenth century:

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 construction of militarized industrial states with new capacities for empire building

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 invention of the “modern” state bureaucracy based on principles of generality and rational efficiency

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 systematic expansion of powers to extract taxes from society redefinition of the state as a provider of public goods

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 development of the constitutional rule of law and a new idea of the citizen, involving a legitimate claim to the protection of private interests and a say in political life

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rise of the political type “dictatorship” as a formalization of clientelist relations and/or the exercise of technocratic rule by acclamation

Not all of these trends gradually spread out from Europe to the rest of the world through a process of conscious export or creeping diffusion. Some of them were of thoroughly
non
-European origin: the constitutional state arose in North America on the foundations of the English Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the political theory that had underpinned it; postmonarchic dictatorship flourished first of all in South America. It would be equally one-sided to see the main tendencies as unfolding “behind the backs of human subjects.” The development of the state was not an automatic process independent of social change and political decisions. This becomes clear when we ask why one and the same main trend was more powerful here than there, and why its expressions were so different.

The problem is thrown into relief if the Western European state is no longer taken as the historical norm. Political systems in western Africa, for example, were by no means primitive or backward because they failed to correspond to the European model. The state in Africa did not involve military control over a precisely defined territory, in which a single power claimed sovereignty and expected people to obey it for that reason. Rather, Africa was organized as a patchwork quilt of overlapping and fast-changing obligations between subordinate and superordinate rulers. In the Arabian Peninsula too, there was no European-style “state organization” far into the nineteenth century, but there were complex relationships among a multiplicity of tribes under a form of Ottoman suzerainty that had for a long time been scarcely felt by those subject to it. The term “tribal quasi-states” has been used to refer to this.
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The political landscape of Malaya, polycentric in a different way with its many princedoms (sultanates), represented a microcosm of the larger mosaic of Southeast Asia, in which only colonialism defined forms of rule on an unambiguously territorial basis.
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To consider the European state normal would mean accepting that the history of that part of the world inevitably resulted in colonial conquest and imposed reorganization. In reality, colonialism was not the gentle telos of historical development but a foreign intervention that often appeared brutal to those exposed to it.

It is equally problematic to regard the state's “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order” (Max Weber)
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not as a theoretical ideal but as an actual state of affairs. For some parts of the world it has never been a meaningful category—in Afghanistan, for example, as we can see today. In the major empires, independently armed minorities such as the Don Cossacks remained outside a central military command structure right up until the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
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Piracy, thought to be a thing of the past, flared up again in the Caribbean in the wake of the Latin American independence struggles of the 1820s, and it was only with difficulty that the British and American navies stamped it out after 1830.
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Monopoly of force,
then, is not an intrinsic part of the definition of the modern state, but rather an exceptional historical circumstance that has been aimed at and achieved only provisionally. In revolutionary periods it has rapidly broken down. The Chinese state, for instance, tried with some success throughout the eighteenth century to disarm the population and keep it quiescent. After 1850, however, millions took up arms against the Qing state in the Taiping Revolution. It has seldom been a problem for revolutionaries to get their hands on weapons. A monopoly of force can be maintained only as long as a central state is able to tame bellicose elites and to convince a large part of the population that it can attend to law and order. If this is not the case, then markets in violence open up and the socialization of violence can quickly give way to its privatization. In one of the most stable democracies, the United States of America, the two tendencies were closely bound up with each other.

This leads to another general conclusion: that “strength” is not always just an independent variable in the development of the state. It would be a distorting idealization to see in the state an inexorable logic of growing depersonalization and rationality. The state does mold society, but it is also dependent on revolution and war, on the productive economy underlying its financial power, and on the loyalty of its “servants.”

Types of Political Order

There are many possible typologies of political order; it all depends on the criterion of definition. One meaningful approach would be to ask where power is located and how intensely and in which ways it is exercised. A distinction might then be drawn between political orders in which power is deployed “extensively” to organize a large number of people over wide areas (a major empire, for example) and those in which “intensive power” within a smaller area induces people to engage in a high level of political activity (as in a Greek polis). Another useful distinction would be between “power of authority” (that is, the communication of commands within a hierarchy of subordination) and “dispersed power” that is less directly perceptible as a relation of obedience and works through more subtle constraints such as a legal system or ideological inputs. This second approach may be applied not only to whole political systems but also to particular organizations, such as an administrative office, a church, or a school.
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A criterion that suits the transitional age of the nineteenth century especially well is the extent to which there are checks on power. Liberalism, the most influential political theory of the time, saw the introduction of such controls as one of its chief objectives. And although in the period before the First World War, liberalism hardly anywhere fully realized the ideals of its leading champions, there was a visible tendency in many parts of the world to reduce individual arbitrariness in the exercise of power and to enforce the principle of accountability. From this point of view, the following basic types of political order may be identified around the year 1900.

Autocracy
, where the will of a prince ruling with the help of advisers held ultimate sway (quite possibly within a system of codified law), was by that time uncommon. There was still absolutism of that kind in the Tsarist Empire, the Ottoman Empire (since 1878 once more), and in Siam. This did not necessarily mean that their systems were particularly backward—King Chulalongkorn of Siam was one of the least restricted rulers of the age, and yet, as an enlightened despot and far-sighted reformer, he made a host of decisions that served the overall interests of his country and led it into modernity.

Even in a monarchy, virtually unlimited executive powers may be given to a minister: Cardinal Richelieu, for example, or the Marquis of Pombal in Portugal in the 1760s. But they always remain dependent on the goodwill of the ruler, however weak he may be.
Dictatorships
are postrevolutionary or postrepublican systems in which a single individual, usually with a small group of helpers and subordinate rulers, enjoys a freedom of action comparable to that of a monarch. He does not, however, have the sanction of tradition, dynastic legitimacy, or religious consecration. The dictator, known in Europe since antiquity, keeps himself in power through the use or threat of violence, and by providing for a clientele of varying size. The army and police do well under his rule, and his control over them is an indispensable element. Having installed himself for life, he must ensure that the special conditions of his coming to power (whether a putsch or popular acclamation) are translated into durable institutions.

Examples of this type were few and far between in Europe after the fall of Napoleon I. The one that came closest was Field Marshal (later Count) Juan Carlos de Saldanha, who repeatedly intervened in Portuguese politics between 1823 and his death in 1876, but who in the long run served to establish less his own personal rule than an “oligarchic democracy.”
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Only with the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and its new-style party dictatorship, followed by the rise of rightist rulers in 1922 in Italy (Benito Mussolini) and 1923 in Spain (Primo de Rivera), did an age of dictatorship begin in Europe and, in the same decade, in noncolonial Asia (Iran, China).

In the nineteenth century, Hispanic America was the only stomping ground for dictators, most strikingly illustrated by Porfirio Díaz, who between 1876 and 1911 broke Mexico's vicious circle of political instability and economic stagnation, while reducing popular participation in decision making to a minimum and generally paralyzing public life. Don Porfirio was neither a warlord nor a murderous tyrant like Juan Manuel de Rosas—who ruled Argentina from 1829 to 1852 (and with particular brutality between 1839 and 1842) by means of a system of secret police, informers, and death squads
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—nor a typical South or Central American caudillo, hostile to institutions, uninterested in economic development, using the business of violence to keep his direct supporters supplied with spoils and to afford “protection” to the property-owning classes. Díaz, rather, was obsessed with stability, although he did not manage to transform his well-oiled machine of personal patronage into a crisis-proof state
apparatus.
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Another strong president from the military, Julio Argentino Roca in Argentina, showed greater farsightedness in the 1880s and 1890s, using political parties and elections to improve the efficiency of the system and paving the way for an elitist “democracy.”
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In
constitutional monarchies
, at least in the form they took around 1900, a written constitution contained some provision for parliamentary representation and authority, but it was not possible for the parliament to bring down the royal government. The executive was neither appointed by nor accountable to the elected national assembly. The monarch played a comparatively active role, and was usually required to arbitrate among the many informal groups into which the power elite was divided. Systems of this type existed, for example, in the German Reich, in Japan (whose constitution of 1889 borrowed heavily from the German one of 1871), and in Austria-Hungary from the 1860s on (where parliamentarianism was far less functional than in Germany, partly because of ethnic fragmentation among the imperial subjects).

Systems of parliamentary accountability
could have a monarchical (as in Britain and the Netherlands) or a republican (as in the French Third Republic) head of state. This was of lesser importance than the fact that the executive was drawn from, and could be removed by, the elected parliament. A special variant was the US dualism of presidency and Congress, but although the president was not appointed by the people's representatives his election (direct or indirect) meant that his term of office was limited and even in wartime did not turn into a dictatorship. The American Revolution brought forth no Napoleons.

Material from all around the world has enabled political anthropologists to demonstrate the numerous ways in which power differences arise in society, and how political processes serving the goals of the collective, or some of its subgroups, get under way and remain in operation. More difficult to establish from the sources are the conceptual worlds or political “cosmologies” of societies with little or no written tradition. Highly complex conceptions of the political do not exist only in the great theoretical traditions of China, India, Christian Europe, and Islam. A static view of state-related institutions must accordingly be replaced with one more geared to the dynamic nature of events within political spaces and fields. The whole typological approach in which each state must be allocated to one particular form and a definite territory thus becomes open to question.
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To complement the above fourfold characterization of the exercise and limits of power, we may posit a fifth category to cover the various possibilities of relatively weak institutionalization: that is,
systems of allegiance
or patron-client relations, in which—here lies the difference with dictatorship—an ancestrally defined prince, chieftain, or “big man” (women also can occasionally play this role) offers protection and serves as focus for the symbolic unity of the community. Here, too, there may be individual officials, but not a state hierarchy more or less independent of specific persons. The dynastic principle and the sacredness of the ruler are less pronounced than in more stable and complex forms of monarchy,
and acts of usurpation are easier to pull off. The legitimacy of rulers rests in part on proven leadership qualities, and checks on the exercise of power mainly consist of deliberation and judgment concerning their performance record. For such an understanding of politics, hereditary kingship is more alien than a system involving election or acclamation of the First Man. Political systems of this kind existed at the beginning of the nineteenth century on every continent, including the world of the Pacific Isles, although the cultural prerequisites varied greatly. They made the “docking process” relatively easy for European colonialism, and after the period of actual conquest Europeans could try to situate themselves as top patrons in a chain of allegiances.