Posts Tagged ‘statehood’
“Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it”*…
The proliferation of nations around the world in the 20th century was largely a result of decolonialization; the central mechanism that arose to allow dialogue and coordination was the U.N. Kal Raustiala suggests that the 21st century and the challenges that it presents need a different understanding of statehood and a different approach to international cooperation…
The global expansion of self-determination over the past century was an essential step in human freedom that reversed centuries of racial domination, liberated hundreds of millions from European colonial control and yielded dozens of newly sovereign states. This proliferation of states nevertheless exacerbated a core weakness of the international order: the ability of humankind to solve the most dangerous challenges of the 21st century. From climate change to pandemics, many of the most pressing problems seem to require not more (and more fragmented) autonomy, but rather more collaboration.
How to square the circle of meaningful self-determination with more effective collaboration is thus a question of the utmost importance. Short of a still-undefined form of planetary politics or a radically revamped United Nations, Europe may provide the most compelling model for the future — one that properly respects self-determination but embeds it in an entity large enough to tackle the truly global challenges of today.
Meanwhile, the norm of self-determination faces a more direct attack, one that looks not forward to a post-Westphalian future but backward to an imperial past. Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine’s independence is an attempted reversal of self-determination, a disturbing shift after decades of movement in the other direction. It also directly challenges a largely unspoken notion: that peoples should not only enjoy self-determination, but also self-definition.
Russia is hardly alone in manipulating self-determination for its own ends. China oppresses minority peoples in Xinjiang and Tibet. The United States contains over 500 Indigenous nations as well as islands, such as Puerto Rico and Hawaii, with strong independence movements. Scotland seeks to break free of the United Kingdom; France faces Corsican and Basque nationalism.
Our world of 200 or so independent nations could easily be broken up into 300, 400, 500 sovereign states. (Indeed, the median state in the world today is already smaller than Los Angeles County in population.) True respect for the principle of self-determination might demand — or at least permit — such an outcome. Whether the world can function effectively is another matter…
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Europe may provide the most compelling model for a future that respects self-determination but embeds it in an entity large enough to tackle the truly global challenges of today…
Who is “a people”? Which peoples should get a state and get to govern themselves? Who draws the borders? How do we manage collective threats? Eminently worth reading in full: “Who Gets A Nation?” from @NoemaMag.
* George Bernard Shaw
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As we contemplate citizenship, we might recall that it was on this date in 1946 that U.N. General Assembly passed its first resolution, establishing the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission (UNAEC), “to deal with the problems raised by the discovery of atomic energy.” It languished, lapsing into inactivity by 1949, and was officially disbanded in 1952.
Still, the spread of “atomic technology”– and the proliferation of nuclear arms– continued apace… leading to the establishment in 1957 of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), an intergovernmental organization that seeks to promote the peaceful use of nuclear energy and to inhibit its use for any military purpose, including nuclear weapons. For example, pursuant to Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (signed in 1968), all non-nuclear powers are required to negotiate a safeguards agreement with the IAEA, which is given the authority to monitor nuclear programs and to inspect nuclear facilities.
“The real war will never get in the books”*…
Still, historians try. And as Anton Jäger argues in his consideration of Charles S. Maier‘s The Project-State and Its Rivals- A New History of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, that’s a challenging, frustrating, but ultimately very useful thing…
“We thought we knew the story of the twentieth century,” Charles Maier notes in an announcement for his new book The Project State and Its Rivals. Both haunting and tantalizing, the sentence’s past tense speaks to a profoundly contemporary mood. As the twenty-first century progresses, confident visions about the previous century conceived from the vantage point of the 1990s—the “age of extremes” resolved by a set of liberal settlements—no longer seem safe and secure. In 2023, the European extreme Right is establishing itself as a force of government, populism is going global, and inter-imperial tensions have ushered in a new arms race. In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland is currently polling above 20 percent, while Modi is set to win another term in India with an approval rating near 80 percent. To the desperation of liberals nostalgic for the 1990s, the “end of the end of history” has arrived.
As Maier surmises, there might be a connection between this sense of surprise and the comfortable judgments we tend to make about humanity’s last hundred years. “If the twentieth century meant the triumph of liberalism,” he asks, “why have the era’s darker impulses—ethnic nationalism, racist violence, and populist authoritarianism—revived?” The question provides the working hypothesis for Maier’s new monograph, a self-described “rethinking of the long twentieth century,” which aims to “explain the fraying of our own civic culture” while also “allowing hope for its recovery.” Provocatively, Maier’s focus is on “both democracies and dictatorships that sought not just to retain power but to transform their societies,” next to “new forms of imperial domination,” “global networks of finance,” and “international associations” that both challenged and shaped the state. The ambition is nothing less than a new general theory of the twentieth century, one that would allow us to deal with an unmastered past, but also to gain proper self-understanding in a new and confusing century.
Readers would be hard-pressed to find a more suitable candidate for the task than Charles S. Maier. At eighty-four, Maier—still teaching European and international history at Harvard—remains a scholar with panoramic disciplinary reach. His 1975 debut, Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany, and Italy in the Decade after World War I, swiftly established itself a masterpiece of comparative political history. Based on a prior Harvard dissertation complemented with a decade of additional archival research, it examined the fraught resolution of the crises of liberalism after 1918, and what factors determined the potential emergence and stymieing of authoritarian regimes. After works on Germany’s collective memory of the Holocaust and an elite-driven account of the fall of East Germany, he waded into historical political science with Leviathan 2.0: Inventing Modern Statehood in 2014, followed by Once within Borders: Territories of Power, Wealth, and Belonging since 1500 in 2016. Clearly a product of a buoyant Cold War academe, Maier has always been locked in an uneasy pas-à-deux with Marxism: attentive to the class content of political life, but never taken to monolithic views of business interests and overly abstract notions of capital. His work on political economy looked closely at the class coalitions that gave way to divergent corporatist settlements in the 1920s and ’30s, and how these national blocs interlocked with differing international arrangements—a Marxist historiography despite itself. He also took the force of ideas seriously, weaving a tapestry of conceptual, political, and economic history, which explains the unique force of his writing. Yet unlike cultural historians, Maier has retained an interest in causality through the construction of comparative counterfactuals—what Britain and Germany shared in 1918, for instance, or why English Tories did not need a Duce and why the American South was different from the Mezzogiorno—a sensibility that also informed his consistently transnational approach to the twentieth century.
The Project State and Its Rivals exudes a similarly boundless ambition. As the book’s announcements make clear, Maier is on the lookout for a unifying category to cohere our historical experience of the twentieth century—or, more specifically, the forms of statehood that emerged in the interwar period, and that still present such vexing challenges to our intellectual imagination…
A critical account of Maier’s hypothesis, eminently worth reading in full: “The Rise and Fall of the Project State: Rethinking the Twentieth Century,” from @AntonJaegermm in @AmericanAffrs. Via Adam Tooze/@adam_tooze.
* Walt Whitman
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As we keep searching, we might pause to contrast the rigorously serious with the frivolously venal: it was on this date in 1835 that the New York Sun began a series of six articles detailing the discovery of civilized life on the moon; circulation soared. Now known as “The Great Moon Hoax,” the articles attributed the “discovery” to Sir John Herschel, the greatest living astronomer of the day. Herschel was initially amused, wryly noting that his own real observations could never be as exciting. But ultimately he tired of having to answer questioners who believed the story. The series was not discovered to be a hoax for several weeks after its publication and, even then, while the paper did admit (on September 16, 1835) that the whole thing was a “satire,” it never issued a retraction (and didn’t suffer a drop in sales).
“Geography is destiny”*…
Why are some large regions (like China) politically unified, while others (like Europe) are divergent? Researchers at The Centre for Economic Policy Research have tested a leading theory…
Why are some parts of the world politically fragmented while others tend to be dominated by a single state? This age-old question has implications for many important topics in comparative economic development such as the origins of the Great Divergence (see Broadberry 2021) or the divergence in political institutions between China and Europe (see Jia et al. 2021).
Scholars going back at least as far as Montesquieu and Hume have attributed the rise of Western Europe to its persistent political fragmentation. More recently, Jones (2003), Mokyr (2016, 2017), and Scheidel (2019) have developed this thesis in novel ways. These authors acknowledge that a polycentric state system has static costs such as tariff barriers and more wars but argue that, on the net, it is associated with better dynamic incentives for intellectual innovation and state building.
But what determines these patterns of fragmentation? More concretely: what factors account for the prevalence of political polycentrism in Europe and the prominence of political centralisation in China? A leading explanation of this phenomenon is the ‘fractured land’ hypothesis, most famously stated by Diamond (1997). According to this view, fractured land such as mountain barriers, indented coastlines, and rugged terrain precluded the development of large empires in Europe. In comparison, China’s geographical features led to its recurring unifications.
While the fractured land hypothesis has been widely cited and much criticised (e.g. Hoffman 2015), it has not been formally modeled or tested. In Fernández-Villaverde et al. (2022), we fill this gap by providing a quantitative investigation of the fractured-land hypothesis. We do so by modeling the dynamic process of state-building and exploring how fractured land shaped inter-state competition in unexpected, non-linear ways…
Simulating the model between 1000 BCE and 1500 CE, it can replicate the fragmentation of Europe and the consolidation of China. Modified versions of the model can predict patterns of development in the Americas and Africa, while future extensions could try to disentangle the importance of culture and religion versus geography…
Fascinating: “The fractured land hypothesis: Why China is Unified but Europe is not,” from @cepr_org.
* Abraham Verghese
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As we muse on the model (and remember that “fragmentation” is relative), we might recall that it was on this date in 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, that West Virginia was admitted as a state to the Union.
A key border state during Civil War, it was the only state to form by separating from a Confederate state (Virginia), one of two states (along with Nevada) admitted to the Union during the Civil War, and the second state to separate from another state, after Maine separated from Massachusetts in 1820.
Some of its residents held slaves, but most were yeoman farmers, and architects of statehood provided for the gradual abolition of slavery in the new state constitution. Indeed, the state legislature abolished slavery in the state, and at the same time ratified the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery nationally on February 3, 1865.
“A house divided against itself cannot stand”*…
It’s painfully obvious that America is a divided nation. The reasons are many, and have deep roots. Alan Jacobs contemplates three of the most fundamental…
The American Civil War was not that long ago. The last surviving Civil War veteran died two years before my birth. A conflict of that size and scope and horror leaves marks — marks on the land and marks on the national psyche — not readily erased.
I have come to believe that certain habits of mind arising directly from the Civil War still dominate the American consciousness today. I say not specific beliefs but rather intellectual dispositions; and those dispositions account for the form that many of our conflicts take today. Three such habits are especially important.
1. Among Southerners – and I am one – the primary habit is a reliance on consoling lies. In the aftermath of the Civil War Southerners told themselves that the Old South was a culture of nobility and dignity; that slaves were largely content with their lot and better off enslaved than free; that the war was not fought for slavery but in the cause of state’s rights; that Robert E. Lee was a noble and gentle man who disliked slavery; and so on. Such statements were repeated for generations by people who knew that they were evasive at best – the state’s right that the Confederacy was created to defend was the right to own human beings as chattel – and often simply false, and if the people making those statements didn’t consciously understand the falsehood, they kept such knowledge at bay through the ceaseless repetition of their mantras. (Ty Seidule’s book Robert E. Lee and Me is an illuminating account, from the inside, of how such deceptions and self-deceptions work.) And now we see precisely the same practice among the most vociferous supporters of Donald Trump: a determined repetition of assertions – especially that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen, but also concerning COVID–19 and many other matters – that wouldn’t stand up even to casual scrutiny, and therefore don’t receive that scrutiny. It’s easy to fall into a new set of lies when you have a history of embracing a previous set of lies.
2. Among Northerners, the corresponding habit is a confidence in one’s own moral superiority. Because the North was right and the South wrong about the institution of slavery, it was easy for the North then to dismiss any evidence of its own complicity in racism. Our cause is righteous – that is all we know on earth, and all we need know. (But if our cause is righteous, doesn’t that suggest that we are too?) And then, later, whenever there were political conflicts in which the majority of Northerners were on one side and the majority of Southerners on the other – about taxation, or religious liberty, or anything – the temptation was irresistible to explain the disagreement always by the same cause: the moral rectitude of the one side, the moral corruption of the other. The result (visible on almost every page of the New York Times, for instance) is a pervasive smugness that enrages many observers while remaining completely invisible to those who have fallen into it.
3. And among Black Americans, the relevant disposition is a settled suspicion of any declarations of achieved freedom. Emancipation, it turns out, is not achieved by proclamation; nor is it achieved by the purely legal elimination of slavery. Abolition did not end discrimination or violence; indeed, it ushered in a new era of danger for many (the era of lynching) and a new legal system (Jim Crow) that scarcely altered the economic conditions of the recently enslaved. After this happens two or three times you learn to be skeptical, and you teach your children to be skeptical. Brown v. Board of Education produces equal educational opportunity for blacks and whites? We have our doubts. The Civil Rights Act outlaws racial discrimination? We’ll see about that. I wonder how many times Black Americans have heard that racism is over. They don’t, as far as I can tell anyway, believe that things haven’t gotten better; but they believe that improvement has been slow and uneven, and that many injustices that Americans think have died are in fact alive and often enough thriving.
I think these three persistent habits of mind explain many of the conflicts that beset Americans today. And if I were to rank them in order of justifiability, I would say: the first is tragically unjustifiable — and the chief reason why, to my lasting grief, we Southerners have so often allowed our vices to displace our virtues —; the second is understandable but dangerously misleading; and the third … well, the third is pretty damn hard to disagree with.
As the man [William Faulkner] said: The past is not dead; it is not even past.
From Jabob’s always-illuminating blog, Snakes and Ladders, “habits of the American mind.” You can follow him at @ayjay.
[Image above: source]
* Abraham Lincoln (in his speech to the Illinois Republican State Convention, Springfield, Illinois June 16, 1858)
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As we dwell on division, we might recall that it was on this date in 1787 that an organic act of the Congress of the Confederation of the United States, the Northwest Ordinance. It created the Northwest Territory, the new nation’s first organized incorporated territory, from lands beyond the Appalachian Mountains, between British North America and the Great Lakes to the north and the Ohio River to the south. The upper Mississippi River formed the territory’s western boundary; Pennsylvania was the eastern boundary.
Considered one of the most important legislative acts of the Confederation Congress, it established the precedent by which the federal government would be sovereign and expand westward with the admission of new states, rather than with the expansion of existing states and their established sovereignty under the Articles of Confederation. It also protected civil liberties and outlawed slavery in the new territories and set legislative precedent with regard to American public domain lands.
The prohibition of slavery in the territory had the practical effect of establishing the Ohio River as the geographic divide between slave states and free states from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River, an extension of the Mason–Dixon line, helping set the stage for later federal political conflicts over slavery during the 19th century until the Civil War.
Re-building America…
A map puzzle that should be simple (for U.S. readers, at least), but may be even more chastening than last Thursday’s…
Click here to play on Jim’s Pages.
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As we get our bearings, we might recall that it was on this day in 1845 that a majority of the citizens of the independent Republic of Texas approved a proposed constitution, that when accepted by the U.S. Congress and approved by President James Polk later that year, made Texas the 28th puzzle piece– that is, the 28th American state.
The Annexation of Texas to the Union, by Donald M. Yena, 1986. Texas State Library and Archives Commission.
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