As we saw, the man who really ‘‘invented” the state was Thomas Hobbes. From his time up to the present, one of its most important functions - as of all previous forms of political organization - had been to wage war against others of its kind.

Had it not been for the need to wage war, then almost certainly the centralization of power in the hands of the great monarchs would have been much harder to bring about. Had it not been for the need to wage war, then the development of bureaucracy, taxation, even welfare services such as education, health, etc.

To focus on the field of economics alone, the Bank of England as the first institution of its kind originated in the wars which Britain fought against Louis XIV.¹ Early in the nineteenth century the first modern income taxes were likewise the product of war, as were both legal tender and its most important specimen, the greenback. Later, to cite but three examples, neither some of the early attempts to provide social security, nor the abandonment of the gold standard in 1914, nor the Bolshevik Revolution (representing the attempt to institute total state control over an economy) would have come about in the form that they did, and at the time that they did, had it not been for the need of the state to mobilize its resources and wage war against its neighbors.

No less important than the massive contribution that war made to the state's structure and organization was its function as an emotionally unifying factor. Famous as they were, the writings of Rousseau, Herder, Fichte, Hegel, and the like were read by only a relative handful. It was only when the French state, after the Revolution, instituted the levee en masse - in which respect it was later followed by other states - that the Great Transformation took place and nationalism, fostered by every

¹ See M. Godfrey, ‘‘A Short Account of the Bank of England” (1695), printed in M.

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means at the authorities’ disposal, was turned into the dominant ideology of the nineteenth century. This is not necessarily to share the views of those who believe that the sovereign state, which admits no judge above itself, is the root cause of war; rather, I believe that the real reason why war exists is because men have always liked war, and women, warriors.^[378] It does, however, mean that states can develop a strong appeal to the emotions only so long as they prepare for, and wage, war. If, for any reason, they should cease to do so, then there will be no point in people remaining loyal to them any more than, for example, to General Motors or IBM, which is tantamount to saying that much of their raison d’etre will have been lost.

The first section of this chapter argues that the ability of states to go to war against each other has been diminishing since 1945. The second section explains how, faced with this loss, they adopted socialist ideas, turned inward, and constructed the modern welfare state, only to find, from about 1975 on, that such a system was no longer either economically affordable or, as some claimed, socially desirable. The third examines the way technology, which between 1500 and 1945 was such a great help in constructing the state, has turned around and is often causing states to lose power in favor of various kinds of organizations which are either not territorially based, or lacking in sovereignty, or both. The fourth section builds on the previous ones and argues that, in places as far apart as South Africa and the United States, many states are becoming less willing and able to guarantee the life and property of their citizens, with the result that this task is being increasingly delegated to other organizations. Finally, once all these building blocks are in place, the time will have come for looking into the future.