The development of the modern state

As John A. Hall and G. John Ikenberry note in their useful introduction to the term, ‘most of human history has not been graced by the presence of states’ (1989: 16). This is undoubtedly the case.

Moreover, whilst the term has been used retrospectively to refer to mechanisms and processes of political governance arising in Mesopotamia as early as 3000 BC, it is only since the seventeenth century that human history has been graced by the concept of the state. According to most conventional accounts, the origins of the state lie in the transition from the nomadic subsistence of hunter-gatherers to more agrarian societies characterized, increasingly, by organized agriculture (Hall 1986; Mann 1988; Sahlins 1974). Indeed, it was the relative geographical immobility of agricultural production that led to the development of the institutions and infrastructure capable of governing and projecting power, albeit at first in a rather diffuse way, over a specific and delineated territory. As Hall and Ikenberry again note, ‘irrigation works - and date and olive trees - tie agricultural producers very firmly to the land, and thus make them better fodder for the state’ (1989: 18). In this way the institutional capacity to project power over a territory which we now associate with the state owes its origins to the historical accident of the replacement, first in Mesopotamia, Meso-America, the Indus river valley, China and Peru and then more generally, of hunting and gathering by agriculture.

In these initial stages of its development, the state was largely despotic and coercive in the manner in which it exercized power over a population. And it is in this context that a second key factor becomes important - religion. Hunter-gatherer communities tended to be tribal - based on kinship ties - whereas the agrarian states which replaced them were not. This made them both rather more reliant upon coercion and, in the absence of strong kinship relations amongst their members, rather more fragile politically when that coercion was challenged.

In this context, as Patricia Crone (1989) demonstrates, it was the capacity of religion to lend legitimacy to the organized and increasingly centralized use of coercive power (through the appeal to divine authority) that made possible, where otherwise it might not have been, the consolidation of state power. This, in turn, facilitated the further development of the institutional capacity to govern and regulate a geographical territory and, with it, the capacity to mobilize militarily. The association between the state and military might was, then, established early on and arguably persists to the present day. Conquest rapidly became the primary mechanism through which the institutional form of the state became diffused, since the organizational capacity which the state developed conferred upon it a competitive advantage when it confronted pre-state-like societies.

If the origins of the state itself lie in Mesopotamia, then it is to Western Europe that we must turn if we are to establish the origins of the modern state. What is invariably taken to characterize the modern state is the simultaneous combination of, on the one hand, its claim to act as a public power responsible for the governance of a tightly delineated geographical territory and, on the other, its separation from those in whose name it claims to govern. The modern state is, then, an institutional complex claiming sovereignty for itself as the supreme political authority within a defined territory for whose governance it is responsible.

The factors that made possible the development of such an institutional form in Western Europe were, again, both complex and bound up with the role of religious authority. And once again the process was a highly contingent one. It was the church, in particular, that challenged the authority of Imperial Rome. The result was a previously unprecedented degree of cultural homogeneity, as an initially unlikely synthesis of Christian doctrine and the strong legal residue which carried over from the Roman Empire facilitated both the development of consensual trading relations throughout the European economy and the diffusion of the institutional template of the modern state.

The result was the birth of the so-called absolutist state in the sixteenth and seventeenth century in Bourbon France, Habsburg Spain and Tudor England. These were the precursors for the institutional complex we now recognize as the state - having a centralized bureaucracy and taxraising capacity, a standing army, a system of diplomatic relations with other states and, for the most part, clearly delineated and commonly accepted territorial borders.

It is, once again, to Western Europe that the origins of the most recent phase of significant state re-structuring and expansion can be traced. This bout of institutional dynamism, largely confined to the most developed economies and occurring in many cases in the immediate wake of the Second World War, is associated with the rise of the welfare state. It has seen the creation of the most extensive state regimes that the world has ever seen. As we saw in Figures 1a and 1b, these welfare states account, in many cases, for in excess of 50 per cent of GDP and 15 per cent of the total workforce. They represent, at least to date, the highest point in the development of the institutional capacity of the state. Whether they are increasingly anachronistic and a burden on economic growth and prosperity in an ever more closed integrated world economy is a source of very significant debate and a key theme of this volume. Suffice if for now to note that, despite the now customary hyperbole, there would seem to be little evidence to date of their ongoing or imminent demise.

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Source: Hay Colin, Lister Michael, Marsh David (eds.). The State: Theories and Issues. Palgrave,2005. — 336 p.. 2005

The development of the modern state

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