The state as historical contextualization
If the appeal to the concept or abstraction of the state serves to sensitize political analysts to the need to contextualize political agency and agents institutionally, then no less significant is its role in sensitising political analysts to the need to contextualize the present historically.
Indeed, the two are intimately connected.The characteristic concern of the political scientist with government and the holders of high office tends to be associated with an analytical focus on the present. Within this conventional framework, the determinants of political outcomes are invariably seen to lie in factors specific to a particular context at a particular point in time - typically, the motivations and intentions of the actors immediately involved and their access to positions of power and influence. This somewhat ahistorical approach is immediately problematized by appeal to the concept of the state. For whilst governments come and go, the state, as an institutional ensemble, persists as it evolves over time. That evolution is shaped by the intended and unintended consequences of governing strategies and policies. Yet this is a reciprocal relationship. For, at any given point in time, the strategic context in which governments find themselves is in turn a reflection of the strategic capacities and competences of the institutions of the state and the constraints and opportunities these impose. To understand the capacity for governmental autonomy is, then, to assess the extent of the institutional, structural and strategic legacy inherited from the past. It is, in short, to understand the dynamic relationship between state and governmental power over time.
An example may serve to reinforce the point. If the institutions of the British state in 1997 (when a New Labour administration was elected for the first time) looked different from those in 1979 (when the first Thatcher government was elected), then this is likely to have exerted a significant influence on the autonomy of an incoming Labour administration, regardless of the size of its majority. Yet, as this example perhaps already serves to indicate, there is a certain danger of structuralism here too.
The newly incumbent Blair administration certainly had to grapple with the institutional, political and cultural legacy of Thatcherism in 1997. Yet, in our desire to contextualize historically we may come to overemphasize the burden the past places on the present. In so doing we may inadvertently absolve contemporary political actors of all responsibility for the consequences of their conduct - attributing, say, the lack of radicalism of the first Blair administration to the legacy of Thatcherism when it might more plausibly be attributed to the lack of an animating political conviction. State theory, especially in its neo-institutionalist form (see Chapter 5), is perhaps rather too predisposed to see continuity, inertia and, at best, incremental evolution over time. States, like governments, change and, under certain conditions, despite their path-dependent nature, they may change surprisingly rapidly. It is important, then, that the historical contextualization of the present that the abstraction of the state encourages does not lead us to an historically undifferentiated account of the endless reproduction of the status quo ante. As this suggests, whilst the appeal to the concept of the state can certainly heighten our sensitivity to historical dynamics, it need not necessarily do so. An overly structuralist and overly historicized account may dull rather than sharpen our analytical purchase on questions of change over time. Yet, as already noted, contemporary theories of the state are perhaps rather more acutely aware of this danger than their predecessors. Recent developments in the theory of the state are characterized, as much as by anything else, by their emphasis upon the uneven pace of the state’s development over time.
More on the topic The state as historical contextualization:
- The state as institutional contextualization
- Historical institutionalism
- CHAPTER V The historical record
- 4.1 HISTORICAL PRECINCTS
- In the spirit of ‘thinking through the international' and reflecting on the ways of (historical and juridical) seeing that might enliven (or temper) such thinking, I want to ask a question and make a small plea.
- Like Henry Higgins who, through his work changed the object of his studies into something other than what it was, the purpose of the Marxist theory of the state is not just to understand the capitalist state but to aid in its destruction. (Wolfe 1974: 131)
- Although it sounds innocent enough - putting legal doctrines, personalities and ideas in historical context - the conclusion is less ‘thought you'd like to know' than ‘this matters'. Contextual histories aim volleys at the field's commanding height
- The so-called ‘new institutionalism’ is a relatively recent addition to the pantheon of theories of the state and, like some of the other perspectives considered in this volume, it is by no means only a theory of the state
- This is a book about history: the ‘historical turn' in international law on the one hand, and the ‘international turn' in the history of political thought on the other.
- What is the state?
- The concept of the state
- Beyond the state?
- Marxism and the state
- SANCTION AND THE STATE
- The genealogy of the concept of the state