Designing and Managing the Future of the State

Michael Reisman¹

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Reports of my death have
been greatly exaggerated.

Mark Twain

All politics is local.

Tip O'Neill

I

We encounter divergent trends. Worldwide communications and movements of persons, goods and services, and the resultant economic links, have created new interdependences. As a result, in more and more social sectors, activities that cross borders can no longer be regulated effectively by the parts of the state apparatus that have been responsible for them. Whether it be health, criminal activity, including terrorism and other forms of purposive political violence, economic organization, immigration or border control, protection of intellectual and material property - whatever - the state, acting alone, seems to come up against increasing difficulties in accomplishing what is expected of it without locking itself into more and more complex and durable intergovernmental arrangements. Each of these arrangements requires some yielding of national competence.²

These new international dependencies are not those of `failed' or `imploding' states, but of some of the most powerful states. Indeed, it is precisely those states which are ineffective that can now claim an isolated sovereignty, a coincidence that is probably not accidental. Even the security of the remaining Superpower cannot be achieved alone. In terms of military matériel, the United States may have been the only country that could have fought the Gulf War on its own. But it could not afford to do it on its own. Hence the continuing need, for the largest and strongest as well as for the others, to enter into alliances of varying durability, with the restraints they perforce impose on the national action of even the strongest alliance members. And when other national security issues, such as preventing the diffusion of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons to state and non-state entities, are augmented by other concerns, such as stemming the transnational migration of disease, protecting the environment, and assuring access to external markets, national subordination to international arrangements is seen as ineluctable.

These developments have inevitable consequences on the individual psychological and personal level. When traditional social units can no longer assure security and access to the other values for which their members look to them, many individuals initiate searches for new identifications which they hope will be more effective. Many of these new identities are transnational, thanks to the conditions that facilitate them. There is a de facto international language and a dynamic, homogenizing global culture of science and technology. For a relatively small but influential segment of humanity, the Internet has provided continuous opportunities for interactive transnational consociation. For a much larger proportion of our species, satellite communication of coordinated sounds and images has created vast, transnational `audience' communities.

As a result of these conditions, the individual is presented with an unprecedentedly broad menu of opportunities for identification: regional systems, transnational associations, transnational religious systems and orders, transnational business entities, transnational and national gangs, transnational and sub-national tribal and ethnic communities, non-territorial cybernetic communities or `audiences', and so on. At any moment, some individuals will be opting for some of these supra-territorial, non-territorial and non-state entities, expanding their identity systems beyond their inherited boundaries.

Some observers view, in this aggregation of social trends, the nucleus of a self-sustaining system, which will, henceforth, guarantee international peace and security. Thus, Donald Johnston, Secretary-General of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), sees a process of `globalization', driven by free trade and cross-border investment, as a systemic solution to the heretofore intractable problem of international security: `Globalization is extending economic interdependence, and this will bring peace and stability.'³ Other observers purport to perceive, in these transnational processes of interaction and interdependence, the decline and ultimate demise of the state, which will `wither away', to be replaced, if not by transnational class formations, then by other newer, more inclusive and larger social organizations.

These optimistic prognoses overlook the fact that the rising transnationalization of so much critical social and economic activity and the transnational expansion of some identities are encountering powerful counter-trends: the revival and political legitimization of isolationism in the United States, the surge of the National Front in France, the recrudescence of right-wing nativism in Austria, the rise of political localism in northern Italy, the acute politicization of religious nationalisms in countries as diverse as India, Iran, Egypt, Algeria, Israel, Turkey and parts of the Balkans, demands for extreme national action in Japan, and so forth.

These counter-trends are manifestations of certain group-dynamic and psychological factors that are apparently fundamental to social organization; they must be considered in any projections of possible futures. The exclusive territorial community, to which the individual accords and insists that others accord primary loyalty, is a response to a persisting set of human demands. There are cogent, `rational' reasons why human beings organize themselves in exclusive rather than the most inclusive of groups, why group boundaries are `a functional necessity, not simply an inert artifact of primordial cultural identities'.

According to collective action theory, successful groups need to establish clear boundaries. Groups producing collective goods, such as defense and economic infrastructure, need boundaries in order to exclude non-contributors and to identify outsiders who might act opportunistically in transactions with group members. They also need boundaries to prevent crowding, which would diminish the value of membership in the club: tribes keep strangers from crowding their scarce land, and the United States bars access to immigrants seeking high wages. In addition, boundaries may help to limit commitments to people whose contributions to the collective good would be outweighed by the cost of defending them.⁴

Viewed from this perspective, ethnicity, for example, with its techniques and rituals of exclusion of outsiders and intense demands for loyalty and self-sacrifice by insiders, is seen as a political practice. It is not the cause of boundaries, but a means developed for policing them.⁵

Whether it be Rhesus and Howler monkeys, distributed at intervals along a tree trunk, or human beings locating themselves in social organizations, the distribution and allocation of space among actors is, as Durkheim taught us, a basic technique for conflict avoidance. When many exclusive groups coexist in contexts of low interaction, the techniques and rituals of exclusion of each have minimal transgroup costs, thanks to social spacing. But when interactions increase and things get crowded, these practices acquire a pathogenic, conflict-generating potential, as otherwise rational collective choices converge with the deep psychological demands of individuals for security. Latent insecurity among all individuals is generated by the ongoing expectation of violence and the perception that peace is an interim between major crises.⁶ Lasswell wrote that:

in crises, many persons revert to the symbols and formulas of childhood. If these formulas are mainly ceremonial, the individual may dispose of his tensions without working over changes in the environment; but the reactivation of these fundamentalist patterns is frequently associated with militant demands for action.

Fundamentalist movements during prosperity are principally laughing matters for the metropolitan sophisticates. An H.L. Mencken may scoff at the corn and bible belt and make sport of a monkey trial. But in depression, this sort of thing has serious meaning for political developments. With the declining economic power of the cities, and the search for soul-satisfying security in hard times, a substantial part of the population especially in the provinces may become incited to action around symbols of The Old Time Religion, and the ancient code of familial and personal morals, manners, and styles.⁷

Rather than sustaining and facilitating collective choices for survival, reactions such as these generate further conflicts with other groups that may threaten the group itself.

In a world in which increased interchanges and resultant interdependences among territorial groups are indispensable for the achievement of the basic social and political goals of each group, those interdependences also generate or exacerbate deep ambivalences and insecurities in many members of the rank-and-file of each community. Professor Robert Dahl, of Yale University, has written:

A country's economic life, physical environment, national security and survival are highly, and probably increasingly, dependent on actors and actions that are outside the country's boundaries and not directly subject to its government. Thus the members of the Demos cannot implore their national government, and much less their local governments, to exercise direct control over external actors whose decisions bear critically on their lives.⁸

Yet rational responses to this increasingly global condition require more transnational governmental structures and the transfer to them of competences theretofore reserved to the national bureaucracy. Each of these new creations, with its necessary transfer of competences, further reduces the range for personal involvement in the decisions that affect one's life. Hence a paradox: the search for political, military or economic security through the creation of transnational institutions simultaneously generates an insecurity, because the resulting interdependences stir deep uncertainty and anxiety in many individuals about their dependence on processes that are beyond the influence of their primary political communities. When the overall value-status of the individual is also imperilled because of other economic or social changes, themselves the result of transnationalization of many sectors, latent feelings of insecurity are further aggravated.

A distinguishing feature of elites is that they have access to more and better information. Hence they will have more accurate images of the interdependences among territorial communities and, accordingly, the need for transnational institutions, endowed with the competences to minimize conflict and facilitate the most productive interactions. But other social strata (and sometimes parts of the elite itself), with less accurate information, can become prey to the belief that, in times of crisis, one must depend on one's own. The result is a cacophony, as if one were listening simultaneously to the language of the global scientific civilization over the throbbing tom-toms of tribalism whose hypnotic rhythms communicate, at levels far below overt consciousness, the virtues of the old modes of identification and operation. Because of this disparity of viewpoint, the trend towards globalizing so many activities, for all its glowing promises of widespread benefits, conceals, in its dark underside, politically exploitable feelings of personal insecurity, ineffectiveness and inessentiality. These experiences may impel desperate searches - on the parts of elites as well as members of the rank-and-file - for guarantees of personal and group security under the `ancient codes'.

These contradictory conditions will continue to generate the need for transnational arrangements and the elevation of symbols of loyalty to them. Yet, at the same time, they will support and justify, in the minds of some elites and members of other social strata, the need for exclusive territorial communities that can jealously police their boundaries and preserve their powers. Parts of governmental decision processes in these exclusive communities will operate in competition with, and even fierce opposition to, the transnational arrangements. Accommodations will be fragile and contingent, depending largely on perceptions of crisis. When such unease intensifies, demands for retraction to increasingly exclusive, and possibly tribal, racial or fictitious identities may come to the fore. Though identification may then expand as perceptions of crisis ease, contractions will recur when feelings of insecurity increase.⁹

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1 Hohfeld Professor of Jurisprudence, Yale Law School. 127 Wall Street, 314 SLB, New Haven, Connecticut, CT 06511-6636, USA. The author acknowledges the comments and suggestions of Andrew Willard.

2 It is interesting to relate these trends to the phenomenon of `privatization', a movement of governmental reform and bureaucratic downsizing occurring, most dramatically, in Japan and Korea in Asia, in Sweden and the United Kingdom in Europe, and in the United States. Privatization acknowledges the inadequacy of government to discharge its responsibilities, but attributes this to an inherent inefficiency in public institutions rather than to changes in the larger context. Ironically, the response of privatization, which gives primacy to efficiency rather than to security and boundary-policing, tends to accelerate the process of transnationalization.

3 Bowley, `Drive to Cut Costs Worries New Head of the OECD', Financial Times, 21 February 1997, at 6.

4 Snyder, `Civic versus Ethnic Nation-Building: A Collective-Action Approach', unpublished paper presented at Yale University, 14 February 1994, at 17.

5 F. Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (1969), at 22.

6 H.D. Lasswell, World Politics and Personal Insecurity (1935, 1965 with new introduction), at 57.

7 Ibid, at 120-121.

8 R.A. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (1989), at 319.

9 See, in this regard, Lasswell, `The Interrelations of World Organization and Society', 55 Yale Law Journal (1946) 889.

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