Anarch
10-25-2005, 01:57 PM
[Note: I typed up this essay today for my international politics class. I didn't use any of the resources but I had to pretend I did, and so a bibliography is included :D]
Is the state the final form of political community, and is there evidence of a superior form of political community? That is the question to which this essay is aimed, and for which an answer is sought.
The state can be defined as an organisation which claims the sovereign power to impose force over a section of territory, whether it does this via general applicable laws (e.g. prohibition of murder punished by prison sentence) or by directives aimed at a particular (e.g. search warrants) is irrelevant. As is the structure of the state, whether it be a bureaucracy in service of an all-powerful monarch (e.g. the former Czars of imperial Russia), or an elected government in the form of a republic (e.g. the United States of America). What distinguishes the state as an organisation from a gang of thugs is a legitimising ‘myth’. In socialist countries, this myth is the state seen as the incarnation of class power; in liberal democracies, the myth of the social contract serves to legitimise the state; in theocracies, the state is seen as the organisation of society in accord with the divine order; in fascist nations, the state is seen as the organisation of national power, and in monarchies, legitimacy is often derived from both traditional claims (that the monarchy is as old as the community it rules, and is a core part of the identity of that community) and religious claims (e.g. divine right).
A political community is related but distinguishable from the state. It is both the legitimising myth and the community from which the state derives its practical authority and its resources. In the modern age of the nation-state, the community is defined by its history, its relations with other communities, shared language and cultural values. To illustrate, with the example of the immediate post-revolutionary United States of America: The United States was assembled from thirteen former British colonies united in revolt against the British Empire, neighbouring many hostile Indian tribes (which generated a racial consciousness in America, the effects of which are still with us today), and freshly suspicious, if not outright hostile, to any European power on the continent. What developed out of these circumstances was a love of independence combined with strength, an iron will to break any European power on the continent capable of posing a threat, and the pacification of Indian tribes, often by violence, in over a century of annihilation warfare.
The political community can be distinguished from all other forms of communities – for example, religious communities, economic unions, and cultural organisations – in that it is political, that is, its identity is of such importance to those whose relations comprise it that all other identities are subordinated to it and on the basis of this political identity, the existential distinction between friend and enemy is possible. The political is the state whose intensity is capable of reaching the point where one party subjugates and annihilates the identity of the other. This is not to say that the essence of political communities is war – but rather, that without this possibility of war, without the existence of an identity for which war can be fought, a political community cannot and does not exist.
The state, therefore, is the form of a political community. The result of translating the values of a political community into political form is called law. The violation of these political values is responded in the same ‘language’ irrespective of who the violator is – the violation of a political value which has its meaning as a prohibition of murder is responded to by the force of the state, that is, the police, just as a violation of a political value which has its meaning in the territorial sovereignty of the political community is responded to by the armed forces of the state.
But a key aspect of the political – and the political precedes the existence of the state – is the concept of sovereignty. What then, is sovereignty? “Sovereign is he who decides the exception”[1] (http://phora.org/forum/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=8#_ftn1) The exception is that which occurs beyond and outside political norms, the exception is the event which challenges the authority and the existence of both the state and the political community. The recognition of the exception means precisely the enactment of emergency power, of the mobilisation of the political community to affect favourable resolution by whatever means necessary to do so. The exception is the liberation of the state from its normal form (that of law), into its exceptional form, which spawned its existence, that of decision.
It is evident that the nation-states of Europe surrendering their sovereignty (there is no partial sovereignty - one either possesses it or one does not) to that order known as the European Union is not an end to the state – rather, that a European state is forming in a piecemeal fashion, first in the economic sphere (free trade, common currency, movement of labour) and then, if the European Union does not dissolve (which it may), sooner or later in the legal and military spheres. The expansion of the scale on which a state operates does not alter the fact of the existence of the state.
Then – is there evidence of a successor to the state? To recapitulate what a state is: an organisation that claims sovereign authority to institute force over a section of territory, whose authority is derived from a myth, a myth in which faith is invested in by a political community.
I call to attention the relatively recent invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq, and the fact that both were conducted, as many other operations such as the occupation of East Timor have been, in the name of human rights. What has occurred here is the legitimisation of political action in the name of myths that are intended to be universally applicable. Indeed, what separates this myth of human rights from many other myths is that the political values of this myth have been elucidated, in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. The idea of violating the sovereignty of a political community in order to assert a political myth sets an interesting precedent. While the United States Constitution was prefaced by a ‘We, the people…’, and the protection the US Constitution and its attached Bill of Rights plainly apply only to Americans, the UN declaration of human rights specifies no such pre-existing political community. The jurisdiction for this legislation has no boundaries. If carried out to its logical conclusion it would mean both the end of the political community and the end of the state system, and the world would end up in a state of partial anarchy.
The reasoning for this conclusion is quite simple. Where the laws are already elucidated (and these series of prohibitions on various human actions are, to writ, the UN Declaration of Human Rights), the political question is simply one of enforcement – enforcement no longer bound by territorial sovereignty (as the United States has most notably set precedent for), nor constrained on legal limits on punishment (witness the death sentences to Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg Trials). Insofar as the rights of humans are respected, anyone may work in any way to protect these rights. The effects of this would be dramatic. Sovereign authority would be withdrawn from the state and granted to human rights, territorial limitations on protective force is no longer a question, and the monopoly on protective force held by the state is utterly illegitimate. This, nonetheless is not anarchy proper – so long as authority is drawn from the universal declaration of human rights, there is authority.
To conclude: There is no evidence of a superior form of the political community to the state – nor is one possible. To respond to those who may claim the European Union to be an example of an alternative, I state that the European Union will either become like the United States of America has since the civil war – that is to say, a trend of increasingly centralised power and the seemingly irreversible transfer of sovereignty to federal authority – or the nations comprising the European Union shall reverse this trend, and opt for the way of the Confederate States of America, with a restoration of sovereignty to the states. There is no middle way. The only alternative to the state as a form of political community is the dissolution of the political community, and for a ‘Government-less’ system of human relations, guided by commonly acceptable principles and enforced by any who see fit to do so, a trend which humanitarian intervention is providing precedent.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Balakrishnan, G., The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, Verso, New York, 2000.
Scruton, R., The West and the Rest, Continuum, New York, 2003
Schmitt, C., The Concept of the Political, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1996
Weber, M., The Essential Max Weber: A Reader, Ed. Sam Whimster, Routledge, New York, 2004
Yockey, F. P., Imperium, Noontide Press, Newport Beach, 1948
[1] (http://phora.org/forum/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=8#_ftnref1) Schmitt, C., Political Theology, Punker and Humblot, Munich, 1922, cited in Balakrishnan, G., The Enemy: An intellectual portrait of Carl Schmitt, Verso, 2000, p.45
Is the state the final form of political community, and is there evidence of a superior form of political community? That is the question to which this essay is aimed, and for which an answer is sought.
The state can be defined as an organisation which claims the sovereign power to impose force over a section of territory, whether it does this via general applicable laws (e.g. prohibition of murder punished by prison sentence) or by directives aimed at a particular (e.g. search warrants) is irrelevant. As is the structure of the state, whether it be a bureaucracy in service of an all-powerful monarch (e.g. the former Czars of imperial Russia), or an elected government in the form of a republic (e.g. the United States of America). What distinguishes the state as an organisation from a gang of thugs is a legitimising ‘myth’. In socialist countries, this myth is the state seen as the incarnation of class power; in liberal democracies, the myth of the social contract serves to legitimise the state; in theocracies, the state is seen as the organisation of society in accord with the divine order; in fascist nations, the state is seen as the organisation of national power, and in monarchies, legitimacy is often derived from both traditional claims (that the monarchy is as old as the community it rules, and is a core part of the identity of that community) and religious claims (e.g. divine right).
A political community is related but distinguishable from the state. It is both the legitimising myth and the community from which the state derives its practical authority and its resources. In the modern age of the nation-state, the community is defined by its history, its relations with other communities, shared language and cultural values. To illustrate, with the example of the immediate post-revolutionary United States of America: The United States was assembled from thirteen former British colonies united in revolt against the British Empire, neighbouring many hostile Indian tribes (which generated a racial consciousness in America, the effects of which are still with us today), and freshly suspicious, if not outright hostile, to any European power on the continent. What developed out of these circumstances was a love of independence combined with strength, an iron will to break any European power on the continent capable of posing a threat, and the pacification of Indian tribes, often by violence, in over a century of annihilation warfare.
The political community can be distinguished from all other forms of communities – for example, religious communities, economic unions, and cultural organisations – in that it is political, that is, its identity is of such importance to those whose relations comprise it that all other identities are subordinated to it and on the basis of this political identity, the existential distinction between friend and enemy is possible. The political is the state whose intensity is capable of reaching the point where one party subjugates and annihilates the identity of the other. This is not to say that the essence of political communities is war – but rather, that without this possibility of war, without the existence of an identity for which war can be fought, a political community cannot and does not exist.
The state, therefore, is the form of a political community. The result of translating the values of a political community into political form is called law. The violation of these political values is responded in the same ‘language’ irrespective of who the violator is – the violation of a political value which has its meaning as a prohibition of murder is responded to by the force of the state, that is, the police, just as a violation of a political value which has its meaning in the territorial sovereignty of the political community is responded to by the armed forces of the state.
But a key aspect of the political – and the political precedes the existence of the state – is the concept of sovereignty. What then, is sovereignty? “Sovereign is he who decides the exception”[1] (http://phora.org/forum/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=8#_ftn1) The exception is that which occurs beyond and outside political norms, the exception is the event which challenges the authority and the existence of both the state and the political community. The recognition of the exception means precisely the enactment of emergency power, of the mobilisation of the political community to affect favourable resolution by whatever means necessary to do so. The exception is the liberation of the state from its normal form (that of law), into its exceptional form, which spawned its existence, that of decision.
It is evident that the nation-states of Europe surrendering their sovereignty (there is no partial sovereignty - one either possesses it or one does not) to that order known as the European Union is not an end to the state – rather, that a European state is forming in a piecemeal fashion, first in the economic sphere (free trade, common currency, movement of labour) and then, if the European Union does not dissolve (which it may), sooner or later in the legal and military spheres. The expansion of the scale on which a state operates does not alter the fact of the existence of the state.
Then – is there evidence of a successor to the state? To recapitulate what a state is: an organisation that claims sovereign authority to institute force over a section of territory, whose authority is derived from a myth, a myth in which faith is invested in by a political community.
I call to attention the relatively recent invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq, and the fact that both were conducted, as many other operations such as the occupation of East Timor have been, in the name of human rights. What has occurred here is the legitimisation of political action in the name of myths that are intended to be universally applicable. Indeed, what separates this myth of human rights from many other myths is that the political values of this myth have been elucidated, in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. The idea of violating the sovereignty of a political community in order to assert a political myth sets an interesting precedent. While the United States Constitution was prefaced by a ‘We, the people…’, and the protection the US Constitution and its attached Bill of Rights plainly apply only to Americans, the UN declaration of human rights specifies no such pre-existing political community. The jurisdiction for this legislation has no boundaries. If carried out to its logical conclusion it would mean both the end of the political community and the end of the state system, and the world would end up in a state of partial anarchy.
The reasoning for this conclusion is quite simple. Where the laws are already elucidated (and these series of prohibitions on various human actions are, to writ, the UN Declaration of Human Rights), the political question is simply one of enforcement – enforcement no longer bound by territorial sovereignty (as the United States has most notably set precedent for), nor constrained on legal limits on punishment (witness the death sentences to Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg Trials). Insofar as the rights of humans are respected, anyone may work in any way to protect these rights. The effects of this would be dramatic. Sovereign authority would be withdrawn from the state and granted to human rights, territorial limitations on protective force is no longer a question, and the monopoly on protective force held by the state is utterly illegitimate. This, nonetheless is not anarchy proper – so long as authority is drawn from the universal declaration of human rights, there is authority.
To conclude: There is no evidence of a superior form of the political community to the state – nor is one possible. To respond to those who may claim the European Union to be an example of an alternative, I state that the European Union will either become like the United States of America has since the civil war – that is to say, a trend of increasingly centralised power and the seemingly irreversible transfer of sovereignty to federal authority – or the nations comprising the European Union shall reverse this trend, and opt for the way of the Confederate States of America, with a restoration of sovereignty to the states. There is no middle way. The only alternative to the state as a form of political community is the dissolution of the political community, and for a ‘Government-less’ system of human relations, guided by commonly acceptable principles and enforced by any who see fit to do so, a trend which humanitarian intervention is providing precedent.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Balakrishnan, G., The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, Verso, New York, 2000.
Scruton, R., The West and the Rest, Continuum, New York, 2003
Schmitt, C., The Concept of the Political, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1996
Weber, M., The Essential Max Weber: A Reader, Ed. Sam Whimster, Routledge, New York, 2004
Yockey, F. P., Imperium, Noontide Press, Newport Beach, 1948
[1] (http://phora.org/forum/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=8#_ftnref1) Schmitt, C., Political Theology, Punker and Humblot, Munich, 1922, cited in Balakrishnan, G., The Enemy: An intellectual portrait of Carl Schmitt, Verso, 2000, p.45