Arjun Chowdhury’s book is driven by a paradox I am not sure exists, but I am glad he wrote it because the result offers fascinating insights into the modern intricacies of state formation, function, and failure. The driving paradox Chowdhury claims to identify is that “[t]he state has been and is incapable of fulfilling its fundamental tasks, yet it remains the central unit of world politics.” Two questions arise: Why is the modern state so fragile and weak? And why does it nevertheless “remain the central unit of world politics” (p. 4)? I am not sure we get a clear answer to the latter question, but the answer to the former is front and center: “State weakness is quite simply the result of the standards of statehood increasing to a greater degree than popular willingness to sacrifice for the state” (p. 6). If the author is a “mythbuster,” as the enigmatic title suggests, it is the myth of the strong state that he is after.
Chowdhury deconstructs the strong state in six chapters. The first theorizes the modern state as a “self-undermining” institution. Modeling “the modern state as an exchange between the central authority and population” (p. 13), he predicates its formation and viability on winnable and costly wars, either interstate or imperial. Such wars motivate the population to sacrifice for the state, and thus to demand more services from it. However, once war becomes too costly or unwinnable, the exchange is broken, and the state weakens, desperately blocking alternatives to its disappointing services.
The author follows up this theoretical overture with historical chapters roughly divided between the Western and the decolonized worlds. The nineteenth-century wars fostered state formation in Europe. The nuclear age, however, rendered wars too costly and unwinnable, no longer able to sustain the mushrooming state services that people came to expect but have been increasingly reluctant to pay for, paving paths for neoliberal alternatives. Meanwhile, postcolonial leaders have discarded interstate wars in favor of a “gamble that the population could be developed using colonial-style coercion and foreign assistance” (p. 135), but failed to deliver, paving a path for militant ethnic and tribal alternatives.
I enjoyed Chowdhury’s historical narratives, elegantly weaving wide trends with illuminating anecdotes, but remained skeptical about his overarching thesis. If I may dare an alternative title, The Sacrificial State is it: To emerge and endure, the state requires human sacrifice, but what sacrifice, and what material and mental state can encourage people to offer it? Blood and money, the author ultimately argues, are the sacrifice of people; and war, costly and winnable, is the only way to make them offer it on the insatiable altar of the state, so that they can be allotted protection, welfare, and, more recently, human rights. The aborted sacrifice of recent generations explains why states—besides some exceptional Western states after the Napoleonic and world wars—are so frail and failed, why “the state” is perforce a self-undermining institution. But is it?
Chowdhury assumes, rather than thoroughly demonstrates, that “most states are weak states” (eBook abstract), that most states—even large and established ones, like Mexico and India—rather resemble the failed Libya. Since he opens by drawing on the Fragile States Index (FSI), we may cite the FSI’s recent “clear message,” that “most countries around the world continue to show signs of steady improvement, and many—particularly Mexico—demonstrate resiliency in the face of enormous pressure” (The Fund for Peace, Fragile States Index 2018, Washington, DC, p. 8).
Chowdhury rejects the strong state thesis, since it is “contradicted by the flux of world politics.” But why do “changes in the role of the state over time” indicate its inherent weakness (p. 12)? After all, emerging in the (long) wake of the agricultural revolution, the state—that centripetal supra-kin geopolitical institution—has been with us for at least five millennia, adapting to changing circumstances, and showcasing its evolutionary fitness. He asks: How can the state so resolutely abide when it is so weak? But we may as well ask: How can the state be so weak if it so resolutely abides?
The conceptualization of (strong) states as “centralized states that monopolize violence and provide basic services” may help explain why Chowdhury finds them rather rare (p. 3). Why is centralism a criterion for the state and its strength, making “decentralized, confederal, or ‘polycentric’ governance structures” alternatives to the state (p. 206)? The decentralized Swiss Confederation, which many consider a state, seems to be doing rather well. The “basic services” criterion is also thorny; it is hard to imagine scholars or citizens reaching a consensus on what it entails.
So we are left with the Weberian “monopoly on violence,” which Chowdhury employs, while sidestepping the central element of Max Weber’s definition: What distinguishes the state is not violence, nor even its monopoly over it—but that “the state is regarded as the sole source of the ‘right’ to use violence” (The Vocation Lectures, 2004, p. 33). It is a question of legitimacy. No state ever has a monopoly on violence, but it successfully claims to have the sole legitimacy to use it, and that depends on how most of its citizens, and other states, see it. Crime, even widespread, does not negate statehood; nor do violent regimes or protests. Haiti, for example, which ranked #12 on the FSI, has suffered all the above, as well as severe natural disasters, but has retained, in recent decades, that claim to legitimacy. In this regard, Lebanon (#44) is less a state than Haiti. For Chowdhury, legitimacy transmutes into rising expectations from the state, which portend its inevitable failure, but that we come to expect more of the state may also suggest its advancement.
Even assuming state weakness, did the exceptional (costly and winnable) interstate and imperial wars of late modernity beget the state, their decline undermining it? Castles, markets, and temples have all partaken in state making since the dawn of human civilization. Throughout, war—costly much before modernity—has bolstered the state by showing that size matters: Leaders commanding more people, territory, and resources usually did better on the battlefield. Mass conscription is no modern novelty either. Facing Hannibal, Rome drafted most of its citizens, kept under arms for years; tribes, city-states, states, and empires have often done the same (Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization, 2006).
Wartime sacrifice need not generate a popular cry for state services; that it often did so in modernity discloses the true novelty: the modern relocation of political legitimacy onto “the people.” I have argued elsewhere that popular sovereignty and self-determination emerged as legitimating principles prescribing a coalescing of identity boundaries and state borders to resolve the nation-state mismatch. Size matters, but for state strength, solidarity counts at least as much (hence, for example, the Canadian conscription crises of 1917 and 1944). Since Chowdhury so deftly explores how imperialist discourse on the colonies boomeranged on Europe itself, and how (post)colonial states ossified identity categories, I would have liked to learn his take on the role of nationalism in the (un)making of modern states.
Various types of political violence may foster nationalism and its thirst for statehood. Tellingly, Chowdhury’s choice for a cover image, Goya’s The Second of May 1808, depicts an anti-French popular uprising near Madrid, not an absolute interstate war. The author claims that “civil wars do not build centralized states” (p. 16). However, public discourse turned the “United States” noun from plural to singular only in the wake of the Civil War, demonstrating that intrastate violence can also help imagine “the people” into existence.
Taxes are a different story. While some predicted, well before the nineteenth century, that nothing can be certain but death and taxes, Chowdhury craftily traces how taxes only truly ascended in the last century, following the world wars. Then he walks the extra mile: Sans costly winnable wars, wiped out with the nuclear blast, people do not want to pay the state for the services they demand—a gap nourished by people prioritizing “economic growth” over “strong defense forces,” opting for neoliberal alternatives to the postwar welfare state (p. 118).
Strong state, high taxation, capitalism, and growth may go together, however, as China and Norway patently demonstrate. More importantly, Chowdhury’s account neglects the high (typically highest) trust most people put in their state military and police. People often find fault with tycoons, politicians, and policies—not with the polity itself; the state is still where the fiercest battles over the shape of society take place. And when the state itself is challenged, often in the name of “the people,” it is mainly to change its borders and create a new state, not eradicate the state as an institution. For most people, having no police to call in an emergency is a nightmare, not a desire.
My differences with the author’s theory do not eclipse my high regard for the assiduous scholarship, literary wit, and sharp historical analysis that fill the pages of this thought-provoking book. Moreover, a deeper debate—concerning human nature itself—underscores our divergence. By trying to square the human circle into a rationalist model, Chowdhury stands with many political scientists. Effectively subscribing to the homo economicus, he “expect[s], in the absence of war when the old and rich need that protection [by the young and poor], they will prove unwilling to sacrifice for the young and poor” (p. 113), and in a similar vein he asserts: “War is costly, and as its costs rise, combatants should prefer alternatives to violence that compel fewer sacrifices of them” (p. 6).
Perhaps people should, but often enough they do not, and therefore sacrifice a lot—whatever for? For kith and kin (homo biologicus), to feel (homo psychologicus), to belong (homo sociologicus), and finally, to find meaning (what I call homo telos). “Human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense,” George Orwell wrote in his review of Hitler’s Mein Kampf; “they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice” (New English Weekly, March 21, 1940). Here, the heroic sacrifice becomes its own reward; taken to the extreme—and history provides ample examples—you should thank your nation, state, gods, for inviting you to sacrifice yourself.
I should know, inhabiting one such living example. Chowdhury briefly refers to Israel as a “permanent Sparta,” where “the threat of war leads to a consistently high level of popular mobilization and sacrifice” (p. 36). Israel’s wars, however, have all transpired in the nuclear age; since 1973 they have been noninterstate and hardly winnable, and since 1985 were not very costly either. Yet the sacrificial state stays. Israel is perhaps unique, but not unique in being unique; it reveals something about all humans, something which we must tap into if we are to answer the big questions of life, death—and politics.
