Sovereignty is a major issue in the political life of a country, though one that receives far less attention than it deserves. The sovereign state is ubiquitous in the modern world. My purpose here is to call it into question. The sovereign state is taken for granted by many political commentators and textbooks, for instance Ronald G. Landes’ The Canadian Polity. The few thinkers who do attempt to account for it employ justifications for its existence based on historical myth. I intend to counter these myths with an accurate account of the events that brought about the state, as we know it, and in so doing, to demonstrate its inherent flaws.
I will begin with the classic definition of the state, as given by Max Weber. I will address the received view of the state, with reference to Judith Shklar, Jeffrey Stout, and Ronald G. Landes. Giddens, Jacques Barzun, William Cavanaugh, and Charles Tilly, will inform my account of its creation. Barzun and Cavanaugh will be employed to give their differing views of why it was created. I will make use of Cavanaugh to engage critically the prevailing, sympathetic view of the state’s birth, as found in John Rawls and Jeffrey Stout. Finally, I will give my own view, that the state’s claim to sovereignty is novel, harmful, and illegitimate, being based on false pretences.
Max Weber defined the state as “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” (Weber, 78; italics his).
While acknowledging force as the state’s foundation, Weber points out that differing legitimations of this domination are employed as justification. He classifies these trebly: traditional, charismatic, and litigious, all of which merely serve to mask the state’s true nature. In considering the validity of his definition, one would do well to recall, as Weber did, that “the right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions or to individuals only to the extent to which the state permits it.” (Weber, 78) But, says Weber, it was not always thus. In parallel with the development of capitalism, the modern state came to control “the total means of political organization, which actually came together under a single head”: what one might call sovereignty.
The state is typically seen as a well-intentioned institution, which exercises its sovereignty chiefly to protect its citizens from each other. Landes asserts that it is necessary as “the institutional means for controlling and regulating conflict within society.” It is thought by many to have its origin in the “Wars of Religion” as a device to control warring religious factions. Jeffrey Stout and Judith Shklar consider it an essentially liberal institution, in contrast to the supposedly oppressive system it overcame. In Shklar’s words, “liberalism was born out of the cruelties of the religious civil wars…The alternative then set is between cruel military and moral repression, and a self-restraining that fences in the powerful to protect the freedom and safety of every citizen…(Shklar, 5.) Again, Jeffrey Stout would have it that “liberal principles were the right ones to adopt when competing religious beliefs and divergent conceptions of the good embroiled Europe in the religious wars…Our early modern ancestors were right to secularize public discourse in the interest of minimizing the ill effects of religious disagreement. (Stout, 241)
Giddens deliberately does not address directly the idea of sovereignty, but much of the thrust of his argument goes towards illustrating the shift that took place from feudalism to absolutist monarchy to modern nation-state. He makes it clear that the absolutist state, like feudal society, did not confer a “national identity” on its citizens. Historians agree that local region was the only beneficiary of nationalist sentiments in 17th and early 18th century France. “Most ‘French’ men and women [of the time] thought of themselves as belonging either to one of the provinces or to one of the cities.” (Giddens, 119). It was partly the growth of surveillance on a national scale which lead to a unified sovereign state, as the reach of central power was extended; on an international level to the monitoring of “international relations,” again expanding the realm of the state.
Indispensable to any theory of the rise of the nation-state is a consideration of the concurrent rise of industrial capitalism. (Here, too, surveillance, this time in the workplace, was a crucial ingredient). While some might see in modern industrial capitalist society the exclusion of the economic sphere from the “constitutional form of the modern state” (Giddens, 150) as leaving it an unincorporated civil society, Giddens alleges that “it derives from the very same sources as the sphere of sovereignty so elemental to the nation-state itself.
It is clear that the consolidation of central power in the modern state was in some way linked with the growth of transnational capitalistic activity. A common set of legal ordinances did much to facilitate intra-continental trade, which in turn benefits the state financially. Now Weber suggests that the state’s dependence on capitalist endeavour dissuades it from enforcing even nominal legal restrictions on economic activity. Giddens, on the other hand, intimates that Weber lays overmuch stress on the economic freedom inherent in the modern state, pointing out cogently that Weber neglects the importance “of a coercive framework in relation to property rights” (Giddens, 152). He seems to suggest that “the authoritative resources mustered to stabilize industrial capitalism nationally and internationally” (Giddens, 160), i.e. administrative unity and flourishing bureaucracy, as well as the professionalized standing army (the former not coincidentally dependent on the infrastructural changes brought about by industrial capitalism itself) broke down the rigid barriers of the class-based society, and created the modern, and sovereign, nation state.
.William Cavanaugh points to the “wars of religion” as a key element of the crystallization of state sovereignty. A superficial reading of the period, one favoured by “contemporary liberal political theorists” (Cavanaugh, 21), e.g. John Rawls, Judith, and Jeffrey Stout, portrays these bloody conflicts as an inevitable consequence of the multiplication of religions that followed the Reformation. In this account, irrational and violent convictions collided, to horrific effect, and had to be reined in by a secular and sovereign state, which confined religion to its proper sphere, the private. As Cavanaugh puts it, “the Church is…the primary thing from which the modern state is meant to save us.
But the truth is something like the opposite of this. In fact, these so-called “wars of religion,” rather than necessitating the modern state, were a by-product of its violent creation. The absolutist state claimed sovereignty in the 15th and 16th centuries, beginning with Spain under Isabella and Ferdinand. The logical result of this claim was a violent effort to crush or assimilate any other body that infringed on its sovereignty, and to lay claim to as much territory as possible. The fruit of the state’s success in this endeavour was a territorial ordering and a nearly unchallenged assertion of practically universal competence, which together make up the nation-state. These wars were also a means to the “creation of religion as a set of privately held beliefs without direct political relevance” (Cavanaugh, 22). The absolute sovereignty the state demanded necessitated this “religion.” The effect of the “wars of religion” was to elevate civil authorities above the Church, their former overlord, setting up the state, oddly, as a peacemaker, and using this role to confine the Church. That God had bestowed temporal authority only on the state is an idea which existed, albeit tenuously, as early as the 14th century, and was revived and brought to the forefront by Luther, among others, serving to strip every last shred of real authority from the Church.
However, this was not a uniquely Protestant, or even a religious phenomenon. As Richard Dunn points out, “Charles V`s soldiers sacked Rome, not Wittenberg, in 1527” (quoted in Cavanaugh, 25). True, it was Charles who sparked the first great “war of religion,” by attacking the Lutheran states of Germany, but his motive was extension of his empire, unadulterated by doctrinal zealotry. It is telling, also, that the French Catholic king Henry II came to the aid of the Lutherans in this struggle, and helped them achieve victory, while the Catholic German princes stood by and watched. The peace of Augsburg, which ended the war in 1555, “allowed the temporal authority of each political unit to choose either Lutheranism or Catholicism: cuius regia, eius religio” (Cavanaugh, 25; italics mine). Ultimately, then, the leaders in this conflict were not concerned with religion, but rather with solidifying their sovereignty. This conflict was really a demonstration of the irrelevance of religion to the new sovereign state.
Charles Tilly, in his essay “State making and war making as organized crime” makes several helpful points on the subject of the rise of sovereignty and the nation-state. He reminds us that “every European government before the French Revolution relied on indirect rule via local magnates” (Tilly, 174). The transformation, he explains, to direct rule was accomplished by “(a) extending their officialdom to the local community, and (b) encouraging the creation of police forces that were subordinate to the government rather than to individual patrons, distinct from war-making forces, and therefore less useful as the tools of dissident magnates.” He describes the demilitarization of the great lords of England by the 15th and 16th century Tudors in “four complementary campaigns: eliminating their great personal bands of armed retainers, razing their fortresses, taming their habitual resort to violence for the settlement of disputes, and discouraging the cooperation of their dependents and tenants.” (Tilly, 174) “In France,” he continues, “Richelieu began the great disarmament in the 1620s. With Richelieu’s advice, Louis XIII systematically destroyed the castles of the great rebel lords…against whom his forces battled incessantly…By the later 1620s, Richelieu was declaring the royal monopoly of force as doctrine.” (Tilly, 174) That is to say, sovereignty was asserted and enforced before and during the “Wars of Religion,” which are, therefore no justification for it.
Another viewpoint on the “wars of religion” and their relation to the rise of the nation-state is that of Jacques Barzun, famed historian and man of letters. He addresses the topic inn a chapter of his magnum opus, From Dawn to Decadence entitled “The Monarch’s Revolution.” Unlike Cavanaugh, he seems to admit of a “war of sects,” which hastened the transformation from feudal kingdoms to absolute monarchies. He says that “[a] king is a monarch when he holds the monopoly of war” (Barzun, 241), which entails a standing army, which in turn implies a flourishing bureaucracy to administer taxation. This revolution was concomitant with the growth in the tendency to perceive nations, rather than realms, “continuous, stable territory with an increasingly homogeneous population” (Barzun, 239). In his account, the sects disrupted and dismantled the unified authority that had been vested in the Church, and the kings of Europe saw an opportunity to reconstitute it in themselves. In their rush to assert sovereignty over territory, faith was often set aside--witness the conversion to Catholicism of Henry of Navarre--and in recognizing this, Barzun apprehends some of Cavanaugh’s view of the fabulous nature of the supposed religious character of the “Wars of Sects.” Barzun too sees that the rulers engaged in these conflicts sought temporal, not spiritual, gain. In his mind, their goal was the extension of their sovereignty, and simultaneously its concentration on a specific territory, which together define the nation-state.
Having considered the two opposing sides of the story of the state, the conclusion that one must draw is clear. The conventional wisdom, as personified in Shklar and Stout, is outdone by the more historically credible account of Cavanaugh and Tilly. If the sovereign state predated the “Wars of Religion,” and in Spain, England, and France at least, it unquestionably did, these bloody conflicts cannot explain its creation. It seems more likely, indeed, that they were a by-product of its establishment. In this case, the assertion of sovereignty can be attributed only to self-interest on the part of the state. Stripped of the pretence of a generous motive for its creation, the sovereign state can now only be judged by its fruits: national unity, and thus nationalistic sentiments; bureaucratization; policed borders, indeed a police force itself; ready-made rivals in the form of encroaching neighbours, and a standing army that cries out for use.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
William T. Cavanaugh, “Killing for the Telephone Company: Why the Nation-State is not the Keeper of the Common Good,” Modern Theology 20, 2004.
William T. Cavanaugh, “A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House: The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State” Modern Theology 11: 397-420, (1995).
Ronald G. Landes, The Canadian Polity, (Scarborough: Allyn & Bacon, 1998).
Charles Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” in Bringing the State Back, eds. Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Theda Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 169.
Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber, trs. H.H. Gerth, C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 77.
