theman9235
Rookie
Posts: 33
Political Matrix
E: 8.59, S: 9.09
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« on: December 23, 2006, 09:58:47 PM » |
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For those of you who like theory and like to think, explain your arguments if you abject.
Anarchy depends on the rules of a statist government for functionality. Without the rule of law enforced by government, anarchy becomes a guaranteed source of unchecked violence.
Englehart '03 (Neil A. Dissent. "In Defense of State Building." pp 18-19. Fall 2003.)
The evil that states do is well known. There are abundant examples: from the brutality of the Thirty Years War to the Stalinist purges, the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, and the Rwandan genocide. Because its repressive capacities are so clear, political theorists seek to protect us from the state (Locke), to divide and limit its power (Madison), to liberate us from it (Marx), or to dissolve it entirely (Foucault). Yet Hobbes's picture of life withouth the state--poor, nasty, brutish, and short--still resonates. States can only be called oppressive if there is an alternative available, a more promising political order.
States dominate our minds as much as they dominate the globe. The conceptual hegemony of the state is so great that there has been little serious thinking about alternative arrangements. Anarchist visions may sound liberating, but only because they assume that life under anarchy would be much like it is now--only better. In fact, anarchists depend on the very order they seek to abolish, assuming that people will be treated as free and equal, able to make uncoerced choices outside the protection of the state. Their utopian visions set the parameters of critiques of the state, but they seldom recognize that the necessary substructure of their utopia doesn't exist "nowhere"--it exists only where states have established law and order.
In real life, the alternatives to the state are more violent, more coercive social and political orders dominated by warlords and gangs. Not quite the Hobbesian war of all against all, they are rather wars of group against group, dividing society and destroying the possibility of a peaceful public sphere, or civil society, rights, and social justice. The corollary to the oppressiveness of non-state politics is that, contrary to our commonsense understanding, states are relatively liberating and egalitarian. Compared to actually existing alternatives, states have more potential for protecting human rights, human security, and international peace than any other political order. Thats why state building is so important.
Modern states are distinctive in two respects: they claim and mostly weild a monopoly of the use of violence and they are bureaucratically organized. The monopoly of legitimate force eliminates the widely dispersed violence typical in other kinds of polites. In medieval Europe, for example, violence was legitimately used by peasant villages, urban guilds, city governments, the nobility, and the church--all in addition to, and independent of, the king. By monopolizing violence, modern states sharply reduce its overall level, enabling ordinary people to live more securely. States create what Norbert Elias calls "pacified social spaces," which permit citizens to pursue their own interests without worrying about their personal safety every minute of every day.
An important reason that states are able to secure this monopoly is that rational-legal bureaucracies give them unprecedented capacity to control society. Although people commonly rail against bureaucratic inefficiency, these complaints measure bureaucracies against an ideal of efficient performance rather than against any actually existing alternative. In most of the administrative systems that preceded the development of modern bureaucracy, offices were a form of property or ascribed status, held as private entitlements. Officials were therefore much less responsive to the public or higher authorities, and social control--including the control of violence--was much less effective.
Bureaucracies are often accused of being intrinsically oppressive because they are so much more effective at gathering information and enforcing laws and policies than other kinds of administrations. This efficiency is indeed sometimes dangerous, but non-bureaucratic systems are always dangerous because there is no systematic accountability, no way to check the abuses of the powerful.
Because of their size and complexity, rational-legal bureaucracies are much more rule-bound than the alternatives. Even if the rules are unjust, their systematic nature promotes accountability. Ordinary citizens, nongovernmental agencies (NGOs), and international agencies can much more easily identify the agents of injustice; they will have an address for protests and recommendations; they will know whom to blame when things go badly. The letter writing campaigns of Amnesty International and the assessments of UN human rights rapporteurs depend on this accountability. Without it human rights activists are helpless, which means that they are helpless in countries that are stateless.
The monopoly of violence and rule of law together create potential for rights--legally enforceable entitlements vested equally in all citizens. Of course, many states fail to vest rights equally or to defend the rights they claim to recognize. However, without states, the legal enforcement of rights is almost inconceivable. Indeed, despotic regimes often attack their own bureaucracies, precisely because they represent a point of accountability and transparency, and thus may empower those outside the regime.
Because our commonsense understanding of states is formed from within the environment created by those same states, it is not surprising that we lack a comparative understanding of the alternatives. It is also not surprising that we chafe against the failures and imperfections of states, holding them--as we should--to an ideal that we can conceive only because of the social order that is potential in them.
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