lecture 2. State formation Flashcards
What is a sovereign state?
**Westphalian sovereignty
External sovereignty: ** no authority above the state - de jure
Internal sovereignty: exclusive authority on territory and population- de facto
Montevideo convention on Rights and Duties 1933:
The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications:
- a permanent population
- a defined territory
- Government, and capacity to enter into relations with the other state
..WEBER :Modern state formation is about power and legitimacy
Politics: distribution, maintenance, or transfer of power.
Authority: legitimate power, power without coercion.
Weber: Different definitions of Authority
Traditional authority: the eternal yesterday
* it has always been there, for example monarchies.
Charismatic authority: the personal ‘’gift of grace’’.
* Qualities located in the individual, he/she can lead, people follow.
in Afghanistan: Warlords, if they go it is very hard to institutionalize their power.
**Legal/ rational authority: **the virtue of legality (ruler)
–> Weberian state.
This was in Afghanistan the goal between 2000-2021.
Robert Dahls definition of power
Having the ability to make someone do something, they would not have done it/ influencing others.
–> Authority is the legitimation of power
Modern state formation is about violence
The state cannot be defined in terms of its end.
The state can only be defined in terms of its specific means: the use of physical force.
If no social institutions existed which knew the use of violence: Anarchy (Hobbes, Leviathan)
Force is not the normal or only means of the state (Machiavelli, The Prince)
Weber:
modern state formation is about violence
What is a state:
The state is a human community that (succesfully) claims the monopoly of the **legitimate use of physical force** within a given territory. ‘’
Weber:
modern state formation is about: monopolizing resources
How do power holders maintain their domination?
- Control the personal executive staff
- Control the material means of administration
- End of indirect rule:
- Lords, warlords, any actor in civil society that holds authority
- Expropriate the expropriators: state/ society struggle (Migdal)
- Society: societal actors like warlords, religious leaders –> need to neutralized.
Weber:
modern state formation is about: bureaucratization
- Establish a bureaucracy (Weberian state)
*. professional politicians who do not wish to be lord themselves bu tenter the service of political lords. - Can the bureaucratic state be exported? Can the Western experience be reproduced
- Can warlords be bureaucrats? (Mukhopadhyay)
War making and state building as Organized Crime: Charles Tilly
Modern State formation is about warmaking, protection, and extraction
Statemaking
Warmaking
Protection
Extraction
=Tilly sees this s a historical process; within European Statemaking
Charles Tilly: Statemaking
Eliminating or neutralizing their rivals inside their territories
Charles Tilly: Warmaking
Eliminating or neutralizing their rivals outside their teritories
Weber: Expropriate the expropriators: state/ society struggle (Migdal)
Charles Tilly: Protection
Eliminating or neutralizing the enemies of their clients
Charles Tilly: Extraction
Acquiring the means of carrying out the first 3 activities
Warmaking is about protection and extraction… Hence state making
- Power holders go to war
- War makers need resources
* short run: conquest, selling off assets, coercing or dispossessing accumulators of capital
* Long run: tax the population (extraction) promote capital accumulation by those who can help them borrow and buy protection - War makers end up building states
> War making, extraction, and capital accumulation interacted to shape European state making.
> Capitalism and state making reinforce each other.
Issue with Charles Tilly his arguments
Charles Tilly neglects external relations
External relations shape every nation state:
1. Flows of resources (loans +supplies)
2. Competition among states stimulates war making
3. Coalitions of states force states into certain forms and posiitions within the international system.
Michael Mann (“Infrastructural Power Revisited,” Studies in Inter
Mann: Modern state formation is about territorizalation and centralization:
Two kinds of power:
Infrastructural power
Despotic power
Infrastructural power (Mann)
The capacity of the state to actually penetrate civil society and implement actions across its territories.
*. Derives from the social utility of a state that is multi-function and centralized
* Similar to Hobbes about safety/ protection.
*. It mainstains welfare, military infrastructure
Grows over time
Here people give up a bit of freedom ‘‘voluntary in order for protection
Despotic power (Mann)
The rance of actions that the state elite is empowered to make without consultation with society groups (autonomy of power)
- derives from inability of civil society to control the mulitplicity of state functions (this creates a manoevring space)
- Varies over time
- Eventually the state elites will meet resistance
- Without asking anyone
Levels of Despotic power/ infrastructural Power Afghanistan
low despotic/ low infrastructural power: Feudal
HIgh despotic/ low infrastructural power: imperial
low despotic/ high infrastructural power: Bureaucratic: democratic
high despotic/ high infrastructural power:
Authorian: single party
The issue of Afghanistan is not about monopoly of violence, but that one group attempts to grasp power.
Pre- 2021: Afghanistan would fit in the middle, it was very hard to reach people
Post 2021: Afghanistan would fit between imperial and authoritarian:
There is some level of infrastructural power, and its despotic.
Empire of Ahmad Shah Durrani (1747)
- King of Afghans
- Abdali/ Durrani Tribal confereration (Kandahar)
- Conquest empire of non-Pashtun lands
- Administer conquests (not govern the tribes)
- No centralized army
- Disputes between ruler and tribes
*opposite of what Mann speaks about: centralization/ infrastructural power.
Great Game & First Anglo-AFghan War
(1839-1842)
What is the Great game
Rivalry between Russian Empire and British one,
Begin of 19th centrury
Great game/ Anglo-Afghan War:
Similarities with Soviet-Afghan war
- Geopolitical context (security dilemma)
- Jihad
Great game/ Anglo-Afghan War:
Similarities with Post-2001 intervention
- Fear of Islamic fundamentalism
- Fear of ‘‘state failure’’
- Regime change
Kim & Flashman (books)
Abdur Rahman Khan as the Iron Emir
1880- 1901
- Centralized army (and conscription)
- Islamic authority; establishment of Sharia courts
- Defensive JIhad
- Taxation
* War making and state making as organized crime.
Second Anglo-Afghan war
1878-1880
Autonomy: British control of foreign affairs
Treaty of Gandamak (1879) + Durand line (1893)
–> leads to buffer state of Abdur Rahman Khan
Buffer state: internal autonomy+ external support
Amanullah’s failed modernization
1919-1929
- Third Anglo-Afghan War + Independence (1919)
- Amanullah’s reign as story of state/society struggle
- Amanullah fails to expand infrastructural power
- He tries to fast, and eventually has to flee
He wanted a progressive state too fast, with parliamentary democracy
The Musahiban Dynasty
1929-1978
1929-1978
* inability to penetrate or trasnform society as a whole
* Reliance on the international system
- Taxes on foreign trade
- Foreign aid
- Sales of natural gas to the Soviet Union
*No process of state formation
Conclusions
A story of state centralization and resistance to it
A story of legitimacy and lack thereof
The failure of modern state formation
Did the international community prevent the successful formation of the Afghan state?
