A Reading in Chapter two 'Systems', from the Book 'Politics, the basics, Fourth Edition' By Stephen D. Tansey & Nigel Jackson.

SYSTEMS

THIS CHAPTER . . .

elaborates upon a point raised in the introduction: that politics is not an activity confined to modern liberal democratic national governments. Chapter 1 argued that politics can be seen in personal and organisational activity – a point to be developed further in relation to our later discussions of feminism, anarchism and ecology. This chapter analyses the politics of societies without formal governments and the systems of government in kingdoms and empires before considering the focus of modern politics: the nation state. It considers the extent to which developments at a supranational level constitute a threat to the dominance of such states. Political ‘system’ is being used here in a loose sense to denote a complex of interconnecting political activities in a society or societies – it does not imply the adoption of any particular system model.

STATES AND SOCIETIES

For a graphic illustration of the thesis that politics is not just about how states are run, let us consider the case of societies without a state and see if we can identify anything resembling what we would normally think of as ‘politics’.

This raises the issue of what is meant by a state. At this stage, let us ignore some complicated academic arguments and settle upon a working definition (Box 2.1) from Max Weber [1864–1920], a liberal German sociologist.

Power

An organisation ‘that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’.

(Weber, in Gerth and Mills, 1948: 78)

This reflects the way most people probably see the world today. The globe is seen as divided into a series of exclusive geographical areas (countries or nations), each of which has a government whose people recognise its authority to maintain order amongst them, by force in the last resort if necessary. This government may, of course, be divided into central, regional and local levels and executive, legislative and judicial arms, but all these bodies are seen as a system for taking decisions on behalf of the nation (or society) and maintaining law and order.

POLITICS WITHOUT THE STATE: TRIBAL SOCIETIES

This is a picture we shall be questioning later. For now let us point out that until very recently ‘tribal’ groups have been ‘discovered’ in the forests of Papua New Guinea and Brazil living apparently undisturbed by the governments which purport to represent them at the United Nations. Of course such tribal groups may be thought of merely as traditional ‘mini-states’ and as only a minor deviation from Weber’s model. However, social anthropologists who study such groups in detail have shown convincingly that tribal societies may differ radically from the state model of government.

Social anthropologists often avoid the use of ‘tribal’ in this context as implying a condescending view of the peoples concerned as primitive – this is not the authors’ intention. Many of the groups concerned have sophisticated cultures, high levels of artistic achievement and admirable ways of life. ‘Tribal’ is used here as an easily intelligible synonym for what anthropologists frequently term ‘simple societies’ – those having common cultures (e.g. one religion and language), undifferentiated role structures (most people do a small range of similar jobs), with strong emphasis on kinship and custom (Mitchell, 1959). Following Weber, the defining characteristic of such societies may be taken to be a claim to common ancestry.

One way in which these groups differ from the state model of government is in terms of territory. Whilst many such groups do have what they regard as their own territory, some are so nomadic that they can make no such claim. Groups like the Fulani of northern Nigeria herd cattle through lands partially cultivated by others. The Kalahari Bushmen and similar groups range broadly over deserts or forests which may also be used by other groups. Such groups think of government as a property of what sociologists describe as the kin group – all those people descended from a common ancestor or married to such persons. Hence the idea of the ‘blood brother’ – to become a member of the group it is necessary either to marry into it or to be adopted as a member of a particular small family group.

Still more startling to the modern Western citizen than such groups’ relative indifference to the idea of a territory being subject to a particular code of law, is the absence in some of them of anything resembling a fixed governmental organisation. Whilst the absence of a chief or council might not be regarded as so strange in tiny groups such as the !Kung bushmen of the Kalahari desert (Marshall, 1961), it seems almost incredible in groups numbering as many as a million or more such as the pre-colonial Tiv of Nigeria (Bohannan, 1965).

How can centralised political institutions be avoided in such societies? One explanation lies in the attitude to law found in most tribal societies. Western societies (following the nineteenth-century English jurist, Austin) tend to see law as the creation of a sovereign representative legislature. Tribal societies see law as a part of the way of life inherited from their ancestors. Thus living human beings only interpret and enforce the authority of the ancestors and no legislature is necessary. Such a view is clearly only tenable in relatively stable societies – although, as Gluckman (1965) points out, rebellion against those interpreting the law is perfectly possible in such a system.

What is unthinkable is the revolutionary process of replacing existing laws with new ones. The inflexibility of such a system can easily be exaggerated since in practice, as with English common law, old laws can be reinterpreted in new circumstances or quietly ignored as being no longer appropriate.

But does not the enforcement of law and the defence of the group require centralised government? The example of the Tiv suggests one way round this problem. They operated what the social anthropologists term a ‘segmentary lineage system’. This means basically that every Tiv’s place in society is governed by the lineage to which they belong – i.e. how they are descended from the ancestor of the group, ‘Tiv’. It is not that the more closely related you are to the founder of the tribe the more important you are – there is no royal family since all are held to descend from the same source. Thus every Tiv is equal and a fierce egalitarianism reigns. Instead, in any dispute people claiming descent in the same line are expected to take sides together. Naturally should non-Tiv attack a Tiv, all members of the group would be expected to assist if need be. If fighting or quarrelling takes place between Tiv, however, support would be due to people in ‘your’ lineage.

Such a system seems merely to encourage conflict and disorder. If everyone can rely on a host of supporters in a dispute with others, will not disputes be the order of the day? Especially in a situation where there are no established permanent tribal chiefs or headmen (in the sense this is usually understood). In fact, though, the system seems to have worked well in practice. One reason for this was the existence of a considerable consensus on the customs (laws) to be applied. Disputes were not automatically the subject of violence or warfare but settled through meetings (or ‘moots’) of those concerned in the broad, Tiv, sense. After a certain amount of more or less violent posturing, the form was for all to have their say on the rights and wrongs of the dispute with relatives helping the aggrieved sides to present their case. Then a resolution of the dispute was attempted by mediation between the two lineages. If a solution could not be found the two groups would remain ‘at daggers drawn’ until a solution could be found.

In such a situation a premium was placed on bargaining and reconciliation rather than mechanical law enforcement. Many of those on either side might not feel too deeply affronted by (say) an alleged case of adultery, failure to pay up on a dowry payment or words said in a drunken brawl. But everyone would be severely inconvenienced if the other lineage in the village was not prepared to co-operate in the next hunt or harvest. An additional subtlety, which modified any tendency to take disputes too far, was the consideration that your opponents in this dispute might be needed in a larger dispute with more distantly related Tiv at some time in the future!

The Tiv are only one example of numerous tribal societies that have existed without centralised governmental institutions. Many have used some variation of the combination of ‘feuding’ and informal reconciliation systems practised by them. Additionally though, disputes might be settled by resort to oracles like the famous classical Greek oracle at Delphi, in which disputes were arbitrated upon using magical signs resulting from sacrifices. The ambiguity of some of these pronouncements may well have been a sensible political device on the part of the oracle, or medicine man, to avoid identification with either side and promote a negotiated settlement.

Other societies practised a division of functions on an ‘age grade’ basis in which, for instance, the oldest men might collectively manage relationships with the gods, another male age group constitute the leaders of the hunt, the oldest women practise medicine, and so on. In some groups important functions connected with warfare, law and order, or magic might be vested in secret or title societies, membership of which had to be earned by giving feasts to existing members, undergoing initiation ceremonies and performing subordinate roles in a trainee grade. In such societies skill in magic or warfare might be rewarded by promotion ‘on merit’, or promotion might depend upon seniority.

Authority in such societies might rest upon a variety of foundations – a reputation for wisdom in settling disputes, knowledge of traditional remedies for illness, ability as a war leader or merely being the grandparent of a very large (polygamous) family. Such authority figures might well be known by a title which translates into English as ‘chief’ – but their powers were often far from the absolute despotisms imagined by many early Western writers on these subjects. (Of course, chiefs in some tribal societies did have what we might regard as ‘despotic’ authority, e.g. Shaka the nineteenthcentury Zulu chief who ordered whole battalions of his men to commit suicide as a demonstration of his absolute authority.)

In these tribal ‘stateless societies’, then, there is law rather than anarchy (in the everyday sense of no guarantees of law and order); equally, collective decisions on self-defence and economic cooperation are also made – but in a decentralised fashion. Many members of these societies would also emphasise that collective activities also occur on a spiritual level. In short, life continues and even apparently prospers without the state with its accompanying mechanisms of professional armies, bureaucrats, prisons and the like.

It is not surprising that, consequently, some modern thinkers – anarchists in the technical sense – have argued that the same is possible in a modern context. We shall examine their views at more length in Chapter 3. First, however, it is interesting to look at another example of what might be described as ‘politics without the state’, although this is perhaps a slightly more arguable case.

FEUDALISM

This second example is the feudal system – particularly as it was practised in Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries – though it has also applied in other parts of the world, such as in pre-modern Japan (Reischaur, 1956; Prawer and Eisenstadt, 1968). European feudalism is of interest as being perhaps ‘nearer to home’ for contemporary European readers, and as showing the state as we understand it to be a more recent innovation than some may have imagined. It may also suggest some lessons for the future of Europe.

At first sight, feudal Europe was full of states and mini-states, rather than stateless. Did not England, France, Poland and other familiar states already exist in this period – admittedly accompanied by extra ‘players’ on the international scene like Burgundy, Saxony and Venice? The appearance of kings, dukes and doges on the scene would seem to indicate the presence of strong centralized decisionmaking institutions for these territories. The similarity of names with institutions and territories of later periods may well, however, be quite misleading. Outside of England and France, particularly, it soon becomes clear that the idea of a number of territories each with its own legal jurisdiction is quite inappropriate.

This is clearest in the area round about what is now Germany in what was misleadingly called the Holy Roman Empire (accurately described as neither ‘Holy’, ‘Roman’ nor an ‘Empire’ by Voltaire [1694–1778] (1756: Ch. LXX). The empire masked a confusing array of jurisdictions. The ‘Holy Roman Emperor’ was the nominal supreme ruler of a hotchpotch of kingdoms, dukedoms, sovereign bishoprics, independent or federated cities and the like. His powers over each were different and ill-defined. The heads of some of these territories had the power to elect the emperor’s successor. The Catholic Church, in the shape of the pope, claimed powers over the emperor and his ‘vassals’ (those who had sworn allegiance to him), which in later times were felt to be ‘sovereign’ prerogatives. Equally the Church claimed exclusive jurisdiction over all the clergy and many matters of family law – as well as rights to censorship and the levying of separate clerical ‘taxes’. In some cases incumbents of independent kingdoms such as France and Spain held territory within the Empire as nominal vassals of the emperor or some other ‘ruler’.

Similar confusions were to be seen in relationships between the King of England in his capacity as Duke of Normandy and the King of France. Law enforcement and defence were the subject of a patchwork of rights and privileges, the consequence of a pyramid of personal relationships between lords and vassals. Each vassal, in turn, was lord to an inferior group of aristocrats, until one descends to the level of the ordinary knight in his manor. At the aristocratic level the possession of land entailed not only something like the modern idea of ownership, but, perhaps more, the notion of government. In principle, in the early feudal period, land could only be held by those prepared to administer and, most importantly, defend it. Hence only adult fighting men could hold land. If, for instance, the king gave land to a duke, the only way the duke could hope to hold it was by subcontracting the administration and defence of much of it to a group of earls or counts. Each earl or count, in turn, would obtain the allegiance of knights to hold particular manors, or fortified villages.

One consequence of this is, logically, an overlapping of jurisdictions in that the same area would be under the control of (in our example) a king, a duke, a count and a knight. Undoubtedly, also, the Church would also claim jurisdiction in some cases. For that matter it was common for hard-up lords to grant jurisdiction in commercial matters to town councils through charters – the terms of which some councils in Britain still preserve and attempt to enforce.

In practice lords were interested primarily in matters relating to their feudal dues – the equivalent of modern taxation and rents originally primarily payable in labour services. The lord might quite frequently originate from a different part of Europe, linguistically and culturally isolated from his serfs – so that they would often prefer to seek justice through informal community channels. Amongst lords, appeals to judgement by legalistic tribunals were often avoided in favour of trial by combat or through the pursuit of feuds or vendettas which could operate in very similar ways to the system described earlier in relation to the Tiv (Bloch, 1961).

Thus it is clear that in the feudal period, as in tribal stateless societies, conflicts over the allocation of resources could be resolved; communities could make decisions about their defence and economic welfare; but no effective and centralised state machinery existed to carry this out.

STATES WITHOUT NATIONS: KINGDOMS

At a later stage in European history, some individual feudal territories evolved over several centuries into something much more like a modern state. Kingdoms emerged with distinct boundaries within which central authorities claimed exclusive jurisdiction, sophisticated judicial systems with rights of appeal from local courts up to the centre, a taxation system divorced from the rents payable to the owners of land, and, in some cases, representative legislative assemblies.

Part of the attraction of the Protestant Reformation for princes was the opportunity both to assert legal control over matters such as family law which had previously been Church matters and to reassign extensive Church property holdings to themselves and their supporters. Henry VIII’s example in these matters was accompanied by similar phenomena in countries such as Sweden, whilst even Catholic monarchs such as Louis XIV began to assert control over religious orders, and to negotiate greater influence over the Church in their territory.

In essence similar political institutions to these kingdoms were also found in many other parts of the world. For instance, in what is now Nigeria at about the same period it seems likely that sizeable kingdoms existed in Benin, Yorubaland (Oyo) and in Hausaland (Kano, etc.), whilst much earlier such kingdoms were to be found in India and Central America.

By definition, a kingdom can be regarded an example of dynastic politics. That is, they are not so much governments by individuals as by families. In the European examples this usually meant that the state was regarded as all the possessions of a single family regardless of geographical sense or the ethnic or national origins. Thus the modern United Kingdom includes Scotland, Wales and parts of Ireland, as well as the Channel Isles, because the kings of England inherited these areas from the Duchy of Normandy, succeeded to the separate throne of Scotland, or conquered adjacent lands. The kingdom was not united by linguistic, cultural or religious similarities.

Other members of the family were frequently expected to take a major role in government – queens ruling in the absence of kings, the eldest son of the Crown of England being designated Prince of Wales.

Similarly, Belgium and Holland could be regarded as possessions of the Spanish royal family. Within a royal family, rival claims to the succession could arise, and conflict between young supporters of the heir to the throne and established counsellors of the king was virtually the norm.

In the African examples mentioned, the family’s role took very different shapes. Within the context of polygamy, there was more scope for dispute as to succession. Such disputes taking the most drastic form were in Zululand where it was usual for the king to execute any brothers who failed to go into hasty voluntary exile (Lemarchand, 1977). In the Yoruba kingdoms a version of the succession crisis involved ‘king-makers’ selecting the heir from the ranks of a number of princely families who each provided a king in turn.

These monarchic political systems shared a ‘court’ style of politics in which the administration of the royal household and its estates were inseparable from the business of the kingdom as a whole. Power in such systems might well reside primarily with those who most frequently had the ear of the monarch regardless of official position. This might include the king’s mistress, confessor or hairdresser. The politics of such a system is primarily conducted within a consensus on fundamental values (those of the tribe or ruling aristocracy). There is emphasis on individual advancement through patronage; a powerful patron rewards his supporters and followers with benefits derived from his control or influence over government that might well be regarded as corruption in a contemporary democracy. The assumption may often be made that a monarchic state is a ‘despotic’ one in which the monarch’s will is final. This seems to be far from the case in practice. First the monarch’s position is usually a traditional one. The same tradition that places the king in power frequently sets distinct limits upon the exercise of it. The king may be seen as divinely sanctioned and protected, but this implies that he respects the religious feelings of his people. These may be expressed by religious authorities – archbishops, high priests or synods – who are regarded as equally legitimate within their spheres as the monarch is in his. A good example of the sort of limit that might apply is to consider the important area of taxation. In the African kingdoms mentioned, Hausa kings were traditionally entitled to levy taxes, but the Yoruba kings could only rely upon a traditional level of offerings on specified occasions. Even the strongest English monarchs required the approval of the Houses of Parliament, particularly the House of Commons, to levy taxes – although they might be able to manipulate a favourable majority by the use of patronage.

The limits on the exercise of royal power also include the lack of any strongly developed administrative machinery, particularly at local level, so that the king might effectively have to persuade nobles/gentry and municipalities to co-operate. The political capacity of the occupant of the throne was also a vital consideration. When minors succeeded to the throne, such a system might, in effect, become government by a committee of prominent court members, whilst the chief minister of a foolish or lazy king might easily have effective power. In the Japanese case, the shogun or prime minister became the effective power for centuries, becoming, in turn, a hereditary office.

Although kingdoms of the type described are now rare, they are not extinct (for instance Kuwait, Nepal and Saudi Arabia) and the dominance of this type of political organisation for centuries in many parts of the world is a caution against assuming contemporary state forms are inevitable. Furthermore many of the concepts we have introduced here, such as political patronage and court politics, can still be applied in contemporary political systems; consider the Reagan White House in which the chief executive’s wife’s astrologer is alleged to have been vitally influential.

STATES WITHOUT NATIONS: EMPIRES

Perhaps still more remote from contemporary experience is the concept of empire. Yet this is a form of rule that has dominated large parts of the globe for millennia. The most notable examples upon which we shall concentrate at first are the ancient empires of China and Rome. But similar structures were to be found in India (e.g. the Moghul Empire), in Africa (Egypt and Mali) and in Central and South America (e.g. the Aztecs). Nor should it be forgotten that, more recently, each of the European nations sought to create colonial empires in Africa, Asia and the Americas, whilst the USA and the former USSR could both be accused of having colonial possessions by other names.

It is tempting, and not totally misleading, to attribute the longevity of many empires to the military advantage of a large and powerful state surrounded by much smaller states, or tribal territories. Whilst empires may be briefly built on military advantage alone as, perhaps, was that of Alexander the Great, the longer-lasting examples can be attributed not only to size, but also to the advantages of a ‘civilised’ culture in the literal sense of a society centred upon relatively large urban centres containing specialised personnel who contributed technical and organisational advantages to the empire.

The prestige and self-esteem associated with such systems may well help them to survive. Certainly the ruling groups of the Chinese, Roman and British empires were all firmly convinced of the superiority of their cultural inheritance, and successfully imparted this ideology to many of their subjects and neighbours. However this conviction did not prevent such systems from adopting and adapting to useful features of surrounding societies.

The history of China is particularly noteworthy for the way in which the empire was militarily subdued on a number of occasions by warlike tribes from the periphery of the empire. However the conquerors on each occasion came to be merely a new ruling group operating a very similar political system to the one they had defeated (Eberhard, 1977). The adaptability of the Romans is well illustrated by their reactions to Greek culture in the early period and the transformation from the Classical Empire based on Rome into the Byzantine Christian Empire based on Constantinople. One vital feature of such systems is the way the rulers must be prepared to tolerate linguistic, cultural and religious diversity, provided that subjects are prepared to make the necessary political compromises with the primary needs of the empire.

Such empires have generally been characterised by the development of an extensive cash economy, permitting complex economic exchanges over long distances. These same distances have required efficient means of communication amongst the ‘civil servants’ of the empire, who must also be capable of working together in a coordinated fashion. The empire can only survive militarily by deploying its military resources over long distances to optimum effect. Thus literacy and bureaucracy as well as good roads (or a navy) and professional soldiers become a necessity.

The Chinese mandarinate is a good illustration of many of these themes (Gerth and Mills, 1948: Chs. VIII and XVIII). China was unified for centuries by an administrative pyramid of mandarins, linking the court and the rural districts, who were required to pass examinations in a common core of knowledge. This centred upon literary and historical texts and was mostly concerned with developing an educated gentleman with a good knowledge of ritual. Good government was mainly seen in terms of political stability rather than social and economic progress. Despite this, some writers stress the role of the Chinese bureaucracy in regulating the drainage and waterway system of China just as the Egyptian priesthood served the pharaoh, sacrificed to the gods, and controlled the waters of the Nile through an elaborate drainage system (Wittfogel, 1957: 17–18, 26–27). Whatever the usefulness of the services they performed, it is clear the cohesion of the system was vastly assisted by the common origins, knowledge and attitudes of these administrators who were amongst the first who could reasonably be described as ‘bureaucrats’ (see Chapter 8 ).

One final point worth emphasising is the contrast between the ancient empires and the nineteenth- and twentieth-century European colonial empires in their attitudes towards their subjects. Basically this may be encapsulated in one rather nasty word – racism. The European empires increasingly were based upon a core metropolitan state that claimed to be a nation and often a democracy. The empire was a separate area of colonies whose dependence on the metropolitan area could only be easily justified by an allegation of the incapacity of their inhabitants to rule themselves. Nineteenth-century anthropologists’ findings were used and abused to justify a doctrine of the racial or cultural inferiority of ‘coloured’ people compared with the ‘white’ race. In theory official attitudes might not quite go so far as to allege permanent inferiority on the part of the governed. British policy in principle was based on grooming colonies for self-governing ‘dominion’ status (like the white ex-colonies of Australia, New Zealand and Canada), whilst the French, for instance, were much more prepared to accord equal rights to ‘natives’ if they assimilated French culture and behaved as black Frenchmen. However the Nazi view of the permanent inferiority of ‘non-Aryan’ races probably reflected the practice of European colonial residents more accurately for most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The near extermination of the aboriginal inhabitants of Tasmania, and the South African colonists’ doctrine of apartheid are extreme examples of these attitudes at work.

In contrast to this, the Chinese restricted their empire mainly to groups who could be assimilated into the Chinese way of life, though viewing groups outside the empire as racially and culturally inferior. The Romans extended Roman citizenship to a number of other urban centres and made no systematic discrimination between Italian, Greek or African subjects of the empire.

NATIONS AND STATES

Earlier we took the state to be, in Weber’s words, an organization ‘that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’. We suggested that the model of government and the state which this may suggest – of a world dominated by sovereign ‘nation states’ – is a relatively arguable and new one. Europe did not look much like this until about 1919, after the Treaty of Versailles. Africa only came near to the model from the 1960s. Countries like the United Kingdom (as we saw earlier) and the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia are (or were) clearly multinational. The Antarctic remains the subject of (frozen!) conflicting claims to jurisdiction.

We shall examine questions of national and ethnic identity at greater length in Chapter 5, but it is worth stating here that states with a one-to-one relationship with an unambiguous ‘nationality’ are difficult, or impossible, to find. Thus even France, one of the originators of the doctrine, is still faced with regional identities such as Breton and Basque, some of whom would prefer an independent existence. Conversely Switzerland, Belgium and Canada all contain considerable French minorities to complicate their national identities. Nor are these isolated examples – virtually every African country is the product of the more or less arbitrary drawing of lines on the map in the nineteenth century. For example, modern Nigeria contains three major – and many minor – population groups, with two of the major groups – the Yoruba and the Hausa – being found in substantial numbers in neighbouring states.

THE NATION STATE AND SOVEREIGNTY

Although nation states are difficult to come by in practice, the predominant theory of the state today, as incorporated in the concept of the United Nations and in international law, is that of the ‘sovereign state’. States’ legitimacy is based mainly on the idea that each nation has a right of self-determination. The people of a nation thus are seen to consent to the establishment of a government over them which supports a system of law appropriate to their culture and traditions. This idea came clearly to the fore in human history only with the French and American revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century.

The model of government in which a nation makes decisions through the state machinery may be helpful in justifying the establishment of self-governing democratic systems in opposition to alien or autocratic rule. Arguably it becomes an obstacle to understanding the working of a modern sophisticated liberal democratic state, which is usually divided into executive, legislative, and judicial arms, and central, local and regional levels of government. The outcome of the constitutional working of these specific institutions of government can be regarded as the ‘nation’s’ decision. An oversimplification that is, however, often put forward is that some individual element in the constitutional structure is the body which incorporates the national will. In the French tradition there has been a tendency to see the National Assembly as that body. The Soviet tradition was to see the Communist Party in an analogous position.

In the liberal tradition, however, the distinction between the government of the day and the state – between opposition and treason – is a clear and vital one.

POLITICS BETWEEN STATES

If we conceive of the world in terms of the nation-state model already described, then international politics looks much more like the politics of stateless societies than the internal politics of states. That is, there is something called international law, but there is no final authority to enforce, interpret or change it. Although the United Nations can be seen as a potential world legislature/government, it is at present based on the theory that individual states possess ‘sovereignty’ and are the final arbiters of what goes on within their territories. All powers of international organisations, including the United Nations, are held to depend upon the agreement of states to treaties authorising such powers.

Thus politics at international level can be seen to depend on compromise and negotiation, rather than upon authoritative decision making by representative organs. In legal theory Monaco is as sovereign as the United States, and both are equally free to resort to force in the last resort to defend their national interests and to go back upon their international treaty obligations. In political practice it is clear that smaller states, with less in the way of military and economic resources to back up their bargaining, are more dependent on the perhaps insubstantial ground of international respect for law and treaty obligations. From the point of view of the study of politics, international relations offers a particular challenge, since the processes of decision making are often even more obscure than at national level, and the consequences potentially more profound.

Traditionally historians tended to describe international relations in terms of the decisions of individual statesmen pursuing, more or less intelligently, ‘the national interest’, which was often related to the ‘balance of power’ between nations. Thus international relations can be seen as a game played between more or less rational players, largely of what we previously termed a ‘zero-sum’ variety – more power for one nation being gained at the expense of less for another, with skilful players achieving goals by forming winning coalitions.

Seeing international relations as a competitive spectator sport neglects the importance of consensual, non-zero-sum goals in international relations. It is more important to ordinary citizens that everyone stays alive and continues in mutually beneficial economic and trading activities, than that they belong to a state which is more powerful than the others.

This in turn relates to the question of the ‘national interest’. We have seen the difficulty in defining a nation – e.g. can it be assumed that the English have the same interests as the Welsh? Similarly professional politicians may experience much more satisfaction from being part of a powerful state than a simple peasant might. Again if, say, in the nineteenth century, British investors’ rights in some Latin American country are safeguarded at the loss of a number of sailors’ lives, does the safeguarding of one group’s (relatively large) income justify the loss of several poor men’s lives? The ‘national interest’, then, may obscure domestic conflicts of interest by wrapping them in the national flag.

To describe national policy making in terms of individuals making choices may be a vast oversimplification, as Allison’s (1987) work makes clear. He analysed the Cuban missile crisis, in which the United States was faced by a Soviet attempt to install ballistic missiles in sites in Cuba. He showed how not only the president and the secretary of state were involved in the decision-making process, but also the perceptions of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the professional military, the US representative at the UN and others.

Assumptions about the motives of the other ‘side’ and the reactions of potential allies, and the electorate, were also seen to be crucial. Allison argues that for a full picture of the foreign policy process, decision making must be seen as part of processes of organizational decision making and of political bargaining. More recently, similar arguments could be applied to the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003.

POLITICS BEYOND THE STATE: INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTIONS

The United Nations General Assembly is in many ways an unconvincing ‘world parliament’ since it is based on the equal representation of giant countries (in population terms) like Brazil and Russia with mini-states like the Gambia and Luxembourg. Nor can a body which allowed dictators like ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier of Haiti or General Amin of Uganda to misrepresent the populations they terrorised be seen to possess great legitimacy. The Security Council can be seen as a potential world ‘government’. Its inclusion of Permanent Members (USA, China, Russia, Britain and France – each with a veto over any decision by the Council) may have the merit of political realism, in that the UN cannot be expected to act effectively without Great Power agreement. Alas, until the 1990s, the Cold War meant virtually all effective action by the UN was stillborn. Even now with apparently greater international consensus, whilst humanitarian action in the former Yugoslavia, Liberia and the Congo has been possible, the UN is handicapped by the lack of effective executive apparatus and in 2003 splits in the Security Council once more prevented effective action against Iraq. Long delays in taking humanitarian action in the Darfur region of the Sudan were accounted for partly by UN weakness against any recalcitrant sovereign state and partly by Chinese oil interests.

However, focusing on major political decisions at the summit level of international organisations may well be a misleading guide to their importance and potential. The examples of NATO, the European Union (EU) and OPEC (Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries) suggest that, when international organisations serve what is seen as a clear and necessary purpose, genuine and effective multinational co-operation is possible. These organisations are of considerable interest in that they have exercised powers that are commonly seen as fundamental activities of ‘sovereign states’ on a collective basis.

Another example of the way international bodies are working effectively in the modern world is to consider such obscure bodies as the International Standards Organisation (ISO) or the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). Bodies like these hammer out essential technical agreements which enable telephones across the world to operate as one vast international network, enable computer manufacturers on opposite sides of the globe to manufacture equipment that will work together, and agree on common scientific units in which new discoveries can be expressed.

MULTINATIONAL ENTERPRISES AND ‘GLOBALISATION’

The importance of multinational enterprises in the modern world is difficult to overestimate. Some of these firms have a greater financial turnover than the gross national income (GNI) of a medium-size state (see Table 2.1). Thus Malaysia has roughly the same size ‘economy’ as the major German insurance company Allianz, whilst the small Central American country of Belize has less than 1 per cent of the revenue of Toyota. Such figures are greatly affected by international currency and market fluctuations as a comparison with previous editions of this book will demonstrate.

In addition many of these corporations control vital economic resources such as oil (the ‘Seven Sisters’: Exxon, Texaco, BP, etc.), banking (Bank of America, HSBC, ING) and computing (Microsoft, Intel and IBM). In some cases the world price of an entire commodity may be under the control of a multinational enterprise (e.g. De Beers and diamonds).

Virtually all multinational enterprises are clearly based in one host country, with the majority of shareholders and senior personnel from that country. (The few exceptions include Anglo-Dutch operations such as Unilever and Royal Dutch Shell.) Operations in specific countries may, however, be minority-owned and largely staffed by local personnel. Most significant multinational enterprises are owned in the USA with Japan and European countries (including Britain) some way behind. Nine out of the twenty biggest multinationals in 2007 were of US origin, whilst the US companies on Forbes list had a combined market capitalisation of 13.9 trillion dollars.

In bargaining with governments in the ‘South’ a multinational enterprise is a sophisticated and richer organisation bargaining with a poorer and less skilled and well-informed one. This can be illustrated by the problems even large Southern countries such as South Africa and India have had in their relations with multinational pharmaceutical companies over drugs to treat HIV/AIDS (Seckinelgin, 2007).

Even in bargaining with a middle-rank power like the UK, a large Japanese or American corporation has very considerable negotiating power since it has the alternative of setting up elsewhere within the EU and exporting to the UK from there. Even a US corporation dealing with its own government can channel its funds and development projects ‘off-shore’ to lower labour cost countries or tax havens.

In the past, multinational enterprises often ran virtually independent operations in separate countries (e.g. Ford in the USA, UK, Germany, Australia). But they are now increasingly pursuing integrated global strategies in which financial resources can be swapped around the globe, production is planned centrally, resources coming from the cheapest country relevant to the market in mind whilst profits are channelled to the most tax-efficient point. (Thus Ford has implemented a ‘world car’ strategy in which all models will have interchangeable parts and components can be shipped all over the world to be assembled in models appropriate to the market in question.) This is only possible as a result of a sophisticated global use of information technology including the Internet (see Tansey, 2002: Ch. 3).

Marshall McLuhan (1964) has familiarised many people with the concept of the ‘global village’ in which rapid satellite reporting and transmission of electronic images of events, from the invasion of Baghdad to the Olympic Games, familiarise everyone instantly with the same version of events all over the world. A shared repertoire of pop videos, international sporting events and Hollywood films characterizes the mass media in many parts of the world. A shared consumption of similar goods such as Nintendo games, Reebok trainers and Coca-Cola is thought to have helped create an international popular (youth) culture. Internet developments such as YouTube and MySpace have enabled the creation of interactive global youth networks sharing music, chat and video clips.

Unprecedented levels of international travel – both for holidays and business, and even for education and spiritual enlightenment – have been made possible by modern technological developments. In addition television documentaries, advertisements and films have all familiarised people all over the globe with something of the way of life of people in faraway places – especially that of affluent America.

On a perhaps more serious level, international publishing operations and the growing practice of international professional communication through journals and conferences have made professionals in all spheres more rapidly aware of the new achievements and standards of international colleagues.

The social and political implications of all this is immensely controversial. In countries as varied as France and Iran many of these developments have been denounced as ‘creeping Americanisation’. There seems little doubt that a growing awareness of standards of living and freedom in the rest of the world was immensely influential in bringing about the end of communism in Eastern Europe.

It is increasingly difficult for national governments to cut their people off from knowledge of developments elsewhere in the globe and this knowledge can be political dynamite. In the USA in the 1960s a series of urban riots were said to have been incited by the greater knowledge of the urban poor of the extent of their deprivation as a result of television. As singer Gil Scott-Heron once satirically announced, ‘The Revolution will not be televised’. It is not beyond the scope of possibility that one of the greatest forces for instability and change in the next century will be a similar awareness of deprivation on behalf of the millions of inhabitants of the South.

Many of the themes introduced so far are encapsulated in the concept of ‘globalisation’ (Luard, 1990; McGrew and Lewis, 1992; Baylis and Smith, 2005). Definitions of globalisation, and attitudes towards the idea differ radically from writer to writer (see Box 2.2).

BOX 2.2 DEFINITIONS OF GLOBALISATION

. . . the removal of barriers to free trade and the closer integration of national economies.

(Stiglitz, 2002: ix)

A historical process involving a fundamental shift or transformation in the spatial scale of human social organization that links distant communities and expands the reach of power relations across regions and continents.

(McGrew, in Baylis and Smith, 2005: 24)

De-territorilization – or . . . the growth of super-territorial relations between people.

(Scholte, 2000: 46)

The authors define globalisation as the thesis that the increasing global interdependence of states, individuals and social and economic organisations is reducing the autonomy of individual states. Box 2.3 summarises some of the factors at work.

BOX 2.3 GLOBALISATION – CHALLENGES TO THE NATION STATE

Internal instability: from mini-nationalisms, ethnicity, etc.

External instability: need for regional/global security

Economic dependence: on global economic and financial organisations

Social integration: development of world standards for human rights, professional behaviour

Technical integration: dependence on world communication networks and leading-edge technical developments increases vulnerability

Ecological: threats of pollution, global warming, etc.

Interdependence: insoluble within state boundaries.

With the disintegration of the Soviet Bloc and the increasing integration of China into a world capitalist trading system, the political power of multinational companies in a globalised world has become increasingly central and controversial. The rules governing economic relationships between states are increasingly decided through international organisations such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

These in turn are often dominated by the United States and to some extent the EU, both of which are sympathetic to the interests of multinational companies (Baylis and Smith, 2005: Ch. 14 by Woods). For instance, Sell (2003) argues that the heads of twelve multinationals successfully lobbied the WTO to mould the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) in the interests of their companies. This technical-sounding victory has been important in making it difficult for countries in the South to make available generic drugs to treat AIDS or to resist the import of genetically modified plant species. Multinational companies have also lobbied hard, via the WTO, to ensure that they are entitled to tender for the provision of privatised government services across the globe.

POLITICS AS A UNIVERSAL ACTIVITY

The more international relations is analysed, the less important the differences between international and domestic politics seem to be.

As we shall see in a later chapter, it can be argued that explaining relationships between member states and the EU is very like explaining relationships between the states and the federal government in the USA. Equally, insights from domestic politics, and even the politics of stateless societies, can be of relevance to international politics.

To return to the theme introduced at the beginning of this chapter, the evidence presented suggests that politics in the broad sense we defined it in Chapter 1 is a more or less universal aspect of life in human societies. Strictly speaking we have not established this – only produced evidence that politics is widespread in many human societies (for further discussion see Human nature and politics in Chapter 3). But we have established that centralised national governments – although a dominating feature of modern Western societies – are by no means inevitable.