ABSTRACT
Over the last 500 years, the sovereign state has been a powerful instrument of human progress, or, at a minimum, human progress has occurred while sovereign states have been the dominant mode of political organization. The existence of an international system composed of many states facilitated economic development by preventing the consolidation of a single absolutist empire that would have stultified private initiative and by providing an environment sufficiently orderly to permit rational economic calculations (Wallerstein 1974a; North 1981; Mann 1986; Hall 1985). This sovereign state system, however, also has some less benign con-
sequences. Because the state system as a whole lacks a sovereign, wars are always a possibility. The severity of wars has increased over time, as measured by casualties rather than the frequency of conflict (Goldstein 1985). With the advent of nuclear weapons, major interstate conflict threatens to destroy human existence. Moreover, even very large states may not be able to cope with economic and other disturbances emanating from the international environment, and the opportunity cost of pursuing autarky is increasing, in part because technological changes in communication and transportation have reduced the transactions costs of international commercial activities (R. Cooper 1968). It is no longer obvious that the state system is the optimal way to organize political life. The existence of a suboptimal institutional structure presents an anomaly
for most of the theoretical orientations that inform social science research. These perspectives adopt a static viewpoint that is either utilitarian or functional. For both of these orientations, actors are adaptive and outcomes are
optimal. History is not particularly important; institutional structures and policies will change if environmental incentives change. A social fact is explained by some other social variable that belongs to the same time period. For contemporary social science, this is a “natural” mode of explanation (Harsanyi 1960: 136). In investigating the basic mode of political organization in the con-
temporary world, the national state, these conventional approaches are not likely to provide either adequate prescriptive guidance or satisfactory explanations. It will be necessary to deploy an institutionalist perspective to construct a suitable explanation for the development and persistence of the sovereign state. An institutionalist perspective regards enduring institutional structures as the building blocks of social and political life. The preferences, capabilities, and basic self-identities of individuals are conditioned by these institutional structures. Historical developments are path-dependent; once certain choices are made, they constrain future possibilities. The range of options available to policy makers at any given point in time is a function of institutional capabilities that were put in place in some earlier period, possibly in response to very different environmental pressures.
