Introduction

This book assumes the imminent demise of the state, and asks what may come next. Yet it is neither a Marxist text, nor utopian or dystopian. As usual, the devil is in the detail. There are many conceptions of the state, and many different institutions, traits and procedures combined in each of them; the imminent demise is predicated of only some of these conceptions and some of these defining elements. So let me begin again and be more precise. What I assume is the imminent demise of the sovereign state. Sovereignty,

as a predicate of the state, is often taken to entail two things: external independence and internal absolute authority. An ideal-typical sovereign state recognizes no legitimate power above itself (except sometimes, though usually pro forma, God). It is the source of all legitimate power, and of all legitimate exercise of power within its territory. It exercises that power over all the people who live or reside there, over all their interests and all intraterritorial interests of non-resident foreigners, and over all material and all immaterial things within those borders. Only the laws of nature limit its power, and then only in a physical sense – if it could, it would make the laws of nature as well. It is a true Leviathan. In the words of Peter Steinberger, who distinguishes between a Hegelian ‘idea’ of the state and ‘governments’, the actual bodies incarnated by the idea of the state: ‘The reach and power of the state is always and inevitably unlimited, constrained only by the vicissitudes of time and physical nature’ (Steinberger 2004: 187) – from which it follows that: ‘To talk of a non-absolutist state is to talk nonsense’ (ibid. 228). The state exercises its absolute power through the attribution of rights:

permissions and non-permissions to perform or not perform certain acts, thus creating, maintaining or excluding specific states of affairs (cf. Wissenburg 1999a, Kanger and Kanger 1966 for a more detailed description of ‘rights’ thus construed). It can permit individuals or organizations to attribute sets of rights in its stead. It can, for example, allow nuclear families to exercise procreative rights among members of the family as the heads of families see fit, or permit churches to attribute salvation, or shopkeepers to

attribute goods. Yet these delegated rights remain just that: delegated, lent, borrowed, until recalled. ‘It is the institution that directs all the lesser institutions of society – universities and churches and all the rest’ (Steinberger 2004: 22). The state can also permit individuals or organizations to exercise rights to the use of violence in order to execute other rights, protect them or undo violations – this is what is known in political science literature as the state’s monopoly on the use of violence or force. All of this constitutes internal sovereignty – and by mutual recognition of each other’s internal sovereignty, states become externally sovereign. It is this sovereign state of which the imminent demise is assumed. I do

not, however, assume that other traits associated with the (concept of the) state will disappear. I shall assume the continued existence of faceless institutions and organizations attributing or delegating rights within communities or territories, their continued facelessness as bureaucratic organizations or impersonal procedures, the possibility of a link to territories and the goods and peoples therein, to armies and legal borders (cf. Dittgen 1999: 173ff.), and even the continued claim to sovereignty. I merely dismiss the feasibility of making this claim true. As Harold Laski often argued (cf. Nicholls 1975: 46ff.), sovereignty is a legal fiction, not a political reality. Today’s political reality is one of what I call political pluralization: the

emergence of polities other than the state, where polity stands for any form of social organization within which (among other things) politics takes place, specifically the attribution of rights within that organized form of life. This is still a bit vague – I shall expand on it in Chapter 2. Suffice it for the moment to say that political reality is about power not legality. States, the assumption is (cf. Walker 2003, Prokhovnik 2007), no longer have the power to make good on their claim to sovereignty: on the one hand they share power with other states and other entities low and high, on the other they cannot (always, fully) control those other entities – nor other states directly or indirectly operating within their respective territories. I assume the demise of the state, I do not predict it or claim that there is

empirical proof for its decline, as that is partly a matter of definition. Recent debates on the decline of the state (see Chapter 2) even suggest that at least some of the processes of political pluralization actually contribute to the survival and strengthening of the role of the state. The assumption I make does not deny or contradict this: any player of a game can become more influential, decisive and important by joining coalitions – but that is not the same thing as becoming more powerful, and it is in fact the opposite of maintaining sovereign power (cf. Ilgen 2003). What I ask the reader to imagine, then, is that the state is just one of the boys (though most likely to be the bully), just one player wielding power among others; and that its claim to sovereignty, to being the absolute source of power from which all legitimate rules and legislation emanate, is false. This is an easy thing to do; all it requires is to understand law as a form of religion, and to stop believing.