Parallel States and The Decline of Statism

Patrick H. Coleman 

Abstract: This essay briefly examines whether and how the statist mindset is changing with regard to the necessity for the monopolization of the use of legitimate force in a territorial context. The rise of neo-imperialism and the accompanying international belligerence of modern imperialist states have forced people in general and political theorists alike to reconsider the definition of the nation-state and the limits of sovereignty. I argue that Weber’s well accepted definition of the state: ‘an organization that holds a monopoly privilege on the use of legitimate violence within a given territory’, no longer applies, and that the state is coming to be defined more and more by violence alone, drawing their legitimacy further into question. To demonstrate my point, I look at some of the implications of neo-imperialism for the statist ideology, with focus upon the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I then consider a June 2011 opinion article from Al Jazeera, ’Parallel States: A New Vision for Peace,” which serves to demonstrate how past state ‘excesses’ are beginning to push the idea of monopoly governments into obsolescence.

One of the major psychological hurtles that proponents of voluntary social structures routinely face in dialogue with statists is the idea that the efficient defense of person and property could not be reliably achieved without a monopolistic agency that can claim dominion over a specific geographic region and impose a uniform legal order on all of its inhabitants. Despite the fact that, for the most part, government functionaries have carte blanche to run rough shod over the most vulnerable of their subjects, and do not in any sense guarantee even predictable legal orders, let alone reasonably just ones; and despite the fact that governments are arguably responsible for more human tragedy than any other single source, many people are convinced that without regional states we would have no recourse against the periodic evils and vicissitudes of life except our own weak efforts. And that if there were more than one agency, without any central authority for appeal, disputes between people who do not subscribe to the same agency would descend into gang war.¹

The practical points of this element of the statist complex of objections to anarchism have been well argued and put to rest by other anarchists, so I will not be addressing it on direct theoretical grounds.² What I wish to document is a shift in the way that the nation-state, and particularly the constitutional nation-state, is perceived by its proponents. The development of a changing set of criteria leaves behind the old Weberian concept of the state as being “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory,”³ toward a more fluid one in which spatial sovereignty plays a much less important role. I will go over a few of the ways that this is happening, with some focus upon the implications of an idea put forward in a recent Al Jazeera opinion article concerning solutions to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

Neo-imperialism is one way that the old conception of the nation-state is changing. Since WWII, we no longer see well-defined wars of conquest, where one nation attempts through brute military force to subsume another straightforwardly, claiming sovereignty over the defeated nation and holding it openly. Rather, empire is achieved through economic entrapment, proxy wars, and ostensibly humanitarian and/or preemptive military efforts. Whereas classical empires like Rome, for example, generally increased through direct military conquest, ultimately expanding their territory and assuming de jure authority over it, the new empire, most fully manifest in the U.S. state, prefers a type of de facto authority, achieved covertly. This new approach allows for similar benefits to the former one, but avoids the costs and responsibilities involved with claiming actual sovereignty. It also blurs the lines that define what a state is and what constitutes the boundaries of “legitimate” violence.

How would Weber’s definition apply to this new world? If a state is an entity that holds a monopoly on the use of legitimate violence in a given territory, then what would that make Afghanistan or Iraq, and how are we to think about the status of U.S. violence in those regions? Iraq and Afghanistan are still generally considered to be “states,”(puppet states, though they are), which is to say that the United States has claimed no permanent sovereignty over either nation, and each is still to some extent thought of as distinct from the U.S. proper, but they hold no monopoly on the use of violence. And though the new regimes are endowed with the patina of legitimacy, it is obvious that the U.S. government is going to do exactly what suits its interests in the region, regardless of what any supposed local authority has to say about it. Thus, the Afghani and Iraqi regimes are called states but have no authority in fact, whereas the United States holds authority in fact but has not increased the land area of its state. Perhaps by looking at the ostensible reasons for the undeclared wars in the Middle East, we can find whether and how these conflicts represent a change in the way that the mainstream has come to think of nation-states.

There were three familiar types of arguments made by the proponents of the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan: a humanitarian argument, a preemptive defense argument, and a justice/revenge argument. Each applies in various ways to these two invasions. The humanitarian argument, of course, was that the Afghan and Iraqi people were subject to brutal authorities, and that the United States had an obligation to “liberate” them. The preemptive defense argument was that Afghanistan and Iraq were harboring dangerous terrorists and that U.S. invasion was necessary in order to impose stability on the region and protect U.S. soil from possible future attack. The justice/revenge argument, which applied only to Afghanistan, was that the person (Osama Bin Laden) responsible for the 11 September 2001 attacks was operating out of that area, and so invasion was necessary in order to bring justice for his victims.

As to the humanitarian argument, it is interesting because it serves to ideologically divorce the nation state from a geographically limited scope of obligation and authority. By arguing that they had any kind of obligation to “liberate” the people of Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States was claiming a relationship between themselves and those they would liberate that resembles very much the theoretical relationship between a traditional state and its citizens. This relationship is usually described as a kind of quid pro quo where the state takes on an obligation to protect in exchange for an obligation of obedience. Of course, because the United States is supposed to be limited to its land holdings in terms of its authority, and consequently its obligations, the obligation to protect people over whom it holds no traditional authority and who live several thousand miles from anything the U.S. government has any recognized claim to makes no sense in conventional terms. The idea suggested here seems to be that the role of nation-states, especially powerful ones, is no longer to provide their “services” to the people who live on the land over which they claim monopoly, but instead are obligated to provide such “services” wherever they are found to be lacking whether monopoly is held or not.

Using the term “obligation” may seem a bit strong, considering how many nations with brutal rulers and humanitarian crises go overlooked by the United States. Certainly, there is no honest argument that could be made to demonstrate that the majority of U.S. government officials care much about such crises or feel any obligation to mitigate them. However, arguments have been made that states have a so-called “right to protect,” which, when implemented, serves as a muzzle to quiet any dissent. Because most people feel an obligation to protect the weak and victimized, if the state is able to successfully cloak its aggressive wars within a humanitarian concern, opposing the war makes one seem anti-humanitarian. So one’s feelings of moral obligation to help victimized people are twisted into an obligation to support massive state violence, throwing one into the paradox of becoming a victimizer of the very people one hoped to save. This is a new way of going about war. It is a new way of perceiving the scope, responsibilities, and geographical definitions of states. The following quote is from an essay by Vasuki Nesiah in the Harvard Human Rights Journal:⁴

[T]he “responsibility to protect” is offered as the new guiding normative and legal framework for transnational cosmopolitan engagement. Because people will sometimes require protection through intervention, the Commission views its report as about “compelling human need, about populations at risk of slaughter, ethnic cleansing, and starvation. It has been about the responsibility of sovereign states to protect their own people from such harm—and about the need for the larger international community to exercise their responsibility if states are unwilling or unable to do so themselves. (p. 83)

Similarly, the preemptive defense, and justice/revenge arguments are strong examples for how statist ideas regarding the limits and quality of sovereignty are starting to place less emphasis on territorial and spatial concerns, and more on broad, intrusive, person-based concerns. Because of the nature of neo-imperialism, conflicts are no longer primarily between nation-states; the interests affected have broadened to include many outside-of-state structures who feel that traditional means of recourse in international affairs are unavailable to them. It is now the case that major powers are regularly involved in military conflicts with combatants who reside inside the boarders of other nation-states, without ever outrightly declaring hostilities toward such states. Here we see governments following people and disregarding borders. They feel that they can penetrate the territory of a nation-state, break its monopoly of violence by attempting to exact “justice” and build “order” at the point of uniformed military guns, without somehow also impeding the sovereignty of that state and bringing their own legitimacy as states into a dubious light. Or, perhaps the interventionist state is legitimate within its own borders, and a gang of thugs outside of them. If this were the case, then the invaded state could still be considered a monopoly holder on the use of legitimate force; conversely, the invaded state would also have the legal right to track down the invader thugs and deport, jail, or kill them. By accepting that the United States has alegitimate right to act militarily in other nations without claiming sovereignty in those nations, statists are implicitly rejecting the notion of monopolistic territorial power and placing emphasis upon the dynamics of international power and a respect for interests over borders.

Thus, a certain disregard for the territorial security of external nation states has grown in the United States, alongside an extreme expansion of executive power and the rise of a vigorous anti-immigration regulatory structure. The government is shutting out the world at the same time as its excesses are bleeding into the foreign landscape. Terrorism, of course, is to some degree a reaction to this, and it is also a horrible catalyst that forces the past excesses of state into the public view. The 9-11 attacks made it so that not only political theorists, but pundits and the public at large, had to either confront the fact that the United States had for a long time been going beyond the normally accepted bounds of sovereign power, or they had to accept interventionism and neo-imperialism as justified practices of a dominant super-state. Naturally, the problem was posed such that picking the latter was supposed to be the natural reaction of any good patriot, and thinking the former meant you were a terrorist, or at least a sympathizer. Serendipitously, for the state, the burgeoning neo-conservative movement had developed a literature wide enough to lend some academic credence to the interventionist cause.

Although it is generally accepted that it was around WWII when the U.S. government largely shook off its isolationist ways, it seems to have taken the people until just after 11 September 2001. Even as recently as George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign, the general political climate compelled him to run on a platform of non-intervention and a humble foreign policy, even though we now know that his plans for the gulf region were already well in place beforehe ever even took office.⁵⁶ Indeed, conservatives, at least in their rhetoric, have historically been isolationists (militarily speaking) when it comes to international affairs, but by the 2004 presidential elections no such national humility remained, and the conservative core had fully endorsed the United States’ role as the police of the world.

Barack Obama in his 2008 campaign also ran on an antiwar platform and claimed that “The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”⁷ But given his failure to end the Iraq or Afghanistan wars, despite the fact that the ostensible goal of entering Afghanistan was to detain or kill Osama Bin Laden, which has now been accomplished, and his recent practically unannounced, largely unexplained, and now fairly long-term invasion of Libya coupled with the milquetoast, sometimes even supportive reaction from the onetime political left, any incredulous observer should be convinced that people in general have embraced a new definition for the role of government. The left’s antiwar/anti-intervention movement has almost completely died since Obama took office, and only libertarians and the radical left still bother to critique it at all. In short, the question of whether or not the United States has the right to unilaterally impose its will on the rest of the world has been settled in the affirmative, and the only lingering questions pertain to strategic and contextual considerations.

It could be said that the same observations I have made about recent U.S. military engagements could be made with regard to any sort of war. This would be an incorrect criticism, I think. Although wars are always immoral atrocities, there used to be a sense that something exceptional was occurring, something beyond the normal and accepted authority of the state apparatus. This is not to say that war was beyond the traditional authority of the state, per se, or that states have always respected the generally understood limits of their sovereignty—such claims would be absurd. It is to say that in the collective consciousness war was considered to be outside of the normal daily functioning and rights of the state, and that it required formal acknowledgment, as with a declaration of war. It was not simply within the right of a sovereign to jump in and out of his regional jurisdiction, enforcing justice willy-nilly all over the planet. Just war theory going back through the middle ages has required that any morally correct war must be a defensive one. Thus, the sovereign had to establish that the state had been attacked or was in immanent threat of attack, announce any plans for military retaliation or defensive action, identify the state(s) to be retaliated against, and gain approval for such action.

What I am attempting to demonstrate here is the fluidity to which I referred in the second paragraph of the introduction. The rise of technology-rich super powers has challenged the terra-centric model of the nation-state, and given rise to a surveillance state, one that follows people and activities rather than borders. This fact has come to drastically change the way that people think about the state. A compelling example of this, perhaps even the ideological culmination of the global chaos surrounding sovereignty, is the parallel state solution proposed recently in an article in Al Jazeera by Mathias Mossberg and Mark LeVine called, “Parallel States: A New Vision for Peace”, in which they lay out the skeleton of a plan that they think would help to resolve the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.⁸

Termed a “parallel states” solution, this concept has been developed over the last four years by a team of Israeli, Palestinian and international scholars, policymakers and even protagonists in the conflict. It is built upon a new understanding of sovereignty that breaks the previously exclusive link with territory, and reorients the basis of identity, citizenship and rights away from land and towards the relation between the state and the individual citizen. Citizenship would follow the citizen wherever she or he may live within the territory of Israel/Palestine, not the territory itself.

As sovereignty would no longer be tied to territory, demography would no longer determine the viability of each state, and Jews and Palestinians, and indeed, members of the Diasporas of both societies, could in theory live anywhere within the space of Israel/Palestine without disturbing the basic ethnic composition, and thus character, of either state.

Although neo-imperialism is unilaterally imposed and still involves the subjugation of one state to another, the parallel state solution hopes to shift away from such dominance, but without the annihilation or incorporation of the less powerful organization. Rather, these states, though still being somewhat regionally confined, would have to follow people rather than boundaries, so that citizenship would not be tied to where one lives, but with which state entity one identifies. Conceivably then, a Palestinian baby could be born and raised on Israeli soil while still identifying solely as a subject of the Palestinian state, and vice versa. This drastic departure from the traditional understanding of statehood represents the near total abandonment of the argument for regionally monopolistic governments.

In principle, if the parallel state idea were widely accepted, or perhaps even implemented, statists could simply no longer argue that anarchism is untenable on the basis that regional monopolies are necessary for order. In fact, the opposite would have to be accepted as true. Statists would be obliged to consider the possibility that conflicts arise, not necessarily from a multiplicity of perspectives, traditions, and cultures, lacking a central authority for the resolution of differences, but rather, as Mahmood Mamdani has argued in “Making Sense of Political Violence in Postcolonial Africa,” from the very fact that monopoly politics pits people against one another in life-and-death struggles for the survival of their cultural identities, knowing that to lose is to be extinguished.⁹

I am not am not taking a position as to whether or not the parallel state solution would actually work given the context and history of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Rather, I am simply noting failure of the monopoly model, a failure that has forced both people and political theorists away from the rigid support ofonly territorial models of statehood and national identity. And although these shifts are not necessarily positive in and of themselves, given that they are still conceived and implemented within the statist context of violent aggression, they are a definite sign of the slow failure of monopoly states and of the statist inclination for violent solutions to social problems in general. Ultimately, I think that these changes bode well for the future of anarchism.