Rethinking States and State Centrism

• In Event: Rethinking Space in World Politics: States, Sovereignty, Territoriality

Abstract

Widespread reliance on the state as a foundational concept in theoretical and empirical models of politics produces a broader state centrism in political science. This state centrism treats states as the most theoretically significant organizational repository of political authority in the international system and assigns a privileged ontological status to states that separates them from other each other and the global political order. The theoretical constraints imposed by state centrism have been repeatedly documented through calls to recognize the political agency of a wider array of actors in global politics, including non-governmental organizations, transnational activists, epistemic communities, multinational corporations, international organizations, and hierarchical political orders. Less attention, though, has been devoted to the theoretical consequences of assigning to states an ontological status that possesses a significant degree of independence from the global political order. Accordingly, important administrative, coalitional, and institutional components of states are assumed to be internally constituted through the actions, interests, and capabilities of domestic groups. This ontological status starkly separates domestic and international political orders, treats them as governed by different ordering principles, enables theoretical distinctions based on the levels of analysis, creates models of domestic politics that overwhelmingly focus on distributional conflict, encourages individualist conceptualizations of global political structure as an aggregated byproduct of state actions, and overlooks the central role of external or excluded actors in constituting a political equilibrium that scholars typically recognize as a state.

This paper builds an alternative model of the state that facilitates a broader reexamination of state centrism in the study of politics. It casts common Weberian models as too narrow and diverges from them in three important ways. First, it highlights the central role of excluded, external actors in any domestic order. The interests and capabilities of external actors help constitute a set of common (opposing) interests that enable a state to cohere by facilitating public goods provision and tempering incentives for secession. Second, this focus on external actors facilitates an alternative conception of the political function of territorial boundaries. They act as institutions regulating collective choice by assigning people to polities that lie alongside them. Accordingly, boundaries help set the configuration of political interests in a polity by excluding some large proportion of the global population. These exclusion restrictions set the range of preferences in any state and, as a result, influence the stability and content of collective choices about domestic institutions, governmental leadership, and policy. Third, it models states as constituted by two sets of related, but distinct pacts: a distributional settlement over the costs and political goals of public goods provision; and a membership pact that is designed to exclude a substantial proportion of the global population from any state. While the former can be modeled as a standard two-actor bargaining conflict, external third parties constitute part of the strategic context in the latter.

A final section of this paper discusses some of the implications of this revised model of the state that challenge: bellicist models of state formation, the utility of two-actor theoretical models of political organization and war; prevailing conceptions of sovereignty; second image models of international outcomes; and internal models of democratization.

Author

• Patrick J. McDonald, University of Texas at Austin