The term ”state” denotes the complex of organizations, personnel, regulations, and practices through which political power is exercised in a territory. In simple societies organized as bands of families, as tribes, or as chiefdoms, political power is not separated from power relationships rooted in kinship structures or religion. Those societies also lack organizations and specialized personnel (beyond the chief) for exercising political authority and therefore have no real states. The state emerged only with the development of more complex societies, either cities or tribal confederations, which formed the bases for city-states, monarchies, and empires. Monarchies and empires in turn have given way to liberal states, modernizing dictatorships, and one-party states as the most widespread current forms of states.
The ”state” is a rather abstract term. Over time and space, the concrete organizational forms, the kinds of personnel, the specific laws and regulations, and the practices of states have varied greatly with the historical development of societies and across different cultures and regions. The modern nation-state is a very particular kind of state that developed in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and currently is spreading across the world (Poggi 1990). However, like other forms of the state, this organizational form is likely to have its day and then fade; already various kinds of supranational and international bodies have begun to take over some of the political power formerly monopolized by nation-states.
The basis of the state is political power. This article examines the roots of that power and then explores the various forms taken by states from their beginnings to the present day.
POLITICAL POWER
All forms of power involve the ability of power holders to coerce others into giving up their property, their free choice of action, and even their lives. Political power, as opposed to economic power (based on money or other forms of wealth), religious power (based on relationships to transcendent forces), family power (based on sex, seniority, and kin relationships), and pure coercion (based on brute force), is rooted in the recognition of the rightful authority of the ruler (Weber 1968). That authority stems from the demands within a society for specialists with the ability to mediate and coordinate.
Any group of human beings in regular interaction among themselves is prone to conflict over possessions, decisions regarding group actions (to hunt or not, to camp here or there, to fight or flee from a threat), and individual actions that give offense (insults, injury, infidelity). In small groups, such conflicts usually can be settled through the arbitration of respected family members or elders, but in larger groups or groups in which much interaction occurs among nonkin, those conflicts produce demands for justice that require a more broadly recognized form of mediation. Individuals who are particularly skilled at mediating such conflicts, who gain a reputation for wisdom and justice, can acquire the role of a specialist in settling conflicts. In addition, every group of human beings faces external threats from wild animals, the weather, and other human groups. Individuals who are particularly skilled at coordinating actions within a group for the purposes of attack, hunting, and defense can gain a reputation that translates into a calling as a specialist in coordinating group actions to meet threats.
The functions of mediation to produce internal justice and of coordination to deal with external threats are distinct; indeed Native American tribes sometimes had a ”peace chief” and a ”war chief’ who specialized in those functions. Modern societies have legal-judicial systems and executive-military systems that show a similar division of functions. However, these functions tended to merge because in both cases it was necessary to have mechanisms to compel compliance with the arbitration decisions of the mediator or the action directives of the coordinator. Once a society develops regular means to compel compliance with those decisions and directives (generally armed warriors closely attached to or under the direct supervision of the mediator or coordinator), that society is on its way to developing a state. Political power is thus the authority given to a recognized leader (whether judge or general) to compel compliance with his or her decisions.
Political power, however, is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, the power of the leader must be sufficient to ensure that arbitration is enforced and that the coordination of military, hunting, or building activities is effective. The larger a society is, the more complex its economy is, the stronger its enemies are, and the more threatening and varied its environment is, the greater are the tasks facing the state. Thus, for a society to avoid turmoil and defend itself, it must grow in organizational size, complexity, and power along with the society of which it is a part. On the other hand, as the leaders acquire control of larger and richer organizations and larger and more powerful coercive forces, there is a danger that that organizational and coercive force will be used to enrich and serve the desires of the ruler, not to meet the demands for justice and protection of the population (Mann 1986).
The history of the state is thus a history of balancing acts and often of overreaching. State rulers frequently use their organization and authority to expand their power and wealth. Some rulers invest heavily in conquest, acquiring power over new regions and peoples by brute force and then setting up organizations and laws to acquire and enforce political authority. Other rulers have sought to distinguish themselves primarily as lawgivers or (e.g., King Solomon) paragons of justice. Still others have simply taken their power as given and abused it. Sometimes they gain mightily from such abuse, but at other times—under very particular conditions—they may become the object of elite revolts or popular revolutions.
For sociologists, the key to understanding the state is knowledge about the shifting relationships between state rulers, their organizations and resources, and their societies. Much of the history of the development of state forms comes from the competition between rulers seeking to extend their control of political organizations and coercive force and elite and popular groups seeking to limit or channel political authority into socially acceptable goals and actions.
CITY-STATES, EMPIRES, AND FEUDALISM
Although cities and states initially may have developed independently, with both gradually moving forward between 8000 and 3000 b.c., by the third millennium b.c., the conjunction between urbanization and state making was firmly established in the Middle East. Elsewhere—in sub-Saharan Africa and southeast Asia (especially Java and Cam-bodia)—states and even empires developed without true cities; those states operated through dense clusters of villages that often centered on great temple complexes. By contrast, in the Middle East and the New World, large cities grew up around the temple complexes that served as the headquarters and ceremonial centers of the new states. Several of those city-states had great success in expansion and became the nucleus of larger empires, such as Sumer, Akkad, Assyria, and the empire of the Aztecs.
City-states continued to emerge throughout history, especially in periods of early settlement of new lands (such as the Greek city-states that spread throughout the Mediterranean in the second millennium b.c.) or after the breakup of large empires (as occurred in Italy and along the Rhine in Germany after the collapse of Charlemagne’s empire in the ninth century a.d.). The legacy of these city-states is that they experimented with a wide array of state forms. At various times, the Greek and Roman city-states of the eighth through fourth centuries b.c.—including Athens, Sparta, Thebes, Corinth, and Rome—were ruled by a single monarch, pairs of kings (or consuls), oligarchies of the wealthy or well-born aristocrats, and popular assemblies. The modern forms of democracy and monarchy can be traced back to the Greek and Roman city-states of that period. However, city-states generally did not survive in any area for more than a few centuries before being swallowed up by large territorial empires.
Those large territorial empires became the dominant form of the state in much of the world for the next 5,000 years, from roughly 3000 b.c. to a.d. 1900 (Eisenstadt 1963). In the Middle East, the major empires included of Sumer, Akkad, Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, and Persia and the Hellenistic empires founded by the generals of Alexander the Great. These empires were followed by the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, and the Islamic empires founded by the followers of Mohammed. These empires were followed by the vast empires of the Mongols and the Turks, the last of which was the Ottoman Empire, which ruled large portions of north Africa, the Middle East, and southeastern Europe and lasted until 1923. In Europe, after the fall of the Roman Empire there followed the empires of Charlemagne and his sons. That empire left as a legacy the Holy Roman Empire, which eventually evolved into the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which survived until 1918. After roughly a.d. 1500, much of eastern Europe and central Asia was under the control of the Russian Empire, which lasted until 1917. In China and India, large empires emerged in the third and fourth centuries b.c. In China, the Qin and Han dynasties initiated a pattern of imperial rule that lasted until the birth of the Chinese Republic in 1911; in India, the Maurya and Gupta dynasties briefly unified the subcontinent and were followed by the Mughal Empire, which lasted until India came under British domination in the eighteenth century.
In Africa, there also were large Empires, including the Aksum Empire in Ethiopia which was (founded around 300 b.c. and whose successor empires and dynasties lasted until 1974), the Ghana Empire and Mali Empire in west Africa, Great Zimbabwe and Mutapa in southern Africa, and the Zulu Empire, which ruled over much of southeastern Africa until it was defeated by the British in the late nineteenth century. In the Americas, three major indigenous empires developed: the Maya and the Aztecs in what is today Mexico and the Incas centered in modern-day Peru. After defeating the Aztecs and Incas in the sixteenth century, Spain established an empire in the Americas extending from Chile to California that it ruled for nearly 300 years.
The vast majority of these empires were conquest empires in which strong imperial centers acquired territory, troops, and resources to build ever-larger empires and thus conquer ever more territory. However, many imperial rulers also were famous lawgivers renowned for establishing justice and order in their empires; they included Hammurabi of Babylonia, Justinian of Rome, and Suleyman the Magnificent of the Ottoman Empire. Their lawcodes were established not to give ”rights” to subjects but to produce order by making a clear list of crimes and the penalties that would be imposed.
Though powerful, these empires were not immune to decay and disintegration. Even the longest-lived empires, such as those of Egypt and China, had periods of civil war and broke up into multiple states. Population growth that created pressure on the capacity of the land to yield taxes, military defeat by powerful neighbors, and conflicts among elite factions could all produce disorganization and decay of the imperial state administration. In times of decay, a locally based form of rule known as feudalism often arose.
Feudalism in the strict sense is a pattern of allegiance by oath taking in which a lord gives control of land (a ”fief”) to a vassal in return for a promise of service. This pattern may have one dominant lord controlling many vassals, or there may be many lords and many vassals, with some vassals dispensing fiefs and thus becoming lords themselves. In this sense, feudalism is not a state, for no centralized administration has full control of the territory. However, if a single lord manages to emerge as dominant over all the other lords and vassals in a territory and is able to expand his own household and personal administration to exert his will throughout the territory, one can then speak of a state, which usually is described as a kingdom or monarchy. Kingdoms were known throughout the world and generally appear in periods in which large empires have broken down or before they are established. In most of the world, empires continued to reestablish themselves, often building on the strongest kingdom in a region. However, in western and central Europe, no empire ever reestablished lasting control over the area that had been controlled by the Romans. Instead, the period of feudalism in Europe (roughly a.d. 600 through 1300) was followed by many centuries in which a number of competing kingdoms controlled major portions of the European continent.
ABSOLUTISM AND BUREAUCRATIC-AUTHORITARIAN STATES
The early empires and kingdoms all had rudimentary administrations and relatively undifferentiated elites. That is, the officers of the state were mainly family members of the ruler or personal favorites appointed at the ruler’s pleasure; many were also high-ranking officials in the church. They gained much of their income from the control of personal properties or privileges granted by the ruler. The mingling of state and church was based on a strong connection between religious and state power; there was usually an official state religion that supported the state and was in turn supported by the ruler.
By around the sixteenth century a.d., however, most of the kingdoms and empires of Europe and Asia had begun to develop into more impersonal and bureaucratic states. State offices were fixed in a ”table of ranks,” and officers were expected to undergo rigorous academic training to qualify for their positions. The number of state offices multiplied greatly, and while favorites still were chosen for key positions, an increasing number were chosen and promoted for their merit and services. States also began to diversify their sources of income. Most early empires relied on various forms of tribute collection or taxes paid ”in kind,” such as set amounts of grain, cloth, or labor services. In contrast, by the sixteenth century, most states had begun to specify and collect taxes in cash, with which they paid regular salaries to state officials. In those states, subjects still had few rights and no participation in politics; rulers remained absolute in authority. However, those states became ”bureaucratic-authoritarian” in the sense that authority increasingly was exercised through uniform rules enforced by bureaucratic officials rather than through local and customary practices enforced by fairly autonomous local notables.
Dependence on cash meant that many states also placed a greater emphasis on trade and on taxes on commerce as an alternative to taxes on land. For some states (e.g., the Netherlands and Great Britain), taxes on trade and industry soon exceeded revenues from traditional land taxes (Tilly 1990). In the period 1500-1900, the promotion of trade and commerce led to a vast expansion of long-distance trade, both ocean-borne and land-based, across the globe. European kingdoms, stymied in creating empires in Europe, created them overseas. Seeking natural resources and new markets, European states (and later Japan) invested in colonies and overseas companies and administrations to control them in the Americas, Africa, India, southeastern Asia, Korea, and along the Chinese coast.
While this period remained one of kingdoms and empires, bureaucratic-authoritarian states faced two extensive periods of challenge. From the late sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century and again from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, all of Eurasia experienced several trends that reshaped states. First, in those two periods the population grew dramatically, doubling or more, while in other periods the population declined or was stable. These periods of population growth were also periods of rising prices as a result of more extensive commerce and a rising demand for basic goods. Pay to laborers and available land for peasants, however, declined as the population grew faster than did the agricultural economy. Population growth also led to factional conflicts among elite groups competing for control of state offices and to greater demands on state administrations. However, states were running into financial trouble, for population growth was reducing the surplus available for taxation and the rapid growth of commerce was shifting more resources into areas where traditional tax collection was weak, leaving more resources in the hands of merchants, local landowners, and urban and regional elites. Toward the end of those two periods—roughly 1580-1660 and 1770-1860—conflicts between state rulers and elites over the rulers’ prerogatives and resources triggered worldwide waves of revolutions and rebellions in kingdoms and empires; these included the English, American, and French revolutions, the anti-Habsburg revolts, and the revolutions of 1848 in Europe; the collapse of the Ming Empire and the Taiping rebellion in China; and thejanissary, Balkan, and Egyptian revolts in the Ottoman Empire (Goldstone 1991).
REVOLUTIONS, NATIONALISM, AND NATION-STATES
Those revolutions and rebellions all involved popular uprisings and elite rebellions against the ruler and loyal elements of the state but had different outcomes in different areas. In most societies, the elites were deeply frightened by popular uprisings and sought to reestablish state power more firmly by tightening the reins of state power and enforcing allegiance to the state-sponsored religion. This was the case in Catholic Spain, Italy, and Austria under the Counter-Reformation; in Confucian China under the Qing dynasty; and in the Islamic Ottoman Empire. However, in England 1689, America in 1776, and France in 1789, the elites were more concerned that excessive state power would damage their positions and fuel future revolutions. Reviving ideas and institutions from the days of democratic Greece and republican Rome, they attempted to place limits on state power and reserve specific rights to elites and even to ordinary workers and peasants. Those limits and rights were codified in a variety of documents, including ”declarations of rights”, and especially in constitutions that became the basis for state power. Those constitutions marked a distinctively modern turn in the history of state. Previously, state authority had always rested on coercion and demands for the dispensation of order and been supported by religious belief and tradition, but from the age of constitutions, the legitimacy of state authority rested on whether the ruler abided by the limits in the constitution and recognized the rights of the elites and popular groups that had established that constitution.
Constitutions meant that a new relationship was forged between the state and the population of the territory it ruled. Under empires, the state established order and most people were simply economic producers, not political actors. By contrast, under constitutions, the people, or at least those involved in creating and establishing constitutional rule, were the ultimate controllers and beneficiaries of state power. This new relationship led to new demands by various groups.
One demand was for greater and more regular political participation by groups that had been excluded: religious and ethnic minority groups, women, and the poor. Though frequently resisted by elites and state rulers, in many areas those groups gained elite allies and acquired rights to regular political participation, most notably through voting (Reuschemeyer et al. 1992). States where voting rights are widespread and the state’s power over its subjects has significant limits are commonly described as democratic or ”liberal” states. By the late nineteenth century, most of the states in Europe west of Russia and in North and South America were liberal states.
Another demand came from professionals, merchants, and sometimes military officers who lived under empires and wanted to take control of their positions and territories under something like the relationship that prevailed in constitutional regimes, where the state was identified as an instrument of the people rather than the reverse. Those elites argued that every ethnic group should be entitled to its ”own” state and its own rulers. The resulting ideology was known as ”nationalism” (Calhoun 1998), and it spread widely throughout the world. Nationalism fueled the revolutions of 1830 in Poland and Greece; those of 1848 in Hungary, Germany, Italy, and Romania; the effort to expel the Austro-Hungarians and unify Italy under Italian rule in the 1860s; and the Serb liberation movement that helped start World War I. Nationalist sentiments also fueled revolts in Ireland throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the Chinese Republican Revolution of 1911; the anticolonial revolutions in India, Algeria, Indonesia, and Vietnam after World War II; and a host of other anticolonial revolts in Africa and Asia.
Nationalism fostered the ideal that states should be ”national” states, reflecting the identity and promoting the aspirations of their inhabitants as a united community rooted in shared traditions and culture (Anderson 1991). In fact, to comply with this ideal, many traditions had to be invented and national languages had to be created. Even today, it often is ambiguous whether a given nation-state reflects a nation (Is there is British nation or only English, Welsh, and Scottish nations plus portions of Scot-settled Ireland sharing the state of Great Britain?). However, the ideal of the nation-state spread widely, even to older states, so that it became expected that modern nation-states would have a national language, a national flag and anthem, national systems of schooling and communications (newspapers, radio, and television), national systems of transportation (highways, railways, and airlines), and a national army.
Nonetheless, since almost all existing states included members of more than one ethnic, linguistic, or cultural group within their boundaries, most nation-states inevitably failed to satisfy to a greater or lesser degree the aspirations of subnational groups, which in turn often developed their own nationalist ambitions. A large number of the violent conflicts in the world in recent years are the result of nationalist movements within nation-states, such as the Chechens in Russia, the Basques in Spain, the Kurds in Turkey, the Uighurs in China, and the Albanian Kosovars in Yugoslavia.
While nationalism seemed poised to bring more liberal, constitutional states into being, things did not develop that way. The defeat of many early nationalist movements led nationalist leaders to conclude that above all else, a people needed a strong state to protect them from control by others, whether multinational empires or other nations. As a result, many nationalist movements gave rise to authoritarian, populist dictatorships. Those dictatorships often promulgated constitutions and claimed to draw their legitimacy—in the modern fashion—from their service to and identification with the people of the territories they ruled, but in fact they operated in as absolute a manner as any older imperial state, only now they were backed by the latest industrial and military technology. Thus, while nationalism was destroying the old traditional empires and replacing them with modern states, those modern states were following divergent paths into democracy and dictatorship.
DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS
The history of the state in the twentieth century has largely been one of a struggle between democracies and dictatorships. In the liberal states over the course of the twentieth century, the range of citizen rights has been expanding, the participation in politics of ordinary citizens (through rallies, financial contributions, petitions, and voting) has grown, and the obligations of the state to support its citizens (the modern ”welfare state”) have been extended. A major result of these patterns is that women, the working class, and the poor are far more closely integrated into political life in liberal states as voters and direct recipients of state actions than ever before (O’Conner et. al, 1999). To accommodate and channel this political participation, most liberal states have a number of political parties that organize and control the competition for political power. At the end of the twentieth century, as a result of growing state obligations, the personnel and budget of modern liberal states has swollen to the point where state expenditures make up one-quarter to one-half of the entire national product of their societies.
However, the model of the liberal state did not triumph in every place where empires collapsed. In many regions, spurred by nationalist sentiment and the failure of liberal states to provide economic and military security under the chaotic conditions that followed military defeat or economic crises, modern dictatorships emerged. Some of those dictatorships, such as those of Adolph Hitler and his Nazi Party in Germany and Benito Mussolini and his Fascist Party in Italy, did not outlast their founders. However, in Russia and China, Communist parties took on a dominant life of their own, and those countries became one-party states in which everything of economic, military, and political importance was controlled by the party-state. In other countries, notably in Africa (e.g., Nigeria), Latin America, and eastern Asia (e.g., Korea and Indonesia), military personnel seized power and held on for periods ranging from years to generations. For most of the twentieth century, such modern one-party and military dictatorships, all professing nationalist ideals and even staging (controlled) popular elections, controlled the vast majority of the states and peoples of the world.
In the last two decades of the twentieth century, however, the majority of those one-party states and military dictatorships collapsed (Walder 1995; Goldstone et al. 1991). Their extensive control of the economy stifled innovation and encouraged corruption, leading their revenues to fall well below those of the leading liberal states. Within dictatorial states, even the elites looked on the far greater material wealth and personal freedom of their counterparts in liberal states with envy. Efforts at reform in one-party and military states thus quickly turned into movements to establish liberal regimes. As a result, for the first time in history, it appears that humankind will enter a new millennium with a majority of its nations and populations living under liberal constitutional states (Huntington 1991).
BEYOND THE NATION-STATE
While the twentieth century has closed with the national, liberal state seemingly triumphant, there is no assurance that this form of state will endure. Constitutional states often have been overthrown by dictatorships, both military and populist, when they encounter severe military or economic setbacks. The Great Depression led a host of democracies to collapse into dictatorships, and struggles with economic development led many Latin American and African states into communist takeovers and military coups in the 1960s and 1970s. In most of the world outside Europe and North America, liberal states are not firmly established and may be vulnerable if another major economic trauma sweeps the globe. Thus, the past threats to the continuance of liberal states may reemerge.
In addition, new threats to the primacy of the nation-state have arisen in the form of supranational organizations with genuine sovereignty and military power. The most notable of these organizations are NATO (a military alliance with a unified command embracing the forces of most European nations and the United States) and the European Union (a supranational body ruled by representatives from most European nations with taxing and legislative authority over certain aspects of its member states). A variety of cooperative multinational organizations established by treaty, such as the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the International Court of Justice, and various environmental commissions and human rights organizations, also have impinged on state sovereignty. The future may see still greater transfers of state power to such supranational bodies as the problems of establishing human rights, safeguarding the global environment, and maintaining stable and sound financial institutions may grow beyond the capacity of any single state or ad hoc arrangement of states to resolve.
