Stephen Toulmin

Are nation states obsolescent?

This lecture was given by Professor Toulmin at a conference entitled ‘Embarrassment of Identities: Humanism and the future of Europe’ organised by the University of Humanist studies, Utrecht. Stephen Toulmin, author of many works on philosophy and the history of science, such as The Discovery of Time, is currently working at the Centre for Multi-ethnic and Transnational Studies, University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

My title ‘Are Nation States Obsolescent?’ is chosen so as to raise issues that - more (perhaps) than any other – underlie two problems about the contemporary situation: the general problem, how the world is to run itself in the years ahead, and the specific problem, how the countries of Europe are to build themselves into a true Union.

These problems can be addressed from at lest three standpoints. So let us look in turn at their practical, psychological and philosophical aspects: focussing first on questions of Function, second on questions of Sentiment, and finally on questions of Justice.

The first set of issues requires us to think about nation states as a class of institutions. Do these states continue to serve human interests, in the ways they were first set up to do? Or do the novel situations in which they increasingly operate make them less and less effective in serving those needs?

The second set of issues requires us to think about nation states as the objects of loyalty. What bonds among the citizens allow them to hold together? Why do they tend to fall apart? And what price do the citizens pay for preserving this ‘national’ cohesion? Watching a Velvet Revolution give way, in Prague and Bratislava, to a Velvet Divorce, what can we learn from this?

The Third set of issues requires us to reconsider our ideas about political representation. From Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes on, classical theories of representative government assumed that the citizens in any state are basically homogenous. This restricts the scope of their analysis: our ideas of democracy, and free and fair elections, were worked out with monoethnic states in mind. So – we may ask – what does experience of multiethnic countries or communities teach us about more just systems of representation?

To start with functional questions: about nation states as instruments for serving human interests. If the only relevant considerations were functional ones, the answer to my initial question, ‘Are nation states obsolescent?’ would be brief and largely positive – yes, they are obsolescent!’ In my heart, I wish this were the whole story, but it isn’t. Still, let me start by setting out this first set of considerations, so as to see how far they take us.

In the late twentieth century, practical experience has upset the assumptions that shaped our grandparents’ sociology. Earlier in the century, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber shared a dark view about the historical evolution of society and the state. As social life and function are increasingly ‘rationalised’ (they argue) the institutions that develop to serve those interests inevitably become complex, rigid and bureaucratic. Recall Max Weber’s image: modern society increasingly come to resemble an iron cage in which individual citizens feel themselves inescapably trapped. L’enfer, c’est la societe.’

In one or another form, Weber’s image seized the mid-twentieth century consciousness. During the Cold War, from the 1950s to the 1980s, readers of Jacques Ellul denounced the so-called Scientific/Technological/Military/Industrial society of Late Capitalism as unfightable: a KGB or CIA armed with supercomputers as Kafka’s ultimate nightmare. In retrospect, that nightmare had more to do with the Bureaucratic/Rational Society of Weber’s analysis than with Technology, let alone with Science: the tyrannical IBM 360 was answered by the Mac and the PC, which helped to undermine more than to strengthen the two superpowers. So, as the twentieth century ends, the crucial question is, how does Weber’s analysis stand up to experience?

The answer is easier to see, if we begin by looking not at national but at industrial organisation. In business economics, the last major expression of Weber’s viewpoint is John Kenneth Galbraith’s book The New Industrial State, which appeared in 1967. Only 27 years ago Galbraith saw the vast, pyramidal corporation – with its intermediate layers of ‘middle management’ as irresistible. Economies of scale (he argued) always give Leviathan an advantage over smaller fry. The bigger is not better as such: it is just more economical, more efficient. In the 1990s, Galbraith’s argument has lost its charm. People recognise IBM and GMC as corporate dinosaurs which will survive in a new business environment, only by ‘down sizing’ and behaving as flexibly as less lop heavy, more decentralised organisations.

As often in history, the pendulum swung. One generation’s unstoppable tendency was a later generation’s recipe for disaster. Intermediate layers of middle management proved to contribute, not economies of scale, but unprofitable overheads and loci for miscommunication. For the immediate future the form of a successful industrial corporation will resemble a pyramid less than a piece of seaweed, in which nodes of creative activity form networks without a single centre, and local managers act on their own decisions in the light of their particular situations.

Such corporate networks are less and less confined by the boundaries of the states they work in: their operations are transnational. A consulting firm like McKinsey has twenty or so offices across the world which put its collective memory and experience to work on problems in all continents. This is not a subtle strategy for the American firm to impose itself on other countries: one of the most damaging critics of US industrial practice is the man who heads McKinsey’s Tokyo office, Kenichi Ohmae.

Turn to national organisations, and we find similar changes. To mention three:

In many countries, what were previously functions of a single state are the concern of trans-State organisations. The European prototype was Benelux; the transportation problems of New York are dealt with by Tri-state authorities; and the people of Seattle and Vancouver BC dream of forming a ‘Region State’ – Kenichi Ohmae’s phrase – to be called (perhaps) Cascadia.

In Europe, moves towards the devolution of power (Subsidiarity) go on. Spain accepts devolution to regional assemblies unreservedly; British politicians welcome ‘subsidiarity’ only to curb the power of Brussels, without in turn giving powers to Scotland or Wales. The problem of Cataluna is harder: its union with Roussillon into a ‘Region State’ will be hindered by French pride.

Other kinds of decentralisation of government power occur less publicly: in part deliberately, by privatisation of (say) national airlines – in part unwittingly, as private agencies fill vacuums left by the failure of the state. State monopoly over the judicial function, for instance is giving away to ‘alternative dispute resolution’ - eg. Rent-a-Judge – especially in jurisdictions where it can take years to bring a case into the official courts; while in less developed countries unofficial judicial procedures regularly operate even in slums where the State police dare not go.

Most strikingly: the inter-national institutions created by collaborating States often display the worst features of national bureaucracy, with less product. Like the United Nations, the Council of Ministers of the European Union is a cartel of governments; one notorious product is the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, set up to support economic reform in Eastern Europe. While the EBRD spent millions on marble for its headquarters, the private financier George Soros spent his millions on a Central University in Prague, and other constructive East European projects; and all the thanks he got from European governments was to be attacked for the profits he made in currency markets when the Exchange Rate collapsed.

One footnote about the functional virtues of the nation state as an institution: here , I spoke of countries where the institution is in reasonable order. If I were more critical, I might talk less about Western Europe and North America, more about – say – Africa. There, the record of the national state, at home or in the OAU, ranges from parasitical and divisive to cataclysmic. As a government, Zaire never reached the level of a national state. Rather than obsolescent - which implies that it was once functional – we must call it ‘non-functional.’ Nearer home, the standing of ex-Yugoslavia is also open to doubt. While Western Europe paid the price for religious intolerance in the Thirty Years’ War, and fashioned its new nation states at the Treaty of Westphalia, the South Slavs were under the imperial rule of the Ottomans, Hapsburgs or the Venetians, and missed a chance to master the arts of self-government, equity and toleration.

To end this part on a positive note: Schumacher’s maxim ‘small is beautiful’ is better illustrated in Asia. There, two small states (Hong Kong & Singapore) function at the average OECD level – between $15k and $20k per head p.a. – two very large ones (Midland China and India) operate at the opposite ends of the scale, at one fifth or less. We live at a time – it seems – when large state like large Corporations, face the worst organisational problems, and do well to try down-sizing. Historians looking back at our era may yet surprise us, by pointing to the sentimental nationalist, Margaret Thatcher, as the one who most clearly saw the functional inadequacy of traditional national states and set out – with open eyes – to initiate what Karl Marx, the political philosopher, long ago called the ‘withering away’ of the state.

Leave aside functional questions for questions of sentiment, and the nation state looks very different. How is it that nation states hold together? How do our feelings of community – even commonwealth – extend beyond the immediate family to larger populations? Let me give you one answer to these questions, which has a good deal of plausibility. I am not sure that it is uniquely right, but it is certainly relevant to the issue of nations and ‘national’ traditions. It turns on the role of shared histories in a people’s collective experience.

For good and for ill (it tells us) every nation is shaped by recollections of its shared experience: its achievements – William the Silent’s leadership in Dutch liberation – and its traumas – memories of the execution of Charles I lingered for 200 years or more, to colour English reaction to the French and Russian revolutions. Dark or light, shared memories are tenacious. To this day citizens of Italy treasure glorious memories of the City States of the Renaissance, and preserve a sentiment of being (say) Florentines, Venetians or Romans. ‘First of all, I am a Florentine’ a colleague tells me: ‘second I am a European; only third, Italian.’ Conversely, some years ago, in rural Vermont, I asked a West German family how bad things ere in their part of the country in the Second World War; the son of eighteen, born twenty years after the war, replied at once, ‘they were hard – but not nearly as hard as in the Thirty Years War!’

If this account is correct, one obstacle to building Europe is the lack of any shared corpus of histories, or the myths that grow around them. The different peoples in the not-yet-very-united European Union have their own stories and myths: eg. Henri IV, le Vert galant with his poule au pot; Alfred burning the cakes; Nelson at Trafalgar, dying at the moment of victory. Dutch, Danes, Portuguese and Greeks, all have their heroes and villains. The closest thing to a shared hero is Asteryx the Gaul, the French Cartoon character, tricking the dumb Romans. This has a comic side, but there is more to it. Are the rulers of Europe not a little jealous to preserve their own national stories – even to maintain exclusive possession of them. European physicists work together at CERN, but who writes histories of Europe that give the people of the European Union a sentiment that focuses a shared commitment to that Union? This is not being done. People cite Fernand Braudel whose framework embraced the Mediterranean Basin as a whole – fair enough. But Braudel was French of the French; and it is hard to name any tru historian of Europe – not a European historian writing about his own stat, from its own national viewpoint.

One may of course ague that, in politics, history is more a curse than a blessing. Certainly, shared histories are often misused. It Bedrich Smetana and Antonin Dvorak were stirred to a new lyricism by legends of Czech heroism and Czech musical traditions, that is all to the good, but in the hands of villains who proclaim themselves ‘leaders’ of (say) the Bosnian Serbs, legends and traditions are equally used to justify atrocities. In the midst of the conflict over the corpse of Yugoslavia, indeed it is helpful to reread Rebecca West’s book Black Lamb, Grey Falcon: a record of three Yugoslav journeys in the 1930s originally published in England in 1941 and just reprinted.

Rebecca West was drawn to the Serbs – their gallantry, pride and vigour – the things that attracted Fitzroy Maclean and other Allied soldiers who fought with the Partisans in World War II. These things (she saw) sprang from the Serb’s feeling of being a people with a historical destiny. The men who seized the fortress of Kaimakshalan in 1916 felt themselves the heirs of those whom the Turks defeated at the ‘Field of Blackbirds’ – Kossovo Polje – on 28 June 1389. While he was at the University of Pennsylvania, a Yugoslav colleague of mine seemed reasonable and pragmatic; now he turns up as a guru to Slobodan Milosevic, and complains that the West does not honour its debts to the Serbs, for having delayed the Ottoman’s advances at that battle more than 600 years ago. To this day, indeed – as I hope Owen and Stoltenburg the mediators understand – the Serbian model of a hero is one who duffers a noble defeat, battling insuperable odds.

What begins as honourable memories can thus be made vehicles for historic grudges that poison the political and social fabric of a whole country, not only in Yugoslavia but in Ulster and elsewhere. Just once, Rebecca West remarks, ‘it is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.’ After three years of war in Croatia and Bosnia, and having met the unfortunate people from Sarajevo who never asked about the ‘ethnic’ affiliations of their neighbours, I sometimes wonder whether – all in all – we might not do better to pray for total historical amnesia.