Project State
Description
By Anton Jäger:
“Maier’s book offers a new solution to this enigma. In his view, all the classical categories used to describe the twentieth-century state miss its central feature: its orientation around the notion of a project, which could weld business interests, the general population, and state bureaucrats under a single, long-term time horizon. What united Roosevelt’s America, Stalin’s Russia, Attlee’s Britain, Hitler’s Germany, Mao’s China, and Nkrumah’s Ghana, then, was not a diffuse totalitarianism or developmental ideology. Rather, it was their status as project states, which all “had a transformative agenda . . . based on authoritarian and even totalitarian as well as liberal and democratic coalitions seeking to reform sclerotic institutions or societies that seemed unacceptably unequal.” Project states thereby tended to “see society as a plasmic whole, sometimes in terms of elites and masses, knowable and controllable through statistical science, biological and legal interventions.” The specimen did not come without ancestors, of course—in Maier’s view, Napoleonic France and the wartime organization of the U.S. federal government in 1861 already exhibited embryonic signs of a later project state—yet “as a continuing and nonexceptional form of polity,” the new creature only “came into its own in the twentieth century.” Maier’s category thereby demarcates and unifies.”
History
Anton Jager:
“The notion of a “project state” allows us to understand what Mao, Hitler, De Gaulle, Attlee, and Nkrumah had in common. Yet it also clearly separates the twentieth-century state from its pre-1914 antecedents. Although Maier’s state never fully abolished capital, it did have a productively agonistic relationship with it: it was able to both discipline and repel those that controlled investment and to direct or claim those resources for itself. It was a state made for and by warfare, yet not exclusively so. To the disgust of neoliberals and New Leftists, it had an eternally uneasy relationship with the public-private divide, both on the social and on the economic front, encouraging higher birth rates while compiling calorific tables.
Above all, it was pitted against the nineteenth-century nightwatchman state, both as a reality and as a metaphor; public authority was to turn itself from a mere facilitator of economic commerce into an active choreographer of social movements. As Maier notes, the hustle and bustle of the traffic jam was replaced by the “ordered direction of the Riefenstahlian march”; under its baldaquin, masses would gather for coordination and instruction, in a rage for order that ran across the whole interwar period. Maier’s concept does not rule out internal differentiation, of course: “creating the fascist man who would live as a lion and not as a jackal was a different project than raising out of poverty ‘one third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,’” and Stalin was surprised to see Churchill switch office with Attlee when negotiating the postwar order.
Still, all its forms took an energetic, even invasive interest in the populations that fell under their control: the project state built the National Health Service, transported prisoners to Kolyma, incinerated Dresden and Nagasaki, birthed cybernetics and nuclear power, reduced infant mortality, and cartelized the coal industries. Here was an entity “addicted to transformative agendas,” with a lifespan as short as it was eventful: born somewhere between 1914 and 1929, gone between 1973 and 1991. By the close of the 1980s, Maier admits, the project state had given up on its project and was no longer capable of controlling the forces of private capital. It slowly gave up the role of sculpting society, instead leaving the field open to self-experimentation and the emerging entrepreneurs of the self. In the historian’s view, its “audacity repelled many at the time and certainly social historians in the century since, but the ambitions constituted a major historical force and deserve empathetic understanding.”
Above all, Maier shows, project states met a crisis of leadership. Max Weber, himself an uneasy prophet for the rising project state, already discerned this feature in the late 1910s, when he called on a newly republican Germany to face a “night of icy darkness” with heroism and the “slow boring of hard boards.” He was hardly a lonely prophet. On a globe in which the oscillations of the market rather than the turning of the seasons governed an ever-larger portion of human life, “drift” inevitably gave way to “mastery,” as Walter Lippmann noted at the dawn of the new age in 1914. Internally, project leadership sought to organize and stratify the suffrage expansion which capitalism had always contained as a promise, yet which made cohabitation between labor and capital difficult. Externally, project states were to guarantee commodity frontiers or what Maier terms “resource empires” that could support increasingly market-dependent metropoles.
Project states, Maier thereby argues, were a product of the First World War, turbocharged by the Second, only faintly surviving into the age of American world-hegemony, finally to teeter in the inflationary 1970s, and fully die out in the unipolar 1990s. Already in the late 1950s, “the poet Stephen Vincent Benet was no longer around to ask us, as he had queried the dead in the 1930s, why we were marching,” Maier recollects. “We were being marched for the sake of a concept of citizenship that would largely dissolve by the 1960s. . . . [T]he project-state still imposed memories and set a cadence, but the urgency of its causes was weakening.” While Maier’s students marched against Vietnam, Milton Friedman proposed a marketization of the draft and a replacement of existing social security with a minimal cash grant. From the inside, plans for the silent execution of the project state were being composed.
Taken on this timeline, Maier’s heuristic thereby acquires a sharper outline: project states were a product of a world war which was itself the expression of challenges to what John Darwin has called the “British world system.” This was a system based on free trade, the gold standard, and asymmetrical naval power. In this board game, countries that wanted to achieve military parity had to industrialize; to industrialize, they needed access to “resource empires” which would assure food and energy supplies in a world supposedly beset by existential scarcity. Naturally, challengers to this system were also under threat of being reduced to primary commodity suppliers to the British hegemon, stuck in unequal trading relationships and the ensuing comparative disadvantage. Internal British developments only created more reasons to break out. As more European nations began to acquire manufacturing sectors in the late nineteenth century, the British Empire began to tie its existing colonial territories to the home country by what was called “nontariff barriers”: “regulatory measures of one sort and another,” as Mike Macnair notes, “which pushed the colonial territories into trade with the metropolis.” As Branko Milanović has shown, the savings glut of capitalism’s nouveaux riches incentivized investment in colonial holdings rather than domestic economies. Coming up to 1914, this surplus was rushed to locations outside of Europe, where the new debt obligations were to be surveilled with navies financed through increased military spending.
The creation of these nontariff barriers led to what Germans termed Torschlusspanik (“closing door panic”): a sense that new capitalist economies with energy and food dependencies would be shut out of imperialist resource networks and face geo-economic extinction. Here was the driving force of the New Imperialism from the 1870s onwards, which accelerated the scramble for Africa and the increasing build-up of naval power. These factors also proved crucial in the German bid for continental hegemony in 1914—itself an attempt to secure a resource empire which could guarantee the population’s food and oil supply.
After 1918, this problem was only moderately resolved by the American supervisory system over Europe. The Versailles order left British and French imperial dominance intact and reduced Germany, unable to build its Eastern empire, to a state of semi-suzerainty. Coupled with the increasingly ambitious demands of domestic working classes, governmental minimalism was becoming a liability. Later, as these formal empires were rendered informal in the 1950s and ’60s, many former colonial territories began constructing their own project states to escape from their status as commodity frontiers: Mao, Castro, and Nkrumah as project leaders.
A general pattern becomes visible here. The rise of the project state can be conceptualized as a series of attempts to break the grip of dependency in an age in which the British world system was already fraying. This escape plan now presupposed a level of mobilization and coordination in a fully capitalist economy absent in the nineteenth century. Even in the case of the Soviet Union, the quest to catch up with Western competitors drew the contours of the Russian project state. For countries that had no internal frontier to recycle their settlers, like Germany and Italy, these attempts took on particularly brutal forms; all in all, however, the attempts saw an enormous expansion of state power, with catch-up projects which could take on both less democratic and more democratic forms—fascist, liberal, clerical-authoritarian, socialist, communist, or nationalist.
After the war, the project states and their resource empires were slowly decoupled, as Maier notes in the book’s middle chapters. This was followed by the construction of a new commercial empire, exemplified by the Pax Americana and Bretton Woods, which encouraged European nations to acquire new manufacturing sectors without threatening class stability. These were no longer the unruly project states that had threatened international disorder in the 1930s and 1940s; “economic growth allowed a policy of allocative neutrality,” while “the European project helped to replace the colonial tribute.” As Maier notes, “formal empire might have ended,” yet the Third World continued to serve its sorry function as a commodity frontier, even as many postcolonial leaders sought to emulate the jailbreak economics which project states had first practiced in the 1920s and ’30s.
There are many virtues to this narrative. Maier’s book offers a powerful corrective to many one-sided accounts of twentieth-century history—particularly self-satisfied liberal narratives which still see the age as a confrontation between tyranny and freedom. Following in the tracks of Mark Mazower’s Dark Continent, Adam Tooze’s The Deluge, and his own oeuvre, The Project State and Its Rivals kicks over idols that still stalk our historical imagination in the twenty-first century.
As the historian Clinton Rossiter already noted in the late 1940s, many Western nations had embarked on a period of “constitutional dictatorship” to stabilize their political institutions throughout the middle of the twentieth century, blurring the very lines between authoritarian or nonauthoritarian regimes. In the latter sense, Maier offers us a twenty‑first-century variant of the 1338 fresco by the Italian painter Ambrogio Lorenzetti, The Allegory of Good and Bad Government, which offered a morphology of state forms through the ages. Most importantly, by drawing attention to the common experience of the project state across continents, Maier also offers helpful tools for understanding the synchronicity of the populist revolts after 2008, from Delhi to Budapest, held hostage by the same phantom memory of a now absent project state.
This limitless ambition also comes with potential risks, however. Throughout the book, Maier does an impressive job tracking continuities and discontinuities between a wide variety of case studies. Yet readers receive relatively little on the exact etiology of the project state. Where did it come from? Maier’s intuition seems to be that the project state came about through inter-imperialist catch up. Internally, capitalist economies generated a power vacuum in which capital and labor were pitted against each other, unprofitable assets were left unused, and populations were condemned to mass unemployment. Externally, an increasingly market-dependent society necessitated the creation of imperial reservoirs which could supply primary resources while being force-fed with the center’s industrial produce.
At the same time, however, Maier also posits interstate competition as a consequence without a cause. Project states are called into existence to modernize resource empires and battle geopolitical rivals—but why were these imperatives in the first place? As mentioned, Maier seems to indicate that increasing market integration at the start of the twentieth century created a set of dependencies which exposed humanity to a new vulnerability. Capital’s invasion into the social fabric, so it seems, called forth a Polanyian counter-reaction. At the same time, Maier also claims that the “term capital is an abstraction, a shorthand for business leaders who represented finance and industry in the public eye and asset-owners and managers who directed privately owned firms”—a more sociological notion which gives us a matrix of choices for different social groups. Yet it tells us very little about the overall environment and structures in which project states were born, nurtured, and died—and why they have proven so difficult to resuscitate and maintain in the new century.”