Project State and Its Rivals
- Book: The Project State and Its Rivals.
URL =
Review
Review by By Anton Jäger:
"Maier is on the lookout for a unifying category to cohere our historical experience of the twentieth century—or, more specifically, the forms of statehood that emerged in the interwar period, and that still present such vexing challenges to our intellectual imagination.
Maier’s project states moved within a triad of forces: the so-called web of capital, the network of governance, and the state as an institution. On this canvas, the long arc of his twentieth century becomes visible: the birth of the project state in the wake of the military confrontations of the 1910s, its sudden maturation and ascendance after the 1929 stock market crash, a period of aggressive rivalry in the 1930s and ’40s, followed up by its domestication under American supervision after 1947, its relative globalization in the 1950s and ’60s as postcolonial nations joined the ranks of contending project managers, and finally, a period of crisis in the 1970s followed up by a haphazard dissolution in the 1980s and ’90s.
In Maier’s view, the project state was set up to subordinate the web of capital and existing networks of governance, modernize resource empires, and embed financial institutions in national communities. In the 1970s, the contradictions of its model were becoming plain to see: both citizens and capital were unwilling to tolerate the inflationary imbalances which it was imposing. Internationally, these moods of discontent compounded with the monetary limbo of previously national economies at the end of the Bretton Woods system, now responsive to bondholders rather than voters. Consequently, new actors within the web of capital and networks of governance crafted coalitions that would liberate themselves from its stranglehold. On its ruins, institutions such as the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization were to sculpt new, more market-friendly states. These would forgo the stringent demands of their predecessors and restore capital’s hold over the investment function.
For Maier, ambivalence is a scholarly virtue when approaching the period: “there are other ways to think about the history of the last hundred years than as a contest between democracies and dictatorships, emancipation and oppression, fascists and communists, or even just between liberals and conservatives, left and right, or moderates and the ideologically obsessed.” Like the Thirty Years’ War which gave birth to Westphalian absolutism, the period from 1914 to 1945 produced a distinctly new state-form that differed from its nineteenth-century predecessors and still casts an intimidating shadow in our own era of state incapacity."
Discussion
Anton Jager:
“After the Project State
These ambiguities are on awkward display in the book’s closing chapters. By the early 1970s, Maier argues, the project state’s energy was spent: it “had mobilized public energy to wage war, overcome the interwar depression, attempt to retain empire, and construct social insurance schemes for old age, unemployment, and varying degrees of medical coverage.” Yet “governmental activism seemed to run into pervasive difficulties by the 1970s,” felled by overheating economies mired in stagnation and energy insecurity. The web of capital now sought to liberate itself from the strictures which the project state had once imposed upon it, including the large share of public property it had gained. The result was a momentous transition: the largest privatization of collective property since the secularizations of Catholic Church lands throughout western Europe and Latin America from the sixteenth century to the 1860s—“neoliberalism’s greatest wager.” The resulting transnational employer offensive saw capital hollow out the project state from the inside and rearrange it for its convenience. The result was a debilitating victory for capital in the social question—indeed, the effacing of the social question—and a dramatic crisis of interest-based politics. As Maier notes, “night was falling in the gardens of the global north.”
The resultant creature is never given a name in the book. Yet it is clear how frail the successors of the project state look in comparison to their centauric predecessors. The new state forms are “lamentably feeble when it comes to collecting taxes, winning wars or forging a really ‘hegemonic’ power bloc or an ideology that can carry the state beyond the coercive and ‘corporative’ level and into the moral and intellectual sphere.” As the Covid and Ukraine crises have shown, post-project states find it amazingly difficult to vaccinate and produce weapons—two of the “plasmic” interventions which were once celebrated as the key attributes of twentieth-century statecraft—and are ever-more helpless when buying consent from their populations.
Maier tells us much about the “how” of this story. Yet we receive comparatively little about the “why.” These problems compound in the book’s concluding chapter on the 2010s. Closing his arc, Maier zooms in on the explanandum of his overall project: a proper understanding of the populist decade after 2008. In his view, existing interpretations of the populist moment are too lopsided, choosing a cut-off point that hampers our understanding of them. Populists “may have believed” they were reviving the project state, he argues, “but the project was reduced to protection of the ethnic community,” with the more plausible result a mere “mafia state.” Maier’s overview of the current literature on populism is cursory, only faintly fleshed out by the references to political economy which run throughout the rest of the book, and replete with liberal pieties. He offers some hazy references to populism as an illiberal ideology with leadership at its center, linked to the charismatic authority endemic to the interwar period, yet never clearly settles on a definition. He rarely relates populism to structural factors that give plausibility to these new movements.
There are undeniable similarities with twentieth-century authoritarians, of course. Like twentieth-century fascists, today’s populists glorify leaders and seek to restrict universal citizenship to national borders; like ultra-nationalists, their primary locus for political decision-making lies in the executive. At the same time, the new populists hardly have ambitions to break the American world system, to rebuild a racial welfare state, or to discipline capital into the productive investment required to meet the century’s new challenges. With comparatively weak and top-heavy parties at their disposal, populists also find it hard to colonize and wield the state, often acting as rent-seeking coalitions that simply adapt to stagnation. Compared to the dynamic states headed by Roosevelt, Hitler, and Mao, today’s populists are cursed by a “cruelly absent grandeur,” in the words of Pierre Rosanvallon.
Maier notes these differences, yet his state-centric apparatus seems particularly ill-equipped to explain them. Both for Stalin, Hitler, Roosevelt, and Mussolini, the relationship between leader and people that crystallized in the project state had its roots in history: a sense of directionality and dynamism, a telos to which humanity was to move. A “people” was to be mobilized for a project, itself indicating a close link between past, present, and future.
Few traces of such a philosophy of history can be found in contemporary populism. In that sense, it is indeed properly post-historical: unable to relate itself to historical dynamics that would determine where the Italian, Dutch, French, or British people are headed. Rather, populism instead relies on a constant short-circuiting between people and leader.
If we see Hitler, Attlee, and Eisenhower as products of the nsdap, the Labour Party, or the GOP, what different history emerges? And what if we were to query the very idea of the mid-century era as that of the “project state”? As the German émigré Franz Neumann famously claimed, the Nazi state could easily count as a non-state, since “under national socialism . . . there is no need for a state standing above all groups; the state may even be a hindrance to the compromise and to domination over the ruled classes.” Partly motivated by his defense of the Sozialstaat which he saw dormant in the Weimar Rechtsstaat, Neumann saw Nazi Germany as little more than a temporary cartel between social groups.
The project state, in the latter sense, was mainly a project society, in which a specific mode of human action made possible durable forms of political engagement. Focusing so closely on the web of capital and the networks of governance, the mass parties and organizations which assured access to the state throughout the century only appear en passant in Maier’s analysis—a choir serenading in the dark.
One need not accept Neumann’s anti-statist readings of the Nazi project state. Yet real questions remain for Maier: if the project states which once forced a jailbreak out of the British world system were above all project societies, what are we to make of the possibility of their return? And if the project state’s revival requires a restarting of the fraught dialectic between society and state which ran across the twentieth century, how does it change our evaluation of populism as a failed attempt to do so?”
More information
- The Project State