Project State and its Rivals

* Book: The Project State and Its Rivals: A New History of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. by Charles S. Maier. Harvard University Press, 2023.

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Review

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.

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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. 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."

(https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2023/08/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-project-state-rethinking-the-twentieth-century/)

After the Project State

By Anton Jäger

"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.”

(https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2023/08/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-project-state-rethinking-the-twentieth-century/)