Evolution of Statehood

* Book: The Evolution of Statehood. From Early States to Global Society. By Leonid Grinin. Saarbrucken: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2011. - 360 p.

URL = https://www.socionauki.ru/book/evolution_of_statehood_en/

Description

"The monograph is devoted to the problems of the origins, development and present situation of statehood. It also provides the forecasts of political development in the coming decades. The book touches upon a wide range of issues and topics, including: What alternatives did state have in evolution? Which main evolutionary stages has it passed as a structure? What are early, developed and mature types of the state? Were Athens and Rome Republic states? What new coalitions of countries will be possible in the nearest decades?

The book presents a new approach to the causes and models of the emergence of the state, to the state’s position among the forms competing with it (analogues of the early state) and new models of the state’s evolution. Today in their full swing are the processes of transformation of state sovereignty, change of state’s nature and functions and countries` integration into supranational communities. In the last chapter the reasons are explained of the inexplicable, at first glance, phenomenon why modern states voluntarily reduce their sovereign prerogatives.

Without the analysis of the statehood genesis and development, it is almost impossible to understand the course of human history and modern condition of World System as well as the possible directions of its transition. So we hope the book will be interesting to a broad audience both to specialists in political anthropology, philosophy, political studies, future studies, globalization studies, historical sociology, cultural evolution as well as to anyone interested in history and modern political problems and global trends."

Discussion

The Three Stages of Statehood

Leonid Grinin:

"We are dealing not with the two main stages of statehood development (the early states and the mature states), but with the following sequence of three stages:

• early states;

• developed states;

• mature states.

This has made it necessary to develop anew the statehood evolution theory and to suggest new formulations of elements of the previous state type, whereas in the third phase (the transitional phase) many of its institutions become ‘overripe’ and the first characteristics of a higher stage of the statehood development appear. Further we will briefly study the main differences between three evolutionary types of state and then examine every type in detail. With such a composition of the chapter the repetitions are inevitable but since the readers are suggested a new theory such iterations are quite justified."

(http://www.sociostudies.org/books/files/macrohistory_and_globalization/083-135.pdf)

MAIN DIFFERENCES OF THE EARLY, DEVELOPED, AND MATURE STATES

Leonid Grinin:

"Early states are insufficiently centralized states. They politically organize societies with underdeveloped administrative-political and with no clear-cut social and class structures. Early states differ greatly from each other in many characteristics in particular with respect to the degree of their centralization, as well as the level of development of their administrative, taxation, judicial systems and so on. However, if we try to understand what differentiates early states from the developed and mature ones, we find that early states are always incomplete states (both organizationally and socially). This ‘incompleteness’ is also relevant with respect to relationships between the state and the society. Let us see what is meant. There were numerous versions of early states, but within each of them some important elements of statehood were either absent, or significantly underdeveloped. In most cases this incompleteness was expressed in the most direct way, as most of the early states simply did not have the minimal necessary level of centralization or/and some significant statehood attributes, or did not develop them to a sufficient degree. Early states often lacked a complete set or a satisfactorily developed set of power attributes that later became universal, such as a professional administrative apparatus, a system of regular taxation, administrative territorial division, written law, and sufficient centralization. Organizational and administrative institutions of early states were quite specific. For example, militia or feudal levy instead of regular army, landowners who performed the functions of both administrators and landlords instead of professional state officials and judges, a conglomerate of individual areas with their individual forms of power instead of a clear division into provinces, incomes from the king's domain instead of taxation, and so on. It is very important to understand, that professional apparatus, taxation system, and territorial division are optional for early states; they become obligatory only for the next evolutionary type, the developed state. But this ‘incompleteness’ of early states is also relevant with respect to the relations between the state and the society. However, in some early states (such as, e.g., the state of the Incas or the Early Kingdom in Egypt) a contrary disproportion is observed. Though the administrative apparatus and bureaucracy were rather powerful there, they were imposed upon societies that were underdeveloped socially and/or ethnically. Hence, in such cases it was the society that looked underdeveloped in comparison with the state.

Developed states are fully formed centralized states of the Late Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Early Modern period. They politically organize societies with distinct estate-class stratification. The developed state is a state that has been formed and is inevitably completed. So that is why the attributes of statehood that could be absent within the political system of the early state – such as a professional apparatus of administration, control and suppression, a system of regular taxation, an administrative territorial division, and written law – are necessarily present within that of the developed one.7 The developed state was an outcome of a long historical development and selection, as a result of which those states turn out to be more successful whose institutes are organically linked with the social structures of respective so- cieties that are both grounded on the respective social order and support it. The developed state affects social processes in a much more purposeful and active way. It is not only closely connected with the peculiarities of the social and corporate structure of the society, but also constructs them in political and judicial institutions. In this respect it can be regarded as an estate-corporate state.

Mature states are the states of the industrial epoch. It is a result of modernization, development of capitalism and the industrial (as well as demographic) revolution; hence, it has a qualitatively different production basis and social structure. Thus, according to this point of view, in the Antiquity and Middle Ages there were no mature states, but only early and developed ones. Mature states politically organize societies, where estates have disappeared, the industrial classes (bourgeois and employees or the analogous groups of the socialist nomenklatura and employees) have formed, nations have developed and nation-state formed, and representative democracy or one-party state have proliferated.8 The mature state greatly differs from its precursors. Organizationally and legally, it significantly surpasses the developed state: it has qualitatively more developed and specialized institutions of management and an apparatus of suppression and control. The state apparatus and army become autonomous to a certain degree and play an increasingly clear role of an abstract mechanism of serving society. There are also a clear-cut mechanism and a written procedure for the legitimate transfer of power (absent in many developed states).9 As a rule, constitutions and systems of power division are created, and the role of law, especially civil law, increases. On the whole (except for some totalitarian and authoritarian states), the systems of law and legal proceedings reach quite a high level in mature states. The most important function of this type of state is ensuring not only social order but also the everyday legal order."

(http://www.sociostudies.org/books/files/macrohistory_and_globalization/083-135.pdf)

“ the state formation process proper is regarded as a constituent part of the general politogenetic process.”

Periodization

Leonid Grinin:

“Basing on the aforesaid we believe it makes sense to subdivide all the diversity of the medium complexity polities (in view of a special role played by chiefdoms in the political evolution) into two major types:

(1) chiefdoms/chiefdom-like polities and

(2) chiefdom analogues.

Chiefdom-like polities

“Chiefdom-like polities can be defined as hierarchically organized and relatively centralized medium complexity polities possessing the following characteristics:

a) population in the range of several hundred to several thousand;

b) political autonomy;

c) they are led by a recognized and stable chief/leader or group of leaders who wield power in the framework of certain traditions and procedures; who are able to exercise real control over certain important social relationships and resource flows; who have influential support groups organized around them.

Chiefdom analogues

Chiefdom analogues, that can be defined as polities or territorially organized corporations that have sizes and functions, which are similar to those of chiefdom-like polities, but that lack any of their other characteristics, such as high levels of hierarchy and centralization, presence of formal leader, organized system of resource control, political independence, and so on (for more detail see Grinin, Korotayev 2011).

Such a subdivision of mid-complexity polities into chiefdoms and their analogues

• emphasizes that chiefdoms are not the only type of mid-complexity polities (yet, in the meantime it indicates their special evolutionarily position);

• demonstrates the diversity of evolutionary alternatives to the chiefdoms;

• allows classification of mid-complexity polities that do not fit the chiefdom definition even if there are doubts regarding the exact type of polities to which they belong.

The formation of the first archaic states and their analogues

The formation of the first archaic states and their analogues (i.e. stateless polities comparable with archaic states – see below) became another extremely important shift.

So during the analyzed late archaic and early civilization periods two major shifts took place, i.e.:

a) the formation of more or less institutionalized political subsystem, starting from the complexity level of chiefdoms and their analogues;

b) the formation of archaic states and their analogues with further institutionalization of the political subsystem.

We have denoted this whole epoch as the epoch of the initial (or primary) politogenesis (Grinin 2009h; Grinin and Korotayev 2009c). We define it as ‘initial’ because the politogenesis had not stopped with the state formation, but continued further with the evolution from the early state to the developed one, and even from the developed state to the mature one (see Grinin 2008a, 2010a; Grinin and Korotayev 2006; 2009a: see ch. 5).

Respectively, the epoch of primary politogenesis may be subdivided into two epochs:

1) the one starting with the formation of chiefdoms and their analogues, which we denote as the period of middle-complex societies or the pre-state period (Grinin, Korotayev 2011);

2) the one covering the formation and development of the early states and their analogues, which we denote as the period of complex societies or early state period (Grinin 2011a).”

(http://www.sociostudies.org/books/files/macrohistory_and_globalization/083-135.pdf)