Understanding the state in contemporary society

Understanding the state in contemporary society


Introduction

The aim of this blog is to look at the concept of the nation-state in contemporary society. Before doing so, I want to remind us of the definition of society that we have been using:

A social system made up of many smaller parts or institutions (including the family, the church, prisons, schools and social groups) living and working together in the pursuit of both self-interest and social harmony.

Society is made up of both its parts and the way that these parts are put together and organised. Therefore, it comprises of both organisations and social relations.

Probably one of the organisations in our modern lives is the ’state’: it is how we define ourselves; how we describe who we are (’I am an Australian’); we even claim our rights and the responsibilities we carry in terms of the state. It is linked with the quality of our lives (compare our lives to those people living in Zimbabwe), our identity and the daily interactions we have with both others and institutions (the laws of the land, bureaucracies and so on).

So, it is for this reason, the topic area of the state is one that crosses all academic fields and is an area that encroaches all dimensions of our lives: therefore, we cannot disconnect it from other aspects of our lives. This includes the fields of: politics (citizenship, immigration, law and order); economics; health and welfare; education; and as I mentioned above, identity.

Before proceeding, however, it is important to remember that ’states’ are not natural – they too are socially constructed. That is, the boundaries that define different states have been constructed over centuries of conflict, wars and negotiations. Political boundaries as we now them, have only come into existence over the last few hundred years – they are determined by humans and can and do change. East Timor, for example, went from being a Portuguese outpost, to a sovereign state, to being part of Indonesia to a sovereign state again: all in the space of a few decades.

Many academics have asserted that the international system of states, multinational corporations and organizations that exists today began in 1648 at the Peace of Westphalia – though many still dispute this.


Understanding the state

It is important to distinguish the nation and the state – but before doing so, I want to emphasise that, because of the above reason, we need to look at the state in a holistic manner considering the political institution, the nation and its society within a global manner.

Particularly in a time of globalisation, the state is not insulated from other parts of the world. The autonomy of the state is affected in many ways and by various global forces. While the state has borders, many global forces do not (for example environmental problems, terrorism and kinship networks)

Therefore, while Australia maybe an island geographically, it is not isolated from what is happening around the world. Even looking at today’s newspaper, you can see how international events are impacting on Australia: the global financial crisis, the swine flu pandemic the fact that Channel 10 may cancel the Simpsons because the producers are asking too much money!

There is an important distinction between the nation and the state that must be understood.

The state – like the term country – is a political institution that claims sovereignty over a given territory. Within this territory, the state has a monopoly over the use of force and attempts to control and define power. While defined by borders, the state’s territory can always be breached in both major ways (such as invasion) and minor ways (such as refugees arriving).

As a political institution it is ruled by bureaucracies and laws – which intertwine. Think of how passports are both bureaucratic and legal instruments: you need one to travel and to get pass border control. If you do not do this, you will be delayed. If you cross borders without one, then you will be arrested.

In contrast, the nation is culturally defined. It is a community of people who claim to have a common culture. Therefore, while the state is a political grouping, the nation is a cultural grouping. So we have Greece as a state – but the nation of Greeks can extend to many different parts of the globe. This is the same when we hear the term ’The nation of Islam’ – this is not a country but a cultural grouping.

Importantly, we need to also understand that this is not a homogenous grouping – there are a wide variety of different groups represented within the nation of Islam – so even the term ’nation’ can be seen as somewhat problematic.

People living in a state may share a common citizenship but have very little else in common: think about the many different ways that Australians would spend the Easter weekend: for some Easter is a religious festival, for others it is nothing more than an excuse to party hard. Even for those who see it as a religious festival, the type of ceremony followed, the language spoken and the way it was spent all vary considerably.

We must remember that no state is uni-cultural: even the most homogenous states such as Japan have diversity (including the very different culture from Okinawa). In this way, all states have multiple nations inside them. Therefore, we can think of multi-cultural as meaning one state containing many nations.

The political institution of the state comes into existence through a constitution. Interestingly, the Australian constitution does not recognise our rights as citizens but depends on the law courts and judgements. In contrast, states like the USA build their citizenship rights into the constitution


An imagined community


Despite not really having anything in common except a shared citizenry, we imagine that we are a ’national’ community and all have something in common. So we see Grant Hackett or Ricky Ponting on television and we feel an affinity towards him for no other reason than he is Australian.

This is a process that has seen the state described as an ’imagined community.’ This concept of imagined community is an important one and was originally discussed by Benedict Anderson (1991).

Benedict Anderson defined a state as "an imagined political community [that is] imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign". This imagined community should be seed as different from an actual community because it cannot be based on face-to-face interactions between its members. Rather, we imagine an affinity based around some shared values. Therefore, according to Anderson, a state:

…is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.

These communities are imagined as both limited and sovereign. That is, they are limited in that they are seen to have "…finite, if elastic boundaries, beyond which lie other nations." They are sovereign insofar as no monarchy can claim authority over them – an idea arising because of modernity:

...the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm. Coming to maturity at a stage of human history when even the most devout adherents of any universal religion were inescapably confronted with the living pluralism of such religions, and the [direct relationship] between each faith’s ontological claims and territorial stretch, nations dream of being free, and, if under God, directly so. The gage and emblem of this freedom is the sovereign state. (pp. 6-7)

Finally, a nation is an imagined community because "regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings."

According to Anderson, creation of imagined communities became possible because of ’print-capitalism’. That is, capitalist entrepreneurs printed their books and media in the ’national’ dialect rather than exclusive languages such as Latin in order to maximize circulation. As a result, readers speaking various local dialects became able to understand each other, and a common discourse emerged. Anderson argued that the first European nation-states were thus formed around their "national print-languages."


The state and government


There is a need to make a distinction between the state and government: governments come and go, but the political institution of the state remains. So when Kevin Rudd replaced John Howard as Prime Minister, but the political institution of the state remained the same.

The state exercises power through different organs including:
• Executive power (government, military, police, prisons and public bureaucracies)
• Legislative power (parliaments which pass laws) and
• Judicial power (courts which pass judgements and set precedents)

It is easy to see how the state through all these dimensions can regulate all aspects of our lives.


The state and power


Importantly, you also cannot disconnect the state from politics: because politics is all about relations of power. Here we must consider the nature of power and how it is distributed between a centralised institution called the state and the rest of us.

Consequently, citizens must always remain vigilant to ensure that their rights are not impinged upon: we must constantly consider whose interests are being represented. So when we see changes to laws, we must consider who do they benefit? Do they reinforce or challenge current power structures? What are the long-term consequences of these changes?

There are many critics that raise concerns about the ways states exercise power both within and outside their borders, while others believe that the state should have a greater role in our lives. Many see that the role of the state should be somewhere in the middle: involved in the public sphere but leaving the private sphere to individuals

Out of the major supporters and critics, three broad theories have emerged:
• Liberal: where the bed is neutral and works on consensus. The state is seen as being the only legitimate power and without it you have anarchy
• Pluralist: again the state is seen as neutral. The state is also independent and it mediates between different groups as a plurality of competing interests emerge
• Marxist: here the state is seen to exist only to protect the interests of capitalists and is in constant struggle between the capitalists and workers


Conclusion


The state is a key element of modernity: never before in history have sovereign lines described as border been such an important element of the global landscape. Today we see barbed wire between states and the rights of citizenship clearly protected.

However, we cannot think of the state as something separated from social, political and economic processes: all these influence the state dramatically. In this way, the power that the state distributes should not be seen as neutral but may be considered as cementing and promoting certain powerful interests. Consequently, we must remain vigilant and always be prepared to challenge its authority – ensuring it remains a servant of the people.

We will return to the issues of the state when we discuss globalisation: the question that many have asked is whether the processes of globalisation are eroding state sovereignty and what the implications are: does it benefit us or detract from the quality of our lives.


References
Anderson, B. (2006/1991) Imagined Communities, New, London, New York: Verso
Arvanitakis, J. (2009) Contemporary Society, OUP, Melbourne

Background: Social construction

Background: Social construction

A term that I often use in these blogs (and teaching more generally) is ‘social construction’.

When something is socially constructed, it is a phenomenon that is constructed by members of a particular culture or society. These constructions emerge and remain because people agree – either consciously or subconsciously – to follow certain conventions and to behave in certain ways. As I note in my book, one of the challenges in our investigation of contemporary society is to detect and unmask the social constructions that we, by our very actions, support.

Key to understanding social construction is the idea that members of a society which interact together form, over time, representations of what to expect from each other. That is, we establish expectations of how certain people behave: be it boys, girls, Greeks, Italians or Lebanese.

Eventually these become embedded in the behaviours we expect and are also reflected in the way institutions such as schools are organised. In the process, we see the construction shape what we consider to be ‘reality’.

The structure of society then revolves around this constructed reality (or realities) that we accept as being both natural and normal (or innate). One example of a social construct is gender roles: that males and females act different ways. Here the concept of masculinity is based around how ‘real men’ are expected to behave: play sports, be tough, and not be overly emotional. From when we are born, boys are dressed a more masculine blue compared to the pink we give to girls.

When I was growing up, I was repeatedly told that I should ‘act like a man’: something that I imagined was kind of like Arnie in the Terminator. Though these roles are slowly changing, we are still aware of the roles men are supposed to play by what is portrayed in the media, the sports boys play (more males play rugby than netball) and the insults dished out to those who do not meet these criteria (such as ‘you throw like a girl’ or ‘put a skirt on’).

The reality is, however, that these are constructions: there is no reason that boys should wear blue, and as a female friend said to me once, ‘If you are so tough, trying coping with the pain of giving birth’.

One article that a student sent me that explores these ideas is from Sesame Street. You can read it in at:

www.sesameworkshop.org


As always, feedback welcomed…

Cheers, james

Background: Race and ethnicity

Background: Race and ethnicity


Before getting into this blog, I want to remind you all of the concept of ‘social construction’: when discussing issues such as the social expectations around gender (what is expected of males and females), these expectations are socially constructed. In other words, they are not natural or innate. We are not discussing obvious physical differences (our bits so to speak), rather, we are looking at those things that are socially constructed.

In this blog, I want to discuss how similar issues emerge around ‘race’. What will we see, is that while we use the word ‘race’ in everyday language, it is a word that has an important and specific meaning that has to do with identifying the social as well as the biological traits that people display. This is the key theme of this blog, is that the word race is about looking at not simply biological traits, but the personality and social traits that has come to be associated with skin colour!

As we will see, this belief was driven and also drove scientific research that justified colonialism and slavery. As I discuss this, you will probably draw important parallels between historical attitudes to women and the attitudes we see towards different groups of people based on their skin, hair and eye colour.


What is race?


Theoretically, the concept of race is based on the idea that a specific population differs in the “frequency of one or more biological traits” (Blakey 1999: 1). In this way, races are usually characterised as having several distinguishing characteristics. Now, the way that we think of these characteristics in our contemporary society is usually biological: as I mentioned, skin colour, eye colour and shape, hair and other such features.

Importantly however, though race is a biological concept, it is also socially constructed (Blakey 1999: 1). Now there are two important dimensions to this.

The first is that biological traits are linked to social traits. That is, the colour of your skin and other such biological features also gives us insight into your personality and aspects of who you are. That is, by looking at the colour of your skin, I could automatically tell you the type of person that you. There are many examples of this that you may recognise include:

• That Asians are are good at maths;
• Middle Easterners do not respect women;
• Pacific Islanders and Africans are inherently lazy; and
• Jews are good with money.

Hopefully you can see that these generalisations are pretty silly: there is no reason that just because you come from somewhere in Asia (Vietnam, China, Thailand or the dozen or so other countries), you would be automatically good with maths. The point here is that we see social traits seen to extend biological features.

These are broad generalisations – and wrong ones at that – used to describe and define entire populations of people. All you need to do is think about the people that you know: how much are they represented by these descriptions?

Well, the obvious answer is that they are not: my friend Ella is Chinese: she is hopeless at maths. But according to the above descriptions, she should be: she should be genetically programmed to be good at maths. So we can immediately question these descriptions – for both their accuracy and why would they be used in the first place.

The second dimension aspect of race is that it is relational – much like gender. That is, I identify myself as advanced and civilised by comparing myself to you. So, for example, we know that we are more advanced by comparing ourselves to others.


What is racism?


So then, what is racism and why is it important to understand it in our contemporary society? Racism is a form of discrimination based on the belief of race: the belief that one race is superior to another. We can see racism expressed overtly: through explicit thoughts, feelings, or acts, or covertly (unconsciously) through institutions that promote inequality between races.

That is, racism is an inherent belief in the superiority of one population (or ‘race’) over all others and leads to a belief that one group of people have the right to dominance. In reverse, this also means that one ‘racial group’ is believed to be inferior to others. This gives the dominant group the right to control other groups. We see this as a combination of power, prejudice and discrimination.

We see racism expressed in different ways:

• Institutional racism: this can be seen as racial discrimination by governments, corporations, or other large organisations that is inherent in their structures and stops people from entering or progressing.

For example, in Australia we celebrate Easter and do not put exams on Easter weekends. As a lecturer I try and avoid exams and assignments anything due around Ede.

Historically, however, no universities recognise holidays other than traditional Christian ones – though this is changing. You could argue that the fact that we are blind to a religious celebration that represents a large proportion of our population is institutionalised racism.

• Environmental racism: is racial discrimination in environmental policy-making and the targeting of certain communities for toxic waste disposal and placement of polluting industries. For example, if you do a search in NSW of the location of highly polluting industries, you are likely to find a strong correlation between their location and the proximity of indigenous communities.


Origins of racism


It is important for us to understand where this came from and what the results are, for these also link to modernity and the way our societies function today.
The first phase of racism was based on simple observations: when the English for example, went to Africa for the first time they observed that the local population would sleep during the day. Now it was 40 degrees so it makes sense to me that you would work in the morning and the afternoon, while sleeping during the day. Based on simple observation, a number of simple correlations were drawn: blacks sleep during the day so all blacks are lazy.

This development expanded with increases in science and scientific processes: remember how observation was an important element of science and the rise of modernity. So in many ways, such racism is a direct result of modernity. So some people argue that racism, as we know it, emerged only in modern times.

Other ‘scientific’ measure also emerged that supported such observations especially around cranial measures (the thicker the skull the ‘dumber the person’). Importantly however, what you will find is that all these scientific tests merely reiterated the existing social order.

This also gave rise to the justification of colonialism and the slave trade. That is, how do you justify invading the nation and taking the land of another group of people? Well, you can justify it on the grounds of superiority and inferiority: that is, as the civilised and superior European, there was an inherent right to take lands and also civilise the ‘savages’.

While justified by science, it was couched in terms that it was a burden for the white man to have to carry: that is, it is the white man’s burden to bring civilisation to those less fortunate – in this case ‘black’ and coloured people.


Biological determinism

Now all this gave rise to the concept of ‘biological determinism’: that is, all human nature is inherited and all human attributes are fixed. Further, this human behaviour is based on the way that people look (absurd I know). The belief then, is that human behaviour is therefore innate and cannot be changed or altered. In this way, the concept of biological determinism disregards or denies the effects of environmental variables.

Such a viewpoint leads logically to the idea that criminals cannot be reformed – they are, in effect, ‘born that way’.

Biological determinism taken to its logical conclusion divorces human action from human responsibility. This then places the blame (or the credit) for actions (both failures and successes) simply on someone’s genetics. Indeed, in this form biological determinism dismisses the idea of free will entirely.

Between 1930-1980 such a concept was directly challenged, and we see the development of alternative theories of race that dismisses the concept of ‘innate superiority’ and the influence of biology on behaviour and social status.

During this period we see the civil rights movement really take hold as well as the emergence of anti-racist science. By 1950, the link between biology and social characteristics is broadly accepted as a social myth. This was confirmed beyond doubt, when in 1962 Frank Livingstone analysed blood group variations, and he found no evidence of differences of any genetic traits amongst different social groups such as Caucasian and “Negroid” (the official term for ‘black’ people then). In fact, he found that all biological traits were independent of one another. Livingstone also found that a great deal of genetic traits were based on the ecological conditions – as people biologically adapted to their environments.


Why is this important?

To understand the importance of the concept race, there is a need to understand both the political implications of biological categorisation as well as the scientific biases in this social construction. Blakey (1999: 1) argues that races are merely the “convenient way” of lumping and splitting human groups into different divisions based on the combination of several traits. But the reality of these categories is that their creation is by scientists rather than nature. Using ‘averages’ and generic categories, Blakey argues, we get statistical representations of group’s biological characteristics that in reality, represent no one. It is here that the social construction of race occurs.

Think about this class: imagine I was told to describe the average student in my class. Let’s say I did: but how representative is this average of any one of you. When I sat in the lecture today, I would say the ‘average’ student is: about 21, female, Caucasian with light hair. But who does this average really represent? The answer is very few people if anyone! And more than that, there is no way you can guess what that person is like by just looking at them.

Despite this, race remains a concept that is seen to be very real, natural and fixed. Politically, it can be used to define and marginalise people. Over the last few years, we have seen broad groups of people categorised together and described in certain ways: this does not need to be overt – it can be subtle and the results are devastating. Worst still, it follows a long tradition of giving social characteristics to biological traits.

What it also does do is that it establishes socially constructed hierarchies within our society that can be used for political purposes.


Conclusion

So where does all this take us? If we think about the last couple of weeks, we see a link between biology and social behaviour. This was a link that was justified by science and resulted in the justification of slavery and colonialism.

That link has been proven to be false – a myth – but it persists in more subtle ways today. In many ways, it is harder to identify because it is subtle: rather than overt it is covert. It is hidden in language and as I mentioned a few weeks ago, in the images we see on television.

I once heard a US General in Iraq state that they only keep body counts of Coalition servicemen and women – not that of Iraqi civilians. In his language, it sounded like that the dead from the other side did not matter as much. I struggle to understand how the suffering of one group of people can be calculated to be below that of our own: the death of a 12 year old in an explosion – be it a war zone or not – must be unbearable for any family no matter the colour of their skin or religion they follow. To suggest other wise buys into centuries and myths and falsehoods that has got us into the mess we are currently in.


References:
Arvanitakis, J. (2009) Contemporary Society, OUP, Melbourne
Blakey ML (1999), ‘Scientific racism and the biological concept of race’, Literature and
Psychology, vol. 45, pp. 29–43.