MODERN STATE, DEMOCRACY AND ORGANIZED VIOLENCE

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MODERN STATE, DEMOCRACY AND ORGANIZED VIOLENCE

• Complexities in their relations
• Prof. Gianfranco Poggi
• University of Trento, Italy

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Earliest phase of state development

• War major aspect of consolidation fewer and
  fewer power centers controlling larger and larger
  territories.
• However, pacification effects in internal affairs
  reduction in quantum of actual violence
  through increase in potential violence (Hobbes
  paradox).
• War perhaps less frequent, certainly more
  murderous given technological advances

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Later phases

• Rationalization of domestic organized violence
  through reliance on law and bureaucratization,
  professionalization of state agents. Effects
  emergence of civil society and marketization of
  economic processes. Durkheim / Foucault effects
  on punishment.
• Some rationalization effects also in external
  relations (Westphalia,Grotius)

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Democracy (1)

• Ambivalences in relationship with violence, war.
• See Tocqueville, both Démocratie (reluctance to
  go to war, great popular commitment when engaged
  career aspirations of officer class incline it
  to war) and Ancien Régime (paradoxical increase
  in intensity of wars with missionary intents as
  in revolutionary, Napoleonic wars but already in
  Islam)

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Democracy (2)

• Some aspects of democratic development (widening
  of suffrage, some welfare policies) are
  associated with military phenomena.
• Awkward association between entry of the masses
  into politics and nationalism.
• Countertendencies associated with cultural
  changes individualism materialism
  consumerism prevalence of economic concerns
  civilizing effects of the market.
• Growing aspirations to collective security.

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Impact of World War Two and prospects of nuclear
war.
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Contemporary democratization.

• Has complex bearing on phenomena affecting
  solidity, security of established states.
• Widespread notion that democracies do not make
  war on one another.
• Persistent nationalism obstacle to transnational
  developments and inspires secession movements.
• But major threats to continuity, security of
  states come from movements denying democracy as
  legitimacy formula.

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One major question for today

• Does increasing economic interdependence make
  states more or less secure?