In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter 1 Sovereignty Out of Joint ARJUN CHOWDHURY Consensus indicates that we are seeing a crisis of authority as we have understood it in the modern era. The modern territorial nation-state’s writ is challenged by global integration on the one hand and subnational fragmentation on the other. To situate these concerns within a broader historical trajectory, I ask two questions: what is driving the challenging of nation-state sovereignty today, and what is the response to the crisis of authority? I argue that the crisis of authority is neither new nor anomalous, but is structural to the development of the international system. We can begin by examining two competing understandings of the contemporary crisis— both of which are articulated by contributors to this volume—that identify a perceived decline of the nation-state’s ability to control its territory and provide public goods, most spectacularly in the occasional instances of “state failure.” Underpinning both understandings is a sense that there is a mismatch between the demand for order and its supply because the state, long the supplier of order, is now incapable of fulfilling that function. Yet we might dispute this picture. Fundamentally, it assumes that order has historically been the outcome of a system of “strong” sovereign states. Now that those units are in decline or overtaken by processes of globalization , the prospects for order diminish. While seemingly self-evident, these understandings are flawed. Instead, I pose two arguments. First, the modern state has always been riven by crises: the demand for order and the supply of order have always been mismatched. Second, the process of state formation that has long been the response to crisis has always thrown the system, first the imperial and then the interstate system, into further disorder. 16 War, Sovereignty, and Plural Citizenships That is, the response to the mismatch of demand and supply of order perpetuates that very mismatch. If the relationship between the state and the system of which it is part has been a mutually destabilizing one, why do extant accounts suggest that the crisis of the state is “new’? The reason is what we might call the “post festum problem.” Marx suggested that much social analysis “begins post festum, with the results of the process of development ready to hand before” the analyst. Consequently, the objects of inquiry “have already acquired the stability of natural self-understood forms of social life,” and the analyst is likely to ignore the process through which the object developed. In the case of the modern state, that process is one of war and almost incessant crisis. But because the ideal-typical European state has successfully emerged, the crises through which it emerged are often forgotten. Yet, these crises, as I will discuss at length below, were not periodic misalignments in the balance of power, but were understood and experienced as threats to an entire way of life. However, dire as the crisis seemed, observers stressed that there were potential solutions or ways out. For example, Edmund Husserl suggested that the “crisis of European civilization” after World War I had two “escapes”: “the downfall of Europe in its estrangement from its own rational sense of life, its fall into hostility towards the spirit and into barbarity; or the rebirth of Europe from the spirit of philosophy through a heroism of reason that overcomes naturalism once and for all.” These threats of “downfall” and “barbarity” were not hyperbole: as Charles Tilly has pointed out, even in Europe, most states did not emerge; they failed. At the same time, stringent efforts were made to avoid such outcomes. The idea that the state is currently in crisis is a symptom of “the post festum problem” that, as I see it, creates two analytical problems. First, analysts become likely to overpredict the stability and likelihood of success of a process because they begin with those states that have actually emerged out of a process of war making, like Britain, and ignore those that disappeared through this process, like the German states or Italian city-states before the Risorgimento. That is to say, if we look at the process as it unfolds, we see a greater level of uncertainty and higher probability of failure than if we began with already constituted states as objects of analysis and sought to explain their emergence. Second, looking at the process as it unfolds provides a view into how crises are negotiated and whether they are negotiated successfully . I will focus on...

Share