Why have some states struggled to fashion state-society relations, neutralise opposition, gain predominance, and achieve social control, whereas others have been strong in this regard? This book presents a model for understanding state capabilities in the Third World based on state-society relations. Its central premises are that: i) the nature of the state cannot be separated from the nature of societies; and ii) the emergence of a strong, capable state can occur only with a tremendous concentration of social control (to the state).
The state’s struggle for social control is characterised by conflict between state leaders, who seek to mobilise people and resources and impose a single set of rules, and other social organisations applying different rules in parts of the society. The distribution of social control in society that emerges as a result of this conflict (between societies and states) is the main determinant of whether states become strong or weak.
- Probably the most important factor in the state’s ability to survive is its ability to mobilise society. Governments acquire the tools of political influence through the mobilisation of human and material resources for state action. States in Europe aquired a triad of ‘essential tentacles’ for this purpose: a standing army, a vastly improved tax-collecting mechanism, and an expanded set of judicial courts.
- The state’s capacity to mobilise society rests on social control, defined as the ability to make the operative rules of the game for people in society. The major struggles in many societies are over who has the right and ability to make the rules that guide people’s social behaviour (the state or other organisations).
- Social control requires the state to become a real and symbolic aspect of people’s daily survival strategies. Informal and formal organisations all have a variety of sanctions and rewards (systems of rules) – both material and symbolic. Strategies for social control need to include both material incentives and coercion, and the manipulation of symbols of how social life should be ordered.
- Lack of state social control means understanding resistance to social control. Societies are often characterised by conflict among organisations offering different rules. Strong societies can be either highly centralised (in state power) or fragmented (across several social organisations). Such conditions can enfeeble the state.
- Where societies have been web-like and where social control has been fragmented among numerous organisations, states have faced formidable barriers in seeing their policies through.
Levels of (state) social control are reflected in three indicators: compliance, participation and legitimation. These are used by state and non-state organisations alike to seek social control.
- Strong states emerged only in the wake of severe social disruption. Social control cannot occur without exogenous factors first creating catastrophic conditions that rapidly and deeply undermine existing strategies of survival; the bases of social control. The two key exogenous factors are 1) spread of the world economy and 2) colonial rule. War and revolution, closely related to mass migration, are 20th century examples of dislocations that have weakened old forms of social control and allowed new ones to emerge.
- The need to achieve social mobilisation and at the same time a strong central state constitutes ‘the rulers’ dilemma’: State leaders can only achieve political mobilisation when they have proffered viable strategies of survival to the populace. This requires an elaborate set of institutions, but creating strong state agencies risks creating powerful sub-organisations which within the state itself can become an oligopoly of mobilisational capacity. State leaders therefore risk creating potential power centres they cannot control.
- Fragmented social control, the rulers’ dilemma, and the difficulties of political mobilisation have led to a pathological style at the apex of the state – the ‘politics of survival’: State leaders have been concerned with preventing leading officials in important agencies from using their own mobilisational capacities against the central state leadership, which has pulverised the very arms of the state that could achieve their goal of mobilisation.
- In situations of fragmented social control, the state has become an arena of accommodations: The local social control of strongmen has led to a ‘triangle of accommodation’ between implementors, politicians and strongmen.
- The legacy of fragmented social control continues to constrain states, and the prospects for the consolidation of the state in parts of society which are fragmented is slim. The politics of survival at the top and the triangle of accommodation at the bottom reinforce social fragmentation.
