The Theory of Structuration & the Politics of the Third Way
For Giddens, the state and violence are intimately connected. In classical sociology, the problem of violence is isolated as an internal social problem, with violence linked to the maintenance of internal social order. The fact that violence and the means of violence are rarely related to the problems of warfare and inter-state relations must been seen in relation to the predominant conception of society, namely, as an isolated unit. The conceptualisation of the state and society as closed entities has further consequences for the analysis of social change. Such an analysis often takes its point of departure in endogenous transformations delimited by the boundaries of the national territory. For Giddens, class struggle and the development of the productive forces, the division of labour, population density and religion are conceptualised by classical social theory as motors of transformation internal to the society. The importance of war and relations between states is frequently neglected, as is the development of the military in the processes of modernity.
The result of the theory of structuration is that society is no longer conceptualised as a closed entity. This entails a new concept of the state, which includes the means of violence. Marxism is the impetus behind Giddens’ alternative concept of the state, for Giddens believes that Marxism suffers from an inadequate concept of power. From this perspective, the proposition that power flows from the balance of class forces is effectively an economic reductionist position. Therefore Marxism’s treatment of the state and violence is inadequate.
For Giddens, power originates everywhere and is permanent, being linked to the concept of agency. Power is capacity - fundamentally, power is the capacity to achieve outcomes. Power is expressed and exercised through resources, where resources are the medium for the actions of the agent. Giddens theorises two sorts of resource: allocative and authoritative. Allocative resources refer to the dominion of human beings over the natural world; authoritative resources are the possibility of dominion over the social world through the exercise of power over others.
This means that for Giddens, Marxism unduly concentrates on the productive forces (allocative resources) at the expense of any independent systematic treatment of authoritative resources. Therefore historical materialism is inherently reductive and evolutionary: the development of the forces of production necessarily implies the development of certain state forms and forces social formations into certain trajectories of development. Fundamentally, Giddens opposes any theory of a single prime mover in history or society. He is antagonistic to all monocausal theories. The theory of structuration depends on two sorts of resources and the actual composition of these forces historically.
Giddens’ concept of the state is strongly influenced by a synthesis of Hegel (The Nation State and Violence pp17-22) with Weber. The Weberian state contains three components: administrative apparatus; monopoly of the means of violence; the ability to uphold that monopoly across a territory. Giddens notes that Weber’s concept is anachronistic in relation to pre-capitalist states, since the monopoly of the means of violence is the characteristic feature of the modern nation state alone. Giddens therefore defines the modern state as a political organisation whose rule is territorially ordered and which is able to monopolise the means of violence to sustain its rule. Only in modernity does the nation state legitimise its exclusive possession of the means of violence through normative claims and legislative controls.
What interests Giddens is the emergence of the modern nation state. He is therefore focused on a differential typology that will highlight the distinctive features of the state form in modernity, rather than a historically differentiated concept of the state that might form the foundation for a new theory of history. For Giddens, states do not undergo an evolutionary development, but instead, there exists a radical break between the modern nation state and the state forms prior to modernity.
Giddens develops an extremely abstract discussion of the state form in terms of the combination of allocative and authoritative resources concentrated in a “power container”. The various state forms are dominated by their specific locale (national territory, city-state, metropolitan centre of agrarian empire) and power container (city, castle, dispersed nation state). The modern nation state is effectively the absolute power container in modernity, and only in modernity is the territory of the state fixed by borders rather than delimited by a shifting frontier. (Giddens’ discussion of the state form is like playing the computer game Civilisation II: you've got to get your castle near the right natural and trade resources, then effectively distribute military and administrative resources for population control, while pursuing a combination of successful wars and expansionary economic policies. It is, in short, unilluminating, superficial and impressionistic. As an “alternative” to Marxian historical theory it is simply embarrassing. I therefore omit any extended discussion of pre-capitalist state forms and concentrate on the modern nation state. The only substantive claims made that differ from a pluralist recapitulation of Marxian historiography is that class struggle is not a decisive force for social change before capitalism (since the struggles between unfree labour and the ruling class(es) are sporadic and do not issue in a reconstruction of the economy) and that European warfare in the epoch of the Absolute state is crucial to the formation of the modern national state.)
The emergence of the modern nation state is fundamentally conditioned by warfare. There is a close connection between capitalism, industrialisation and military developments, particularly in the phase of the consolidation of the emergent modern states from 1800 onwards. For instance, developments in communications as well as the more general industrialisation of the military were a driving force for capitalist development. At the same time, the rights and responsibilities of liberal democratic citizenship have to be seen from the perspective of the role of war in the development of states. General conscription is inseparable from liberal democratic rights and the existence of a national territory controlled by the state that is expected to protect and empower its constituents. “if the sovereign state is inherently a polyarchic order, in which citizenship rights are the ‘price paid’ by the dominant class for the means of exercising its power, citizenship in turn implies the acceptance of the obligations of military service” (Nation State and Violence, 233). The emergence of liberty, equality and fraternity is coextensive with the development of nationalism, conscription and constraints on political action.
The First and Second World wars were instrumental to the industrialisation of production and the growth of military technology, as well as the disciplining of the labour force and its acceptance of Taylorism and then consumerism (that is, the Fordist paradigm). Following the Second World War, the welfare state extended the framework of rights and responsibilities with its “institutionalisation of class conflict” through welfare reforms and corporatist style cooptation of the labour movement (NSV, 236-237). Moreover, according to Giddens, the appearance of liberal democratic states in Germany and Japan was a result of war and not an internal product. [The Allies and the Entente as democratic forces in the twentieth century ... what garbage.]
The modern nation state can now be characterised: fixed borders, extended administrative control of the population and the permanent existence of class conflict as a result of the relation between capital and wage-labour. Relative to pre-modern states, the state form in modernity displays a massive concentration of power: increased surveillance, control by the state power, monopoly of the means of violence via control of the army and police, intensified industrialisation often subsidised by the state and the expansion of capitalism. For Giddens - and this is the crux of the differences with Marxism - there are four dimensions to the national state:
a strong development of surveillance potential by the state. The entire population is controlled by the state apparatus and the authority of the state extends throughout everyday life.
Expansion of military power and monopoly of the means of violence. This concerns internal affairs (the police) and international relations (the army).
Capitalism and the development of class society and class conflict becomes a dynamic force for social change, but capital accumulation and class conflicts are separated from political institutions. The rights of private property lead to the capitalisation of all resources while the workplace becomes a focus for power struggles.
Industrialism exists as an independent dynamic force, leading to a radical transformation of nature. According to Giddens, industrialism and not capitalism enables the centralisation of labour processes in one location (the factory system).
Giddens maintains that the modern nation state is created and developed in a structuration process, that involves the external and internal relations of the society. The nation state is a state form “which exists within a complex of other nation states, is a set of institutional forms of governance maintaining an administrative monopoly over a territory with demarcated boundaries (borders), its rule being sanctioned by law and direct control over the means of internal and external violence” (NSV, 121). Only in Europe do surveillance potential, military power, capitalism and industrialisation combine in a unique configuration. During the second half of the twentieth century, the specifically unique European state form has been globalised, and it is therefore only with the nation state that we obtain an international system of states. Globalisation of the nation state is one of the dimensions constitutive of modernity. Giddens analysis centres on the political dimensions of the state including international relations and warfare. This aims to break with classical social theory’s concentration on internal dynamics of social transformation to the exclusion of external relations.