Note
A masterful portrait of the main features of the modern State and a premonition of the future risks (totalitarianism at home and imperialism abroad) that this political form of organization might reserve for all of us.
Today, all the old political, religious, family and geographical units in which humans used to group themselves - tribes, cities, provinces, churches - have merged into States, even if they sometimes straddle their borders or challenge their authority. The State, for its part, tends to suppress diversity within the territory it controls, where it sees only a mosaic of particularisms that rebel against its unifying authority and run counter to “national cohesion.” Outwardly, it tends to oppose other States, even when it is temporarily their ally, and to think of the world in terms of rivalries, since it is a tool created for rivalry. Its law and weight exacerbate what we might call border consciousness. At the same time, it makes the society within the borders increasingly homogeneous, and the separation between this society and the outside world, between “us” and “them,” increasingly marked.
This is why so many governments strive to isolate their populations from the rest of humanity, by prohibiting or carefully dosing their contacts with foreigners, the ingress and egress of people, and above all of ideas. (In this area, after a while, there's not much left to get out.) They prevent the free flow of information, concerning both the country itself and other countries and world affairs. Day after day, censorship and propaganda reconstruct a national and international paranoia, so that nothing, or almost nothing, penetrates that is not favourable to the government and does not appear to demonstrate the soundness of its views and the fruitfulness of its actions.
The dream of every State - that no one, at least among those subject to its authority, should be able to verify its claims and judge its works - has become a reality on almost the entire surface of the planet. The flood and speed of information that media theorists have been talking about since 1960 only affect only thirty or so nations among the world’s one hundred and forty States. Everywhere else, there is undoubtedly a surge and speed, but of something quite different from information. Rather, the media are extensions of political power, cages where the mind is domesticated.
This isolation of human groups from one another is facilitated by a parallel operation, namely the encouragement of popular nationalism, chauvinistic vanity, xenophobia and susceptibility. The unfathomable under-information of the people, due to the almost universal preponderance of State propaganda, both triggers and justifies a collective megalomania that is all the easier to cultivate as it removes any possible point of comparison with foreign countries - and all the more useful to social tranquillity as it relieves the boredom of populations for whom the parading of the grandeur of the State is generally the only show in town.
Nationalism is exploited by rulers to distract minds from criticism, to divert them from the domestic situation and to fascinate them with ambitious foreign policy objectives, which serve as a new pretext to legitimise the omnipotence of the executive powers. We know that the main concern of contemporary governments is to procure weapons. Every year, global military spending, including that in the poorest countries, is equivalent to twice the amount spent on education, three times the amount spent on health and twenty times the amount spent by rich countries on aid to the Third World.
The normal relationship between Nations and States, whereby the latter would be instruments at the service of the former, and the men who inhabit them, has been completely reversed. In almost all cases, it is nations and people who have been forcibly placed at the service of the States, which have become autonomous bodies or apparatuses, pursuing nothing other than the contemplation of their own functioning and the growth of their own power.
States generally see this search for power only in others. Coming from themselves, they experience it as a natural desire for independence, a simple resistance to the imperialist encroachments of others.
But there is only a difference in degree between “power” and “independence.” A “power” or “superpower” is a State that has the means for global diplomacy. An “independent” State is one that only has the means to counteract, in a perceptible - often purely symbolic, but psychologically effective - way, the planetary policy of the super-powers. “Independence” is the super grandeur of the weak. In principle, it is no different from the super-power's policy of hegemony, and is driven by the same motives and the same statist-nationalist culture.
It consists in practicing what is known in soccer as anti-gambling, i.e. taking the ball out of play as often as possible and multiplying useless passes between players. The team that plays anti-game limits its ambition to preventing the game from progressing normally, as it is unable to score goals of its own. But if they were strong enough, they would go over to the offensive and try, like everyone else, to win the championship or the cup.
Since the diplomacy of national States is itself a competitive sport, the policy of “independence” on the part of average or weak States does not represent progress in civilization, or the beginnings of a change of system, which would lead to a more synoptic and universalist vision of the interests of the human race, but a position of retreat, a substitute for a hegemony beyond their reach, which they condemn not in principle, but because it belongs to others.
[...]
Since 1945, at the same time as the rhetoric of international cooperation was developing, and organizations were flourishing that were supposed to deal with major issues in the interests of all mankind, we have witnessed the increasing fragmentation of the world into ever harder, ever more hermetically sealed nuclei. And, at the same time as an ideology and a parody of democratic power, supposedly rooted in the people and serving the masses, were spreading, we saw, in reality, the finest horde that history has ever known of powers who are freebooters in their origins and authoritarian in their exercise.
The stronger the Nation-State has grown, asserting itself in the international context as a sacred authority, accountable to no one for the way it treats that portion of humanity that happens to be under its control, the less the masters of these Nation-States were truly chosen and controlled by the peoples in whose name they speak.
This indictment of the State can be summed up in a few propositions.
By provoking and nurturing nationalist sentiment, the State substitutes, to varying degrees, false problems for real ones.
The boundaries of the State almost never corresponds to the real cultural and economic divisions of human societies.
The State stimulates what is least critical and most pathological in the human being, in the service of pseudo-national interests, which are not always so.
It diverts the bulk of wealth into armaments.
It provides an ideological and passionate basis for despotism, as well as a stage for the political stardom of demagogues. (The conditions under which State power is acquired and maintained in most countries do not offer a sufficient guarantee of the intellectual competence and sense of responsibility of its leaders).
It is an incentive to corruption, because it pushes those who occupy it (in most cases it is indeed an occupation of the State, in the sense of the occupation of a conquered country) as much into venality and profiteering as into the abuse of political power. This can be seen in both developed and underdeveloped countries, whether capitalist or socialist.
The State can only achieve its full potential at the cost of either total censorship or massive information amputation, making human groups increasingly opaque to each other and to themselves.
The increasingly egocentric national State is therefore incompatible with modes of action adapted to the global nature of the most important problems facing humanity today.
Being, by vocation, increasingly centralizing, the State leaves minorities who feel, rightly or wrongly, oppressed, with little other option than to revolt and found new national States, thus accelerating the fragmentation of the world day by day, with the risk of prolonging this fragmentation ad infinitum.
Theoretically a simple tool of the collective will, the State has gone from being a means to an end, increasingly taking itself for an end, and, in the pursuit of its own interest. By doing so it tends inexorably towards a limit constituted by totalitarianism at home and imperialism abroad.