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Dimensions of statehood

Our research programme is based on a conceptualization of statehood that connects statehood to an existing historical constellation (in order to avoid too high a degree of abstraction); splits the highly complex notion of statehood into different dimensions that can be separately analyzed (in order to avoid too high a degree of aggregation); and attempts to systematically identify processes of change in statehood in all their complexity (to avoid false dichotomies).

The Democratic Constitutional and Interventionist State (DCIS) characteristic of the OECD world of the 1960s and 1970s, which we use as an ideal-typical blueprint, was probably considered by so many to be particularly successful because it contributed to the realization of four basic central norms, or normative goods, in modern society: security, legal equality and legally guaranteed freedom,political self-determination and social welfare. Today, governments essentially aim at realizing these four goods, which correspond to the following individual rights and freedoms:

1. Internal and external peace and the containment of collective risks; that is, the right to personal security.
2. The implementation and institutional safe-guarding of the rule of law and legal equality; that is, the right to personal freedom.
3. The guaranteeing of political decision-making processes that allow for the participation of all people affected by political decisions; that is, the right to democratic self-determination.
4. The combination of economic efficiency and distributional fairness; that is, economic freedom and social rights.

These four aims of government are "normative goods", since most people in the Western world consider them important and desirable. They are also "functional goods", since a lasting inability to achieve of one or more of them signals a political crisis. These normative goods exist independently of the form in which they are institutionalized.
The DCIS of the 1960s and 1970s is today, in retrospect, considered a "golden age" because it developed, consecutively, four institutional components or dimensions (Rokkan 1975) through which these four basic rights could be secured. To the extent to which these institutional components of the DCIS are subject to change, the state's ability to guarantee peace, the rule of law, democracy and social welfare also comes under pressure. Because the four aims of government developed consecutively, the following discussion of the four dimensions of statehood will follows a historical logic. At core, however, our argument is systematic in nature and thus applies to each dimension regardless of the historical timeframe.

Resource dimension and modern territorial state
Statehood presupposes the territorially bound control of basic material resources, which find their modern expression in the means of force and the means of money. Modern statehood developed through the monopolization of the means of force and the taxation of the people. The monopolization of the means of force developed, historically, through conflicts between various territorial rulers. This process began in France and England, but by the 18th century, all of Western Europe was dominated by territorially centralized monopolists of force. The process culminated in the 19th century in Central Europe, and Germany in particular (Nolte 1990; Demel 1993). The new structure that developed superseded the medieval order, in which different territorial rulers could use force and collect taxes on one and the same territory (Weber 1972; Mann 1993; Ullmann 1986; Brown 1998; Reinhard 2002a). The monopolization of the means of force was connected to the monopolization of the right to collect taxes. The financial resources the state gained through taxation helped it to strengthen and stabilize its control over the means of force, both internally and externally vis-à-vis potential competitors (Elias 1969; Tilly 1985; Giddens 1985; Ertmann 1997). Control over these resources - which later, in the newly developed territorial states, formed an essential basis for the development of individual freedom, the rule of law and the welfare state - was initially a crude monopoly of force and taxes. At first, it was not normatively bound per se: even in Nazi-Germany the monopoly of force and taxes existed without being tied to the rule of law (Stolleis 1999: 380ff.).

The process whereby the means of force and the power to tax were monopolized did not evolve in the same way everywhere. Especially the later institutionalisation of the crude monopoly of force and taxation differed in form and pace. Thus one can, in today's OECD world, discern enormous differences in the resource dimension of statehood, and the once close relationship between the means of force and finance has loosened somewhat. One obvious ideal-typical differentiation in the resource dimension is that between centralized and federal states. While in central states the means of force and taxation are monopolized by the center, in federal states both the federal and the state levels exert certain powers over these.

Legal dimension and sovereign constitutional state
In the 17^th Century, once the state in Western Europe had for the most part monopolized the means of force and taxation on its territory, a development began which in effect internally and externally restricted the powers of rulers through legal means. As a result, the crude monopoly of force that had developed with the centralization of the means of force was transformed into a monopoly of the legitimate use of force (Tilly 1998).

To the outside ... the rule of the state was legalized by international law through the mutual recognition by states of their sovereign status. External sovereignty thus means the right of a state - accepted by other states - to the exclusive power to rule on its territory, to legitimately exclude other states from rule its territory, and, finally, to international recognition as a governing organisation with rights equal to those of other states (Morgenthau 1967: 305; Krasner 1999a). This form of external sovereignty started to develop into a legally based institution as a result of the religious wars. The Augsburger Religionsfrieden of 1555 signalled the start of this development, which was to some extent formalized as a basic legal norm for regulating sovereign power relations between states in the Westphalian Peace Treaty of 1648, and became a central principle of international law over the course of the next few centuries. With this international law, the rulers of territorial states not only excluded Emperor and Pope from the effective execution of powers in their territories, but also marginalized competitors like the city states of Northern Italy and city leagues like the Hanse (Spruyt 1994; Keohane 1995).

Internally ... state rule became increasingly legalized. Step by step, absolutist state power was replaced by the rule of law. The territorial states developed a separation of power; that is, the separation of lawmaking, the application of law and the judicial enforcement of the law (Montesquieu 1784). This strengthened the "new" rule of law, since the state was increasingly bound by its own law and constitution - or their functional equivalents. The state differentiated into several functional elements and was able - on the basis of its monopoly of force - to acquire the exclusive right to make laws and to guarantee the effective application and judicial enforcement of these laws. This, in turn, positively affected the economy (North 1990, 1988; Spruyt 1994). The state's increasingly legalized monopoly of rule on a given territory guaranteed a degree of legal certainty previously unknown in the 14th and 15th centuries. On the basis of this legalization, it was eventually possible to secure the legal equality of all citizens. The internal and external components of the rule of law are joined when there exists a generally accepted nationally defined judicial institution that is able to resolve legal disputes between state institutions, or conflicts between national and international law (see Mayer 2000). In this sense, national constitutional courts and their parliamentary equivalents can be considered symbols of the rule of law.

In the dimension of the rule of law - like in the territorial dimension - different forms developed within the OECD world. Although sovereignty is typically treated as a dichotomous variable - one either has it or one doesn't - there is some variation in the empirical picture. There have been and still are "states" with deficits in the external acceptance of their sovereignty; for example, the German Democratic Republic or Taiwan. Furthermore, Austria and the Federal Republic of Germany are examples of states which, following the Second World War, found broad worldwide acceptance, but which, because of the war, had only limited rights. Thus, even among the fully developed DCIS there can be considerable variation in the sovereignty dimension.

There are also considerable differences between states with respect to their internal legal structures. The best known distinction is that between states like Germany or France, with their tradition of the droit civil, and states like Great Britain or the United States that follow the common law tradition. In the droit civil tradition, the judiciary is restricted to the application of the law, and is expected to implement the will of the lawmaker with utmost accuracy. In the common law tradition, by contrast, the judiciary itself has a law-making function. In states within the continental European tradition, the state plays a relatively large role in regulating societal relations; in the Anglo Saxon world, societal self-regulation is more dominant.

Legitimation dimension and democratic nation-state
During the 19^th and 20^th centuries, an additional dimension of statehood developed: the democratic nation-state. Common institutions are legitimate in the empirical sense of being socially accepted if the governed demonstrate a certain degree of internalized compliance with collectively binding rules. With the development of the DCIS, the democratic constitutionalization of statehood has become the most important (but not sole) source of this kind of political legitimacy. In the normative sense, democratic legitimacy is based on the democratic constitutionalization of the form of government. It exists when the empowerment to make laws is based on due process and is constitutionally limited, and when those affected by these laws have participated in a meaningful way in generating them.

A precondition for the development of a legitimate government is the existence of a political community formed by citizens who are loyal to the state and its laws. Thus, the development of national communities constituted an important element in state legitimacy. In encouraging such political communities, the state was often able to build on extant proto-national communities. Especially in the 19th century, the state encouraged the development of national communities through the introduction of compulsory school attendance and military service (Hobsbawm 1990). The spread of mass media also promoted the development of "imagined" national communities that overshadowed local communities and distinguished themselves from other "imagined" communities (Anderson 1991). The nations that developed through the politicization of these communities transformed existing states into nation states (Deutsch 1972). All nations without their "own" states demanded that they be allowed to found their "own" nation states. The borders of nations and nation states became increasingly congruent in Western and Central Europe during the 19th and 20th centuries (Gellner 1991). This strengthened the territorial character of the political order and of government (Maier 2000).

At first, nationalism was an institutional principle that went more or less hand in hand with the demand for greater democratization. Both were based on the normative principle of self-determination. While nationalism contained the postulate that a national community should not be determined by foreign forces, legitimacy, understood as internalized compliance, rested on society's acceptance of the state's monopoly of force and on the application of this monopoly by society. The idea that the state belongs to society and that acceptance of the monopoly of force depends on the democratic constitutionalization of common institutions was developed through the American and then the French Revolutions.
This development was made possible by the rise of the bourgeoisie, who increasingly made their support for the aristocracy and clergy dependent on their participation in government (Weber 1972: 815; Elias 1969, Vol. 2; Spruyt 1994). Especially during the second half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries, this process led to a general democratization of the nation states of Western Europe and North America, which guaranteed society an institutionally protected participation in government (Poggi 1990).

All states in today's OECD world have experienced this kind of democratization based on a national society. However, important differences can be identified in the corridor of the democratic nation state. There are important differences regarding the basis of membership within the political community (on Germany, see Gosewinkel 2001). A well-known if disputed differentiation is that between national communities with an ethnic and those with a civic basis. Communities with ethnically defined identities are argued to have developed mainly from pre-existing homogenous communities that did not dispose over their own territory. National communities with a civic basis are argued to have developed mainly out of situations in which several different communities migrated to a clearly circumscribed territory (Lepsius 1990a, b; Rokkan 2000).

Differences in the organisational arrangements of political democracy in the OECD world
There are important differences not only in the structures of political community, but also in the organisational arrangements of political democracy in the OECD world (for an overview, see Schmidt 2000). Thus, one can distinguish between parliamentary democracies and presidential systems (Lijphart 1992; Hartmann 2000), centralized and federal democracies (Wachendorfer-Schmidt 2000; Braun 2000), and systems based on representation versus more direct democratic ones (Luthardt 1994; Wagschal/Obinger 2000). Furthermore, one can distinguish between majoritarian democracies, in which political decisions are made in parliaments based on majority rule, and consociational democracies, in which decisions are settled by what Gerhard Lehmbruch calls "amicable agreement" (Czada 2000; Lijphart 1984, 1999; Lehmbruch 1968, 2000). Closely tied to this is the distinction between corporatist and pluralist relations between the state and interest groups (Lehmbruch 1984; Lijphart/Crepaz 1991; Kenworthy 2000; Schmitter/Lehmbruch 1979; Siaroff 1999).

Welfare dimension and interventionist state
Especially since the late 19^th century, the modern state has been expected to take over the various tasks of an interventionist state rather than limiting itself to the tasks of a "laissez-faire" state (Grimm 1994; Kaufmann 1994). The state was able to prevail over city leagues and city states only because it was better able to fulfil certain tasks, and thus to contribute decisively to the prosperity of society (North 1981: 24; Spruyt 1994). The absolutist or "early modern" (Maier 1976) state began to increase welfare and laid the foundations for a national market economy by removing market barriers, standardizing weights and measures, among other things, and investing in infrastructure and education. In order to be able to defend themselves militarily against other states, it was imperative that absolutist states build a national economy that allowed for efficient production and trade. Hence, the state took over regulative tasks like the supervision of industry, land use planning, and control over industrial safety measures. In the late 19th century, states were also expected to fairly and equitably (re-)distribute wealth within society. The primary distribution of income through the market was to be corrected by a state sponsored secondary redistribution. This kind of modern welfare policy was implemented largely because the working classes, whose numbers increased rapidly during industrialisation, were no longer willing to accept the glaringly unequal distribution of wealth within industrial society. In the fully developed interventionist state, society takes over the responsibility for each and every one of its citizens (Marshall 1975: 15, 1992b-d; Kaufmann 1997: 21; Lampert 1999, 2001; Rieger/Leibfried 2001; Ritter 1991). Often even the primary distribution of wealth in society is guided by state regulations (for example, through systems of collective wage bargaining). This is easily overlooked, and it grounds the welfare state in its social environment. Especially after 1945, the idea of the Keynesian welfare state gave the state the additional responsibility of ensuring continuous economic growth, including economic stability and full employment (Barr 1998; BMA & Bundesarchiv 2001ff.; Lutz 1984; Flora 1981ff.; Flora/Alber 1981; Flora/Heidenheimer 1981a, b; Ritter 1991, 1989).

The interventionist state is characterized by three types of political interventions (Cerny 1995b; Streeck 1998b; for an appraisal, Leibfried/Pierson 1995: 454ff.). The state regulates market and production processes (market-making). It supplies (market-braking) human resources, infrastructural preconditions and certain basic services (traditionally known as économie public). It corrects market results through the secondary redistribution of income (welfare state), macro-economic policies and various other micro-economic forms of risk absorption (market-correcting).

The interventionist state of the OECD world did not develop uniformly, however, so that different forms are evident along a common corridor. The most well-known typologies in the literature focus on the social interventionist state, or welfare state, as the institutionalization of market-correcting policies. Different distributions of power in society and different traditions led to the development of different welfare regimes along the common corridor of the social interventionist state (see Esping-Andersen 1990; Hicks 1999; Huber/Stephens 2001; Leibfried 2001; for a broader perspective, see Cameron 1978). Studies differentiate between the conservative welfare regime typical of continental Europe, the social-democratic welfare regimes characteristic of Scandinavia, the liberal welfare regimes of Canada, the USA and, with certain reservations, the United Kingdom. The existence of a Southern European regime and a so-called "radical" model of social security in its antipode is also postulated (see Ferrera 1996; Castles/Mitchell 1993; for an overview, see Arts/Gelissen 2002).

These welfare regimes can be distinguished by the different weights they have historically assigned to the central welfare producers (state, market, family), their different requirements for access to welfare services and payments (citizenship, need, employment), their levels of support and modes of financing, and - connected to this - the degree to which they secure social status (stratification), and the extent of the pressure they bring to bear to exploit ones own labor (decommodification). They also differ in terms of their leading elements: in Germany the pension system, in Great Britain the health system, and in France the education system.

The aggregate constellation: the DCIS
Whatever the details of the development by which the different institutional dimensions of modern statehood were acquired in each and every case, in the 1960s and 1970s all four components of statehood were rendered prominent at the national level in the OECD world. The result was the DCIS, whose transformation is debated today. The acquisition of the different components of modern statehood by the state is a recent phenomenon in the OECD world. For most states outside the OECD world - and even for some recent OECD member states like Mexico or Turkey -the acquisition of these components has been unsuccessful, or at least cannot be considered to have been fully concluded. Thus, the differentiation of various dimensions in the development of statehood is not only analytically possible, it corresponds to what can be observed empirically. A closer look at the states outside the OECD world reveals that only single dimensions of statehood are typically fully developed. Colombia, for example, lacks a protected monopoly of force and tax collection, an institutionalized form of democracy and an institutionalized welfare regime. Colombia's statehood is limited to its legal status as a sovereign state. Taiwan lacks recognition as a sovereign state, but has a fully developed monopoly of force and tax collection as well as an increasing degree of legitimacy through its developing national community. Saddam Hussein's Iraq could count on a monopoly of force and tax collection and the status of a sovereign state under international law. But it was certainly neither a democratic constitutional state nor a well-functioning welfare state. Finally, defective democracies exist in which political elites are democratically legitimized but government is not constitutionally limited. Examples for such illiberal democracies are Argentina and the Philippines (Merkel 1999: 368).

Despite these limitations, it is safe to conclude that the fully developed DCIS of the OECD world - acknowledging a certain amount of flexibility regarding institutional arrangements - is seen by the median voter as exemplary and as a model for statehood (see Kaase/Newton 1995). A substantial deviation from the DCIS model in one of the four dimensions is typically viewed by those affected by it as a deficient, underdeveloped or aberrant form of statehood.

For our purposes, however, what is important is that in the DCIS of the OECD world of the 1960s and 1970s, all four dimensions of statehood converged. All four dimensions of statehood were concentrated at the national level: the monopoly of force and tax collection was situated at the national level; the interventionist state was anchored there; until recently, the institutionalization of democracy was exclusively tied to the national level; and the rule of law was seen as inextricably linked to the constitutional nation state. The legal status of the sovereign state was seen as doubly linked to the national level: territorially bound governing entities (nation state as subject of recognition) recognized other territorially bound governing entities (nation state as object of recognition) as sovereign states. Since all four dimensions of statehood were connected to the national level, the DCIS can be considered the expression of a national constellation.

This national constellation must be seen as synergetical, since all four dimensions of statehood supported and stabilized each other. Without the monopoly of force and tax collection it would have been impossible to establish an effective legal system. Without an effective legal system, however, a political community bound to the state could not have developed. Without the institutionalization of democratic processes at the state level, the expansion of social welfare regimes would have been impossible. And without democratic legitimization and legal constitutionalization, the monopoly of force and tax collection would not have been sustainable.

Read on: Ideal Typical Lead Questions in the Three Modules