Why Are We So Obsessed With the State?

Why Are We So Obsessed With the State?

Umer Farooq

In my view, the state has no religion. I will go further and say that the modern state is completely amoral and, in many circumstances, immoral both in its nature and behavior.

I do not know when the state became my academic obsession. I only know that I have been engaged in an intellectual endeavor to understand this all-pervasive institution of the modern world. There are very few public libraries in Islamabad and those that exists have no specific repository of literature on this subject. The National Library has no dedicated section related to the literature on the history, sociology and politics of the state. My own library at home is richer than the National Library on this count.

A friend during student days in Lahore introduced me to Engels’s (Karl Marx’s collaborator) The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. This was my first tryst with unconventional ideas about this subject. At that time, it was very difficult to digest Engel’s ideas. Reading the history of how family and state started their careers in human history was kind of a jolt to the mind of a member of a religiously conservative family whose political orientation was towards the religious right. Family had several forms in history—group marriages were one. State emerged in human society at a particular stage in the social development of society when it got divided into irreconcilable economic classes.

These ideas remained in my mind in abstract form during student days. Until that time, I remained clueless that the traffic police which imposed a monetary fine on me for crossing the traffic signal was part of state machinery I have come to detest after reading Engels and Marx. The riot police with which we fought pitched battles at the end of several students’ protests was part of the state which, as reading Engel made clear, was imposed on us to ensure control of dominant social and economic classes of society. There is no need to fully subscribe to Engels’s theory of state. Two points, however, are noteworthy:

first, the state is not a natural, timeless institution. It is a product of historical processes. So, there was a time in human history when there was no state. Secondly, loyalty to the state, whether for religious or secular reasons, is not naturally and universally obligatory.

I started to realize the full weight of the state and its coercive machinery during my 35-year career in journalism. I started cursing the state when as a crime reporter I met a family of two women, one old and another young and pregnant, who were facing the highhandedness of Rawalpindi police. Older woman was the mother-in-law of the younger woman and her drug addict son in police lock up and was accused of robbery. The older woman told me the local SHO was forcing them to sell their property to a local influential who was planning to construct a shopping plaza on the site. I felt the state’s ruthlessness when I met Baloch families in Quetta—during my days with Herald while investigating a story on enforced disappearances—who were afraid to spend two consecutive nights in the same house, fearing they or any of their members could be kidnapped by intelligence agencies or paramilitary forces.

War, diplomacy, treaties, bureaucracy, borders, laws and political crises all pointed towards one entity: state. The more I covered politics the more I realized that behind every development, every crisis there is state. No wonder that, like everybody else, I started to take state for granted. As part of our daily life, the state becomes so deeply part of our political imagination that we stop asking questions about where the state comes from.

As Fredrick Engels said, the state is a historical institution and human societies lived without it for quite a long time. Government is not necessarily a state. Human societies had different forms of authority, hierarchies and leadership. But the state is something more specific in the sense that it is territory, coercive machinery, it is impersonal, bureaucratic and its sovereign within its territory.
Pakistanis are politically and socially obsessed with the idea of state. They want all their problems to be resolved by the state. They think that they can change society by capturing the state and then using state power to transform society.

The idea that many of the problems could only be solved by building the capacity of civil society has never occurred to them. What else can you expect from a power-oriented society?

No political group, in our society, more obsessively delves into the institution of the state and the methods and procedures related to capture of the state power more aggressively than the Islamists. The obsession of Islamists with the state is not restricted to our society, it is the most common feature of Islamist politics throughout the Muslim world.

My academic obsession with the idea of state took me on a journey through western, Islamic and Indian political thought. I want to emphasize three points, a) the idea of coercive, impersonal territorial state emerged in the west, and it has no parallel in Islamic or Indian political thought, b) Instead basic unit in Islamic political thought is Ummah and in Indian thought there is a concept of kingdom somewhat close to state but still not a territorial state in the modern sense, c) how and why Islamists became obsessed with the state, I want to answer this question. In the west thoughts like neoliberalism emerged which have a disdain for overarching states. The private sector is becoming more important in the west. Why have we become obsessed with the state?

Ancient Indian political thought comes surprisingly close to the theory of Modern state as it was developed in the west. In Kautilya’s Arthashastra we find mention of rulers, territory, population, treasury, ministers, allies and coercive powers. But make no mistake, it is a theory of patrimonial kingdom, not an impersonal bureaucratic state. In Islamic political thought the primary unit or concept is Ummah. Classical Islamic thinkers developed sophisticated theories of government without developing the concept identical to modern impersonal state. Remember political authority has existed in human society since time immemorial and this political authority in several circumstances was not state.

The breakthrough came in western political history, where western political thinkers transformed political authority into an institution which was distinct from the person of the ruler. Only in Western political history was this impersonal institution, which possessed territorial sovereignty, in control of permanent apparatus of administration and coercion.

This idea of impersonal, coercive, territorial state developed and spread into Asia, Africa and Muslim Southwest and South Asia as a colonial project. The career of the state as an institution underwent a decline in the west after the end of the Cold War. Political commentators and analysts started predicting the demise of the state in the face of the rising tide of globalization.

Political philosophies like Neoliberalism started to take root in the west which assigned a much-reduced role to state in western societies. Even the concept of a welfare state came under criticism. Market, private enterprise, civil society and voluntary organizations come into prominence in political and social life in western countries. While neoliberal project was assigning a restricted role to the state, political life in our part of the world started to become afflicted by the obsession of the state.

If state is not the central concept of classical Islamic political thinking, then why did Islamists become obsessed with the idea of modern state? And why did they strive to capture the state in their respective societies? I will offer three explanations which are all part of the historical process which brought us into the present political situation. First, Islamists learned their lessons from colonialism, which introduced them to immense powers of a modern state—to legislate, educate, police, imprison, regulate, reshape the social institutions and tax society. In fact, Islamists realized that with this immensely powerful state they can socially transform society.

Secondly, after the First World War, the Islamic political order under the Ottoman Empire collapsed completely, giving rise to nation-states in the Muslim world. Islamists came face to face with a new political reality:

The concept of Ummah was still a powerful attraction but Muslim World now was territorially organized. In this situation without controlling the state the Islamists groups had no future. Thirdly, this was the time when ideologues like Maududi and Syed Qutb were transforming Islamists’ project of social transformation into the modern language of the state. Their political writings were introducing modern terms like state, constitution, government, law and sovereignty in the context of struggle for an Islamic political order.

Muslim societies inherited the institution of the modern state from the west. Now the Muslim political thinkers developed the idea to resist western modernity with the institution they borrowed or inherited from the west—this is an institution which is the product of western modernity. Islamists think that they can subordinate the state to their Islamist project. It is beyond their imagination that the institution they are trying to capture is not only extremely powerful it is immensely ruthless.

The tide of globalization that the world witnessed after the end of the Cold War compelled many thinkers to predict that the state was in fact breathing its last. But the state bounced back. The events of the last three years during which the world witnessed multiple military conflicts also increased the salience of state. During the Ten to twelve thousand years history of human civilization, myriads of different political arrangements have been practiced by the human race. And while the state may be the most powerful political organization among these arrangements it is not the most successful one. History is clear evidence that there is nothing permanent about the state. What may come next, we don’t know.