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Vol. 2, No. 2a On the Devolution of State Power: Comment on Wagar's "Praxis"
Salvatore J. Babones
Sociology Department
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, MD 21218 USA
sbabones@jhu.edu
Copyright 1996 by Salvatore J. Babones
v. 6/10/96
In "Toward a Praxis of World Integration," (Wagar
1995) Warren Wagar argues that "a transnational party
firmly committed to the democratic integration of all
peoples is essential to steer us through the storms of
the next century." (p. 22) Such a transnational party
might infiltrate governments and corporations around
the world and sabotage them "when the time is ripe,"
(p. 16), that is, when the "doomed and polarized
world-system of capitalism" (p. 22) self-destructs,
perhaps in a global core war. Only after the success
of a transnational party has transformed our world
into "a new planetary civilization in which every
human being everywhere has an equal voice" (p. 22)
might the people of the world "peacefully scatter into
many disparate communities each under its own roof."
[Page 1]
When we examine Wagar's proposition that a
universal world-state might, ultimately, devolve the
world-state's sovereignty upon its constituent communities,
two questions come to mind. First, it seems natural
to ask whether or not a particularist nation-state
might not do the same; that is to say, is a world-state
a prerequisite for the devolution of state
power? Second, and more basically, one may question
whether it is likely or even possible that a state
would devolve its sovereignty upon its constituents;
we know that states have given up sovereignty in order
to gain the advantages of membership in larger
entities, but have the rulers of a state ever given up
state power in favor of lower levels of organization?
In addressing these questions, it will be useful
to distinguish between two separate functions of the
state: governance and administration. A state governs
to the extent that it restricts or regulates the
actions of its citizens; in the economic sphere, it is
the function of government to make laws relating to
commerce, to enforce contracts, to regulate the
distribution of public goods such as land, air, and
water, to establish and protect property rights, and
the like. A state administers to the extent that it
actually performs services for its citizens; in the
economic sphere, it is the function of administration
to operate public utilities, to provide social
services, and, in the extreme case, to run state
corporations. Both the degree of governance and the
degree of administration performed by a state could,
in principle, be indexed along a continuum; the result
would be the two-dimensional vector space represented
[Page 2]
by Figure 1. Note that in Figure 1, states are
characterized only by the extent to which they perform
the two functions of governance and administration,
and not with regard to the ways in which they
perform those functions. The intent is to classify
states on functional, not moral, dimensions.
Figure 1. Type of State by Degree of Governance
and Degree of Administration
Degree of Governance
HIGH . . . LOW
Degree HIGH totalitarian socialist
.
of .
.
Admin. LOW liberal anarchic
State power is manifested in governance, not in
administration. That principle is the root of Engels'
theorem that the state is the instrument of the
oppression of one class by another. When the state
has become the organ of *all* of the people, instead
of the instrument of a single class, then "the
government of persons is replaced by the
administration of things, and by the conduct of
processes of production" (Engels 1894/1954, p. 389),
and the state, as a governing entity, "withers away."
[Page 3]
However, the state does more than just govern, and to
the extent that it administers the activities of
society, a central organization will continue to exist
in some form. Engels the socialist thus condemned
both the social-democrats, who agreed with him in
wanting the state to administer production and
services but who intended that the state continue to
govern, taking the totalitarian view that the state
should do everything, and the anarchists, who agreed
with him in demanding the abolition of the state as a
governing entity but who also demanded the abolition of
the state as administrator. (Lenin 1918/1974, p. 18)
On the other hand, the complete antithesis of socialism
is liberalism, the idea that the state should govern
but not administer.
As in Engels' socialist ideal, in Wagar's
praxis, once a transnational party incorporating the
ideals of the "Left Enlightenment" has founded a world
state and put human affairs in order, it is given as a
possibility that the world-state will be dissolved and
state power devolved upon its constituent communities,
since the citizens of the world-state may no longer
need the world-state. Putting that in Engels' terms,
once the world-state no longer governs, that is,
presumably, once it has eliminated the class
differentials that are the indication and the means of
the repression of one class by another worldwide,
there will no longer be any need for governance, and
the world-state will become superfluous. Thus, in an
Engels-ian analysis, at that point the world-state may
dissolve, since at that point it will serve no class
interest, and thus it will be in the interest of no
[Page 4]
class to promote it.
It is important to note that in Wagar's praxis
of world-system integration, as opposed to Engels'
socialist ideal, there is no assumption that
government as such will cease to exist. After the
world-state is disbanded, the people of the world are
governed by their locally appointed and approved
representatives, which, in the end, means that people
will continue to be restricted and regulated, albeit
under local regimes. But even under a democratically
elected, representative government, one class, the
majority, rules at the expense of another, the
minority (and even this leaves aside the possibility
that a minority manipulates the democratic process in
such a way that it is able to rule in spite of its
small size). Thus, in Wagar's praxis, governance
continues, governance in the interests of some class,
even if not in the interests of the former capitalist
class, which will have been eliminated by the socialist
(and thus administrating) world-state.
Given that the succeeding world-state is to be
socialist, it is possible that it might even be in the
selfish interest of the ruling elite of the world-state
to disband it. In theory, at least, it cannot be in
their interest to promote it. A parallel case may,
perhaps, be seen in the breakup of the U.S.S.R., in
which a state did dissolve that, according to its own
ideals, had ceased to govern. In the aftermath of that
dissolution, state power did not disappear; instead,
it devolved upon the constituent republics, whose
leaders are often the very persons who presided over
its devolution. Soviet government ceased to exist, but
[Page 5]
the peoples of what had been the Soviet Union continued
to be governed, often by the very same persons as
before the dissolution. In a similar fashion, the
dissolution of the world-state, instead of being
resisted by its leaders, might very well be instigated
by them.
As the Soviet example shows, it is both possible
for a state to devolve its power upon lower levels of
organization and possible for such devolution to occur
in a state that is not a world-state. If anti-systemic
movements in individual countries are committed to
eliminating the domination of classes by one another,
then the ascendency of anti-systemic movements in
individual countries could lead to the devolution of
state power in those countries from the national level
to the community level. Of course, such a devolution of
state power may not be a good thing: witness community
self-rule in 1980s Lebanon or 1990s Somalia. Such
examples steer us toward Wagar's praxis. Wagar's
praxis calls for the establishment of a world-state as
a vehicle for the suppression of class interests,
economic and otherwise: the world-state is needed to
reconcile "radical feminism, fundamentalist Islam,
populist libertarianism, militant Hinduism, Marxian
socialism, born-again Christianity, megacorporate
capitalism, Bosnian nationalism, Serbian nationalism,
and all the other colliding forces at work in our
whirling world." (p. 1) Once the world-state has
accomplished this reconciliation, community self-rule
might be a more palatable prospect than it is now.
On the other hand, Wagar's world-state would
only be able to acheive such a reconciliation through
[Page 6]
the repression of at least some members of the world-
society. Supposing that Wagar only intends the world-
state to take from the undeserving rich and give to
the deserving poor, still, this at least implies some
world-wide power to take and give, a power from which
there would be no hiding and no refuge. There would
be no safe havens for deposed dictators; there would
also be no safe havens for exploited masses, should
such exploitation ever occur. The only assurance
that such exploitation would not occur -- the moral
commitment of the leaders of the world-state to
*govern* only in the interest of humanity at large
-- is a doubtful assurance, at best, even assuming
that those leaders can determine the overall
interests of humanity in the first place. Thus,
having demonstrated the practicability of Wagar's
praxis, we are faced with another question: might
not the potential for repression of a world-state pose
an even greater risk to humanity than our current
"doomed and polarized world-system of capitalism"?
References
Engels, Friedrich. 1894/1954. Anti-Duhring. Moscow:
Foreign Languages Publishing House.
Lenin, Vladimir I. 1918/1974. State and Revolution.
New York: International Publishers.
Wagar, w. Warren. 1995. "Toward a Praxis of World
Integration." Journal of World-Systems Research, Vol. 1, No. 2.
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