One dramatic historical lesson of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the spectacular failure of modern states to respond to the crisis by mid-twentieth century standards. The Soviet Union had a solid record of fighting infectious diseases, whether that was stopping the 1959 epidemic of smallpox in Moscow in under three weeks or curbing the 1970 outbreak of cholera, by using the army to seal off the quarantined southern cities and the Russian Orthodox Church to impose strict hygienic measures across its parishes. Today the Russian government calmly watches the country burn, both in terms of having the highest COVID-19 mortality rate in the world and letting the largest ever forest fires rage unchecked. In 1941 the American economy converted into wartime mode in a matter of weeks and was able to produce an average of three 14,400-ton Liberty cargo ships every two days, not to mention dozens of tanks and over 200 airplanes a day. By contrast, throughout 2020, the United States was unable to produce the required quantity of face masks, which are not sophisticated products. For several weeks, hand sanitizers – diluted alcohol – were in short supply across the country. Given the virtual paralysis of the American political system, the popularity of deep-state conspiracy theories in society, and the quality of government expertise in all spheres – from foreign policy to domestic affairs – the diagnosis of a failed state does not seem to be merely a partisan exaggeration. In this respect, the complete dismantling of state institutions in Russia, replaced by informal networks of private interests, seems a trendsetting phenomenon rather than a marginal one. The modern state with its robust institutions as envisioned by normative social theories seems to exist no more.
A few notable exceptions only support this conclusion: China, Israel, and some northern European countries with homogeneous populations can still boast of having interventionist and efficient states in the mid-twentieth-century mode. These cases highlight that the main condition of the modern state’s functionality is the need to be a nation-state or an aggressively nationalizing one. As it turns out, it is not some mysteriously self-sufficient “developed institutions” that make the state work but the popular mandate to exercise coercion on behalf of the entire society, which is only possible in a nation committed to self-censorship and the purging of its individual members in the interests of the like-minded majority. If so, the perspective of a postnational society that prioritizes individual rights and multiple loyalties seems to undercut the foundations of the modern state and raises the question of the future political forms to replace them.
To historians, the crisis of the modern state is a reminder of how multivalent and historically conditioned this basic political concept is. In 2022, the editors of Ab Imperio invite contributors and readers to revisit the history of this elusive phenomenon and deconstruct its meaning when applied to different periods and societies.
1/2022 The Neverending Story of State-Building: Who Was Making the Power Work and How?
2/2022 Imagining Leviathan in Myth, Religious Ideas, Literature, and Ideology
3/2022 The State of the Nation and Empire: Was there a Difference?
4/2022 The Role of the State in Projects of Social Improvement
The topics relevant to this annual program include but are by no means limited to the following:
Global frameworks of thinking about state-building ● The “state school” in history and social sciences in Russia and other countries ● Imagining Leviathan: the literary imagination as a state-builder ● The state as a philosophical concept ● “The eros of the state” (Peter Struve): the irrationality of state-building ● Converting the hierarchies of kin, gender, or race into political hierarchies ● Legal estate and class as categories of statehood ● From an estate to a state, and back ● Can a state exist without difference? ● The early modern state: composite polities, multiple sovereignties ● The state of modernity and modernity of the state ● The state of empire ● When nation and state are one and when they are not ● Can nationalism be indifferent to the state? ● The revolutionary state: between anarchism and totalitarianism ● Where is the state in a civil war? ● The state as a gender regime ● The state between a moral economy and a political economy ● Does any religion fit the confessional state? ● The historical evolution of nonterritorial sovereignty ● A state within a state: frontiers, fiefdoms, and federations ● What is a composite state? ● Unitary states: myth and reality ● Who are the subjects of interstate relations? ● Globalization and the state, past and present ● Legitimacy: an ambivalent concept ● Constitutions: unwritten, formal, and merely decorative ● The past and future of legal pluralism ● When the center of power is incongruent with the center of knowledge ● Social policy: Who gets the upper hand, the state or society? ● Revisiting the welfare state ● Bureaucracy: in theory, in propaganda, and in lived experience ● The business of state: political entrepreneurs and their competing projects ● Are the state and political community the same? ● A state of statelessness and a failed state ● Can there be colonialism without a state? ● Nomenklatura revisited: citizenship and bureaucracy in the one-party state ● A Soviet Union republic as a nation-state ● Imperial situations of nonimperial states: reproduction and rearticulation of difference in homogenizing regimes ● The individual and the state: a cog in the wheel, David and Goliath, or a trickster.
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Theory and Methodology ■ History ■ Archive ■ Sociology, Anthropology & Political Science ■ ABC: Empire & Nationalism Studies ■ Newest Mythologies ■ Historiography and Book Reviews.
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