Eric Rubenstein Due: 5/8/2015
Revised In-Class Essay Diminishing many hundreds of years of state-society interactions into an over-simplification, the expansion of states has been both a positive development and a negative one. Yes, in some cases, strong states have led to mass genocide, as they did at the hands of Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Russia – this being James Scott’s view of strong states. But at the same time, state expansion has also helped the world reach unprecedented levels of order and peace. For Thomas Hobbes, the ability to impose order proves the most vital responsibility of the state. And without strong states, he wrote, life is chaos - a “war of all against all,” where continual lack of security renders life “poor, nasty, brutish and short.” The provision of physical security is undoubtedly a fundamental requirement of a successful state; in this sense, Hobbes’ understanding of a successful state is accurate. But economic health comprises another requirement. States must provide economically inclusive institutions for their citizens, which in turn require well-established notions of property rights and courts of law. For a state to achieve successful development, it must satisfy these two criteria. But success does not come overnight; it is a process, and geography often poses significant, though surmountable challenges to successful development. In the end, though, it is in large part the nature of a state that dictates its development trajectory – with success entailing state-provided physical security and economically inclusive institutions for citizens. Many Westerners today equate developmental success with democracy and the politically inclusive institutions and civil liberties that accompany it. But this definition of success is misguided. It was not until the end of the Cold War, when it beat out communism on the world stage, that