The rest of us are left banging our heads against the wall in despair.

Until you compare it to accounts of traditions in the Russian army…

Indeed, Gérard Noiriel argues in État, nation et immigration that citizens of the periphery of France (think of rural farmers far from Paris and speaking in vernacular) willingly joined the massive social apparatus of classification, conscription and accounting carried by central power at the end of the nineteenth century because they thought that would give them more power. The central power was too weak to constrain the periphery into providing enough informations to collect taxes and organize draft but citizens willingly provided them because the perceived advantages were greater (chief among them, access to public education for their children). Once registered, and thus submitted to military and fiscal control, citizens of the periphery started to engage in national politics, if only to get their fair share of the budget.

This always struck me as a very important lesson in state formation: successful new powerful public entities are those which could be those able to entice their formal members into real participation by offering them important perceived advantages. The EU is currently good at it with respect to member states, not so with respect to citizens.

I’m reminded of an argument that Jerry Mander made about computers that struck me as wrong for just the same reasons. I can’t find the particular piece I was looking for but this is close enough:

People may edit their copy, communicate with their friends, connect with other like-minded people, and so on. But the computer doesn’t change the fact that great centralized institutions — corporations, trade bureaucracies, militaries, governments and so on — are able to use those same computers with far greater connections and with far greater real power.

http://www.scottlondon.com/interviews/mander2.html

What this misses is that “great centralized institutions” were able to gather and exploit information quite effectively even before the computer and internet ages. But widely dispersed ordinary people could not. So the effect of computer networking has been to reduce rather than expand the information advantages of centralized institutions. For example, it has long been the case that companies were aware of systematic failures in their products while their customers were ignorant. But now it is quite easy to discover that there are many other users experiencing the same failure you’re seeing.

You’re right that both (a) IR courses should ask where states come from, and (b) most of them don’t. I also had a session that I wanted to teach on where international markets come from, with dollops of Greif, Polanyi (some of the less well known anthropological stuff) and others, but sadly it had to be cut b/c of lack of time in the semester (I am already asking the students to attend an extra session voluntarily if they can). Ideally, some day, I would love to do a complete course on this sort of stuff.

Otto – I haven’t read any of Downing – it sounds interesting. I have read Alf Luedtke on barrack society in Prussia which presented it as being pretty extraordinarily horrible.

I guess it is fair to say that the state is most often the villain in Scott’s work. But I do not think your reading above is fair. Scott points out at an early stage in Seeing Like a State that “the State is the vexed institution that is the source of both our freedoms and our unfreedoms” (something like that, at least, I don’t have the book at hand).

His main point is not that state formation is always bad, but exactly that states that are unconstrained by a public sphere, legislators unconstrained by constituencies, when guided by high modernism tend to go awry.

In his story, England would pass as one of the more successful (less bad) cases of state formation.

I thought that “delivering people to the labour market” was the principal function of public transport rather than higher education.