When sovereignties of any kind—modern nation-states or the much more numerous swarm of political forms that preceded them (and to some extent live on inside of them like the children of Cronus, swallowed by a fearful god)—make dramatic, sudden interventions into the lives of their inhabitants—or into the lives of neighboring states via war, sanctions or interstate agreements—it can be stunningly difficult to trace where and how that intervention was decided upon. If it was decided at all: there are times as a historian where I honestly feel that a momentous change was assembled like a multi-part cipher whose key was held by fifteen to twenty different parties where no one knew what the message they were assembling was or what would happen when they put it together.
Sometimes that’s quite deliberate. For the last few years, I’ve been reading early Cold War communications between middle-ranking civil servants in the UK and similar conversations in the US about a wide range of issues. There are times where they are very clear that they absolutely do not want to engage in highly coordinated deliberation across agencies and across hierarchies. The reasons are familiar: rivalries between ministries or departments, rivalries between individuals, overlapping remits where no one is in a hurry to sort out precedence. In those cases, an accidental alignment towards momentously coordinated action comes on them all like a flood. They see the clouds gathering, they try to stop the storm, and then as it bursts upon them, they try to evacuate with as much of their possessions as possible.
There are other times where they think they’re coordinating deliberately, or they think they’re following orders or plans that have been handed down from higher in the hierarchy, but what they’re doing is very much counter to one another or there isn’t a plan in the way they think there is and yet somehow they stumble into some decision that has huge consequences up and down the line and compels the entire apparatus of the state to align behind it.
This dynamic goes fractally all the way down to individuals. Today I was reading a coordinating conference of British diplomats stationed in Africa in the early 1960s and they’re superficially agreeing on almost everything (and taking the trouble to align their agreements with the policy positions of the Cabinet) but if you read the transcript carefully they’re actually notably divergent in their perceptions and in what they believe ought to be done by HMG in specific and in general. They know they’re speaking for the (internal, confidential) record, so if you know enough about the individuals from other materials, you’re also aware that there’s an unspoken shadow transcript of things they really think and things they’ve really done that is only being barely hinted at in official documents. Every once in a while someone slips and says the quieter parts out loud, like the early 1950s embassy head who didn’t want a trainee from West Africa stationed at his embassy because, well, the man would be Black, don’t you know. (Which provoked some evasively pained hand-wringing from the Colonial Office staff who were trying to wheedle the embassy into accepting their plan.)
Any time I reflect on what I know as a historian in this respect, I feel as if most of our narratives about politics in our public culture kind of disintegrate in front of my eyes, including some of the stories I commonly tell. I know that what we call “government” is in many ways an emergent phenomenon arising out of a complex system, more than the sum of its parts, and that what seem to be decisive actions taken at the command of leaders and people in charge are frequently anything but. Am I in command in a conscious sense when I walk down the stairs and step aside to avoid the person coming up in a hurry? When I wake up and wonder if the burning smell I sense is someone in my house cooking something or something worse than that? When I look at a dog and get the sense that it’s best avoided—something in its eyes, its stance? When I look down an alley at night and decide not to go down it? Yes, sort of—they’re all momentous decisions in some way, full of potential consequence. But nerves, cells, autonomous systems in my body, are really doing most of the work in these cases.
We don’t really know how to talk empirically about organizations, whether as small as a company that employs 20 people or as large as a national or regional government. We use short-cuts, models, simplifications, stories about why things happen and who decided that they should. But the stories aren’t just pragmatic ways to reduce complexity to descriptive manageability. They’re mythologies that undergird the political status quo.
And when you’re down in the guts of it, you see that mid-ranking civil servants are the first to want to uphold those mythologies. They’re not the “deep state” in the sense of a star chamber making the real decisions. They aren’t that and they don’t want to be that—they’re eager to be sure that they respect their remits, that they obey the precedence of political leaders higher in the hierarchy. If Trump discomforted (and still discomforts) the people who worked for him (both appointees and career civil servants) it’s partly because they just wanted to be able to follow his direction, which took him saying what his direction was and sticking to it. A professional bureaucrat can’t just be a courtier who just echoes the rapidly shifting whims of the emperor—they need a persistent directive or command to follow in a coherent way, or to at least believe that’s what they’re doing.
But when the moment of a major break arrives, by whatever road—accident, confluence of deliberate actions, a single agency or body seizing the moment and making everyone else follow in their wake—it literally changes the environment in which all those middle-ranking conversations unfold. It makes some thoughts thinkable and others unthinkable that were only a year prior otherwise. I was reading men who in one year found it impossible to really imagine Ghana as a sovereign and independent nation and in the next year talked as if that were an incontrovertible near-future reality. They didn’t make that decision, but afterwards they talked as if they had been part of its making and as if they had never thought otherwise.
In the U.S., everyone’s known for decades that the reversal of Roe v. Wade would be that kind of change if it happened, and it has been. Doctors who would never have hesitated to say that an ectopic pregnancy had to be terminated to save the life of the mother and besides wasn’t viable anyway now operate in institutional environments where that simple thought is becoming literally unsayable. People who would never have dreamed that they would face dramatic compression of their rights or safety already have had to face exactly that prospect just in a few short months since the decision. And it is not a simple matter of a command from the Supreme Court transmitting like a clear signal all the way down to the emergency rooms of Arkansas. There are all those complex conversations out there going on, all that autonomous action. The nerve endings are firing off to new stimuli.
Left, right and center, we all long for decisive action in a variety of ways. We want change and we want it to come as the result of deliberate, clear-thinking will aiming for some known outcome. We tell stories about what has happened and could happened that align with those wishes. But anybody who has spent time studying how governments and organizations act and decide know that this is maybe never what actually happens.
Image credit: Photo by Brandon Lopez on Unsplash