The more I dig into my current project that focuses on interstate politics and diplomatic history, the more unsatisfied I am with commonplace narratives that represent nation-states or national governments as having a coherent unitary ‘selfhood’ that reasons and has emotions, that calculates or intends in a singular way.
For example, there’s an old argument among historians about the causes of the “new imperialism” in the latter half of the 19th Century, the period where a handful of European nation-states seized vast territories in sub-Saharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Oceania. I have always been partial to an argument commonly attributed to John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, or at least my own refurbished understanding of the argument.
The interpretation runs something like this: that the “new imperialism” at its roots was initiated by Europeans who had been appointed by the newly coherent national governments of the 19th Century to represent those nations in small outposts and fragmentary possessions that were a result of the earlier mercantile era of European expansion. Senior administrators at the periphery were by the mid-century often working directly for national governments rather than merchant companies. There was still a gap in communication between those peripheral agents and the metropole, even with the spread of the telegraph. In the 17th and 18th Centuries, a mercantile appointee who pressed beyond what the company directors had authorized or would countenance often was recalled or relieved, especially if that led to a restriction of commercial trade or a major outlay for sending military forces. In the mid-19th Century, a peripheral agent who took a chance and committed the nation-state to a territorial expansion or to a military action suddenly found that a fair amount of the time, he was professionally rewarded even if he was initially reprimanded, and moreover, there was something about the nature of these new nations that made them disinclined to undo or reverse actions even if metropolitan decision-makers had not wanted to undertake that action. The most famous example of this dynamic might be General Charles Gordon’s independent decision to fight Muhammed Ahmad (aka the ‘Madhi’) in Sudan, where the initial reluctance of the British government to support Gordon led to the resignation of the Prime Minister after Gordon was killed. I think there are many other examples where imperial expansion in its initial phase was driven by situations in the periphery and the ambition and perceptions of actors who had only local authority and influence. There was a “tipping point” eventually where the push for imperial expansion became systemic and relatively centralized, but even afterwards, the reality of colonial administration on the ground for the first two or three decades of European rule was often derived from peripheral rather than centralized decision-making.
More conventional narratives do pay attention to differences between key decision-makers in shaping the actions of nations. In a contemporary rather than historical frame, that can be very hard to do successfully simply because governments guard their internal deliberations closely. This mostly is still a “great man theory” of causality in that it turns on particular individuals and their style of leadership, their perception of the issues, their defense of their individual political prospects. Conventional analyses by journalists and pundits also know how to weave something more like a “history from below” into the explanation by referencing both the mobilized engagement of particular movements and groups and the more abstract “national feelings” and how those influence decision-making.
What I think is mostly missing is what I might call “history from the middle”, essentially an account of the everyday labor and engaged interests of an array of mid-ranking state actors, influential lobbyists, behind-the-scenes pundits, publication editors trying to control or frame the agenda, the heads of civic institutions that interact with concepts of national action and national perspective through hosting events, lectures and dialogues, and so on.
All of that detail periodically vanishes when the public conversation shifts into a rhetorical mode where we are talking about a nation-state as if it were a composed, fully coherent individual, where suddenly we are saying “The Iranians want this”, “The Israelis want that”, “The United States wants this outcome and sees the situation in the following way”. Some experts will say, “No, all the detail you’ve mentioned is still there, this is just a shorthand way of compressing it for the sake of conversations that happen in public”. Other experts, especially in international relations, may really mean that compression, thinking that there is actually such a thing as a “great power” and that “great powers” think coherently in particular ways the same way that organisms adapt to environments, or that nations really are engaged in a kind of game-theoretic rationality that forces them into particular kinds of actions.
I’m not wild about “this is just a simplification”, because I think governments act in ways that very much turn on the individual character of leaders, on the administrative and institutional structures that mediate between leaders and government, and on collective mobilizations within societies. The simplification steps around the real causal forces driving events. But I understand that in a five-minute conversation in a public venue, you have to simplify.
However, it’s that latter proposition seems entirely bizarre to me, that a nation really is like an individual, that nations make rational choices. It’s about as nonsensical as treating a corporation as an individual before the law. It is a case of story-telling that has metastasized into a gigantic, bizarre Rube Goldberg machine that traps the storyteller in their own fictions. The storytellers are, like the Queen in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, wanting to deliver the sentence before the verdict. When I hear people saying “Well, Israel has to retaliate in a particular way to send a message and then Iran has to retaliate in another way to counter that message and the United States has to avoid being drawn in but if Iran sends a particular kind of message then it will have no choice but to get involved” as if this is some kind of equation with only one solution, I figure that they’re either trying to bamboozle people into accepting a preferred outcome by making it sound like a weather forecast or they’ve gone so deep into the jungle of a particular way of imagining state power that they can’t even see how far gone they are.
In the case of at least some particular interests and actors within the Israeli government, I suspect it’s the bamboozling rationale. There are people who’ve long wanted to kick off a regional war because they believe it will turn out well for them, not the least because they believe that “the United States” as a singular national actor will have no choice but to lend its full military power to their cause at that point.
And yet, if there are lessons from history, it would be that leaders, ‘middling’ government and civic actors, and even mobilized social classes are quite frequently wrong when they talk themselves into this sort of formulaic, generic, game-theory-for-dummies understanding of national action. Wrong, that is, in the sense that they run the formula and think it absolutely strips the nation of any agency at all—that it must act in particular preset ways in relation to specific circumstances—and wrong in the sense that when they manage to force action based on that mythological vision, it often goes very badly for the government that embraced that story and the nation that government represents and controls.
War notoriously has many contingencies that cannot be calculated in advance, but even less totalizing sorts of military, economic and political actions often have very unpredictable outcomes, and not merely because an adversary counters them with particular effectiveness or strategic insight. Just run the tape backwards from the situation in the Middle East and you will rarely find a situation where a national leadership accurately decided, “we must now take this action because of an action another state undertook” and was vindicated in that decision. (Though there are usually spin doctors who try to produce that vindication through some kind of transparent Baghdad-Bob level of bullshit.)
Did the people in the Saudi government who argued they had to attack the Houthis in Yemen in 2015 do something they had to do that led to the expected outcomes? Very obviously not, and not only did it waste lives and resources, the Houthis as a movement and military threat seem about as strong as ever. Did the United States have to invade Iraq after 9/11 because something-something WMD something-something liberalism something-something acquiring a new ally? There isn’t anybody left in the American government who will try to hold up any of that nonsense now at the other end of things, and it was plain from the beginning that the nonsense was emanating from a very particular set of individuals who were drunk on hubris and power-hunger. Did Bashar al-Assad have to fight a civil war that utterly destroyed Syria as a coherent nation-state? Did Ariel Sharon and his close allies have to make Israel invade Lebanon? Did Bill Clinton have to fire cruise missiles at a milk factory in Sudan, or direct U.S. troops in Somalia to capture Mohammed Aidid? What would have happened if none of those had to decisions were taken? Nothing worse than what did happen, perhaps even from the selfish perspective of the specific decision-makers and their immediate circle, but certainly from the wider perspective of “middling sorts” who end up having to administer and execute those actions.
Had to is the devil’s language when it is spoken within politics, especially by the powerful. Had to is often the signal of its opposite, a decision that is already known to be indefensible and risky that is being pushed for the same way that a gambler who is deep in the hole decides to put more money down on the table despite long odds. It is how bloodthirsty extremists, narrow partisans, and semi-blind experts who have tightly constrained domain-specific knowledge indemnify themselves in advance, grant themselves a benediction. We had to climb the escalation ladder. We had to strike back. We had to neutralize the threat. The nation had to. It’s not us, the human beings who work for it, speak for it, decide for it, who have to. Israel does. The United States does. Iran does. Hamas does.
It’s nonsense that nevertheless drives the world deeper into shit year by year.
Who cares for you? You’re nothing but a pack of cards!
And every time you, not “we”, deal this hand, every time you choose to deal this hand, people die for no reason and in the end you usually lose security, lose prestige, lose your interests. We the people, we the nation, we the towns and cities, certainly do. If you were chasing security, prestige and the predictable protection of your interests, you’d never let yourself get trapped in the dumbest possible game of prisoner’s dilemma in the first place. Security, yours and ours, comes from removing reasons to fight, from building predictability and transparency. It comes from not having to win everything, control everything, own everything. It comes from fairness and it comes from tending to your own problems first, last and in between.
This take comports with my understanding of the early days of the US imperial project, which was almost entirely made up of "everyday labor and engaged interests of an array of mid-ranking state actors, influential lobbyists, behind-the-scenes pundits, publication editors trying to control or frame the agenda." Contingency explains how it turned out far better than manifest destiny or state planning. Would that the "‘middling’ government and civic actors, and even mobilized social classes" could abandon "had to decisions" that disguise violent grabs for status and wealth for something better, for themselves and the common good.