In those days the world was full of countries: 195 recognized “sovereign states”.
In 1920 there were 76: a hundred years later they were more than double.
Perhaps the most distinctive thing about the time was that, with very few exceptions, each territory prided itself on governing itself according to its own laws and manners: that order, which was then presented as logical and natural, had never happened before in the history.
Monkeys with the Union Jack flag, on the Rock of Gibraltar.
picture alliance
There had always been empires, colonies, land grabs by more or less distant powers.
And in those days the world had just emerged from another version of this system: the Western Age, the long period in which the European Far West had occupied much of the Americas, Asia and Africa.
The last of the great decolonizations, the African one, was only a few decades old.
There were still a few enclaves left—Guam, Hawaii, the Malvinas, Gibraltar, Ceuta and Melilla, the French overseas territories—but they were tiny parcels, anachronistic remains.
The truth was that, for the first time since states had begun to form some 6,000 years earlier, there were no metropolises exercising their colonial power over other large territories.
The country was then the basic geopolitical unit of the world—and they had proliferated unstoppably.
There was nothing newer than countries.
Only seven were still as they were before 1800: Japan, France, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, the United States.
All the rest were two centuries old or less and many had just turned 60, a dozen 30 —but part of the national story consisted of presenting them as eternal entities, immutable essences.
And billions of people, devoid of historical reference, accepted it: it is probable that the 20th and 21st centuries have been the time in which nationalism, based on that image, served the various powers more and better to maintain and carry forward your projects.
Dulled the brilliance of the gods, it was the great moment of the homelands.
Where men knew how to fight —for millennia— for their divinities, their kings, their chiefs and warlords, their group of encompassable dimensions, the French Revolution inaugurated a period in which the new symbolic unit was "the Nation", the sum of its citizens.
Thus, all those causes and banners were replaced by the homeland, a pipe dream that claimed that the millions or hundreds of millions born within the same borders shared natural interests, naturally inalienable, and should defend each other against those who had not been born. over there.
Few ideas shed as much blood as this one — which in 2020 was still raging.
The fact that —almost— all the territories were formally independent countries did not mean, of course, that each one could decide their destiny for themselves.
In those days the power of the global powers was exercised in less visible, more subtle, probably more effective ways, and the autonomy of poor countries was, in many matters, more formal than real.
In that world of inequalities, one of the clearest was established between the three or four all-powerful countries and almost all the others—under the formal cover of equal rights for all.
The first line of intervention of the dominant countries used to be the current political and economic relations;
when there was a conflict, commercial pressures and sanctions appeared —which the powerful country not only exercised but also made its lesser allies exercise—;
UN General Assembly, on November 14, 2022. Michael M. Santiago (Getty Images)
Or, in the best of cases, they discussed their differences in the great world assembly created after the 1939-1945 war to try to avoid such waste.
The —pompously named— Organization of the United Nations was a large building in New York where envoys from each country met to discuss certain problems, unbeatable intentions were launched and, on occasion, even an armed conflict was avoided —provided that common decisions did not contradict the interests of the hegemonic powers.
Around 1960, the countries that made up the United Nations were about 80. Then the new decolonized African, Caribbean and Asian nations began to be added;
then came Bangladesh, the former Soviets, the new Balkans and some more, until close to 200: the expansion of the number of countries was almost comparable to that of the number of people (see chapter 1).
The number of countries was not exact because a few were under discussion, such as Taiwan or the Vatican, nor did it make sense because, beyond the formalities, the word "country" covered such diverse situations.
How to postulate that China or India, with its 1,400 million inhabitants, were the same as Nauru, with its 10,000 or San Marino with its 33,000?
The presence of these two giants, whose size was out of proportion to all the rest, would have its consequences.
Each of them had four times as many inhabitants as the third on the list, and between the two they had a third of the world's population.
The conflict was served.
There were five other countries with between 350 and 200 million people each: the outgoing great power, the United States, and four from the so-called Third World or OtherWorld: Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil and Nigeria.
Between 200 and 100 million there were seven, well varied: Bangladesh, Russia, Mexico, Japan, Ethiopia, the Philippines and Egypt.
This enumeration makes a truism very clear: that the population of a country did not define its characteristics at all —because very different countries had similar populations.
In short, only 15 countries had more than one hundred million inhabitants and, of those 15, eight were at the Asian end, the New Center (see chapter 11).
The other seven were three Africans, three Americans, and Russia.
Fifteen other countries were large—between 100 and 50 million people;
the remaining 160 had between 50 million and 10,000 people.
And, despite the differences, the world order of the 21st century supposed that each nation was an independent entity, with autonomy to decide its own laws and ways of life and its government.
Countries were still a very effective way of biasing any initiative: all of them were segmented by country, modernize this country, change this country, save this country.
As if they did not have the possibility of undertaking anything or almost nothing beyond those borders that had been invented.
***
Not only the form "country" had been imposed throughout the globe;
the vast majority of those countries used the same systems of organization and government.
It was the one that had started more than two centuries before the bourgeois revolutions of the United States, France and America.
During the 20th century, the most established countries had gradually arrived at a common model, and the most recent ones were armed by imitating them: for the first time since the appearance of the states, almost all of them shared a similar format.
It seems like a minor fact but it is not: never in history have states been so similar to each other.
Describing those shapes may seem boring;
It is decisive to understand the time.
Each nation-state was made up of a territory, a population, a government, a bureaucracy, armed forces, a series of economic activities based on the notion of private property.
The forms of government could vary and, depending on them, the degree to which citizens could influence the course of their country also varied.
In general, the state apparatuses were divided into three large blocks that, not by chance, were called powers: the "Executive Power", which included all government agencies, from the presidency to the last secretariat;
the “Legislative Power”, which included the parliaments or congresses where the laws were elaborated;
and the “Judicial Power”, which included the courts of justice and their specialized personnel.
That same structure, which worked at the national level, was replicated at the regional and provincial levels, consuming a very significant amount of people, resources and energy.
The operators of the first two powers were defined in more or less free elections, more or less rigged depending on the case.
On the other hand, almost all the members of the third were appointed by other members of the same body, according to a system of merits and examinations that never ended, excluding personal accommodations and political alliances.
States used to be very complex structures that employed millions of people.
The number varied widely, but it can be estimated that, in the Rich World, one in four or five workers was employed by a state.
This included, of course, civil servants and administrators as well as teachers, police officers, doctors, nurses, garbage collectors, judges, soldiers, railway workers, investigators, firefighters and a very long etcetera.
Thus, the states spent a significant part of the country's money to meet their basic obligations.
Among them were the supposed representation and realization of the will of its citizens through its power structures;
its supposed defense against foreign threats that, in those days, did not usually appear;
the supposed care of your health, your education, your housing, your safety;
the supposed control of the sanitary, nutritional, environmental conditions and other contexts necessary for general survival;
the definition of those rules of coexistence called "laws" and their application according to the mechanisms of "justice";
the much talked about “monopoly of violence”, which made any private use more or less illegal.
All these expenses of the states were based on a decisive prerogative: their power to collect “taxes” from their citizens.
In other words: to raise the money supposedly necessary to fulfill all its functions.
Taxes were amounts of money that each state claimed for any economic movement of its subjects, and they used to be a percentage of said movement.
They could be indirect: the party that appropriated a state when any merchandise was sold or bought or any service rendered or required.
They could be direct: the part that appropriated what each citizen charged for his work or, even, of the properties, movable or immovable, productive or unproductive, that he owned.
The type of tax that each state practiced more and the proportions that it received defined its characteristics and were the subject of the most heated discussions.
Indirect taxes were considered “regressive”: they charged, proportionally, much more to the poorest citizens, who had to pay the same amount on each consumption as the richest —and that meant a larger portion of their income.
Direct taxes used to be considered more “progressive”, in that they charged more to those who had more – and, in many countries, their proportions increased as the amounts received or owned increased.
Tax money was the capital that the states had to carry out their activities.
These taxes were supposed to serve to “redistribute” wealth in some way: that part of the money of those who had more benefited those who had less by offering them different services —education, health, security, various inputs, subsidies, pensions— that were not they could get for themselves.
The theory was clear;
practice, often not.
An important part of the income from taxes was spent on the state apparatus, which many saw as excessive, or on investments that only benefited the sectors with the most power in it.
And taxes used to be the tool politicians in government used most to favor their friends—by charging them less than they should—or to consolidate their power.
The most common way was to use the money collected to give gifts to the poorest, establishing with them what was still called a relationship of “clientelist assistance”: the government in power —national, provincial, local— granted that money or goods and, in exchange, he expected his receivers to support him in elections, mobilizations or whatever he asked of them.
On the other hand, the differences in the ability to collect taxes —and therefore to spend them on their public policies— between the richest and poorest countries was another of the dominant inequalities.
The global average of the expenditure of each state was around 45% of its Gross Domestic Product, which was the figure, for example, of the United States, Israel, Australia.
The rich countries of Europe spent a little more —between 50 and 60— and the Asian countries considerably less —between 40 and 30%.
In most African countries and the poorest in Latin America, states spent less than 20% of their GDP.
The poorest states did not have the mechanisms, the credibility, the control necessary to collect more, and it was not enough to ensure the basic services that they had to offer.
The tax collection mechanisms were multiple.
The richest of the poor countries avoided them with their contacts and corruption, and the richest of the rich countries completed these mechanisms with legions of lawyers who took advantage of legal loopholes and globalization to pay as little as possible (see chapter 13).
To defend themselves —when they wanted to defend themselves— the states used two of their main prerogatives: the administration of justice and the monopoly of violence.
In those days, as always, justice was a mobile concept: “justice” is the set of laws and norms that a society accepts at a given moment.
Those laws and norms were always the result of a pact between the different sectors of a society, that is, an expression of the relations of forces in each society at that time.
The set of these laws defines what can or cannot be done in that society: a relative, variable set, with claims to the absolute.
Each society tends to believe that its idea of justice is something ahistorical, immutable, essential, like countries, but —like countries— there is nothing more variable: in Israel in Bible times it was fair to take an eye for an eye and kill anyone who worked on Saturday;
In the Christian Middle Ages it was fair to obtain confessions by torture and dip the offender's hand into boiling oil to see if his god would acquit him.
In that Third Decade, without going any further, it was fair in certain countries to stone an "adulterous" woman who, on the other side of the border, in a country with another justice, would not have even committed a contravention.
But throughout the world, then, justice consisted of upholding private property without fissures and the punishment of those who violated it—thieves, swindlers—and the “sanctity of human life”—as long as those who eventually desecrated it were not “ judges” or soldiers.
in a country with a different kind of justice, he would not have even committed a contravention.
But throughout the world, then, justice consisted of upholding private property without fissures and the punishment of those who violated it—thieves, swindlers—and the “sanctity of human life”—as long as those who eventually desecrated it were not “ judges” or soldiers.
in a country with a different kind of justice, he would not have even committed a contravention.
But throughout the world, then, justice consisted of upholding private property without fissures and the punishment of those who violated it—thieves, swindlers—and the “sanctity of human life”—as long as those who eventually desecrated it were not “ judges” or soldiers.
To sustain its justice, each country needed to maintain an apparatus, which was also called justice: the set of agencies, facilities, and personnel supposedly dedicated to forcing all its citizens to comply with its rules.
Its weak point was the people in charge of governing that apparatus: those flesh and blood characters called “judges”.
They were, in most cases, men and women who had reached their positions through a long process of mental homogenization and believed they deserved a series of privileges: in many countries they could not be removed, they received important salaries They did not pay taxes.
In some they even enjoyed a certain reputation;
in others they had a reputation for being easily corrupted.
And, even when they did not, their role was decisive in blocking changes and renewals: the majority were people of a conservative nature who used the texts of the laws —always interpretable— to give way to their prejudices.
That was, in fact, the main function of the highest body of the judicial apparatus —Supreme Court,
Headquarters of the Spanish Constitutional Court, in December 2022. EUROPA PRESS
The judicial apparatus was formally separated from these two powers.
But in many countries that separation was fictitious and their judges were particularly sensitive to suggestions and pressure from members of the government.
In addition, those “justice” mechanisms undoubtedly favored the wealthier litigants and defendants.
The myriad of legal quibbles that any trial included meant that they were often won by people who could afford the best lawyers—and lost by those who couldn't.
Due to all these characteristics, confidence in “justice” had diminished so much in many countries that, as we know, the search for new mechanisms began then.
In order for the decisions of justice to be applied, the states had to resort, we said, to another of their basic privileges: the much mentioned “monopoly of violence”.
We will deal with it in detail later (see chapter 22): almost all states had, then, their own professional human army, which should serve to repel any attack against their territory —and, eventually, launch it against external enemies.
And they also had other professional human armed forces called police —or civil guard, finance guard, gendarmerie, carabineros, etc.—, prepared to maintain order in public spaces, direct motor vehicle traffic and repress offenders, discover and arrest criminals, attack enemies of the government.
Those armed forces had, in most countries, very dubious reputations:
Almost every state had, along with its visible police, one or more "secret" corps dedicated to countering any attempt to undermine the machine of that state—or to tilt it in certain directions.
Parapolice control of the citizenry was a main function of the state apparatus.
And the inequality of resources of these states in the richest and poorest countries used to produce, also, an inequality in the forms of control: the richest states could exercise a "softer" control thanks to their abundance of means and instruments and their management of permanently updated data (see chapter 18), while the poorest, who did not have these resources, exercised a tougher, more direct, physical control.
The combined action of police and courts produced the most common form of punishment: confinement.
After millennia of highly varied corrections —which, in general, were merciless with the bodies of the inmates— for more than two centuries most of the punishments of the judicial system consisted in separating those bodies from the rest of the bodies of the social body.
They were called “prison sentences” and they consisted of locking up the convicted person for a time previously decided by a judge in enormous buildings, where hundreds or thousands of them were crowded into small cells, with few comforts and quite a few dangers.
This idea of deprivation of liberty was an exaltation of freedom: there was no worse punishment —except in the countries that maintained the death penalty (see chapter 23)— than that confinement.
Which had, to top it off, an extra strangeness:
the deposits were separated by gender, men with men, women with women, that is, part of the sentence consisted of not living together, for years, with people of the “opposite sex”.
In times when so many groups demanded an equal mix of men and women in all spaces and institutions, it never occurred to anyone to ask for it in prisons, as if it really did not apply there.
It was a good metaphor for the contradictions of the time.
Next installment
10. So little politics Stale democracies, disdained by many, defended themselves from the offensive of other forms of power —and sought their future.
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