The Changing Nature of Political Power

In the contemporary world the traditional concern of political thought and action has become of declining relevance. On the one hand, the progressive dispersal of power among wider and wider sections of the population, and the increasing reluctance of any to question the Tightness of that process, has reduced the scope for controversy, or for striking new theories about the proper organization of political power within national states. Once a democratic system has been established, political debate and action have increasingly concerned questions of relatively marginal importance: the precise relationship between legislature, executive and judiciary, the details of parliamentary scrutiny and enquiry, the minutiae of the legislative or electoral process, the precise balance between the public and private sectors of the economy. The most important change in the way power is organized has already occurred.

At the same time the process of democratization has led to an increasing tyranny by the majority. This has brought a decline in the variety of the political prescriptions on offer. For none can diverge too far from what the majority is thought to desire. Political programmes, even those of opposing parties, become more and more alike. Socialist parties, which only fifty years ago offered programmes of full-blooded economic and political change — a radical extension of state power, massive nationalization and large extensions in welfare services, financed by substantial increase in taxation — now fear to offer anything more than marginal variations in the existing system, for fear of alienating the electorates to which they appeal. Conservative governments are not able, for all their rhetoric, to dismantle the welfare state, to reduce the generous medical and pension benefits, or to cut back the high levels of public expenditure they once so vigorously denounced. Increasingly political controversy is confined to minor details of the organization of national life.

But there is a more important reason why traditional political concerns, related to the organization of state power, has become of less significance in modern times. This is that the power of states is itself far less than in earlier days. There is a paradox in this. On the surface the power of national governments in the modern world is greater than ever before.

International Systems

International systems live precariously. Every «world order» expresses an aspiration to permanence. With each century, the duration of international systems has been shrinking. The order that grew out of the Peace of Westphalia lasted 150 years; the international system created by the Congress of Vienna maintained itself for a hundred years; the international order characterized by the Cold War ended after forty years. Never before have the components of world order, their capacity to interact, and their goals all changed quite so rapidly, so deeply, or so globally.

Whenever the entities constituting the international system change their character, a period of turmoil inevitably follows. The Thirty Years' War was in large part about the transition from feudal societies based on tradition and claims of universality to the modern state system. The wars of the French Revolution marked the transition to the nation-state defined by common language and culture. The wars of the twentieth century were caused by the disintegration of the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, the challenge to the dominance of Europe, and the end of colonialism. In each transition, what had been taken for granted suddenly became anachronistic: multinational states in the nineteenth century, colonialism in the twentieth.

Since the Congress of Vienna, foreign policy has related nations to each other — hence the term «international relations». In the nineteenth century, the appearance of even one new nation — such as the united Germany — produced decades of turmoil. Since the end of the Second World War, nearly a hundred new nations have come into being, many of them quite different from the historic European nation-state. The collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and the breakup of Yugoslavia have spawned another twenty nations, many of which have concentrated on re-enacting century-old bloodlusts.

The nineteenth-century European nation was based on common language and culture, and, given the technology of the times, provided the optimum framework for security, economic growth, and for influencing international events. In the post-Cold War world, the traditional European nation-states — the countries which formed the Concert of Europe until the First World War — lack the resources for a global role. The success of their effort to consolidate themselves into the European Union will determine their future influence. United, Europe will continue as a Great Power; divided into national states, it will slide into secondary status.