UPDATE II:
John Robb’s incisive analysis of Hezbollah’s performance against Israel’s IDF has particular salience for this discussion. Israel’s unwillingness to accept casualties or inflict them effectively ( either by accurately hitting a high ratio of Hezbollah fighters or callously using the same WWII meat-grinder tactics Russia used when it took Grozny) has put the IDF at an uncharacteristic military disadvantage in Lebanon. The IDF can chew up Hezbollah but not without bringing it’s full power to bear and inflicting massive civilian casualties
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Daniel Nexon:
July 30th, 2006 at 10:29 am
Mark, very provocative and thoughtful. Expect a reply in the near future.
Can’t resist one quick note, though: I said “social-democratic or otherwise ‘statist’…” Conservative nationalism would certainly qualify, and MacArthur, moreover, was an agent–albeit a significantly autonomous one–of Truman’s administration.
mark:
July 30th, 2006 at 3:40 pm
Hi Dan,
Bismark was certainly a paternalist who enginered the first social welfare programs (albeit out of pragmatic political concerns) so I agree he slides into the statist column.
look forward to your post & your book ( when is that scheduled to be out roughly ? )
Andrew:
July 30th, 2006 at 6:50 pm
Mark,
The difference between scope and strength when talking about “strong” states should be noted. However, in a state like the US where the state is relatively limited in scope, but strong within that range of functions, global guerrillas have found considerable space to operate given the limited scope of the state. Yet, as evidenced by the recent news stories of foiled plots, the US state is quite strong when it comes to law enforcement and other domestic counterterrorism missions, despite its relative (though growing) uninvolvement in the private affairs of its citizens.
Building this sort of capacity in nascent states is not easy. It is not much easier expand the scope of new states than it is to grow the strength of institutions, particularly when faced with guerrillas’ own version of EBO. Thus scope can be expanded in name, but for state power to have true reach the state must be able to exercise power in a certain area, or just the same, choose not to exercise power in a certain area yet still maintain legitimacy. Strength and scope are therefore, at least partly, functions of legitimacy and the first order of legitimacy is the legitimate control of the use of violence.
And the question of demographics is an important one for weak states, though often overlooked. If demographics are key, was the notion of a unified, democratic Iraq stillborn and a more “Baltic” solution inevitable. Perhaps something I will examine after giving it some thought.
mark:
July 31st, 2006 at 2:42 pm
“The difference between scope and strength when talking about “strong” states should be noted”
Point well taken.
Andrew, send me a link if you would when you have a post up on this topic
Isaiah Roberts:
October 6th, 2010 at 7:05 pm
video blogging consumes more server bandwidth than traditional text blogging but video blogging is more exciting*.,