Examining States and State-Society Relations from the Feminist and Environmentalist Optics
Precis
When communism crumbled with the disintegration of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and when the Cold War ended towards the latter part of the 20th century, the world thought that a new hope to resolve the enduring social ills was born in the fundamental tenets of liberal democracy. However, even those states that espoused these values have been confronted by acute political predicaments such as questions of legitimacy, authority and autonomy compounding the growing concerns on trans-geographic issues of trafficking, environmental degradation, racial discrimination, gender oppression, ethnic minoritization, religious extremism and armed conflict among many others.
At the turn of the century, feminism and environmentalism took centerstage as key development agenda across the globe. These currents have left an indelible mark in contemporary politics challenging states to ferret out the value of these marginal issues in the ever changing society. Central to these problems is the inquiry into the role of the state, either from the point of view of being the cause of social and political decay or as the answer to these crises. Critically too, power relations need to be interrogated amidst the backdrop of poststructuralist discourses on feminism and environmentalism so as to offer a new configuration of a viable state-society relations. A reflection on the normative value of the state becomes imperative in this respect.
The objectives of this essay are first, to identify the fundamental sameness of feminism and environmentalism from the works of Johanna Kantola (2006) and Matthew Paterson, Peter Doran and John Barry (2006), respectively. The comparative analysis will highlight key themes that will establish the supposition that contemporary theories of the state are founded on its anti status quo standpoint and that the approaches necessitate a reconstruction of state-society relations, where power should be diffused rather than centralized and where state view should be peripheral rather than focal.
From State-centered to Society-centered Theory of State
In the attempt to “bringing the state back in” (Skocpol, 1985), several waves of theorizing have shown the centrality of state and its pre-eminence in governing societies underpinned by various assumptions pointing to the necessity of keeping the state alive. For instance, the theory of elitism endures in its relevance in explaining that power is still contained within the control of the few who perpetuate themselves into a position that monopolizes authority through elite circulation (Evans, 2006:57). By focusing their analysis on the role of the elites in maintaining command over the processes of rendering political choices, the contemporary elite theorists have neglected up to some extent the importance of appreciating the relationship of the state with the society. On the other hand, the normative framing of pluralism to limit the role of the state presupposes their fear of a highly centralized power (Smith, 2006:36). This finds resonance in the neo-Weberian contemplation of the state as Vom Hau (2015:136) described it to be a coercive structure that can forcibly bind everyone with every decision it fashions. Also, some neo-Marxist interpretations show how the state was instrumentalized by the ruling class to ensure the security of capitalist interest (Hay, 2006:61) and the perpetuation of the economic power of the bourgeoisie.
While a plethora of theories tried to resurrect the pivotal role of the state in understanding politics, from its being drowned in postmodern debates, the contemporary approaches found in feminism, environmentalism and poststructuralism seem to pull the locus of analysis away from a very state-centered paradigm to a society-centered template of state theorizing. By this, the state becomes more ambiguous as horizontal proliferation of power dynamics create more self-organizing, agenda-based and anti-status quo networks like the circles advancing the feminist and environmentalist ethos.
To exemplify this moving away from the state-centered reasoning, Kantola (2006:118) narrates the paralysis in the feminist debates brought about by the divide between the “in” group or those who see integration as key to reforming the state and the “out” group or those who see autonomy from the state as a more effective approach. The former asserts that changing the state must come from within while the latter believes that it has to emanate from the outside to avoid co-optation especially that the state is organically patriarchal. The “out” group represented by the Radical Feminists hints on reclaiming some amount of power from the center by bringing it to the peripheries and use the same to reform the state. Citing Judith Allen, Kantola (2006:125) brings up the deconstruction of the state from the poststructuralist position arguing that the state as a class in itself must be abandoned because it is a notion too homogenized to address the very disparate realities of the feminist question.
Meanwhile, for Green Theorists like Paterson, Duran and Barry (citing Fritz Schumacher and WCED, 2006:137,138), who spoke about two spatial metaphors of ‘small is beautiful’ and ‘the earth is one but the world is not,’ the state is to be understood in two ways. On one hand, it is a central arena of decision-making processes to pursue an ecological agenda. They view the state as “the site around which centralized decisions coalesce, and where forms of representation concerning the impacts of ecological degradation are articulated” (2006:138). On the other hand, the state is perceived as a political actor that engages a global regime to manage the trans-geographic effects of environmental hazards. Here, the territorial composition of states across the globe, described as fragmented and distanced, makes it difficult for co-operation, a mechanism needed to face an ecological challenge that spans beyond territorial boundaries. States typically behave to protect its internal interests and given the global scope of environmentalism, the challenge therefore is in constituting a world order to avoid environmental breakdown. In both contemplations of the state, the green arguments assert that the more effective way to address environmental concerns is to move away from the center of power and democratize decision making through empowering local ecological communities, both from the standpoint of the domestic sphere and the international sphere. These local ecological communities, implied as a logical necessity born of the inadequacy of a centrally consolidated state, reflect the emphasis by the green supporters on the society’s role in state building making green theory more of a society-centered approach than state-centered in understanding the state.
Methodical “sameness” in state engagement
Towards this shift from state-centered to society-centered approaches of engaging the state, both feminism and environmentalism share a number of common ideation of the the concept of the state. In this section, I will sketch a comparative description of these ontological sameness by arguing that feminism and environmentalism are anti-status quo theories, where they see the state, being the center of power, as a problematic institution and as an instrument of oppression but at the same time, a powerful structure that allows potential reforms.
Belief in the state as the ‘architect’ of the status quo
The state is responsible in perpetuating the status quo and both the feminists and the environmentalists are challenging it for being contrary to the agenda that they are advancing – women’s liberation for the feminists and environmental protection for the green supporters. The subjugation of women and the destruction of the environment are anathema to the goals of the two contemporary approaches to the state.
Kantola (2006) claims that there are different strands of feminism and asserts that there is not only one feminism but several feminisms – all are challenging the state’s current political order. While most of the time, the different traditions of feminism contradict each other, they all agree in the claim that the entire state structure and processes are gendered and patriarchal. She said that the “feminism’s main contribution has been to expose the gendered and patriarchal character of state institutions, practices and policies,” (2006:118).
To most feminists, the status quo or the current political order is one that glorifies the supremacy of male dominance and the subjugation of women. This needs to be challenged so as to reform the order from subjugation to emancipation, from marginalization to liberation and from subordination to equalization of women.
The liberal feminists look at the sate primarily as a male-interest-wielding instrument where male-defined assumptions are fossilized within its institutional structures through policy generation, obliterating in the equation gender-specific interests and needs of women (2006:119). On the other hand, radical feminists believe that the only acceptable social and political arrangement to the state is patriarchy because the state itself is essentially patriarchal and “patriarchy is always about the rule of men, male supremacy” (Kantola citing Millett, 2006:120). This oppresses women not only because the state is captured by male-dominance but also because the state in its most organic form is the embodiment of patriarchy, no matter the form of the state. Patriarchy as the status quo opposed by the feminists found support from Marxist’s capitalist state (Kantola, 2006:122) by establishing that patriarchy and capitalism are mutually reinforcing each other reducing women’s role to reproduction in the family as a way of sustaining capitalism. Moreover, the Nordic model of feminism reaffirms the observation that patriarchy has set itself as the permanent archetype of state rule by mirroring the “private dependency of women on individual men to a public dependency on the state” (2006:124) whenever the welfare states provide everything women need.
Taken from the lens of environmentalism, the state is also blamed for being the cause of further destroying the environment by instituting the existing state of affairs, that is, a policy of consumption rather than conservation, a dogma based on exploitation rather than preservation and an ethic of harm rather than protection.
The tendency to consume, exploit and harm are alleged to be naturally a part of the normal actions of the state (Paterson, et.al, 2006:140), the state being the “ultimate hierarchical institution which consolidates all other hierarchical institutions” (2006:141). Jeopardizing the ecological resources that keep all people alive is within the regular behavior of the state. This is entrenched in the state’s natural instinct towards self-preservation where overconsumption of natural resources becomes necessary to support its military capability building efforts and other mechanisms for survival. States compete with each other and in competing, the battlefield becomes rivalrous and access to accumulation of power based on finite and limited resources gets narrower.
This analysis made by the green theorists echoes the earlier assertions of Charles Tilly in his Coercion, Capital and European States (1990), who postulated in part that,
“With a nation in arms, a state’s extractive power rose enormously, as did the claims of citizens on their state. Although a call to defend the fatherland stimulated extraordinary support for the efforts of war, reliance on mass conscription, confiscatory taxation, and conversion of production to the ends of war made any state vulnerable to popular resistance, and answerable to popular demands, as never before. From that point onward, the character of war changed, and the relationship between warmaking and civilian politics altered fundamentally.” (p. 83)
Clearly, when accumulation and concentration of coercion grow together, they form states making resource extraction an intrinsic element of the state. To the green supporters, this must be interrogated and eventually re-formulated for being an anomaly, that is, as the state consumes to survive, it actually accumulates more resources to its own demise, if not arrested the soonest possible time.
Challenging the status quo therefore, requires a strategic probing into the role not only of the state but also of the society represented by the feminists and environmentalists. The vacillating core of power between state and society needs to be re-interrogated in order to formulate a better and more effective approach at negotiating a mutually beneficial arrangement to liberate women and allow nature to regenerate. Otherwise, the state with all its powers, may successfully immortalize the status quo of patriarchy and environmental decay.
Changing the status quo: Inside-outside approaches to the state
Changing the status quo vary from one tradition to another. The environmentalists seem to combine the approaches of both radical feminism and liberal feminism in challenging the current order of the state. For the environmentalists, a green state that exhibits a strong ecologically modernizing structure is the “passive-exclusive” form emerging from the German model (Paterson, et.al. citing Dryzek et.al., 2006:148). This state form presupposes the sifting of policy ideas, beliefs and norms from an engaged citizenry to the state through a widely held exogenous compression without obliterating the divide between state and society allowing the free growth and development of such ideas and providing a space for dialectical interactions of divergent paradigms that can lead to the formulation of a strategic approach among environmentalists to re-engineer the policy landscape of the state.
But this externally driven engagement with the state does not insinuate a form of anarchism (2006:144) which calls for the undoing of the state to give way to independent smaller insular villages that are self-organizing with defined horizontal relationships akin to associationalist federation and a vertical interaction in a form similar to a consociationalist direct democracy. The consequence of this arrangement, if pursued, gives little room for inter-community cooperation where pockets of little states develop a strong propensity for egotism. While they may use coercive forces to protect their self-interests, they may also develop indifference in relation to equally egotistic self-interested insular villages.
The green theorists warn of looking at the state from an essentialist point of view, that is, treating the state not only a part of the problem but the problem itself because this necessarily calls for the destruction of the state. Nor can the state be viewed as self-reforming and is able to correct itself to achieve the goals of ecological modernization with an indifferent citizenry. Either way, the state shall fail with an absent social pressure. At best, the state must be approached by the communities of people with an end view that it is a powerful tool for the rectification of its anti-ecological posture. This necessitates an exogenous wave of social force requiring society to negotiate with the state. In short, “the green state should be made by the green citizens gathered within civil society (both within and outside the state), forcing the states (and the state system internationally) to change” (2006:152-153), in order to achieve the green agenda.
The green approach echoes the parallel debates in feminism on how states must be engaged to challenge the status quo. Like the environmentalists, the feminists also see the state as a political space (Kantola, 2006:132) where power analyses occur. This space must be captured both from the inside and the outside in order to reverse the status quo in favor of the feminist agenda. An astute mix of endogenous and exogenous strategies to state engagement assumes higher chances of reforming the state.
To the liberal feminists, the state is just “a neutral arbiter between different interest groups (2006:119) including women. As a proposal, liberal feminists assert the maximization of the policy-making arena for it to yield gender-equalizing laws and elevate the status of women at par with men. This is a position of engaging the state from within. There is an assumption here that the women’s cause is just one of the many other equally important causes that the state must carefully account for in managing a society with pluralist interests. This implies therefore that the feminist push for recognition as equals has to compete with other interests like religious tolerance, ethnic representation, LGBT identification, environmentalism among others. Working from within the state structures somehow applies to “Nordic feminists” and ‘femocrats’ (2006:123), or feminists who work within the bureaucratic state structures. The centrality of the role of the state in supporting the enfranchisement of women is key to understanding that the logical approach these group of feminists pursue is one that optimizes their presence within the bureaucratic contraptions of the state as may be found in state feminism or gender mainstreaming (2006:132) initiatives.
Meanwhile, the state is not only an apparatus to oppress women but in itself the oppressor of women according to the radical feminists. Thus, if the state is in itself the oppressor, the whole structure propagating male dominance must be destroyed as suggested by the radical feminists. This comes close to the Marxian foresight of the state where it has to be eventually destroyed if the goal of women’s liberation is to be achieved (2006:121). If it is the state that imprisons women, the state has to be shattered to free women from bondage. This is an admission that the state cannot address women’s concerns because it is essentially patriarchal. Therefore, women must step out of the state because they cannot challenge patriarchy from the inside. It has to turn to an externally organized community to attack patriarchy because the state cannot be trusted to free women since the state and patriarchy are one and the same. The socialist feminists followed this same approach with a more nuanced stance towards the subordination of women in the home as a means to perpetuate the capitalist capture of the state (2006:122).
For poststructuralist feminists, the debate on engaging the state from inside or from outside can be too limiting given the complexity of the state and its practices (2005:126). Instead, feminists, according to them, must contribute in reconstructing the state through and from multi-faceted platforms until the most effective approach is formulated borne of the multi-layered experiences of women with the state.
The density of methodologies in engaging the state from the lens of contemporary approaches require a more context-specific analytical tool to unravel the input of the state in both perpetuating and correcting the empowerment or disempowerment of women and the preservation or the destruction of ecology. The same scrutiny is needed to identify the entry points through which the society may be able to engage not only the state’s “power over” but more importantly its “power to” transform social inequities into a negotiated equilibrium. For poststructuralists, the nexus of state-society relations in reference to the feminist and green agenda shall be the core of an evolving discourse in the years to come.
Existential ‘otherness’ in state ideation
Every world view we have explored thus far, while sharing some forms of sameness in their approaches to state engagement, have varying reflections on the concept of the state itself. The ideation ranges from looking at the state as an arbiter to an institutional rule, as a structured system to a welfare provider and as an arena of discourse to a space for political negotiations.
This simply proves that to feminists, along with its different traditions, and to the environmentalists, the state fluctuates between the center and the edges and therefore must be appreciated as transcendental of its traditional hypothesis as being the focal point. Instead, it could be understood as well, as shown by the contemporary theorists, from the peripheral point of view especially when, in the language of the poststucturalists, the feminists and the environmentalists ‘de-center’ from the state by acknowledging that there is no singular perception of the state. This is a position that criticizes the “enthroning” (Finlayson and Martin, 2006:156) of reason from the structuralist frame. This implies that the power that belongs to the state must be re-captured by the anti-status quo aggregates in order to effectively challenge the existing political order both from within and outside the state. Therefore, power needs to be circulated rather than concentrated in the center, that is, the state.
The liberal feminists understand the state as a ‘neutral arbiter’ (Kantola, 2006:119) of interests following their experiences in working with state policy-enacting structures. This is different from the radical feminists’ take on the state as an institutional rule of men, the embodiment of patriarchy (2006:120) stemming from their world view of state-generated oppression against women. For socialist feminism, the state follows a dual mutually-reinforcing structures of capitalism and patriarchy (2006:122) although with special slant towards capitalism as this was advanced by women in the labor force who saw their subjugation as a state-orchestrated mechanism to reinforce the rule of the capital elites. Nordic feminism on the other hand emanates from the immersion of women in the bureaucracy of welfare states that provided women-specific indulgences cultivating an attitude of state dependency (2006:124).
Whereas, the ideal green state for environmentalists follows the tenets of ‘ecological democracy’ (Paterson et.al., citing Eckersley, 2006:150) which departs from the typical template of liberal democracy and where the regular assumptions revolve around satisfying the state’s material consumerism. They champion a state that puts premium on the participation of the society, preferentially of those distressed by ecological risks in decisively defining policies or choices linked with contrary or favorable consequences to the ecology. To them, the state is where political negotiations transpire to advance a green ecology.
All of these ideation of the state are fragments of a discursive proposition from the poststructuralists who argued that the formulation of a state theory is contingent upon every feminists’ or every environmentalists’ phenomenological encounter with the state. The state must be understood therefore, according to the dynamism of the political processes (Finlayson and Martin, 2006:170). As such, the state of the feminists is a reality formed from their engagements with the state and the state of the environmentalists is also an ideation resulting from its negotiations with the state. For poststructuralists, they all deserve to be honored and respected.
Synopsis
The brief survey on feminism, environmentalism and poststructuralism presents to us conflicting, though not excluding, claims of the state. We have seen that what is more material, is not the question on what the state is but on how the state should be engaged. In a world with intricate social crises, strengthening state-society relations becomes imperative. Given the anti status quo bearing of feminism and environmentalism, in a society that questions centrality of reason and celebrates individualism instead, their agenda must be advanced both through inside and outside the state. As such, these groups must be empowered to negotiate with the state in a space that recognizes equal power relations, in an arena that honors the powers from the margins and in a context that values connections between the state and the society, “having the ability to have the feet in both camps [the state and the civil society] and the heart in empowerment” (Paterson, et.al. citing Alex Begg, 2006:154).
(Photo from google)
References Cited
Evans, Mark. “Elitism.” In The State: Theories and Issues, edited by Colin Hay, Michael Lister and David Marsh, 39-58. Basingstoke, United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Finlayson, Alan and James Martin. “Poststructuralism.” The State: Theories and Issues, edited by Colin Hay, Michael Lister and David Marsh, 155-171. Basingstoke, United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Hay, Colin. “(What’s Marxist About) Marxist State Theory?” In The State: Theories and Issues, edited by Colin Hay, Michael Lister and David Marsh, 59-78. Basingstoke, United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Kantola, Johanna. “Feminism.” In The State: Theories and Issues, edited by Colin Hay, Michael Lister and David Marsh, 118-134. Basingstoke, United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Paterson, Matthew, Peter Doran and John Barry. “Green Theory.” The State: Theories and Issues, edited by Colin Hay, Michael Lister and David Marsh, 135-154. Basingstoke, United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Skocpol, Theda. “Bringing the State In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research.” In Bringing the State Back In, edited by Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol, 3-37. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Smith, Martin. “Pluralism.” In The State: Theories and Issues, edited by Colin Hay, Michael Lister and David Marsh, 21-38. Basingstoke, United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Tilly, Charles. Coercion, Capital, and European States. AD 990-1990. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990, 67-122.
Vom Hau, Matthias. “State Theory: Four Analytical Traditions.” In The Oxford Handbook of Transformations of the State, edited by Stephan Leibfried, Evelyne Huber, Matthew Lange, Jonah D. Levy, Frank Nullmeier and John D. Stephens, 131-151. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2015.
