However, instead of taking this force for granted, as though it was part and
parcel of ‘human nature’ (as Hobbes does), it could be argued that force arises
where people lack what we have called common interests. Policies that cement and
reinforce common interests help to make government work. There is a case for
resorting to force where this is the only way of implementing policies that will
strengthen common interests. The debate around the war in Iraq revolved around
the question as to whether the use of force, in the form of a war, was the only way
to defeat Saddam Hussein’s regime, and whether the use of force could lead to a
democratic reconstruction of the country.
It is true that force can never really be legitimate since it necessarily deprives
those whom it targets of their freedom, but it can be justifiably used if it is the only
way to provide a breathing space for policies that will cement common interests.
For example, it could prove impossible to involve residents in running their own
lives on a rundown housing estate, until force has been used to stop gangs from
intimidating ordinary people.
In early tribal societies, conflicts of interest were settled through moral and social
pressures. This historical reality is a huge resource for pursuing the argument that
it is possible to find ways of bringing about order that dispense altogether with the
use of the state. Max Weber’s definition has implications that he himself did not
see. When he read that Leon Trotsky had said that ‘every state is founded on force’,
he commented ‘That indeed is right’ (Gerth and Wright Mills, 1991: 78). But in
making this endorsement, Weber had not committed himself to Trotsky’s Marxist
analysis of politics. In the same way, we find Weber’s definition immensely useful,
even though we see implications in the definition of which Weber himself would
not have approved.
Moreover, it is not only tribal societies in the dim and distant past that were
stateless. It is now several decades since Hedley Bull (1977) noted the ‘awkward
facts’ confronting a state-centric view of the world. These awkward facts embrace:- the increasing importance of international law as a body of rules which has no
wider monopoly of legitimate force to impose it; - the globalisation of the economy which makes the notion of autonomous state
sovereignty peculiarly archaic; and - a growing number of issues – Bull mentioned the environment in particular –
which can only be settled through acknowledging the common interests of
contending parties.
This is why Bull characterised the international order as an ‘anarchical society’,
and it is clear that developments of the kind noted above mean that statist solutions
are becoming ever more dangerous as a mode of resolving conflicts. The increasing
degree of interdependence that characterises both domestic and international society
makes the resort to force (the chosen and distinctive instrument of the state)
increasingly counterproductive. The fact that criminal individuals like criminal states
are also the beneficiaries of a technology of violence (whose sophistication escalates
all the time) means that if we want a secure future, it is vital that we learn how to
settle differences without the use of force, i.e. in a stateless manner.
As we will demonstrate later in Chapter 11, anarchists also wish to do away
with the state, but they seek to abolish it rather than see it wither away, and they
28 Part 1 Classical ideas