The State

Countries, states and governments are terms that we confuse with each other when we should treat them separately and know how to distinguish one from the other. A country is physical and it has a name. It is Brazil with its incredible mix of people, its cities, Rio, samba and carnaval (and much, much more), its mountains and rivers, the Amazon, and its coastline, its economy and its amazing (at least it has been in the past) football team. That’s what we think of when we think of Brazil.

But Brazil, like every country, has a state and its has a government. Now both of these things are where power lies. But it helps us to distinguish between the two things if we first think of one as permanent, and that is the state, and one as temporary, and that is the government. One has political power, the government, and one is the mechanism by which that power is enforced, and that is the state.

So, the state is the bureaucracy, i.e. the civil service, and though in some states the top levels of the civil service will change with the government, in others it doesn’t and in all states, the civil service reaches right down to the people we deal with in tax offices, welfare providers, and so on. The state is the coercive force, imposing the government’s will. Indeed, it has a monopoly on legitimate coercive power: the police, the judiciary and the army. And that bureaucracy we mentioned is all the time checking that the citizens (or subjects) are obeying the state, paying their taxes and obeying the laws. The state will also in most cases (though Britain is something of an exception) have a written constitution that the government and opposition parties have to operate within.

There will be a head of state, and this can blur the lines between state and government for in some countries, like Saudi Arabia, there is a monarch which has political power, whereas in states like Britain, the monarch is a notional role unifying the people but with no real political power. And then there are republics which generally have a president as head of state who can have a great deal of power, as in France, and can also be head of the government, as in America.

There has also been attempts to personalise the state: Britannia, Uncle Sam, the Fatherland, Mother Russia. But don’t let that fool you. The state is a particularly impersonal beast!

So, think of the state as permanent and think of it as a coercive force with a monopoly of legitimate coercive power.