10 What is politics?
For power in human and social relationships we have an overarching definition,
which is in its simplicity logically elegant: power it is
the ability of actor A to make
actor B (or actors B, C, D . . .)
act as B would not otherwise act. This definition is called
relational because power is all-defined as a feature intrinsic to and deriving from the
relationships among actors. It tells us nothing about the actors or the tools used by
them, and it does without ‘thick’ notions such as will or interest. Power is not just
actual power, as it is rather an ability – as Thomas Hobbes noted – projecting itself
in the future, promising to bring us ‘some future apparent Good’ (Hobbes 1651, 58).
In this definition B would not act like that without A’s intervention, but not
necessarily because s/he or it is opposed to A’s indications. For example, traffic laws
and the enforcing agencies have the power to make a boy or girl who is learning
to drive respect traffic rules, not however against their will or interest – on the
road, driving by the rules is first of all in my own interest. Maybe
we simply did
not know about them, and do easily agree to submit to them; but without the
power of the parliament passing the rules and the administration enforcing them,
we would not drive in a regular manner;
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on the other hand, finding on every ride
an agreement on how to drive with all other traffic participants would be infeasible,
time-wasting and lastly life-destroying. Political power with the same formal fea-
tures (legislation+enforcement in a sovereign polity) can result either in top-down
impositions (‘pay more taxes’, ‘obey the conscription law and go to the front’) or in
binding central coordination, as in the case cited.
Now, the scattered presence of this second moment of coordination does not go
as far as to justify Hannah Arendt’s definition of power as ‘to act in concert’ (Arendt
1972, 143); this is a shapeless view on power and does
not at all fit political power,
from which the moments of verticality and asymmetry (see §6 in this chapter)
cannot be removed. Even power instances in which the moment of coordination
is significant cannot be seen as a ‘concert’ of equal voices, because in any case the
coordinator possesses a better knowledge of the process than everybody else and
insofar also more power.
All-inclusive (from the economy to human relationships in the family) as it is
in its abstractness, the relational definition is a good basis for understanding power,
though not capable of closing in on what we strive to grasp in its specificity:
political
power. We move therefore to a second definition, which indicates the instrument
used by political
power to assert itself, insofar as adding to the formal structure
described in the first definition an element related to its content. This second
instrumental or substantive
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definition reads:
A’s ability to make B act as B would not
otherwise do constitutes political power if it is guaranteed in the very last instance by A being
able to use or threaten force for the implementation of her/his/its preferences. We will later
see how in the entities called states, political power is endowed with the legitimate
monopoly of force.
It is wrong to say that political power consists primarily or exclusively of
force.
Not even the
prince of political realism, Niccolò Machiavelli, went so far, given that
in Chapter XII of
Il Principe/The Prince he wrote that state power relies on both
Politics and power
11
‘good laws’ and ‘good armies’ (Machiavelli 1532, 42). It is one thing to say that power
uses or threatens force in the first place in order to impose its preferences; it is a very
different thing to say that domestically or internationally political power sometimes
uses force, but mostly employs other procedures to assert itself, while in any case,
these other procedures are backed by A’s and B’s
knowledge that, if they fail, force
could (but will not necessarily) be in the very last instance brought to bear. B can be
a tax evader, in the countries in which tax evaders can be given prison sentences, or
a region on its way to unilaterally seceding from the home country, or a state caught
in an irreconcilable tension with state A. Guaranteeing A’s power is different from
being the whole of it, while force remains in the ‘horizon of expectations’
16
of the
participants of a political game. More on the link between political power and force
as well as on the notion of influence will be said in the following.
Instead of force we can almost interchangeably say
violence. I do not see chances
for a conceptual
distinction to be established, not at all in the untenable sense that
force is legitimate whereas violence is not. When we say violence we are simply
putting the accent on how B perceives the effect of the physical force applied by
A on her or his body. Force or violence though it be, it is nearly always – except
in duels between princes, abounding in literature rather than in history –
organised
force or violence (police forces domestically; armies, navies, air forces and cyber war
units internationally), as political interaction happens among collective actors such
as parties or countries.
Power guaranteed by force is not the only way
how actor A can change the
behaviour of actor B. Going back to the relational definition, A can try to drive B to
acting as B would have not otherwise acted also without relying on the guarantee
of last resort provided by force and without expecting B to act in a binding way
according to A’s preferences. In this case we speak of
influence rather than power, a
concept that explains many an interaction in the political field and is particularly
important in international relations. Influence is however a complement rather
than an alternative to political power guaranteed by force, which mostly finds its
culmination and stabilisation in state power, supported by the monopoly of legiti-
mate force.
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