The state
59
rise of the welfare state) strongly intertwined more than in the time before, as the
state was not yet endowed with the financial, organisational and technological tools
that seem to make it omnipresent and omnipotent. Nonetheless, the two notions
do overlap neither conceptually nor in fact – think for example of the politi-
cal role recently played worldwide by non-governmental and other transnational
organisations.
Flexibility has to be shown with regard to the use of the word ‘state’. In accurate
terms it can be only referred to the modern European state as it was shaped in the
seventeenth and eighteenth century, and then spilled over to other continents, first
of all the Americas and much later (in the twentieth century) China, and by far
not only as a side effect of colonialism: Japan, which was never a colony, adopted
at the end of the nineteenth century a private law code that largely reproduced
the German
Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch. It was Europe, primarily France, that ‘invented’
the modern state in its self-definition and organisation, both unthinkable with-
out the fitting legal system. It was adopted elsewhere because doing so favoured
the modernisation process in which more and more extra-European countries
were engaging. Nonetheless, we keep using ‘state’ to indicate the period in Chinese
history (BCE 453–221) called of the seven Warring States (or Kingdoms), or speak
of the Roman state, which in fact anticipated many features of its modern cousin.
Neither the history of the word nor that of the thing itself can be told here in a
way respecting its complexity. Suffice it to say that it derives from the Latin expres-
sion
status rei publicae/the state of public matters or – in the English discourse about
politics – of the commonwealth. The career that later made ‘state’ the key word in
the lexicon of institutions started in 1513 with the first line in Machiavelli’s
Principe
(1532): ‘All states, all powers, that have held and hold rule over men have been and
are either republics or principalities’.
2
This career was shining in countries with a
powerful, omnipresent central power such as France and Spain with their empires,
the Hapsburg Empire, Prussia and Russia with its huge
Государственное,
3
while
the Anglophone culture is likely to have been the last in reluctantly adopting it –
in the mid seventeenth century Hobbes was still speaking of ‘Commonwealth’.
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: