In Max Webers most historically known essay entitled Politics as a Vocation, he gives his famous definition of the state; “the state is an entity which has a monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a given territory”. (Garner, 2010). When this definition is given a glance, it makes the state come across as a coercive, physically and mentally controlling body of authority that aims to keep a group of people in order through the use of force. When I personally think of state, a broader definition comes to mind, which includes areas of the state, what the state’s job is, and who the state is made up of. For example, in my mind state is a set of institutions that are not all necessarily governmental that work together to keep a population intact. Furthermore, i believe that the state consists of these institutions (hospitals, schools, organizations, etc.), governments at the federal and provincial level, and the constitutions that govern them. In addition to these entities I do agree with Weber that the state operates with a use of force because when looking back on the history of Canada the state did do just this to develop into what Canada as a state is today. A prominent example of this use of force is the Chinese Exclusion Act in British Columbia which restricted immigration of workers from China, and controlled where the Chinese who could afford to live here would be able to live in Vancouver. The state in this case exercised its use of force to ensure that the development of Canada would be just as intended, with no flaws and in perfect order. The state at the time believed the most efficient way to do this would be to forcefully control all aspects of life that were not ‘Canadian’. Another telling example shows that the Canadian state came to being through the use of force; the Riel Rebellion in which the Metis were forcefully removed from their land and required to work on MacDonald’s railway project.
My aim of this reflection is not, however intended to merely focus on the fact that Canada’s history proves that the state came into being through the use of force. I will show examples from two different articles from different time periods that suggest Max Weber’s definition of the state is narrow and that the term hegemony is an important aspect of defining the power of the state.
Antonio Gramsci wrote about this term, suggesting that the state controls its population not only through the use of force but through spontaneous consent. This means that the less powerful groups of people in society will follow the beliefs of the dominant group because it becomes common knowledge and these smaller groups subconsciously feel their security is in the hands of the dominant groups. Hegemony, as defined by Gramsci, is “the ability of the dominant class to project its own way of seeing the world so that those who are subordinated by it accept it as ‘common sense’ and ‘natural’.” (Chandler, 2010).
For this reflection I will focus on two examples of hegemony and compare and contrast them. These examples will show that the state can control the population with a use of force, but at the same time have society believe that this use of force is for the greater good.
The two articles are Queering National Security, the Cold War, and Canadian History, Surveillance and Resistance by Gary Kinsman and Patrizia Gentile, and Cultural Hegemony and the Race Definition Process in Chinatown, Vancouver: 1880-1980 by K.J Anderson. The former is about the administration that forced homosexual servants in the military and other government departments out of their positions solely because of their sexual orientation. The article by Anderson is about the Chinese exclusion measures that created Vancouver’s Chinatown. Both of these articles describe forceful actions taken by the state that are discriminatory, but accepted by society and considered for the greater good.
In Kinsman and Gentile, it is described that the focus of the time (during the Cold War) was on national security mainly because of the soviet threats and many dangers of the current order. This gave the state a reason to take advantage of its legitimate use of force. (Kinsman and Gentile, 2010). In Anderson, it is described that the 1875 Federal Government’s main focus was legitimizing the status of the ‘white citizen’ as opposed to the Chinese immigrant. “Federal officials, like their provincial counterparts saw it as both their moral calling and a means of political legitimacy to secure a white European order against those who would pass their deficiency on.” (Anderson, 1988). The articles then move onto examples of state officials speaking of these situations in a way that would persuade the public that what the state is doing is for the protection of the population. In Kinsman and Gentile, the CIA director of the 1950’s describes the homosexual as the ‘moral pervert’ and that this individual is a risk to national security (Kinsman and Gentile 2010). In the Anderson article it describes officials of the State such as Secretary J Chapleau who warned the white population about the evils that would take shape in the rise of Chinese immigration. (Anderson 1988).
In order for the state to have citizens make these ideologies ‘common sense’ and have them spontaneously consent there had to be descriptions of why they were implanting these policies. In Kinsman and Gentile, the states reason for the discharge of homosexuals was due to a character trait that was “associated with the dangerous, impure, unnatural, sick and abnormal” and that these homosexuals possessed “weaknesses, unreliability, and immoral unethical traits, which supposedly make [homosexuals] vulnerable to blackmail” (Kinsman and Gentile, 2010). In Anderson, a similar tactic was used by the state to describe the Chinese people at hand: “the Chinatown idea was made up of European assumptions about the inherent dirtiness, amorality, criminality, cunning, and unassimilability of ‘John Chinaman’.” (Anderson, 1988).
In conclusion, it is evident that in order for the state to have society spontaneously consent to irrational policies, they link unpleasant qualities with the specific ways of life just like they did when the homosexual officers and Chinese immigrants were described. The state uses coercion, not through force, but through state dominance and consent. In addition, I believe that it is mainly fear that motivates members of society to make discriminatory policies ‘common sense’ because the state is telling them that, for example, homosexuals in the military are causing a risk for communist blackmail, and since that is the exact opposite of what society wants, they will agree with anything the state can do to prevent this.
Works Cited
1. Anderson, K.J. (1988). Cultural Hegemony and the Race Definition Process in Chinatown, Vancouver: 1880-1980. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 6(2) 127-149.
2. Chandler, Daniel. Marxist Media Theory: Gramsci and Hegemony. Retrieved from the Aberystwyth University Media and Communication studies site: http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/marxism/marxism10.html.
3. Garner, Ferdinand, and Lawson. Introduction to Politics: Max Weber (1864-1920). Retrieved from Oxford University Press online resource centres: http://www.oup.com/uk/orc/bin/9780199231331/01student/keythinkers/weber/.
4. Kinsman, Gary and Patrizia Gentile (2010). Queering National Security, the Cold War, and Canadian History, Surveillance and Resistance. In Gary Kinsman and Patrizia Gentile (Eds.), The Canadian War on Queers: National Security as Sexual Regulation (pp. 1-25). Vancouver: UBC Press.
No comments:
Post a Comment