The Science of Everything Podcast - Episode 39: Sovereignty and the State

Episode Date: December 6, 2012

An overview of the state as understood in political science, including a discussion of the meaning of terms like ‘state’, ‘country’ and ‘nation’, and a summary of some of the different types of states, including unitary, federal, and confederal. I also discuss some of the core principles of government in modern states, including sovereignty, the rule of law, separation of powers, and separation of church and state.

You're listening to The Science of Everything podcast, episode 39, sovereignty, constitutions, and the state. And I'm your host, James Fodor. In this episode, we're going to look at the core principles of modern governments and states, including a look at some of the different terminologies, how the different words like nation, state, country, and so on are used. And then we'll look at some of the principles of modern government, including sovereignty, which is a very important topic in political science, the rule of law, representation, separation of, powers, suppression of church and state, and a number of other such things. Recommended pre-listing for this episode is episode 30, Systems of Government,

which will give you some of the background that will be helpful in understanding the things I'm talking about in this episode. Just one clarification. In episode 30, we looked at the different types of systems of government, that is the way of running a country. In this episode, we're going to look at some of the different types of states, which is not the same thing. It's not... types of states is not the way that a country is run, it's the setup of the country itself. This is not the same, although it's often related, and I'll clarify the exact difference a little bit more later on when we get to that part of the episode. But for the moment, let's start off with some basic terminology and some words that people

often get confused in these contexts. So first of all, we're going to define the most basic term, which is state. A state is a political organization with a centralized government that has supreme, authority over a geographic area. You can tell that that's a quote, but it's a good concise definition, and there's actually a lot packed in there, so let's break that down a bit. So a state is a political organization. So a state refers to a political entity, not a music club or a chess club or a corporation or anything like that. It's a political organization. And the next part of the definition is crucial, with a centralized government. So a state has to have a central

supreme overarching government. Next part, that has supreme independent authority. This is also crucial. And it also leads into one of the key misconceptions of the use of this word. So people from federal countries, and I'll define what I mean by that in a moment, such as the US, Canada and Australia, would, especially the US and Australia, would perhaps understand the word state somewhat differently, because in those countries, state refers to the level of government just below the national government. They have national government and then state governments

which are more local. The way that state is used in that context of the government just below the national one is very different to the way I'm using state now. In other words,

there are two ways in the word state is used. One refers to the subnational unit of government found in federated countries like Australia and the US. The second definition, which is the one I'm giving now,

is the supreme political entity that has geographic control over a certain area. So under this latter definition, the United States of America is a state. Australia is a state. Nigeria is a state. Japan is a state and so on. They are all states. This is more a political science term. It's not so much used in ordinary conversation where people would use the word country or sometimes nation, and I'll get to those in a moment, which actually have slightly different definitions. So in this context, I'm defining the formal term state, as is used in political science and similar disciplines.

So that's why the aspect of the definition regarding supreme independent authority is crucial. That's effectively a reference to sovereignty, a concept that I'll discuss in a moment. But a state has the supreme, the highest, the upper level of control over a certain geographic area, which is the final part of the definition. And that's crucial because a state has to have some actual physical geographical territory. It can't be just sort of an idea, which is why like intergovernmental or transnational, organizations like maybe the Red Cross or something are not states, although they have central governments in some sense, they don't have independent control over a geographic area,

so they're not states. Another common definition of state, other than the one I've given, comes from Max Weber, who is a famous sociologist and who defines a state as a political organization with a centralized government that maintains a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within a certain territorial area. And this phrase, a monopoly on the legitimate use of force is crucial because anyone can use force if they're physically capable of it, but the key aspect there is legitimate use of force. So the idea is that within a given territorial area, only the state can legitimately use force in support of its maintaining its power and enforcing its laws and so on.

And this monopoly on the use of force is what allows states to be the sovereign, supreme political organization within a given territory. And so the ability to maintain a monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a given area is sort of what defines the existence of a state. So if a state's not able to maintain that monopoly, say for example if there's a rebellion or civil disorder or a civil war, then that is a manifestation of the collapse or potential collapse of that state. And as I mentioned before, a state, the state is often considered to be the fundamental unit of analysis in international relations. So international relations being the study, of the interactions essentially between states.

Increasingly, with globalization, we've seen a rise in the importance of non-state actors, such as international organizations, charities, corporations, and so on. But states are the traditionally considered the fundamental unit analysis, being the actors that, you know, Senate diplomats make war enter into treaties and so on. Okay, so understanding what we mean by state, that is an independent political entity,

enjoying a monopoly over the legitimate use of force within a certain defined territorial region, and having the capacity to enter into relations with other states in the international arena is crucial for what political science generally and also for the remainder of the podcast. So now we'll move on to some other terms that are also used. The next one we're going to look at is country. Now this term is used more in sort of popular discourse to refer to what is actually a state. So people will talk about, you know, China and New Zealand, India, whatever, has been countries.

And sort of what they actually mean is states. A country is really just a region legally defined as being a distinct political entity. So in the more formal language of political science, a country may or may not be an actual independent sovereign state. In other words, in popular language, most people use the word country to refer to the highest level of political organization and state to refer to the level below that. However, in political science, state more correctly refers to the highest level of political organization,

and country may refer to the same thing as the state, so they may be essentially synonymous, like the United States is a country and it's also a state. However, a country can also refer to something that's not necessarily a state, a region that may actually be part of another state. So a really good example is Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland in Great Britain. So the state in that case, that is the sovereign political entity, is actually the United Kingdom. The countries are those legally defined distinct political entities, including England and Scotland and so on, which have their own parliaments and are legally and sort of geographically and historically distinct, and so are sometimes referred to as countries, but are not completely independent, so they're part of the same state.

Tibet might be another example. That's a country, although the Chinese government may not like to refer to it as such, but it's essentially a country politically and culturally and historically distinct, but it's not an independent state, it's a part of the larger state of the People's Republic of China. A lot of smaller island countries are actually not really independent states, or it's sort of questionable whether they're independent states. So regions in the Caribbean, for example, that may have their own teams at an Olympics or something like that, or some other sporting event, but are not actually illegally independent.

Okay, the next phrase we're going to look at is that of a land or a territory. This phrase isn't used so often, but they're just generic terms which refer to essentially a particular area of land. which may or may not be the same thing as a state or a nation. Examples of where this term is often used are for particular geographic regions which are often significant to refer to but are not themselves states or politically independent in their own right. So examples that I might give up Brittany, which is a certain region in France,

the Caucasus, which is the region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, and Patagonia, which is a region in South America, sort of Argentina and Chile. none of these regions are political entities, or they're not independent, they're either part of states or actually made up of several states, but they can potentially have geopolitical relevance, so we might want to refer to these particular regions, and so we use these terms and referring to these lands or these areas. Another one is Siberia, which is often referred to, and so on. Moving on to our fourth definition, that of nation. Now, in the popular language, nation and country effectively mean the same thing. In political science, nation is very different to a country and to a state. again. So a nation is a community of people who are perceived to share a common culture,

language, ethnicity, descent, history, and or identity. Really, the last phrase, identity is crucial there, because that's what a nation is. It's a group of people who are perceived to share a common identity, usually including common language and culture and history,

although those aren't necessary. But common identity, shared identity, is the crucial one. So, nations are a relatively recent historical concept, the concept of nation only dates back to a few hundred years in Europe really, before that, people associated usually at two levels, one like their local village or tribe or something like that, at a very small local level, and the second level with a much larger political unit, perhaps something like Christendom or the

Islamic world, or a particular empire or something. The idea of a nation, which is sort of fits in between those two identities and is also more exclusive than either of those form-wise, is quite a recent phenomenon, and sort of dates back to the early modern period in Europe when the National Monarchs in, say, Britain and France and Spain, were trying to consolidate their power. They sort of tried to build up a sense of national unity and identity, based on a common language and government and so on, sort of centred from their own capital city, but spreading throughout the entirety of the region they controlled, which was not as large as one of those former empire, like a Roman Empire or a Chinese Empire or something, but was certainly much larger

than the very small local entities that previously had been the source of loyalty or identity. Because it's sort of considered to be a group of people, a nation does not have any very specific physical borders, although you can often, you can sort of draw maps of roughly where people who, say, speak a certain language or identify with a certain culture where they live compared to another one. But those boundaries are always fuzzy and not necessarily contiguous. A very important concept in international relations and politics, in general is that of a nation state. That's written as a nation-hyphen state. So you can see we're combining two terms there, that of a nation and that of a state. A nation state is a state,

so it's an independent political entity, that is made up of a single nation, that is a single group of people who perceive themselves to share a common identity. So France would be probably an archetypal example of a nation state. It's a single state, political entity, that's made up of one nation, the nation of the French people. Germany is a good example. of a nation, that is the nation of the German people, which only relatively recently became a state. Prior to, I think, 1871, there were a bunch of different independent states, which comprised the current territory of Germany. And they came together under the auspices of Prussia, who was sort of organizing that,

or conquering the other territories in essence, and they formed a single political entity, which is the state of Germany. In fact, you could even argue that Austria and Germany are essentially the same nation, that is the nation of the German people, although I don't know how much of the Austrians would like that these days. Certainly Hitler thought so when he promoted the Anschluss or the Union of those two countries back in the 1930s. The nation state, though, is a single sovereign state with a single nation in it. The United Kingdom would be a good example of something that's not exactly a nation state, because it has, depending on how you define things, of course, potentially has multiple nations,

perhaps the Scots, perhaps the Welsh and the Irish, in the same state. Another good example of a multi-nation state is that of Iraq, which has sort of three main peoples or ethnic groups, the Sunni, the Shia and the Kurds. And one of the reasons that that area has been so violent and unstable of late is because essentially those three quite distinct groups were just smushed together into a single state by the British during post-decolonization. India is a really good example of a very large state that has many, many nations. within it. I really couldn't give a meaningful figure, but definitely dozens of smaller and more local peoples who often speak different languages and potentially have different cultural and historical backgrounds, etc., but are all inside the same state of India. Just as it's possible to have a single state comprised of multiple nations, it's also possible to have a single nation that's spread

across more than one state. One really good example of that would be the Chinese nation or the nation of Chinese people, which is split between at least two states, the People's Republic of China and Taiwan. Also, you could potentially add Singapore there if you counted that as Chinese. Another good example might be that of the Arab people, if you want to consider them a nation. Again, it's often controversial as to exactly what a, whether a given group of people is a nation or an ethnic group or or something else. The Arab peoples are spread across a wide variety of countries, including Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Libya, Egypt, and so on. It's also possible for a single nation to not have a country at all.

So historically the best example of that are the Jewish people who for, well, almost 2,000 years really, were a distinct nation, probably one of the best examples of a group of people with a common identity, who did not have a state and independent country to call their own up until 1947, 48, when the state of Israel was founded. Other examples of stateless nations would include the Roma or the Gypsy People, and today the Palestinians. The nation also is the origin of the term nationalism, which is a strong feeling of pride and common purpose with one's nation. And nationalism is a very recent phenomenon, really only dates to the 19th century when it became very important and a powerful political movement. The nation and nationalism and associated topics are very controversial in political science, and I may do a future episode on those topics. But just one final word that I want to point out, you'll notice that I've referred to a nation as a community or group of people who perceive themselves to share a common history and culture and so on.

Language is a bit more objective, but especially the perception of a common identity and culture and history is very subjective and socially, historically, and geographically contingent. So it's often very difficult to say what a nation is and who is included and who is not included and so on. That's why this concept is very messy and could be potentially divisive. Another important factor to consider is that the nation is, to use the common phrase, an imagined community. That is, one never actually meets all of the other members of a nation, and you never exactly know who they are or have necessarily any dealings with them. So it's an imagined community that one's in. It's not like a football club or a chess club or something like that, where you might actually know most of the other people there. It's an imagined community where if you change the definitions of exactly who fits in or who doesn't fit in, you know, whether it's this particular dialect of language or this group of languages or

how broadly or narrowly you define your terms. For example, you could define a nation as being the Egyptian people or a specific subset of the Egyptians or go broader than that and talk about the Arab people. So it really is contingent and dependent upon often political groups pursuing a particular agenda to try and unite or divide groups of people. So, for example, if you wanted to, like Hitler, if you wanted to promote the union between Austria and Germany,

you'd advocate for a larger nation concept of the German people. Whereas if you were, say, maybe an Austrian now, nationalist, you're interested in consolidating your power within Austria, you might advocate a smaller nationalism just within Austria as distinct from the German nationalism. And historically, this has happened. Umpteen times in history, uh, rulers using, uh, the definitions and, um, conceptions of national identity as a way to consolidate their power or undermine the power of their enemies. Okay, so, uh, that's what a nation is. Uh, first definition, that of a polity, this is a word that's very seldom used. It's spelled P-O-L-I-T-Y. It's just a generic

term for a political unit. It can refer to a country, a state, or anything really. It's just a very generic term. I just thought I'd throw it in here for completeness. The final definition is a little bit different from the previous ones, but it fits in this purview, that of a constitution. All of our previous definitions, state, country, territory, slash land, nation and polity are all different terms which just refer to political units. Constitution is really quite different from that, but it's related because a constitution is the set of fundamental or founding principles and precedence, according to which a state or a country or other organization is governed and organized. Take it together, the constitutional rules make up, or in other words, constitute what the entity is.

So often the constitution will specify the different branches of government, the powers of the different branches and the limitations of those powers, how leaders are to be selected, limitations on the leader's powers, how the different leaders and branches relate to each other, various legal provisions, all sorts of things like that. constitutions are generally written down in a single definitive document in other words you can point to a piece of paper and say that, well, a bunch of pieces of paper and say that is the constitution. That's the US model. I think the US has the oldest written constitution in the world, and a lot of countries since then have essentially copied the US model

of having a single document, which is the constitution, which just establishes all of these fundamental rules and as to how the country is set up. But not all countries or not all states, have a single written constitution. The three main ones are the UK, New Zealand and Israel. None of these countries have written constitutions. So a written constitution is not necessary for the functioning of a state, but it is the norm. And constitution is very important because it defines what the state is, how it works, and changes in the constitution can often be,

are often used to change fundamental aspects of how a country works. In the US in particular, the Constitution is often held in some degree of reverence, actually, and there's a lot of talk about, you know, the original intent of the writers of the Constitution and following the Constitution, ignoring the Constitution, etc. Indeed, from following some U.S. political discourse, one might get the impression that a Constitution is utterly essential for a functioning democratic state, or any state, in fact. But, of course, the UK, New Zealand, and Israel would remind Americans that one can function quite successfully without a written constitution, thank you very much. And the reason for that is

essentially because a constitution is just a piece of paper. Really what matters is, first of all, how the words on those pieces of paper are understood and interpreted, and second of all, the degree to which the meaning of those words is actually followed in practice. And if you look at US history, and in fact the history of essentially any country, the way that their constitution has been interpreted and applied in practice has varied dramatically over the history of that country. in line with historical and political and social circumstances. So a constitution, although the words of a constitution may be fixed over a long period of time, in the US case, over 200 years, the meaning of it in the sense of how it's actually interpreted and applied,

can dramatically change. And in fact, in many countries around the world that have constitutions, the constitutions are likely ignored. A good example of the Soviet Union where they had a constitution that granted democratic rights and free elections and freedom of speech and all sorts of wonderful things that were just completely absent in practice. because in the actual political structure that existed, those rights were simply not upheld, and the Constitution was to take it seriously in that regard.

The UK, New Zealand and Israel still have constitutions. They are just not contained in a single definitive document, that is. Instead, they are contained in numerous documents, including decisions of judges in numerous legal cases over the centuries, parliamentary proceedings and decisions, the speeches of prominent politicians, cabinet meeting notes, and all sorts of such things, which define how the political system operates and how customs and conventions. work. So constitutions are very important for structuring how a state works, but simply having a good constitution, or a democratic constitution, is not nearly enough to ensure that a nation is actually

democratic or stable. Iraq would be a good example. The US can go in there and overthrow the Saddam government and introduce a new democratic constitution, but that does not mean in any way that the new democracy will be effective or stable. What is needed there is actual practices and procedures on the ground which actually followed, which lead to that stable government. And the UK, Hey, New Zealand and Israel have these procedures, even though they don't have the written documents. Again, this is a very large and controversial topic in political science, which I may do another episode on later, but it is important to understand what a constitution is and also what it isn't. So that's some of the basic terminology that we need to understand.

Now I'm going to move on to look at some of the core principles of modern government. Admittedly, this is a little bit of a mishmash of just different things that I wanted to talk about, but they really are some of the ideas that are underpin the operation of. of states or countries, I'll effectively use the terms interchangeably from now on, of how they work and what they do. The reason I put in the word modern into the phrase here is because these principles, many of them only date to two to three centuries. Before that, governments operated quite differently, and I'll make a point of sort of emphasizing how these modern principles of government are quite different to traditional principles of government. Also, the principles

I'm about to talk about are most explicitly relevant and fulfilled in, say, Western democratic states like America, France and so on. But they are still largely followed to a greater or lesser extent in many non-democratic states too. Or at the very least given lip service in these states, even if they're not completely followed. And some of them are largely followed, essentially universally, and I'll describe what I mean there. So principles of modern government. The first one we're going to start with is sovereignty. This is the single most important principle. and as I noted before, it's only a few centuries old, the modern conception of sovereignty. It is the fundamental concept, or one of the two fundamental concepts, that underpins the United Nations,

that's the intergovernmental organization that basically every country in the world is a member of. And I'll just read a quote here from an online handbook of political science that I use as a source for this episode. Sovereignty is one of the most contested concepts in political science, although it is conventionally used to denote supreme authority within a given polity, Although long crucial to modern political science and international relations, the concept of sovereignty is notoriously ambiguous and hard to define with any precision. So, this is a good introduction to what we mean by sovereignty, that it's a very traditional but also very controversial and ambiguous term. Basically, sovereignty refers to supreme power within a particular territory, and this is the definition that I referred to before, when I was talking about what a state is. A state has sovereignty that is supreme power in a given area.

traditional elements of sovereignty, which I'll go through now, and then I'll talk a little bit about how these traditional elements are somewhat problematic in today's world. They always have been somewhat problematic, but they're increasingly problematic. So some of the traditional elements of sovereignty. First of all, absolute and binary. So sovereignty is conceived to be an all-or-none phenomenon. In other words, a state is either sovereign or it isn't. There's no half-sovereign or partial sovereignty. It doesn't make sense. Second, indivisible. That is, all of the sovereign powers belong to a single political entity or body. You can't have some sovereign powers and then give some other sovereign powers to another body.

The United States of America is sovereign. It's not partly sovereign, it is sovereign. And it has individual sovereign powers, which are, you know, international diplomatic relations, the ability to make war, taxation, etc. The third traditional aspect of sovereignty is the idea that sovereignty is a normative phrase, which means that we could say that sovereignty includes both a descriptive and a prescriptive element. Sovereignty thus not only refers to a standard. state of affairs that exists, but also to what should exist, or a norm that we should seek to emulate.

That is, the idea of sovereignty is that states should be sovereign. Not simply that they are sovereign, or that there is an organization that exercises absolute political authority in a certain area, but that there should be such a government, that there should be one state that's supreme above all in a given area. Fourth traditional aspect of sovereignty is that it is territorial, that is, sovereignty is fixed to a specific, usually contiguous, territory. So you can't just have sovereignty. You have sovereignty over some specific territory.

And so sovereignty is very closely associated with the concept of a state, not really a nation, because a nation doesn't have specific territory. And the final aspect of sovereignty is that it is depersonalized. That is, although a particular person may act as the sovereign ruler, so it could be a queen or a king or a president or whatever, but properly conceived person who is the, sovereign is not actually sort of in possession of the sovereignty, but they are simply occupying a position within the polity, and it is the polity, or the state, or the country, that itself is

sovereign. So a country is sovereign, a person is not sovereign. A person may act as the sovereign, that is they may be in charge of the state for a given period of time, but the fact of sovereignty or that situation of sovereignty is not embodied in the person of the king or the president. It is embodied in often the constitution or simply the legal existence of the state. And this is a very different conception to historically, where the country or the empire or the state really was directly identified with the physical body and person of the ruler. So increasingly, these traditional aspects of sovereignty as being absolute and indivisible and territorial and so on are being disputed and their relevance is being questioned.

In particular nowadays, with the processes of globalization, the increasing role to play from international organizations, the United Nations, transnational corporations, bodies like the European Union, it seems that sovereignty is increasingly relative and divisible in character and not absolute binary, as the traditional notion of sovereignty would have said. So some political commentators argue that we should completely abandon the concept of sovereignty or revise it. Others have also pointed out to more philosophical aspects or questions of the concept of sovereign,

including whether such a thing as absolute binary sovereignty has ever really existed at all, and whether its normative aspect in particular should be something that we establish our international organizations on. For example, the United Nations is based on the core concept of national sovereignty, that is, states should not interfere with the internal affairs of other states because of the concept of sovereignty. There's some question as to the validity of that. For example, when there comes to a question of human rights, does human rights trump, Trump national sovereignty or vice versa. This is still an ongoing question. And some have argued, in fact, that sovereignty is really just a fiction invented by rulers to justify their own power

and to try and prevent other rulers from interfering with their internal affairs. Anyway, but sovereignty, regardless of whether you think it's a useful or not so useful concept, is still crucial to understand for an understanding of modern government and international relations. Okay, so that's sovereignty. Now moving on to our second principle of modern government, is the rule of law. So a government's powers are limited by formal constitutional or similar means, and disputes are resolved and laws enforced fairly and impartially, treating all people equally, so there are no special treatment for people of certain social or class or race or something. This idea of the rule of law whereby you limit the powers of government is a very new phenomenon.

Previously, basically the states were run along the lines of absolutism, usually rule from a prince, king or emperor, where the state would, was sort of conceived as the personal property, in some sense, of the ruler. Usually under some kind of divine mandate, or perhaps the ruler was actually themselves a god or a demi-god, or maybe they were just appointed by the gods, or under the authority of the god, or under the authority of God via the Pope, or the Caliph or something like that. But under this sort of idea of absolutism, the power of rulers was, at least theoretically, absolute and unlimited.

They could do literally whatever they wanted. There were no constraints on their power, because of the state was sort of their own. own property in some sense. Of course, in practice, the powers were never that absolute, but in theory, this was the idea. The rule of law, which is really an Enlightenment phenomenon, the Enlightenment referring to the sort of 18th century period when a lot of these ideas of modern government and liberalism and other social theories came to prominence, is really an idea that the government themselves and the rulers of the state should also be limited by laws. In other words, laws don't just apply to the people of a country, they apply to the

rulers as well, and they should apply to everyone equally, not treating, say, the nobable. or the priests with special treatment, as had previously been the case in most countries. Apart from just treating people equally, there's also an important aspect of the rule of law in which decisions are made and implemented according to known and established legal principles and governmental structures, and not to play arbitrary edicts and ad hoc organisations and methods. This is still something that's not completely adhered to even in democratic countries today, where it's not heard of for presidents or prime ministers to set up sort of arbitrary commissions or groups of advisors that don't really have any specific constitutional validity

and just implement arbitrary edicts and so on. A good example of that might be something like the Vietnam War, which were really initiated by the American president without specific authorization from Congress. So it's something like that. It's not clear how that fit into the existing rule of law. But the core idea of the rule of law is that it is the law, instantiated through custom and also through written documents that is truly in charge of the

country. And the ruler is only in charge in so much as they obey and are subject to the constraints of this law. And this fits in very much with the Constitution, because constitutions are like the rule of law, they are also a relatively new phenomenon. So when you have a constitution that sets, those are laws and rules that set up the structure of the state and how rules are chosen and their limits their powers and so on. Previously, if the ruler has simply unlimited powers, then there's really no need for a constitution because you don't have those rules that limit the powers of the absolute despot. And the rule of law today is, as I've said, you know, most strongly followed and most strongly influential in Western democratic countries,

but it still has some degree of influence throughout the world as exemplified, for example, by the fact that virtually every country has a written constitution. So at least nominally, they are subjecting themselves to the rule of law, even if in practice there's not always followed to the letter. So our third principle of modern government is that of representation. Now, this is not the same thing as democracy, although it's obviously closely related, and we'll definitely do a future episode on democracy. So I don't want to talk about this in too much detail right now, but representation is simply the basic idea that the population elects representatives or people to speak and act on their behalf as their political leaders. The elections for

these rulers should be fair, free, and regularly held, and usually there's some notion of freedom of the press incorporating to that as well to be able to select a leader based on an informed knowledge of the issues and the candidates. Again, this is very different to traditional notions of governments, which were usually conceived as rulers, either ruling by divine right or by right of conquest, and so therefore there was really no need for the people to be represented directly because the idea is that the ruler did represent the people through the ordainment of God, essentially, and that the people themselves didn't really know how to rule themselves. They didn't know what their best interest were, and that the sovereign was responsible for that.

The sovereign had some sort of special knowledge as to what the needs and what the needs of the people and what would be best for the people. The idea that the people would rule directly was very foreign historically, except for some cases, like ancient Greece and Italian city-states and the Middle Ages, for example. example, which had direct democracy, which is still quite different from representation, because in direct democracy, the people would literally gather in one place and make decisions, pass laws, and render court judgments and so on. They didn't elect representatives, for the most part, in the same way as we do. So this concept of electing representatives who then

act on your behalf is quite a modern phenomenon really dating back to 18th century Britain. And although not all countries in the world today are democracies, most countries at least pay lip service to the idea that they are elected representatives of their people. There are a few exceptions. For example, Saudi Arabia is still an absolute monarchy, but for the most part, even countries that aren't very democratic, like Russia, for example, still pretend at least that they are legitimate elected representatives of their people. Fourth principle of modern government, the separation of powers. Now, this is, again, an Enlightenment concept, really first embodied in the American Constitution. The idea of the separation of powers is that you

divide the state or the state's sovereignty, the state's powers up into different branches or sections of government, which are separate from each other and independent of each other, and are independently granted their powers and areas of responsibility. And the idea of this is that no single branch of government can become dominant and sort of subordinate the others to itself. The idea of this is to try and maintain the freedom of the people and avoid tyranny, so by breaking up the power of government into separate branches. The normal division is of power is into legislative, executive, and judicial branches. So there's three usually, although sometimes there's a little bit of variation. Sometimes those are grouped together,

and sometimes some of those plows sort of split up between a couple of different bodies. In some countries, such as Taiwan, there's an additional auditing branch of government whose role is to investigate and supervise the other branches. So this three-way division into legislative, executive, and judiciary is the norm, but it's not the only way it can be done. But we'll just look at each of those, each of these branches briefly. The legislature is the parliament. It's a deliberative body or an assembly, a group of people who get together and talk, basically. Those are responsible for passing and amending laws.

The point of a legislature is to make law and also to represent the people. Usually a legislature is elected, although they don't have to be. For example, the upper house in Great Britain, the House of Laws is still not completely elected. So many legislatures have two houses, that is, they're sort of divided up into two sections, each of which have their own responsibilities. So that happens in the US, for example, where you have the Senate, which is the upper house, and the House of Representatives, which is the lower house, both of which together comprise the US Congress, which is the Parliament or the Legislature of the United States.

Many other countries have so-called bicameral systems as well, meaning two houses. Other countries only have a single House of Parliament, a so-called unicameral. systems. The idea of having multiple houses of parliament is to further break up the powers of government between two branches. The legislature is generally supposed to be the supreme branch, although the whole idea of separation of powers is that there is no supreme branch, but there sort of has to be a supreme branch to tie the government together. So legislature is supposed to be supreme in the sense that it is responsible for passing, for actually making the laws, and especially for passing budgets and money legislation, which is, you know, money is. Money is.

is what allows the government to do things. So if that power is in the hands of the legislature, that effectively puts the Trump cards in the legislature's hands. And the idea of that is that the legislature is elected by the people as their representatives, and so they should have the final say in things, or at least the sort of pre-eminent position amongst the three branches. Second branch of government is the executive,

or often this is what people will simply refer to as the government. This is the part of the government that has the responsibility of the daily administration of the state, and the government. You know, they actually run things. So the executive officer, who in the United States, for example, is the president, is not supposed to make laws. He is simply supposed to enforce the law as it's written by the legislature and as it's interpreted by the judiciary, as I'll talk about in a moment. Heads of states, who are heads of the executives, can either be presidents or monarchs. And sometimes they have real executive powers, and sometimes they have

merely ceremonial powers. It depends upon the particular government. So in Great Britain, for example, The head of state, that is the head of the executive, is legally the queen, but the queen is purely ceremonial. She doesn't really have any real executive powers. In the United States, that's very different. The head of state is the president, but the president does have real executive powers. Heads of state are usually their main roles include being head of the military, head diplomat, and they're responsible for granting assent to law, so they have to sign laws, making some various appointments in government roles,

summoning and dissolving the legislature, granting pardons and immunities from prosecutors, granting titles and rewards, and sometimes wielding various, loosely defined, reserve powers. So what we mean by heads of state being either ceremonial or having real executive power is essentially, to what degree can they exercise these powers that I've just listed, you know, head of the military, head diplomat, granting pardons and so on? To what degree can they exercise those of their own initiative, and to what degree do they have to, can they only exercise them after consultation with the legislature, usually the prime minister? So the Queen in Britain and the President in the US both have similar formal powers, de Juro powers, or by the law.

That is, you know, they're both heads of in charge of diplomacy, responsible for granting assent to laws, granting pardons, and things like that. Although some of the details may differ, but fundamentally they have the same responsibilities. But the key difference is the Queen doesn't have the ability to exercise any of those powers without consulting with the Prime Minister, who's essentially in charge of the legislature in some sense whereas the US president doesn't have to consult the legislature in order to exercise these powers and some countries like, for example,

France have a sort of mix between the two systems so it can be a bit messy and we'll talk more about that later but that's the idea of the executive. They are responsible for running this sake rather than making the laws and that's why it's perhaps slightly odd that US presidents nowadays are, and not just in the US, but in other countries too, but particularly in the US, often campaign on policy proposals, which are in fact the responsibility not of the executive, who the president is,

but the legislative branch of government. But that probably reflects an increased blurring of these two branches of government in practice in current US political discourse. The third branch of government is the judiciary or the court system. This is the system of courts that interprets and applies the law. law in the name of the state, and also provides a mechanism for the resolution of disputes. So, basically, there's two different branches of law, civil law and criminal law. Criminal law means you break a law and the government prosecutes you and you might end up in

prison. That's like, you know, killing people or stealing or even parking offenses that comes under criminal law. Civil law is suing other people, basically complaining that someone's bridge contract or trespass on your land or done something like that. Courts are responsible for both of those types of disputes and resolving those, interpreting the laws and applying it to those particular cases. Courts, many courts also have, or court systems have judicial review power,

which means that they can annul or overturn the laws of the state when it finds them incompatible with something like the Constitution, which is why the Supreme Court in the US, for example, can sometimes strike down laws, which they interpret as being unconstitutional or inconsistent with the Constitution, the sort of highest law. The judiciary, independence of the judiciary is often considered, to be the most important of the separate branches of government, because the ability to,

if any single body has the ability both to make laws and to enforce them, that often, or can lead to great abuses of power, where you can effectively just change the definitions of the law or the meaning of the law to suit your own purposes. Like you can potentially charge people for crimes that don't exist yet, or for crimes that didn't really exist, but you just change the interpretation of the law ad hoc. These sort of abuses are very common. in less developed countries that don't have properly independent judicial systems. Another example of abuses that occur is that maybe the president, I think I've heard of this

happening in Pakistan, the president passes some law or institutes some change. The Supreme Court judges this to be unconstitutional, and if an independent judiciary really uses it, then that law would have to be struck down. In practice, what happens in some countries like this, including the situation in Pakistan is simply that the president just sacks all of the judges who made the decision and points a new bunch of judges who make the right decision, and then they get their way. So that sort of abuse is what the separation of powers is supposed to prevent, but we see in practice that abuses of power can occur anyway,

even if you have nominal separation of powers, because it really depends upon whether this is actually followed in practice. And this comes back to the discussion of the constitutions that we had earlier, where even good legal provisions in the constitution don't necessarily lead to effective governance if they're not actually followed in practice. So moving on to the next principle of modern government, the separation of church and state. This is something you've likely heard of before. It simply means drawing a very clear distinction, or sometimes not so clear distinction, but nonetheless a distinction and maintenance of a division between religious affairs and government

affairs. So exactly what this means differs a lot between different governments and different states. But generally, it's understood to mean something to the effect of governments can't restrict religious belief or compel religious observance or require religious tests for government officers or often enforce a state religion, and at the same time, purely religious matters should not turn into political matters and that religious matters should be kept private or separate from the state. So different countries have different interpretations of exactly what separation of church and state means. For example, in France and Turkey, they have adopted a form of separation of church and state known as Laicite, which sort of means that there is an enforced total separation of religion from

public affairs, which goes to the extremes like banning religious headware from public buildings and having some religions actively regulated by the government, for example. In the US, on the other hand, separation is interpreted as more that there's a wall of separation between the government and religion, such that the government can't regulate religion at all. However, there's still a fair bit of religion in political life. For example, the fact that the president's constantly refer to God in public speeches and so on and having religious motives in public buildings, that's something that you would never see in, say, France or Turkey. So exactly what separation of church and state means differs between countries, but most countries around the world, with a few exceptions,

mostly in the Middle East, have adopted this policy. And again, this is a very new conception of the relationship between religion and the government, because basically prior to around the Enlightenment, religion and state were inextricably intertwined. Often the chief political figure was also the chief religious figure, or the religious figures were appointed by the state, or sometimes vice versa, and religion was considered to be an important political tool

in keeping the country united and in keeping the people unified under the sovereign. So this idea of separating the government, out from the government is a very modern concept. Okay, moving on to the next aspect of modern governments. Civilian control over the military. This is a fairly simple doctrine which just simply says that the ultimate responsibility for a country's

or nation's strategic decision-making is placed in the hands of a civilian political leadership rather than professional military officers. So, for example, if you go up the chain of command for most armed forces, you'll go through up the generals and then the higher-ranked generals, commander-in-chief of the army and navy and so on, commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and right above them will be the Secretary of Defense or Minister for War or something like that.

There will be a civilian official there, and highest of all will be something like the chief of state, the president in the case of the U.S. So at the very top of the military hierarchy is a civilian. And this is the critical concept here. It's the idea that the military is a tool of the government. It's kind of like the civil service, which we'll talk about in a second. It's not independently run. It's not an end unto itself. It's a tool of the existing civilian government. Civilian just means non-military, by the way.

So, I mean, the actual level of control sought and or achieved by any given civilian government, again, varies greatly between different countries. And, of course, there are still military dictatorships around in the world. Burma is probably the best example, although they're undergoing some transitions at the moment. but generally most countries have this principle of separation of the military from the civilian control over that military. This is kind of a modern concept as well, although standing armies presided over by a civilian government have been known in history. But historically, standing armies, that is a professional military that existed in times of peace as well as in times of war, was relatively rare. Usually they just called up irregular armies when they needed them, when they were. was a professional standing army, for example in ancient Rome, it often became extremely powerful

politically in its own right. So the simultaneous existence of a professional standing army and civilian control over that army is again a relatively modern concept. And it's crucial for the modern concept of the state as being sovereign and being able to make war on other states through its military apparatus rather than the military dominating the state. And following on from the civilian control of the military, as I mentioned before, is the final aspect of modern government, the Professional Civil Service. The Civil Service is basically the officials and agencies that are part of the government, generally part of the executive branch of government, that are responsible for carrying out the functions of government. So a professional civil service simply means that you have

a full-time staff of professional bureaucrats who work for the state carrying out the various administrative functions that need to be done. Again, this is a relatively modern concept, as previously, usually such administrative functions were performed either by the royal family members or members of the nobility or sometimes by private contractors, like for example tax farmers. The idea that there would be a specific branch of government employees directly answerable to the government, but not related to them in any way. So reaching their posts by merit rather than by birth or by payment

is a relatively recent innovation, with the exception of China, which has used such a... system for quite a while, actually. They were the first to really make that a big part of their governance. But again, this professional civil service is about instrumentalising the state or the government apparatus to the sovereign state and making it a tool of the state rather than something that sort of dominates the state in and of itself. Okay, so that's an overview of the principles of modern government. I'll just outline them briefly again as a bit of revision. there was sovereignty, the concept of complete overarching control over a given territory,

the rule of law, that is law is supreme, rather than the ruler being supreme over the law, representation, that is the people elect representatives to make the laws for them, separation of powers into the legislature executive and judicial branches, separation of church and state, civilian control over the military, and a professional civil service. As I said, not all states these days, body or incorporate all of these elements, but most states incorporate most of them, and at least pay lip service to the other ones, even if not all of them are completely fulfilled. Okay, so that's all I really have for this episode. It went on for a bit longer than I'd

intended, but I think we covered the necessary ground. Hope you enjoyed the episode. Please visit our Facebook page. Go to Facebook and type in the Science of Everything podcast and give us a like. On the Facebook page, you can find news about potential upcoming episodes and also some links to images and diagrams that supplement the episodes and help to provide a richer viewing and listening experience. Thanks for listening and I'll talk to you next time.