FEMINIST AND CULTURAL THEORIES
Feminist Theories
Feminist theories of the state are rarely mentioned in introductory textbooks of
comparative politics, but it is important to at least consider these perspectives before
we compare states based on gender equality, a popular topic. The most prominent
feminist theorist of the state is MacKinnon (1991). She starts with a Marxist conception
of the state as described above, but not only discusses the ability of the state to
concentrate wealth in the elite nexus of capitalists and state officials, but also
considers the consistent ability of the state to concentrate power in the hands of men.
Therefore, for a feminist (especially a Marxist feminist), the state became a more
efficient regulator of both capital and women, which led to its rise and dominance.
Indeed, most states have historically gone to great lengths to keep women (and other
underrepresented groups) out of positions of power within the state apparatus by
making it illegal for women to vote, run for office, attain a certain level of education, or
participating in the military. Many of these laws have only recently been undone, and
many states still have not had a female head of state or government.
More philosophically, feminists critique the idea of the modern state as
embodying stereotypical “masculine” qualities such as rationality, aggression and self-
reliance (often called the principle of “self-help”). Those people within the state that
display these qualities are given higher status than others, hence why most states
somewhere along their development tended to value the activities of men over those
of women. The creation of the state, especially through internal and external
sovereignty, also creates a split between the public and the private. The state is
concerned with public life, and society with private life. This split also becomes
gendered in that men occupy the public and women in the private. The consequence
of this is that women are rendered unsuitable for public life. Hoffman (2001) contends
that one of the main causes of the state was men attempting to gain more power over
other men as well as women and their reproductive capacity. Patriarchy therefore is
both a cause and an effect of state sovereignty, according to feminist theories.
It is unclear whether patriarchy, however, is truly intertwined with the
emergence of the state or if patriarchy existed well before. Exhaustive reviews of
societies across cultures and across time have uncovered a great variety of gender
roles and hierarchies, some deeply patriarchal and others surprisingly egalitarian. For
example, in ancient Egypt, women had equal status before the law and they
worshipped both male and female gods. Women had the right to own property as well
as inherit land equally with male counterparts, implying a great deal of economic
power. Women participated in public professions such as money lending. There were
several female Pharaohs. Still, women’s rights existed through their relationship to
men and men held most of the power and privilege (Roth, 2020).
At the same time, there is also a wealth of evidence that the gender roles of
Indigenous communities were often completely upended in favor of a much stricter
gender hierarchy during the process of colonization. This includes the Incas, whose
patriarchal society held some complementary roles for women and the ability for
women to serve in politically important roles. After the Spanish conquest, most women
were relegated to second-class citizens, and a complex hierarchy of ethnicity, religion,
and gender resulted, some of which is still in existence in modern Peru (Bakewell et
al., 2010).
While there is much to be gained from feminist critiques of modern statehood
and sovereignty, it remains, like many other theories, a weak account for why the state
emerged. Certainly, patriarchy existed prior to the state. Yet, there is also evidence
that the European state model did, for many centuries, depend on a particularly strict
gender hierarchy that was imposed on nonEuropean societies, and many modern
states have continued that hierarchy in various capacities. It could also be argued that
this gender hierarchy wasn’t dependent on the European state per se, but rather on
the capitalist economic model instead. Still, one could argue that it has also been
through the state, however with great resistance, that women have gained more rights
than they have ever enjoyed in human history. Therefore, it can be said that the
European state model was indeed deeply patriarchal, and institutionalizing existing
gender roles may have been one of many reasons for the consolidation of power in a
state. But gender roles and patriarchy vary greatly by culture and were profoundly
altered by colonization. Therefore, we should consider theories of the state that
consider both culture and colonization.
Cultural Theories
This text has questioned two traditional notions of the state: first, that the state
arose primarily in Europe; and second, that states are substantially different than the
empires that preceded them. However, if even some of the above propositions hold
weight, then a theory of state emergence must account for exclusive elements of both
states as well as of European life that were not present in empires or in other parts of
the world. While economic, bellicist, and feminist theories offer some arguments that
might explain the uniqueness of European statehood, cultural theories might go
further. We have shown that elements of statehood certainly existed in non-European
empires, but that at least two innovations distinguish themselves from empires: an
expectation of external sovereignty, and thus more solidified borders, and the internal
monopoly on the use of force. If these are truly unique, then perhaps the differences
are rooted in European culture, or more specifically, a shift in the culture that
precipitated the emergence of the state.
Cultural theories are the first to consider the role of nationalism. A nation is a
group of people that feel unified in some way, whether it is by language, religion,
heritage, or some other connection. This concept was discussed in Student Feature
Study: Sovereignty in the Iroquois Confederacy above. In everyday usage, people
often conflate the state and the nation, but in political science these are very distinct
concepts. While the state is the government and the land, the nation is an identity.
People have formed communities based on a common identity since time immemorial.
What is new, perhaps, is the marriage of the state with the nation. Referring to Figure
26 and Figure 29 above, it is apparent that there were often several nations within an
empire, but as the state began to form, people began to identify with their states, in
addition to other identities such as religion and ethnicity (although as we will see below,
other identities were expected to become less prominent). This unification of the nation
and the state helped reinforce the state’s legitimacy and allowed the state to increase
its policing and taxation powers. This new nationalism required a shift in culture which
was previously more tied to the local rather than the state. Many theorists in this school
of thought cite the French Revolution as the culmination of this cultural shift
(Greenfeld, 1996). If there was a significant cultural shift that led to the formation of
modern states in Europe specifically, European culture and the change that occurred
through events such as the French Revolution might help explain both the timing as
well as the geography of state emergence.
Another strand of cultural theories focuses on the role of religion, specifically
Protestant Christianity in 17th century Europe. The main idea here is that this new
form of Christianity emphasized discipline and orderliness, which allowed for easier
and more efficient governing (Gorski, 2003). This is not unlike Max Weber’s (2002)
hypothesis (who we learned about above for his insight on the importance of monopoly
on the use of force) that Protestantism also paved the way for modern capitalism.
Once again, a potential problem of this argument is that it ignores other religious
practices that are similarly disciplined such as Islam.
Yet, other scholars focus on the effect of secularization in the establishment of
the state. Sovereignty requires that the state be the highest form of legitimate authority,
and religion is at odds with that concept. Thus, the process of detaching religion from
governing bodies and placing it into the hands of civil society instead aided the
development of the modern state. This helps explain the outcome of strong states in
Europe (and later North America), at least to some extent. When religion became
separated from the burgeoning state, several things occurred in Europe (particularly
post-revolutionary France) that did not take place in, for example, the Islamic world
(although we will explore some exceptions to this in later chapters). First, Catholicism
in France was able to survive due to the presence and hierarchy of the Catholic
Church. Islam has no similar central social institution and therefore Islam fell into the
hands of many actors. Second, the increasingly secular European state utilized its
significant cultural and educational resources into fomenting nationalism, while most
Islamic states did not have as many effective institutions. Therefore, Islamic identity
was not as easily supplanted with nationalism. Exploring the deviant case of Turkey
(Türkiye) might help to elucidate these nuances.53.
Snapshot Case Study: Secularism and Sovereignty in Turkiye
Full Country Name : Republic of Turkey / Türkiye (English), Türkiye
Cumhuriyeti (Turkish)
Head of State and Government : Recep Tayyip Erdogan
Government : Presidential Republic
Official Languages : Turkish
Economic System : Market-Oriented Economy
Location : Southeastern Europe and Southwestern Asia
Capital : Ankara
Total land size : 783,562 sq km; 302,534 sq miles
Population : 83,593,483
GDP : $2.668 trillion
GDP per capita : $31,500
Currency : Lira
Türkiye is one of the few Muslim-majority states that has managed to retain its
Islamic identity while also building a secular state. The state that we know today was
born out of the Ottoman Empire (1300-1922), perhaps the most powerful Islamic
empire as well as the last empire to collapse as the sovereign state became dominant
in the aftermath of World War I. The Republic of Turkey was declared by Mustafa
Kemal Atatürk, a military commander, and the first Turkish president. Türkiye was one
of the few states to become independent after World War I; most of the former Ottoman
Empire was carved up by the victors of the war.
Kemal purged Islam from the newly founded state, but also didn’t allow it to
have an independent life in society. He established the Directorate of Religious Affairs,
which acted as a quasi-state “church,” overseeing religious activities and absorbing
potential competition for the teaching of Islam. Therefore, Islamic fundamentalism
didn’t take hold in Türkiye as much as it did in many other Islamic states as they formed
such as Egypt and Iran (Toprak, 1993). Therefore, Türkiye is a deviant case of Islamic
state secularization that displays the challenges that many other Muslim-majority
states faced in their state-building efforts. In addition to this balancing act between
state, society and Islam, Türkiye managed to also mobilize considerable educational
and cultural resources, mostly vestiges of the Ottomans, in creating a new national
identity that superseded Islam but didn’t replace it. Furthermore, a secular legal code
was institutionalized rather quickly, as well as relative economic prosperity, which
legitimized the new nation-state (Yilmaz, 2007). Some of Türkiye’s success in these
statebuilding capacities can be attributed to a cultural revolution instituted by Kemal
as well as its wealth of religious tolerance and cultural diversity it contained during the
Ottoman period.
However, a case study of Türkiye wouldn’t be complete without consideration
of some recent developments. The AKP, or the Justice and Development Party, came
into power in 2002, which was co-founded by the current President, Recept Tayyip
Erdogan. The AKP has since dominated Turkish politics. Erdogan was reelected in
2023 for a third term. His party members are known to lean more heavily on Islam than
other more secular parties, and are also more skeptical of the West. Still, the party
initially supported Türkiye’s bid to join the European Union, to shore up support from
Muslim conservatives as well as those wishing to see the country modernize. The AKP
was therefore an impressive coalition between liberalism and conservatism.
In subsequent years, however, particularly around the attempted coup in 2016,
the AKP and Erdogan himself have taken a decisively more authoritarian turn. A new
political system was instituted in 2017 via referendum. The new system dissolves the
old parliamentary system for a presidential one as well as the office of the Prime
Minister. (We will consider the differences between a presidential and parliamentary
system in subsequent chapters). These reforms concentrated a great deal of power in
the president. It was argued that these reforms were necessary in light of the coup
and runs counter to the prior ideology of the AKP (Ağar, 2022).
While cultural theories may give us a slightly more convincing case for the rise
of the state in Europe, a few caveats bear mentioning. First, any cultural theory must
define exactly what we mean by culture, which has proven rather challenging even for
more culture-oriented disciplines such as anthropology (Williams, 2014). Second, like
the previous two approaches, we would need to be clear about whether a cultural shift
prefaced the state or whether the state itself preceded a cultural shift. To be fair, many
cultural theorists see these two things as mutually constituted in that culture guided
the formation of the state, but the state also comes to both reflect and inform culture.
Third, we would also need to contend with culturally diverse states (Laitin, 1999).
Fourth, we need to question whether the cultural elements that theoretically played a
role in state formation are indeed particular to 17th century Europe or whether we can
detect those elements elsewhere. Finally, any theory using culture and/or nationalism
as its primary explanatory variable is particularly vulnerable to ethnocentrism. Weber
himself acknowledged that other cultures contained features amendable to statehood.
He wrote a whole volume on China and the mutually reinforcing relationship between
the state and Confucianism (Weber, 1951). A similar argument follows his volume on
India and Hinduism (Weber, 1958). However, he dismisses these two states as being
“patrimonial” rather than following a more “rational” logic of the Western states (Weber,
2019). Therefore, any cultural argument must be careful to treat foreign nations fairly
and not to assume that one’s own culture is superior just because it is more familiar.
Post-Colonial Theories
Postcolonial theories have not penetrated comparative politics in the same way
that they have in its sister discipline of International Relations (Jones, 2006). Yet, it
should be clear through the previous discussions of other theories of the state that
colonialism has played an important role, if not the central role, in the development of
most modern states, even those in Western Europe. Indeed, if the primary
characteristics of the modern state is sovereignty and the monopoly on the use of
force, colonies by definition had neither. Furthermore, by definition, independence
movements were the attempt to gain both. Therefore, the absence of these
approaches is not only remarkable, but it is also irresponsible. Without an appreciation
for European colonization, and the various patterns this phenomenon took on in
different locations, it is nearly impossible to truly recognize the realities of most of the
world’s states and people today.
Postcolonialism refers to a large body of literature that is broadly anti-colonial
and critiques the variety of ways that five centuries of European colonization has
deeply affected the politics, social system, economies, identity and even knowledge
of the non-European world (Gandhi, 2019). The roots of this perspective can be traced
to anti-colonial independence struggles themselves and some of the prominent
intellectuals that led these movements. Franz Fanon is one of these early thinkers. A
black psychologist born in the French colony of Martinique, he joined the Algerian
National Liberation Front in their struggle to overthrow French rule.
As a psychologist, he emphasized the cultural and psychological processes that
allowed European empires to justify their dominance, as well as the psychological
impacts on colonized populations as they internalized their subordination. His most
famous work in this vein was Wretched of the Earth, a book that continues to inspire
liberation movements (Farrington & Fanon, 2002).
The state has remained a subject of great interest and critique even after the
era of colonization came to a formal end. Postcolonial theorists believe that while
mainstream political scientists find the origins of sovereignty in Westphalia, “modern”
European sovereignty wasn’t really solidified until it could violate the sovereignty of
the Global South. The reason that states like Netherlands, France, and the United
Kingdom are often modeled as the ideal cases of “strong” states in the study of
comparative politics is that these states were the largest extractors of wealth,
resources, labor, and power from most of the rest of the world for several centuries.
This gave their state-building enterprises a clear advantage. Postcolonial theorists
would also point out that it is no accident that statehood rose in Europe around the
same time that colonization was taking off in earnest. Finally, others astutely argue
that the barometer by which we measure statehood, namely legitimacy and
sovereignty, is not a fair measurement for much of the Global South. Subaltern realism,
a strand of postcolonialism, argues that “[m]ost states that have emerged into formal
independence within the past fifty years are currently struggling to approximate the
idea of the Westphalian state by acquiring effectiveness and legitimacy within a
drastically shortened timeframe and in highly unfavorable normative and practical
circumstances” (Ayoob, 2002, p. 40). The central dilemma for Global South states,
according to subaltern realism, is they are trying to assert themselves as sovereign in
a post-sovereign world.
Furthermore, postcolonialists also offer a strong critique of social sciences
themselves and the way in which these disciplines study the postcolonial world. The
origins of this critique can be found in Edward Said’s famous work Orientalism (Said,
1979). Here, he shows that what the Western world counts as “objective” truth
discovered through “scientific” methods about the Orient are often couched in
Eurocentrism and therefore can hardly be counted as impartial knowledge. This
echoes a similar critique leveled by feminists, in that claims of objective knowledge
about the social world are often produced by male-dominated circles about their own
experience that doesn’t accurately reflect women’s experiences.
The implication for this critique in the study of comparative politics, which
attempts to follow the scientific method and strives for objectivity, is profound. We have
already discussed these difficulties, which have no easy answer, in some detail in
Chapter 3: The Promise and Pitfalls of the Comparative Method. At the very least, a
postcolonial approach to comparative politics demands that students be aware of their
potential biases due to lack of experience in the Global South, as well as their position
of privilege as a member of the Global North and how that might shape their views of
the Global South, seek out knowledge of these cultures from insiders when possible,
and finally do their best to question any claims that their own countries are ideal cases
of any particular phenomenon.
To be fair, most postcolonial theories take Western European colonization as
the colonization without much consideration of other sources of colonial empire. In
particular, the 27 states of the former Soviet Union often are not considered
“postcolonial” in the literature (Moore, 2001). Some of these states have emerged from
Soviet rule as model Westphalian institutions in the traditional sense of the term (such
as Latvia and Estonia), while others have either completely disintegrated (such as the
former Yugoslavia), and others are caught in the more familiar Global South trap of
spiraling poverty, conflict, and authoritarianism (such as Azerbaijan).
Furthermore, one could argue that colonization in some form has been going
on for most of human history. A review of Figure 29, Figure 40, and Figure 44 indicates
that empires were in the habit of massive expansion over previously independent
territory. Imperial expansion certainly left similar cultural, political, and economic
imprints on the subjugated populations as theorized by postcolonialism. However,
postcolonial theorists would counter by indicating that European colonization is
different than imperial expansion in that empires generally expanded in ways that kept
the empire at least marginally territorially contiguous, while colonization was different
in that it managed to subjugate and absorb land and people in a way that was
decidedly dis-contiguous. While no theory in the social sciences is flawless, this text
approaches the study of comparative politics with a postcolonial lens. It contends that
postcolonialism can take some of the best insights of all the previous approaches,
while also accounting for their weaknesses, and is able to deftly integrate them into a
unified theory of state formation. A postcolonial perspective does not specifically reject
war, capitalism, culture, or gender as powerful explanations of the state, but they argue
that colonization is the unifying process under which all these other variables come to
play a role in the building of a state. Postcolonialism not only offers a convincing
account for state formation that takes both the European and non-European world into
consideration, and corrects for the Eurocentrism of traditional approaches, it also
offers a clear explanation of how the state diffused globally. Finally, it also explains the
continued challenges that plagues the Global South such as poverty, political
upheaval, and authoritarianism (which we will explore in further chapters) that isn’t
rooted in cultural or political superiority. While some of these things are very real
challenges faced by Global South states, a postcolonial theorist would point out that
the cause of these problems is largely in the history of colonization and the legacy left
by the process of decolonization. In short, they would make the case that colonization
caused the European state, and decolonization caused the state in the Global South.
To explore postcolonialism in more detail, we turn to a deviant case study of one of the
few Global South states that wasn’t colonized on a sustained basis: Ethiopia.
