Internet and Society - Social Theory in the Information Age

The state system has certain functions that it fulfills in modern society: 1. Economic regulation The state and the economy are structurally coupled and mutually dependent; the economy is in need of certain laws that enable economic accumulation; the state depends on economic accumulation and the taxes derived from capital and wage labor.

The economy can’t cope with its own complexity; it can’t organize itself all the conditions necessary for its self-organization. Hence, the state takes over certain of these tasks and integrates them into its own dynamics and helps to reduce the complexity of the economy. These activities of the state can include welfare, wage policy, labor legislation, subsidies, taxation, property rights, regulation of competition, antitrust laws, contract laws, research politics and subsidization, central bank policies, the organization and maintenance of infrastructures like transportation, energy supply, communication, education, and so on. These infrastructures can have and frequently do have a public character, but this must not be the case, as the privatization and deregulation of public infrastructure that has taken place in many countries in recent years shows.

2. Control of the means of violence The state holds a centralized control/monopoly of the means of violence and is organized within a certain natural and social territory. The processes of the state take place within strictly defined boundaries. Means of violence are used in order to secure the organization of society; the state protects society from external and internal influences that threaten its self-reproduction. The nation-state is based on a certain territory; it has natural and social boundaries that are defended with the threat of using violence. The nation-state is a precondition of the organization of an economic system of accumulation because regulatory rules and the organization of the infrastructure of the economy are efficiently possible only within a bounded territory that is controlled by a system that monopolizes the means of violence. The development of the modern economy and the modern state system was a process of coevolution; hence, both are based on similar principles and depend on each other. Economic self-organization is based on wage labor; the effective organization of wage labor relationships is only possible within a bounded territory that is controlled by the nation-state. The modern nation-state is both based on the notion of the individual as citizen that has certain basic rights and the idea of the individual as private owner of property and labor power. The state’s monopoly of violence consists of both internal defense (police, legal system, secret service) and external defense (military, secret service). The differentiation between internal and external aspects of defense of the system’s boundary has resulted in the differentiation between the police and the standing army.

Political colonialism means the enlargement of the border of the state by making use of violent means. Warfare is the central means of the state for defending and enlarging its bounded territory.

3. Legitimization The existence of the means of violence in the hands of the state and their usage must be explained and justified. The legitimization of violence has become a permanent affair of politics. One can observe this phenomenon especially during times of warfare and its prearrangements.

4. Surveillance for the self-observation of society The nation-state is a power container, a metastorage of social information structures and a system that implements the self-observation of society. In order to maintain and reproduce itself and to foster the various autopoietic self-reproductions of its subsystems, society must observe itself. Surveillance, understood in the sense of 65