State of Progress

A project to understand the importance of the state in achieving progress in the Global South

State of Progress is a project that aims to develop the idea that states are an important factor to create or hold back progress around the world. State as we know today is probably one of the most important ideas of humanity. It is no for nothing that an international system exists comprising 195 countries, each one of them with political and economic systems housing roughly 8.2 billion people. The state as we know it today can be traced back to 1648, a year most historians agree marks its conception. That means this idea has only existed for 377 years out of our 6,000 years of civilization.

In 1648, the Thirty Years’ War ended. This war was a conflict that began between Catholics and Protestants within the Holy Roman Empire. It involved European powers, including Sweden, Spain, France and Austria. However they did not fight as the countries as we know today; it was actually a conflict between the Habsburg Monarchy and the Spanish Empire, against the Bourbon Dynasty and the Swedish Empire. It means that at this point of history, in the 17th Century, the powers were represented by royal dynasties.

Royal dynasties mean also a vastly different political and economic system. There were patrilineal successions, strategic marriages, divine rights, feudal monopolies, personal armies and patronage networks, among other characteristics.

Those powers entered into conflict and in 1648, after almost 30 years of war signed a peace agreement known as the Peace of Westphalia. This was a treaty in which the Holy Roman Emperor figure was weakened, defined territorial borders and declared something that might not be too obvious at that time (and actually nowadays it is still a gray zone), set the rule that other nations should not interfere in a country's internal religious or political choices. This rule birthed the modern idea of state sovereignty and national borders.

Again, this might sound too evident and we might tend to think that there were borders and were limits before Westphalia. Think about Ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, etc. and many other empires, that set borders and established powers within those borders. Actually, French philosopher Jean Bodin wrote in 1576 about ‘absolute sovereignty’. However, by 1648 was the first time in history that these ideas were turned into reality through a binding international law. It brought order.

Some of this order was that the ruler of a state became the ultimate authority inside their own borders, and then, the Pope and the Emperor lost their legal right to intervene within those borders; religion, so important through the dynamics of power, became an administrative internal choice; mercenaries turned into national armies funded by government taxes; and any intervention over the border lines was a clear declaration of war.

Once more, those kind of rules that we might consider conspicuous today, were not at that time. Those kind of rules set the bases of the international system that recognizes 195 countries today.

So part of creating State of Progress is the idea to identify political ideas that can trigger progress and others that can hold back that progress. The general hypothesis is that the order and set of rules created in the 17th Century were equally important as scientific and technological innovations. And the existence of an international system, nation states, and autonomous political systems has helped to create progress while the lack of it can withhold that progress.

In this project, we will dive into the study of the state as a political institution with profound consequences on the cultural, social, economic, technological, and scientific issues that affect progress. Our intention is to debate the idea of how much progress can be affected by the figure of the state, and what that means for the advancement of humankind, with a clear focus on low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).

The idea started when we were reading literature about progress and noticed a deep nostalgia for a specific era of countries like the United States and the United Kingdom. A period in which these countries created a series of actions, programs, and inventions that foresaw a better future for all of humanity –or, at the very least, for their own citizens. However, the construction of that set of ideas and that mindset was based on immense political, economic, and even cultural power. The United Kingdom built this capacity in the 19th Century through the Industrial Revolution, a formidable Royal Navy, and the construction of a robust financial system; The United States did the same during the 20th Century through its geographic position, mass migration, and its industrial expansion during WWI and WWII, and ultimately, its Cold War victory over the USSR.

Even though, there were debates regarding how much influence the state should have over the economy, there was a consensus on having a political structure that can drive progress.

It was not the same for other countries, even those whose independence was relatively close in time to the independence of America from the British, such as Colombia. The United States achieved independence in 1776, while Colombia’s was achieved between 1810 and 1819. And besides the dates, the construction of the state as a political institution was completely different from one nation to the other. This is exactly what we want to study in State of Progress. Not to compare these nations to one another, but to analyze how the figure of the state in LMICs has approached the idea of progress, and how it can be a vital factor in achieving it for 5.6 billion people in the Global South (excluding China).

So far, we have developed two main ideas based on this premise. Throughout the project, we will iterate on these and generate new perspectives. The first idea is that progress in LMICs is frequently adopted rather than created. Consider the inventions and technologies built in the developed world that are later imported to drive progress in these developing countries; and the second idea focuses on the active role LMICs play in building global progress, by innovations generated within these states or by migrants from LMICs who have contributed to advancements in developed countries. In both cases, we consider the figure of the state as an important factor.

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