LET’S talk big picture. Here are some experimental thoughts that come to mind when one takes a dispassionate view of the direction we are going in.

The state as the primary vessel of political power is a relatively recent phenomenon. Large, bureaucratically organised states with standing armies and elaborate fiscal systems and massive social obligations emerged from a period of constant warfare that began in Europe in the early modern period with the collapse of the Habsburg empire.

New forms of warfare emerged that combined with new economic innovations and discoveries, like fiscal centralism, joint stock companies, the New World and its riches. Artillery was a hallmark of modern warfare, and steadily rendered obsolete the 1,000-year-long dominance of the horse. Slowly armies were amalgamated into single large units, as opposed to many smaller private militias, which is how they were organised through much of the later medieval times.

But standing armies and growing batteries of artillery were expensive to raise and maintain, and rulers quickly learnt the importance of developing the fiscal apparatus necessary to sustain them. Modern revenue systems emerged primarily to meet the growing expense requirements of modern warfare. And growing developments in artillery made the conquest of distant lands possible — the riches from which fed the hungry treasuries of European monarchs. In the words of one historian who has written most authoritatively on this process, “in Europe, states made war and war made states”.

After fighting each other to exhaustion in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, the European powers arrived at a tenuous peace the result of which was to end the constant fighting on the continent, but to continue it unabated in distant lands. Out of this process of conquest and subjugation, patrimonial empires and all other forms of state were battered down and upon their ruins, often with the remaining debris of the empires themselves, centralised states were erected.

As with the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, the new system that emerged after the Second World War ensured that direct conflict between the great powers was held at bay, while the ‘Third World’ became the proxy battleground for superpower rivalry.

Virtually no large-scale, and long-lasting wars have been fought between standing armies since the Second World War ended. Instead, conflict moved into the finer grooves of society. The longest wars of the half century or so since the Second World War — Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan — were fought between an army on one side, and ragtag irregulars, militias, warlords and insurgent groups on the other.

Here’s what I’m getting get: what we’re actually seeing happen before our eyes in Pakistan, what lies behind the sustained and painful ‘debates’ on the merits of talking or fighting, is an inexorable process where the state itself is being superseded by other, cheaper, more agile, and certainly more determined models for the deployment of armed force. An entire world stands to be transformed along the way. The rise of the nation state, for instance, brought with it new modern publics, institutions for the administration of populations, the measurement of economic welfare, a discourse of rights, notions of citizenship and participation and entitlements. For the first time, rulers were exhorted to earn their right to rule “from the just consent of the governed”, an idea largely alien to rulers of ages past.

The supersession of the nation state will necessarily see all these ideas replaced by something else. But the replacement will not be smooth, principally because the new notions that are struggling to be born are far from clear about how they can form a basis for the exercise of power over large populations.

Even the modern state inflicted terrible savagery on its own people before recognising them as citizens, as opposed to subjects. The journey to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights goes through slavery, colonialism and civil war, for instance.

But more than just ideas are at stake. It’s easy to miss the significance of the things that are closest to us. The modern state gave us a universal medium of exchange and central banks designed to manage this medium.

Likewise with large-scale fixed capital. Extraction of oil, gas and minerals, for instance, requires the deployment of large-scale capital, which in turn needs expertise, finance and protection. Each of these requires large institutions to arrange, educational, financial, plus a law and order machinery. Each of those carries a price tag, which means revenue that can only come from incomes derived from a functioning economy.

The new militias that are increasingly challenging the nation state derive their own sustenance from the very economic and social order that the nation state presides over. Even the smallest band of determined fighters needs to eat, and needs ammunition and fuel. It also needs recruits to replenish its ranks. These recruits usually have families and other social obligations.

In some places, these militias are able to ‘live off the land’, so to speak. Crime and plunder can keep them going for a while, but when the fighting gets intense — like the Congo or Afghanistan — it takes powerful patrons to survive.

In short, the very emergence and rise of these militias poses an economic question. What sort of an economy can their leaderships envision? How do they see their relationship with the resources they need to sustain their fight?

The writer is a business journalist and 2013-2014 Pakistan Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Centre, Washington D.C.

khurram.husain@gmail.com

Twitter: @khurramhusain