If journalists write history’s first draft, their efforts demand extensive revision to account for both new information and the consequences of events as they emerge. Trends only come into view over a much longer term. What seemed important at first often matters less than other things that bring larger patterns into focus.      

Charles Maier builds on more than fifty years of scholarship to highlight important trends over the long twentieth century in The Project-State and Its Rivals. He offers four different categories of political forces to explain the political dynamics of that period. All of them stand apart from the standard dichotomies of either political left and right or liberal-democratic and totalitarian regimes. Sweeping agendas “for transforming political institutions, civil society, and even mentalities” define the first category of what he calls activist “project-states.” Resource empires marked a different kind of modernizing project, in which governments pushed colonial development as a means of exploiting their overseas territories more effectively, trying to stay economically viable and maintain their great power status. A third trend grew around what Maier calls a realm of governance in which non-governmental organizations set norms and influenced policy. Businesses backed by a network of transnational capital formed the last category. These four groups operate as collective agents in a symbiotic relationship that shaped the last hundred and twenty-five years. At the same time, this era had its own discontents which reveal important aspects of tensions in the present day.

Maier clearly values the well-regulated state as the vehicle to advance public interests, uphold the political community, and temper business cycles and economic inequality. Indeed, he blames civic strife and other problems on the state’s retreat from a leading role since the early 1980s. Readers might draw other conclusions. Maier does admit that without checks, “the project-state alone can become abusive.” While all of these agents have a proper role, each on its own remains prone to overreach. If rewards to capital are excessive, corruption and self-dealing tend to follow; rational governance in the hands of self-appointed experts tends to spark backlash. All these political tendencies have their shortcomings and characteristic abuses. The cycles Maier traces deftly in The Project-State and Its Rivals show the difficulty of sustaining a balanced political order underpinned by popular support.

Struggle, Mission, and the Project-State

What Maier calls the activist project-state emerged from a combination of crisis and the ambition to reshape society. The pressures and experiences of World War I proved to be important catalysts. Advocates of the project-state sought to transcend established loyalties to family, church, and community by an enhanced form of civic consciousness that could be defined in liberal-democratic, authoritarian, or even totalitarian terms. Examples range from Adolf Hitler’s Germany, the Soviet Union, and Communist China to America’s New Deal and Great Society, and the French Popular Front of the 1930s. Though he does not equate despotisms that violated human rights with liberal democracies that upheld them, Maier does defend the project-state as an analytical category that captures important shared characteristics. Its transformative agenda went beyond economic or institutional modernization: social engineering captures the project-state’s ambitions well. And it demanded popular enthusiasm rather than mere acquiescence. Project-states therefore had a shelf life. They became institutionalized as initial zeal lagged and leaders compromised or faltered against determined resistance. 

Maier describes the project-state as redemptive in an emotional sense that evokes religious movements. This captures an important reality, but there was also resistance to this aspect of the modern state that he does not develop or engage. Not everyone bought into the various secular theodicies behind the push for redemption. Investing politics with transcendent meaning and framing alternative civic religions antagonized the conventionally religious while leaving many skeptics unconvinced. Starting in the late nineteenth century, science and culture, along with militant nationalism, filled a role that churches once played, while the social gospel among American Protestants made salvation a worldly concern to be achieved here and now. A Calvinist sensibility detached from scripture and Christian teaching—what James Kurth calls “The Protestant Declension”—reframed sin and salvation anxiety among the purported elect around shifting programs for secular change that precluded redemption for those who rejected it. Marxism offered proletarian triumph over capitalists in its millennium, with other groups later replacing workers as history’s vehicle in the oppressor-oppressed dialectic cribbed from Hegel. While these impulses and others certainly aroused enthusiasm, many people saw the visions of project-states as naive or even malevolent. 

Many people preferred the world they knew—possibly improved through meliorist reforms—to the brave new ones pressed upon them. Some valued private life and its priorities over public action, while others believed disruption had costs that outweighed the likely benefits of sweeping change. Religion imposed a barrier as an alternative source of meaning, but so did local community and family along with material comfort. Wartime mobilization soured those who lived through it on regimentation and the dislocations conflict brought. Rather than enlist for a moral equivalent to war, people turned apolitical and disillusioned with the political drama they blamed for their suffering.

The desire for “normalcy” Maier notes (without attributing the word to Warren Harding), applied in other times and places beyond the 1920s United States. German authorities in World War II strived to contain domestic opposition by keeping civilian living standards as high as possible and resisting mobilization of women, recognizing the limits of their popular support. The post-1945 efforts to build the Labor government’s New Jerusalem were impeded not only by middle-class resistance to austerity and high taxes, but also by the private and community-focused nature of British working-class life. A potent backlash against the Great Society and Civil Rights movement shaped American politics from the late 1960s. But even as project-states waxed and waned, they persisted as a lasting phenomenon.

Resource Empires and Modernization

Resource empires, by contrast, faded after World War II, though variants like the British Commonwealth and French Union persisted after decolonization. These supranational projects that kept former rulers in charge of economic and cultural relationships provided an alternative to direct imperial control, but development initiatives guided by non-governmental organizations and foreign capital became the main alternative from the 1960s. Resource empires grew from efforts to make colonies profitable, especially those ruled directly (as opposed to self-governed settler domains). Colonial powers developed their colonies and integrated them with national economies as sources of revenue and vital resources unavailable at home. This was especially effective as those secure markets for home goods or services became more valuable in the 1920s and ’30s.

Turning colonies into resource empires helped European powers and Japan match continental states of wider territorial expanse. The policy secured access to energy and strategic materials that could be traded within a currency bloc controlled by a metropole which let its banks dominate public and private finance. Procedural security and the rule of law encouraged investment in finance development. The British used the policy of Imperial Preference during the 1930s to protect home and colonial agriculture and their manufacturing sector from foreign competition. But could resource empires operate at a profit? Or did they merely subsidize at taxpayer expense metropolitan interests that benefitted from colonies? Maier suggests that colonies largely bolstered their ruler’s international position and that modernizing prior empires of conquest worked only for a time. Other forces supplanted backward-looking resource empires from the 1950s.

Non-Governmental Organizations

What later became known as non-governmental organizations developed in the early twentieth century around philanthropic endeavors through lavishly endowed foundations and initiatives to expand international law. Examples include the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Council on Foreign Relations, and later the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations. These bodies occupied a space between state authority and private action while striving to direct them both along rationalist lines. They reflected what Maier calls “a dense field of aspirations and discourse” that viewed society as a manageable whole that experts mastering statistical and biological sciences and law could know and control. Private foundations only had the authority governments allowed them, but they increasingly conferred legitimacy while providing knowledge and advice. Maier describes them, and the widening range of international organizations spawned by two world wars, as “a realm of governance” offering an alternative to territorial states and their political divisions. Like the project-state, its reach followed cycles while forming an increasingly dense network by the late 1980s. 

Maier calls this realm of governance “a domain of norms, ostensibly based on science, considerations of justice, or calculations of utility” acting for the common good from “empirical findings and disinterested debate.” His modifier “ostensibly” carries much weight here because claims to expertise, in our time, may invite defiance more than they command assent. Episodes from Brexit to the Covid-19 response show that without democratic accountability, the further technocratic governance reaches, the greater resistance it arouses. Even while supporting its claims, Maier asks, “How could equality be reconciled with [this] governance”? Or indeed liberty and constitutional government? Expertise brooks no check on its authority from persons or institutions and sets what it determines as the verdict of science as final. Those deemed wrong have no right to appeal. Since the 1960s, foundations staffed by professionals and funded by donors have supplanted organizations accountable to their members (trade unions, civic groups like Rotary, and churches). Instead of conferring legitimacy, as Maier suggests, the realm of governance increasingly lacks it.

As a counterpart to governance, banks and corporations since at least the 1920s formed “a web of capital” tied with and sometimes backed by home governments but holding interests and loyalties apart from them and often acting independently. Capital and governance stepped into the development space left by decolonization to shape programs that states had previously guided. Global trade during the post-1945 and post-Cold War decades enhanced the power of capital until periodic crises pushed it back. States, often working through international organizations, provided a safety net during periodic financial panics, but demand for profit gave capital leverage especially when governments pulled back from regulating business. A turn against social democracy, accelerated by stagflation in the 1970s and globalization after 1989, empowered the web of capital in new ways. Technology in the digital era gave it increasing wealth and weight. Maier sees that dynamic as both exploitative and destabilizing for world order.

A Ghost at the Feast

Framing history since World War I around the project-state and its rivals brings pivotal events into sharper focus. Maier’s categories serve a valuable explanatory purpose that encompasses movements in the Progressive Era United States along with state action in response to the demands of total war. As project-states receded at different points, their non-governmental rivals grew and yielded precedence themselves as events dictated. Cycles repeated where pressures made state and non-state actors more prominent, with the latter growing along the way. War, including the early Cold War, favored the project-state with its capacity for mobilization. Maier sees in the crisis of recent years an imbalance exploited by populists and authoritarians. He seems to hope a recovery of the project-state guided by norms of governance and checked somewhat by capital will recover what he considers the success of earlier decades.

The dynamic equilibrium Maier seeks, however, is becoming increasingly elusive. The fact is, the project-state, organizational governance, and international capital all depend on a certain consensus that the public, by and large, rejects. He notes revealingly how lifestyle issues replaced economic concerns on the political left as part of a larger shift from the 1960s. Bourgeoise bohemians in governance and capital alike embraced a trend that left working-class voters politically homeless. The managerial state also took a therapeutic turn, which Maier does not address, that reframed social disagreement in psychological terms as irrational phobia requiring treatment rather than debate. Neither checks nor balances have flourished under those changes. Indeed, business and non-governmental organizations have worked since the 1990s to handle a whole range of issues from smoking and accommodating sexual preference to residential mortgages as matters of “best practice” outside the political sphere and democratic accountability. 

Maier’s typology also presents critics of project-states and technocratic governance as either relics of a fading past or unsavory populists. Many of those critics followed a more modest pragmatism that resists the transformative aims of project-states and the hubris of governance, while treating capital as one tool among many rather than an unquestionable force. Improvement matters more to them than redemption. They prefer to uphold established ways and adapt where necessary instead of reaching for a golden future that turns out to reflect a passing intellectual fad. By dismissing such critics, Maier opens a gap in his analysis because he just cannot see why any reasonable person would differ from the bien pensant milieu that shares his own assumptions. How can you resist progress? 

Thoughtfully engaging the critics of progress over the long twentieth century would address that question to expand Maier’s analysis and perhaps consider where project-states, governance, and capital went wrong.