Recently, the incarcerated former Prime Minister Imran Khan has been asking his supporters among the diaspora to stop sending remittances home. Similarly, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf supporters in the diaspora have been lobbying legislators in the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union parliament to sanction certain individuals in the current dispensation and to revoke Pakistan’s Generalised Scheme of Preferences Plus (GSP +) status.
As with many developing countries, the money sent home by Pakistanis is a major lifeline for the country’s economy. Remittances are Pakistan’s second biggest source of foreign exchange after its exports. If remittances were to drop, the country’s economy would certainly be hurt.
It’s the same with GSP+ which gives the country duty free access on 66% of EU tariff lines. The arrangement helps both Pakistan and the EU. Since 2014, trade between Pakistan and the EU has increased 78% from Euro 6.9 billion to 12.2 billion. This, again, is a major foreign exchange earner.
These calls by Mr Khan and efforts by his supporters abroad to inflict pain on these obvious pain points has resulted in much brouhaha within the country. Predictably, though no less unfortunately, the debate is conducted on partisan lines. The anti-PTI/Khan segments have even taken to calling the former PM and his supporters anti-state. The common refrain is that Mr Khan is prepared to hurt the interests of the state (Pakistan) to advance his personal agenda.
Mr Khan’s strategy or its merits and demerits aside, I want to focus on the use by analysts of the term state rather than government not for any semantic reasons but because the two, while they embrace each other in functional terms, are separate concepts.
And yet, the terms state and government are often and mostly erroneously used interchangeably or, worse, conflated even by scholars across the allied disciplines of social sciences. This, as political geographer Edward Heath Robinson has noted, results in reducing “linguistic expressiveness” which in turn decreases "the ability to differentiate between two very different entities.” [The Distinction Between State and Government; 2013]
Linguistic expressiveness or the stress on “terminological specificity” is important not only for developing a theory of state but also to point out that states and governments are “two related entities and not one and the same.” This distinction, as I want to point out, has real-life political and legal consequences. It is also somewhat amusing that social scientists have more clarity on the distinction between state and nation than between state and government.
States as an organising principle of political, social and economic life date back to ancient Greeks. Plato and Aristotle wrote about the state as a necessary institution for organising society and promoting justice. They could be democracies, as in the case of Athens or ruled by military oligarchies as in the case of Sparta.
For the most part, however, until the emergence of modern political thought and increasing technological developments which created complex societies and urban conurbations, states had monarchical systems of governance, the five centuries of Roman republic being an exception.
The monarchical systems weren’t the same, of course. The evolution in Europe was different from other parts of the world and even within Europe, for instance, Britain evolved differently than France or Spain or Russia.
But regardless of the systems of governance, political and legal thought has been grappling with how to define state, where to situate it and in what way or ways it might be or is different from the government.
This is where we need to fast forward to the Peace of Westphalia, which referred to the Peace of Augsburg of 1555 and recognised the “exclusive sovereignty of each party over its lands, people and agents abroad.”
While conquests, occupation and annexations continued, Westphalia and Augsburg are considered by scholars as instruments that laid the foundations, even if shaky, of the inviolability — if not the immutability — of state.
This means two things in legal and geopolitical terms: state has certain attributes which make it a state and interstate relations must rest on diplomacy and respect for state sovereignty. The important implication of this is the distinction between state and the governments it can have at different points in time.
In a paper for the Columbia Law Journal, Professors Monica Hakimi and Ingrid Brunk argue that “the set of treaties that European states concluded at the time (in the mid-seventeenth century) were meant to foster peace amongst themselves by settling title to territory and, on that basis, entrenching state authority.” In other words, this process evolved towards the concept of sovereign authority, which “eventually became the defining attribute of state-hood in international law.” [The Prohibition of Annexations and the Foundations of Modern International Law, 2024]
The modern concept of state can safely be attributed to the 1933 Montevideo Convention. Article 1 of the Convention was the first clear declaration of the state as “a person of international law [juridical entity]” possessing four attributes: a permanent population; a defined territory; a government and the capacity to enter into relations with the other states.
This is also the view of Krystyna Marek, Swiss-Polish professor of international law, when she refers of the Montevideo Convention and argues that “the identity and continuity of the State are not affected by changes of government.” [Identity and continuity of states in public international law; 1968]
Robinson notes that international law has more and earlier clarity on the distinction between state and government than social sciences have managed so far with an elusive theory of state.
The idea of title to the territory goes further back than the Montevideo Convention, though. As Hakimi and Brunk write: “At the first Inter-American Conference held in Panama in 1826, treaties were signed to provide collective guarantees of respect for territorial boundaries and to limit war.”
In that sense Latin American countries became “global leaders in pressing to end conquest. They also pushed for other norms to preserve territorial boundaries [by drafting] instruments that tried to establish a duty not to recognise the transfer of title in certain cases involving forcible acquisitions of territory,” and advocated for what came to be known as the “duty of non-recognition.”
To clarify, states’ emergence as a juridical entity, the foundational principle against annexation and title to territory have combined to create “nonphysical juridical entities of the international legal system, whereas governments are organisations with certain coercive powers. The relationship between a government and its state is one of representation and authorised agency.”
This gives us a central distinction. While governments come and go, states — to the extent of the norm against aggression, occupation and annexation — are to be treated as permanent entities under international law.
To put it differently, while governments can be removed, peacefully through electoral cycles or through protests, insurrections, civil wars and revolutions, “the state (with its rights and obligations) remains.”
As Professors Colin Flint and Peter Taylor argue, “Governments may try to define themselves as the state and hence condemn their opponents as ‘traitors’, but this is a very dangerous game.” They are clear that “Governments are short-term mechanisms for administering the long-term purposes of the state.”
This is also the view of Australian jurist and academic, James Crawford: “[I]nternational law does distinguish between change of State personality and change of the government of the State. There is a strong presumption that the State continues to exist, with its rights and obligations, despite revolutionary changes in government, or despite a period in which there is no, or no effective, government. Belligerent occupation does not affect the continuity of the State, even where there exists no government claiming to represent the occupied State. The legal position of governments-in-exile is dependent on the distinction between government and State.” [The creation of states in international law.]
In democracies, governments come to power through an accepted constitutional-political compact. The compact establishes the succession principle. Laws define how political entities will compete and how interests are to be aggregated. In that “ideal” world, governments run states through authorised agency. At the end of their term, people decide whether to return them or send them to the political Lapland.
It is therefore important to situate the debate about PTI’s strategy (a) in a clear distinction between state and government and (b) in the question of what has forced the PTI to resort to such a strategy — i.e., why was a constitutional process (elections) subverted, by whom and to what end? One might still end up faulting the PTI for resorting to its current strategy but at least we will be able to situate it in a context rather than conflating the distinct concepts of state and government.
The important point here is that making such a distinction is not just an exercise in academic or legal thinking. It is about how politics has played out in Pakistan and continues to and whether that path is the road we should have taken or continue traversing.