(Page 9 of 41) - War Makes the State, but Not As It Pleases: Homeland Security and American Anti-Statism authored by Kroenig, Matthew.

of TSA, can usurp powers once exercised by individuals, private actors, or state and local
governments.

Since our interest is in how institutions influence the degree to which the state can
penetrate society in times of war, we are not only interested in an absolute measure of
state power, but also a relative one. Our method of measurement must enable us to gauge
how much of the impulse for state expansion was dissipated by America’s domestic
political structure before it was actualized in state power.

We thus ground our understanding of the expansion of state power in relation to both the
pre-9/11 status quo and the early proposals for improving homeland security in the wake
of the terrorist attacks. Cases in which early proposals were adopted without substantial
resistance, as expected by theory and conventional wisdom, we score as “expected”
increases in state power. State power is “restrained” in cases in which movements to
expand state power were challenged and significantly scaled-back. “Rejected” is the
score given to cases in which proposals to expand state power were thwarted completely
and the status quo was maintained.

A large number of cases in the “expected” category would indicate that a great expansion
of state power occurred in the United States after 9/11. This finding would validate
prevailing beliefs about U.S. homeland security policy and the war makes the state
school. A clustering of cases in the “restrained” category would signal that state power
did increase, but less than expected by common understandings and traditional
scholarship. This finding would be more consistent with our argument that the shock of
war provokes attempted expansions of state power, but that the extent of state growth is
shaped by domestic institutions. While the war makes the state school does not
necessarily imply that all proposals to expand state power will be implemented, it cannot
explain why a large proportion of state building efforts would fail during wartime. A
preponderance of cases in the rejected category would indicate little or no expansion of
state power. This outcome is not predicted by either approach, although cases in this
category would tend to favor our institutional argument.

We treat each case as an equivalent indicator of state power. For example, an “expected”
increase of power in domestic intelligence counts no more, or no less, than an “expected”
increase in critical infrastructure protection. It is obvious that growth in some functional
areas may have a bigger impact on aggregate state power than in others, but in the
absence of an a priori theoretical justification for which functional areas are most critical
to state-society relations, assigning varying weights to selected areas would be arbitrary
and inadvisable.

Rather, in order to ensure that any measurement bias works against our hypothesis, we
select for analysis only the issues often invoked as evidence of post-9/11 state growth.
These cases are: the USA Patriot Act, the detention of enemy combatants, the National
Strategy for Securing Cyberspace, the creation of TSA and the Department of Homeland
Security (DHS), and the restructuring of domestic intelligence.

For a small sample of the many articles and books citing these cases as real or potential expansions of

executive power see Dhalia Litwak and Julia Turner, “A Guide to the Patriot Act, Part I: Should you be
Scared of the Patriot Act,” Slate.com, 8 September 2003, available at http://slate.msn.com/id/2087984/;