The state’s apparent unity masks radically heterogeneous local power struggles

Evidence

For as suggested above, the state may be thought of as the phantom of governance and authority, a territorial placeholder for sets of often competing and more or less local institutional interests and powers. In this sense, the state provides media and a measure of scope for the assertion and authorization, legislation and legitimation of institutional power(s). The latter two institutional practices offer to the former two a semblance of coherence, a singularity of style and voice, a common language and mode, the shadow of an institutional sphere in the face of prolific heterogeneous messiness. They offer, that is, the artifice of national, cultural, and expressive unity - community - in the face of fractured disunity and anarchy, the artifice of homogeneity in the face of proliferating heterogeneities. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1720

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘phantom of governance’ reading of the state resonates with James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State and with the ‘on the make’ colonial-state point raised earlier in this same chapter. — connects to: National unity is a falsehood masking class division within states — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 339