Building State Infrastructural Capacities: Sweden and Greece

Abstract Transition into modernity takes very different roads, depending on the sequencing of bureaucracy and democratic regime. This is demonstrated by comparing Sweden and Greece. At an early stage of the long-term modernisation of Swedish society, due to early penetration of the internal territory and before the extension of suffrage and political modernisation, a number of state organisations were established at the interstices between state and society, creating direct relations between the state and society. The impressive Lantmateriet, the organisation of tax authorities, the establishment of authorities for registering the population and the Tabellverket are typical illustrations of such organisational structures. Such organisations functioned as social mechanisms that elucidated society making it legible and thus strengthened the infrastructural capacity of the state. In Greece, where the state was built after political modernisation, the establishment of similar organisations proved to be more difficult. Although there is evidence that similar Swedish practices were known in Greece to be possible paths, they were not chosen. The establishment of a land registry system, for instance, was discussed in the decades prior to the 1871 land reform. On other issues, such choices could not be materialised given opposition or political counter-mobilisation to abolish the reforms after they were approved by parliament. These reform efforts were rather short-lived or countered by new reforms and exemptions, creating an ambiguous labyrinth of regulations of state–society relations and a state without the capacity to intervene in society and implement logistically political decisions throughout the realm. On the whole, the state remained a distant entity, mostly a distrusted one, and relations between the state and society were mediated by parties and by social and kinship-based networks.