There are at least four types of states.

I. The state known as the “Asian” type—or of the “Asian mode of production (AMP) was born as a result of the great hydraulic works, described by Marx and Engels, the most perfected model of which is the Pharaonic Egyptian state. It should therefore be called, with utmost precision, the “African type of state.” In our opinion, one of the distinctive traits of this category is the weight of civilian power as compared to military power; military aristocracy is practically absent, and in normal times, the soldiers play only an unobtrusive, if not nonexistent, political role. The military aristocracy is not the focal point of society. War has rather a defensive function. The entire ideological substructure is only an apologetic for moral and human values, excluding the values of warfare.

The privileged physical situation of Egypt (abundance of resources, a valley protected by two mountainous deserts with only two access roads, at the north and south) ensured the quasi-permanence of these characteristics of the Egyptian state. Egypt had to be invaded by the Hyksos in order to embark, in reaction, on the conquest of western Asia beginning with the XVIIIth Dynasty, under Thutmose III (1470 B.C.).

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II. State born out of resistance to the enemy. … A homogeneous ethnic group (a confederation of exogamous tribes) organizes, not for conquest, but to drive off a danger, an outside enemy.

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III. The third type of state is represented by the ancient Athenian model, a result of the dissolution of the mode of production of antiquity; the state is only the legal instrument of domination of one class over another.

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IV. The Spartan and Tutsi type of state. If, for whatever reason, the conquering ethnic group refuses to mix with the indigenous conquered element and bases its domination on this absolute separation, the opposition is essentially ethnic and will always be resolved, in ancient and modern history, by genocide.