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States with Adjectives
David Sogge
P@X Bulletin No. 1, March 2004
Not so long ago, a main thrust of Western strategy
was Rollback. Its specific purpose was to defeat
"communist" governments in non-Western places. There
has also been another thrust, running parallel but with a
larger purpose, to roll back government generally - in
the words of a top American policymaker, "to get it
down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub".
A justification for rolling back the state was that it
naturally tends to fail; markets, it was said, don't fail.
Evangelists for market fundamentalism could smugly
point to "state failure" as proof of the need for their
dogmatic teachings.
After a couple of decades of shrinking and de-legitimising
states and promoting a norm that everything
is for sale, these strategies are now known to impose
huge costs. In targeted countries in Africa, Latin
America and the ex-Soviet Union, hundreds of million
have born those costs. But Western countries are also
now paying a price as disorder, poverty and resentment
in targeted places blows back at them - in migrants,
drugs, firearms, criminal mafias and, most dramatically,
mass murder and destruction of symbols of Western
power. The costs show up in ugly swings in voting
patterns, in government curbs on basic rights, in bloated
budgets for armed forces and police, and in bailouts of
banks whose poor country loans have gone bad.
In a world that has become one place, faraway sites
of distress and violence are not so far away from the
West after all.
Collapsed, weak, fragile, diminished states - states
with adjectives - are no longer merely the quaint
preoccupations of aid agencies and a few probing
journalists and academics. Especially since 11
September 2001 they are on the "radar" of military,
diplomatic, corporate, academic and NGO researchers
and strategy-makers. Attitudes toward the state have
also shifted. According to strong versions of the dogma,
government was to be shrunk, if not drowned in the
bathtub. Now under weaker versions it is to be
reinvented, and given roles in "nation building" - though
chiefly with powers to keep public order.
Now, from the same quarters that pushed a rollback
of the state, come definitions of "failed state" problems
in terms of preferred solutions: the imposition from the
outside and from above of a new regime, military
occupation, and protectorates. This is imperialism with
adjectives - like "benign" or "humanitarian".
For researchers and policy activists wishing to
promote emancipatory alternatives, this situation looks
bad, but it is not altogether hopeless. Policy agendas
are not sewn up. Some policy makers, especially in
Europe, are open to fresh ideas. A number of issues and
hypotheses about weakened states present themselves
for renewed research and debate. Among them are
opportunities to:
- Shift attention beyond nations like Somalia or
Afghanistan toward sub-regions such as the southern
Philippines and even urban areas such as in Brazil, where
public order is extremely fragile if it exists at all.
- Approach state collapse less as an unfortunate
accident and more as an outcome of deliberate policy.
This was the case in the ex-Soviet republics, according to
Jeffrey Sachs, an architect of "shock therapy" there. A
weak state can be analysed as something predatory
leaders perpetuate because it is useful to them, as in
sub-Saharan Africa, where disorder has been
"instrumentalized" by politicians and warlords.
- Study global systems of rules that promote
conditions for state collapse, such as bank secrecy,
corporate freedoms to bribe, the "war on drugs" and
incoherent economic systems that redistribute wealth
from poor to rich.
- Study domestic arrangements that permit greater
transparency about the use and allocation of public and
private resources (such state investment as across
regions and ethnic groupings) and that restrain those
peddling "solutions" that offer little genuine democracy
but unleash polarizing trends.
- Finally, it may help our understanding of weak
states and what can be done about them to look North as
well as South and East. Silvio Berlusconi is no Mobutu,
but a comparison of their respective effects on public
institutions in Italy and the Congo might shed light on
the processes of state failure.
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