The Idea of Failed States

Community, Society, Nation, and Patterns of Cohesion

H. Breede, H. Christian Breede

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138716391
• eBook ISBN: 9781351768351
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Why are some states able to deliver public services to their citizens while others cannot? Why are some states beset by internal conflict that leaves many impoverished? Much of what has become known as the failed states literature attempts to engage with these questions, but does so in way that betrays a particular bias, engaging in advocacy for intervention rather than analysis. The Idea of Failed States directly challenges existing thinking about conventional state strength as it finds that institutional approaches to state strength obscure as much as they reveal.

The question of why some states are strong and others weak has traditionally been addressed using measures of economic growth, resources, and quality of life. This book compares the dimensions of state strength characterised by community, society, and nation and uses social capital concepts to further illuminate them. Applying this approach across forty-two countries shows 'weak' states exhibiting a consistent and unique patterns of relationships between community, society, and nation as well as equally consistent and unique relationships in strong states. A blend of theory and empirics, The Idea of Failed States present a new way to think about the state – one that applies to both strong and weak alike.

This work should be of interest to students and scholars researching social capital, public policy, international development and security studies.

1
The puzzle of failed states

From Port-au-Prince to Kandahar

The smell is something that I will never forget. It was everywhere and yet hard to pinpoint in terms of a source. Later, I was told that the smell was equal parts burning charcoal and feces, a smell which sadly complemented my visual surroundings. Driving through the streets of Port-au-Prince in our Bombardier Iltis, essentially an open-topped light truck, I was assaulted by not only the smell, but also the sight of mountains of garbage that we had to navigate around in order to reach our destination. Garbage was heaped on the roads, clogging the city’s open sewers, spilling over onto the sidewalks. It was everywhere. Port-au-Prince, planted on the shores of a large bay and creeping up the slopes of nearby mountains, was a city that must have truly been idyllic in the past. Just not today; not in that summer of 2004 as we drove and walked through those streets, my senses exposed to something I’d never experienced before, having spent my life up to that point firmly planted in the developed West. The streets of Port-au-Prince teemed with clusters of people, marked by shanties and a sense of individualism that I found jarring; Durkheim’s anomie on full display.¹ Garbage was carefully removed from homes and moved onto the streets, leading to a complete degradation of the commons the likes of which the late Elinor Ostrom would have sympathized with. The experience, needless to say, left a mark.

A few years later in 2008 I found myself in another troubled place, this time half a world away; the city of Kandahar. While walking and driving through its streets, this time in an eight-wheeled armoured vehicle we simply called a LAV, the same smell I had experienced in Port-au-Prince greeted me, but the sight was very different. Although the sight of shanties lining the streets was still common, crumbling and abandoned buildings, scarred by signs of battle, were equally present. What was missing, however, was the garbage. Rather than piles of garbage impeding traffic, be it foot or otherwise, travelers were greeted with clear streets, and yet the level of poverty was just as severe. Kandahar, unlike Port-au-Prince, straddles a small river which snakes through a desert, having once been christened Alexandria in Arachosia by the ancient conqueror of the same name – Alexander the Great. Kandahar City, like Port-au-Prince, was subject to a weak state system and yet that small difference – the level of garbage in those two cities – continued to sit with me for years after those deployments in 2004 and 2008. Both cities are in states that have consistently topped the lists of poor state performance,² such as the Fragile States Index, and yet the nuances of these places are drastically different. No two states are exactly alike, to be sure. The problems facing Haiti are just as acute, but also completely different from those facing Afghanistan.

One reason for the different observations is captured by the idea of social capital. In the broadest sense, social capital is a way of thinking about how people relate to each other, offering a potential clue for the differences observed in these two cities. A differentiation offered in Robert Putnam’s classic Bowling Alone between bonding and bridging social capital is particularly helpful. Put simply, bonding social capital is the close or tightknit bonds of family, while bridging social capital is the broader and looser bonds between acquaintances.³ These two concepts provided me with a vocabulary to try to make sense of the jarring difference I observed between Port-au-Prince and Kandahar.

Obvious differences aside, there was something that conceptually separated these two places that culture alone – as I understood it – failed to encapsulate. The idea that bonding social capital might be high and bridging social capital might be low in Haiti, and that both forms of social capital may be comparatively higher in Afghanistan, spoke volumes to what I observed. Piles of garbage littered the street in Port-au-Prince to the point of hindrance, while in Kandahar the streets were comparatively bare, and dare I say it, even clean. Where Port-au-Prince was characterized by mountains of garbage piled in the streets, the rubble and debris of war was the characterizing feature of Kandahar, but even this was cleared away, the rubble and the debris swept aside. Social capital gives a potential clue as to how one gets from Port-au-Prince to Kandahar. The bridging social capital is what clears away the garbage, while bonding social capital is what put it there in the first place.

It became clear to me that even within the category of states, one finds that between Haiti and Afghanistan, many, less obvious but clearly important, differences exist. Not all states ‘fail’ for the same reasons, and not all states remain ‘failed’ for those very same reasons. That such stark differences, like differences in the pattern of garbage disposal, stood out to me while I traveled and worked in these places revealed the complexity of what makes a state work. As big as the differences were between Port-au-Prince and Kandahar, such differences are orders of magnitude greater when compared with the developed, and comparatively strong, states of the West. What is it that makes some states strong and some states weak? It is into this realm that this book wades.

Theories and meanings of strength

Strength and weakness are relative concepts: they only have meaning when compared against something else. When we talk about the strength of the state, or the weakness of a state, we need to first examine what a state is supposed to do. We need a point of reference for comparison in order to assess strength and weakness. An Olympic lifter is strong compared with what I can lift; however, that same elite athlete is weak compared with the load a forklift can raise six or seven feet in the air. Although an extreme example (and somewhat unfair to the Olympic lifter), this analogy demonstrates the utility of comparison. So with this in mind, what are states supposed to do?

This book will begin by briefly engaging with the philosophy behind Western conceptions of what the state is, and more importantly, what a state is supposed to do. This will clarify the limitations of existing conceptions of the ‘failed state’. All of this, of course, will further reinforce what this book contributes, namely a novel and measurable understanding of how states differ in terms of what policymakers have increasingly referred to as ‘state failure’.

The study of political philosophy is always a tricky endeavour. The intellectual richness of the texts rarely affords consensus amongst those who study it, especially those in which the source of the text are long dead. A single interpretation can be deemed by one individual as enlightening, and yet another may interpret it as a disservice to the original work. Neither interpretation can be validated beyond consensus in an ongoing debate, however. Simply recall high school English classes as they explored and dissected the plays of Shakespeare, searching for nuanced meanings and conclusions from each line of text.

I was once counseled that in order to understand the work of political theorists, one should also appreciate the historical context of when they were writing. The political writings of Thomas Hobbes, notably his 1651 work Leviathan, were very much shaped by the time in which he wrote. Having witnessed the horrors of the English Civil War, Thomas Hobbes was quite aware of what happens when a state ceases to function. For Hobbes, the purpose of the state was to protect people:

The final cause, End or Design of men (who naturally love liberty, and Dominion over others) in the introduction of that restraint upon themselves (in which we see them live in Common-wealths) is the foresight of their own preservation, and of a more contented life thereby; that is to say, of getting themselves out from that miserable condition of Warre [sic].⁴

For Hobbes, the state provides a defense against others, but also a defense against internal despotism. Although Hobbes holds the state as key to the protection of individuals, the state can also be a threat to its own people, just as people can pose threats to each other. For Hobbes, the state was about providing protection, whether through the protection of all from all or protection of all from the state itself. Indeed, Charles Tilly made this connection decades ago with his famous comparison of states and protection rackets of organized crime. States are in an extractive relationship with their citizens, whether through taxation or services, and that extraction is compensated by a provision of security – the state provides protection in exchange for something from the people.⁵ The state is supposed to protect.

A century later, writing not in England, but from Germany, and having enjoyed the fruits of enlightenment rather than the chaos of civil war, Immanuel Kant argued that the state was not about protection, but instead justice. For Kant, “a perfectly just civil constitution, must be the supreme task nature has set for mankind.”⁶ Only through a just society, argued Kant, can people realize their full potential. With the Kantian view of the state we see a shift, subtle yet important, from what Hobbes argued a state should do, to a conception that is more general and broad. Kant argues that the state as a whole – one that includes both the institutions of the state (the government) and the people who populate it (the society) – needs to pursue justice. All elements of the state need to work towards giving the population a sense of just control: everybody gets a say, which will result in all elements of the state working to protect one another. Kant would agree with Hobbes that people form states to thrive, to stop worrying about outsiders, but feels that this burden falls not just to the government, but extends to the governed as well.

Both Kant and Hobbes, as intellectual founders of the modern conception of the state, have identified the principal role of the state while also demonstrating the foundations of two distinct traditions within the study of states. Hobbes, considered by realists as their starting point (perhaps along with certain readings of Thucydides) presents a pessimistic view of human nature that the state must protect against. Kant, in contrast, is somewhat more optimistic concerning human nature, with liberals often using the Kantian argument that reason can lead to perfectibility of humanity’s natural defects.⁷ Where Hobbes sees people as the cause of conflict and instability, and therefore demanding an institutional solution through the state, Kant regards people as the solution to conflict and instability. The implication of Kant’s argument is that a solution to conflict needs to be more than just institutional, but one that includes the people too.

In the centuries that have passed since Hobbes and Kant wrote about the role of the state, the entire planet, not just Europe, has organized itself into a system of states.⁸ As Margaret Moore pointed out, every habitable corner of the planet has some form of territorial claim made upon it by a state.⁹ Moreover, the way in which all states have conceptualized themselves is in keeping with the construct first forged out of the Peace of Westphalia that ended the Thirty-Years War in Europe; territorial sovereignty and the construction of borders. The modern state model – as critics are quick to point out – is Eurocentric in nature, but still a model that all actors on the international stage are emulating.

Writing in the early 1900s, within a decade or so of his death, German historian-economist-sociologist Max Weber argued that a state is a Rechtstaat, or a “rights state”, which is concerned not only with material power, but also with rational-legal power.¹⁰ This specification of power indicates an emphasis upon the idea of legitimate power, formed through the relationship a state must have with the population. Moreover, this particular type of power is based on laws, not the whims of an individual leader, with those laws concerned with the maximization of some concept of common good.

At this point it is useful to examine what is meant by the words ‘justice’ and ‘legitimacy’, especially since the above...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1 The puzzle of failed states
• 2 Measuring failure or capability?
• 3 Concepts of cohesion
• 4 Bringing in social capital
• 5 Challenges to social capital and the centrality of trust
• 6 The idea and a measure of the nation
• 7 The idea and a measure of community and society
• 8 What state strength looks like
• 9 Conclusion: new approaches
• Appendix – calculations
• Selected annotated bibliography of Buzan’s works
• General bibliography
• Index