Weak States, Vulnerable Governments, and Regional Cooperation

An ASEAN Case Study

Atena Ştefania Feraru

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032067773
• eBook ISBN: 9781351015059
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

War, famine, poverty, organized crime, environmental catastrophes, refugees, epidemics and pandemics, modern slavery – all these affect people in the non-Western world to an increasingly disproportionate extent. It is also where wealthy governments wield economic leverage and military force to renegotiate existing norms of international relations. Under these circumstances, it is difficult to overestimate the importance and urgency of comprehending the mechanisms and motivations driving these phenomena.

This book is the outcome of a decade-long effort to advance both theoretical and empirical understanding of what motivates non-Western governments' decisions to cooperate/not cooperate regionally. It starts by acknowledging the Western-centrism of prevailing international relations theories, abandoning deeply entrenched assumptions regarding the nature and roles of states, and redefining state weakness. The inquiry continues by elaborating this new concept and applying it to Southeast Asian polities while positing that it creates governments vulnerable to internal and external threats, in line with Joel S. Migdal's well-known findings on the topic. A set of regional cooperation strategies is then inferred, based on the survival needs of insecure governing elites and its empirical validity is tested against the experience of regional organizations in Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

The second part of the book provides an in-depth examination of how Southeast Asian governments' shared security needs and interests shaped the emergence of the identified regional cooperation pattern and its evolution over 50 years of cooperation within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Overall, this book is a call to international relations scholars to do our part in understanding non-Western experiences and making a substantive contribution to addressing humanity's most intractable security threats.

Part I Weak states, vulnerable governments, and regional cooperation

1Re-conceptualizing state weakness and its impact on government behaviourA brief assessment of Southeast Asia

DOI: 10.4324/9781351015073-2

State weakness/strength as an aspect of the state-society relationship and the manner it shapes government behaviour

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a comprehensive understanding of the nature and extent of state weakness in Southeast Asia. It starts by re-conceptualizing state weakness with a view to facilitate a deeper understanding of ruling elites’ behaviour. As such, it advances a definition that emphasizes the state-society relationship, its connections with government vulnerability, and how it shapes government action. The chapter centres on weaknesses in the state-society relationships in Southeast Asia. In particular, according to this adjusted concept of state weakness, it looks at existing challenges to state control as well as obstacles to its legitimacy, taking into account societal reactions to government behaviour and their implications for the overall strength of the state-society relationship. Therefore, the chapter is organized along two main sections. The first part claims that the weakness or strength of the state lies in its relationship with the society and posits that weaknesses within this relationship help condition and explain governments’ proneness to prioritize their political survival at the expense of strengthening the state-society relationship. The second section, which constitutes the bulk of the chapter, elaborates on the particular state-society weaknesses within Southeast Asia. It is divided into two subsections, which discuss control and legitimacy issues, respectively. The subsection on legitimacy itself is further divided into two parts—the first part deals with electoral manipulation practices and the second examines pervasive clientelism and patronage politics and their effects on state-society relationships in the region.

Re-conceptualizing state weakness/strength¹

Unlike most research on the topic, which seeks to explain or measure the “problem” of weakness, the purpose here is to gain an insight into how state weakness/strength shapes government behaviour. The concept of state weakness/strength thus is designed to direct focus on its connections to such behaviour, through government vulnerability. A secondary aim is to integrate previous research as much as possible.

Bearing this in mind, state weakness/strength, as employed here, refers exclusively to the relationship between the mostly abstract concept of state embodying the core norms regulating citizens’ rights and duties in relation to the state and vice versa and the society. The notion of state as an ideal, encompassing local normative frameworks on its roles in relation to the citizenry, allows consideration of how implementation of these ideas by state institutions may affect the state-society relationship. Moreover, since it is the state-society relationship and its stability and effectiveness which defines the level of state strength, this approach allows for a great deal of societal agency. This is due to the fact that like any relationship, the state-society one is understood as being interdependent, where the two shape each other's preferences, choices, and behaviour. Under these circumstances, the size of the state, in terms of territory, population, military, or economic prowess has little consequence on state strength/weakness, as formulated here. This opens the door to reconsidering the status of many of the states that international relations scholars call “big”, “great”, or “middle powers”.²

In an effort to simplify the inherent complexity of state-society relations, the strength/weakness of this relationship is defined along two dimensions: control (as the (in)ability of state institutions to reach parts of the territory/population to implement these norms) and legitimacy (as the authority and societal trust enjoyed by these norms and key institutions meant to uphold them). Absolute strength, as control over every inch of the territory and population and legitimacy in relation to every single citizen, is an ideal state and all polities are expected to display some weaknesses along one or both of these dimensions. The purpose here is to enable categorization of a state as fundamentally weak or strong,³ not to precisely quantify weakness. This task requires a close look at manifestations of control and legitimacy within specific polities. Moreover, these two concepts are deliberately wide in order to enable incorporation of the historical, political, economic, and social experience of non-Western states. The general idea is that the criteria used to assess the levels of control and legitimacy need to be context-dependent insofar as they refer to particular tactics, societal responses, and their overall effect on state-society relations.

On how the approach used here deviates from existing scholarship on state weakness

This approach incorporates existing research on institution-building and the capacity of governing elites to employ coercive power against challenges to state authority, extract resources, mobilize political support, and deliver (basic) public goods—as these are important indicators of levels of both control and legitimacy. However, it also departs in significant ways from contemporary understandings of the concept of state strength/weakness. One important way it does that is by understanding the “state” as an ideal, which is to be discovered through the analysis of local normative frameworks, not posited by the researcher. This not only removes the Western European state as the yardstick against which all other states are evaluated, but also calls for meaningful insight into local ideals on the roles of the state. A second departure from traditional concepts of state weakness is the formulation of control and legitimacy as separate concepts. Thus, while scholarship on state weakness centres on the ability of the state apparatus to control the population as a precondition for its capacity to build legitimacy, the former is seen here as only one means for achieving the latter.⁴ This implies that state legitimacy may be built through means other than control, which, in turn, expands the notion of legitimacy well beyond its fundamentally institutional character to include more recent insights into the manner essentially authoritarian non-Western states and governments justify their rule and engage with populations—i.e. performance legitimacy, meritocracy, theocracy, and populism.⁵ Moreover, understanding control and legitimacy as separate concepts opens the door to examining situations where actions taken to enhance state control over population end up undermining legitimacy-building efforts and vice versa. For instance, actions adopted with a view to consolidating control may be regarded as excessively coercive by large segments of the population and/or key social actors and engender reactions that contribute to an erosion of state legitimacy. These include crackdown on peaceful protests, manipulation of the electoral process, and measures taken to reduce or abolish regional autonomy among others.⁶ Such an approach requires more in-depth assessments of particular non-Western contexts, thus contributing to reducing the inherent Western bias within the scholarship.⁷

In addition, when regarded as depicting state-society relations, state weakness acquires renewed explanatory potential insofar as it provides a conceptual framework to understand how and why states traditionally regarded as strong, in terms of institutional capacity for control, sometimes prove to be vulnerable to societal forces. For instance, in 2008, Rice and Patrick's Index of State Weakness in the Developing World used 20 economic, political, security, and social welfare indicators to rank 141 states into the following categories, from the weakest to the best performers: failed, critically weak, weak, to watch (yellow coded), to watch (green coded), and best performers. Libya, Egypt, and Syria scored outside the weak spectrum, as states “to watch” (Libya as green coded and Egypt and Syria as yellow coded), while Tunisia and Bahrain scored as best performers.⁸ However, just a few years later, mass protests that triggered the Arab Spring movement succeeded in overthrowing the Tunisian regime, while Bahrain needed neighbouring Saudi Arabia's intervention to avoid a similar fate.⁹ More concerning, what started as a pro-democracy mass movement led to civil war in Libya and Syria, the collapse of the Mubarak regime and widespread political turmoil in Egypt.¹⁰

Another epistemological consequence of the focus on state-society relations is that it renders reaction of societal actors to state efforts to build control and legitimacy equally important. This requires integration into the analysis of societal actors’ resistance activities, both violent and non-violent, including secessionist movements, mass protests, and the emergence and popularity of subversive discourses. These are also expected to inform future state action, thus creating an action-reaction cycle, which makes the current conceptualization of state strength a fundamentally dynamic one. The caveat to this is that while state strength/weakness is likely to vary in the short- to medium-term, in the long run, the likelihood that a fundamentally weak state will become strong remains low. This assumption is based on Joel S. Migdal's finding that state weakness as such, independent of its degree, generates a security dilemma for ruling elites, which leads them to sacrifice state-building imperatives essential for their long-term security in order to ensure their own (political) survival in the short-term.¹¹

This approach also radically reconsiders the role of the capacity, coercive or otherwise, of state institutions in defining state weakness. For instance, while most scholars draw a direct link between institutional capacity and state strength, this research introduces two intermediate variables: control and legitimacy. In other words, it is argued here, the ability of state agencies to coerce and mobilize the population, extract resources, and implement policies only contributes to state strength to the extent that they strengthen the state-society relationship, by consolidating it along one or both of its two dimensions (i.e. control and legitimacy).

State weakness and regime security as government vulnerability¹²

The understanding of “regime security”, as employed here, was advanced by Mohammed Ayoob in his study of what he calls “Third World” states, where he defined “security/insecurity” in relation to vulnerabilities, internal or external, that threaten or have the potential to weaken state structures and governing regimes.¹³ The notion of “regime” here refers exclusively to incumbent governing elites and is used interchangeably with terms like “political leaders/leadership”, “ruling/governing elites”, “political elites”, or simply “government”. Like state weakness, the concept of “regime (in)security” is imagined as a spectrum, where insecure political elites occupy various positions towards the vulnerable end of the vulnerable/invulnerable continuum.

The argument advanced in this book posits a relationship between state weakness, as fragile state-society relationship, and the vulnerability of incumbent governing elites. In particular, it claims that the same aspects that generate and sustain control and legitimacy issues in state-society relations also frame a general climate of insecurity for government leaders, which shapes their behaviour. This assumption is based on Joel S. Migdal's finding that weak states’ top political elites share a general security predicament, which places them in a dilemma, encouraging them to sacrifice long-term security for short-term survival, thus perpetuating both state weakness and regime insecurity.

Therefore, M...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents Page
• List of Figures
• List of Acronyms
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword by Joel S. Migdal
• Introduction
• PART I Weak states, vulnerable governments, and regional cooperation
• PART II ASEAN case study
• Conclusion
• Index