State-Building

Theory and Practice

Aidan Hehir, Neil Robinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781134160198
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This study brings together internationally renowned academics to provide a detailed insight into the theory and practice of state-building.

State-building is one of the dominant themes in contemporary international relations. This text addresses both the theoretical logic behind state-building and key practical manifestations of this phenomenon. Unlike 'how-to' manuals that seek to identify best practice, this book interrogates the normative assumptions inherent in this practice and the manner in which state-building impacts on contemporary international relations.

The logic of state-building is explored and analyzed providing insight into the historical context that catalyzed this process, the relationship between international law and the practice of international administration, and the political ramifications and implications of external governance. Case studies on Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor provide practical examples of key contradictions within the state-building process, highlighting the lack of accountability, democracy and vision manifest in these operations.

Offering a coherent critical analysis of an increasingly important international issue, State-Building will appeal to students and scholars of international relations, comparative politics and political theory.

1 State-building and international politics

The emergence of a ‘new’ problem and agenda

Neil Robinson

Introduction

It has become conventional wisdom since the end of the Cold War, and especially post-9/11 when the problems of Afghanistan came to the forefront of world attention that a major, and perhaps principal, threat to peace and security globally is the breakdown of state power.¹ The conventional wisdom is correct to an extent. The breakdown of political authority within states is a major source of conflict and warfare,² and of the humanitarian problems, such as refugee flows, that stem from conflict. Enfeebled state power has also provided various forms of armed groups – ethnic, religious, criminal, ideological or some combination thereof – to organize and extend their operations beyond national boundaries, and most famously in the case of Al-Qaeda and insofar as it exists as a coherent organization, globally. Statehood and peace are thus related; as the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty report, The Responsibility to Protect, put it ‘a cohesive and peaceful international system is far more likely to be achieved through the cooperation of effective states, confident of their place in the world, than in an environment of fragile, collapsed, fragmenting or generally chaotic state entities’.³

Whilst the conventional wisdom might be right to highlight the relationship between state failure and threats to peace and security, it has not been able to move from this to a clear idea of what might be the solution to the problems of stateness beyond the obvious observation that if state breakdown is a problem it should be addressed by state reconstruction. It would be pleasant to be able to claim that this book contains such a solution, even if only in outline, but it does not. Instead the essays in this book try to do one of two things. First, they look at the general problems that the issue of state-building raises in international politics, presenting different critical perspectives on the nature, purpose and general prospects for international involvement in state-building. Second, they look at a very specific aspect of statebuilding in international politics, namely state-building under the auspices of a transitional administration⁴ established by the international community. The contrast between the general and the specific lets us look at how the discourse on state-building is shot through with paternalism and downplays the ability and necessity for local political action as the source of state-building. This is not to deny that some form of international assistance in the shape of resource and knowledge transfers may be necessary. Rather, it highlights some of the dangers that these transfers can bring when they take the form of state-building rather than assistance in state-building. The specific focus on the relationship between international territorial administrations and state-building throws this in to sharp relief since international territorial administration directed towards statebuilding is the most extreme example of externally led state-building practices.

The contrast between the general arguments about state-building in the book and the specific instances of international state-building through transitional international territorial administration together show how much work and thinking need to be done in this area. The rest of this chapter seeks to contribute to this discussion by looking at the way in which state-building has become an issue – a ‘new’ problem – in international politics and how its emergence as an issue at that this time has shaped the state-building agenda. It will argue that a series of changes in international politics – globalization, the end of the Cold War, changes in developmental discourse, alongside the existence of a larger array of weak states since decolonialization – have created a dangerous situation in which the state-building agenda has become simplified and universalized. The chapter will then introduce the other contributions to this volume and try to draw out some of the ways that they deal with the aforementioned themes. Another take on these issues can be found in the conclusion to the volume.

The rise and character of the contemporary state-building agenda

The context in which the contemporary agenda for state-building has developed is the post-Cold War world. The evolving international system after the Cold War has both created the perceived need for statebuilding and has given state-building its particular, simplified character. The boundary between cause – what has lead to state-building’s increased prominence in international politics – and effect – what state-building is imagined to be in theory and practice – is often not all that distinct. Roughly, however, we can say that state-building has increasingly been seen as necessary because of the collapse of the bipolar Cold War order, which gave a measure of artificial stability to some states in the world and helped to compensate for their weakness. The need for international assistance in state-building has been a product of some of the humanitarian problems that this collapse contributed to, plus certain changes that are associated with the idea of globalization. These changes have created a belief that the state in general is in crisis and that this crisis is deeper for certain forms of state so that intervention to save them is more necessary than in the past. This in turn has helped to create a simplified view of what statebuilding should produce. If the crisis of the state afflicts a particular kind of state the obvious solution is to build the other kind, the state that is less threatened by globalization and more adaptable to its demands regardless of circumstance, suitability or practicality. The security threat that the breakdown of state power is supposed to pose globally, rather than to the unfortunate inhabitants of a state where power fragments to some form of anarchy, and to that state’s neighbours, is not the cause of simplification but has magnified the dangers of breakdown in state power and hyped the simplified solution to it. What we are trying to understand here, then, is how state weakness, which like the poor has always been with us, has been transformed into a global problem and, moreover, became an issue for humanitarian intervention in a particular way. To understand these things requires us first to say a few words about what weak and strong states are historically so that we can look at how the environment in which states are weak changes and how the state-building agenda has arisen in response to this changing environment.⁵

Weak states: a basic outline

A weak state is a state that does not have ‘capacities to penetrate society, regulate social relationships, extract resources, and appropriate or use resources in determined ways’.⁶ Where these capacities are high states are, in Mann’s terms, possessed of infrastructural power.⁷ This form of power exists where there is a cross-penetration of state and society so that decision making is not isolated from social concerns. The state’s decision- making powers are created by negotiation of its functions, rights and responsibilities, with this negotiation carried out through the interaction of state officials and social representatives. Being neither isolated from society, nor dominated by it, a state with high infrastructural power can claim to work for a common good and extract and use resources appropriated from society in a regularized, routinized fashion. It can do this without having to use a large part of the revenue that it collects to coerce resources from its subjects, and has the ability to redefine bureaucratic and social responsibilities mutually and periodically so that state capacity can be increased or decreased in response to pressure for security, welfare provision and changing forms of international competition. States that are strong and possess infrastructural power are thus adaptive and ‘organic’.⁸

Weak states, which lack this infrastructural power, are not adaptive. They are based on despotic power, that is, state officials centralize, or try to centralize, decision making rather than embed it in society. State policy and form are imposed by elites, rather than negotiated, and enforced through the state’s possession of coercive resources, rather than accepted and enacted by society generally. This form of power is relatively inefficient in comparison to infrastructural power. Whilst state officials may have a high degree of freedom from social pressure to set taxes and decide state expenditure, this freedom does not produce general social benefits. This is because office-holders need to insure their power, or because they are uncertainty of it in the absence of social support and checks on political competition. Where officeholders need to insure their power from rivals they may transfer state resources to supporters and/or buy off opposition. Where officeholders are uncertain of their power and their ability to hold it over time they may appropriate those resources for personal ends as a sort of pension plan. Either way, the effect is the same. Office holding is proprietary, rather than impersonal, and officials do not have an ‘encompassing interest’ in their domain, or only have an interest faintly; like Olson’s ‘roving’, as opposed to ‘stationary’, bandits, they do not gain from reducing their rate of tax theft since in doing so they may lose office or may leave behind something for their rivals to plunder at a later date.⁹ Under these circumstances the rule of law and stable property rights do not develop and power is not institutionalized – in the absence of rule-based bureaucratic behaviour – or accountable. The supply of public goods is not more important to office-holders than the provision of private goods and personal gain. Moreover, the fragile hold that leaders may have on office can further impede the adaptability of weak states. Leaders have to calculate the effect of change on their tenure and may decide that reform is not worth it if there is a likelihood that it will lead to a loss of political resources as vested interests affected by change defect to opponents.¹⁰

The spread of the weak state and its varieties

We can see from this outline of what constitutes a weak state that moving from weakness to strength is a politically fraught and difficult process. For much of history this has not mattered. The vast majority of states in history have been weak in the sense that they did not have large reserves of infrastructural power. Weakness was not, however, a problem for them because they were not necessarily confronted by stronger states (in terms of competitor states being possessed of infrastructural power) so that their security and sovereignty were not threatened because weakness equalled backwardness. Moreover, what was required primarily of a state, securing borders against other states that relied also on despotic power, was relatively uncomplicated to organize financially and administratively in comparison to some of he tasks that states with high degrees of infrastructural power undertake (such as the provision of mass social welfare). Finally, historically, weak states could also be moderately organic. They did not penetrate society directly or extensively, but some combination of religious affiliation or absence of strongly defined or politicized ethnic differences meant they could be organic by default since they could have a spiritual claim on popular allegiance, or else there was no clear alternative state project to which people could attach themselves.¹¹

This situation began to change in the post-Second World War period with the proliferation of new states during decolonialization, and this change accelerated again after the Cold War. Decolonialization saw the emergence of what Jackson has called ‘quasi-states’.¹² States were built on the foundations of colonial territories that had not always had some pre-colonial experience of statehood and where there was often a mixture of ethnic groups, with significant diasporas in neighbouring new states. These states were supported as sovereign entities by external powers and international convention, rather than by their own qualities and institutions, and did not develop their infrastructures and institutions as a result.¹³ The bulk of these quasi-states emerged in Africa in the immediate post-Second World War period, but arguably they have been joined by some of the post-Soviet and post-Yugoslav states since the late 1980s.¹⁴ These quasi-states differed from many previous examples of weak statehood because their origins and own failings made them less organic and weaker than their predecessors. They also had the misfortune to be competing with states that were strong due to infrastructural power.

As a result of all these factors many of the quasi-states that emerged during decolonialization soon displayed many of the characteristics of weak. A great number went beyond weakness to develop traits of what have subsequently been termed failed or collapsed states. There is an extensive debate in the literature as to what constitutes state failure or collapse and the relative importance of conflict to the definition of a failed state.¹⁵ Much of this debate is generated by the problems of explaining state failure – what comes first, weakness (failure to deliver public goods) that produces civil conflict, or civil conflict that generates weakness? – and of seeing the moment at which either weakness or conflict are sufficient quantitatively to cause a qualitative shift in the nature of the state to failure or collapse. It is also debatable whether failure need be total in that it might occur within a part or whole of a state’s territory, and what the gradations of failure according to its geographic spread across a state’s territory might be.¹⁶ At the extreme end of the spectrum of failure – collapse – the outcome in terms of the character of the state is fairly clear. A collapsed state is a ‘rare and extreme version of a failed state’ where ‘the structure, authority (legitimate power), law, and political order have fallen apart and must be reconstituted in some form, old or new’.¹⁷ However, the distinction between a weak and failed state generally is not so clear. The route to collapse is thus also not clear. A failed state, Rotberg argues, is ‘tense, deeply conflicted, dangerous, and contested bitterly by warring factions’. It cannot control its borders and the characteristics of a weak state are magnified as a failed state exhibits extreme patterns of predation by political authorities and elites, decaying infrastructures and regression rather than economic and civil development.¹⁸ This, however, is problematic. It argues that the difference between a weak and a failed state is that some power centre exercises control over predation in a weak state so that the damage done is more moderate and as a result less likely to lead to collapse. This is a slim distinction to make. The difference between a weak and a failed state can be eroded by time in practice; the developmental implications of long-term ‘controlled’ predation in a weak state can be as severe as the short-term developmental implications of predation in a failed state (as in Zimbabwe). Moreover, weak states where they are authoritarian (as most are), or have only rudimentary democracy, can lapse quickly from managed to unmanaged elite conflict since they often do not have fully institutionalized and legitimate succession processes. A challenge to a leader or the death of a leader can move a weak state from controlled to uncontrolled predation, quickly (as seems to be happening in Kyrgyzstan).¹⁹

The distinction between weak and failed states it is not, therefore, a hard and fast one. Since this is the case a weak state is a form of failed state – they are often described as being on a continuum – at least incipiently. With the line between the two blurred the need for intervention in a weak state is potentially and logically as great as the need to intervene in a failed one if the object of state-building is global security: not to intervene runs the risk that the moment at which weakness becomes failure is reached unchecked and with global security consequences, especially since that moment might be promoted by anyone of a number of undetermined and hence unseen factors. Iraq is a case in point. It was a weak state that did not deliver public goods to its citizens in many important respects, it was not governed by the rule of law, its leaders were predatory and it had some problems managing its territory because of Kurdish revolt in the north of the country. However, it was not a failed state in that the same way as Somalia or Liberia: the militias that terrorized the Iraqi people were licensed by the state and were guarantors of its monopoly over coercion, rather than competitors for that monopoly. Yet Iraq was deemed a global security threat by the US and the ‘coalition of the willing’ because of its weapons ‘programme’, its instability and its lack of legality and respect for human rights. Absent weapons of mass destruction from this equation for some other security problem and intervention in any weak state becomes possible.

A second point to note is that since weak and failed states are alike in so many respects it is hard to distinguish the policy response from one to the other outside of military intervention being an absolute necessity in a failed/collapsed state as a prelude to state-building. Once the military situation has been solved in a failed state, state-building will involve tackling the same range of problems in a failed and weak state. Indeed, the very act of military intervention in a failed or a collapsed state, if it is successful, turns it into a weak one since it resolves the question of who has a monopoly over coercion – that lies with the intervening powers or force – and what we are left with is a weak state with a fragmented elite incapable ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• State-building
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 State-building and international politics
• 2 Colonialism redux? Territorial administration by international organizations, colonial echoes and the legitimacy of the ‘international’
• 3 State-building
• 4 The state-building dilemma
• 5 Witnessing the demise of the developing state
• 6 Who guards the guardians?
• 7 UNMIK – facilitating Kosovo’s final status or its future status?
• 8 Building state failure in East Timor
• 9 In praise of folly
• 10 Conclusion