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TAIWAN, THE PHILIPPINES, AND THE PUZZLE OF STATEBUILDING

Military planners once imagined war among the great powers and nuclear annihilation as the gravest threats to humankind. In the current era, this fear has given way to preoccupation with the dangers of ungoverned and undergoverned spaces, which threaten lives across the globe as incubators of warlordism, terrorist cells, illicit trafficking, pandemics, and famine. At the same time, the strength and weakness of the state has also become a pressing concern for economists, who—having moved away from their earlier consensus that macroeconomic stability, fiscal responsibility, and private sector dynamism were sufficient for economic growth—have increasingly emphasized that bad governmental institutions are the foremost cause of economic stagnation and decline. Consequently, statebuilding has now become the United Nation’s core agenda and the World Bank’s top priority. It was the ultimate strategic objective of the United States in Iraq after toppling the Baathist regime in 2003 and is the raison d’ĂȘtre of continued U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan, now two decades after the 9/11 attacks. However, despite the dedication of humanitarian workers and development experts, the many books and policy papers written on this subject, and the billions of dollars spent on statebuilding across the globe, little progress has been made in transforming ungoverned and undergoverned spaces into strong states.1
Recent failures in statebuilding, it is argued, are products of their impositional nature. Although the United States, the United Nations, the World Bank, and other international actors involved in statebuilding may believe that their vision of modernity will necessarily lead to the betterment of people’s lives, such faith is often not shared by those on the receiving end of institutional reform. Instead, efforts by contemporary statebuilders to remake ungoverned and undergoverned spaces in their own liberal-democratic image are regarded by subject populations as unwelcome intrusions into political, economic, and social affairs. Just as the “well-intended schemes to improve the human condition”2 by authoritarian and colonial rulers of the past were met with widespread resistance, so too have today’s statebuilders encountered feigned acquiescence, sabotage, and outright armed opposition from those they have set out to help. Accordingly, with newly constructed institutions enjoying little legitimacy in the eyes of the governed, they are ignored or simply absorbed into existing institutional structures and practices, with limited long-term behavioral impact. At worst, statebuilding irreparably damages, and even destroys, traditional political, economic, and social systems, resulting in worse governance outcomes for local peoples and communities.3
As I contend in this book, imposition has indeed been the defining feature of statebuilding in the contemporary era. Critics of statebuilding are correct in their assessment that when new governance institutions are imposed on localities amid widespread resistance, they will lack local ownership, and any associated rules and regulations are unlikely to be obeyed or respected, at least voluntarily. Yet, my analysis also critically departs from prevailing accounts that characterize statebuilding by imposition as an infeasible proposition that is destined to fail. Recent statebuilders have undoubtedly struggled to remake occupied territories in their liberal and democratic image. However, let us not forget that modern governance institutions have been successfully imposed in the past in places such as China, Russia, and, as we will see shortly, Taiwan.4 Although imposition may not be the easiest way to forge strong and modern institutions, and we may object to the oppressive and violent methods through which strong states are typically created amid resistance, the historical record demonstrates that it is hardly impossible. Why, then, has statebuilding by imposition been so unsuccessful in recent decades? What has stood in the way of American and United Nations officials in their quest to transform ungoverned and undergoverned spaces in their image? The principal obstacle to the success of statebuilding by imposition has been, for better or for worse, the commitment of recent statebuilders to liberal and democratic models of governance.
Our beliefs and values on how modern states ought to be constructed have also stifled development of an empirically grounded theory of statebuilding by imposition. Due to the oppressive and violent methods employed by the most effective statebuilders of the past, scholars have tended to view their endeavors as categorically different from those undertaken by contemporary liberal-democratic statebuilders and hence irrelevant to the study of statebuilding in today’s ungoverned and undergoverned spaces.5 Yet, as long as statebuilding is pursued amid resistance, the underlying process through which new governance institutions are established within the locality is similar regardless of the statebuilders’ vision of modernity or the degree to which they rely on oppression and violence to achieve their ends. Hence, even if we find the strategies employed by successful autocratic or colonial statebuilders objectionable, by studying them we will come to a better understanding of how modern states may be effectively imposed on those who resist. Such an exercise will inevitably lead us to conclusions that are normatively unappealing, or outright unacceptable. But this is precisely the point. It is only then that we may understand what it would actually take to establish strong states within the structural and political conditions found in today’s ungoverned and undergoverned spaces and problemize our faith in statebuilding as the best way to advance security and welfare across the globe.
To this end, this book engages in comparative analysis of Taiwan under Japanese rule (1895–1945) and the Philippines under U.S. rule (1898–1941): two contemporaneous cases of statebuilding by imposition that produced contrasting outcomes despite comparable underlying structural and institutional conditions. Under the Qing and Spanish administrations, nineteenth-century Taiwan and Philippines, respectively, were shallowly governed polities wherein the exercise of governmental authority, as through the collection of taxes, maintenance of law and order, and provision of public goods, was highly uneven. The socioeconomic structures and conditions of Taiwan and the Philippines—ethnic diversity, rising inequality, and frequent conflict over land—also made these territories inherently difficult to govern. Like today’s ungoverned and undergoverned spaces, Taiwan and the Philippines were therefore hardly conducive to the construction of strong states. Yet, despite commonalities in the conditions under which these parallel statebuilding projects began, the outcomes were anything but similar. Whereas the enforcement of rules and regulations in colonial Taiwan became systematic and rule-bound under Japanese administration, it remained uneven and prone to corruption in the Philippine Islands.
I advance two interrelated claims. First, I highlight attainment of systematic compliance with rules and regulations as the central challenge of statebuilding by imposition. For individuals residing in strong and established states, who have been socialized into behaving as law-abiding citizens, rules and regulations enacted by the state are, for the most part, unquestioningly accepted. Such is not the case with ungoverned and undergoverned spaces, where expectations and views of government are shaped by the performance and behavior of a minimalist—and often predatory—state, and the people are thus likely to react with fear and anxiety to any attempt by the government to expand its scope. It is for this reason that societal actors, as intermediaries between state and society, come to play an important role in the statebuilding process. Through relying on such administrative intermediaries, and taking advantage of the power and authority that they exert locally, government officials can obtain systematic compliance from the people. However, when modern governance institutions are imposed on the subject population, the very individuals who are most capable of fulfilling this mediational function—local elites, and especially community leaders—are themselves, by definition, opposed to the endeavor, thus increasing the difficulty of statebuilding. If statebuilding is to have any chance of success, uncooperative, and even openly hostile, community leaders must be made to behave as obedient intermediaries.
Second, I argue that the effectiveness and cooperativeness of administrative intermediaries are determined by the structure of mediational institutions that regulate their interactions with government officials at the interface of state and society. These institutions—such as clientelistic networks, neighborhood associations, and government-administered mass organizations—decide who is empowered to represent local communities as officially sanctioned intermediaries, the duties and responsibilities of these individuals, the special privileges that they may enjoy, and any punishments associated with noncompliance. In turn, the extent to which mediational institutions constrain the behavior of administrative intermediaries and compel their adherence to the statebuilder’s modernist agenda varies according to the constitution of these institutions. In some instances mediational institutions are structured in ways that advance the interests of local elites at the government’s expense, but in others they function as highly effective instruments of discipline. Whether mediational institutions become inadvertent sources of state weakness, or mechanisms through which community leaders can be made to behave obediently, is not historically or structurally predetermined; rather, the mediational institution’s constitution, and hence its effect on statebuilding, is endogenous to the process of imposing new governance institutions on the subject population.
Specifically, mediational institutions can be configured by statebuilders into effective disciplinary instruments through two types of institutional interventions. First, by formalizing rules that regulate interactions between government officials and administrative intermediaries, society itself becomes intelligible to the state and thus closely surveillable by bureaucrats. Formalization also allows for the routinization of punishments and rewards by standardizing and codifying acceptable and unacceptable behavior. Second, by disaggregating institutions of state-society mediation to the most basic units of sociopolitical organization, administrative intermediaries are themselves made more disciplinable. It is, after all, much easier for frontline government officials to exercise disciplinary power over intermediaries who have limited influence, wealth, and coercive capacity. Those at lower levels of sociopolitical aggregation are also more interchangeable, making it less likely that rulers become dependent on any one individual for the enforcement of rules and regulations. Ungoverned and undergoverned spaces are, in short, transformed into strong states by reconstituting the very fabric of society in ways that advance the government’s capacity for disciplining community leaders into obedient intermediaries.
Recent and ongoing statebuilding missions have been pursued under the premise that strong states are constructed by establishing representative governmental institutions, holding free and fair elections, liberalizing the economy, and enacting laws that protect private property and advance personal liberties. In actuality, there is an inherent contradiction between the liberal-democratic model of governance advanced by today’s statebuilders and the process through which a strong state may be successfully established amid widespread resistance. The implication is not necessarily that the United States or the United Nations should adopt illiberal and undemocratic statebuilding strategies for the sake of success. Rather, I demonstrate what successful statebuilding by imposition has entailed historically, so that we may engage in informed discussion of whether the tremendous costs associated with this endeavor are worth the benefits of transforming the world’s ungoverned and undergoverned spaces into strong states.

A Tale of Contrasting Outcomes in Statebuilding by Imposition

Regardless of the vision of modernity undergirding a polity’s governance system, modern states are distinguished by their expansive reach over the lives of their subject populations.6 Whereas traditional rulers sought merely to count the number of inhabitants and record the extent of their most valuable possessions (land, castles, etc.), modern states expend considerable effort in collecting detailed statistics on the socioeconomic characteristics and behaviors of the population. People’s interactions with the state were once largely limited to fulfilling tax and labor obligations; otherwise, most individuals went about their lives without much attention from the authorities. In the contemporary era, the presence of government is felt from the moment of birth to the end of one’s life, as the state intervenes in the health and education of children, working conditions within farms and factories, care of the sick and elderly, and treatment of human bodies during and after death. Today’s rulers provide much more for their populations than the kings and queens of centuries past—in the form of communication and transportation infrastructures, public education, healthcare, retirement benefits, and the like—but in exchange, they expect the people to contribute to the provision of public goods and services by paying burdensome taxes and following an array of rules and regulations. The modern state, in short, knows more about, does more for, and demands greater participation and contributions from its people than political orders that came before it.7
Modern states nonetheless vary across two key dimensions of stateness. First, they may be differentiated based on the extent to which they attempt to exercise control over, and extract resources from, the subject population—that is, the scope of government. European colonies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for instance, were distinctly modern in that their populations were subjected to new labor and land regimes that integrated local economies into the world capitalist system; the codification of customary law, meanwhile, led to concentration of judicial and political authority in the hands of traditional leaders (chiefs, sultans, and the like) in the locality, reification of ethnic and tribal categories, and overall expansion of social and economic interactions placed under official purview.8 Yet, the scope of colonial governments was still far more limited than that sought and achieved by statebuilders in Europe itself. A major challenge of decolonization thus became one of constructing and developing new governmental institutions and capacities that would make former colonized territories more like European nation-states in both form and function. Indeed, what makes Taiwan under Japanese rule and the Philippines under U.S. rule unique among colonized territories concerns this dimension of stateness: Unlike European rulers in Africa and Asia, Japanese and American statebuilders attempted to construct a modern state in their respective colonies that were similar in scope to their home territories.
Second, while all modern states seek, in varying degrees, to exert greater authority over a wide range of human activities and interactions in contrast to traditional polities, not all will succeed in actually obtaining systematic compliance with an expansive and intrusive set of rules and regulations. This variation in the strength of the state is what makes a statebuilding enterprise, irrespective of the scope of government sought by modernist reformers, a success or failure.9 Here, state strength is defined as the evenness with whi...