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Article Excerpt
From Sierra Leone to Solomon Islands, developed powers have undertaken a range of state-building interventions in the early years of this century. Two influences appear to shape the emerging state of the art on state building: conceptions about the nature of the state in the developed world; and the postcolonial sensitivities and practicalities that attend the project of intervention. After examining the imperatives driving interventions in fragile states, I explore the remarkable consistency among approaches to state building applied by different states and coalitions in different contexts. I then examine the imperatives driving this convergence of approaches and conclude with some observations tracing the difficulties of contemporary interventions to the current dominant approach to state building. KEY-WORDS: state building, intervention, fragile states, development, transnational security, sovereignty.
The past decade has seen the states and international agencies hesitantly assume an increasingly hands-on role in trying to stabilize states beset by or prone to internal conflict. The imperative of dealing with "weak," "failing," or "fragile" states, and the reluctance with which most interventions are undertaken, has led commentators to coin a range of terms, from "Empire-lite" (1) to "neotrusteeship" and "postmodern imperialism." (2) Yet these terms suggest a coherence of policy approach that belies the ad hoc pattern of interventions; despite several attempts to quantify state dysfunction and to rank fragile states, (3) there is little evidence that the project of state building is being approached in a systematic manner, that those states at most risk of collapse are being priortized. (4) But while there is no apparent logic to where interventions occur, there is an emerging pattern to how state building is being undertaken by Western states and Western-dominated development agencies. (5) I contend that there are two influences shaping the emerging state of the art on state building: conceptions about the nature of the state in the minds of policymakers in the developed world; and the postcolonial sensitivities and practicalities that attend the project of state-building interventions.
My argument proceeds in four parts. After examining the imperatives driving interventions in fragile states, I explore the remarkable consistency among approaches to state building applied by different states and coalitions in different contexts. I then examine the imperatives driving this convergence of approaches and conclude with some observations tracing the difficulties of contemporary interventions to the current dominant approach to state building.
The Rise of International Concern with Fragile States
The stampede to decolonization between 1945 and 1975 was underpinned by several dominant norms. One was that, as imperial administrations packed up and left, the state form would take their place, leaving imperial demarcations unchallenged. Another was what Robert Jackson called the doctrine of "negative sovereignty": that these new states were given international assurance of their status as sovereign states irrespective of their capacity to govern their people and territory as a viable state unit. (6) Granted sovereign status and at least in theory freed from the pressures of predatory power politics, it was expected that, in time, the internal attributes of state function and control--Jackson's "positive sovereignty"--would develop within new states. "Modernization theory" gave voice to this teleology: the widespread expectation that, given the requisite resources and advice, economic development and political maturity would come to postcolonial states along the same trajectories as had developed in Western Europe and North America. Negative sovereignty, postcolonial sensitivities, Cold War geopolitics, and modernization theory expectations combined to produce a disinclination in developed states to take too close an interest in the internal affairs of developing states--confining themselves to regime change when client states' foreign policy alignment started to waver. (7)
But by the 1980s, this tolerant agnosticism had begun to wane amid growing convictions that the inadequacies or pathologies within postcolonial states had an impact beyond the borders of the states concerned, and that there were perhaps unacceptable costs associated with waiting for new states to develop of their own accord. Humanitarian tragedies, rooted in smoldering conflicts and the venality of indigenous elites, became significant causes among Western publics. As the performance gap between successful and unsuccessful former colonies grew, the conviction began to spread among academics and officials that the problems of the worst-performing states were not transitional but structural. The developed world and development agencies moved through stages of concern about the economic management, quality of democracy, protection of human rights, and standards of governance in developing states. (8) Over time, as it has grown increasingly concerned about the internal workings of developing states, the developed world has become more insistent and interventionary in its responses: from advice, to aid conditionality, to direct physical intervention.
The end of the Cold War offered the opportunity to address a range of conflicts within developing countries. The instrument of choice was the United Nations, which oversaw cease-fires and brokered peace agreements in Namibia, Nicaragua, EI Salvador, Angola, Mozambique, Cambodia, and Western Sahara. UN missions enacted increasingly complex mandates, from supervising the disarmament and demobilization of combatants to overseeing elections, conducting postconflict reconstruction, and supporting the development of state institutions. Despite the ambition of their mandates, the early post-Cold War interventions remained true to the original intention of UN peacekeeping missions: that it was the task of the intervention to "hold the ring" while an indigenous peace agreement emerged, or to help implement a peace agreement that had been already hammered out among the belligerents (9) Even the ill-fated interventions in Somalia and Bosnia were conceived in line with this model as attempts to ameliorate humanitarian crises and provide a measure of stability while the belligerents were encouraged to come to a peace agreement.
Four developments combined to increase the urgency of responses to violence-prone developing states. One was sheer impatience with the obduracy of belligerents in the Balkans and a frustration that the international community could be kept waiting while humanitarian atrocities continued. The NATO air campaigns against Serbia in September 1995 and March 1999 saw the West's policy of "holding the ring" while a peace agreement emerged shift toward imposing a cease-fire and coercing the belligerents toward a peace agreement. Concurrently, a new advocacy of muscular cosmopolitanism developed within academic communities and international organizations. Scholars argued strongly that humanitarian crises imposed exceptions to injunctions to nonintervention and sovereignty, (10) while a series of UN reports, from Agenda for Peace to the Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, advanced the argument that sovereignty is conditional on the discharge of certain responsibilities by the state and that the international community has a "responsibility to protect" those suffering from humanitarian abuses. (11)
The second development was a growing awareness and discussion of what many in...
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