Dunn and Englebert CHAPTER 2 - The Evolution of African States

The Evolution of African States

Dunn and Englebert CHAPTER 2

(review provided by Serra Deniz and Ismail Gurler)

   In the African political affair, states are undoubtably crucial organizations, although they are not the only units to determine the political sphere. This chapter focuses on chronologically the process of the formation, the functions, the distinctive features and the evolutions of the African states. Shortly, in this chapter, the authors try to examine the logic of states as formed and ongoing organizations in the role of African politics.

 

   Precolonial Politics

   Before the European exploitation, Africa had dynamic politics over centuries. It witnessed certain conflicts, patriarchal systems, slave ownership, the formations and collapses of kingdoms and empires, stable and unstable political systems and international trades. There were commonly two different forms of political organizations in Africa. Societies with organized, centralized authority, administrative institutions and with the lack of strict divisions of wealth indicated kingdoms and empires whereas societies without these strong central authority and kind of bureaucratic organizations referred to as stateless or anarchical societies. In the stateless societies (acephalous), the lineage system based on shared descent, was the precondition in the social organization. That is, the rulers consisting of these groups, family and clan elders created different clans through a process of segmentation. On the other hand, there were well established and organized states and empires across the continent. On the basis of conquest and assimilation of regional groups, controlling trade routes and slave trade, many states were created. However, these organized and centralized states separated from the European state structure a considerable extent. First of all, except from Ethiopia, they were lacking in the written language enabling the constant political administration. Besides, states operation was based on the clientage relationship between local chiefs and the rulers. On the other hand, the sovereignty over people was much more important than over a territory. In the state like societies, clans and lineages had crucial roles in societal and political organization as in the stateless ones. Eventually, there was strong relationship between secular and spiritual authority among African states and with the encountering colonialism, certain features of the states had remained the same within the preexisting systems.

 

   The Colonial State

   The Scramble

   Although the early settlers like Dutch and Portuguese had reached the fertile lands, by the late nineteenth century, significant European penetrations started to be intensified. The dynamics of these occupation claims were lying the seeking for new markets on the continent for the capitalist economic rivalries and beside the economic motives, the aim was an expanding the territorial sovereignties of European states, especially Germany and Italy. The colonizers benefited from the local conflicts within the continent to make an alliance with the local rulers. In fact, administrative states were easily persuaded to renounce their sovereignty due to capitulations, treaties and some exchanges, whereas stateless societies had to be defeated repeatedly.

 

   Early Colonial Rule

   Africans started to be recognized the new rulers through pacification to turn these regions into profitable agencies. Then, colonization evolved into forceful extraction and created economic regime based on an expanding of enslavement for Africans. They forced to become seekers of employments in the colonial projects and worked for cash crops rather than subsistence ones. And many forced to become wage laborers in mining areas. Mostly in colonies, Africans were forced to be used as beasts of burden in that they were taxed in their bodies. So, portage became widespread throughout the continent. Thievingly, European gained fertile lands from natives and used them as their own profits. Now, African economic relations were forcefully transformed into serving European needs and interest in an unequal and subservient condition.    As well as economic relations, cultural relations were also shifted and that brought inconsistent in the gender roles. Women became a disadvantageous group under the understanding male European colonial supremacy. And, in the political sphere, colonizers adopted different ruling system such as indirect rule, like in British colonials and direct rule like in French cases. In former, Africans could apply both formal and customary laws, in the latter, they were likely to apply French colonial directives under the French commandants.

 

    Late Colonial Rule and Decolonization

   Although Africa stepped in the decolonization process in the Post World War II period and got rid of European rules, it maintained and reproduced colonial policies. In these periods, many new reforms based on self-rule and self-determination of the colonies were determined. But literally that doesn’t mean independence for the colonizers. Early colonization was at mere exploitation and domination, yet later by the 1950s, it used the development discourse as legitimation of the state. So, development substituted the official reason of the colonial states. Besides, although British decolonization progressed at a rapid pace, some colonies had complicated problems for the achievement of sovereignty from white settlers. Whereas French colonial policy remained the idea of assimilation of colonial subjects into its own culture and politics until 1950s. Then, France began to embrace association with the colonial subjects because of some demographic and counter actions. By replacing European rulers with African ones, the new era called postcolonial era started within the limit of enduring colonial projects.

 

   Postcolonial States

   All questions about the African politics matter to the extent that they might illuminate some of the roots of the problems experienced by modern states in Africa, such as their difficulties in nation building, their weak capacity, or their relative propensity for internal conflict. We need to realize that the African state has its own specificities and its own ways of doing politics.

   The author take advantage of previous works on the discussion about definition of state and social contract.  Especially he refers Max Weber’s definition of the state as a “human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory”. (1978 [1922] (44) “Monopolized violence” refers to the fact that the state is the only institution, agent, or social group that controls the exercise of force. In an ideal state, there cannot be competing militias or rebel groups, alternative lords and rulers, or pockets where central authority cannot reach.  What Weber tries to get at is that there must be some sort of social compliance, a sufficient acceptance of the state for it to exist as a state the analysis of African states. Then, he refers Hobbesian definition of the state which inspired by episodes of civil war in England in the 1640s, about a society without a state, living in a “state of nature.” In such a system, everyone would have to fend and fight for themselves. There would be perpetual violence, looting, theft, and fear. Property and other individual rights could not develop like we see in the African states.

   The author also refers the definition of the state suggested by Mancur Olson (1971 [1965]), the state can force everyone to bear their share of the work or of the financial burden for the public good to be supplied. If the state is indeed intent on maximizing public welfare, it has the formidable tool of its sovereign legitimate force to organize collective action.

   Even if one does not believe in the necessity for the state to provide many public goods, such as education or healthcare, most believe that states are necessary for providing some basic agreed-upon lawmaking mechanisms to secure property rights and reduce transaction costs (the costs of doing business, such as negotiating and enforcing contracts) so as to make production and exchange among individuals possible. And he mentions the idea of “well-governed society” for the division of labor to produce its expected productivity gains (1976 [1776]:15). More recently, authors such as James Buchanan (1975) and Douglass North (1990) have highlighted the role of the modern state in reducing transaction costs and securing property rights This might not be exceedingly relevant to Africa, where capitalist industrialization remains limited and where working classes still are hard to find (as opposed to scattered peasantries), but it raises the question of whether the African state could be conceived as the instrument of exterior economic forces, using it for access to resources and to keep African populations submissive. Such “dependency” arguments, which were particularly popular in the 1970s and 1980s, continue to hold sway among many scholars of Africa (Amin 1976; Ahiakpor 1985; see also Taylor and Williams 2004a).

   On average, African states are not very successful at providing essential human security to their citizens. In not a few cases, they are the ones that represent a threat to the security of their populations. Even those that do not oppress or terrorize their citizens are generally weak at supplying them with essential collective goods. The majority of African states do poorly at coordinating collective action also, reducing transactions costs, providing stable property rights, and offering basic services to their citizens. In a nutshell, they are short on good governance and lack capacity.  He gives some interesting empirical data: The best worldwide score is 17.9, for Finland (the “least failed” state in the world by this yardstick). The worst is 113.4, for South Sudan, which just barely beats out Somalia. The average score forAfrica is 88; for the rest of the world it is 61. Only two African countries—Seychelles and Mauritius—perform better than the average for all other countries of the world. Some African states, such as Ethiopia and Zimbabwe, have gone from apparent success stories to crisis cases, whereas others that were once lamentable, such as Ghana and Kenya, now count among the most capable ones of as “imported” to the extent that they are the continuation of colonial creations from the late nineteenth centuries.

 

   Imported States

   Bertrand Badie (1992) has argued that this process of importation of the European rational-legal state has led to a “Westernization” of political order around the world. But the results, he suggests, were not quite as intended, and the universalization of the state has largely “failed. ” A crucial consequence of this failure is a “loss of meaning” in the relationship between the rulers and the ruled, which “discourages the individual in his efforts to adapt to an institutional life of no concern to him” (227). Badie relies on this insight to account for “new forms of mobilization,” including particularisms based on identity (239), which he argues characterize politics in regions where the graft of the Western state has failed. The importance of ethnicity in African politics, to which we will return at great length in the next chapter, comes to mind.

   Also, some scholars argue that, rather than any inherent African characteristic, it is the European nation-state that is at the root of most contemporary African political problems. African societies, he argues, were largely prevented from continuing their own evolution by the destruction inflicted by the slave trade and colonialism. The latter promoted the rise of alienated African elites largely trained in Europe and oblivious to the historical foundations of political legitimacy. These regimes, severed from their history and people, produced “nationstates” that have been largely inimical to the interests of Africans.

   Robert Jackson and Carl Rosberg (1982, 1986) suggested that the recognition of African postcolonial states in international law reproduced the colonial bias in favor of rulers and voided the necessity for African states to gain internal legitimacy and develop capacity states gained their sovereignty at the time of their independence from the mere act of recognition of their existence by other states and by the United Nations Scholars of international law refer to this type of recognition as constitutive of sovereignty, as opposed to declarative recognition, which merely recognizes the already effective existence of a state. For the majority of African states, it is thus the act of recognition by external actors and institutions that confers the quality of sovereignty.

   Entitlements to foreign aid and the benefit of international norms such as noninterference in domestic affairs, gives African rulers a significant advantage over their society and allows for the reproduction of their autonomy and authority while exonerating them of the necessity to build capable states.

   Contrary to what is believed, generally borders of Africa were determined after making treaties with local chiefs (Prescott 1987),or were adjusted afterward to take account of partitioned groups and migration rather than by merely Europeans.

Treaties among imperial powers and with local chiefs, as well as administrative decisions within single colonial empires, often resulted in straight lines or the use of rivers or other geographical features that previously had been as likely to unite as to separate local populations shape of states too was a function of population density, as colonizers were more likely to draw straight lines in low-density environments, where there were few or weak preexisting systems on which to rely. In high-density areas, colonizers were more attuned to local political realities. African ruling elites showed little ambiguity or hesitation in embracing the borders they inherited from colonialism and defending them against challenges.