Herbst Chapter 9 - The Past and the Future of State Power in Africa

Herbst Chapter 9

The Past and the Future of State Power in Africa

(review provided by Asim Erdem and Eylul Leblebici)

 

Since African state consolidation can be assessed in the last several hundred years, African politics became more understandable. It is important to acknowledge the trajectories of states which later on will help to understand the suffering parts of Africa. There are still struggles to upmost a future in Africa, Additionally, It is still ambiguous whether or not African countries will be stable and successful in the 21st century.

 

There are a variety of factors that form state consolidation in Africa. For example, similar to precolonial era of the continent, today’s leaders still adopt a strict policy of authority mechanism to prevent their area from sparse. Hence, gaining a clear control of the center region.

“The role of boundaries” and what they represent has evolved with time. In the precolonial time of Africa, boundaries represented power, since states tried to extend their region. This mentality changed in colonial leader’s rule. Boundaries no longer determined a state’s power. Rather, rulers decided how far their state should extend .As for post-independence leaders, new approach to citizenship regulations and national currencies improved the prestige of their boundaries.

Far from the nation-state melting away in the face of pressures for globalization, national boundaries, broadly defined, are, in a number of ways, more relevant than ever before. If we examine the boundaries of the countries in Africa as physical protection, we would observe that they are weak and porous. Physical protection isn’t the main function of these boundaries. Their main job is to preserve the territorial integrity of the state by preventing significant territorial competition and delegitimizing the norm of self-determination.  Consequently, weak states could claim authority in their areas without a threat from other states.

In a physical environment that made the extension of power very difficult colonial and post-independence leaders made a great investment to frontiers to keep their state’s hinterlands under control.

Considering all this, state consolidation in terms of taxes, nationalism and the desired characteristics of the design of the state is “radically different from that of Europe.” The fundamental problem with the boundaries in Africa is not that they are too weak but that they are too strong. African leaders have been extraordinarily successful in manipulating the boundaries for their own purposes of staying in power rather than in extending the power of their states.

State Failure

The tremendous euphoria surrounding independence and the success that African leaders had in delegitimating claims of self-determination initially masked the incompleteness of state consolidation. The problem of state failure in Africa, where leaders cannot even govern their core areas, is becoming more apparent as African states travel further from the grand unifying moment of independence an example of poor management over their state is the inability of African countries’ effort to extend their writ of authority into the distant rural areas resulted in rural-based movements.

While there are many cases of state failure, some states are becoming stronger or at least that failure was not an immediate challenge. State failure, as the new introductory chapter noted, is still a possibility and Africa remains the host of a very large number of fragile states Hence, Somalia, Mali, Democratic Republic of Congo.

A factor that plays role when states fail is people’s ongoing conflicts,” The World Bank states that ‘’Many countries and subnational areas now faced cycles of repeated violence, weak governance, and instability...conflicts often are not one-off events, but are ongoing and repeated; 90 percent of the last decades civil wars occurred in countries that had already had a civil war in the last 30 years...”

Coming back to state consolidation, The factors that are critical to the African stories of state consolidation are— political geography, domestic political calculations by leaders, the role of boundaries, and nature of the state system

The Future of State Power in Africa

The attachment developed by Africans and others to the current state system is extraordinary, given that even the parties to the 1885 Berlin Conference noted explicitly that they reserved the right to change principles “as experience may show to be expedient.” The feeling of the conference was that rules demarcating the continent could not be permanent because “possibilities and new requirements will probably reveal themselves, and the time may arrive when a wise foresight will demand the revision of a system which was primarily adapted to a period of creation and of change.” However, Africans chose to keep the states that the Europeans demarcated and ignored the warning that future developments would cause basic principles to be questioned.

Now is an especially appropriate time to revisit the question of alternatives to those nation-states in Africa that have failed or are fragile. The dramatic failures of some states and the poor performance of many others has diminished the attachment that many in Africa automatically felt toward the new nation-states in the 1960s. Two entire generations have now been born in Africa who do not remember the relief many felt at the dawn of independence when the decision to retain the old boundaries meant that there would not be widespread violence of the type that had engulfed the Indian subcontinent in the late 1940s. Instead, these generations, now the vast majority of people in Africa, have lived under states that have often failed to deliver the goods in terms of economic well-being, political order, or freedom. Perhaps most importantly, the increasing differentiation of Africa has shown that decline and failure is not inevitable but is the result of leadership decisions in the context of demographic and political opportunities and challenges. The very success that some African countries have had makes it even more imperative to ask what changes can be made so that more can benefit from the security of an even moderately successful state.

Africa’s low population densities would have required particularly nuanced and dynamic political institutions for states to consolidate authority over distance. That is why, although state failure does occur elsewhere, it occurs most often and most dramatically in Africa.

 

Alternatives within the Current International State System

It is important to develop a set of policy options that clearly recognizes the differences between countries in Africa. Developing new alternatives would be to provide “the intellectual space” is necessary for Africans to present alternatives by stating that “the international community.” Given the state of African universities, the international community might have to go further and provide small amounts of resources for individuals and think tanks that might actually want to analyze alternatives to the nation-state.

 The international community and African countries can also begin to understand African problems on a regional basis without regard to country boundaries. “The intellectual framework” continues to be dogmatically based on the current maps, because in many cases, multilateral agencies such as the United Nations and the World Bank—constituted solely by sovereign countries—are conducting or funding the analysis. These agencies find it hard to work on any set of assumptions other than that the current boundaries will continue indefinitely because the UN system itself is the source of the sovereignty that African leaders jealously guard.

Donors can accelerate the process of designing new alternatives by using some of their aid for regional integration to promote alternatives and projects that really do treat sections of Africa as regions, as opposed to groupings of countries.

It is not appropriate to think about regional problems by using existing countries as the unit of analysis.

Decertifying Old States

Decertification would be a strong signal that something fundamental has gone wrong in an African country and that parts of the international community are no longer willing to continue the myth that every state is always exercising sovereign authority. Decertification should be a rare step that would only be used as a last resort.

It is an irony that the states that the United States does not recognize (including Cuba, Iran, and North Korea) are, by any measure, states. The problem with those countries, according to United States, is that their states have far too much control over their societies. In turn, African states that have little control over their societies continue to be recognized as states.

 

Recognizing New Nation-States

There are very few “natural” boundaries in Africa that allow for the rational demarcation of land. It has been creating challenges from past to present; hence, the dogmatic devotion to the current boundaries should be discarded.

Smaller states, given the particular political geography of Africa, actually have certain advantages in consolidating power. Given how poorly large states have performed, the burden of proof is certainly on those who want to retain the national design of these states. Similarly, many armies of failed states suffer from the same institutional weaknesses as the rest of the government and are not viable fighting forces.

Recognizing and legitimating those minority groups can be one of the possible solutions to state consolidation problem. With this solution, the international community has the opportunity to ask that they respect international norms regarding human rights and also has a chance to bring them into the international economy

Because local rulers who are actually exercising elements of sovereign control will continue to focus on informal trade, often involving drugs, guns, and poached animals to survive, rather than beginning initiatives to promote more routine economic development that would aid all of the people in their region. The international community faces the choice which is “ignoring successful secessionist movements” and forcing them to remain “semi criminal affairs.”

 

Conclusion

State consolidation in Africa has prevented of the continent from experiencing the brutality of interstate war. Yet, the consolidation emerges that this specific avenue of state-building paves the way to a dead end for a significant number of countries. The African model—where states are born easily but some do not experience the death they deserve—is dramatically at odds with traditional western accounts of state-building. Non-European paths toward state consolidation to begin to take the African examples, and the examples of other regions with “low population densities,” into account in order to develop a truly comparative account of how states develop. Also, “leaders in Africa” is another problem. Regarding alternatives to at least some of the political arrangements such as “ identifying minority groups” and “giving them representation”, due to the fact that existing international system does not to provide enough solutions to political, ethnic and humanitarian challenges to state failure in Africa.