Political Order and Political Decay (51 page)

The record of the international community's success in stabilizing conflict or postconflict zones is mixed. In some cases, like Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, the Solomon Islands, and El Salvador, the peacekeeping mission largely prevented the reemergence of conflict. In Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, they did not. Indeed, there is some argument that well-meaning humanitarian interventions in Somalia and the eastern Congo actually prolonged the crisis by inadvertently aiding one of the parties to the conflict.
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Results of state building are very disappointing. The United States is scheduled to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan in 2016 without having created a functional, legitimate centralized state. Iraq seemed to have more of a state, but the latter's authority in the areas north of Baghdad collapsed in 2014. Repeated interventions and billions of dollars in foreign assistance have yet to create functional governments in either Haiti or Somalia. In other cases, like the Balkans and the Solomon Islands, basic stability has been maintained only through heavy continuing outside involvement.

These failures have engendered a prolonged discussion of the conditions under which institutions are created and strengthened, and the role that outsiders can potentially play in promoting them. And this brings us back to the study of colonialism, since colonialism provides a rich source of experience of outsiders seeking to implant institutions in culturally different societies.

Many of the precedents and examples set by European colonialism are irrelevant to present-day interventions. Colonial powers were most successful in implanting modern institutions in places where the indigenous peoples were so weak, small in numbers, and primitively organized that they could be effectively killed off by war or disease, herded into reservations, or otherwise eliminated from the picture. This was the story of the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—British colonies that are today models of liberal democracy. This pattern will not be repeated. Even if we could find parts of the world so lightly inhabited, contemporary views on the rights of indigenous peoples would correctly present insuperable obstacles to this form of colonization.

The British and French colonial administrations in sub-Saharan Africa are actually far better precedents for contemporary state-building interventions because they were lightly resourced, didn't involve large-scale European settlement, and in their later years began to actually take on developmental goals. Indirect rule by Britain is of particular interest because it sought to deal with what I have labeled the “getting to Denmark” problem by declaring that producing “Denmark” was not the goal of foreign rule in the first place.
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The problem is that Denmark did not get to be Denmark in a matter of months or years. Contemporary Denmark—and all other developed countries—gradually evolved modern institutions over the course of centuries. If outside powers try to impose their own models of good institutions on a country, they are likely to produce what Lant Pritchett, Michael Woolcock, and Matt Andrews call “isomorphic mimicry”: a copying of the outward forms of Western institutions but without their substance. To succeed, institutions need to accord with local customs and traditions: for example, law codes imported from abroad wholesale often don't win acceptance because they don't reflect local values. Institutions are often complementary: you can't build a steel plant in a country in which there is no market for steel, no supply of competent managers or workers, no infrastructure to move product to market, and no legal system to protect the rights of the plant's investors. Strategies seeking to prioritize some goals over others require intimate understanding of the nature of local institutions. Moreover, institutions evolve based on the interests and ideas of local elites and power holders. Outsiders often don't understand who these elites are, how they interpret their interests, and therefore what resistance they will pose to well-meaning plans for reform or change.
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In light of these considerations, a number of observers have suggested that the international community ought to dramatically scale back its ambitions and go for “good enough” governance, seeking to get not to Denmark but to some more realistic objective, like Indonesia or Botswana.
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Rather than importing entire modern legal codes from the United States or Europe, why not try in some circumstances to rely on customary law? Instead of insisting that the entire civil service be squeaky-clean with regard to corruption, why not wink at petty corruption by low-level officials and deal with only the most egregious cases? Rather than requiring people to vote for nonexistent programmatic parties, why not accept the reality of clientelism and aim instead for rent-seeking coalitions that nonetheless promote stability and some degree of economic growth?

One could have imagined, for example, a very different American policy in Afghanistan following the initial rout of the Taliban in the fall of 2001. Rather than seeking to reestablish a centralized, unitary democratic state, the United States could have tried to create a coalition of tribal leaders, warlords, and other power brokers who would among them have agreed to keep the peace and suppress al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Instead of attempting to build a democracy in Iraq, the United States could have kept Saddam Hussein's army intact and put it under the charge of a general with no ties to the old regime.

British indirect rule in Africa was in fact an early version of this “good enough” governance strategy. Lugard and other administrators made a virtue of necessity and recognized that they had neither the resources nor the manpower to rule their African colonies the way they ruled Hong Kong and Singapore, and therefore sought to make use of as many local traditions and existing facts on the ground as possible. As we saw, the French, though espousing a very different policy of direct rule and assimilation, ended up in much the same place as the British.

As we have seen, indirect rule had many pitfalls and often led to unanticipated and undesirable consequences. In the first place, the local knowledge requirements were huge and often overwhelmed the capabilities of the foreign administration. The search for “native law and custom” was easily manipulated by locals and led to misunderstandings of local practices. The formalization of informal law then froze in place certain customs that had previously been much more fluid. In other cases, colonial authorities were not actually willing to permit local chiefs to make decisions, either when they went against the interests of European settlers, or when they were judged to be contrary to “civilized morals.” In still other cases, an otherwise admirable respect shown for local traditions failed to recognize that the objectives that Africans themselves sought were changing. The latter didn't want to preserve their traditional cultures, they wanted to modernize. To underline an uncomfortable fact, Northern Nigeria, where indirect rule was born and most consistently practiced, has for decades been the poorest and least educated part of the country, precisely because locals were left to their own traditions.

These same contradictions are evident in the contemporary indigenous rights movement. Public opinion in Western countries has shifted 180 degrees from colonial days, when indigenous peoples were regarded as savages needing to be forcibly “civilized,” to what has now become a scrupulous regard for the right of the world's surviving indigenous communities to continue their traditional ways of life. This has led to violent conflicts in countries like Peru and Bolivia between mining or energy companies and indigenous communities supported by a worldwide network of international NGOs.

In principle, it is hard to argue that traditional communities should not be allowed to govern themselves under their own traditions. The alternative for most is not life in Denmark, but rather a marginal existence in a squalid urban settlement. The problem with outside promotion of indigenous rights, however, is that it is very difficult for outsiders to accurately judge the real interests of local communities, just as it was for the practitioners of indirect rule. Many of these communities are already half modernized, just as many Africans were in the early twentieth century, and many would actually have jumped at the chance to join the modern world. Continuing to live in a traditional village and speaking a local language may represent a dramatic closing of opportunities, something often overlooked by the well-meaning outsiders claiming to speak on their behalf.

Many of the problems created by indirect rule reappear in the practices of present-day development programs in Africa and other poor regions. For example, the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and other donor agencies have been sponsoring so-called community-driven development (CDD) projects since the first one was launched in Indonesia in the 1990s.
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The theory behind CDD is very plausible and appealing: local people know better than people in Washington or London what they need and should be the drivers of development projects intended to help them. Like colonial officials trying to implement indirect rule, CDD projects solicit community views on what sorts of local investments to make with donor funds, whether irrigation, roads, latrines, and the like. The outside donors hire local facilitators who presumably have sufficient local knowledge to be able to organize village communities and get fair representations of their views. The very act of organizing as a community will build, it is hoped, social capital that will last beyond the termination of the project.

CDD projects run into two distinct problems, however. The first is knowing what the real views of the community are. Like communities everywhere, villages are dominated by local elites, often older men who claim to speak on behalf of the group as a whole. It is very hard to know whether a particular community spokesperson is really reflecting general interests or is a locally powerful person who simply wants the latrine built near his house. In order to get around problems like this, the outside donors force the community to include women, minorities (if there are any), or other marginalized people, in accord not with local but with Western standards of fairness. This leads to a situation where the outsider either is forced to leave things up to local elites, or else tries to engage in a very intrusive form of social engineering. Few donors have enough local knowledge to understand what they are actually accomplishing. This dilemma would have been very familiar to district officers in colonial times trying to implement indirect rule, with the difference that most of them had much longer tenures and thus better local knowledge than the aid officials administering CDD programs today. Although such projects have proliferated around the world, their total impact on development is at this point quite uncertain.
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Reo Matsuzaki has suggested that to the extent state building has been successful, it has depended on the autonomy of agents on the ground who could make use of local knowledge to achieve developmental objectives. He points to the relative success of Japanese administration in building institutions in Taiwan in the years that it was ruled as a colonial dependency (from the Sino-Japanese War of 1895 to Japan's defeat in 1945). Japan's aims in Taiwan were not benevolent. As in Korea, Tokyo sought to Japanize the island, including making Taiwanese speak Japanese and using it as a platform for commodity exports to Japan. But they also pursued developmental objectives, building substantial infrastructure, schools, and a local state administration, all of which survived after the Japanese departed.

Matsuzaki argues that this came about because the governors-general like Kodama Gentar
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appointed to run the island were powerful military bureaucrats whose stature allowed them to make decisions without heavy oversight from Tokyo. Kodama in turn appointed and protected his man on the spot, Goto Shimpei, who could implement policies based on his intimate knowledge of actual conditions in Taiwan. In dealing with land issues and education, they shifted policies frequently in response to local developments; moreover, they served in Taiwan long enough to develop sufficient local knowledge to recognize when things weren't working.

This contrasts with American overlordship of the Philippines, where local administrators (like future president William Howard Taft, civil governor there from 1901 to 1903) were constantly being overruled by politicians in Washington. Congressional leaders controlling the purse strings were eager to impose American models of government on a society they only dimly understood. Thus the American administration missed a big opportunity to redistribute Catholic church lands to poor peasants due to a Catholic lobby back home. American administrators left land distribution up to the Philippine court system rather than to an executive agency, since that was the way it was done in the United States. They failed to recognize that in the Philippines, in contrast to America, widespread illiteracy meant that legal proceedings would be dominated by educated elites, who then succeeded in grabbing large estates despite the Americans' explicit desire to promote land reform. By exporting the nineteenth-century U.S. model of a government of “courts and parties” to the Philippines, the United States permitted the growth of a landed oligarchy that continues to dominate that country.
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We should thus be wary of foreigners bearing gifts of institutions. Foreigners seldom have enough local knowledge to understand how to construct durable states. When their efforts at institution building are halfhearted and underresourced, they often do more damage than good. This is not to say that Western models of development don't work, or don't have some degree of universal validity. But each society must adapt them to its own conditions and build on indigenous traditions.

Institutions are best created by indigenous social actors who can borrow from foreign practices but also are well aware of the constraints and opportunities presented by their own history and traditions. Some of the most remarkable cases of institutional development were those in East Asia, where local elites could draw on a long experience of state- and nationhood. In many other places, however, such traditions did not exist and had to be created.