I woke up in a sweat this morning, remembering suddenly that I must complete and submit my article by tonight. I had not given the piece a minute of thought, and had neither an idea nor a clue as to what to write about.
Finally, after a busy day, it struck me that the only thing I could write about coherently is the books I have been perusing and the ideas from these books which are floating randomly in my head. And these are closely connected with what I have been writing about over the past 10 months in articles specific to Pakistan and Bangladesh.
I wrote in my previous article about weak and strong states. By my reckoning, and by that of most political theorists and political scientists I know, Pakistan is a weak state. That is, it has a tenuous grip on the territory that defines it geographically. This seems counterintuitive to many outsiders, as Pakistan has a large and well-equipped army (which is the main but not the only state military organisation); but the presence of a large and assertive army does not make a strong state.
Francis Fukuyama, of The End of History fame, defines a state in his second volume of The Origins of Political Order as “a hierarchical, centralised organisation that holds a monopoly on legitimate force over a defined territory.” I have emphasised “legitimate” because that is where, despite its powerful army, Pakistan falls down.
There are large swathes of Pakistan’s territory in which other non-state actors also exercise much control through force, though this is contested from time-to-time by the army, as it is doing now in North Waziristan and some of the other tribal areas. There are other areas in which militant groups live in an often uneasy truce with the state, thus negating any monopoly Pakistan might claim on force in that area.
Fukuyama’s new work is long and dense, and I am short on time these days. So I have not been able to read every word. But I think it carries on, though very densely and circuitously, his belief that liberal democracy is – how shall I put it – still the end of history.
It will be the last political system standing ultimately (whenever that is). His first volume covered the origins and evolution of political order from its earliest (pre-human) stages to the French Revolution, and contends that the state is only one of three basic components of political order.
The other two are both, in a sense, proxies for democracy: The rule of law, and the development of accountability mechanisms. One could also argue that both the rule of law – in his view, simply a set of rules binding uniformly all society from the top to the bottom, and accountability – that the government of the state is responsive to the needs of the entire society, and not just to its own self-interests or the interests of a narrow segment of the society, are basically sets of institutions that are the foundation of democracy.
States which have not developed the rule of law and accountability institutions along the lines he defines may well be strong states, but they will not be democratic states. And even strong states, if not democratic, will probably not last.
By extension, it would appear that Fukuyama sees political order as consisting of states having strongly developed democracies. My inference is that political order then is the steady-state ideal, because without order there can be no permanent stability. Thus, democracy is still the end of history.
It is institutions that are the key, and the nature of these institutions makes all the difference. This is the clear lesson of the best book on the development of states that I have read in a number of years.
Why Nations Fail by Deron Acemoglu and James Robinson is now a classic, and an exhaustive survey of the history of the development of states and nations. Their research show very clearly that the development of institutions that are inclusive – that is, which give a voice to all segments of society in one way or another – is directly linked to the development of democratic states and nations.
On the other hand, institutions that are extractive, ie which function for the benefit of the elites of a state and are used by its elites to siphon off economic rents earned by the state and often distributed to interest groups to keep them quiescent, are pernicious and are directly linked to the growth of authoritarian states, and often to the failure of states.
Acemoglu and Robinson are convinced that strong authoritarian states which govern well (if economic growth is an indicator of such growth) must either convert their institutions from extractive to inclusive or, in the long run, risk failure.
Both Fukuyama and Acemoglu and Robinson recognise, however, the importance of nation-building in the development of the state. States that are not built on a national identity and narrative often have to create one. Pakistan is a good example of the danger of creating a defensive national identity because no national identity existed when the state was created.
Nation-building is, in essence, creating a national identity, a common loyalty, larger and more compelling than family, tribal, or ethnic ties. National identity can be built organically from the grass roots up but over a very long time. Or, historically, they have been built by violence as peoples are subjugated and often killed or displaced. This was the case primarily in the “settler” nations of the Western hemisphere 200-300 years ago.
We hear much about nation-building these days in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, and others. I think that often it is a misnomer or a non-sequitur. We may have meant to build a nation, but we really needed to build a stronger state.
Nations grow organically, from the grass roots up but over a very long time. They cannot, I suspect, be built over brief periods of time, particularly by outsiders. In the 17th and 18th centuries, force and, sadly enough, extermination were sometimes used by invaders to try and create nations and states. Fortunately, those days are gone forever, as I suspect ISIS will ultimately find out.
This article was previously published in The Friday Times.
