Fixing Failed States
For my day job, I've been thinking and writing about failed states. Failed states pose one of the deepest challenges to American national security and international peace and stability. Finding a comprehensive and effective solution to the challenges of terrorism, human rights violations, or poverty and economic development requires some understanding of how to restore failed states. The response of the United States and its allies has remained the same: to rebuild the institutions of state control, and, if lucky, to plant a working democracy and a market economy within existing state borders. But many international law scholars remain openly dubious about the ability of states to rebuild – the problem is not failed states but the nation-state as the primary actor in international relations. I think that both American and U.N. policy on the one hand, and the conventional academic wisdom on the other hand, are mistaken. Building a normal nation-state with full sovereignty on every territory in the world, without changing any borders, fails to understand why some states are failing in the first place. Viable states simply do not align with the borders recognized by the United Nations or created during the period of rapid decolonization in the decades after World War II. Those who see in failed states the rise of alternatives to the nation-state have no practical solutions that do not depend on the political, economic, and military resources of strong nation-states. Without them, supra-national governments, trusteeships, or non-governmental organizations have shown little ability to fix failed states. I think that powerful nations can help by performing the more modest role of promoting and guaranteeing power-sharing agreements between competing groups within failed states -- as illustrated by the outcome of the surge in Iraq.
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Dec '10
Re: Fixing Failed States
Interesting point, John. Biden's plan to partition Iraq smacked of the 1947 partition of Palestine and the 1920-1922 partition of Ireland, as well as the sometimes arbitrary post-WWI national boundaries in Europe and the colonial-era national boundaries in Africa, Asia and South America.
Partition seems like a great solution to intractable disputes between ethnic-national groups. In practice, however, almost invariably one or both sides decide that the partition was unfair or fundamentally wrong and lay claim to the territory apportioned to the other side. As Claire notes, hardline nationalists in Northern Ireland will never accept Northern Ireland's independence from the Republic of Ireland, and hardline Palestinians and other hardline Arabs and non-Arab Muslims will never accept that part of "Muslim lands" were apportioned to Jews to form an independent state (rather than a Muslim-owned and -dominated ghetto).
The approach of fostering co-existence in a single nation under a democratic framework is far better.
Nov '10
Re: Fixing Failed States
How much more money does the U.S. government have to spend, including on saving failed states abroad, before it gets classified as a failed state itself?
Edited on Jun 22, 2011 at 1:01pmAug '10
Re: Fixing Failed States
What if we just reverted to the rules of the playground ? Finders keepers, have neighboring states be able to rush in and squabble over the parts they want. The things of value to the world at large are usually uncollectable debt, the neighboring countries always have their eyes on certain things. After all, if the citizens of that particular failed country didn't have the wherewithal to sustain the earlier government or the desire, what do they have coming to them ?
Is there an international tradition to protect private property , or mimic the cultural and institutional modes of behaviour that most closely match the strongest country within reasonable proximity ?
Edited on Jun 22, 2011 at 12:08pmJan '11
Re: Fixing Failed States
We come from a culture where many different families, clans, tribes, and even races all belong to the same country. We center our perspective of law and justice on the level of country. That is, so long as you're a citizen of the United States, you expect the law system anywhere withing the United States to treat you equally.
That isn't universal.
If you're a Kurd in Iraq, and you find yourself in a Shiite Baghdad jail, you expect to get screwed ... and you expect the only way out is to bribe someone. If you're a Catholic on the wrong side of the fence in Belfast, you expect to get screwed. If you don't belong to the tribe or sect that controls your current location, you expect to get screwed.
In most of the world, justice isn't blind ... and everyone knows it.
To nation-build, you have to start with justice, and that means you have to convince the tribe or sect of your current location to not use bias against others. That isn't easy, because the rest of the world is soaked with prejudice.
America is exceptional.
Jun '10
Re: Fixing Failed States
Nation building starts at home. If we don't get our fiscal house in order, our policy toward failed states will become a domestic issue.
Oct '10
Re: Fixing Failed States
As all attention is focused on the Middle East, the reasons for turmoil there are clear. Apply the failed state model to Mexico and the effects to the US.
Just a thought and they just happen to be impacting the US in other ways.
Mar '11
Re: Fixing Failed States
Stuart Creque
The approach of fostering co-existence in a single nation under a democratic framework is far better. · Jun 22 at 11:43am
Says who? What if different peoples don't want to live with each other? Wouldn't forcing them into a "multicultural" solution be exactly the wrong thing to do? Under this logic, we'd have forced Yugoslavia to stay together.
Aug '10
Re: Fixing Failed States
This is something I've been mulling over for a long time without having a good way to express it. For lack of a better way to put it, the world seems to have recently rejected the "right of conquest": the idea that if you conquer a territory and can hold it, then it is legitimately annexed and should be considered the conqueror's sovereign territory. (cf Iraq invading Kuwait or the Six Day War).
This concept is why we say that a state needs to hold a monopoly on the use of force within its borders; it underlies the system of per capita taxation (an evolved form of tribute) still used today; it is the basis for states being able to treat with other states as actual, separately sovereign entities.
To deny the ability to conquer is to attempt to metastasize the world forever. Who really believes this is feasible, or even desirable?
Edited on Jun 22, 2011 at 2:11pmDec '10
Re: Fixing Failed States
Douglas
Stuart Creque
The approach of fostering co-existence in a single nation under a democratic framework is far better. · Jun 22 at 11:43am
Says who? What if different peoples don't want to live with each other? Wouldn't forcing them into a "multicultural" solution be exactly the wrong thing to do? Under this logic, we'd have forced Yugoslavia to stay together. · Jun 22 at 1:27pm
The problem is that you can't reduce the partition to the level of individual households.
When Yugoslavia blew apart, the situation would have been far better for all the people of its former republics if the US and Europe had said to those people, "Congratulations: now you have political-national boundaries that approximate your ethnic-national boundaries. Each of your new nation-states should understand that ethnic minorities within those new political boundaries have the right to be treated as equal citizens, so long as they accept the sovereignty of their new national governments."
Instead, the reaction of Serbia to the secession of Slovenia was to support the ethnic cleansing efforts of ethnic Serbs in Croatia. That led to the carnage in Bosnia and thence to Serbia's partition.
Apr '11
Re: Fixing Failed States
BlueAnt
This is something I've been mulling over for a long time without having a good way to express it. For lack of a better way to put it, the world seems to have recently rejected the "right of conquest": the idea that if you conquer a territory and can hold it, then it is legitimately annexed and should be considered the conqueror's sovereign territory. (cf Iraq invading Kuwait or the Six Day War)...
....To deny the ability to conquer is to attempt to metastasize the world forever. Who really believes this is feasible, or even desirable? · Jun 22 at 2:06pm
Edited on Jun 22 at 02:11 pm
Sadam Hussein failed to conquer Kuwait because he could not defend his conquest from America and its allies. So your principles were followed. Israel also has conquered and kept the West Bank now for 50 years.
The difference now is that many nations can project power (or theoreticaly have that ability) and can take issue with another nation expanding its teritory. The simple fact is the world has become very integrated, and war in one region now has economic impact and consequences every where.
Apr '11
Re: Fixing Failed States
This is not true of every place for instance we seem little effected by war in the Sudan, or West Africa, thus we do little to stop such conflicts.
The old method of dealing with ethnic strife was ethnic cleansing, but that is not something our society will or should tolerate. Thus we are stuck trying to get people to get along, especially in regions that are critical to our own economic activity, such as the middle east.
Jan '11
Re: Fixing Failed States
The current international system is overwhelmingly biased in favor of the existing nation-state boundaries for obvious reasons. States have a near-monopoly on international influence, and any state that agrees in theory to the dissolution or partition of another risks encouraging her own restive separatists (and just about every country has them to one degree or another). Yet there are some (Somalia is probably the best example) that have effectively partitioned themselves to mutual benefit, but whose successor states (Puntland, Somaliland) are not recognized as such. How do we support those who seek (or who've achieved) a measure of self-determination without inviting global chaos?
Aug '10
Re: Fixing Failed States
Sadaam picked off a tiny contiguous state with valuable resources, the first land grab in the post-USSR era. 100 years earlier that news wouldn't have landed above the fold in daily US newspapers.
But the international community decided territorial conquest was so bad they must drum up a coalition of completely unrelated countries around the globe to throw him back. (And look at all the wonderful benefits we got over the last 20 years from jumping into the region.)
Israel, on the other hand, held on to its conquests. But even though they have securely held it for 40+ years, the international community refuses to acknowledge it as a legitimate annex. This refusal to treat Israel and those areas as a complete sovereign entity complicates every single diplomatic relation in the region.
I do not find either case mysterious; I know the outside factors affecting each. I am saying the wholesale rejection of conquest legitimacy might be doing more harm than good.
Jun '10
Re: Fixing Failed States
I saw the headline and assumed you were writing about California...
Jun '11
Re: Fixing Failed States
Darn! I was going to make a california joke...
Edited on Jun 22, 2011 at 8:18pmApr '11
Re: Fixing Failed States
Years ago, while working in Somalia, I used to wonder if it was maybe time to reconsider the old League of Nations system of "Mandates" whereby a failed polity could be taken under the wing of a more stable nation. Many failed states have resources and human capital but lack a workable model for governing themselves.