The South’s fragile states

A new arena for individual initiative Interview by René Lefort, director of the UNESCO Courier.

Demonstrating against child labour in Colombo (Sri Lanka) in 1997. Wars are beneficial as long as they are not waged. Francis Umbral, Spanish author and journalist (1935-) The South’s fragile states The South’s fragile states Developing countries are still wrestling with the business of fashioning a nation-state and building structures which in the West grew and matured over several centuries into modern, integrated societies. These societies only became democratic after going through an industrial revolution. Until the late 1980s, the construction of nation-states in the countries of the South was seriously hampered by colonization and then by the Cold War. Before independence, nothing was done to integrate the different peoples living inside artificially drawn frontiers. In fact, the colonial powers conducted a policy of divide and rule. Then during the decades of East-West confrontation, heads of state only won power through their loyalty to one side or the other, not because they were good rulers. The great powers clearly played a hand in this by often backing dictators at the expense of certain “founding fathers of independence” who had better intentions towards their people. Today, a third generation of rulers is gradually taking the reins in the countries of the South, mostly as a result of more or less democratic elections. But when these leaders are called upon by their subjects, sometimes violently, to install real democracy and develop their countries, they more than ever lack the means to do so. Development aid has fallen by 20 per cent since the end of the Cold War. Interest payments on debt are an increasing burden on government finances. Structural adjustment programmes have eroded the legitimacy of the state by dismantling public services and widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots. The deterioration of the environment, notably soil degradation (six million hectares are lost every year) and deforestation (10 million hectares destroyed each year), is depleting vital resources already in short supply. Another destabilizing factor is that 60 per cent of the world’s weaponry ends up in developing countries. So how can young and fragile states be strengthened? How can people be persuaded, as they struggle to survive, not to look to their clan or tribe as a way of defending themselves, when their government can neither guarantee their security nor a basic standard of living? Making fine speeches about good governance is not enough in poor countries handicapped by the heavy legacy of the past. Such countries must have access to development, and the North, which in the past built its prosperity partly on their lands, their manpower and their natural resources, must help them. Mohamed Sahnoun, special envoy of the United Nations Secretary-General in Africa

Zaki Laïdi* believes that politics today revolves round three unequal poles: the state (slimmed down but still alive and kicking), the market and civil society There is a lot of talk about the weakening of the state’s role in national and international life. What exactly is the situation? In the last twenty years or so, the state’s regulatory powers have declined. This decline began in the economic field, with the 1973 world oil crisis in the rich countries, which noticed that their economies no longer automatically responded to kick-start measures imposed from above. It was then that people saw how far the Keynesian model of economics had broken down. Three things happened in the 1980s to speed up this process. The first was ideological. It was associated with the advent of new governments in Britain and the United States which were strongly opposed to state intervention. These governments further discredited the state’s role as a social and economic regulator. Secondly, in the mid-1980s, the deregulation of financial markets and the free movement of capital began. This was a major turning point. Thirdly, the collapse of the Berlin Wall rubbished the ideology of socialism and socialist policies around the world. How have these changes been transmitted to the South? Mainly through the structural adjustment programmes of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, beginning in the 1980s. This process had mixed results, depending on the country involved. But the pressure of structural adjustment was very strong until the 1997-98 Asian economic crisis, when we saw the effects of excessively rapid and poorly-organized economic liberalization. Is there a link between the reduction of government economic regulation and the emergence of civil society? Yes and no. There is no automatic relationship. In most countries of the South and the East where economic privatization has been put into effect, you can usually see that traditional elites have jumped on the bandwagon and taken control of the resources made available by privatization. This is why there is more talk about the privatization of the state rather than about the privatization of the economy. So we must avoid being overly simplistic. At the same time, the loss of confidence in the state, its diminishing redistributory functions and its increasing ineffectiveness have spurred the members of society to take action and to abandon their deference to the state. In human rights and the environment, for example, NGOs have triggered new initiatives that governments have been forced to act on. Fragments of a worldwide public awareness are now having their say. It’s impossible to hold a world conference about anything these days without involving NGOs, which are a kind of indicator of the democratization of world relations. Why is this? Because they encourage and facilitate the world’s pluralization. States have lost their monopoly of violence and of authoritative declaration. We’re seeing an extraordinary and far-reaching reconfiguration of power into three components—the state, the market and civil society. But beware. Here too we must avoid stereotypes and utopianism. These players are not necessarily opposed or in contradiction with each other. It is too abstract simply to say that “civil societies” are in process of taking power. Something far more complex is going on. There is now a stronger and more complicated interaction between the three components of power I’ve been talking about. And they aren’t very equal components either. Also, we mustn’t forget that governments can be tempted to outsource their functions and get various groups or the private sector to take over responsibilities they formerly assumed. You’re not going to understand much about what’s happening if you look at it in terms of a zero-sum game. What role do you think civil society will play in the future? As I said, I think we’re moving more and more towards a kind of tripartite politics, associating government, the private sector and social groups. But I don’t think the state’s retreat means the end of politics. That would be an enormous step backwards which would bring us face to face with the nightmare of the 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes of a “war of every one against every one”. So the really important thing is to expand the frontiers of politics, to think about politics beyond the state. After all, everything of concern to the community is politics. And what people call “the crisis of politics” varies in intensity from society to society. It’s always more noticeable in countries where there is only limited mediation by cultural and workers’ movements between government and society. In these cases, when the state gets weaker, society feels weaker too. I want to stress one point. The state isn’t dead, far from it. Even in the developed world, public expenditure has risen as a percentage of gross national product in every single country. This is because the solemn responsibilities of the state remain very great in the domains of social security, pensions and debt repayment. There are also growing demands on the state in several areas, including education. So the state isn’t dead, just a certain conception of it—one that makes refrigerators, for example. Even civil societies need an organized state in which to flourish, one anchored in the rule of law and capable of expressing various demands and concerns at an international level. The recent attempt in Seattle to launch a new round of world trade negotiations shows the tightly-knit relationship between governments and economic and social players. What’s the role of new information technology in the emergence of a worldwide civil society? A tremendous one, provided of course that you don’t look for oversimplistic explanations. It’s obvious that the Internet plays a decisive role in mobilizing people about the environment, human rights and trade. The speed at which information is exchanged greatly strengthens the building of campaign platforms. It undoubtedly takes less time to mobilize social groups than to mobilize states. But once again, there’s no innate conflict between the two. One might think, for example, that the social mobilization of Europeans against genetically-modified organisms is an important bargaining counter for the European Commission as it faces the United States. *French scholar and professor at the Institute of Political Studies, Paris. Mr Laïdi was visiting professor at the European Center of the Johns Hopkins University in Bologna (Italy) between 1995 and 1997. Among his recent works published in English is Crisis of Meaning in World Politics (Routledge, 1998). The UNESCO Courier Peace is not the absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice. Baruch Spinoza, Dutch philosopher (1632-1677)