Paul Collier - Wars, Guns, and Votes

by Democracy in Dangerous Places (pdf)

  ment can easily defeat a youth militia, and so the FN advanced rap-

  idly on Abidjan. At this point President Gbagbo had few options. If

  he stayed put and fought it out his fate would be the same as Gueï’s.

  If he went into exile and appealed to the international commu-

  nity, the end result would be an internationally supervised election,

  which he would most surely lose. Gbabo’s only card was his capacity

  for violence within Abidjan: could this be useful? He could use the

  young street gangs to murder some more northerners, but where

  would that get him? Was there any group in Abidjan whose vulner-

  ability to violence might be turned to advantage? Recall that until

  the coup Abidjan had been Africa’s Paris. This description was not

  entirely figurative: it had by far the largest concentration of French

  citizens in Africa. Gbagbo used them as hostages, demanding that

  the French army come to his defense. They arrived within three

  days to reinforce Gbagbo’s position: French troops had to defend

  his regime to avoid a massacre of French civilians. This accounts

  for the extraordinary spectacle of Gbagbo denouncing the French to

  mass rallies of his youth supporters and indeed inciting youth to kill

  French civilians in Abidjan at the same time as the French army was

  defending his regime against the FN.

  The French military imposed a cease-fire line, Operation

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  Licorne, and forced the FN to withdraw around one hundred ki-

  lometers from positions that they had won. This created a strong

  signal that the French government was not impartial. At this stage,

  outside of urban areas, the FN was in a position to advance on the

  south, and with its finance at least partly dependent on unsustain-

  able outside sources in Burkina Faso, it was in a hurry.

  The international community again tried to broker a power-

  sharing agreement during negotiations in Paris. The agreement set

  up a coalition government under Gbagbo, but assigned some of the

  most important cabinet positions to the FN. Specifically, the rebels

  would hold the post of minister of defense. This was the guaran-

  tee for the rebels of post-settlement security. Once the peace deal

  was taken back to President Gbagbo for ratification he rejected this

  component of it, whereupon it fell apart. In the process he inadver-

  tently signaled that he had every intention of reneging on the peace

  deal.

  Gbagbo appears to have realized that time was on his side. Al-

  though initially weaker militarily than the FN, he had the larger

  revenue stream and invested in buying armaments. The United Na-

  tions and the regional organization, the Economic Community of

  West African States (ECOWAS), responded by placing an embargo

  on exporting arms to Cote d’Ivoire. However, this did not prevent

  both sides from acquiring guns. Weapons from Belarus and other

  poor-governance countries came into the country via Togo. Gbagbo

  even acquired an air force. His forces began to move against the

  north in violation of the Paris agreement. The French peacekeepers,

  whom Gbagbo had previously needed for protection, were now in

  the way of his own attack. He therefore ordered his new air force

  to bomb the French base near Bouaké, killing nine soldiers. The

  French retaliated by destroying his air force.

  The conflict attracted neighbors and predators. Mercenar-

  ies from Liberia and Sierra Leone, hired on a “pay yourself” basis,

  preyed upon Ivorian citizens and were responsible for some of the

  Meltdown in Cote d’Ivoire

  165

  bloodiest attacks. In addition to the major armed groups there were

  at least nine unofficial militias: organized violence was all too feasi-

  ble in this environment. The methods all parties used to finance the

  conflict drew in unscrupulous companies, countries, and leaders.

  The Central Bank of West Africa was robbed first in Abidjan and

  then in Korhogo. Money came in from the neighbors: both Presi-

  dent Compaoré of Burkina Faso and President Taylor of Liberia

  were generous. The FN created an “economic police force” to patrol

  diamond areas and levy taxes.

  From this situation it was going to be difficult to reach a settle-

  ment. The French cordon of troops kept the fighting limited so the

  cost of the conflict was not so severe as to force the parties to nego-

  tiate. Since neither side had the slightest trust for the other, there

  would normally have been an important role for the international

  community to negotiate a settlement. The attempts failed because

  the only type of settlement that the international community could

  endorse was one that was validated by free and fair elections. But

  such elections would inevitably hand power to one or other of the

  serious Ivorian politicians, Bédié and Outtara, both in exile. Worse,

  from the perspective of the FN in control in the north and Gbagbo

  in control in the south, Bédié and Outtara managed to patch up

  their differences sufficiently to form a common electoral front: they

  would fight the election under one party. So, from the perspective of

  both the incumbent leaders, an international peace settlement was

  equivalent to defeat. The only hold that the international commu-

  nity had over them was that Gbagbo’s term as an elected president

  expired. With his term expired, Gbagbo’s legitimacy began to look

  highly suspect. In a deal forced on him by the international commu-

  nity, his own government was dismissed and a neutral technocrat

  brought in as prime minister, a change described by some members

  of his government as a coup. It was hard to envisage how this stale-

  mate could be unblocked.

  And then a settlement appeared out of nowhere: certainly with-

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  out the participation of the international community. It was an in-

  ternal settlement, between Gbagbo and Soro. Gbagbo got rid of the

  technocrat and appointed the rebel leader, Soro, in his place. Bédié

  and Outtara were excluded. Gbagbo and Soro promised elections

  in due course, but now there was no international community to

  require that excluded candidates could stand, or that the elections

  would be free and fair. As you have seen, under such conditions in-

  cumbents have a range of strategies for winning an election, and so

  at last Gbagbo and Soro need not regard peace as the path to the hell

  of electoral defeat. The internal settlement was potentially very at-

  tractive for both of them. Aid could be resumed, and Cote d’Ivoire’s

  offshore oil could be tapped without awkward questions. The poli-

  tics was brilliant. Within a month Soro narrowly escaped death in a

  helicopter accident.

  Cote d’Ivoire is at last back to peace. But a decade of coups,

  war, and elections have taken their toll. The mantle of Francophone

  Africa’s flagship has passed, largely by default, to Senegal. Could

  anything have been done to avert this catastrophe? It is time for

  some solutions.

>   Part III

  C H A N G I N G

  R E A L I T Y :

  A C C O U N T A B I L I T Y

  A N D S E C U R I T Y

  C h a p t e r 8

  S T A T E B U I L D I N G A N D

  N A T I O N B U I L D I N G

  Famously, President Bush began by deriding state

  building and ended up attempting it. I am going to suggest

  why it is so difficult. The now-successful states were built

  through a painfully slow and circuitous process of formation that

  turned them into nations with which their citizens identified. This

  enabled them to undertake the collective action that is vital for the

  provision of public goods. In the high-income societies we have come

  to take these features for granted: so much so that we have forgotten

  that they are essential. Legally, states can be built by the stroke of an

  international pen: they need only recognition. This is how the states

  of the bottom billion came into existence. They have not been forged

  into nations, and so they face an acute lack of public goods.

  Most modern states were once ethnically diverse. The boundar-

  ies of a modern state generally emerged not out of deepening bonds

  forged out of a primordial ethnic solidarity but as the solution to the

  central security issue of what size of territory was best suited to the

  creation of a monopoly over the means of violence. Often the sense

  of a common ethnic origin bonded to the national soil was imagined

  retrospectively: conjured up by the urban, middle-class, romantic

  nationalists of the nineteenth century.

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  State formation was driven not by a sense of community but

  by the unusual economic properties of violence. We now know

  that violence is not something that emerged as a result of the for-

  mation of states: on the contrary, stateless societies are horribly vio-

  lent. The production of violence depends upon the available tech-

  nology. Hunter-gatherer societies are inherently extremely violent

  because the technology does not permit anything else: the winning

  strategy for a group of hunter-gatherers is the preemptive strike

  against neighbors through the predawn raid, catching your enemies

  detached from their weapons. Any group sufficiently quixotic to

  trust a peace deal gets eliminated before it can change its mind. So

  violence is intrinsic to such societies: they would more accurately

  be described as hunters, gatherers, and killers. However, with tech-

  nological advance the production of violence becomes subject to

  specialization and economies of scale. Both make violence a paying

  proposition.

  Start from a primitive landscape with no government and many

  identical households and now introduce a minimal degree of differ-

  entiation. Some people are more productive than others and some

  people are stronger than others. From the resulting four different

  types of people, ask yourself how one type, the unproductive strong,

  are going to earn a living? They are going to plunder those who are

  productive but weak. By abandoning their incompetent efforts to

  produce and specializing in violence, the unproductive strong get

  even better at violence. Violence requires skill and hence gives an

  advantage to professionals.

  Onto this scene of specialization now add economies of scale in

  violence, this being a fancy way of saying that size matters. It is this

  that makes violence distinctive. Other economic activities had to

  wait until the industrial revolution before scale became important.

  A thousand-person farm was no more productive per person than a

  one-person farm; a thousand-person firm of cobblers was no more

  productive per person than a solo cobbler. But a thousand-person

  State Building and Nation Building

  171

  army could kill, one by one, a thousand solo fighters: large groups

  of professionals tend to defeat small groups of professionals. Not

  always and everywhere: small armies can win if they have better

  technology and better management; there is even room for differen-

  tial heroism. The race is not always for the swift, but that is where

  to put your money.

  So, by forming or joining a large group of professionals that

  establishes a monopoly of violence over a territory, you as a mem-

  ber become safer from attack. That is clearly a powerful incentive.

  But safety is not the only consideration: life can only be sustained

  with income. People specialized in violence forgo the chance to

  produce. Where is your income to come from? The answer, as any

  mafioso knows, is that having established a monopoly of violence,

  you now have the power to extort from other inhabitants of the ter-

  ritory. Why do the inhabitants not run away? Perhaps your army

  can enforce penalties for attempting to escape: you are able to turn

  the inhabitants into serfs. Perhaps the inhabitants have nowhere to

  run because the neighboring territories are dominated by similar

  armies, so flight would merely get them out of your frying pan into

  some other army’s fire. Perhaps the protection from other predators

  that is a consequence of your local monopoly of violence is worth the

  payments. You, the army, are inadvertently supplying a public good:

  you have become a state.

  Although the public good of security for the locality may be

  inadvertent, you gradually realize that it is in your own interest to

  supply a few other public goods. One is to help your inhabitants to

  trade with one another. If they become richer, then you can become

  richer by taxing them. So you provide a contract-enforcement ser-

  vice for them; after all, you are good at enforcement. You call it a

  court, and around it grows a legal system. You might also run to

  some trade-enhancing infrastructure: roads, bridges, and market-

  places. You might even, though this takes a certain amount of vi-

  sion, put a few limits on yourself. By closing off some options, you

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  make your richer subjects less inclined to adopt the infuriating de-

  fensive strategy of refusing to invest. We have arrived at a state, but

  not a modern one: the range of public goods is too limited because

  the interests of many people are ignored.

  The final step from a state that is effective but serves the inter-

  ests of a minority to one that serves everyone is another long haul.

  Once hemmed in by neighboring states, these become the primary

  threat: either you defeat and swallow them or they defeat and swal-

  low you. Arms races develop. This requires high taxation, and the

  warfare generates a sense of nationalism: people start to sense a

  common identity. As the effective state facilitates economic growth,

  even the politically weak become better off, and this, together with

  an emerging sense of common identity, gradually makes them more

  powerful. Recall that autocracies become more prone to political

  violence as income rises. More specifically, they become increasingly

  beset by riots, demonstrations, and political strikes. T
he sense of

  common identity further eases the collective action of protest. Better

  provision of public goods is gradually prised out of the elite by this

  pressure. To make these improvements credibly permanent, elites

  also concede limited extensions of the franchise: the society inches

  toward modern democracy.

  I n t ry i n g t o a p p ly t h e s e simple but powerful economics of violence to the actual history of state formation, it is always convenient if we can find a starting point for history. In the process of

  European state formation, to my mind, the natural starting point

  is the fall of the Roman Empire during the fifth century. This has

  some rudimentary analogy to the decolonization of Africa in the

  mid-twentieth century. Given the suddenness of the decolonization

  of Africa, which was basically over a decade after it had first been

  seriously contemplated, the closest analogy is with the decoloniza-

  tion of Roman Britain.

  State Building and Nation Building

  173

  The decolonization of Roman Britain was even more abrupt

  than that of Africa. Britain had the single largest unit of the Roman

  army, around 15 percent of the imperial force, paid for by aston-

  ishingly heavy taxation of the British economy. So whoever was in

  charge of this army had the potential for conducting a coup d’état.

  As the Roman Empire hit political turbulence in the late fourth

  century, twice in twenty-five years the head of the Roman army in

  Britain tried to become emperor. Since the first attempt in 380 had

  failed, the leader of the second attempt in 403 decided to improve

  his chances by taking his army with him on a march toward Rome.

  He still lost, but in the process Britain suddenly lost its army. Since

  the Roman government in Britain had been military, not only did

  Britain lose its army, it lost its government. The history of Brit-

  ain post-403 makes the post-colonial history of Africa look like a

  staggering success. Within a few years the British had petitioned

  Rome to be recolonized: even heavy taxation was preferable to the

  absence of security and government. But Rome was not in a posi-

  tion to respond, so British society was left to its own devices. What

  followed was a descent into civil war, the collapse of public goods to

  the extreme extent that the urban economy disappeared. People fled