Profound changes in the international environment facilitated the third wave. The collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1990 and the Soviet Union itself the following year obliterated the cold war security logic that had motivated the superpower competitive quest for client regimes in Africa, whatever their internal deficiencies. The former Soviet bloc, which had progressively withdrawn from costly African engagement under the impetus of the “new thinking” of premier Mikhail Gorbachev during the 1980s, vanished as an alternative to reliance on the Western donor community and international financial institutions. The West, for a brief moment at the beginning of the 1990s, insisted on democratization. Unusually outspoken American ambassadors in Cameroon, Central African Republic, Kenya and Congo-Kinshasa pushed publicly and aggressively for political liberalization. France, usually indulgent toward its most faithful clients, warned at the Franco-African summit in August 1990 that Françafrique was not exempt from the democratization imperative. Within the World Bank, a significant current of opinion held that political reform was a necessary companion to economic liberalization.79 “Governance” became a password in the discourse of structural adjustment, overlapping notions of democratization with such aspects as citizen influence and oversight, responsible and responsive leadership, decentralization, and meaningful accountability and transparency.
Internally conditions were likewise exceptionally propitious for political change. The old order of life presidents and single parties was utterly delegitimated. Ideologies rooted in Afromarxism or other forms of socialist orientation or anti-imperial revolution rang hollow in the face of continuing decline in living standards. The institutional fabric of the state was corroded by long years of fiscal crisis; bankrupt governments slashed spending on basic social services. The “vampire state” was at bay, its hegemony now subject to challenge from a long-silenced society.80
The capacity of the urban street to force a seemingly impregnable regime into retreat first became manifest in Algeria in October 1988. For a new generation of unemployed urban youth, the liberation struggle and the Algerian revolution were remote abstractions; emigration or “trabendo” (underground economy) seemed the only survival alternatives. An emergent Islamist movement offered new hope to them in their social despair. Riots sweeping Algerian cities forced the ruling FLN to abandon it claim to political monopoly and to accept multiparty elections. When in 1992 the Islamist challengers, the Front Islamique de salut (FIS), were poised to sweep the elections, the army intervened to block their ascent to power. But the psychological shockwave generated across the continent by the spectacle of a once-invincible revolutionary movement humbled by street protest was electrifying.81
The next source of diffusion was Benin. Veteran ruler Matthieu Kérékou, a pioneer of Afromarxism, by late 1989 was cornered. His creditors refused further advances; the government payroll was deep in arrears. Abandoned by his former clientele, he faced growing isolation, escalating street protest, and a chorus of denunciation from intellectuals, teachers, civil servants, unions, and students. They demanded a “national conference” of the forces vives of the nation: the major interest categories of the country. Once convened, the forces vives, echoing the 1789 French États-Généraux, seized effective power through a declaration of its sovereignty and created transitional institutions leading to multiparty elections and a new constitution. This stunning coup by civil society resonated powerfully through Africa, especially its francophone states. Elsewhere, without benefit of national conferences, single-party rulers were compelled by the confluence of internal and external pressures to yield to competitive elections and constitutional redrafting. About a third of the rulers in power in 1988 were driven out, voluntarily or involuntarily, by the democratic wave. By my count, thirty-nine African constitutions were either entirely replaced or substantially revised in this period.82
A final dimension of the democratization dynamic was its revival as necessary element in the final stage of liquidating white minority rule. Constitutional democracy was a crucial aspect of the international diplomacy leading to the long-delayed independence of Namibia in 1989. Even more decisively, the democratizing process that was initiated by the release of Nelson Mandela and the legalizing of the African National Congress (ANC) in 1990, leading to the achievement of universal suffrage majority rule in 1994, anchored constitutionalism in the final redoubt of exclusionary white rule. The same year, an admirably democratic constitution was adopted (although never implemented) in newly independent Eritrea, after painstaking consultation of the populace and a global search for appropriate models.83
PHASE 6: DIVERGENT PATHWAYS
The sweep of the democratization wave was astonishing. Though a number of the more wily incumbents (for example, Paul Biya in Cameroon as well as Gnassingbé Eyadéma in Togo and Omar Bongo Ondimba in Gabon until their deaths in 2005 and 2009, respectively) were able to ride out the storm, in almost all cases important concessions were made. The single-party model was abandoned, and opposition parties became legal. State media monopolies were abandoned, and a political space opened up for civil society, even if the former ruling party remained dominant. Only three countries managed to preserve autocratic forms virtually unscathed: Libya, Sudan, and Swaziland. For a brief moment at the beginning of the 1990s, an exhilarating sense of African renewal took hold, reminiscent of the euphoria accompanying independence. The hopes vested in this third cycle of African political evolution as a durable democratic dispensation, however, crested quickly and began to deflate by the mid-1990s. In contrast to the first two cycles, however, emergent patterns proved remarkably divergent. The most widespread pattern was a partial and incomplete political liberalization, usually matched by half-hearted economic reform. Yet there were a significant number of pacesetter states that achieved impressive results and that appeared to have secured sustainable constitutional democracies, usually accompanied by effective economic reform. At the other end of the spectrum, large zones of protracted internal war emerged, and total state collapse emerged as a possible outcome.
By the mid-1990s, the term “semidemocracy” (or “semiauthoritarianism") had emerged to describe a system of rule whereby incumbents adapted to the new rules of the game by adopting the formalities of a liberalized polity but restricted their application to assure retention of power. Marina Ottaway defines such regimes as “ambiguous systems” not easily classified as democratic or authoritarian.84 William Case had earlier coined the phrase to capture the political essence of such durable Southeast Asian regimes as Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand.85 Richard Joseph proposes a different metaphor, “virtual democracy,” driven by the twin imperatives of retaining power and securing “external presentability."86
Such hybrids of democracy and authoritarianism appeared a durable regime type by the early twenty-first century; well over a third of African states fell in this category. By 2004, eighteen rulers who held power on the eve of the democratic wave in 1988 were still in office. Opposition forces that sprang to life at the peak of the transition in 1990s over time became demoralized by their inability to oust such governments in countries like Gabon and Cameroon, among others. With the spread of civil wars in Africa, stability regained its standing as a policy determinant for the Western donor community. Cooperation on Western donor community proposals for market-based economic reform soon became an effective means for semidemocracies to fend off political conditionalities. After the 2001 George Bush proclamation of a “war on terror” security collaboration proved another avenue for reducing external pressures on the political front. Soon after, the emergence of China as a major partner opened yet further opportunities for circumscribing liberalization.
Still, semidemocracy was in most respects a clear improvement on the patrimonial autocracy that preceded it. There was some opportunity for an opposition voice in the legislature or through a freer media. Human rights groups organized and became forceful voices, linked to an international network that amplified their message. National and intern
ational nongovernmental organizations could take root and provide alternative forums and mechanisms for social action.
In a number of countries, the democratic wave produced much more favorable outcomes. A genuine transition to a regime type more closely approximating classical definitions of democracy seems consolidated in a number of countries.87 By my count, in 2010 some sixteen countries had maintained reasonable standards of polyarchy without interruption since the moment of third-wave transitions.88 Two, Botswana and Mauritius, have had sustained liberal democratic regimes since independence (1965 and 1968 respectively), although in the former one dominant party has held power continuously. In all these cases, rulers have turned over, though in nearly half the same party has held the majority. In the best cases (for example, Benin, Cape Verde, and Ghana), the successful democratization has been accompanied by dramatic improvement in economic performance; in 2007, once-impoverished Cape Verde moved into the category of middle-income countries, despite the complete absence of high-value resources.89 Worthy of note is the fact that the two continuously democratic states stand far ahead of the field in terms of economic performance since independence.
Juxtaposed to these positive developments after 1990 were some profoundly negative trends: the spread of internal wars. Some were already in course: Angola, Somalia, and Sudan had long endured violent civil strife. But in the years that followed another fifteen countries were torn by insurgencies or, in the case of Eritrea and Ethiopia, by bitter border wars.90 Comoros and Guinea-Bissau were beset with repeated episodes of internal turbulence. At the extreme edge of possible disastrous outcomes was the 1991 dissolution of the state in Somalia, which was replaced by a chaotic pattern of warlord competition and clan-based militias vying for control of local areas, relief resources, and trade routes. Even devoid of a government, Somalia remained nonetheless an internationally recognized juridical entity, a potential state in perpetual rebirth. Analytical prophecy in 1960 never included the possibility of total state failure and dissolution into anarchy.
Even in instances where state failure was less total, constituted authority all but vanished for periods of time (Congo-Kinshasa, Liberia, Sierra Leone in particular). As the patterns of internal war spread through the 1990s, they coalesced into two large zones of interpenetrated conflicts: one extending southwestward from the Horn of Africa to the two Congos and Angola and the other from Senegal and Mali to Ivory Coast. Insurgents sought shelter and supplies in neighboring countries, which in turn intervened on behalf of governments or sometimes rebels. In the most complex of these civil wars, Congo-Kinshasa from 1996 to 2003, no less than eight other African armies at one time or another took part in the fighting and in several cases took advantage of the opportunity for large-scale plunder.91
A number of novel factors appeared in this wave of violence. Militias without legible political agendas took root, replacing the liberation movements of an earlier age that had identifiable political programs. They found weapons supply readily available because weakened states were less able to control arms flow. The collapse of former Soviet bloc armies led to the funneling of large quantities of now-surplus weaponry into international markets. In a number of instances, rebel forces from the periphery seized power, resulting in the dissolution of existing security forces, who often vanished into the countryside with their weapons and military knowledge. Insurgents also developed revenue sources by seizing high value resources: the “blood diamonds” syndrome. They found a ready source of recruits in unemployed young men, and they augmented their ranks through the use of child soldiers, frequently recruited by kidnapping. For all these reasons, once launched, internal wars proved singularly difficult for debilitated regimes to bring to an end.
By the turn of the century, efforts within Africa and through the international community to resolve such conflicts began to bear fruit, and the number diminished significantly. But several simmered on (notably those in Sudan and Somalia), and others verged on reigniting. Restoration of an effectively functioning state capable of providing basic services to its population was an evident necessity.
PLAN OF THE VOLUME
In the remainder of this volume, I turn first to the problematic of analytical capture of the African state, suggesting a framework for its analysis and exploring the avenues of conceptual debate seeking purchase on this quarry. Then follows four chapters that offer a fuller analytical narrative of the half century of African postcolonial itineraries, drawing on the three-cycle periodization in the foregoing overview.
In a final section, I examine a pair of dimensions of postcolonial Africa that have been of crucial importance: internal wars and the politics of identity. The recent wave of rebellions lays bare the fragility of the state and interrogates its capacity to exercise its sovereignty. The contradictions of elevated levels of ethnic consciousness and the astonishing survival capacity of the African state system suggest a naturalization of a territorial nationalism that invites analysis; so also does the enduring vision of pan-Africanism in the face of its multiple disappointments. Both these two issues have captured my attention from the opening moments of my academic journey. As I was completing my first Congo study, the country was swept in by a wave of rebellion that upended many premises. The role of political ethnicity was a key theme of Politics in the Congo and has remained a central focus of my research ever since.
The volume concludes with some reflections on the postcolonial state over the first half century. If one relies on the expectations of 1960 as a measure, African state performance overall is clearly disappointing, particularly when compared to most of Asia and, to a lesser extent, Lain America. This outcome beckons one to search for some of the overall factors that might explain the divergence, as well as the wide range of difference in state performance, from Botswana to Somalia. Of particular relevance is whether democratization makes a difference in developmental outcome. As the second half century opens, the improved performance of many states perhaps offsets the disposition to disappointment arising from the shortcomings of earlier decades.
2
* * *
In Search of the African State
Not just the management of development belonged to the state, but also its initiation, implementation, and direction. One expected that the state would be not just a gendarme or even a welfare state, but also a demiurge of development.
—Jean-François Médard, 1990
The new state is everything. It must exercise a role of surveillance and control for territorial integrity, public security and application of administrative instructions. It must be the catalyzer of development through the organization of production, harmonization of exchange, nationalization of the means of production and egalitarian satisfaction of the needs of the people.
—Pascal Chaigneau, 1985
The state does not exist in Zaire [Congo-Kinshasa]. It is no more than a skeleton that sustains the illusion.
—Buana Kabwe, 1978
The state is nothing more than organized pillage for the benefit of the foreigner and his intermediaries.
—Declaration of Congo-Kinshasa Bishops, 1981
The epigraphs to this chapter capture the yawning chasm separating once widespread visions of the mission and destiny of the African state, which reached a climax in the early 1970s, and the dispiriting realities of widespread state decline, crisis, failure, or even collapse that became dominant in the later 1980s.1 The itinerary of the state is central to comprehension of the dilemmas facing contemporary Africa; its analytical capture is a major purpose of this work. Thus we need to suggest a conceptualization of the state, review the diverse interpretations of its nature, and examine its diverse mutations from the decolonization point of departure.
THE STATE AS CONCEPTUAL FIELD
To set the stage for this task, a return to the state as conceptual field is indispensable. I turn first to the idea of the state as a general theoretical category, whose construction builds on a conceptual tradition of remarkable lineage,
stretching from such classical political philosophers as Machiavelli, Bodin, Hobbes, and Rousseau to the monumental contributions of Marx, Durkheim and Weber. The vast corpus of recent state theory can be seen if closely inspected to travel along a dual path: a deductive one manifested in successive elaborations of its conceptual superstructure and an inductive one reflected in the extraction of qualities of a small number of countries deemed exemplary: the thorough bureaucratic centralization through its prefectoral instrument of France, the strong but parliamentary regime of the United Kingdom, the effective social democracy of the Scandinavian states, the liberal constitutionalism of the United States, and more recently the state-led developmental achievement of the Asian “tigers.” These attributes fuse with the stream of theoretical reflection into abstracted and idealized visions of the model state, which has evolved over time and presented somewhat varying parameters. This normative state, equipped with a Weberian self-image as a rational-legal essence, has pretensions to universality and is accompanied by a corollary premise of exportability irrespective of the cultural specificities of receiving societies.2
How then may one win conceptual purchase on the modern state, whose model sets such aspirational parameters for postcolonial Africa? Representing the state usually involves enumerating its characteristics and tends to focus on the institutions of rule and its visible manifestations. However, such a perspective captures only a portion of the state as organism. Beyond its empirical form, Hegelian ghosts lurk; the state is also an idea, engraved in the perceptions and expectations of civil society and its own human agents.3 The state is also a macrohistorical actor that persists through time, constrained by the path dependencies of its past and engaging the future in its daily action. An important determinant of its purposive behavior is its location in a global universe of 194 sovereign polities, as defined by membership in the United Nations. The webs of internal conflict drive security regimes; patterns of interstate cooperation produce a partial international juridical order. The state at once faces inward toward the populace it rules, a relationship marked by scarcity and thus allocation, and outward toward the international arena, a zone of danger and thus defense.4
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