B009THJ1WI EBOK

by Young, Crawford

  Early versions of a state can be traced back six millennia.5 However, the contemporary form flows from the emergence of the absolute state in Europe in the sixteenth century, with France as a critical model. Gradually over the next three centuries, the state acquired the instrumentalities and resources that define its modernity: permanent armies, professional bureaucracies, elaborate fiscal mechanisms. The capacity of emergent modern states in the sixteenth century to replace feudal levies and seasonal mercenaries with permanent armies and navies transformed warfare and the state itself; one recollects the cogent Charles Tilly aphorism that “the state makes war, war makes the state."6 Also transformational was the rise of a professionalized bureaucracy, skilled in the management of the public realm; through these security and administrative mechanisms, the modern state fulfills its classical Weberian definition as a compulsory association organizing domination, enjoying a monopoly on the legitimate use of coercion.7 Permanent revenue flows not limited to royal domains, customs, and the whims of Florentine bankers were equally pivotal; Margaret Levi exaggerates only a little in her assertion that “the history of state revenue production is the history of the evolution of the state."8 Securing the resources now required compelled absolute rulers to concede voice to civil society: hence constitutionalism and liberal democracy, at first with very limited suffrage. In the economic sphere, the ascendance of capitalism and the class politics to which the industrial era gave rise fueled an expansion of the social vocation of the state to include a welfare mission.

  The evolution of the liberal democratic state for some decades unfolded in a context that posited the Fascist dictatorships and Soviet-type states as menacing other, framing them as the object of intense global competition for standing as authoritative normative guide. More recently, the market socialism of China and the Islamic state in Iran are also alternative models. Over time, however, the dominant currents in state theory began to be generated internally in Europe, shaped in important measure by the contemplation of the Western state by the philosophers, sociologists, and political scientists preoccupied with the concept.

  ATTRIBUTES OF THE STATE

  My own reading of the state as concept was initially set forth in The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective, distilled from a wide range of state theory.9 That model, summarized in table 2.1, proposed to summarize the complex historic persona of the state by identifying nine defining attributes and a half dozen behavioral imperatives that shape its action. This frame proved especially applicable to the African colonial state in its mature form, stateness in that mature form being underwritten by the power reserves of the occupying metropolitan nation and the delegated sovereignty being shielded from popular challenge by the constraints of subject status. These crucial vectors vanished with independence, and the contemporary African state is a complex symbiosis of the normative state, the legacy of the colonial state, and customary precepts of social reciprocities and more personalized concepts of rule. I retain the conceptualization, largely for its convenience in structuring later analysis. In the pages that follow, I briefly review the categories, focusing on the African specifics of the attributes and imperatives.10

  Governing

  To begin with the most evident everyday understanding, the state is a government. When I queried students in the opening session of my introductory course on the state as to their understanding of the meaning of the term, the great majority responded with “government.” Its institutions of rule at both center and periphery constitute the visible expression of stateness. Governing is its most conspicuous function, the function through which the ordinary citizen recognizes and acknowledges its existence. In much of Africa, popular understandings are also shaped by a critique of state performance of its expected functions: policing, defending, adjudicating, educating, social provisioning, taxing, regulating, monitoring, planning, and managing, to offer but a partial roster of governing activities.

  TABLE 2.1. State as Concept

  Attributes Imperatives

  1 Government Institutions of rule Hegemony Monopoly of legitimate coercion

  2 Territory Land enclosed within boundaries Autonomy Minimizing external, internal constraints

  3 Population Inhabitants within territory Security Protection from external, internal threat

  4 Sovereignty Ultimate internationally recognized authority Legitimation Rightfulness of rule

  5 Power Capacity to exercise authority Revenue Resources for exercise of rule

  6 Law Codified standing commands Accumulation Expanding economy

  7 Nation People as collectivity

  8 International actor Membership in global community of sovereign states

  9 Idea Images, norms, expectations in social imaginary

  Territory

  Territory comes next in any list of state attributes. The modern state system is based on clearly demarcated boundaries, pictorially captured in the sharp lines drawn on maps, enclosing differently colored spaces. On the ground the boundary becomes legible by the fences, border officials, and usually formal exit and entry procedures for those traversing the territorial limits. Territoriality was much less clearly defined in precolonial forms of African states. Rule was rather often exercised only at the seat of power, and authority progressively attenuated as one moved outward, becoming only intermittent at the periphery of ill-defined and fluid outer limits. The power of territoriality in the contemporary social imaginary finds full measure in the utter failure of pan-Arab solidarity to overcome the division of the Arab world, mostly through artificial boundaries of imperial imposition, into seventeen sovereign units; so does the persistence of even failed states in Africa, to which we return in chapter 8.

  Territoriality assumed singular force in independent Africa with the inscription of existing boundaries as foundational principle of the African state system in the 1963 OAU Charter; territorial integrity was mentioned no less than three times in the document. The 1964 Cairo OAU Summit further reinforced territorality by declaring by acclamation (though Somalia and Morocco demurred) that all member countries “pledge themselves to respect the borders existing on their achievement of national independence."11 Rather than vest this engagement in the notion of state succession, postulating the independent state as inheriting the assets, territorial and other, of its colonial predecessor, African jurists imported the doctrine of uti possedetis from Latin America. This juridical theory, stipulating the permanence of a territorial frame unless international agreements determined otherwise, enjoyed prescriptive dignity not only for its origins in Roman private law but also for its presumed (but actually debatable) success in preserving territorial integrity and state stability in Latin America.12 Indeed, territorial attachment even had divine imperative in the famous remark of radical Cameroonian nationalist Ruben Um Nyobe at a 1952 party congress: “Speaking in a Christian manner, the whole world recognizes that GOD created a single Cameroon."13

  Population

  A third and classical attribute is population. The state exercises its authority over a human community enclosed within its frontiers. It regularly counts and codifies its residents, assigning a range of formal statuses. Those classified as full members of the national community are citizens, who have an array of legal rights and responsibilities. Birth normally guarantees citizenship; immigrants may obtain it but typically have to satisfy a roster of requirements, sometimes onerous, to qualify. Others are categorized as alien; though they fall under the authority of the state, their status is precarious and their rights circumscribed.14 In a number of African states, the concept of citizenship is limited by notions of indigeneity: fully authentic citizens are those descended from an ethnic community resident in the national territory at the time of colonial occupation.15 States exhibit a compulsive disposition to classify their subjects, conducting periodic censuses that group individuals by such attributes as gender, race, ethnicity, occupation, or income, although a number of African states now avoid enumeration by ethnicity.
As James Scott suggests, the exercise of domination impels codification, facilitating state control by simplifying its social domain.16

  These first three attributes sum to form the established definition of a state in international law, reflected in the 1933 Montevideo Convention that was negotiated to establish the criteria necessary for a political entity to claim recognition as an international person. The minimal requirements for stateness were a permanent population that inhabited a defined territory and that possessed a government demonstrating the capacity to enter into relations with other states. Through international recognition, the aspirant state acquires the critical fourth attribute, sovereignty.17

  Sovereignty

  Sovereignty is the juridical sword of the modern state and a jealously guarded property of the African polity. Its central role for the African state requires more extended discussion. The stupendous doctrine awaited discovery by Jean Bodin in 1576. Earlier authority inhered in rulers, often claiming to be God's delegates; the Bodin formulation first asserted a “high, absolute and perpetual” authority existing outside the mortal body of the king and within a permanent commonwealth. Hobbes glossed the doctrine as a necessary donation of unrestricted power to the leviathan by a populace fleeing the “nasty, brutish, and short” life in the state of nature. Rousseau delved further into the sources of authority, finding sovereignty to be ultimately popular and thus merely exercised by the state. Despite the elusive notion of a “people” enjoying the collective capacity to possess sovereignty, this reading proved enduring, with “people” metaphorically transformed into “nation.” The 1791 French Constitution declared: “Sovereignty is one, indivisible, inalienable and imprescriptible. It belongs to the Nation."18

  The symbolic moment of inscription of sovereignty into international law was the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, ending the disastrous German civil wars by an agreement barring princes from intervening in the affairs of neighboring states. By the next century the doctrine of sovereignty enjoyed general acceptance in the European state system. The vast Asian, western hemisphere and ultimately African zones that fell under imperial conquest, annexation, or negotiated subjugation were swept under an expansive version of colonial sovereignty.19 Yet the assertion of sovereignty as coeval with empire was ultimately subverted by the Rousseauvian codicil that its ultimate derivation was from the people.20 Through this inversion, anticolonial revolt claimed sovereignty to naturally repose in its popular base.

  Sovereignty has two faces: external and internal. The Westphalian doctrine incorporated the external dimension. The state as sovereign entity asserted the right to unrestricted supreme authority within its territory; intervention within its boundaries by alien powers was a cardinal sin. The powerful hold of this principle in newly independent countries is well illustrated by the alacrity with which African states sacralized sovereignty as a foundational principle of the OAU.

  Naturally, external sovereignty has empirical limits. Power remains the currency of the international system, and weak states cannot avoid trespass by the more powerful actors. Global economic forces operate through the interstices of sovereignty and cannot be readily controlled by the more feeble states. The emergence of structures of global governance and the slow extension of the domain of international law impose further constraints, as has the recent appearance, mostly triggered by African internal wars, of a novel doctrine of an international right to humanitarian intervention. Its contours are uncertain but suggest the shield of sovereignty no longer absolves states culpable of grave abuse of segments of their populace. The establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC) empowered to try and punish genocide and other crimes against humanity likewise creates restrictions on sovereignty. To date its case registers have been mostly African and have included even sitting heads of state, such as Omar al Bashir of Sudan, allegedly responsible for mass killings of Darfur civil populations. Such an international “responsibility to protect” was overwhelmingly endorsed at a UN summit in 2005.21 Indeed, the relative weakness of many African states has given rise to an influential notion that their stateness was defined only by their external recognition; in this view, the laying on of hands by the international community conferred a sovereignty that lacked internal application.22

  But however circumscribed by internal weakness, external sovereignty remains a priceless attribute whose transactional value is vastly enhanced by the corollary doctrine of sovereign equality of states. As an international legal person, the independent state is the juridical equivalent of any other country; thus sovereignty conjures lilliputian Seychelles as the formal equal of China. As a group, the community of African states can punch above their weight in world affairs through their equal votes in international bodies, often pooled through an African caucus; they constitute over a quarter of the UN membership. Further, the exercise of sovereignty becomes in some instances a commodity, available for sale or other transaction.

  On its internal face, sovereignty doctrine accords to the state the right to regulate the behavior of the citizens, to extract their resources through taxation, to expropriate their property, and to conscript them for military service. Only extreme totalitarian states, such as the Soviet Union in the Stalin era, possess the capacity and the will to exercise the plenitude of sovereign authority. In Africa and elsewhere, in well-ordered states the scope of domestic sovereignty in the contemporary state is circumscribed on several fronts. Constitutions are compacts between states and civil societies that set explicit limits upon lawful state action. Representative institutions assert a right of control on the executive agent of sovereignty. Codification of state commands as law sets explicit parameters to state behavior. Constitutional and other public law includes a roster of individual and group rights that can be invoked to oppose state claims. In their design, constitutions normally divide and fragment power in order to safeguard society from unrestricted state power.

  In postcolonial Africa, the growing weakness of many states by the 1970s was a huge impediment to full exercise of internal sovereignty. In peripheral zones or rural areas a number of countries were incapable of enforcing the writ of state. But even if the limitless domestic authority conferred on the state by the pure concept of sovereignty is rarely attainable in practice, the doctrine remains serviceable to rulers who wish to extend their authority.

  In a stunning new gloss on the doctrine of sovereignty, Pierre Englebert demonstrates its paradoxical vitality even in the weakest African states. The essence of sovereignty in a weak state, he suggests, lies in the internationally sanctioned power of legal command. Local agents of the state enjoy the delegated use of the prerogative. When a weak center loses the capacity to monopolize this power, sovereignty does not disappear but merely filters downward to local agents. Sovereignty thus fragmented becomes a means of accumulation for those possessing its symbols and instruments (for instance, the official stamp required to authenticate the sheath of documents needed to navigate police and other checkpoints).23

  Power

  A fifth attribute is power, closely tied to its rightful exercise or authority. The very core of any state is its security apparatus, the storage center of its physical power. African armies and security agencies project state power, above all internally, and this projection of power is reinforced by the police, who manage in a variety of ways those who defy or resist its edicts. In the semiotics of international relations, countries are “powers,” big or small. “Le pouvoir” in French serves as synonym for state or regime. Anthony Giddens usefully summarizes power as accumulated in several containers: in surveillance and information storage and in specialized human skills that are assembled in its organizational structures, in sanctioning capacity through its policing and punishment agencies.24

  Law

  The state speaks through its sixth attribute, law. Its power is systematized and congealed in the corpus of standing commands codified in its legal system. Though modern states insist on the primacy of their legal domain, some degr
ee of legal pluralism may subsist. In much of Africa, customary law may operate, particularly in the civil sphere. Even here, the colonial state and its successor have found a constant impulse to systematize, to capture an oral instrument in writing and monitor its application. In the process, as Martin Chanock argues, the state “changed the nature and use of custom,” which “became a resource of the instruments of government, rather than a resource of the people."25 In regions with significant Muslim populations, the rich heritage of Islamic law continued to shape the legal domain. Overlaid by European legal codes in the colonial period, shari'a within Muslim societies remained operative in the civil sphere and at local level. After independence, Islamic law often expanded its domain, extending to the criminal sphere in Sudan in the 1983 “September laws” and in a dozen northern Nigerian states earlier this decade, as well as becoming a necessary point of reference for all legislation in Egypt. The precarious if not fictive transitional government in Somalia declared shari'a as sole legal instrument in 2009, in a desperate bid for legitimacy. Indeed, in a recent study of policy accommodations to the social reality of ethnic and religious pluralism, legal pluralism was recommended for Africa and Asia as an effective, even indispensable, antidote to the tensions and frictions of cultural diversity.26 Beyond legal pluralism, a larger issue for many states has been deficiencies in upholding the rule of law, a flaw that detracts from their stateness.