Nation
The first six qualities constitute the state as a bloodless, abstract entity. The seventh, the idea of the nation, transforms an abstraction into a living organism, with a personality defined by the cultures, languages, and historical memories embedded within the populations enclosed within state boundaries. So profoundly has the intertwining of state and nation penetrated the social imaginary that the two terms in everyday discourse are interchangeable, and they are frequently conjoined through hyphenation: nation-state.
The idea of the nation has assumed potent force in the last couple of centuries through its ideological expression: the doctrine of nationalism, appropriated by Africans as ideological armor to confront colonialism. The contemporary ideology of nationalism as assimilated in Africa wove together two potent dogmas: popular sovereignty and self-determination. Through the normative if mostly fictive location of sovereignty in the populace, nation vested in the people as a collectivity an ultimate moral authority; furthermore, it metaphorically transformed the assortment of ethnic groups and religious orientations into a collective person. This metamorphosis allowed African nationalists to draw on the moral resource of the right to self-determination. Postcolonial Africa domesticated popular sovereignty and self-determination by restricting their application to extant territorial units of the decolonization settlement, a crucial point to which I return in chapter 8.27
In the contemporary state, the idea of nation is firmly woven into doctrines of legitimation. Older states could usually claim to be a natural embodiment of a constituted national community. For the new states of Africa, nationhood was conceived as a work in progress, achievable through “nation building.” The “normal” polity is a nation-state; the imperfect version is in process of normalization.
Unit in International System
The penultimate state attribute is its membership in a global arena of comparable units. The slowly evolving web of international law constitutes the state as a unitary juridical person, formally equal to all other polities. International recognition is a prerequisite for full statehood and for receiving the perquisites that accompany membership in the global roster of states: witness the travails of Somaliland, effectively governing its territory since 1991 yet denied the laying on of hands by the world community that would assure external standing.28 At the same time, prior full international recognition shelters even a failed state, such as Somalia, whose statehood remains externally acknowledged for an extended period since its 1991 implosion.
Notwithstanding their sovereign equality, states as international actors vary enormously in the currency of hard and soft power that they bring to their external interactions. In Africa, only the Arab states of North Africa and South Africa have enjoyed a significant endowment of such resources. Coercive diplomacies and the threat of violence remain a vital medium of exchange in international transactions, creating incentives for relatively weak African states to seek the protective cover of dependent partnerships with the more powerful.
As with all forms of identity, the national personality of the state is partly defined by the external other, often as a negative point of reference. In appearance, the state most closely approximates a unitary actor in its external relationships, notwithstanding the currents of globalization of recent decades. The operation of a reason of state appears with greater clarity in external relationships than in most internal government operations.
State as Idea
Lastly, and crucially, the state is more than a set of visible institutions of rule. The state exists not only in its physical manifestations but is also deeply imprinted in the minds of its subjects and agents as an array of images, norms, and expectations. In its symbolic form, the state idea is represented by its rituals, its artifacts (such as flags and currency), and its monumental architecture. Most African offices, public or private, prominently display a picture of the ruler, embodiment of the state. The national football team, through ritual combat in international matches, performs the state.
Throughout Africa, the everyday idea of the state includes an array of expectations as to services it should provide: education, health facilities, roads, clean water, among other social provisions. So also is it assumed to provide mechanisms for conflict resolution. For some the idea of the state may be inseparable from a presumed religious idea: the obligation of a true Islamic state to defend, uphold, and propagate Islam or the notion still encountered in the United States and Europe that the ethos of the state has Christian sources. The idea of the state finds regular reinforcement through its self-celebration in national holidays and the performance of its legitimating values through elections and inaugurations. Indeed, Murray Edelman argues that state behavior is best understood as performance, “constructing the political spectacle."29
The pertinence of the idea of the state emerged with particular clarity in Africa in the era of the declining or failed state. Such a notion continues to shape hopes if not immediate expectations in the most dislocated polities and demands for action in recovering countries. Even in anarchic Somalia the power of the idea motivates repeated efforts—fifteen at last count—at resurrection of an institutional form. The Somali state is alive in historical memory, and that memory includes recollections of social functions once performed and a higher order of security than clan and kinship mechanisms can provide.
STATE AS ACTOR: BEHAVIORAL IMPERATIVES
Any roster of characteristics only captures the static aspect of a state, projecting it as frozen in time and space. Yet the very essence of a state lies in its action. The polity is purposive; the daily proclamations of its leaders announce intended moves and promise desirable outcomes. The state through its diplomats attends conferences, enters into accords, forms alliances, exhorts others to collaborate in common goals, or admonishes its adversaries. It trains, equips, and deploys its security forces. The tax collector never sleeps; the police agents make their rounds, arresting those suspected of infraction; courts rule on suspects or adjudicate conflicts. Annual budgets are enacted, prescribing the purposes of and resources available for state action. Longer-term goals are inscribed in electoral platforms, major pronouncements, and the once-fashionable five-year plan. Classical history always privileged the state as primary agent; the enriching new currents of social history cannot elude the state as constituting a field of interactions and relationships. The state is an inescapable macrohistorical actor.
In this role, the state is located in an evanescent present in which action occurs, in perpetual transition from past to future. Decisions are grounded in historical experience and memory. States remember through the voluminous archives that constitute its storage capacity; they draw on accumulated experience as libraries of lessons. Most routine daily actions are predetermined by long-established precedent or rules; economy of decision-making capacity compels limitation of choice. But the most important action is conscious, pointing to the future, conceived in terms of purposive goals. Perhaps most fundamental is the reproduction of the state itself. But state aims reflect the pressures placed on it by powerful economic or political actors and promises made to society at large by its leaders in the pursuit of legitimacy. Though goal driven, the complexity of human events ensures that policies rarely meet full success; thus a continuous process of adjustment mingles with new policy claims.
To recapitulate the operational code that shapes state action, I have suggested that the complex web of interests and requisites that govern the behavior of the state can be reduced to a half dozen imperatives that cumulatively constitute reason of state. These invariably function in combination and are susceptible of differing interpretation and weighting by the leading state agents staffing its summit instruments. But there is an “official mind” in the upper reaches of state bureaucracies that shares a number of assumptions and historical understandings setting parameters to policy debate.30 In the application of state reason, a notion extracted from Machiavelli in a seminal work by Friedrich Meinecke, power an
d morality combine, generating constant tension.31
Hegemony
The list needs to begin with hegemony, the vocation of domination identified by Weber. Rule-of-law states, and even most of their authoritarian counterparts, insist on the supremacy of the law, or the standing, codified commands of the state. The law may circumscribe the outer bounds of state behavior, but its enforcement requires the professionalized policing agents that are a hallmark of the modern state. Passive resistance or even limited civil disobedience, which acknowledges the law even if declining to follow it, may be tolerated. But overt challenge to the authority of the state and its right to rule will provoke a government response, limited only by its practical capacities.
The notion of hegemony is influenced by its central place in the reworking of Marxism by Antonio Gramsci; in this perspective, uncovering the operation of domination exercised by a ruling bloc is the analytical key.32 Hegemony becomes effective through an array of ideological, educational, organizational, and other “apparatuses.” Robert Fatton follows this path in defining the African state as “the organ of public coercive force that organizes the political domination of the ruling class and disarticulates the unity of subordinate classes."33 If one sets aside the notion that African societies can be reduced to clearly demarcated economic classes and understands “ruling class” as a congeries of presidential allies, ethnic fractions, wealthy “godfathers,” public sector employees, and military combines, then hegemony as exercised in many states may be understood as “disorganizing” and marginalizing some regions and ethnic communities, much of the youth, and urban informal sectors. Even though by the 1980s the reach of hegemony in a number of African states was increasingly limited by weakening institutions and budgetary crises, the ambition to restore it was ever reborn.
Autonomy
Autonomy, the second imperative, has both an external and internal face. The external dimension is most obvious; sovereignty as prized state value mandates that governments resist and block any trespass on their domains by external actors. Even powerful states are restrained by the realities of world politics but nonetheless maneuver to preserve and expand their range of choice. In the African political universe, only the strongest or wealthiest states—arguably Egypt and Libya (before 2011), and South Africa—have had relatively few limitations placed on their external autonomy.34
But state bureaucracies equally aspire to unimpeded exercise of their domestic authority. Individuals and groups constantly seek to orient outcomes of administrative process in their favor; a skilled and professional bureaucracy pushes back as agent of state interest. Indeed, academic admirers of the Asian developmental states point to the insulation of the bureaucracy from particularist pressures as a keystone of their effectiveness: these bureacracies have embedded autonomy, in the words of Peter Evans.35 In seeking lessons for Africa from the dramatic developmental success of South Korea, Thomas Callaghy and John Ravenhill perceive effective autonomization of the state as critical: “Pivotal to this effort was the centralization of political power, the gaining of autonomy from pressures from societal groups, and the institutionalization of centralized decision-making by technocrats who again enjoyed substantial autonomy from societal pressures."36 From this perspective, insufficient state internal autonomy is a major drag on African development. The opposite view is held in many African quarters; in this perspective, the developmental impasse was a result of inadequate external autonomy. One may cite the lament of Claude Ake, who claims African states were cornered by their external weakness, compelling acquiescence in SAPs that “ hardly any [African leaders] believe in” and “that most of them condemn.” According to him, they “put up with it to avoid economic sanctions and in the hope of eliciting material support from external patrons."37 The thread connecting these disparate perspectives is the autonomy imperative.
Security
Security is a third imperative. Indeed, within Africa the northern tier of Arab countries are frequently characterized as mukhabarat states, defined by their omnipresent and pervasive security apparatus.38 In the final years of apartheid in South Africa, the government, fearing what it termed a “total Communist onslaught” from the north, increasingly became a national security state as well. More broadly, cold war competition in Africa led both blocs to assist in the strengthening of armed forces and internal security organs. In the West, the United States and France were particularly active on this front; on the eastern side, East Germany in particular specialized in training secret police forces in ideologically aligned states.
"National security” as policy objective is a staple of political discourse everywhere; so is stirring public fears of insecurity by warning of external dangers or internal subversion. The experience of extended periods of internal war and attendant profound insecurity burns deeply into the public consciousness; only recently has the psychosis of the bitter civil war of the 1930s begun to fade in Spain. For three decades, Mobutu Sese Seko in Congo-Kinshasa relied on the trauma of the 1963–65 rebellions to legitimate the “Mobutu or chaos” theory. In contemporary Liberia and Sierra Leone, the searing memories of the atrocity-laden civil wars of the 1990s induce a powerful longing for domestic peace and internal security. Not the least toxic impact of state crisis or failure in Africa is the likely perversion of security forces into predatory instruments of disorder and insecurity.
Legitimation
Legitimation, the fourth imperative, is a constant necessity for a state. Legitimacy is indispensable to assuring at low cost the habitual consent and obedience of civil society and its respect for state agents. A deficiency in legitimacy makes likely a larger reliance on coercion and fear to motivate conformity to the law. Coercion in turn serves as a gold reserve for the currency of state authority. If constantly deployed, the reserves are depleted and hegemony is devalued. An immediate consequence is a diminished disposition of the populace to everyday deference to state authority and the rules enshrined in its legal code. The reservoir of legitimacy is not fixed or permanent; the frictions inherent in the daily operations of the state are corrosive. The daily replenishment of the stock is the challenge of the legitimation imperative.
Jürgen Habermas suggests that a legitimation crisis can occur for four reasons: the economic system fails to provide the requisite consumable values; the administrative system cannot provide enough rational decisions; the legitimation system does not yield enough generalized motivations; or the sociocultural system is deficient in the production of action-motivating meaning.39 In sum, a quantum of legitimacy is earned in the daily performance of the state, in its capacity for effective governance. Legitimation is a perpetual referendum on state behavior.
The performance is partly rhetorical. The need to articulate goals that resonate with the public is one aspect. Related is the need to frame policy in terms that win broad support. Until recently in Africa, the capacity to cast goals and policies in some inspirational ideological form—often a version of socialism—was instrumental to legitimation; the global devaluation of explicit forms of socialist ideology since 1990 leaves nationalism as the primary vehicle for portraying the state as an active defender of collective interests. Ritual and ceremonial performance likewise contribute: popular festivals, public displays of military might.
Even more important than discourse is the integrity of state behavior. A powerful vector of delegitimation in Africa has been the scale of corruption in many states. A number of African rulers secreted billions of dollars in offshore accounts; to cite but one example, former military dictator Sani Abacha in Nigeria managed to steal $4 billion in his brief presidency from 1994 to 1999.40 Regimes originating in military coups inevitably claimed entry legitimacy by cataloguing the sins of their predecessors: venality, incompetence, nepotism, atrocities, subservience to external actors.
State conformity to constitutional limits and requirements is another source of legitimacy, optimally effected through democratic institutions. States manifesting scrupulous respec
t for their own laws more readily earn willing compliance from the citizenry. The proper functioning of the judicial system also enhances the dignity of the state more broadly. Assuring state accountability through meaningful elections and functioning representative institutions likewise increases legitimacy.
Finally, competent governance, the effectiveness of state action in performance of its expected obligations, reinforces its legitimacy. Management of the economy in ways that visibly enhances prosperity, assures growth, and constrains abuse is one dimension. Another is assuring a functioning legal order, one that provides individual security and protects property rights, as well as reliably delivering of basic social provisions: schools, clinics, safe water, roads. Everyday state competence is a reliable pathway to legitimation, and its conspicuous absence in a number of African states is a vector of delegitimation.
Revenue
In pursuit of the fourth imperative of legitimation, the state acts as a helping profession. The opposite is the case for revenue, the fifth imperative, which pits the state against society in its extraction of sufficient resources to perform its other roles. Society does not readily yield its wealth; no legislation is more painful than tax increases, and no campaign promise is more tempting than the pledge to reduce them. Indeed, the erection of constitutional democratic polities on the absolutist foundations of the early modern state is largely a narrative of successive concessions of authority to representative institutions in return for meeting often war-driven needs for revenue enhancement. The revenue imperative is the most fundamental of all the components to the operational code of the state.
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