The reasons are obvious enough, well summarized by Levi: “Revenue enhances the ability of rulers to elaborate the institutions of the state, to bring more people within the domain of those institutions, and to increase the number and variety of collective goods provided through the state."41 The difficulties in collection are directly proportionate to the visibility of the tax to those obliged to pay. Until the twentieth century states tended to rely heavily on taxes on trade; import and export imposts have always been a crucial source in Africa. Income tax collection in particular requires a sophisticated revenue administration, and a reasonable reserve of state legitimacy is needed to induce broad compliance; these state qualities are often lacking in Africa, leading to widespread evasion. Further, the state decline in the 1980s led to a shrinkage of the formal economy and a concomitant growth in the informal sector, outside the reach of the state fiscal net.
A fatal revenue shortfall is crucial to understanding the state crisis that emerged in Africa during the 1980s. External assistance and rents on high-value primary commodities had become dominant sources for many. Revenue shortfall leads swiftly to delegitimating incapacities. Arrearages in public-sector salary payments become endemic, undermining bureaucratic performance and provoking volatile discontent. Funding for basic social provisions dwindles, and schools and clinics function only if their clientele supplants government support with informal payments to replace the salaries of the teachers and medical personnel. State agents monetize their authority by demanding illicit compensation for any service.
Accumulation
The sixth and last imperative is accumulation, intimately linked to the revenue requirement. Only in the age of mercantilism did this dimension of state action become evident. Soon thereafter, it became joined to an emergent idea of progress, reflecting the philosophic optimism of the Enlightenment. The dramatic advances in science and technology in the nineteenth century, and novel vistas of a possible cumulative increase in the level of societal prosperity, gave rise to a new theory of history as a narrative of progress. Perhaps best defined as irreversible ameliorative change, the idea of progress, absorbed into decolonization African nationalism, implies human agency in its realization: thus the idea of the state as overseer of a marshalling of resources and instruments to assure sustained growth.42
The notion of progress fused with the concept of development in the early years of the twentieth century to assert more explicitly an accumulation mission for the state—reflected, for example, in the summons of French colonial minister Albert Sarrault in the 1920s to a mise en valeur of the colonial estates. In the authoritative words of leading British colonial statesman Lord Hailey, “A new concept. . . had come to be increasingly accepted[:]. . . active State intervention was a necessary lever to the amelioration of social conditions."43 Development at a redoubled pace was the primary legitimating doctrine of the newly independent states.44 To achieve this goal, energetic state action to plan, direct, and organize economy and government seemed indispensable: the accumulation imperative in action.
The accumulation imperative in Africa requires a complex and difficult balance of action, with respect to the private economy, especially regarding foreign participation. The effectiveness of state accumulation-directed policies, more than the other imperatives, is subject to an array of measures and indicators: above all the ubiquitous GNP increase statistic. A blend of state intervention, direction, facilitation, and abstention is required. In the first two decades of African independence, consensus favored privileging the first two; since 1980s, the balance has shifted toward encouraging the private sector, to supporting property rights and offering investment inducements.
Needless to say, simultaneous optimization of the entire array of imperatives is impossible. At any given point, aggressive pursuit of one may come at the cost of others. I am reducing the complex processes through which state behavior is determined to this parsimonious list only for reasons of analytical convenience and clarity; key state actors do not consciously pursue their policy calculus within such a simplified framework.
LIMITS TO THE CONCEPT
The portrait of the state sketched in this summary of its attributes and behavioral imperatives, taken alone, inevitably sins through unintended reification. Its conceptual transformation into an apparent unitary rational actor must at once be set aside. At an abstract level, one may perceive an identifiable reason of state. Periodic political statements may castigate a proposal as contrary to state interest or advocate an action as required for state well-being. But rationality fully operates only in the realm of abstraction; in the real world, what Michael Mann calls the “cock-up-foul-up” dimension of state action must enter the picture.45
Still, at the end of the day states remain authoritative actors. This is especially evident in the geopolitical realm; states as collective actors do sign accords with other international actors, declare war, form alliances, and take positions in international forums. These acts belong unambiguously to the state, whatever the complexity of the processes through which they were decided on.
Internally, the division of the state into several realms of authority—executive, legislative, and judicial branches, state corporations and central banks, security agencies, among others—both fragments the decision-making process and creates multiple institutional sources of state action. Furthermore, government operates through a nesting hierarchy of territorial subdivisions, with their own functional and often representative organs. Still, once the prescribed procedures for a binding act have been followed, a decision ensues in the name of the state. The decision process encompasses a deliberative, reflective element; as Bertrand Badie and Pierre Birnbaum observe, “The essential function of the state is to think."46 This observation echoes the Durkheim notion that as organic solidarity takes hold, the state becomes the brain or guiding intelligence for society.47
Thus the state acts: yet a paradox remains. In the last analysis, the state is an abstraction; the real actors are the skilled human agents who staff its institutions. Giddens frames the issue well: “All state action is carried on by knowledgeable human agents who both construct the social world through their action, but yet whose action is also conditioned and constrained by the very world of their creation.” These agents draw not only on data in state information storage containers but also their on own memories, which they apply to the future-directed purposes at hand.48 State norms, professional culture, bureaucratic hierarchy, and formal rules all shape and constrain the action of government actors, but they remain subject to their individual identities, interests, and passions. In real policy settings, reason of state is a complex calculus with incomplete information and large uncertainties, yielding some range of possible choice, perhaps inflected by personal dispositions of key actors. In the minds of political leaders, reason of state jostles with the desire to perpetuate their grip on the agencies of rule; the “official mind” most clearly operates at the level of the permanent administrative staffing of the state.
The hegemony and autonomy drives of the African colonial state did place it not only above but largely outside of subject society. The postcolonial successor, even in its most authoritarian moments, could not enforce such a separation. Timothy Mitchell cogently argues that state analysis needs to blur the line between state and society. “The state,” he writes, “should not be taken as a free-standing entity, whether an agent, instrument, organization or structure, located apart from and opposed to another entity called society,” although the distinction between state and society should nevertheless be taken seriously, as the defining characteristic of the modern political order.49 The very notion of “civil society” is constituted by the state itself: an analytical collective whose recent rediscovery as a moral actor owes much to the degeneration and delegitimation of the Eastern European states of the former Soviet bloc and of most African states in the 1980s.50 Various definitions of civil society are on offer; I prefer to regard the concept as referencing the arr
ay of associations lying between the household and the state, seeking voice and influence on the public square in that part of their action that operates in a public-regarding domain.51 Civil society and the state are joined in a web of conflict and cooperation, a constant contest over the boundaries of state authority and over what constitutes the optimal supply of public goods. At the same time, in innumerable more particularistic arenas of encounter, state and society more broadly interact in the realms of identity, resource control, and access to public favor. As I suggest in The African Colonial State, “Civil society simultaneously pursues exit, voice, and loyalty at any historical moment; what may vary over time is the valence of each of these factors. The state constitutes, dominates, and rules civil society, which in turn penetrates the state and imprints its collective personality and major cleavages."52
There are thus many qualifications to the preceding portrayal of the state as macrohistorical actor whose reproduction over time is guided by a distinctive set of interests. In my reading, reason of state is operative in African polities. In the most debilitated, it is overwritten by competing logics of aggrandizement of rulers or protection of incumbent regimes. But even in these instances a residue remains to which at least a handful of state agents cling. Further, the recent enthronement of good “governance” as supreme developmental virtue in Africa, especially in the eyes of the donor community, can be understood as embodying the elements of stateness I have elaborated.
THE NORMATIVE STATE
Through all of its mutations, the African state dwelled not only in the shadow of its colonial predecessor but also in the normative shadow of external state models: what one may term a “normative state.” By this I mean an internationally dominant abstracted concept of the appropriate institutional forms, doctrines, and functions of a sovereign state. This term originates with Ernst Frankel; it was then was adapted by Jens Meierhenrich to frame his careful study of the role of law in the South African transition beyond apartheid. In its original version, “normative” applies only to the supremacy of the law in limiting the prerogative powers of a ruler.53I use the concept to suggest an overall model of the effective state.
The very notion of a development gap to be closed in the modern age implied a magnetic tug from idealized external models that purported to fulfill the vision of a life more abundant. Initially, the exemplary nation-state after its post-World War II reconfiguration embodied the Keynesian premises of active economic management and the social pact of a welfare infrastructure; in response, the first-generation postcolonial states adopted indicative planning and rapid expansion of social provisioning. The ideological flow of dependency theory from Latin America in the 1970s pulled state orientation toward expanding its capacities so that it might supplant the economic hold of colonial and international capital.54 At the same time, the persistent stagnation of advanced economies in the 1970s interrogated the consensus surrounding the welfare state as authoritative model, leading to the revisionist ideology of neoliberalism incarnated by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. By the 1980s, the dominant normative state was clothed in the garment of market supremacy, a new master principle that quickly filtered into the operating codes by which international financial institutions and donor communities governed the conditions for assistance to crisis-ridden African states. By the 1990s, the now-ascendant liberal market state model embraced democratization as well as marketization as basic criteria of respectability.55 Ever since African independence, the primary version of a normative state has always had a major competitor. Initially this was state socialism of Soviet inspiration, characterized by comprehensive state ownership, a command economy, and a densely organized autocracy. As chapter 1 argues, at the moment of independence the Soviet Union and China seemed to march toward progress in seven league boots; this model stood at the pinnacle of its prestige and power, apparently associated with rapid economic growth and transformation of backward societies. In 1960 its African adoption was initially inconceivable, given the institutional legacy of the colonial state and the deep entanglement with the norms, practices, and operating ethos of decolonization. By the 1970s, a handful of states adopted state socialism and attempted to remake the polity on Leninist lines with indifferent success. The 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union and Chinese shift to market socialism removed this alternative vision from the landscape; in its place the remarkable success of East Asian developmental states, which became visible by the late 1980s, provided an new inspiration. Marked by an activist state managing a market economy and guided by a proficient and technocratic bureaucracy and often by semi-authoritarian politics, this model was only temporarily dimmed by the 1997 Asian economic crisis. But by the time the Asian example came into view, the decline of most African states appeared to preclude its adoption. State rebuilding and reform did take hold for a few African countries in the 1990s, and so the allure of the Asian example is still evoked by some, most explicitly by Paul Kagame, Rwandan president since 1994; Singapore has been constantly cited in regime discourse as the exemplary instance of a very small polity that achieved dramatic transformation under authoritarian auspices.56 By the turn of the century, a resurgent China added a new dimension to the Asian model.
However impaired many states might have become, the normative reach of the primary advanced liberal market state model expanded in tandem with Africa's needs for external support. Whether the profound crisis of the neo-liberal state that emerged in its heartland—the United States—in 2008 and that then spread throughout the world through the avenue of globalization will reshape the model modern state is a newly posed and crucial question. Whatever the outcome, the enduring reality is the potency of external models of the efficacious nation-state.
THE DEVELOPMENTAL STATE
Over its five postindependence decades, one can perceive three successive ascendant African state models, corresponding to the three cycles identified in chapter 1. In the immediate postcolonial years, the doctrine of the developmentalist state ruled supreme. This built on but expanded the policy impulses of the terminal colonial state, reconceived in a far more activist mode. At that moment, industrialization was the key passageway to high modernity; marshaling the requisite resources necessitated state planning and initiative. In its most expansive version, Algerian planners, influenced by French radical economist François Perroux, framed this ambition as prioritizing basic heavy industry, especially steel: “industries industrialisants."57 The fascination with steel mills and giant hydroelectric projects was a mark of the times, not just a unique interest of Africa's. Agriculture was tasked to provide the domestic resource base for development; its surplus was to be transferred to industrial and urban sector needs. Social infrastructure enjoyed similar energetic state backing. The amenities prized by the citizenry—schools and medical facilities above all—expanded impressively in the 1960s, their services often made available for reduced fees or even for free. Indicative planning was held in high esteem and at the time carried the blessing of the international financial institutions; the glossy, bound five-year plan conveyed visions of a prosperous future, with a legitimating subtext of state capacity for fulfillment. A sense of purposive urgency drove the developmentalist state. So also did a relative abundance of resources; withdrawing colonizers at first expanded the public aid to their former African holdings, and independence opened access to a far broader array of external donors, as well as to financing from public and private international institutions.
The activist developmental state needed to concentrate authority to fulfill its ambitions. Thus neutralization of opposition voices in representative institutions was the ransom of progress, as was the expansion of the ruling party into a disciplining mechanism by which to silence the discontented. Authoritarian practice drew on the heritage of the colonial state, which provided an arsenal of legal weapons against dissent. So also did a deeply implanted notion among the ruling elites and bureaucratic cadres that they governed backward societies that required their pedago
gical direction. By 1970, of the states then independent, only Botswana, Gambia, and Mauritius had remained within a democratic ambit without interruption.
THE INTEGRAL STATE
By this time, a more ambitious version of the model African state was taking form, influenced by larger ideological currents, especially in the third world. In a number of countries, regimes emerged in the early 1970s laying claim to a far more extended role in management of economy and society. In this system of perfected hegemony, which I and others have termed the “integral state,” the state seeks unencumbered domination over civil society. Control is pursued not only via the political realm, usually through the agency of a single party into which all social organization is channeled, but also by the imposition of state suzerainty over the instances of economic accumulation. The integral state falls short of the totalitarian model, requiring only passive subjects, mobilized into sporadic ritual affirmations of deference. It lacks the massive superstructure of coercion and terror of Soviet or Nazi totalitarianism, nor does it fully embrace a totalizing ideology.
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