B009THJ1WI EBOK

by Young, Crawford

  The notion of an integral state is found in Gramsci, identified with the success of a ruling “historic bloc” in homogenizing base and superstructure, which renders civil society a merely “gelatinous” condition.58 The concept appears in the African context in the work of several observers inspired by state developments of the 1970s. Christian Coulon, writing of Senegal in Gramscian terms, perceivsd an emergent effort to transcend the “soft state” with a regime whose “hegemonical apparatuses” would operate more directly on civil society rather than only through political intermediaries (clientelism) or ideological mediation (marabouts).59 Jean Copans offers a similar portrait of Senegal in the early 1970s: “The objective of the dominant groups in the state apparatus is the control, the maintenance, the augmentation of surplus extraction. . . . The lesson of recent years is the following: the interests of the Senegalese state have triumphed over local private interests[.] . . . [T]his growing role of the state, rendered concrete through the remodeling and multiplication of institutions of control of the peasantry, leads to a new policy. The Senegalese state aims more and more at direct administrative, ideological, and political control over the dominant masses, be they urban or rural."60

  Bayart, writing about Cameroon a decade before his celebrated discovery of the rhizome state driven by “the politics of the belly,” offers a similar portrait of the “hegemonical project” of former president Ahmadou Ahidjo:

  From the moment of his accession to office, he held a vision at once precise and vast of the hegemonical quest that it was his task to direct and understood at once that he needed to transcend the clientelistic state he inherited[.] . . . [T]he nomination of Ahidjo as Prime Minister inaugurated in reality a process of autonomization of the state that constituted a global and coherent response, of a Bonapartist stripe, to a structural crisis almost a century old. . . .

  . . . The struggle against “under-administration” . . . had always been conceived in terms of encadrement of the population. ... By means of the development of its structures, the territorial administration pretended, in barely concealed form, to guarantee the essence of social control and political direction of the country.61

  Several other states of comparable ambition might be noted. Tanzania's abortive project at the time to impose a comprehensive populist socialism reflects a clear integral state thrust. The 1967 Arusha Declaration set forth the platform for state expansion; there followed a wave of measures spreading the net of government control. Through nationalization and construction of a large state enterprise sector, most of the private economy was placed in state hands. Seizure of higher-end and rental urban property at the beginning of the 1970s dispossessed much of the Asian mercantile class. Conversion of an initially voluntary villagization program by 1973 into obligatory resettlement convulsed the countryside with compulsory relocation. Agricultural cooperatives were replaced with state marketing monopolies. An ostensibly decentralizing reform in reality displaced local governments with central government agents; customary chiefs had lost their official roles earlier. The Tanzania Daily News observed in 1984, in evaluating the decentralization experiment, that “the bureaucrats had hijacked the power of the people to decide on their own affairs."62 Thus one observes the unmistakable metamorphosis from the would-be democratic socialist developmentalist state of the immediate postindependence years into a close approximation of an integral state by the late 1970s.

  In the extravagant scope of its pretensions, the Congo-Kinshasa regime of Mobutu Sese Seko in its first decade (1965–75) stands out.63 The 1974 constitution transformed regime ambitions into fundamental law, enshrining “Mobutism” as state doctrine and punishing “deviationism.” A single party, the Mouvement populaire de la révolution (MPR), enjoyed exclusive standing; all Congolese were enrolled in it at birth. At the peak of intoxication, in 1973, a law reduced all customary chiefs to mere local administrative agents, who were subsequently all ordered transferred to another jurisdiction. One need hardly add that such a radical measure far exceeded the implementation capacities of the Mobutist state at its integral hour.

  In part, the Congo version of the integral state built on the comprehensive scope of the Leopoldian apparatus that preceded it. The first decree founding the state on 1 July 1885 declared all “vacant land” belonged to the state (that is, everything but a small area occupied by Congolese villages). Regalian rights over African labor were asserted through compulsory rubber delivery and conscription for porterage and military service. After Belgium assumed took control from Leopold II in 1908, a comprehensive web of regulations were established that enclosed the African subject: obligatory cultivation, muscular recruitment for mines and plantations. Bruce Fetter sketches an arresting portrait of what he terms totalitarian ascendancy in Belgium's zone of most concentrated dominance, the Katanga copperbelt; the colonial state and its allied hegemonical structures of mining corporations and Catholic missions exerted “full control over its human mileu,” a control that extended to virtually all aspects of the life of the African workers.64 A regime spokesman, interior ,Minister Engulu Baanga Mpolo, referenced the colonial heritage in a major summation of state ideology of the integral era: “The administrative organization of the Colony, the hierarchical military type, was a heritage of the structure established by Leopold II for the occupation of [Congo]. It was founded on the principle of unity of command, which means that, for whatever action, an official receives his orders only from one chief.... It was necessary to indicate to the population that authority was one and indivisible."65

  The majestic potency of the integral state was on display through its chief, represented as a prophet. Engulu declared that “God has sent a great prophet, our prestigious Guide Mobutu . . . our Messiah. Our Church is the MPR."66 The seductive analogy between the millennial structures of the Catholic Church and the MPR invested the party with the capacity to monopolize doctrinal space and shepherd its following along regime-designated pathways. Another encomium composed by a regime courtesan at the peak of the integral moment suggested that “the majority of Africans believe in the influence of supernatural forces and sorcerers who communicate with the ancestral spirits” and also find enchantment in European science and technology, and so the leader who embodies the two magics “is the greatest magician of all, the greatest sorcerer ever."67 Mobutu projected a seemingly effortless ascendancy in 1973, spending no less than 150 days in travel abroad.68 The majesty of the state found illustration in an array of gigantic projects: the Inga dam, the eighteen-hundred-kilometer-long Inga-Katanga direct current power line, huge copper projects, a large steel mill. Serving at the time as a faculty dean at the University of Lubumbashi, I vividly recollect the oft-surrealistic environment, as draconian edicts, national, local, and university, passed across one's desk. Many measures swiftly proved incapable of being put into effect, and the credibility of the integral state began to crumble around the edges by 1975. But it was not revealed to all as a shattered illusion until well into the 1980s.69

  State expansion well beyond the bounds of the first-generation develop-mentalist state occurred across the continent. In a number of instances, state-building fell well short of the integral model: in Botswana and Mauritius, where democratic process and liberal economics prevailed, in Nigeria, which was too large and complex for such centralizing impulses to fully succeed, and in Kenya and Ivory Coast, which operated mostly market economies. However, a larger number of countries experienced at least moments of integral state aspirations.

  Tunisia was a brief pioneer, during its socialist decade in the 1960s under planning minister Ben Salah, given free rein for a time by President Habib Bourguiba. French land holdings were nationalized in 1964, and Tunisian cultivators were herded into “cooperatives,” which in reality were agencies of state control. Commercial enterprises were forced into state parastatals, or government-run cooperatives. In the words of a perennial Tunisian leader, Tahar Belkhodja, this version of integral statehood was operated by a “monstrous bureau
cracy” and an “opportunist nomenklatura,” which managed “an authoritarian policy with the objective of collectivization of all economic activity in the country.” The ruling movement, already a single party, became omnicompetent, omnipotent, and committed to a collectivization that was beyond question.70 By 1969, a spreading revolt in the countryside forced out Ben Salah and put an end to the integral state venture.

  Egypt in the Nasser years likewise operated in an integral state mode, beginning with the nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956. State takeover of the sprawling mercantile empire of Osman Ahmad Osman, Arab Contractors, followed in 1961. A series of increasingly radical land reforms marginalized the once-dominant landlord class, and the peasant former tenants were organized into state-run cooperatives. At its ideological peak between 1965 and 1967, the Arab Socialist Union was the privileged instrument of state expansion, mandated at that moment of intoxication “to do everything: preempt all other political forces, contain the entire citizenry, and, through its vanguard, turn it into a mobilizational instrument with a cutting edge."71

  Ambitions faded after the humiliating defeat at the hands of Israel in 1967 and Nasser's death in 1970. The infitah (opening) announced by Anwar Sadat in 1974 marked the final rhetorical end of the integral state and the beginning of its dismantlement. As John Waterbury perceptively observes, “Because the initiators were not rooted in any existing set of social or economic interests, they were ‘statists'; the state was their chosen instrument of change, and in their vision it was to be self-perpetuating. It would deal with class interests either by creating them or subordinating them, but in no event were these interests to challenge the primacy of the state. The state, as regulator of social and economic activity, would be handed down from generation to increasingly professionalized generation of civil servants and technocrats."72

  Out of chronological phase, Eritrea following its 1993 independence belatedly followed the integral state path after firmly pledging to avoid the overreaching miscalculations that had so damaged many African polities. Under the leadership of distinguished Eritrean legal scholar Bereket Habte Selassie, an admirably democratic document was completed in 1996. However, rather than implement a carefully drawn constitution, ruler Isaias Aferworki restored the iron military discipline and rigid hierarchy of the Eritrean People's Liberation Movement (EPLF), rebaptized the Popular Front for Democracy and Justice, sweeping populace and economy under the total control of the state.73 The sheer reach of the state finds measure in its remarkable capacity to enforce tax payment by the large diaspora.

  The most bizarre specimen of the integral state genus was surely the Libyan Arab Popular and Socialist Jamahiriyya created by Muammar Qadhafy after his power seizure in 1969.74 In the Green Book launching his Third Universal Theory in 1975, Qadhafy announced the dissolution of the state and even his title as ruler in favor of basic people's committees and congresses, claiming to incarnate the direct democracy through which the stateless polity would be governed. Relying on Qadhafy's idiosyncratic interpretation of Islam as legitimating doctrine, the jamahiriyya eviscerated the existing bureaucracy. The Libyan National Oil Company progressively expanded its control over oil, virtually the sole productive sector; private retail was ended by 1979, and the government controlled what limited agricultural marketing there was. By a curious inversion, the ostensibly dissolved existing state was reborn as an integral, personalized, and highly centralized mechanism of surveillance and control, dominated by the personal rule of Qadhafy. The jamahiriyya employed 80% of Libyan workers, confiscated all housing beyond the family residence in 1977, and assumed responsibility for providing the citizenry through its mechanisms the basic necessities of food, housing, and clothing.75 The all-encompassing centralized personal autocracy of Qadhafy, however pervasive its hold, utterly failed to institutionalize its structures, beginning with its security apparatus core. When the ruler was overthrown in 2011, state structures dissolved into congeries of armed militia linked to regional or clan factions.

  Other examples might be cited. Algeria in the Houari Boumedienne years (1965–78) is an evident case. Rulers of even the weakest states, such as Chad, were tempted by the integral model. In the mid-1970s, inspired by the apparent success of the Mobutu regime, François Tombalbaye embarked upon a demented “cultural revolution,” which featured, among other excesses, the imposition of initiation rituals for all civil servants into the Yondo cult of the ruler's Sara ethnic community.76 The magnetic appeal of the idea of the integral state in its momentum of ascendancy is clear.77

  Several contextual factors operated in its favor. By the late 1960s, a mood of disappointment in the rate of economic progress took hold. Although in retrospect growth statistics appear respectable, achievements fell well short of the transformative aspirations of independence. The appeal of dependency theory to the intellectual elite and ruling circles went hand in hand with a conviction that the invitation to foreign investment most countries issued after independence fell on deaf ears. The solution was to turn inward toward self-reliance and to enlarge the capacity of the state to assume more extended responsibility.

  New ideological currents supplied the doctrinal stimulus for state expansion. The more circumscribed theories of “African socialism” in vogue in the first independence years gave way to far more radical versions of socialist orientation. In their more extended form, these regime doctrines drew on orthodox Marxism-Leninism, widely known as Afromarxism in its domesticated form. At the peak in the early 1980s, there were eight regimes that officially embraced Marxism-Leninism as state doctrine. Three—Angola, Mozambique, and (ambiguously) Sao Tome and Principe—issued from the collapse of the Portuguese colonial regime in 1974. Many of these liberation movement leaders had spent formative years in close contact with underground opposition milieux in Portugal, where communist currents were strong; the Soviet Union provided succor for armed struggle refused by Western powers. The other five were regimes originating in military seizure of power: Ethiopia, Somalia, Madagascar, Benin, and Congo-Brazzaville. None of the rulers concerned had any known previous record of Marxist-Leninist conviction; however, they faced the challenge of co-opting an intelligentsia for whom this ideological discourse was common currency.78 The doctrine of the Leninist state fashioned by the Soviet rulers provided a convenient vessel for the erection of a strong, centralized regime in which exclusive power vested in the ruler and an allied “vanguard.” The ideology also offered a formula for building on the already dominant notion of a single party, which further reinforced the tendency to force all corporatist organization within the party framework and to force them to operate according to the norms of “democratic centralism.” The Soviet model of the Leninist state also validated the expansion and ideological subordination of the internal security apparatus and the erection of a nomenklatura as ruling caste.79

  We have lingered over the integral state as modal form, both because of its extraordinary nature and its central role in precipitating the state crisis of the 1980s. The integral state was not only unsustainable but had legacy costs that took years to unwind. The change of mood by 1979 was clear; a consensus of developmental failure, made official by a 1979 OAU summit declaration, had crystallized. African external debt, still negligible in 1970, had reached unbearable proportions. The stage was set for a harsh external critique of the performance of the African state, given official standing by the World Bank's 1981 Berg Report.80 At the same time, increasingly forceful external voices demanded economic reform that entailed a fundamental reworking of the state itself. Meanwhile, in the industrialized nations outside the “camp of socialism,” the global model of the normative state was mutating. The years of stagnation in European and North American advanced economies in the 1970s seriously tarnished the democratic welfare state. Conservative politicians joined a new breed of neoclassical economists to assault the doctrinal foundations of the welfare state: Keynesian economics, social democracy, and liberalism as understood in the 1960s. The private
market was enshrined as supreme value; the antistate animus pervading the discourse of singularly influential conservative leaders such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher shaped public perspectives, especially in the United States and United Kingdom, and penetrated the official mind. In discourse and practice, market fundamentalism as framed by Reagan and Thatcher and as theoretically elaborated by neoconservative economists was more strongly embraced in the United States and Britain than in continental Europe, where a new infusion of liberal doctrines reshaped but did not erase the normative hold of a social market economy. By the early 1990s, the revised liberal conventional wisdom that took shape during the 1980s had hardened into what became known as neoliberalism, a label at first mainly applied by critics of what Nicolas van de Walle terms a new liberal orthodoxy.81 The label “Washington Consensus” emerged to characterize the reform agenda expected of African countries that sought international financial institution and donor community aid. Visions of an integral state vanished in the face of World Bank and IMF demands for SAPs, which called for a reduced, remodeled government and enlarged private markets.

  NEW MODEL: A LIBERALIZED STATE

  As the African crisis deepened in the 1980s at the same time that the available alternatives to accepting the conditions proposed by the World Bank and IMF shrank, leading over time to a revised dominant model for the African state, a liberalized polity. The more radical regimes at first hoped that Soviet camp aid might provide an alternative to the state dismantling otherwise required. However, the “new thinking” associated with Mikhail Gorbachev, who replaced a succession of geriatric rulers in 1985, did not include competing with the international financial institutions in setting the rules for reform.

  At first, the standard formula aimed at eliminating imbalances of foreign trade and domestic budgets and enlarging the space for a private economy. In 1979, Senegal received the first IMF loan based conditionally on its effecting certain policy changes; over the following crisis decade nearly all African states faced the necessity of accepting policy-based lending. The scope of the conditions expanded over time; by the time that structural adjustment became known as the Washington Consensus, the standard formula included fiscal discipline, elimination of subsidies, reduction in the public bureaucracy, an end to exchange controls, encouragement of foreign and domestic private investment, privatization of the sprawling parastatal sector, deregulation, and reinforced property rights.82