Those skeptical of this assertion point to other factors that inhibit state fragmentation; these have unquestionable validity and require examination before I turn to the sources of the perhaps surprising attachment to territorial nationalism. The pronounced hostility of the international state system to the fragmentation of countries is indeed a critical element in accounting for the persistence of African states. Although any number of new states emerged in the wake of World War I, from World War II until 1990 decolonization was the only widely accepted avenue to sovereignty. In the first three postwar decades, the only postcolonial exceptions to this rule were the consensual withdrawal of Singapore from the Malaysian Federation and Bangladesh’s separation from Pakistan, midwived by the intervention of the Indian army. The sanctity of the territorial integrity of the states issuing from decolonization received increasingly robust affirmation, notably in the UN General Assembly 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples; this insisted that the right of all peoples to self-determination did not include “the partial or whole disruption of the national unity and territorial integrity of a country,” which would be “incompatible with the purposes and principles of the charter of the United Nations.”14 Sacralization of territorial integrity is enunciated more emphatically still in the 1970 Declaration on Principles of International Law Concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation among States in Accordance with the Charter of the United Nations. After issuing a ringing declaration of the sacred right to self-determination, the document states that “nothing in the foregoing paragraphs shall be construed as authorizing or encouraging any action which would dismember or impair, totally or in part, the territorial integrity or political unity of sovereign and independent States. . . . Every State shall refrain from any action aimed at the partial or total disruption of the national unity and territorial integrity of any other State or country. . . . The territorial integrity and independence of the State are inviolable.”15
For a brief moment at the beginning of the 1990s, the floodgates appeared to open, as the fifteen component “republics” of the Soviet Union all withdrew, to the dismay of parts of the international community. The “velvet divorce” of the Czech Republic and Slovakia soon followed, then the violent breakup of Yugoslavia. Eritrea benefited from this breach in the walls of the state integrity principle to make good its escape from Ethiopia, though only after winning the thirty-year civil war. The international system quickly re paired this break in the dam; an international commission headed by French jurist Robert Badinter appointed by the European Union gave retroactive blessing to the existing separations but erected a new barrier to any others by restricting any separations to existing autonomous administrative units, whose own borders were sacrosanct.16
By ricochet, the Badinter report reinforces the operative code of African decolonization set forth in chapter 3. Only constituted colonial territories with a distinct administrative personality were entitled to succeed to internationally recognized sovereign status.17 The small number of separatist movements of significance that have developed have invariably invoked a claim to a territorial standing of colonial origin, never ethnic self-determination (for example, Katanga, Biafra, Casamance, Zanzibar, Cabinda, Anglophone Cameroon), or to special standing as kingdoms that enjoyed a privileged treaty relationship with the colonial occupant (Buganda in Uganda, Barotseland in Zambia).
The African state system reinforced this international jurisprudence with its own charter affirmations of the sanctity of existing boundaries and state integrity. In articles 3 and 5 of the OAU’s charter, which was drawn up at the first conference in 1963, stipulated that all member states were obligated to respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of every African state.18 Although four African states appeared to subvert this principle by recognizing Biafra (Ivory Coast, Gabon, Tanzania, and Zambia), the Nigerian triumph in the civil war erased this breach in the African international legal order. The blessing of sovereignty could only pass to distinct and separate colonial territorial entities, which justified the recognition of Western Somalia by most African states. But Eritrea, which also met this standard, was accepted into the African community of nations only after its independence was won militarily, acknowledged by Ethiopia, and validated by an internationally supervised referendum.
Somaliland further illustrates the force of territorial integrity doctrine. Though de facto separation from the anarchy of Somalia was proclaimed in 1991, in deference to the united African front against external recognition not a single country has acknowledged the living reality of an independent state. Even though as British Somaliland the territory had a separate colonial antecedent, its freely made choice in 1960 to unite with Somalia was deemed irrevocable. The acute disabilities faced by the forlorn unrecognized polity find compelling demonstration in the Somaliland example. Lacking the grace of sovereignty that only comes with the ritual laying on of hands by the international state system through formal recognition, Somaliland cannot participate in international institutions, access external aid, win acceptance of its currency or identity documents such as passports, or borrow from the international financial institutions or banks.
The insistence on territorial integrity and border sanctity closes another historical pathway to state reconfiguration elsewhere: partial or total absorption of weak units by a more powerful neighbor. The Ethiopian attempt to acquire Eritrea by decolonization diplomacy ultimately failed; the Moroccan annexation of Western Sahara still lacks full international recognition. Consensual amalgamations at the moment of decolonization were accepted: British Somali land and Somalia, anglophone Cameroon with its larger francophone neighbor, and British Togoland with Ghana, all legitimated by referendum or assembly vote. The only enduring postcolonial expansion by absorption of a smaller unit was the 1964 incorporation of Zanzibar by then-Tanganyika, which became Tanzania in the process. This territorial amalgamation occurred at a moment of political turmoil in Zanzibar and was supported by the incumbent island leadership; thus the African state system overlooked this transgression of its charter. Zanzibar was granted disproportionate standing in the central institutions; elements on both the island and the mainland periodically question the union even yet.
Another illuminating example of the impracticality of state expansion by incorporation is found in the failed confederation of Senegal and Gambia from 1982 to 1989. Political disorder in Gambia triggered Senegalese army intervention in 1981, and the confederation scheme was designed to bring the Gambian microstate, entirely surrounded by Senegal, under the protective cover of a more powerful state and to facilitate economic ties. Gambia however proved a troublesome and indigestible junior partner; Senegal unilaterally ended the confederation. The failed Senegal-Gambia union, taken together with the periodic tensions in the Tanzania conglomeration and the stubborn tenacity of Zanzibar particularism, illustrates what might be termed the East Timor syndrome: the intractable difficulties in securing a compliant acceptance of the new territorial identity that was proposed by Indonesia when the former Portuguese territory was forcibly seized at the moment of collapse of Lisbon imperial will in 1974–75. After enduring a prolonged and costly insurgency, Indonesia was compelled by international pressure to abandon its annexation. Though historically powerful states pursued territorial expansion projects with sublime confidence in their capacity to absorb new populations, within the contemporary ideological, social, and communications environment, acquisition of new territory and unwilling subjects guarantees endless costs and few benefits.
The persistence of African states then finds powerful reinforcement in the jurisprudential doctrines underlying the international system. The most important such precept is the doctrine of sovereignty, whose crucial role as an attribute of statehood is underlined in chapter 2. The weakened condition of many African countries illuminates the gap between the extraordinary reach of sovereignty as concept (absolute and unitary in the eyes of international law) and the real capac
ity of states to project power internally. Robert Jackson in an influential work suggests that many African (and other third-world) polities are mere “territorial jurisdictions supported from above by international law and international aid. . . . In short, they often appear to be juridical more than empirical entities: hence quasi-states.”19 Quasi states or not, they enjoy the blessing of internationally recognized sovereignty, whose inertial force acts as agent of reproduction of the existing roster of state units.
A second major factor driving the embrace of the colonial partition as the basis for the postcolonial state system, in spite of the artificiality and historical illegitimacy of the territorial entities thus created, is the absence of any viable alternative. Nyerere famously declared that “precisely because African boundaries were so absurd, it was essential to maintain them.”20 Though reworking the state system as a solution to the travails of Africa has at times been suggested by academics, none provide a persuasive formula.21 Ethnonationalism might serve as basis for revamped states in the former Soviet Union or Yugoslavia, but cultural geography in Africa is far too complex and interpenetrated for this to serve, and the political implications remain much too explosive. Nor is a multiplication of micropolities an appealing option, either to the world state system or within Africa. Initiatives to form larger regional units exist (for example, the commitment of Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi to establish a federation by 2015), but bigger states such as Sudan, Congo-Kinshasa, and Nigeria have faced some of the most intractable difficulties in governance. Thus there is no audible African conversation about a reconfigured cartography, leaving reproduction of the extant polities the likely outcome absent some drastic precipitating circumstances beyond the ken of contemporary imagination.
A third explanation, redolent of rational choice theory, situates the explanation in the shared interest of political elites in preserving extant polities on whose rents they rely for their livelihoods. Through mechanisms termed “reciprocal assimilation of elites” by Bayart and “hegemonial exchange” by Rothchild leaders resolve their own differences by summit transactions assuring minimally satisfying access to state resources by regional barons and factional big men.22 Even those in a dissident role are acutely conscious of the high risks associated with espousing separation; externally, the international system will provide neither succor nor hope of recognition, while internally such a step exposes those participating to the capital charge of treason. Reno takes the argument a step further in suggesting that even where warlord politics prevail, the preservation of a shadow state is indispensable to give the cover of international sovereignty to the predatory operations of militia leaders.23
In short, the elite interest thesis explaining state persistence argues that the diffusion of neopatrimonial modes of state management that gained momentum in the 1970s normally operates to assure servings of the “national cake” to enough regional elites to guarantee continuity of the polity. In a large country like Nigeria that is home to intense ethnic and religious contestation, elites recognize that without access to the Niger delta oil revenues controlled by the center, their prosperity would vanish. In Congo-Kinshasa, whose endowment is more scattered, regional elites in the resource-bearing areas of Katanga, Kasai, and Kivu are better able to profit from this bounty under the cover of an enfeebled sovereignty than from within a new state, given the international uncertainties that a secession effort might bring.
Englebert takes this line of argument several important steps farther in teasing out the full implications of the doctrine of sovereignty in its local applications. External sovereignty derives from the international system; internally it confers a monopoly of legal command. In everyday terms, even when the central capacities of the state are impaired, the many local agents who operate in its name even in failed states continue to benefit from the fragments of sovereignty operative at the ground level. The pervasiveness of regulatory activity undertaken under the cover of legal command, particularly in urban settings, continues even if few if any services are provided. As Englebert suggests: “Survival is not infrequently predicated upon following procedures. There appears to be, for example, an endless series of circumstances when one will need a birth certificate or some evidence of nationality, including enrollment in school, matrimony, voter registration, or starting a business. These documents will have to be obtained at some agencies of the state and produced to some other agencies as evidence of one’s status. If nothing else, the ubiquity of police and military roadblocks puts a significant premium on the necessity of official documents.”24
Possession of the ubiquitous official stamp validating such documents is a valuable asset. Theodore Trefon, in an engaging study of administrative process in Lubumbashi in Congo-Kinshasa notes the handicaps facing local agents: they have no resources, phones, computers, office material; they oscillate between predation and constraint yet at the same time are empowered by the shards of delegated sovereign legal authority embodied in the official stamp. Even external providers—NGOs, aid agencies—can only operate through the local state apparatus.25
Thus regardless whether the rule of law is circumscribed, its commands can be a useful instrument in interpersonal conflict. One option available, widely used in Lubumbashi and vividly documented by a Congolese sociologist who served as participant-observer in a police station for a week, is denunciation of an adversary to the police, which can result in the incarceration of the victim. Once jailed, a complex interplay of police, judges, and litigants comes into play; money inevitably changes hands, and usually the victim reemerges, poorer for the episode.26
The pertinence of the Englebert argument is reinforced by the fact that even rebel forces clothe themselves in the appropriated local sovereignty of the state by establishing their own tax collection mechanisms and document enforcement practices in the name of laws and regulations inherited from the ousted administration, notably by levying “customs” on the illicit export of seized resources. The rebel militia commanders rely on a predation dependent on the borrowed sovereign command of the state. Beyond “hegemonial exchange,” counterhegemonial appropriation of state attributes also operates to preserve at least the fiction of a persisting state.
TERRITORIAL NATIONALISM
The preceding explanations all have substantial validity, and Englebert makes a noteworthy contribution to the debate. Yet taken together they do not fully explain why African citizenries remain attached to an idea of an imagined nation, even if the state that enshrouds itself in this vision has lost most of its legitimacy and barely functions. In the final analysis, African states persist because most of their populations want them to do so, and they will nor hear the few voices proposing their fragmentation. Not only is the discourse of the nation firmly assimilated into elite discourse but a perhaps diffuse attachment to the extant territorial frame has become an unreflected everyday part of the lifeworld of the mass of the population. The political language that describes this orientation is grounded in the global doctrine of nationalism. Thus, while acknowledging its specific contours in the African setting, one must perforce identify this phenomenon as territorial nationalism, an indispensable element in unraveling the puzzle of state persistence.
Congo-Kinshasa is an illuminating point of departure. Though the deliquescence of the polity was overwhelming by the early 1990s, and a civil war originating in 1996 continues episodically to this day, few voices have been raised contesting the preservation of a Congo. Lifelong Congo specialist Herbert Weiss and a collaborator provide persuasive evidence that “the identification of the Congolese with the Congolese nation over the last forty years has become stronger, despite predatory leaders, years of war and political fragmentation, devastating poverty, ethnic and linguistic diversity, and the virtual collapse of state services.”27 This conclusion is buttressed by survey data collected in 2002 in five cities scattered around the country (Kinshasa, Kikwit, Gemena, Goma, and Lubumbashi). Overwhelming majorities agreed with the statement t
hat “the Congo must remain unified, even if the use of force is necessary to achieve this” and that “the unity of the Congo is more important than the interests of any particular group or ethnicity.”28 Most Congolese believe that the long and predatory rule of Mobutu Sese Seko, however destructive to state institutions and economic well-being, had one merit: its nation-building effect. In a series of Afrobarometer surveys in ten democratic African states in the late 1990s and early 2000s, 94% agreed with similar statements, demonstrating a level of national attachment exceeding that of any other region (Latin America came in second with 91%).29 Francis Deng, a leading southern Sudanese scholar, reports that in surveys he directed in the early 2000s, as many as 47% of southerners interviewed likewise agreed with such a statement, suggesting that the late SPLM leader John Garang was not alone in seeking a formula for salvaging a single Sudan.30
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