Since the end of the Cold War, increases in global independence and the rise of chronic, brutal civil wars within the developing world have moved feelings of Western vulnerability away from their previous focus on Soviet internationalism and towards concerns over a growth in disorder within the periphery (Zartman, 1995). Of these supposed threats to the West, Robert Rotberg, an advisor on the American Secretary of State's Advisory Panel on Africa, identifies two main categories (2004). The first concerns Weak States. These include an array of nation-states that may be inherently fragile because of geographical, physical or fundamental economic constraints as well as those that are socially weak because of internal antagonisms, greed or despotism. According to Rotberg, weak states typically harbour ethnic, religious, linguistic or other tensions that may be transformed into violent conflicts by relatively minor events and then, in some circumstances, exported to destabilise the region and threaten Western interests. Other indications of state weakness include inadequate supplies of public goods, poor physical infrastructural networks, falling GDP per capita, high levels of corruption, judicial partiality and weak civil organisation. The Central Intelligence Agency currently lists Haiti, Niger, Lebanon, Chad and Papua New Guinea as examples of weak states.
The second category of state defect is the Failed State. It provides only very limited quantities of essential public goods with much of the state forfeited to decentralised actors. Legislatures and jurisprudence exist simply to ratify the decisions of the executive which is, itself, dominated by the interests of local feudatories. Literacy rates, GDP per capita and growth are on an acute downward slide, while infant mortality, crime and prices indices are increasing rapidly. The ultimate destination of such failure is collapse in which the state becomes a mere geographical expression without any semblance of order. Substate actors take over and collude with sectors of the former state to become, in Rotberg's view, a regional and possible global threat. The CIA's list of failed states, all potentially vulnerable to collapse, includes Liberia, Nepal, Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Côte d’Ivoire.
The reasons for the alleged descent into chaos besetting the South in general and sub-Saharan Africa in particular are many, complex and subject to considerable debate. Some commentators blame inherent weaknesses born of decolonisation or the self-aggrandising tendencies of domestic elites, while many, implicitly or otherwise, blame the two former Superpowers for leaving their former clients bereft of guidance and revenue (Ignatieff, 1993; Derluguian, 1998). Generally, though, defective states in the developing world are thought to constitute an imminent and growing threat to the West. The fact that they ‘serve as a breeding ground for many extremist groups is indisputable’ and axiomatic (Carment, 2003:408). For example, the revealingly named report of the bi-partisan Commission on Post-Conflict Reconstruction, Play to Win, begins ‘one of the principal lessons of the events of September 11 is that failed states matter – for national security as well as for humanitarian reasons’. Moreover, in implementing its findings and dealing with the more delinquent of the current range of defective states in the developing world, the West will, the Commission goes on to claim, ‘dramatically improve its ability to protect itself, promote its interests and enhance its standing’ (2003:4).
To legitimise such an undertaking, it becomes necessary to ascribe responsibility for the activities of one or more of a defective state's citizens to its national administration. This has a number of obvious advantages for the West. First, and most obviously, it offers an explanation for the above faults that does not implicate outside forces. Second, it justifies external action to intervene in the internal affairs of domestic regimes and, finally, it implies that such action can only reliably remove the inherent threat posed by reluctant or unwilling states if it produces a project of political transformation (Callinicos, 2004:15). This suggests three questions (which will make up the focus of the following sections). First, if outside forces are not to blame, what is there within defective states to explain their failings? Second, what form should an external response to these problems take and, third, what sort of political transformation should the external response seek to enact within the target state?
In addressing the first question, this paper suggests that, in the West, there has been a resurgence in cultural understandings of social instability. Thus, the first section argues that, for Western policy-makers, the key determinant of state defectiveness is the immutably obscurant and resistant nature of local cultural patterns. Such a view allows relief agencies working in defective states both to ignore their own complicity in existent power relations and the consequences of the West's response – the focus of the second question and section two. Finally, the third section argues that transforming defective states deemed to be worthy of, and amenable to, remedial action involves deregulating markets, privatising the public sector and using aid inputs to exploit comparative advantages in labour intensity. Achieving this may involve the strengthening of ‘willing’ comprador elites (as suggested in the recent report from the Commission for Africa (2005)), the selective promotion of ‘good’ governance and, in cases of acute debilitation, the imposition of a new structure of sovereignty conducive to greater Western penetration.
Culture & delinquency
In the days of casting the Ottoman Empire as the ‘sick man’ of Europe and intervening in its affairs, policy-makers could simply, and with impunity, blame the ‘foreign mind’ for the brutality of oriental despotisms and the failure of their regimes to provide for their people. While some refinement of these themes has proved necessary since the age of mass immigration into the West, they have, in many ways, survived the decline of Victoriana social theory. This section looks at the reemergence of such notions of ‘culturism’ which, it is suggested, have two key features. The first is an emphasis on the irrationality and self-destructiveness of Southern resistance to Western supremacy. The second is the notion that this is so deeply and immutably ingrained within developing societies as to be largely irredeemable and thus not amenable to the beneficence of the West. The result, it is argued, is that hierarchical concepts of culture, having entered notions of ‘development’ via colonial continuities and theories of modernisation (Kothari and Minogue, 2002:7–12), are increasingly securitised as the only way to safeguard Western interests.
For much of the Cold War, theories of modernisation have long contained strong cultural emphases. As P. T. Bauer put it, ‘economic achievement and progress depend largely on human aptitudes and attitudes’ (1976: 41). For him and others, the developmental potential of Southern society is limited by a cultural traditionalism reminiscent of the European Gemeinschaft (Tönnies, 1957). This presents itself as an orientation towards the past which, reinforced by the ascription of status based on kinship and a general sense of fatalism, prevents people from adapting to new circumstances. This emphasis on the supposed cultural features of the South was deployed by the New Right during the early 1980s as a way of countering multicultural discourses. The argument was that social phenomena incompatible with a ‘modern’ Western Gesellschaft (in which traditional values have been relegated to the private sphere, kinship ties weakened through increased geographic and social mobility and fatalism overcome through innovation, entrepreneurialism, scientific rationality and the correlation of social position and merit) are an inevitable consequence of cultural heterogeneity (Ingelhart and Baker, 2000). Unable to define explicitly the innate inferiority of non-Western values without risking electoral rejection from an increasingly multicultural West, it ‘modernised racism and made it respectable … [by moving] discourses structured around categories of hierarchy and superiority to one in which cultural difference is argued to be the key operational factor’ in explaining social phenomena (Duffield, 1998:175). This is perhaps best exemplified by Huntington's millennial vision of liberal-capitalism's struggle for hegemony which ‘rebottled 19th-century fears – the Brown, Yellow and Black Perils – into the Islamic, Sinic, Hindu and African “civilisations”’ ostensibly held to be comparable to that of the West's (Abrahamian, 2003:530).
Increasingly, however, a more radical version of a similar cultural discourse has emerged. This was driven forward over the last fifteen years by the enfeeblement of the European left which has dichotomised politics into a choice between the endorsement of the status quo and the empowerment of the extreme right (Moschonas, 2002:107–8). Consequently, their discourse on cultural defence has become the only viable critical vote in many polities leading to the emergence of racist parties within the national governments of Austria, Denmark and Italy and a resurgence of rightism in France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Norway and Belgium. It is, however, in the United States, home to some of the lowest voter turnouts in the Western world, where the focus on culture has taken on its most aggressive form. There, attitudes openly ‘speak of a new sense of Caucasian superiority [and] a new desire to subjugate those of other colours and cultures’ (The Guardian, 9 May 2002). In a country where only 18 per cent of the population hold a passport (compared with over 40 per cent in neighbouring Canada), the creation of international hate figures has long proved efficacious (Hansard, 17 December 2002). East Asian expansionists of the 1940s and 50s, South-East Asian Maoists of the 1960s and 70s, Hispanic socialists and narco-gangsters of the 1980s and 90s have all taken their place alongside the Russian in the American collective consciousness of ‘the other’.1
For the most part, though, these were far away cultures giving rise to far away societies unlikely to endanger the global economic and military core directly. By contrast, the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon demonstrated that the cultures of the developing world and the states and social movements they produce are able to threaten the fundamental institutions of Western superiority. This has radicalised the moderate right, promoted the extreme right and ended the equivocation of Huntington's earlier thesis of civilisational contest – a change heralded by Silvio Berlusconi's immediate response to the attacks: ‘we [the West] should be conscious of the superiority of our civilisation’ (The Guardian, 27 September 2001). The result has been a mainstreaming of previously more marginal ‘culturised’ discourses. The widely accepted, though probably inaccurate, identity of the 19 terrorists alleged to have participated in the 2001 attacks has driven forward a renewed interest not only in Arab Islam as an antithetical ideology (the Qu'ran went straight to the top of bestseller lists),2 but also the cultural patterns, and potential hazards, of the developing world as a general, amorphous vehicle for future defiance (Edgell, 2003).
This interest has produced two visions of non-Western culture. The first is that the South's resistance to the West, which the events of 2001 are said to epitomise, represents an emotional and irrational combination of anger and envy identifiable in much of the developing world. This is apparently confirmed by the suicidal nature of the 2001 mission (as well as the futile resistance of Afghanis and the senseless losses of sub-Saharan intra-state warfare). Although little is known about the motives and backgrounds of the 19 suspects and the Federal Bureau of Intelligence has acknowledged that it has withheld important information regarding their political demands, a general sense that their desire was simply to ‘seek martyrdom’ in a cathartic expression of ‘Muslim rage’ pervades (New York Review of Books, 17 January 2002). As Thomas Friedman put it, ‘their act was their demand’ (New York Times, 24 March 2002). Similarly, although bin Laden and Zawahiri say much less about Western culture than the politics of Palestine and Iraq, their comments are construed to represent a ‘nihilistic subculture’ leading an ‘assault on civilisation’ (Kelly, 2001:2). Resistance to the ‘liberation’ of Iraq was couched in similar terms. As its major cities descended into chaos, President Bush's Head of Military Intelligence, General William Boykin, was reported to have remarked:
The battle that we’re in is a spiritual battle. Satan wants to destroy this nation, he wants to destroy us as a nation, and he wants to destroy us as a Christian army … We in the army of God, in the house of God, in the kingdom of God, have been raised for such a time as this (New York Newsday, 17 October 2003; Los Angeles Times, 16 October 2003).
Closely connected to this, a second strand to the culture paradigm has tended to see social ‘ills’, criminality and defective states as broadly unconnected to political or economic concerns. The maxim that ‘neither a democratic nor a capitalist economy is conceivable apart from certain cultural and moral habits’ leads to the view that, in some ‘cultures, people do not strive for progress or development’ regardless of Western beneficence (Novak, 2001:169). For some writers, this appears to reaffirm the findings of earlier modernisation theorists. Lawrence Harrison, for instance, lists 10 ways of ‘promoting progressive cultural change’ which are highly reminiscent of Tönnies' Gesellschaft and 1960s functionalism (2000:296–299).3 Mostly, though, culture is regarded as immutable or only very slowly changing. As Daniel Etounga-Manguelle, a former World Bank advisor from Cameroon, puts it, ‘authoritarianism permeates our families, our villages, our schools, our churches. It is for us a way of life. Thus, faced with such a powerful, immovable culture, what can we do to change Africa's destiny’ (quoted in Huntington 1996:75; see also Etounga-Manguelle, 2000)?
Such a monist and determinist view of the role of culture in society runs contrary to anthropological orthodoxy,4 yet it continues to exert an extensive influence on the Western political psyche (Crawford, 1998). Explanations for the cultural, material and military superiority of the West, so much a feature of mainstream discourses since 2001, have repeatedly pointed to the obscurant and inert nature of society in the developing world. Victor Davies writing in The Wall Street Journal, for instance, suggests that:
few in the Middle East have a clue about the nature, origins, or history of democracy, a word that, along with its family (‘constitution’, ‘freedom’ and ‘citizen’), has no history in the Arab vocabulary, or indeed any philological pedigree in any language other than Greek and Latin and their modern offspring (25 February 2002).
To conclude this section, then, it has been argued that culturally deterministic explanations of disorder in the developing world, of the ineffectual nature of Southern states and of resistance to Western hegemony have all been boosted and radicalised since 2001. The notion of a global cultural confrontation has moved towards the centre of discourses concerning the developing world in general and defective states in particular. This ‘new barbarism’, as Paul Richards calls it (1996), has a number of foreign policy implications (which will be discussed in more detail in the next section) in addition to its domestic importance. As John Gledhill perspicuously notes, ‘the construction of an “external enemy” is integral to attempts to define the unity of the United States’. The periphery, he continues, ‘is constructed as not simply barbarism but a site of irrational disorder and social violence’ (1994:163). This perceived chaos threatens to destabilise the West either through increased immigration (which, for Pat Buchanan, might foment a settling of old scores and, ultimately, The Death of the West (2001)) or the visitation of pre-modern, apocalyptical and indiscriminate violence (seen as an archetypal feature of Southern conflicts) upon an inherently vulnerable liberal order. Since the motive for such nihilism is seen to be ‘embedded in local cultures’ (Tuastad, 2003:592), mollifying the unfathomable and largely unalterable volatility of defective states can only be accomplished through a reordered commitment to securitisation – the focus of the next section.
Military humanitarianism
In considering how to respond to the supposed threats of defective states, the South's perennial failure to adopt the cultural norms of the West has considerable political efficacy. For much of the post-colonial period, it has provided Western policy-makers with a ready-made excuse for global inequity, widespread human rights abuses and environmental degradation which have not implicated agents outside the South itself. Since effecting change through social measures can do little to reform ancient cultural patterns, that are themselves viewed as the determining (or most influential) factors explaining all social phenomena inimical to Western interests, defensive securitisation has long been the framework through which defective states have been approached. For much of the post-Cold War period, two strategies have been particularly influential in determining which defective states to focus upon and which to ignore. The first concerns the notion of ‘pivotal’ states (Chase, Hill and Kennedy, 1998). This is defined by James Miskel, a former director of defence policy on The White House's National Security Council, as the extent to which ‘a state's successes and failures ha[ve] major ripple effects on neighbouring states’ (Miskel, 2005:65). According to this view, the West should increase its support for, and influence over, states which are regionally dominant. When combined with concomitant reductions in support for nearby non-pivotal states, a strong client state will emerge which can promote Western hegemony through stability. When initially conceived in the mid-1990s, important examples of pivotal states included Egypt, Algeria, South Africa and India (Chase, Hill and Kennedy, 1996).
A second, overlapping, approach to selecting target states is the idea of ‘seam’ states. Indicative of the persistence of Huntington's civilisational model, this splits the world into a core of globalised trading nations and a periphery of weak, unstable and unpredictable states dubbed ‘The Gap’ by Thomas Barnett, formerly of the Office of the Secretary of Defence. For Barnett, ‘the Caribbean Rim, virtually all of Africa, the Balkans, the Caucasus, central Asia, the Middle East and Southwest Asia, and much of Southeast Asia’ should be seen as a ‘strategic threat environment’. To ‘suppress bad things coming out of the Gap’, seam states such as Morocco, Algeria, Pakistan and Turkey must, he continues, be mobilised ‘to firewall the Core [sic]’ (T. Barnett, 2003:174–5; 2004).
An important example of the influence of this view is the work of the travel writer turned social scientist, Robert Kaplan. His article entitled ‘The Coming Anarchy’ published in Atlantic Monthly in 1994 so impressed the White House that it was, according to Richard Holbrooke, faxed to every American embassy in the world (1999). In it, Kaplan claims that West Africa, defined only in terms of ‘disease, overpopulation, unprovoked crime, scarcity of resources, refugee migrations, the increasing erosion of nation-states and international borders, and the empowerment of private armies, security firms, and international drug cartels’, represents a general vision of the future (1994:46). Later, in a book based on the article and similarly entitled, he explains how such a situation has come to pass: ‘in places where the Western Enlightenment has not penetrated and where there has always been mass poverty, people find liberation in violence’ (2000:45). Such an irredeemable condemnation of the developing world was, when coupled with a reading of his earlier (and similarly deterministic) account of Balkan historiography (1993), instrumental in persuading the Clinton administration that the Yugoslav conflagration was an unavoidable consequence of local propensities and therefore best ignored (Tuastad, 2003:598).
The efficacy of regarding ‘the Gap’ as immutably tragic is, of course, readily apparent. The catastrophic intervention in Somalia in 1993, where the United States armed forces lost 18 soldiers and over 80 per cent of aid allocations were said to have been misappropriated through looting and corruption, had convinced Washington that defective states which were not on geo-strategic seams or of pivotal importance were best contained through the type of defensive securitisation implied by Thomas Barnett.5 Indeed, the tenacity with which this view was held was demonstrated by the West's procrastination over Rwanda the following year and the limited response to Srebrenica (Europe's worst abuse of human rights since World War Two) the year after that. In the latter case, however, domestic public opinion made it more difficult for Western policy makers to take ‘refuge in semantics, legalisms and feigned ignorance’, so when Serbian expansionism began to threaten the stability of the region as a whole (with considerable implications for Nato's second most powerful military watching from Edirne), a more concerted remedial effort was undertaken (Lloyd, 2003:12).
Indeed, the subsequent ‘successful’ implementation of the (ostensibly oxymoronic) notion of a humanitarian war in the Balkans foretold of a new approach to castigating recalcitrant defective states (Lang, 2003). This emergent military humanism became institutionalised by the attacks of September 11th 2001 which, for many, revealed the limitations of attempting to contain or influence ‘The Gap’ through the promotion of pivotal or seam states. Instead, as the White House's National Strategy for Combating Terrorism reveals, a more proactive approach is necessary ‘to build an international order where more [sic] countries and peoples are integrated into a world consistent with the interests and values we share with our partners.’ To do this, the White House continues, it may be necessary to ‘persuade reluctant states and compel unwilling states through a more vigorous programme of remedial action’ (2003:30, 21).
Such a view is shared by Robert Cooper, a senior aide to Tony Blair and recently Director-General for External Affairs at the European Union. Having affirmed Thomas Barnett's partition of the world (‘a premodern zone where the state has failed and a Hobbesian war of all against all is underway’; ‘Machiavellian’ modern states who still ‘think of security primarily in terms of conquest’; the ‘postmodern’ West), he writes:
The challenge to the postmodern world is to get used to the idea of double standards. Among ourselves, we operate on the basis of laws and open co-operative security. But when dealing with more old-fashioned kinds of states … we need to revert to rougher methods of an earlier age – force, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary to deal with those who still live in the 19th century world of ‘every state for itself (2002:16).
This new ‘postmodern’ imperialism must, he suggest, take two forms. ‘First there is the voluntary imperialism of the global economy. … If states wish to benefit, they must open themselves up to the interference of international organisations and foreign states’ (Cooper, 2002:18). This will be discussed in more detail in the next section. Second, there is the imperialism of aid. ‘It is not just soldiers that [sic] come from the international community; it is police, judges, prison officers, central bankers and others. … As auxiliaries to this effort – in many ways indispensable to it – are over 100 NGOs’ (Cooper, 2002:18). To put these different strands together is to conclude that, in order to persuade the reluctant and compel the unwilling (as the White House puts it), it may be necessary to use military force; doing this, however, risks the domestic support base of Western leaders. Warfare may cost Western lives, impair Western trading interests and damage the electoral prospects of incumbent Western governments. A preferable solution is to turn to the world of human rights and cosmopolitan values embodied in the third sector – as both a substitute for (in the case of the reluctant), and an accompaniment to (in the case of the unwilling), military action.
The result has been that major bilateral donors have increasingly pressured the growing NGO sector to bear more of the material and ethical responsibility for international action. To do this, aid levels rose from $2.1 billion in 1990 to $5.9 billion in 2000, of which the United States contributed between 20 and 30 per cent of the annual allocation. Aid classified as ‘humanitarian’ (the area of allocation most pertinent to responding to defective states) has risen from 5.83 per cent of the total in 1989 to 10.5 per cent in 2000 (Randel and German 2002). Such an enlargement has permitted the West to exert a greater level of control over the activities of nongovernmental agencies. There has, for instance, been a sharp decline in the funds allocated to multilateral agencies in favour of explicitly earmarked bilateral aid. This has had ‘a significant impact on the discretion available to humanitarian organisations’ with the consequence that ‘state interests, rather than the humanitarian principle of relief based on need, drives [sic] funding decisions’ (M. Barnett, 2005:11).7
These interests have rarely been compatible with Henri Dunant's humanitarian principles of impartiality (the delivery of assistance to all), neutrality (the delivery of assistance in a way that does not promote the objectives of any particular party) and independence (the delivery of assistance without significant input from any particular party) (Minear, 2002). Instead, there has emerged an ever-greater tendency towards overtly value-led intrusions into defective states. Indeed, the International Committee of the Red Cross' efforts to adhere to Dunant's initial conceptualisation have been extensively derided as ‘cautious, lawyerly’ and suggestive of a ‘complicity with war crimes (Ignatieff, 1999:204; 1998:124). Accepting that trying to adopt a fully impartial stance is ‘ultimately futile’ (African Rights, 1994:4) has thus opened the way for a greater selectivity in the deployment of resources, more in keeping with the West's geo-political objectives. Much of this is surrounded by a moralising afflatus of philanthropy. Andy Storey, for instance, concludes that assistance to conflict-affected countries ought not to fall into the hands of an ‘abusive authority’, while Fiona Fox suggests that the reconstruction of defective states ‘should be seized on as a tool to promote peace and justice’ (1997:392; 2001:277). Such consequentialist reasoning is clearly an important departure from the previously overweening need to remain impartial, neutral and independent. Moreover, since it attempts neither to define what form an abusive authority might take nor to distinguish peace from pacification, it is not, by itself, an autonomous political position. Combined with a pronounced lack of local knowledge (reinforced by the generalist and temporary nature of most nongovernmental appointments), the overall result is often a meek confirmation of Western policy.8
Here, the value of viewing defective states as driven by cultural patterns is apparent. First, it offers an apolitical entry point for agencies seeking to prioritise their resources and promote reform. This not only adopts a kind of defensive pluralism in which power relations are comprehensively ignored, but also supports an anti-governmental ideology broadly in line with the marketisation preferences of the major donors (to be discussed further in the next section). Consequently, ‘most aid agencies have surprisingly little to say, by way of concrete analysis, about the nature of the alternative political structures that are emerging in protracted crises’ (Duffield, 1998:181). Since, as Mark Duffield suggests, they ‘persist in believing that their response is a mirror image of need … the only useful form of knowledge is that which translates easily into a series of technical solutions.’ The result, he continues, is that instability within developing states is often assumed to be based upon ‘irrational acts stemming from a development malaise’, the mitigation of which is ‘precisely the role of development agencies … as de facto agent[s] of Northern security policy’ (1999:32, 33).
As a consequence, ‘at the policy level, new relationships have been forged between the international security community and humanitarian actors’ – an intimacy officially recognised in 1999 when Medecins sans Frontier (MSF) was awarded the Nobel peace prize and its founder, Bernard Kouchner, was made Pasha of Nato's colony, Kosova (Abiew, 2003:27). In other words, a realisation has emerged that
the lessons of humanitarian intervention offer some insights into challenges involved in coercing nonstate actors in other contexts as well, and lessons from past efforts to coerce terrorists or other nonstate groups for strategic reasons are often relevant to the challenges faced in humanitarian action (Byman and Waxman, 2002:176).
This was also true of Iraq where the role of NGOs was built into the warplan as Phase 4 through a newly created Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance within the Pentagon under the leadership of Retired General Jay Garner.
‘The US government considered NGOs, particularly those based in the United States, as natural partners … In Iraq, as in Afghanistan, the message was clear: the US government and NGOs share the same values and should combine their efforts (de Torrente, 2004:9).
Political transformation
This brings us to the question of what sort of transformation will the West seek to enact within defective states. Here, the West has long sought to back coercive elites as a way of reforming the unwilling, pressurising the reluctant and securing a stable and compliant order within the developing world. Small cabals of pro-Western military leaders (or civilians enjoying the full support of the security sector) exercising considerable force have, since the 1960s, been believed to be a more effective route into the Western sphere of influence than waiting for an organic bourgeoisie to establish comprador links with international capital (Huntington, 1969).
Four factors make the support of security elites within developing countries more prudent than promoting incremental societal change. The first is that military, or military-backed, authoritarian regimes are ideally suited to dealing with social instability (Johnson, 1962). Grounded on the hierarchical discipline of the bureaucratised chain of command extrapolated to include the civilian sphere, their sense of order leads to considerable caution in permitting the free expression of political dissent. The result of this is that security officials are so sensitive to the possibility of disorder that they overestimate the power of actual opponents, react to potential challenges as if they were actual threats and assume that what might happen is likely to happen unless preventative actions are taken (Janovitz and Van Doorn, 1971). Party politics are thus viewed with suspicion at best or, more often, as excessively competitive, manipulative and divisive. This is particularly useful in suppressing a rise in labour organisation, socialism and resistance to Western influence. It also tends to stimulate weapons purchasing and upgrading, a sector in which the West has extensive interests (Nordlinger, 1977).
A second factor behind the capacity of security apparatuses to push forward social change favourable to Western interests is their tendency to adhere to a monist belief in the national interest. To view the nation as made up of conflicting interests or incompatible parts is to downgrade the importance of the armed forces who are charged with defending it and expressing its power and for whom it provides a source of esteem and legitimacy. Such an identity structure obviates class-consciousness and is thus attractive to Western bourgeois capital (Stepan, 1971). Third, the broad, largely lower middle-class recruitment base of many security sectors tends to make them less tied to localised factionalism (frequently reinforced by their barracked isolation) and more in touch with careerist aspirations. They are also inclined to be more unsympathetic to the conservative interests of propertied elites than their elected counterparts are. The result is that the security forces are often seen as concerned to promote bourgeois profitability by increasing meritocratic influences generally and, in identifying more closely with the ‘nation’ than with any particular ethnic or religious sub-unit, they are better able to overcome social cleavages and drive through pro-Western policy (Hibbs, 1973).
Fourth, Western policy-makers often regard defective states' security agents as more perspicacious and assiduous than their civilian counterparts. Many undergo extensive training in the social sciences at academies frequently located in the West and are thus, in the minds of Western elites, better equipped to govern (Perlmutter, 1977). The increasingly broad curricula of these institutions tend to propound a correlation between public policy, wealth generation, legitimacy, internal security and the ultimate need for a ‘guided’ political liberalisation process once industrial links to global capital have been secured. As Paul Cammack puts it, Western leaders have tended to ‘emphasize the need for elite social, political and institutional control in order to overcome … what they saw as ‘premodern’ internal social and psychological attributes’ (2002:162).
Indeed, such elite support has produced considerable obedience. The American NGO, Freedom House, records a rise in states adjudged to be consistent with Western political standards of ‘freedom’ from 43 in 1972 to 89 today (Puddington and Piano, 2005). These countries are so diverse that economic levels, political history, institutional legacies, ethnic make-up, socio-cultural traditions, patterns of civil resistance and other structural features could not have been major factors in, or precursors to, their conformity. Social change in Mongolia, Albania and Mauritania, for instance, can hardly be explained by the presence of comparable European style middle-class political dynamism (Roll and Talbott, 2003). The result has been a vindication of elite support within defective states. It has made clear to Western policy makers that it is not necessary to wait for financial transfers to produce a facsimile of early developers' middle-class vigour (Shin, 1994). The pattern of elite-led social change within the developing world over recent decades also demonstrates that by supporting leaders who can wield sufficient despotic power to fend off challengers and push through reforms, an unwilling state of significant geopolitical importance could be brought into the West's sphere of influence without the expense, delay and, given the immutable nature of cultural inertia, probable disappointment of waiting for a comprador bourgeoisie to emerge (Carothers, 2002).
For those left behind by this so-called ‘third wave’ of pro-Western reformism, however, it may be necessary to undermine or remove incumbent elites. Ensuring that reforming defective states produces outcomes favourable to the West could require, for instance, the imposition of shared sovereignty. Advocated by Stephen Krasner as a means for the West to reduce capital exposure in states of emerging economic importance, this would involve host countries ‘making a trust agreement with a trusted third party such as the World Bank. The trust would have its domicile in an advanced industrial country … [and] all revenues would go into an international escrow account’. Aimed at allaying Exxon-Mobil's concerns over arbitrary contractual revisions of their Chad-Cameroonian pipeline project, such measures, he continues, might be bolstered by ‘more modest options … [such] as leavening developing-country commercial courts with foreign judges’ (Krasner, 2005:78, 80). Clearly, then, transforming defective states focuses predominantly on their association with the West rather than on state elites' relationship with their citizenry (which tends to assume a subsidiary position to be deployed discerningly or abbreviated by more general geopolitical concerns). So while much is said about the role of conditionalities in promoting political reform, it is perhaps unsurprising that, in the words of Peter Uvin and Isabelle Biagiotti, they have
been constantly violated by those claiming to uphold them … The major states promoting these regimes have systemically sought to avoid committing themselves to their implementation. Whether for political, strategic, or economic reasons, they have wished to remain free to implement regime provisions bilaterally, when they see fit (1996:395–396).
To obfuscate such apparent hypocrisy, considerable energy is given over to conflating marketisation with broader moral standards. As Bush the younger effused, in a speech at the University of Carolina on 9 May 2003, ‘across the globe, free markets and trade have helped defeat poverty, and taught men and women the habits of liberty’ – a homily underlined by the White House's National Security Strategy which claims that ‘the concept of “free trade” arose as a moral principle even before it became a pillar of economics … [It] is real freedom, the freedom for a person – or a nation – to make a living’ (2002:18). Freedom has thus become, in the words of Arundhati Roy, the ‘Empire's euphemism for neo-liberal capitalism’ (2003:2). When armoured with a range of charity-sector NGOs, it is also the means through which the creation of a post-modern empire is legitimised and the true, economic, nature of transforming defective states is obscured.
This is most apparent in states where the character of emergent regimes is unclear, where the West has removed the incumbent administration or where internal instability has facilitated a comprehensive Western intervention. Within such economies, it has become, according to Paul Dunne, obligatory
to undertake some form of short-term stabilisation programme, to correct balance of payments problems and increase efficiency … [These] include cuts in government spending, reduction in government staff, freezes on wages and salaries and privatization to reduce budgetary deficiencies … imposed by the World Bank and the IMF … as conditions for then providing assistance (2003:37).
In Afghanistan, where the NGO sector has long used the motif of the defective state ‘to assume and justify its role as a “surrogate government”’ (Goodhand, 2004:44), the Kabul government has, for instance,
endeavoured to create a bureaucratic system which accords with prevailing international norms determined by the World Bank and others. [As such it aims] … to achieve no more than the provision of regulatory and contractual framework for the necessary functions of the state and the operations of the private sector (Marsden, 2003:94).
This has recently been institutionalised by the White House through the establishment of the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilisation in August 2004. In close co-operation with the National Intelligence Council, its task is to assemble ready-response teams to engage in pre-war planning. These are, as Naomi Klein notes, ‘made up of private companies, nongovernmental organisations and members of think tanks. … [Some of which] have ‘pre-completed’ contracts to rebuild countries that are not yet broken’. After all, as Klein continues, many acutely vulnerable states are not in a position to resist Western encroachment: such ‘governments will usually do whatever it takes to get aid dollars – even if it means racking up huge debts and agreeing to sweeping policy reforms’ (The Nation, 2 May 2005). The ‘allure of a blank slate’ is thus what truly underpins the desire to transform defective states – the more acutely defective, the more alluring (The Guardian, 18 April 2005). Acts of God or acts of Bush (on what he claims to be the orders of God) are all occasions to transform and profit. For Condoleezza Rice, for instance, the Asian tsunami of December 2004 was a case in point; it represents, apparently, a ‘wonderful opportunity’ likely to pay ‘great dividends’ to the United States (Agence France Presse, 18 January 2005).
Conclusion
This paper has sought to contribute to debates over the current paradigmatic emphasis on the defective state by putting forward three interrelated arguments. The first is that, in order to obscure Western complicity in, or in some cases responsibility for, the defects of states in the South, policy makers have been influenced by, and contributed to, a rise to prominence of cultural explanations for social phenomena in the developing world. While this has long been a feature of Orientalist, Africanist and other area studies literatures, it has, since the rise to prominence of the New Right in the 1980s and, perhaps more importantly, since the attacks on the United States in 2001, emerged as the key means of explaining resistance to Western hegemony. Its efficaciousness to policy makers is extensive. Dividing the world into civilised and uncivilised, for instance, reinforces President Bush's dichotomy of ‘for us or against us’ – later refined into a specific focus on the reluctant and unwilling. Furthermore, by casting the latter as irrational and immutable, the West's turn to culture legitimises an unprecedented programme of securitisation through which defective states can expect greater penetration and the constant threat of pre-emptive war.
The second argument this paper has sought to substantiate relates to the West's attempts to improve its capacity for intervention into the domestic polities of defective states. Here, there has been a gradual move away from policies of containment, which were necessitated by the bipolar tightness of the Cold War and reinforced by the miserable failures of Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia during the first half of the 1990s, and towards a new imperialism. This has its roots in the ‘humanitarian war’ against Serbian fascism and the subsequent annexation of Bosnia and Kosova by a combination of military force and NGO-led dialogism. The promotion and assimilation of humanitarian agencies through changes in their funding and management structures has proved particularly efficacious since 2001. The result has been a subsumption of the international third sector beneath the West's securitisation agenda, reflected both in NGOs' marketisation and apolitical complicity in the economic and military penetration of defective states.
Finally, the third of this paper's arguments suggests that the notion of a defective state implies a process of transformation in order to bring recalcitrant examples into line with Western political, economic and strategic priorities. For the most part, renovating such states has involved the support of comprador elites deemed to wield sufficient coercive force to drive through pro-Western reforms. The attacks of 2001 demonstrated that the West could no longer ignore states in which such clients did not have a controlling influence. In order to ensure long-term obedience, initiating remedial action in these states entails the imposition of an economic transformation as well as a change of regime personnel. This involves an extensive programme of marketisation with the overall objective of enhancing Western capital's profitability. In general, it is, along with concomitant political changes, conveyed in moralising tones – a myth made more plausible by the co-option of charity NGOs. States may be rendered amenable to such a transformation by military action, the incremental corrosiveness of the Bretton Woods institutions or an environmental catastrophe.