Failed States, or the State as Failure? Posted by Rosa Brooks

Oy. Even my husband assures me that absolutely everything I just wrote is going to be misunderstood, and it will serve me right for sticking my nose into a hornet's nest. But as long as I'm courting controversy, let me expand on something else I said in my previous post: "Principles of democratic self-determination notwithstanding, there is no human right to statehood. The nation-state is a rather recent human invention, and not a particularly happy one. Questioning the value of a particular social-political unit-- which is all the state is-- should not be equated with questioning the right to exist of a particular group of people."

Let me draw out, here, a critique of the idea of the state as the fundamental building block of international society.

Strictly speaking, legal recognition of statehood is a matter for the international community to determine. The standard international law definition of a state is drawn from Article 1 of the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States: "The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: (a) a permanent population (b) a defined territory ; (c) government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states."

But of course, there are entities that satisfy this definition that are not recognized as independent states, and other entities that only tenuously satisfy this definition that are nonetheless recognized as independent states. What makes the difference is fundamentally political, rather than legal: when most other existing states choose to recognize a given socio-political unit as a state, it's a state (and-- mostly-- that is formalized through UN membership). But when most other states do not choose to recognize a candidate for statehood, then, legally speaking, it's not probably not a state.

 

For aspiring states that have not been formally recognized, statehood is more of a privilege than a right: the international community might or might not allow aspiration to become reality, and the decision is as likely to be based on political expedience as on the satisfaction of any "legal" requirements.

But once a state is recognized, it's another story: as a strictly legal matter, once a state exists, it exists, and international law recognizes the inviolability of state borders. In a legal sense, once a state is recognized, it does have a "right" to continue to exist. It can dissolve or alter itself through its own internal procedures (by voting to merge with another state, divide into several states, etc.), but other states are expressly prohibited from messing with it. This does not, of course, preclude border disputes, and it also does not necessarily preclude some sort of Security Council decision to alter a state's status in one way or another. This is controversial, and largely hypothetical, but given recent trends in understanding sovereignty, it is not impossible to imagine the Security Council deciding to "un-recognize" a state.

Statehood (and its attendant rights) is a messy area at the intersection of law and politics.  Most of us recognize this, but at the same time, we tend to assume that the state is the be-all and end-all of international politics: we assume that every  geographically bounded society should either be a state or be part of a state.

This, I think, represents a failure of imagination. Whether we're concerned about global stability or concerned about economic development or concerned about human rights, it's far from obvious that "statehood" is a one-size-fits all solution. Especially when it comes to so-called "failed" states, we (and the inhabitants of those failed states) might do much better to think in terms of a variety of non-state forms of social organization, rather than assuming that formal statehood is the only way to go.

I wrote a longer article about this about a year ago (Failed States, or the State as Failure? 72 U. Chicago L. Rev 1159 (2005)). For anyone who is still reading their way through this long post, here's the article abstract, which lays out the argument in abbreviated form: 

This article seeks to challenge a basic assumption of international law and policy,arguing that the existing state-based international legal framework stands in the way of developing effective responses to state failure. It offers an alternative theoretical framework designed to spark debate about better legal and policy responses to failed states. Although the article uses failed states as a lens to focus its arguments, it also has broad implications for how we think about sovereignty, the evolving global order, and the place of states within it.

State failure - as exemplified by the former Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, etc. - causes a wide range of humanitarian, legal, and security problems. Unsurprisingly, given the state-centric international legal system, responses to state failure tend to focus on restoring failed states to the status of successful states, through a range of short and long-term nation-building efforts. This essay suggests that this a misguided approach, which in some cases may do as much harm as good.

In large part, this is because most failed states were never successful states to begin with. Indeed, as the article describes, the state itself is a recent and historically contingent development, as is an international legal system premised on state sovereignty. Both states and the state-centric international system have poor track records in creating stability or democratic accountability.

This article explores the implications of this for both the international legal order and for approaches to failed states. It concludes that although the existing state system is likely to survive for some time to come, despite the challenges of globalization, not all states will or should survive in their current form. The populations of many failed states might benefit more from living indefinitely in a non-state society than in a dysfunctional state, artificially sustained by international efforts.

Long-term non-state arrangements could range from international trusteeships to affiliations with willing third-party states to special status within regional bodies, and alternative accountability mechanisms could be developed to overcome democratic deficits associated with the lack of formal legal statehood as currently understood by international law.

 

Comments

[Don Bacon]

It's interesting how you morphed from a discussion of Israel to one on failed states. You have a non-linear mind. I like it!

In these troubled times I think that the problem is not failed states, it is successful states, particularly the United States which has in the past been successful in terms of its citizens' living standards, but also in its often (not always) annexation of external territories. The western Mexican territories, Hawai'i, The Philippines--all successful in terms of statehood (not on personal terms). Failures with Canada, Cuba, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, but that hasn't dimmed the efforts to move on to places like Iran, all done by the successful state, all done against the best interests of US citizens.

But what can we expect? With this state business, we have entrusted others with responsibilities they obviously shouldn't have. Influenced by powerful forces, they are incapable of acting in the best interests of their citizens and in this sense we end up with a failed state.

The anarchist Edward Abbey: "No man is wise enough to be another man's master. Each man's as good as the next--if not a damn sight better." For proof of this, open the newspaper. The United States, threatened by nobody, spends as much on war as the rest of the world combined, and is now in the process (again) of killing people halfway around the world and (principally because Israel says so) threatening to kill even more in an empirical quest for power and profit. A quest, given the current state of world communications and weaponry, that is bound to fail.

So I'm saying that not only can't a state be equated with a people, as you write, but that the state can be, and often is, not only in the US example, but in many others, antithetical to the interests of its own citizens, and in this sense you might say that the successful state has in fact failed, just as an unsuccessful state can fail. Dysfunctional. And the bigger they are . . .

[Zathras]

On this subject it might be useful to consider by far the most influential force in the creation of the modern state system as it exists in Africa, the Middle East, and much of Asia, where most of the states we now consider as failed are located.

This was the German Army, the effort to defeat which shattered the strength of the major European imperial powers and forced the independence of scores of states long before they were ready for it. For good measure the wars launched by Germany in the first half of the last century fatally undermined the concept of monarchy as a tool ethnically diverse states could use to maintain their political unity; the German invasion of Russia in 1941 also made possible a firm and enduring alliance between Russian patriotism and an ideology committed to overthrowing governments around the world whether or not this served Russian national interests.

There is nothing sacred, morally or otherwise, about self-determination in and of itself. Most often, all self-determination means is the right of one faction or tribe within a country to seize control of the state, kill or imprison its enemies, and enrich itself at the expense of its country's people without foreign interference. It did not have to mean that for all eternity; the 19th century European empires were bound to yield to another form of governance eventually, whether this involved local autonomy or complete independence, or even permanent inclusion in the polity of the colonial power. The transition would surely not have been perfect or orderly in all places, but it is hard to see how a more gradual transition from colonial status to something else could have produced worse results than what we've seen since the war ended.

The question of the state system's deficiencies is hard to understand properly if we aren't honest about how it evolved, and the fact is that in many of the places where states have failed most badly the system didn't evolve -- it was simply dropped on people after the former imperial dispensations had been shattered or crippled. It rather sounds as if Ms. Brooks somewhat academic-sounding argument is pointing toward trying to recreate something of a form of imperial dispensation, involving some people or regions being placed under some form of political authority in which they would have a modest amount of input and that would in turn ask little of them. Imperialism without empires, in other words: an effort to answer the failures resulting from the end of the European empires by clipping the wings of local state power, the most likely source of abuse, corruption and instability. How practical this is as anything but a temporary expedient I can't say, but the idea is interesting.

[MQ]

A conceptual problem here is that the notion of "rights" is an individualistic one, and states are collectivities. States are just the modern form of a very, very old thing -- collective or communal self-determination. There is a sense in which a community does not have full control over its physical space, cultural and economic autonomy, etc. unless it has a functioning state with sovereignty. Communal self-determination is a very central human value -- we are after all social animals probably more than we are separate ones. This is why nationalism is such a powerful force and so many people are willing to die for it.

In this sense, states with sovereignty are no more an artificial construct of the international community than individuals with rights are. They are both the modern vehicles to express very old values.

Now, there are some deep sociological questions about how one can work out communal self-determination without the protection of a state. It's dicey, you have to trust the people who do control the state. Needless to say, Jews no longer had that trust post-WWII, Sunnis do not have it for the Shi'ite majority controlling the nascent Iraqi state today, etc. And no native community is likely to trust a state controlled by Western powers, no matter how "well-intentioned" we say we are.

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