The Dynamics of States: The Formation and Crises of State Domination 0754645045, 2005007436, 9780754645047, 9781138266858

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Contributors
Foreword
1 Rethinking the State
2 Whose State is it? Hindu-nationalist Violence and Populism in India
3 The ‘Privatization’ of the State: North Africa in Comparative Perspective
4 The State Against Itself: Market Reforms and the Judicialization of Politics in Mexico
5 The Phoenix State: War Economy and State Formation in Liberia
6 The Rise of the Social and the Banalization of the State in China
7 Uganda – A State in Suspense
8 Boundaries of State and Military in Pakistan
Index

Citation preview

THE DYNAMICS OF STATES

The Dynamics of States The Formation and Crises of State Domination

Edited by KLAUS SCHLICHTE Humboldt University at Berlin, Germany

First published 2005 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © 2005 Klaus Schlichte

Klaus Schlichte has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editor ofthis work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data The dynamics of states : the formation and crises of state domination 1. Authoritarianism 2. State, The 3. Developing countriesPolitics and government I. Schlichte, Klaus 321.9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The dynamics of states : the formation and crises of state domination I edited by Klaus Schlichte. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7546-4504-5 1. State, The--Case studies. 2. Comparative government. I. Schlichte, Klaus. JC11.093 2005 320.9172'4--dc22 2005007436 ISBN 9780754645047 (hbk) ISBN 9781138266858 (pbk) Transferred to Digital Printing in 2014

Contents List of Contributors Foreword 1 Rethinking the State Joel S. Migdal and Klaus Schlichte

vi viii 1

2 Whose State is it? Hindu-nationalist Violence and Populism in India Julia Eckert

41

3 The ‘Privatization’ of the State: North Africa in Comparative Perspective Béatrice Hibou

71

4 The State Against Itself: Market Reforms and the Judicialization of Politics in Mexico Tom Lewis

97

5 The Phoenix State: War Economy and State Formation in Liberia François Prkic

115

6 The Rise of the Social and the Banalization of the State in China Jean-Louis Rocca

137

7 Uganda – A State in Suspense Klaus Schlichte

161

8 Boundaries of State and Military in Pakistan Boris Wilke

183

Index

211

List of Contributors Julia Eckert is a postdoctoral fellow at the Max-Planck-Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale in Germany. Holding a Ph.D. in political science, she is currently working on communal violence in South Asia and the restructuring of the security sector in Afghanistan. Her PhD-thesis is entitled “The Charisma of Direct Action: Power, Politics and the Shivsena”, and was published by Oxford University Press in 2003. Béatrice Hibou Chercheur at the CNRS, France, holds a Ph.D. from the EHESS in Paris. Currently she is a member of the editorial board of “Politique africaine” and “Critique international”, author of L’Afrique - est-elle protectionniste? (Paris 1996), editor of La privatisation des Etats (Paris 1999, English Edition, 2005) and co-author of La criminalisation des Etats (with J.-F. Bayart and Stephen Ellis, Brussels 1997, English Edition 1999 with Indiana University Press). Tom Lewis is a Ph.D. student at the Political Science Department, University of Washington, Seattle. He also teaches at the Henry M. Jackson School for International Studies and has published several articles in various journals. Joel S. Migdal is Professor at the Henry M. Jackson School for International Studies and the Political Science Department of the University of Washington, Seattle, author of Strong Societies and Weak States (Princeton University Press 1988), States in Society (Cambridge University Press 2001) and numerous contributions. He is co-editor of several volumes. François Prkic holds a Ph.D. in political science from the Institut d’Etudes Politique, Bordeaux and is currently working for the French Foreign Ministry. He has published several articles on the politics and war in Liberia and security policy in West Africa. Jean-Louis Rocca holds a Ph.D. in political science from the “Institut d’Etudes Politiques” in Paris. Currently, he is chercheur at the “Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches en Relations International” (CERI) of the French Foundation for Political Science. He is the author of various articles in international journals. Klaus Schlichte holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Hamburg (1996) and is currently leading a research unit on “Micro–politics of Armed Groups”, funded by Volkswagen-Foundation at Humboldt University at Berlin. He is the co-author of Kriege in der Weltgesellschaft (Wiesbaden 2003), co-editor of Strukturwandel inter-nationaler Beziehungen (Wiesbaden 2000); author of Krieg

List of Contributors

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und Vergesell-schaftung in Afrika (Münster 1996) and Einführung in die wissenschaftliche Arbeitstechnik der Politikwissenschaft (Opladen 1999). Boris Wilke is a researcher at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) in Berlin, and has published several articles in leading German social science journals such as Leviathan and Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen.

Foreword Debates about the state abound. However, the discussion about the reality and future of statehood in the age of globalization revolves almost exclusively around a minority of states, namely those in the OECD. It is hard to find any systematic analysis or discussion of the rest, the majority of states, under whose control four fifths of the world population live. In the late 1970s, the dispute between dependency theory and the vulgar modernization theory faded out, and since then little work has been devoted to an empirically enriched theoretical and comparative discussion of state domination outside the West. This book aims to relaunch this debate. It tries to combine recent developments in social theory with empirical research of different aspects of state domination outside the OECD. In the beginning, the discussion between the authors assembled in this volume was about the theoretical necessity of terms for the current dynamics of political domination. The decision to collect the various contributions in a book was taken after it became apparent that expressions like ‘failed states’ and ‘rogue states’ were gaining more and more ground in a strange blend of political and academic discourse. Think tanks and organic intellectuals – in the Gramscian sense of the word – have produced a new discourse that simultaneously dominates the academic thinking on politics within the OECD and accompanies new forms of intervention. There are reasons for scepticism that these discourses and their respective practices might not lead to the desired results. These doubts are based in on insights in local dynamics of politics. However, up until today, the conceptual vocabulary has been dominated by terms and expressions that were generated in the European experience, at a different historical time. Terms like ‘civil society’, ‘democratisation’ or ‘development’ designate the moving horizons of expectations of a predominantly Western public. However, their analytical value for the understanding and explanation of different contexts has become more dubious. As this volume shows, the tendencies of state domination are ambiguous. States can extend their reach in one functional area, and at the same time, shrink in others. Phenomena like the delegation of state functions are typical in this regard. What looks like a weakening of the state’s grip might, in reality, reach into the societal world. We find that this and other ambiguities are a major challenge for the study of the political sociology of the emerging world society. Therefore, we consider this book as an offer to others to re-enter the debate concerning the question of who rules – where and how – in contemporary world society, and how statehood is to be interpreted in this context. We do not intend to deliver another contribution to ‘improve’ statehood in the spirit of developmentalism or the ‘governance’ discussion with its socialengineering approach. Rather, we think, recent developments in social theory help us to understand the dynamics of domination from new perspectives by employing a new language that is not already subverted by its object: the state.

Foreword

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The use of ‘we’ in the foregoing paragraphs is justified by the fact that this book is the result of a rather rare collaboration between scholars from different national contexts. The ‘Centre d’Etudes et des Recherches Internationales’ (CERI) in Paris, the University of Washington in Seattle, and the University of Hamburg were the kernels of this discussion that began in 1996. These institutions contributed to the travel costs of our meetings that were also partly covered by grants supplied by the Thyssen-Foundation, Cologne, and the Hanseatic University-Foundation, Hamburg. A three-year research grant from the ‘Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft’ not only allowed Boris Wilke and the editor to conduct extended field research in South Asia and East Africa, but also to organize this process of discussion. On several occasions, the results of our research and discussions have been collectively presented to the academic public; First, in October 1999 in a joint conference with the ‘Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik’ (SWP) – German Institute for International and Security Affairs – near Munich. And second, on a panel of the International Political Science Association (IPSA) which met in Quebec in summer 2000. Furthermore, single contributions and works that are related to the discussions of the group were debated in numerous different settings. We wish to thank William I. Zartman, Dietrich Jung, Jean-François Médard, Caty Clement and the community of scholars with particular regional expertise from SWP for their comments on earlier versions of the contributions in this volume. Amir Nahum and Paula Hudson proofread and edited the manuscripts and also gave numerous helpful comments, particularly for the French and German speaking authors so in love with fancy phrasing and ambiguous expressions. Barbara Lemberger’s help in the production was as valuable as always. Finally, the adventure of bringing such a group together and managing this process despite the normal bureaucratic hindrances was only possible due to the pragmatic attitude and liberal support of Klaus Jürgen Gantzel at the University of Hamburg and of Udo Steinbach of the German Orient-Institute in Hamburg. Klaus Schlichte Berlin, February 2004

Chapter 1

Rethinking the State Joel S. Migdal and Klaus Schlichte

Powerful forces during the tumultuous last quarter of the twentieth century buffeted states, leading to widespread, transformative crises in them. From members of the European Union facing daily challenges to their local officials’ accepted prerogatives, to victims of rapid withdrawal of foreign investments in East and Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Russia, to the targets of brutal civil wars in Africa, states faced covert and overt challenges to their power. Rapidly increasing capital flows; unprecedented levels of debt; new information technologies; growing trade and the formation of trade blocs; heightened activity by international organizations, such as the International Monetary Fund, in the domestic affairs of states; wildly fluctuating commodity prices, especially for the most important of all commodities, oil; and the new power alignments spawned by the end of the Cold War were among the potent forces that strained existing governing institutions. By the beginning of the 1990s, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Ethiopia, and several other states were territorially disintegrating; entire regimes in other East European countries were collapsing; and formal political institutions in much of Africa seemed to be more the booty of bloody wars than actual governing organizations. Even as these momentous events brought continuous surprises, scholars continued to stick with their existing understanding of what the state is and how it interacts with its own society and outside forces. Dissatisfaction with those old ways of thinking about states in the circumstances of the transformative crisis in the last two decades led to the collaborative project that gave birth to this book. To be sure, academic divisions abounded in the older models about the future of the state. Some scholars went on championing it, despite all the problems besetting it, as the key institution in people’s lives, providing the rules and norms for daily life. Others shifted to predicting its imminent demise, with alternative institutions, both local and transnational, moving in to establish the parameters of everyday life as well as the source for collective identity. Indeed, this divergence over the centrality of the future state became the focus of serious debates in the fields of comparative politics and international relations (see, for example, Krasner 1999: 3).

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These debates have spawned a bewildering number of models, theories, and definitions. According to the tradition of German Staatslehre, popular in studies of international law, the state is the enigmatic composite of ‘state territory, state people and state power’ (Staatsgebiet, Staatsvolk und Staatsgewalt, Jellinek 1920: 394). Others have seen it as the preeminent organization among many other organizations in society. Some political scientists have conceived of the state as part of ‘a system of negotiations’ (Scharpf 1991: 623). For many economists, the state is the ‘multitude of public economic actors’ (Stobbe 1983: 2). In the theory of social systems, the state is seen as ‘the self-description of the political system’, as ‘a semantic artifact’ (Luhmann 1984: 627). According to neoclassical theory, the state is an ‘organization which has a comparative advantage in violence’ and is therefore ‘in the position to specify and enforce property rights’ (North 1981: 21). For all the divergences in views, most scholars across the social science disciplines have shared key assumptions about how to think about politics and the relations of states and societies. Drawing on Max Weber’s ideal-type of the modern rational state, scholars have generally assumed the coherence, integrity, and autonomy of the modern state, and some have made the study of autonomy a cottage industry. They have all started with the state having a fixed set of boundaries and a unified set of rules that circumscribe its realm. These assumptions of the state as the overarching institution have been the bedrock of the study of comparative politics since at least the beginning of the twentieth century. And it is those assumptions that this project aims to question. The premise of the authors here is that a pervasive, transformative crisis of the state has occurred in recent decades, forcing a reevaluation of existing conceptual models. The following articles suggest an alternative way of thinking about, even of defining, states. Their premise is that actual states’ practices have often been fragmented, even contradictory; the institutionalization of the state has been a far cry from that of a centrally controlled organization using a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence in order to get its way. If scholars are to understand cases, for example, where military ‘units are fighting their own small wars and pursuing their own economic interests’,1 rather than acting as parts of an integrated chain of command, they are going to need new starting assumptions.

Casting Aside Old Assumptions about the State Existing state theories stumble on cases where the lines between state and society, public and private, formal and informal, and legal and illegal are blurred. Existing theories have been built on these binary opposites and have had difficulty even finding appropriate terms when these binaries have failed to capture the situation on the ground. Australian political scientist, Harold Crouch, reflected the 1

‘Indonesian Commanders Losing Control of Troops’, New York Times, 22 August 2000, p. 2.

Rethinking the State

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frustration with existing terms in talking about soldiers in Indonesia who hire themselves out for all sorts of jobs, which are ‘illegal, semi-legal, a-legal and occasionally some legal like bodyguards’.2 Older theories lack the vocabulary to deal with institutionalization of actual states along different lines, without these clear dualities. Weber was careful to pose his concept of the state as coming out of the modern European experience and did not intend its application for politics outside Europe. But those who have drawn on Weber have often transposed this concept elsewhere for states that have emerged in very different circumstances. Meanwhile, the teleology of the early theories of modernization3 in which it was assumed that nonWestern states would follow the route of European states has proven inadequate in the face of ongoing dynamics in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The same has happened with the structural determinism of the dependency school.4 Functional analyses that interpreted the state simply as the necessary fulfillment of certain ends – again pointing to the underlying unity of different states – similarly failed to anticipate the new and diverse forms of state institutionalization. Theory needs more than negatives – illegal, informal – to capture the variety of new forms. Partly, the ideal-typical method used by Weber is at the root of these limits. An ideal-type, in the sense Weber conceived this heuristical tool, is an exaggeration, the over-statement of a particular characteristic in order to allow comparisons (Weber 1988: 190). An ideal-type is not itself a hypothesis, but it allows one to build hypotheses on deviations, variations, and totally different forms. Once these differences are noticed, the need for a vocabulary of description and explanation becomes obvious. The central events of this project, a series of workshops by French, German, and United States scholars examining the decay of centralized governing institutions in non-Western countries, revealed those theoretical and conceptual anomalies and lacunae. Participants found themselves, early in the project, forced to shoe-horn their fascinating findings on Africa, Asia, and Latin America into analytic categories that simply did not fit their cases. In particular, using the standard understanding of the modern state inspired by Weber demanded intellectual contortions and gyrations that constrained imaginative thinking on the subject of decaying or changing-beyond-recognition central organizations and their relationships to their population. In particular, new sorts of alliances between state officials and individuals or groups in society – networks that did not fit well into existing analytical categories – demanded new attention. The institutionalization of these networks, their existence outside the formal laws on the books, and their tendency to ensconce different sets of state officials in conflicting normative and 2

Quoted in Ibid. Cf. for example the works of David Lerner (1958), David E. Apter (1965) and W.W: Rostow (1960). 4 Cf. for example the works of Amin (1976), Frank (1969) or the contributions in Senghaas (1972). 3

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behavioural universes, all made it increasingly difficult to simply dismiss what was happening as illegal – as graft or corruption – or as private and informal. It became harder for those looking at their cases to describe what they were finding as simple deviations from the proper norm of what a state is (and should be). This introductory chapter attempts to pinpoint the difficulties with the old assumptions and to suggest an alternative way of imagining the state. It aims, in short, to capture the different view of the bases of statehood underlying the empirical studies presented in the workshops. The chapter begins with a brief examination of some of these old assumptions found in writings on the state, both of those touting the state’s resilience and those pointing to the state’s fall from its exalted perch. It then turns to the task of reimagining the state, starting with a definition in place of Weber’s conception. That definition suggests studying the state by looking at a set of dynamics within the state and between state and society. We set out these dynamics in the following section. Finally, we offer some conclusions and ask about the future of the state – the entity that, along with the market, has been the cornerstone in the building of the modern world. The State as an Autonomous Sphere This section begins by drawing a composite picture of the state by distilling some common assumptions from diverse writings of social scientists. While the language used in this composite, particularly the emphasis on space and boundaries, is different from that used by many political scientists and others, it does afford a window into some of the underlying assumptions in existing state theories. Scholars looking at state autonomy, drawing on realist and other theories in international relations, have imagined the world as divided into well-insulated political spaces. In existing models of the state, the political boundaries drawn on maps mark not only the endpoints of state jurisdiction; they also set off social systems, rules and norms of daily behaviour, and the bounds of primary collective identity. Boundaries are social, not just physical; phenomena (cf. Ruggie 1993). In these insulated spaces, one complex actor, the state, has been able to differentiate itself from the tangle of other social organizations and their specific interests. These other organizations, from family and clans to business corporations and churches, have often been grounded in very different imagined configurations of space, whether these have been local, regional, or transnational. The centrality of the concept of autonomy comes in the ability of the state to transcend the power of these other organizations and their interests and re-frame them in terms of the state’s territory, which insulated space. It has not so much obliterated other conceptions of the configuration of space as subordinated them to the primary ordering of space, that defined by the state’s borders. Autonomy means that the state is a coherent, fairly unified actor, set apart from, or above, other social organizations. The state’s coterie of officials, according to these theories, en masse mesh the organizational interests of the state with their

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own, particularly its requirement that its boundaries be regarded as the most meaningful shapers of space. Through its officials, the state exhibits its own preferences and has the strength to act on those preferences and to change the behaviour of others. Its sheer power to make others bend to its rules is transformed by its many officials in their bureaus and agencies into an ordered sort of power, what Weber called bureaucratic domination (bürokratische Herrschaft) (Weber 1985: 551). The state generates domination in its designated space through a uniform set of rules on how to behave (formal law, bureaucratic regulations, judicial precedents, customary procedures, and more), backed by the threat and practice of violence, trumping any other rules that might exist. Totalitarian states have set and executed those rules themselves or, frequently through the strong arm of single political parties; in them, the internal space of the state can be thought of as fairly undifferentiated. The tentacles of the party and state apparatus reach uniformly from central literal and figurative sites through the territory, applying a single code in a one-size-fits-all manner. Liberal and federal states, in contrast, have further differentiated their bounded space. For example, liberal states have allowed for areas where numerous other institutions, such as families and markets, create and execute some rules for daily behaviour and where individuals possess rights, creating seemingly inviolable spaces for certain forms of behaviour (for example, speech, worship, and assembly with others). In federal states, the rules of daily behaviour take on different guises in different sites; a 16-year old in the United States can be licensed to drive in Oregon but not New Jersey. Even in the case of liberal states, however, it is the central state that establishes the parameters for the domain of other organizations, both in terms of area and function, and the permissible types and limits of behaviour for organizations and individuals. Thus, various families may have rules quite different from one another – one in which parents set their children’s curfews at 10:00 p.m.; another, at midnight; and a third, in which they set no curfew at all – but no parents can make rules to regularly beat their children. When other organizations violate the state’s parameters, as when a family’s parents abuse their children or a corporation operates monopolistically, state officials may discipline or even disband the family or the corporation. Whether totalitarian or liberal or something in between, states, from this perspective, exercise supremacy in both establishing the bounds of meaningful space and the kinds of permitted behaviour within their borders. Most political theories posit the autonomous state as the sine qua non for people (its society in that political space) to survive and, if possible, to achieve a modicum of prosperity (cf. Evans and Rauch 1999). Through the sheer physical force at its disposal and, ultimately, through the moral power that it generates as the pre-eminent organization, the state tames or mediates the unruly differences that bring members of society into conflict and threaten their individual and collective survival and well-being. It simultaneously protects them from outside predators and imposes upon them an order, both social and moral, that allows them

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The Dynamics of States

to live peaceably with one another. Effective property rights necessary for economies to function are mainstays of that sort of order; so, too, are the codes of other laws and the mediation and stability that an autonomous state can provide. These laws are both firm guidelines for behaviour in various realms – rules in the strictest sense – and symbolic representations (as in reverence for the Law) of the overall collective order. In U.S. academic literature, the watershed in highlighting the importance of the autonomous state came with the publication of the book, Bringing the State Back In, edited by three important figures in American sociology and political science, Evans, Skocpol, and Rueschemeyer (1985).5 The hoopla surrounding the book as a turning point in academic studies was certainly overdone. Perhaps the word ‘state’ itself was not analytically present in key works published in the United States in those earlier years before Bringing the State Back In; still, conceptions of a powerful, centralized political organization imposing rules on what had been diverse populations and shaping the way people thought of themselves and the larger meaning of their lives certainly could be found in the earlier social science and policy literature. Many social scientists, implicitly or explicitly, understood political institutions as moulding people to think of themselves first in terms of the political space claimed by the state (for example, as French within the territory claimed by France) and only secondarily in terms of their other interests and social organizations (for example, as farmers, Catholics, or Bretons, or even Algerians, at one point). State autonomy, then, indicated a power separate from, even above, the fractious groups interacting in a given space – a power that could relegate these other organizations to a subservient role. Even in cases where it could not blend people into some harmonious whole, that is, shape them into a single social entity, such as a nation with an overriding unitary identity, the autonomous state could at 5

While much was made by them of the innovation of their approach in placing the autonomous state at the centre of analysis, in fact, long before the appearance of their book, some other researchers had employed a similar conception of the state as an actor powerful enough to change existing currents in society. As far back as the late 1950s, for example, the Committee for the Comparative Study of New Nations, based at the University of Chicago, incorporated the idea of a strong state imposing itself upon, even shaping, society. Note the words of David Apter, a key member of the Committee, in a book, Old Societies and New States, that was probably the Committees most important publication: ‘The state as a legal expression is not merely that of society in legal terms. It is also the basis for requiring obligation to the community…The society gives purpose to the individual. The state bases itself on the right to express that purpose and exact from its citizens those obligations necessary to ensure success. It may do so in a variety of ways, some of which appear to obliterate the individual. Identity, then, through citizenship, locates the individual in relation to his obligations’ (Apter 1965: 90). In one of the most influential scholarly books of the 1960s, Political Order in Changing Societies, published nearly two decades before Bringing the State Back In, Huntington’s insistence on the centrality of autonomy for political institutions heralded the emphasis of many later researchers on the autonomous state.

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least mediate among them, establish rules of contestation, and serve as a court of last resort, all within a moral and legal frame based on its own political boundaries. As the rule-giver and the rule-enforcer, the state stood out as the ultimate force in people's lives, shaping their daily behaviour and even how they thought of themselves and the meaning they attached to their actions and lives (the state was something for which one would even give up his or her life). Even when state identity was not primary (as it was in the nation-state), the state’s political boundaries constituted a social boundary by encompassing the people – society – who related to each other through the state-generated moral and legal universe within set and recognized boundaries. Perhaps the biggest irony involving Bringing the State Back In was that it heralded the imagined autonomous state precisely at the outset of the storm that precipitated transformative crises in actual states – the rush of petrodollars followed by the precipitous drop in oil prices, through-the-ceiling debt, the emergence of the IMF as a force demanding internal structural changes in national economies, the consolidation of Gorbachev’s power and his determination to end the Cold War, the collapse of the South as an effective bloc in world politics, and more. These forces led to the crippling of what had seemed to be the promising new central state organizations of Africa and sent others in Asia, Latin America, and Europe into prolonged crises regarding their powers and prerogatives. Autonomous-state theory came to be canonized at the very moment that real states began a nosedive, with a host of forces nibbling away at their supposed insularity and supreme position within their borders. Globalization and the Attack on the Autonomous State Another stream of social science literature in the late 1980s and the 1990s took a different path from that found on autonomy. This school grew out of the dependency and world-systems literature that had gained currency in the 1970s. Both of those had challenged existing historiography and social science approaches by rejecting the presumption of the insularity of states. The concept of insularity directed scholars to analyze events, processes, and qualities within territorial boundaries to explain social and political formations, as well as change (or the lack of it). This focus was a point of convergence for both the state autonomy scholars and those who looked to broader elite, normative, and systemic factors. Dependency theorists, such as Frank (1967), saw porous state territorial boundaries, not well insulated ones. Rejecting the historiographical presumptions of earlier thinkers, they explained highly stratified, economically deformed patterns of Latin American (and other non-Western) societies in terms of forces found in far-off metropoles, in the United States and Europe. The ability of Western states and corporations to transcend Latin American states’ territorial boundaries with impunity, through the collaboration of key economic and political elites in these states, underlay the creation and perseverance of Latin American under-development. While Evans (1979) tried to straddle the divide between

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dependency and state-centered approaches, for the most part dependency theorists roundly condemned the assumption of a world defined by impermeable state borders. Similarly, a variety of world-system approaches put forth by Meyer/Hannan (1979), Modelski (1987), Dunn (1995), and others and, most notably, by Wallerstein (1974), followed dependency theories in attacking the old historiography. Going beyond the dependency theorists’ point about the permeability of boundaries, they contended that the territorial state was not at all the appropriate unit of analysis to understand social formations and change – especially the skewed distributions of wealth and power locally and worldwide. The fitting boundaries to understand existing relations and change are those of sprawling interactive, transnational systems, of which in today’s world there is only one, spanning the entire globe. In this conception, state boundaries could be understood as sieves, filtering out some things but letting many others through, within a larger, more meaningful unit of analysis, the world system. Given the popularity of globalization theories only twenty or so years after the ascent of dependency and world-systems approaches, it is surprising how rapidly those earlier works faded in the scholarly imagination and how little credit the globalization writers have paid to their predecessors who had moved away from state-centered analysis. Perhaps the Marxist ideological project of numerous (but by no means all) world-system writers as opposed to the liberal designs of so many globalists accounts for the amnesia of those touting globalization. In any case, while the present-day works on globalization have rejected dependency's tendency to analyze social dynamics in dyadic or bilateral terms and world system’s penchant to see interactions in such tight terms that they appeared almost conspiratorial, they have shared the earlier scholars skepticism about the centrality of the state. They have turned dependency theory’s morality tale – the evil exploitation of permeable, weak societies – on its head: the penetration of state boundaries by global forces has been, and will continue to be, a liberating process, leading to widespread prosperity and well-being. Globalization theories gained momentum, particularly towards the end of the twentieth century, by arguing that the vaunted state that Evans et al. had trumpeted was, in fact, in the midst of its swan song. One scholar, Saskia Sassen, put the case in rather moderate terms: ‘The growth of a global economy in conjunction with the new telecommunications and computer networks that span the world has profoundly reconfigured institutions fundamental to processes of governance and accountability in the modern state’ (Sassen 1996: xi). The punch line comes in what old processes Sassen sees as collapsing – sovereignty and territorial exclusivity. ‘Sovereignty’, she goes on, ‘remains a feature of the system, but it is now located in a multiplicity of institutional arenas: the new emergent transnational private legal regimes, new supranational organizations (such as the WTO and the institutions of the European Union), and the various international human rights codes. All these institutions constrain the autonomy of national states’ (Sassen 1996: 29).

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As is clear in Sassen, the globalization literature singled out the forces – economic mostly, but others as well – that cut across state boundaries, determining life opportunities and shaping individual behaviour and, by their very nature, subverting the state’s attempt to insulate and privilege its defined space. The sovereign state and its correlate institutions, such as citizenship and civil society, then, become an artifact of ‘cultural and historical specificity’ (Sassen 1996: xiii), that is, an institution whose time has passed. It is not that Sassen denies the core assumptions of state theorists about what a state is. She declares readily that rule in the modern world has flowed ‘from the absolute sovereignty of the state over its national territory’ (Sassen 1996: 3). The bone she picks with these state theorists is whether the historical conditions that supported the old assumptions have now passed. ‘Can we continue to take for granted’, she asks, ‘as much of the literature on the state does over and over again, that the [state’s] exclusive authority [is] ... today the same as it was before the current phase of globalization...?’ (Sassen 1996: xv). In short, this mode of research contested the central claims of the autonomousstate literature. Writers on globalization mostly attacked the idea of autonomy, arguing that powerful outside forces (based on wholly different configurations of space from that of the state) have begun to shred states’ pretensions of dominance in shaping their societies. Rules now, the claim goes, are generated as much, or more, by powerful forces whose centres are outside the state’s territory as they are by the state apparatus. More works than one could count have attested to the demise of the autonomous state. Much of this literature has overstated the case that global economic (and other) forces have crippled the state (Migdal 2001, chap. 5). Many international and transnational forces have propped it up more than they have sabotaged it. Frequently, the state has become the all-important mediator between global actors and the domestic population, putting state officials in a position to enhance their power over society through the control of key distributional mechanisms, directing such resources as foreign aid, loans, and investments and using them as levers to propagate state rules. Still, globalization enthusiasts have rightly pointed to the contingent nature of state boundaries. Not only might physical boundaries of states change, as they have in recent years for several in Eastern Europe, but the social nature of boundaries might also be subject to change. States’ varying abilities to maintain the insularity of their borders in controlling flows of labour, goods, and capital have meant that not all boundaries have produced the vaunted insularity associated with the statecantered literature. More than that, different configurations of space associated with these movements of people, products, and cash – from smuggling rings to multi-national corporations – have offered alternative social configurations, as well, including with whom people associate, where their supreme loyalties lie, and what their primary identities are. The parameters of society might not be explained best by state boundaries at all but by these alternative configurations of space, such as those encompassing transnational families, which might span several continents.

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The Dynamics of States

Numerous alternative configurations might now pose similar challenges to states around the world that Jews did to so many European states, whose officials and non-Jewish population so often suspected that the Jews’ primary identity, loyalty, and practices were less defined by state boundaries than by the imagined boundaries of the Jewish world (Chirot 1997). But, for all their telling criticisms of state-centered literature, globalists frequently have not abandoned some key elements of state theories. In fact, writers defending state autonomy and those championing the momentous impact of globalization have shared some key assumptions. To be sure, they have historicized those assumptions differently in that the state-autonomy researchers have continued to see the conditions that promoted the autonomous state as still largely extant (and, possibly, even enhanced), while the globalization scholars have pointed to new conditions undermining the state’s ability to maintain its autonomy, especially since the exponential growth in the rates of capital movement starting around 1980. What do these two schools share about their understanding of the state in its heyday, even if they disagree on when that heyday was or is? Sharing Assumptions about the State For both researchers professing the continuing strength of the state and those touting the power of globalization, there is uniformity in the idea of the state, a standard understanding of what a state is. That is, both have pretty much the same view as to what a properly functioning state looks like and what it does. It tends to exhibit high levels of internal coherence, to use rational-legal methods to set the parameters of who gets what, to implement policies in a way that is faithful to stated policy and written law, to favour aggregate economic benefits through high overall growth rates over high benefits to some but with overall lower growth, to provide some minimal rewards and rights universally, to limit others from establishing competing ground-rules and systems for a biased distribution of rewards. And it achieves all this through a mix of violence (as in putting people in jail against their will), threats of violence, and means convincing people that what states do through their officials is the moral, right way for things to be done. In short, the common understanding of the state imagines a set of parameters for state-society relations, of the state’s role in distributing rewards, and then canonizes that image. The two approaches put forth by statists and globalists both see state strength – its ability to transcend local and transnational forces – in its capacity to garner key resources from its own territory and from beyond. Recruitment of resources enables it to build powerful institutions, including armies, police, courts, regulatory agencies, schools, and more, that can enforce particular rules of behaviour among its population and socialize people as to the appropriateness of the state’s role in making rules for daily behaviour and the intrinsic rightness of those rules. In Weber’s terms, as noted above, this image is an ideal-type. It is what a state firing on all cylinders is imagined to be. Of course, in real human society, no state

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can do all that an ideal-type state is imagined to, as Weber makes perfectly clear (Weber 1988: 190). Tremendous variation has existed among states in the levers that they have controlled in order to garner resources and to accomplish this skewed distribution of economic (and other) opportunities; in the sheer quantity of resources they could mobilize through taxation, aid, plunder, conscription, and so on; in their effectiveness in making sure the resources ended up in the hands they wanted; in the inner coherence they exhibited in deciding and acting upon whom to favour; and in the means they used to achieve the selective distribution of rewards. Those differences among states are extremely important (for scholars of the state, these variations have been the stuff of comparative politics). It is not only that differences exist from state to state but also that worldhistorical conditions may move real states as a group closer to, or farther from, the imagined ideal-type. Here is where state-autonomy and globalization theorists part ways, over how far from the ideal-type contemporary states can be expected to deviate. The state-autonomy theorists point to all sorts of conditions that have enhanced state power, from technological improvements in means of surveillance to fine-tuned fiscal instruments that allow them to manage economic cycles effectively. These theorists point to the tendency of important international actors to single out the state as their interlocutor. Globalists, on the other side, talk of other circumstances, which undercut state ability to approach the ideal-type, from spiraling increases in international capital flows to information flows that undercut the state’s territorially-based message. These theorists highlight the augmented power of transnational institutions that limit state choices. Even with all the hightech surveillance techniques at hand, they indicate, record numbers of people are crossing borders in direct opposition to state laws. But both sorts of theories approach the question of variation among states, at any given time or in changing world-historical moments, similarly. Variation can be conceptualized and measured only as distance from the ideal-type. As long as the idea of the state is uniform and constant, the variation of states, even the failure of some states, can be expressed only in terms of deviation from the standard. If real states fell short of the standard, as they were bound to do, all sorts of words had to be invented to express the gap between actual practice and the ideal. Terms, such as quasi-states, soft states, shadow states, weak states, non-state states, decay, corruption, weakness, and relative capacity, all implied that the way things really work are somehow exogenous to the normative model of what the state and its relations to society are, or should be. Comparison comes in specifying and measuring deviation from the norm or the ideal-type. State capacity can be gauged against a measuring stick whose endpoint is a variant of Weber’s ideal-type of the modern rational state. For non-European states, the danger is that the one measure, the ideal-type state drawn from European experience, creates a hierarchy in which those farthest from the ideal-type are lowest on the hierarchy. This methodological point is made quite well by Fernandes (1997: 13):

12

The Dynamics of States The point is to develop an analytical framework that can generate generalities without creating a hierarchy of cases, in which one context provides the basis for an ideal type and other contexts provide the field for the application and testing of this ideal type. The establishment of such a hierarchy in fact hinders the comparativist project by creating both methodological and theoretical biases. When categories of analysis are derived from particular contexts, general conclusions drawn from such analysis reflect the conclusions of these particular contexts and do not provide us with a comparative understanding of social and political phenomenon. This disjuncture is perhaps most evident when categories derived from a Western European context are transposed onto ‘Third World’ cases.

Fernandes (1997: 16) goes on to note that rejecting these ideal types has the added benefit of shedding new light on the Western experience, as well, through an examination of the struggles in the West where contested meanings have been lost in the narrow focus on the form of the ideal type. Questioning Assumptions about the State The understanding of Weber’s ideal-type conception of the state that became dominant in the study of politics presents serious difficulties both normatively (something for which leaders strive and which is seen as the proper form of rule) and analytically (something that scholars want to study in all its rich variation). The standard understanding of the state as the rule-maker, either enacting the rules for human behaviour itself or authorizing other social organizations, such as families and businesses, to make and enforce some rules puts a tremendous burden on the state. The assumption that only it does, or should, create rules and that only it does, or should, maintain the violent means to bend people to obey those rules minimizes and trivializes the rich negotiation, interaction, and resistance that occur in every human society among multiple systems of rules. It posits a human society where one incredibly coherent and complex organization exercises an extraordinary hegemony of thought and action over all other social organizations intersecting that territory. It has no way to theorize about arenas of competing multiple sets of rules, other than to term these as negative, as failures or weak states or even non-states. Social scientists, starting decades ago, felt a keen need to soften that assumption by creating additional categories to study states that took into account how overburdened any state would be that even tried to reach that ideal of pure autonomy. Neo-patrimonialism, for example, was a concept put forward attempting to capture the limited capabilities of actual states and their systems of rule that were decidedly not rational-legal in nature (for example, Eisenstadt 1973). Even the champion of bringing the state back in, Evans, wrote a book a decade later trying to come to terms with his observations that autonomy is far more attenuated than he had imagined earlier (Evans 1995).

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The difficulty with the ideal-type autonomous state, acting on its own preferences, is that this image did not open the way for scholars to unravel the most difficult of tasks that states face, garnering the resources to maintain and reproduce themselves. Mobilizing those resources necessarily involves complex alliances and networks with particular elements of that population, as well as with key outsiders. That is, in order to create a lifeline of revenues and human power to sustain itself, the state must share or direct resources in ways that favour certain groups of the population. Evans’ softening of his assumptions in his latter book was an attempt to come to terms with the alliances between states and favoured portions of the population. But without abandoning the ideal-type typology, these sorts of modifications run into difficulties conceptually. A central problem is the primacy of law and a rational-legal order underpinning the understanding of the state. These accounts shift uneasily between two views of how states ‘imagine’ their societies, which are in tension with one another. On the one hand, the central activity of the state, making and enforcing rules, assumes that the population of the territory constitutes an almost totally inclusive public (certain aliens and tourists might not be included, but these are marginal exceptions). The rules of the state, then, are expressed in universal terms, placing them above any possible rules of other, competing organizations with alternative conceptions of how to configure space. The state defines these other rules as parochial, divisive and tendentious. On the other hand, the state’s unquenchable thirst for resources leads it to adopt practices that favour particular groups in the territory. Now, one could certainly imagine the ‘corruption’ of universal-type laws because of exogenous factors like greedy officials. The difficulty is that Evans would like to endogenize the second type of particularistic behaviour that comes through alliances with particular groups. And that is not possible given his starting assumptions. Those studying law have begun in recent years to deal with this anomaly. Instead of treating state law as a single, dominant code and all deviations from it as simple illegality, legal pluralists have begun to consider law as a many-sided phenomenon. Legal pluralists have portrayed numerous normative orders, that is, plural systems of law, co-existing. Non-state normative orders have been, in part, constituted by state law, but they may, in turn, constitute state law (challenging one dimension of its putative autonomy). They may contribute to making of state law and/or they may challenge the hegemony of codified state law. Even more, there may exist multiple normative orders, complementary or in tension with one another, within the state itself. One cannot capture this sort of plurality by simply measuring deviation from a norm or softening some assumptions about autonomy. The challenge is to illuminate the variation in forms of the state expressed in this pluralism, rather than reducing all cases to more or less straying from the ideal-type. Would it not be more useful to develop a more inclusive understanding of the state, one that would encompass (rather than label as deviant or corrupt) the variety of attributes and

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rules associated with the state’s role in distributing rewards and opportunities? Could one instead start out with a broader understanding of states as not an integrated organization but as entities with multiple forms of institutionalization? Parts of the state then can enter into alliances and coalitions with other social actors (domestic and international). State boundaries, not only territorial ones but social ones, too, apparently move, and they are differently configured in varying circumstances. The challenge theoretically is, then, to develop a limited set of types categorizing the variety of states: their differing configurations of social and territorial boundaries, their multiple relations with those inside and outside their formal boundaries. The goal here is to sketch such a categorization by classifying the dynamics that underlie the process of boundary construction and reconstruction. To do this, an understanding of the state is needed that captures both its unity as a singular state and its diversity in actual boundary construction. The next section sets out a post-Weberian conception of the state, which encompasses both the state’s singular and multiform side. We will then turn to a categorization of state dynamics.

A Post-Weberian Conception of the State The following conception distinguishes between ‘seeing the state’ and ‘doing the state’. Both state actors (functionaries, customs officials, policemen, teachers, legislators, and the like) and non-state actors (the broader population in the territory and those outside the territory who interact repeatedly with state actors) ‘see’ the state in a particular way; they have a mental picture of it as an integral unit, a way of conceiving what it is about and in which kind of affairs it plays or should play a role. While states are sprawling and complex, seeing the state means capturing it in the mind’s eye as a single whole. This is what we call the ‘image’ of the state. While this image may not be universal – and may not even be identical for all the people in a given territory – it has taken hold widely over the globe over the last two centuries. The modern state as a singular actor, in fact, is one of the most commonly held images in today’s world across diverse areas and cultures. State actors and non-state actors also ‘do’ the state. Teachers teach and their students learn in state schools. Traffic police enforce state laws, and drivers obey or try to avoid the police. Border officials check passports and issue visas, and tourists present their passports or smugglers seek ways to bypass the check point. Police may hand out tickets for violations or possibly accept money not to issue the ticket, while drivers may pay the ticket or stuff some cash into the shirt pocket of the police officer. Tax authorities may track down people’s incomes, while entrepreneurs may try to hide parts of their incomes or just follow the rules. Doing the state involves the diverse, multiple actions of state actors as well as the myriad

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responses and interactions with state officials of non-state actors. These actions are what we call the ‘practices’ of the state. Both the image and practices of the state involve power, inducing people to think and behave in ways that they would otherwise not do, and particularly using the most direct inducement of all, violence. Acceding to power can range from being generally law-abiding, that is, accepting the state as a whole as the proper law-giver that shapes everyday behaviour, to succumbing to the entreaty of the police officer for a side payment or sneaking around the border checkpoint to avoid detection. Power can flow from state actors to non-state actors or the opposite, as when non-state actors induce state personnel to accept or bend certain rules. The process in which power is exercised involves a constant struggle among multiple actors, both state and non-state. The patterns of this struggle, the ways that power flows repetitively and how the flows change, are what we refer to as the state’s dynamics. The following conception of the state gives the tools to begin to capture those dynamics:6 The state is a field of power marked by the use and threat of violence and shaped by 1) the image of a coherent, controlling organization in a territory, which is a representation of the people bounded by that territory, and 2) the actual practices involving those staffing its multiple parts and those they engage in their roles as state officials.

A key to this conception is the lack of any necessary unity or coherence to the combination of state image and state practices. In fact, the two may run in opposite directions. While the image conveys a unitary state law in a given realm, practices may divulge diverse ways in which that ‘law’ is actually played out in the interaction between teacher and student, police officer and driver, tax collector and taxpayer. It is the ongoing relationship of image to practices, how they reinforce each other and how they undermine each other, which our conception seeks to capture. The struggle over power occurs in multiple sites, involving both state officials and others determined to press different demands on people. Pierre Bourdieu’s (1985) concept of field, what he terms relationships in a multi-dimensional space, encompasses those struggles. Within the field, the struggles involve efforts by state and non-state actors to have their rules, whether state law or some other implicit code, become the routine basis upon which people act. Indeed, a central part of state dynamics revolves around efforts by state actors to change the raw power of curbing people’s behaviour into a more stable, institutional form. This transformation is what Weber conceived as the move from power to ‘domination’.7 6

This definition developed during the meetings of the group that presents its results in this book. A slightly different version is presented in Migdal (2001: 16).

7

The difference comes clearly to the fore in Weber’s famous definitions of power and domination. Power (Macht), he says, ‘is the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his won will despite resistance’. Domination

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The extent to which a field actually becomes one of state domination varies considerably both within a country and from one state to another. In many cases, ‘the state’ is not the deeply institutionalized set of rules expressed in the standard image but rather a shaky field of power relations that are not much more than sheer coercion and brute force. Or the field may have a pattern in which institutionalized practices far different from those expressed in the image of the Law, practices often involving partnerships of state and non-state actors, are the basis for domination. The ongoing relation of image to practices provides the innovation in this conception of the state. This interaction is dynamic and departs from conceptions of the state that are static, which lead to the petrification of a defined object. The following paragraphs elaborate some of the components of this conception of the state. Many of these components can be found in the existing body of state theory, but they have been recontextualized into a process-oriented, dynamic conception of the state. The use and threat of violence have been part and parcel of practically all attempts to define the state. Weber emphasized the co-optation of those schooled in, and able to exercise, violence by an agent who then establishes a monopoly over the means and use of violence. Subsequently, Norbert Elias showed that this step was inextricably linked historically in Europe to the development of a monopoly of taxation. He also added the notion that the state’s monopoly of violence affected the psychic structures of the ruled, making them susceptible to domination (an oblique reference to the move from the practice of violence to the power of the image of the state). Subsequent state theories have also accepted the monopoly of violence as the necessary precondition for all other sorts of state activities. In the need to understand the state in terms of power, and particularly violence, the conception above does not differ from the emphasis of Weber, Elias, and others. The departure begins in the understanding that the exercise of power varies and is shaped by image and practices. Taking account of the different ways in which image and practices condition the flows of power will enable scholars to talk about a variety of states, including many present-day states that do not have anywhere near a monopoly of violence, no matter how hard their leaders have sought it. Image. State leaders have sought to unite officials under them to mould an image that has at least four characteristics: the state as singular, as supreme rulemaker, as separate or bounded, and as a representation. The image conveys the idea of the state as the dominant and single centre of authority (Shils 1975: 74). In the conception here, the image of the state is of a dominant, integrated, autonomous entity that controls, in a given territory, all rule-making, either directly through its (Herrschaft) ‘is the probability that a command with specific content will be obeyed by a given group of persons’. Domination refers to an already established hierarchy, to established rules, cf. Popitz (1986).

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own agencies or indirectly by sanctioning other authorized organizations, including businesses, families and clubs, to make certain circumscribed rules.8 The ability to harness and use violence certainly enhances the image and, conversely, the success of the image in taking hold of people’s imaginations shapes the ability to exercise power and use violence. In short, the image of the state is as the chief and appropriate rule-maker within its territorial boundaries. In that regard, it is a single entity that is fairly autonomous, unified, and centralized. The strength of this image of any given state as a coherent, controlling organization in today’s world derives, at least in part, from the global idea of statehood. The spread of this idea is historically rooted in the process of the ‘statization of the world’ (Reinhart, 1999), the outcome of European expansion.9 Be it via the direct colonial experience or by mimicking of occidental ideals, as in the case of Japan or Kemalist Turkey, political leaders adopted this image and tried to mould their relations to societies accordingly. The image of the state is also one of an entity that is clearly bounded. In this image, territorially, it is marked off from other states, and, within that territory, it is separated conceptually from the general population. Both the separation of the state from other states and from the general population has strong social implications, making that general population into something more than a collection of diverse peoples. They are united in this image into their own singular entity – society or the nation. The heterogeneous people within the boundaries claimed by the French state, then, become French society or the French nation. And they are made that because of their relationship to the French state. Thus, in the image of the state, the boundaries separating states from each other and state from society have strong social implications (Ruggie 1993). If, for example, state leaders are successful in imposing their image of the state, the state is not only separated, it is elevated. That is, the state as the representation of society distinguishes it from all other entities; other social forces in the image can signify only particular or parochial interests. The image portrays the state exclusively as the general representation of the commonality of the people. Indeed, the image of the state has been extraordinarily powerful throughout the world. Even in countries that have experienced long civil wars and violent internal struggle, the idea of statehood as a form of representation has seldom been dismissed. Even if large parts of the population have sought to quit a state they belong to, having rejected the state as a representation of them, the alternative is not statelessness but to build yet another state. The statization of minds has been so successful that no major political actor in the contemporary world has denied statehood as such, and only a few have aimed to redesign the current order of the world as one of states. 8

Weber writes, ‘The right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions or to individuals only to the extent to which the state permits it. The state is considered the sole source of the right to use violence’ (Weber 1964: 78). 9 On this term cf. Krippendorff (1986), Siegelberg (2000) and Luethy (1967).

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The notion of the state as representative contains a contradictory core. On one side, all over the world, state actors have clung to the idea that ‘national’ societies are contained within the territory that demarcates the boundaries of a world of states. The image of the state, as our conception notes, is of an organization that is a representation of the people bounded by the state’s territory. These national societies have appeared in the image as natural phenomena, which thus have had the effect of naturalizing, too, the state’s status as representation of such national societies. On the other side, leaders and followers alike have recognized that these leaders have actually found collections of people in their often arbitrary borders who have had little in common, not even a common language; that is, there is the absence of any ‘natural’ society. State leaders have sought to make the image of representation of society real by moulding the motley people of the territory into a single People, capable of singular representation. In this sense, state leaders have looked on ‘their’ societies as objects that need to be ‘developed’, controlled, supported, and contained. Foucault outlined the forms of these very broad projects when he introduced the concept of gouvernementalité for early modern European states. But other states, outside Europe, have developed such projects, as well. The idea of the developmental state is a case in point.10 Practices. While the image of the state has had a powerful hold on popular imagination, it alone has not defined the state or shaped the field of power. It has existed alongside practices, the second key shaping element of our conception.11 The routine performance of state actors and agencies, their day-in and day-out practices, may reinforce the image of the state or weaken it; they may bolster the notion of the territorial and public-private boundaries or neutralize them. Endless numbers of practices have bolstered the image that the territorial markers on maps are real and effective. State leaders have employed visas, passports, official maps, school textbooks, border markers, barbed wire and electronic fences, border police, armies, and more to mark off the territory that the state purports to govern. This list makes clear that the threat or use of violence has stood behind many of the state’s practices. In many others, though, the use of violence has been practically non-existent and even the threat of violence, remote. Bureaucrats, teachers, drivers of public busses, all act in the name of the state, reproducing its very boundaries generally without the use of violence or even the overt threat to employ it. Because the image of the state, in the end, is a symbol of the unity of what one might otherwise think of as thousands of disparate workers, agencies, and bureaus, it is not surprising that states employ rituals and ceremonies 10

Foucault’s text on governmentality is to be found in Burchell/ Graham/ Gordon/ Miller (1991: 87-104). On the debate on the developmental state and its historical timing and its global shaping cf. Schlichte (2000). 11 The term practices that became prominent in social theory with the writings of Michel de Certeau (1984) and Pierre Bourdieu (1985) refer to regularized patterns of action and behaviour. To put it in Weberian terms, practices encompass both social action and mere behaviour.

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to solidify that symbol. From the robes of the judge to the coronation of the king, ceremonies and rituals serve as practices to bolster the image of the singular state. Participation by the populace in such rituals, along with other daily behaviour by the people, can similarly buttress the image. But just as there are practices that have fortified the image of the state, others have weakened or neutralized that image. Even as state actors have tried to impose the boundaries separating the state from society or one state from another, they have encountered an endless array of ‘strategies and tactics’ (de Certeau 1984: xix) that have served to bend or to escape those boundaries. While the image has the state encroaching on the inner workings of society, actual practices can resist that encroachment. In addition, while some state actors themselves may employ practices that strengthen the image of the state, others may employ those that weaken the image; they may enter into partnerships with other state actors or nonstate actors that have the effect of ignoring the separation between state and society, private and public, state A and state B. The effects of these practices can be very far-reaching: The extreme case is the dissolution of the state, when people’s practices deny the state, ignore its rules, and contradict its aspirations. It is in this sense that Weber assessed the question of state decay: ‘Sociologically, a state ceases to exist when the chance is disappearing that particular forms of meaning-oriented actions occur’ (Weber 1988: 568). What remains then, however, is the image of the state – as a reference. What this conception of the state captures, allowing new theoretical lines to emerge, is precisely how the dynamics of states work. These dynamics are not restricted to deliberate policy by the state or nonstate actors, by any means. Indeed, a focus on official policy alone can be very misleading. Actual states have not simply been institutionalized as mirrors of the universal image of the state as singular, dominant, bounded, and representative. The forms of actual institutionalization – the way that power has been transformed into routinized patterns of domination – have derived from the interaction, and tension, between that image and everyday practices. It is to those dynamics that we now turn.

The State as a Process The dynamics of the state involve its changing image, its changing practices, and the changing relationship between them, as well as the effects of all these changes on the field of power that is the state. In this process social groups are transformed, including their goals, and, ultimately, the rules they are promoting. Like any other group or organization, the state, then, is constructed and re-constructed, invented and re-invented, through its interaction as a whole and of its parts with others. It is not a fixed entity; its organization, goals, means, partners, and operative rules change as it allies with and oppose others in and outside its territory. The goal of social scientists should not be to isolate a snapshot of the state and try to explain vectors that produced that static picture, a process that Elias called

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Zustandsreduktion;12 rather, they need to identify the contours of the ongoing process of change – the dynamics of the state. Elias suggested what he called the prozess-soziologische Methode, an orientation that takes the inner contradictions of social processes into account and acknowledges the change of the constituent elements (1977). The essays in this book reflect the move from static approaches to a conception that focuses on processes, the ongoing interactions of elements and the way they are mutually shaped and reshaped. This move requires some explanation. In this section, we will deal with practices that fortify and solidify the state image and those that are at odds with that image. By drawing on the evidence in the cases we will then sketch how these dynamics affect the very boundaries that circumscribe a state’s realm and on which it rests simultaneously. A Word on Processes Much has been made of the rigor of the methods used in rational-choice, empirical/quantitative, structural, and other fashionable approaches in the social sciences. But this rigor is as limiting as it is illuminating. The presentation of highly stylized pictures in which the action is frozen, in which one is presented with static independent variables in the context of other non-dynamic factors (such as fixed preferences or structures or institutional arrangements) bearing the weight of causality, places far too restrictive blinders on students of comparative domination and change. The point in putting the emphasis on process, on dynamics, is to avoid searching for one-way causality that starts at a key moment or some critical juncture. Existing methods popularly found in political economy, rational-choice, and structural analyses tend to overemphasize the explanatory power of independent variables. By fixing those variables in time, they ignore how the effects that they spawn may, in turn, transform them. Dealing with the question of how to explain the variety of outcomes of state-building, most studies try to trace what might be called the moment of original sin – the event or crossroads from which one can read back to the present to see how the current state of affairs came into being. Stories of the institutionalization of power in a territory do not end with the original sin or the critical juncture where there is the imposition of a powerful normative force; indeed, that is precisely where the most interesting part of the story often begins. Strong normative forces, leaders who have harnessed the means of violence, new institutions, a cataclysmic event such as war, all call into being resistance and struggle, cooperation and coalitions, that transform the original impulse and the actors themselves. The creation of any strong form of domination induces those subject to it, in the words of Robert Cover, ‘to submit, rejoice, struggle, pervert, mock, disgrace, humiliate, or dignify’ (Cover 1993: 100, 102). In 12

This statement comes from an interview that he gave in Amsterdam in 1969; cf. Goudsblom/Mennell (1998: 143).

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other words, the institutionalization of any field of power brings strong reactions, which transform those imposing power and those whose behaviour it aims to change. Existing understandings of rigor in social science may divert the observer from those continuing dynamics. Existing methods in social science, by seeking to explain the freeze-frame image in terms of a timeless configuration of independent variables also run the risk of losing the importance of history. Many scholars in social sciences, like Norbert Elias, have rightly insisted on the historicity of the objects of social sciences. It is only through the historical perspective with its varying time horizons, that the importance and ‘deepness’ of changes can be assessed, he argued. This view is shared by Jean-François Bayart (1996), who in his recent work introduced the term trajectoire, or ‘trajectory’, in order to come to terms with the historicity of societies and states. He felt that the historical dimension has been neglected in the study of non-European societies. States in Africa, Asia, and Latin America were not just ‘imported’ but have been the outcomes of complex interactions, of local dynamics in the course of the integration into the modern world system. States outside Europe have indigenous social roots, as well; they are anchored in the logic of their societies. Even colonial states were largely formed by these local forces and their interaction with the new European institutions. The colonial experience was not, as Bayart stresses, a history of mere submission. It was always simultaneously a story of alliances and collaboration, that is to say, of active involvement on the part of the colonized themselves.13 Furthermore, colonial and post-colonial states were built on longstanding traditions and practices, which themselves were historically formed. The ruptures, overthrows, and continuities of these regions have helped shape the contemporary forms of political domination. His concept of the trajectoire enables scholars to deal with the heterogeneity of states without falling back into the teleology of ‘developmentalism’, with its emphasis on the common outcomes of modern states. The emphasis on trajectory also allows for so-called external events to be endogenized into the analysis of state dynamics. In other words, such an approach treats outside forces as part of the mix of state and non-state actors participating in the local field of power, as ‘the external’ can only be seen and studied in the concrete context of the local. The sort of method advocated by Elias, Cover, and Bayart extends to the territorial dimensions of states. Social scientists have tended to treat the territorial configurations of states as constants in their inquiries, as nearly invariable and largely uncontested. They have been inclined to see world space as carved up into static blocs called states, which can periodically go through an eruptive change, as in the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but for long periods in between stay 13

Recent sociological work on practices in colonial states reinforced this point. A master example is Trutz von Trotha’s study on the colonial administration of German Togoland (1994) in which he shows how translators and ‘chiefs’, but also porters and servants could change their power as intermediaries between two worlds for the manipulation of the very fabric of the colonial state.

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constant. Ian Lustick (1993) was one of the first theorists in recent years to challenge this perspective, urging scholars to see states as entities with often fundamentally contested, changing boundaries. Lustick’s work has shown how dynamic even territorial borders are. But territorial lines are only the most obvious kind of boundaries that delineate the state. As the following paragraphs will sketch out, in the processes of state formation, all kinds of boundaries of the state are affected by the change of images and practices, including the lines between the legal and the illegal, the public and the private realm, the economy and the state, in addition to territorial borders. All of these are constantly moving; they are continually reconstructed. This is the state as a process. Direction I: Fortifying the Image of the State In any state, all sorts of factors fortify the state’s image. Files have the state's stamp, officials receive their salaries from the state’s budget, citizens have to apply for state licenses. All these actions serve to reproduce the state’s image. Historically, the semantics supporting the state image developed in the household of the ruler. Courtoisie is the first form of this state-symbolism, as Norbert Elias has shown in his sociological analysis of kingdoms (1969). In the historical development of bureaucratic rule, these semantics have developed into a fullfledged ‘raison d’Etat’ (Bourdieu 1997). They have been sustained by the interests of state employees and forged into texts by generations of jurists. The state has become part of the broader social landscape through numerous practices integrated into people’s daily lives. But these practices cannot account for the specific content of the image of the state. Why is the image of the state so particular, why did it become so prominent that some authors see the state as the ‘concomitant meaning of all operations that claim to be elements of the political system’ (Luhmann 1984: 627)? While the image of the state generically has derived from the development and spread of the European state to all corners of the world over a number of centuries, in any particular case, it has resulted, too, from deliberate actions by state leaders. These leaders have aimed to portray a particular picture by wrapping their power in a symbolic language. The symbolic language in any given case has drawn on existing sacred symbols and language and reconfigured them to bolster the image of the state. Terence O. Ranger and Eric Hobsbawm (1983) called this process the reinvention of tradition. Lions, eagles, Jerusalem, Masada, God, and countless other symbols have been incorporated into fortifying the image of the state. Those symbols have been woven into complex narratives about the meaning of the state, including the state’s representation of people’s identity. Leaders thus use symbols and narrative to strengthen the idea of the state as the incarnation of a collective fate. The symbolism and narratives have also been connected to the meaning of the state’s rule, or why it is proper – morally right – that it should determine the parameters of daily behaviour. In contemporary states, such meaning has included ideas of what its rule is about – justice, development, democracy, and

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the like. In foundational myths, ‘national’ histories have merged with the state as a political form, whose purpose is to ensure the realization and stability of collective achievements. Problems with these representations arise when the change of generations alters the relations between those who experienced the moments of revelation, as for example the victory in a war of independence, and new generations longing for their own redemption, something the state cannot deliver. The production of narratives and the manipulation of symbols take place in all sorts of state agencies. In accounting for the terrifying power of the German totalitarian state, Cassirer (1988) stressed its mythological side. To him, myths are symbolic forms that do not vanish with progressing modernity. In times of uncertainty, in deep social and political crises, modern societies have been susceptible to the mystification of their own functioning. A myth is a picture, as Cassirer puts it, a compression of feelings in picture-like symbols and, as such, it is a symbolic form like any other: A myth is a synthesis, implying a cosmology, introducing and justifying differences, as between the sacred and the profane. States and their agents have benefited from the legitimizing effects of myths. In some instances, such as Nazi Germany, this process involves the total mystification of the state, whose image derives almost exclusively from this complex of symbols and meanings, rather than from its everyday, utilitarian actions. In those systems, Cassirer points out, politicians play a dual set of roles: they need to be homo faber and homo magus. As homo faber, they need to operate as technicians devising dayto-day policies, but as homo magus they ‘employ magic’, preaching the new religion of the state and its reigning myth. The creation of rites and ceremonies is an integral part of attempts to mould the image of the state. Rites serve to illustrate and actualize myths. In his analysis of a day in the life of the then French President François Mitterand, the anthropologist Marc Abélès (1991) stressed the importance of such rites and ceremonies in the everyday life of states. The opening of new highways, speeches at particular occasions, and related sorts of ceremonies, all reinforce the state’s image and its claims. In rites, references to the past are combined with new procedures. State leaders try to enhance the state’s legitimacy by appropriating old, sacred references and put them to use in new contexts for their own ends. Rites and ceremonies anchor political domination in worlds of meaning allegedly handed down by earlier generations, emphasizing the longue durée of a society. These symbolic strategies also embrace the use of language. Since protean political acts are rather colorless, politicians use metaphor to integrate means and ends, values and aims, in making sense of every day life (Münkler 1994: 126). Metaphors render ‘the unillustrated illustrative, the polysemic unambiguous’. Metaphors, such as the ‘father of the nation’, the ‘land of the free and home of the brave’, the ‘land of the upright’, or the state as a ‘machine’, ‘organism’, ‘corporation’, or ‘institutionalized revolution’, all illustrate the ways language is used to bolster the image of states. All this is done to place the current political authority into a broader image, rooting it in the longstanding patterns of social life.

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Dynamics fortifying the image of the state involve, not only the effect of practices on the image itself, but the effect, as well, of the image on practices. The image of the state employing a unified and sacred Law, for example, affects (although not necessarily determines) everyday interactions of state officials and citizens. It establishes a common set of references of how to act, conduct business, behave in state offices, treat state personnel (for example, calling judges Your Honor), and more. The image reinforces those practices, moving the institutionalizing of the state towards a more centrally controlled, coherent organization. Foucault (1991: 103) probed the effect of practices on image at a time in which, he felt the coherence of the state image had been battered: But the state, no more probably today than at any other time in its history, does not have this unity, this individuality, this rigorous functionality, nor, to speak frankly, this importance; maybe, after all, the state is no more than a composite reality and a mythicized abstraction, whose importance is a lot more limited than many of us think. It is the tactics of government which make possible the continual definition and redefinition of what is within the competence of the state and what is not, the public versus the private, and so on; thus the state can only be understood in its survival and its limits on the basis of the general tactics of governmentality.

Direction II: Weakening the Image of the State While Foucault separates practices, or what he calls the tactics of governmentality, from image, he still tends to see such practices as reinforcing the state’s image. But practices may also work against the myths and perceptions that underlay the state’s image. Both state officials and the populace have motives and incentives to adopt and institutionalize practices that act to undermine the image of the state. Practices, in short, are often pitted against image. While the image of the state implies a singular morality, one standard way, indeed right way, of doing things, practices can denote multiple types of performance and, possibly, some contention over what is the right way to act. They do so precisely when change in other fields occurs that affects the possibilities or likelihood of continuing state practices; when new markets open up, for example, people who had previously obeyed customs regulations might switch to smuggling. Generally speaking, practices that deviate from the official image occur if modes of action that circumvent the states’ rules seem to be more promising and rewarding. This is what Michel de Certeau intended to show when he wrote about the development of ‘tactics and strategies’ that ‘bend’ or ignore the rules. He notes that these challenges are true even for the poorest and weakest groups in society: Innumerable ways of playing and foiling the other’s game (in our case, the state’s “game”), that is, the space instituted by others, characterize the subtle, stubborn,

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resistant activity of groups which, since they lack their own space, have to get along in a network of already established forces and representations (de Certeau 1984: 18).

These challenges to those practices consonant with the image of the state come not only from the dispossessed but from powerful elements, quietly or loudly championing alternative practices. Strong groups in society and well-placed individuals in the state institutionalize new networks, coalitions, alliances, and partnerships that produce alternative sets of practices, ones that defy the existing territorial boundaries of the state as well as the barrier between state and society, private and public, and legal and illegal. State agencies and bureaus are transformed from their use as envisaged in the image of the state to ‘tools manipulated by users’, in de Certeau’s terms, by institutionalizing very different ways of doing things. A wide variety of alternative sets of rules (many little laws as opposed to one big Law) may challenge the state’s own official laws and regulations. The alliances, coalitions, or networks associated with these many laws have neutralized the sharp territorial and social boundaries that the official portrayal of the state has acted to establish, as well as the sharp demarcation between the state as preeminent rule-maker and society as the recipient of those rules. Such fragmentation of practices may occur even at the very core of the state. State officials may act in total conformity with the self-image of the state as a coherent agency at one moment and switch in the next instance to follow quite different imperatives. How can one understand the appearance of multiple sets of practices, many of which may be at odds with the dictates of the image (and morality) of the state? The sheer unwieldy character of states’ far-flung parts, the many fronts on which they fight battles with groupings with conflicting standards of behaviour, and the lure for their officials of alternative sets of rules that might, for example, empower or enrich them personally or privilege the group to which they are most loyal, all have led to diverse practices by states’ parts or fragments. Practices that are not in accordance with the standard image of the state are not simply deviations from normative – good – behaviour as set out in state codes. They are moral codes in their own right, contending with that expressed in the state’s image for predominance in recruitment of officials into state offices, distribution of state resources, discretion in the application of regulations, and more. What may be easily labelled as corruption or criminality, such as nepotism or smuggling, can also be looked at as a code of morality favoring kinship ties over meritocracy or one expressing the right of movement of people and goods across borders arbitrarily-imposed by state law.14 In contexts where the benefit of obeying or following the state’s legal order is not obvious, it might even be more rational to follow the rules of the ‘economy of affection’, as Göran Hyden has shown (1983) in regard to peasant families’ market behaviour in Africa. 14

‘Instead of treating corruption as a dysfunctional aspect of state organizations, I see it as a mechanism through which the state itself is discursively constituted’ (Gupta 1995: 376).

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There are, then, several ways to explain why practices do not always follow the state’s image. Rationality of alternatives is one: as long as the state has less to offer and other agencies are stronger or more efficient in the distribution of certain goods or services, it could be self-defeating, even suicidal, to act in accordance with state laws instead of obeying other moral codes. In favellas, bidonvilles, and other marginal areas, crime prosecution by state agencies is often not efficient. Protection from theft and robbery is then frequently organized by other social mechanisms, and any member of the society must pay attention to the moral codes that circumscribe the realm of these agencies. Here, it is the orientation of outcomes that is the reason for the success of practices that contradict the state’s rules. But not all of these moral codes that challenge the state are of-the-moment instrumental responses to everyday problems, and not all of them are induced by orientations toward outcomes. In almost any state, some groups contest the state's legitimacy to deal with particular issues due to differences in ‘values': abortion, the right to have guns, the use of violence in families, the use of languages or customs and religious rites are cases where widespread anti-state attitudes with old historical roots can result in practices that come into conflict with state regulations. Practices in which Weber’s value rationality (Wertrationalität) is of crucial importance regularly can generate severe political conflicts as they cut to the very core of the state’s image: its idea of supremacy. The traditional legitimacy of older customary or religious-based rules might lead to fierce resistance against state policies and regulations.

State Dynamics and the Reconfiguration of Space and Time: The Importance of Boundaries in the Dynamics between Image and Practice While the image of the modern state took hold across the globe by the second half of the twentieth century, it has varied in its hold on people’s imaginations. Changes in the state image due to local or global events may also affect everyday practices, especially which practices state actors choose and with whom they engage. When the state does not take hold in people’s imaginations as representative, moral, and coordinated, it opens the door for practices institutionalizing differently based relations in society and between state and non-state actors from those prescribed by state Law. Also, the decay of state institutions can induce a series of selfreinforcing practices undermining the state’s image. Thus a massive capital flight induced by the wealthy can lead others to engage in tax evasion. These selfreinforcing processes can lead to a total collapse of public authority. It is, however, remarkable – and an indication of the strength of the dominant state image in today’s world – that out of these situations states can often re-emerge very quickly. François Prkic sketches in his contribution in this volume how the ‘phoenix state’ of Liberia arose from civil war after the total decay of the former state.

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Whenever those dramatic political changes occur, as in the case of the breakdown of public authority in Liberia or Somalia, the fluid and provisional character of statehood becomes apparent. As eternal and massive as the state seems to be in the standard image, the actual field of power can have very different lines from those implied by that image. These lines include not only territorial boundaries but other social boundaries, as well. The cases in this volume attest to the different way in which such boundaries configure the field of power. Public and private. Of fundamental importance for the idea of the modern state, especially the liberal state is the line between public and private. According to this idea, there is a divide between social realms in which the state as an ‘official authority’ has the right to intervene and a private realm that is subject to the regulation by individuals or non-state agencies. The divide is so prominent that, in some parts of Western experience, ‘“public” became...synonymous with “statal”’ (Habermas 1962: 33). It is no news that the line between private and public is moving, porous, and crooked. But the ubiquity of the Western image of the state tends to obscure how and when this line is formed or dissolved and how those processes may differ from Western case. These are some of the questions raised by Jean-Louis Rocca in his contribution to this volume. He suggests that the processes of formation and of negation of the public-private divide can differ enormously. In the People's Republic of China, the formation of both state and society occurred without the prior emergence of a bourgeois private sphere that separated itself from the state – the conception of the creation of the public-private divide most commonly found in existing theories (cf. Ariès 1991). In China, the crystallization of the line between public and private has been the result of interlacing causal relations: of the socialization of the state and the statization of society. More attention to these kinds of processes could help to reveal the factors shaping the modes of rule in sub-Saharan Africa. The term ‘neo-patrimonialism’ was perhaps the theoretically strongest and empirically most grounded characterizing post-colonial African states. It rightly ignores the distinctions between public and private, state revenues and a ruler’s private funds, public policy and family affairs (cf. Médard 1991; Eisenstadt 1973). But the term alone does not offer any insight in the dynamics that have led to this form, nor does it tell much about contemporary changes. In order to advance the understanding of these processes, one needs to look more carefully at the processes underlying the relationship between image and practices. Space. In the rush to understand states in institutional terms, it is important to remember Weber’s cautionary note that a central dimension of the state is territory (Weber 1985: 713). The dynamics of image and practices affect the organization of territory or space and thus the way a field of power is institutionalized. In dealing with territory, it is important to treat it 1) as variable and 2) as social in character (not simply physical). The common idea of political territorial borders separating spaces of control, or what we call fields of power, by different states is augmented by the common

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notion that those states somehow embody the people inside their lines; this is what we referred to as representation in our conception of the state. Representation means that the state speaks for, reflects, and grows out of the population of the territory; the state is the unified expression of the diverse people inhabiting the territory. The underlying assumption here is that the people are connected in some fundamental way that allows their common representation. Everyday speech, common prejudices, and journalistic language reflect this notion of the relatedness of people of a country to one another. So, too, do major international institutions, such as the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and countless others. Such representation signifies that territorial boundaries serve both as the physical limits of state control and the social circumscribing of a connected people. In some instances, state leaders seek to amend that physical and social limitation of the state. Prime Minister Shimon Peres of Israel, for example, claimed that the state of Israel is a representation both of the population within its boundaries and of Jews, no matter where they might be located. But the need to state this exception affirms the general rule. It is the notion of representation that makes territorial boundaries a social, not just physical, phenomenon. As social artifacts, then, territorial boundaries are ‘real’ only as long as they are observed, that is, accepted through social practice. Powerful states might be able to enforce this observance, as in the placing of border posts or engaging in aerial surveillance along the border. But territorial boundaries must exist, too, in the state’s image – in the imagination of people inside and outside those boundaries. In the state’s image, boundaries are lines that can stem and regulate the flow of ideas, goods, and people. Clandestine migration and smuggling are practices circumventing the rigidities of territorial boundaries that claim to delineate political space. These movements, then, may, in one sense, deny the existence of boundaries, rather than confirm them, by promoting movement where borders are supposed to restrict it and, in a different sense, actually confirm those borders by slipping a bribe to a state border official or resorting to moving stealthily in the night. Estimates of unrecorded and unregulated trade between Niger and Nigeria range up to 80 per cent of the total volume of commercial exchange between these countries.15 Migration across state borders, legally and illegally, creates spaces of collective perceptions, that is, boundaries that do not coincide with the political world order so dear to school book maps. Diasporas, commercial réseaux, networks of political exile groups, the army of employees of international organizations and NGOs, smugglers, do not necessarily conceive their environment as ordered according to the principle of territoriality set out in the state’s image. Other orderings of world space might be more relevant to them, ones independent of the official idea of territorial statehood. The state’s image of territoriality is, then, just one way of conceiving space and, perhaps, not always the most important one. 15

On these and other examples of the African contexts cf. Roitman (1998) and MacGaffey et al. (1991).

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Precisely because territoriality became such an integral part of the idea of modern statehood, violations of boundaries and territorial disputes have remained high on the agenda of international relations, leading to high costs both in political efforts and human lives. As the example of the dispute between India and Pakistan concerning Jammu and Kashmir shows, territorial lines are value-laden, as they are not simply seen as administrative distinctions but as spatial expressions of ‘bigger’ claims. The example, dealt with in Boris Wilke’s contribution, also indicates that despite the general impression that during the Cold War few international boundaries changed, change actually was tremendous. Not only was there the demise of the colonial empires and the resultant new mapping but small movements and arrangements occurred all the time. The principle of state territoriality itself, however, was never openly contested. In this regard, the image of the state once again proved to be quite durable, but the existence of contending practices quietly subverted and transformed that image. Time. Territorial boundaries are meant to delineate the state in terms of space. The character of space is what Kant called a form of ‘internal intuition’ (Anschauungsform). And it is the most common way that people commonly conceive of states. But another form of internal intuition exists, as well, that of time. States also create ‘temporal boundaries’ and internal temporal orders. Public holidays, work times, school times, office hours, schedules of public transportation, maximum hours for a workday, maternal leave, all these temporal boundaries are part of the fabric of the state and its image as the supreme rule maker. State law sanctions age limits, the calendar that is used, tax days, and much more and it determines the insertion of national time-orders into the global one (and vice-versa). In some instances, temporal orders are even enforced with violent means, as in cases of military desertion or school truancy. These temporal boundaries are crucial components of the image of the state and, like other parts of the image, may be bolstered or diluted through practices. Work time restrictions and permissible shopping hours become political issues in which the state’s competence to rule is challenged. As in the case of territoriality as a political codification of space, the image of the state presents a synchronization of social life. The very idea of the developmental state16 connects the image of the particular state with a project of social change according to the broader image formed in the West. The task of state agents, according to the image, is to synchronize all parts of the society and to accelerate change. And, as in the case of spatial control, state successes in this regard are highly dependent on the degree of monetarization and capitalization of society. The intensification of interaction in a bourgeois society necessitates the conceptualization of time as linear and organizable (cf. Maier 1987: 164). In modern times, the task to organize these temporalities and to put through these orders even in the face of resistance by customary and traditional practices (what we might call the little laws) was assigned to state officials. Even 16

On the history of this conception see Cumings (1999).

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states existing in an environment of well-entrenched alternative practices have managed to exert a huge influence on the temporality of societies. As Schlichte’s contribution on Uganda and Wilke’s on Pakistan demonstrate, state leaders decide about the times of peace and the times of exception when rules are suspended, and when the state grants itself a period of ‘unruled’ rule. However, in a globalized world, temporal orders and political rhythms tend to be internationally homogenized. This synchronization of time across state boundaries applies to the scheduling of elections as well as to the rhythms of accounting in public finance and national statistics. States are inserted into a ‘world time’ (Laidi, 1998), with its chains of events that create meanings of ‘eras’, such as the ‘age of revolution’ and ‘the 1960s’. The achievements of ‘development’ and the timing of ‘democratization’ are measured in international comparisons. These international orderings of time constrain the options of states if they do not want to lose international recognition and support. Another temporality of states can be seen in their representation as entities with histories. ‘Spaces of experiences’ (Erfahrungsräume) and ‘horizons of expectations’ (Erwartungshorizonte) (Koselleck 1989: 349) become intertwined in the state. In countries which experienced civil wars, such as Liberia and Uganda, the entire political debate has revolved around ‘lessons’ from the tumultuous past of the country and how to avoid the repetition of war and predatory rule. It is widely seen as the state’s task to order society in this way. In this regard, the image of the state might be totally accepted even if numerous other practices display fierce resistance against the state’s attempts to intrude upon society. The relations between the temporalities of individual lifetimes and state orders, between historical experiences and future options, might be as contradictory and complex as the different attitudes toward the ordering of space that result in practices that either strengthen or weaken the image of the state. State and Society. The image of a boundary between the public and the private realm separates the state from other non-state, or private, actors and social forces. Weber noted that the separation of public and private – he was looking particularly at public and private law – is a hallmark of the modern, bureaucratized state. The conceptual separation of public and private law presupposes the conceptual separation of the state ‘as abstract bearer of sovereign prerogatives and the creator of legal norms, from all personal authorizations of individuals’ (Weber 1968: 239). But the practices of the state can affect the efficacy of this boundary, even among so-called modern, developed states. The line between state and society is constantly reshaped, in words and in deeds. Very often, the reshaping of this boundary starts with practices that ignore the official boundary. Examples of such practices neutralizing or reconfiguring boundaries associated with the image of the state can be found in the contribution of Béatrice Hibou. The way in which so-called corruption and trafficking are controlled and allowed in Morocco, she argues, is just an indication of the state’s malleability. It should not be inferred from an increase of informal, extra-legal activities that the state is necessarily in retreat or that it is a so-called ‘failed state’.

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Indeed, leaders and other officials may use these extra-legal practices to solidify their control, employing socially familiar types of behaviour to bolster political domination, rather than the above-board means associated with the image of the state. What is somewhat euphemistically called then ‘privatisation of the state’ (Hibou 1999) need not be a loss of domination by political leaders nor need such states be thought of as failed; it may simply imply practices suggesting a different mode of governing. These practices may bolster state domination at the same time that they run counter to the prevailing image of the state. They could also be just a change in mode of government. This is not to say that the results are unproblematic. The delegation of power to intermediaries, the resurgence of practices such as tax-farming, and the growth of private security arrangements, all render it difficult to say where the line between the state and its societal environment actually runs. It almost seems as if the constant movement of the line and the uncertainty that is connected with it can themselves constitute a mode of rule (cf. Chabal/Daloz 1998). Law. As with state/society and public/private, a similar dichotomy on which the state’s image is built upon is legal/illegal. Law involves the creation of sanctions, structuring society in a way that non-state actors’ engagement with the state and with each other reinforces the image of the state; in this way too, law stabilizes power relations, creating institutionalized domination. Popular morality is always in tension with state law, even though all that state law, to some degree, is built on and integrates such morality, especially in common law systems. In Hegel’s terms, morality (Moralität), as opposed to the reflected form of ethical life (Sittlichkeit), is epitomized in the Law. The imposition of the state’s legal system is therefore always to some extent challenged by competing sets of everyday moral rules. This tension is not only found in social movements against particular state policies, it can also be found in strategies of state officials themselves, who might put their particular understanding of the purpose and opportunities of their position above the formal rules of the state. The reshaping of the boundary between the legal and the illegal can affect the use of violence, what Weber saw as the sine qua non of the ideal-typical state. The privatization of violence in post-Soviet Russia is telling in this regard. Here, too, lines are fluid and moving. Racketeer groups of criminal origin as well as security companies built up by former state security personnel overtook essential state functions, as the enforcement of contracts between business partners and the protection from other racketeers could no longer be guaranteed by the state. The movement of boundaries has been considerable: First, the state accepted, at least tacitly, the formation of these competing associations, thus withdrawing from certain areas and allowing forms of organization to evolve and to operate that were formerly considered illegal. Second, some of these gangster-like racketeer groups transformed into investing companies that are also active in the political arena by supporting particular politicians (Volkov 2000). To some extent, one could argue, the former pretence of monopolization of violence has become undone; the former

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criminal gang has become a recognized, if not necessarily legal, entity, not clearly distinguishable from the state. The state and its interior. Most of the boundaries above refer to dualities; they demarcate a distinction between the state and something else. The movement of boundaries that result from the tension between the image of the state and actual practices can also affect the inner logic of the state. As any analysis of a coup d’état makes clear, the relation, for example, between the civilian and the military part of the state is also moving. Power struggles within the state are ubiquitous. Partly, the reason for the continuing reconfiguration of the state itself stems from divergent ideas of how to mould a state; partly, from changing alliances of state agents with agents of other societal groups and associations. The military is certainly the institution that – due to its relatively closed character – is most prone to the development of a particular esprit de corps, which both encompasses the image of the state in general and the particular role of the military therein. But, as Tom Lewis’s contribution clearly shows, jurists too tend to develop their own understanding of what the state should be and do. The effects of these struggles among the agencies of a state can hardly be overestimated. Also, the dynamic at work in Lewis’s case of the ‘judicialization of politics’ in Mexico should not be reduced simply to internal or domestic changes. International political pressure, professional ideas obtained during studies abroad, the spread of knowledge about developments elsewhere, all these contribute to a closer relation between local events and the rhetoric and keywords of global agendas. Numerous agencies straddle state boundaries; their strategies and worldviews stem from intermingled traditions and experiences that are not constituted within single ‘national’ realms.

State Formation in an International Space State dynamics, in any given case, stem from the interaction of state officials with societal forces, as political and social actors try to shape the field of power. But these domestic actors are not the only ones in this process. International actors play a significant role, too, in these fields of power, interacting with various state and societal forces, and thus helping shape the field of power and state dynamics. As in European history, where international forces contributed to state formation – and state decay – states in the twentieth century were formed in an environment replete with interventionist global forces, as are states in the twenty-first. The three primary waves of state creation in the twentieth century – following World War I, World War II, and the collapse of the Soviet Union – all involved intense international involvement in the shaping of relations between the new states and their societies. Leaders of new states that were born in the wake of the crumbling of empires in World War I or the disintegration of colonial empires after World War II were profoundly aware of the uncertain environment into which these states emerged and how attentive they had to be to intrusive international

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factors. They faced not only avaricious neighbours, but new international agencies, corporations, and other transnational forces that impinged on their everyday decisions. In the 1990s, these mostly still-fragile states and new ones that emerged in southeastern Europe, central Asia, and elsewhere encountered a now even more complex international environment, as Western powers and international organizations were more likely than ever to intervene directly in these states. Moreover, the stability of borders that marked the Cold War, at least after the disintegration of the colonial empires, gave way to a period in which states, such as Yugoslavia, simply disappeared and others, such as Liberia, became playgrounds for multiple outside armies. Also, ‘state-building’ and ‘nation-building’ came to be explicit goals of Western powers, although the actual experiences in attempting to change state dynamics and state-society relations usually ended badly. A number of cases of international intervention, such as Bosnia or Kosovo, have produced what some authors label as ‘protectorates’ (Pugh 2003). In other instances, such as Mozambique or Uganda, the weaving of practices by local societies, governments, and international agencies has produced settings far from the image of the state as a coherent, unified actor. International financial institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, have fashioned the general direction of economic policy. At the same time, bilateral donors engaged in conditional lending, moulding still other fields of policy. And a gaggle of non-state agencies and private companies has assumed everyday functions, including education and health, which were considered state activities in the standard image of the state.17 The sheer numbers of international actors involved in the local field of power have affected state dynamics and the relationship of states to their societies. Beyond the numbers, these international forces have introduced their own interests and goals into the mix, making state-society relations increasingly complex. Whether those interests have been narrowly defined or have involved grand international visions, such as ‘peace’ and ‘development’, they have provided an endless source of motivation for international actors to continue participating in local fields of power, deeply affecting state formation. There is always something for international actors to fix, always a plan that the international community should contribute something to, and always something that goes wrong and needs fixing through further intervention and programs. Global discourses on development, democratization, human rights, peace and more have become the code for institutionalized involvement of all kinds of externally-rooted agencies that shape states on all continents. This involvement places international forces squarely into the complex shaping of relations between states and their societies. This mix of powerful forces is not only problematic for domestic actors; it can lead outside states and agencies into difficult areas, as well. International actors have come to be caught in a moral vice 17

See also Chapter 7 on Uganda in this volume.

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as states ‘expropriate’, in Weber’s terms, functions from other social groups, as they ‘break the hold of existing groups’, often through the use or threat of violence (Ottaway 2002: 1015). Outside powers and agencies have often aimed to help institutionalize states in some conflict-free manner but end up in the midst of violent internal battles or repressive state practices. Some sorts of outside intervention, from full-scale invasion to ‘peace-keeping’, involve violence. But even forms of intervention that appear totally peaceful and benign may involve the international force in violence. Various forms of social engineering, at the heart of so many examples of intervention, come to be connected to the local dynamics of violence. As outsiders, international actors find it extremely difficult to gain legitimacy in the local setting and discover that, as they become associated with the violence of the state, that gaining local acceptance becomes nearly impossible. Violent means need a much longer time to be transformed into legitimate rule, because violence creates resentments that are not easy to overcome. The long shadow of coercive colonial rule that made it so hard for post-colonial states to gain legitimacy (cf. Mbembe 2000) confirms this experience. In short, the complexity of local state dynamics, the addition of international agencies’ (and their workers’) own interests into the mix and the difficulty for outsiders of achieving broad acceptance as they ally with states using violence all speak to the near impossibility of international intervention actually achieving the stated goals. The image of what the local state should be might survive, but international actors may only widen the gap between that image and actual practices. Together with domestic state and social forces, these outsiders internationalize state formation and contribute to the shaping of states that are far from what these outsiders imagined they would be.

Conclusion: Towards a New International Political Sociology There are no indications that the state as a political form will vanish soon. Popular discourse will continue to portray the world map as, first and foremost, divided into territorial states. In fact, the image of the state in popular imagination may be at an all time high, certainly much more pervasive and persistent than many recent scholarly works have suggested. This volume insists on keeping the state at the centre of academic debates, as well. Beyond that simple but important message, the articles that follow also point to the adaptability of states, their diversity, and their persistence at a time that scholarly work has either schematized the state or pushed it to the margins in the face of globalization. The approach presented here prompts researchers to broaden their view, without a priori excluding relevant phenomena, to include processes that shape the actual forms of statehood. By contrasting image and practices, it is now possible to take the particularity of singular processes (Bayart’s trajectoires) into account without falling into the traps of historical or cultural relativism.

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The view presented here also leaves room for a fruitful variety of interpretations. As it turns out, many elements that first look like parts of a story of state decay and disintegration may actually be part of processes that lead to a reconfiguration of state domination. The states, as well as their surroundings, are replete with ambiguities. But it is possible to discern the meaning of these ambiguous turns of events only if the view of the state is not prefigured by an orientation towards the Western experience and its stylized image of Weber’s legal-rational rule by a centralized, bureaucratic state. The vectors of forces that shape contemporary states cannot fully be revealed through the system of coordinates that previous understandings of the state employed. The proposed conception should also allow scholars to see common metaphors associated with today’s states – privatization, criminalization, democratization, shadow state, state collapse, and others – in a different light. First, the emphasis on a field of power in our conception avoids the static character of political theories and approaches that too often forget or neglect the conflictual character of political relations within and around the state. Second, our differentiation between image and practices facilitates bringing the ambiguities and contradictions of state domination to the fore. For example, it is possible that the image of the state can persist through long periods in which practices contradict that image. Most observers would call that ‘state decay’. But the very same practices that seemingly subvert the image of the state can be incorporated into the state’s institutions and its overall pattern of domination. The conception of the state used here grew out of the discussions among the authors in this volume; not surprisingly, then, it fits the cases in the book, mostly from non-OECD regions, quite well. The conception, however, should work for contemporary Western states, as well. In the West, too, states have been experiencing tremendous change. Programs of privatization; the reshaping of social security systems; the ‘décharge’ of the state in the field of policing; the administration of prisons by private, barely regulated firms; and other recent phenomena, all suggest that there is a yawning gap between the image of the state and the actual practices in the West. The gap might differ in kind and magnitude from the cases presented here, but the gap is real. In Western states, too, boundaries between legal and illegal, public and private, state and society are unstable and moving. As in our cases, these spheres are constantly reconstructed. Indeed, it would be fascinating to compare some Western cases with others, something that is rarely done. One conclusion from such comparisons might well be that the differences of context and of forms do not allow all-encompassing assertions about the future of statehood – the forms of domination, the persistence of states, the nature of the dynamics between image and practice. A second possible conclusion is that the main lines of the future of states, of the image and of the practices, may not easily be determined because the differences of constellations are simply too big. Third, such comparisons are necessary to gain some purchase on changes in the image of the state. Unlike practices, the prevailing image of the state is fairly constant from state to state; the image is not

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simply dependent on local practice but has a world-historical context. By comparing the events in the West, such as the growth of the European Union, with those elsewhere, such as the breakdown of personal security in parts of West Africa, it is possible to begin to understand how the image of the state is changing globally. To be sure, state image changes far more slowly than do state practices, but the combination of local and global practices certainly does change the image of the state across the globe. The approach here, then, does not discount the importance of global phenomena and globalization; rather it insists on seeing the dynamics of states as key elements in understanding new global processes. The growing importance of allegiances that straddle state boundaries (cf. Badie/Birnbaum 1994) and the spread of organizational forms that are all too easily summarized as ‘global civil society’ need to be understood much better in order to assess the future developments of state domination. These new international forms of political organization do not necessarily stand in contradiction with the form of statehood. Exiled groups still mobilize for support of political projects that concern states, even if these states exist, as in the case of Kurds, only in people’s imagination. Networks of families that live in different countries or even continents use the differences between states, in terms of services, opportunities, and rights available, in order to maximize their security, wealth and income – just as multinational corporations do. But the activities of both multinational families and corporations need not undermine states. Their practices, rather, often are incorporated into the field of power that makes up the state, producing new forms of state domination. The approach suggested here, we hope, opens multiple new avenues for research. A new political sociology of the state needs to focus on the multiplicity of state forms and begin to categorize them. It has to take account of the dynamic between image and particular practices, especially those that run counter to the world image of the state. The new political sociology, too, must not be bound by the state territorial boundaries printed on world political maps; it must be an international political sociology that accounts for transnational, regional, and global practices and their impact both on local state dynamics and on the prevailing world image of what states are.

References Abélès, Marc (1991), Anthropologie de l’Etat, Paris. Amin, Samir (1976), Unequal Development, Sussex. Apter, David E. (1965), The politics of modernization, Chicago. Ariès, Philippe (1991), ‘Einleitung zu einer Geschichte des privaten Lebens’, in Ariès, Ph. / Duby, Georges (eds) Geschichte des privaten Lebens, Bd. 3, Von der Renaissance zur Aufklärung, Frankfurt am Main, pp. 7–20. Badie, Bertrand / Birnbaum, Pierre (1994), ‘Sociology of the state revisited’, in International Social Science Journal, vol. 46(2), pp. 153–167.

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Bayart, Jean-François (1996), ‘L’historicité de l’Etat importé’, in Bayart (ed.) 1996 La greffe de l’Etat, Les trajectoires du politique, no. 2, Paris, pp. 11–39. Bourdieu, Pierre (1985), ‘The Social Space and the Genesis of Groups’, in Theory and Society, vol. 14(6), pp. 723–744. Bourdieu, Pierre (1997), ‘De la maison du roi à la raison d’Etat’, in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, no. 118, June 1997, pp. 55–68. Burchell, Graham / Gordon, Colin / Miller, Peter (eds) (1991), The Foucault Effect. Studies in Governmentality, Chicago. Cassirer, Ernst (1988), Der Mythos des Staates. Philosophische Grundlagen politischen Verhaltens, (first ed. 1944, New York), Frankfurt am Main. Certeau, Michel de (1984), The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley. Chabal, Patrick / Daloz, Jean-Pascal (1998), Africa Works. Disorder as Political Instrument, London. Chirot, Daniel (1997), Essential outsiders: Chinese and Jews in the modern transformation of Southeast Asia and Central Europe, Seattle. Cover, Robert (1993), ‘Nomos and Narrative’, in Martha Minow, Michael Ryan, and Sutin Srat, (eds), Narrative Violence and the Law: The Essays of Robert Cover, Ann Arbor. Cramer, Christopher / Goodhand, Jonathan (2002), ‘Try Again, Fail Again, Fail Better? War, the State, and the “Post-Conflict” Challenge in Afghanistan’, in Development and Change, vol. 33(5), pp. 885–909. Cumings, Bruce (1999), ‘Webs with no Spiders, Spiders with No Webs: The Genealogy of the Developmental State’, in Woo-Cummings, Meredith (ed.) The Developmental State, Ithaca, New York, pp. 61–92. Dunn, John (1995), Contemporary Crisis of the Nation State?, Cambridge, Mass. Eisenstadt, S.N. (1973), ‘Traditional patrimonialism and modern neopatrimonialism’, Sage Research Paper, Beverly Hills and London. Elias, Norbert (1969), ‘Die höfische Gesellschaft: Untersuchungen zur Soziologie des Königtums und der höfischen Aristokratie’, Darmstadt. Elias, Norbert (1977), ‘Zur Grundlegung einer Theorie sozialer Prozesse’, in Zeitschrift für Soziologie, vol. 6(2), pp. 127–149. Evans, Peter B. (1979), Dependent Development: The Alliance of Multinational, State, and Local Capital in Brazil, New York. Evans, Peter B. (1995), Embedded Autonomy. States and Industrial Transformation, Princeton. Evans, Peter B. / Rauch, James E. (1999), ‘Bureaucracy and growth: A crossnational analysis of the effects of “Weberian” state structures on economic growth’, in American Sociological Review, vol. 64(3), pp. 748–765. Evans, Peter B. /Rueschemeyer, Dietrich / Skocpol, Theda (eds) (1985), Bringing the State Back In, Cambridge. Fernandes, Lela (1997), Producing Workers: The Politics of Gender, Class, and Culture in the Calcutta Jute Mills, Philadelphia, Penn. Foucault, Michel (1991), On Governmentality, in Burchell et al. (eds), pp. 32–119.

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Frank, André Gunder (1967), ‘Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America’, New York. Goudsblom, Johan / Mennell, Stephen (eds) (1998), The Norbert Elias Reader, Oxford. Gupta, Akhil (1995), ‘Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State’, in American Ethnologist, vol. 22(2), pp. 375–402. Habermas, Jürgen (1962), Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft, Darmstadt. Hibou, Béatrice (ed.) (1999), La privatisation des Etats, Paris. Huntington, Samuel P. (1968), Political Order in Changing Societies, New Haven, Conn. Hobsbawm, Eric J. / Ranger, Terence O. (eds) (1983), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge. Hyden, Göran (1983), No Shortcuts to Progress. African Development Management in Perspective, Berkeley. Jellinek, Georg (1920), Allgemeine Staatslehre, 3rd ed., Berlin. Koselleck, Reinhardt (1989), Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten, Frankfurt am Main. Krasner, Stephen D. (1999), Sovereignty. Organized Hypocrisy, Princeton NJ. Krippendorff, Ekkehart (1986), Internationale Politik. Geschichte und Theorie, Frankfurt am Main. Laidi, Zaki (1998), ‘Le temps mondial’, in Marie-Claude Smouts (ed.) Les nouvelles relations internationales. Pratiques et théories, Paris, pp. 183–202. Lerner, Daniel (1958), The Passing of Traditional Society. Modernizing the Middle East, New York. Luhmann, Niklas (1984), Soziale Systeme. Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie, Frankfurt am Main. Lustick, Ian S. (1993), Unsettled States, Disputed Lands. Britain and Ireland, France and Algeria, Israel and the West Bank-Gaza, Ithaca, New York. Lüthy, Herbert (1967), ‘Die Epoche der Kolonisation und die Erschließung der Erde. Versuch einer Interpretation des europäischen Zeitalters’, in Herbert Lüthy, In Gegenwart der Geschichte. Historische Essays, Cologne, pp. 179– 270. MacGaffey, Janet et al. (1991), The Real Economy of Zaire. The Contributions of Smuggling and Other Unofficial Activities to National Wealth, Philadelphia, Penn. Maier, Charles (1987), ‘The politics of time: changing paradigms of collective time and private time in the modern era’, in C.S. Maier (ed.) Changing boundaries of the political, Cambridge, pp. 151–175. Mbembe, Achille (2000), De la postcolonie. Essai sur l’imagination politique dans l’Afrique contemporaine, Paris.

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Médard, Jean-François (1991), ‘Etatisation et désétatisation en Afrique noire’, in Médard (ed.) Etats d’Afrique noire, Formations, mécanismes et crise, Paris, pp. 323–354. Meyer, John / Hannan, Michael T. (1979), National Development in the World System: Educational, Economic, and Political Change, 1950–1970, Chicago. Migdal, Joel S. (2001), State in Society. Studying How States and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another, Cambridge, Mass. Modelski, George (1987), Long Cycles in World Politics, Seattle. Münkler, Herfried (1994), Politische Bilder, Politik der Metaphern, Frankfurt am Main. North, Douglass C. (1981), Structure and Change in Economic History, New York. Ottaway, Marina (2002), ‘Rebuilding State Institutions in Collapsed States’, in Development and Change, vol. 33(5), pp. 1001–1023. Popitz, Heinrich (1986), Phänomene der Macht. Autorität - Herrschaft - Gewalt Technik, Tübingen. Pugh, Michael (2003), ‘Protectorates and spoils of peace: political economy in south-east Europe’, in Jung, Dietrich (ed.) Shadow Globalization, Ethnic Conflicts and New Wars. A political economy of intra-state war, London, pp. 47–69. Reinhart, Wolfgang (ed.) (1999), Verstaatlichung der Welt? Europäische Staatsmodelle und außereuropäische Machtprozesse, München. Roitman, Janet (1998), ‘The Garrison-Entrepôt’, in Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines, vol. 38(150–152), pp. 297–330. Rostow, Walt W. (1960), The Stages of Economic Growth: a non-communist manifesto, Cambridge. Ruggie, John G. (1993), ‘Territoriality and beyond’, in International Organization, vol. 47(1), pp. 139–167. Sassen, Saskia (1996), Losing control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization, New York. Scharpf, Fritz W. (1991), ‘Die Handlungsfähigkeit des Staates am Ende des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts’, in Politische Vierteljahresschrift, vol. 32(4), pp. 621–634. Schlichte, Klaus (2000), ‘Staatsbildung und Staatszerfall in der Dritten Welt’, in K. Schlichte / J. Siegelberg (eds) Strukturwandel internationaler Beziehungen. Zum Verhältnis von Staat und internationalem System seit dem Westfälischen Frieden, Wiesbaden, pp. 260–280. Senghaas, Dieter (ed.) (1972), Imperialismus und strukturelle Gewalt. Analysen über abhängige Reproduktion, Frankfurt am Main. Shils, Edward A. (1975), Center and Periphery. Essays in Macrosociology, Chicago – London. Siegelberg, Jens (2000), ‘Staat und internationales System: Ein strukturgeschichtlicher Überblick’, in K. Schlichte /J. Siegelberg (eds) Strukturwandel internationaler Beziehungen. Zum Verhältnis von Staat und internationalem System seit dem Westfälischen Frieden, Wiesbaden, pp. 11–56.

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Stobbe, Alfred (1983), Mikroökonomik, Berlin. Trotha, Trutz von (1994), Koloniale Herrschaft. Zur soziologischen Theorie der Staatsentstehung am Beispiel des “Schutzgebietes Togo”, Tübingen. Volkov, Vadim (2000), ‘The Political Economy of Protection Rackets in the Past and in the Present’, in Social Research, vol. 67(3), pp. 1–36. Wallerstein, Immanuel (1974), The Modern World System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century, New York. Weber, Max (1964), Theory of Social and Economic Organization, New York. Weber, Max (1968), Economy and Society, New York. Weber, Max (1985), Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriß der verstehenden Soziologie (first ed. 1922), Tübingen. Weber, Max (1988), Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre (first ed. 1922), Tübingen.

Chapter 2

Whose State is it? Hindu-nationalist Violence and Populism in India Julia Eckert

The demise of the modernist vision of the secular republic of India has fundamentally transformed the modes of political incorporation that govern Indian politics. Gone (in principle – not in practice) is the paternalist bureaucracy and with it its étatist idea of the volontée generale that promised ‘development for all’. Gone, too, is the so-called Congress system (even when the Congress Party has come back) that incorporated local patronage systems and transported that ‘Idea of India’ (Khilnani, 1999) into the furthest reaches of the country. It was precisely the idea of the Indian state as envisioned by Nehru’s modernist ideology, however, that underlay the ‘democratic revolution’ (Hansen, 1999) that led to its demise: its promises of ‘development for the people’ have determined expectations towards state agencies and their practices; and it has generated those demands to access and participation that, translated into practices, have changed the face of Indian politics. The democratisation of Indian democracy has seen the pluralisation of political mobilisation and the inclusion of hitherto underrepresented groups into the electoral fray. In the ensuing struggle for a reconfiguration of legitimate control over state resources competing ideas of entitlement all pose the question: whose state is India? Among the most successful contestants in this struggle have been those Hindu-nationalist groups and organisations that propagate an idea of the state of India which substitutes communal unity for claims to developmental equality, at once espousing the slim state of neo-liberal persuasion and collectivist norms of solidarity. They propound nativist images of a harmonious and organic body politic, defining thereby unity and homogeneity of the nation – and defining its ‘other’: those to be excluded. They suggest a unitary ‘will of the people’ that is posed against parliamentarian forms of political representation. These movements thus take an ambivalent relation to institutions of representative democracy: they fight democracy as the political foe and the source of national decay while at once connecting to democratic legitimation and the expectations and demands raised by stylising their mode of operation as a form of direct representation of the people’s will. Moreover, their rise to (parliamentarian)

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power is result of as well as response to the democratic revolution that pluralised political organisation in India. The contention is that their success is founded not merely in their nationalist credo but in the specific opportunities of action and participation that are inherent in their mode of operation and form of organisation. They re-set the terms of inclusion and exclusion not only in an ideological manner – redefining rights to participation in a religio-nationalist way – but also in a practical manner offering local possibilities of participation. Their particular offers and the generation of opportunities for participation, as well as the transformation of the ‘public’, of modes of governance and of belonging that their forms of operation, action and organisation provide, are evident in the practices of the Shivsena, a minor but loud and militant Hindunationalist party. The Shivsena’s complex relation with Indian democracy and with the Indian state; its incorporation into, opposition to and appropriation of many of the state’s institutions are the topic of this paper. It examines the modes of governance that the Shivsena has established at the local level thereby supplementing if not substituting for the state; it looks at the party’s practices of welfare, culture and control; it analyses its modes of incorporation through violent actionism that achieve an anti-democratic form of participation; and it traces the movement’s tight-rope walk between norm-setting and norm breaking that shifts the standards of legitimate rule, thus establishing in practice a counter-model of governance and a vigilante vision of the state of India. Such processes of the appropriation of governmental activities have often been treated as a sign of state crisis, or the infringement of state sovereignty, as ‘fragmented sovereignties’ (Randeria, 2002). Frequently, such autonomy and the associated ruptures of the integrity of the ideal-type modern state, and thus signs of its failure, have been seen in the establishment of local fiefdoms of criminal gangs, warlords, (neo-) traditional authorities and so on (Humphrey, 1999; Schlichte and Wilke, 2000; Volkov, 2000), all of which the Shivsena, too, has been called. However, rather than such processes being residues of incomplete state-building, or a sign of state failure it appears that such local, sub-national centres of governmental authority and their particular infringements on state monopolies (of coercive force particularly) are also part of and embedded in functional regimes of governance that are shaped by the merger of processes of (sometimes informal or unofficial) delegation and (forceful) appropriation. It is the selectivity of state-craft that opens spaces for its alternatives.

Shivsena’s Violent Actionism The Shivsena has been governing the city of Bombay for two decades, was part of the central government in an alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party – Indian People’s Party (BJP) which ruled India from 1999 till 2004 and has also held power in the rich state of Maharashtra. The party is defined by its cult of direct

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action, its militant enemy images and the cult of its autocratic leader, Bal Thackeray.1 He is advocating a ‘benevolent dictatorship’ and, in accordance with Hindu-nationalist positions, propounds a vision of the body politic and its legitimate representation that is fundamentally anti-pluralist. The Shivsena started as one in a chorus of regionalist movements in 1966, demanding privileges for the sons of the soil. Only in the 1980s when many of its regionalist demands had been integrated into mainstream politics, and when communalism was gaining currency in Indian politics for reasons which I cannot elaborate on here,2 it jumped onto the accelerating bandwagon of Hindu nationalism. It proved itself a fervent defender of the causes espoused by the Hindu nationalist forces. Less concerned with the ideological intricacies of Hindutva, Hindu-ness,3 it stylises itself as the saviour of the nation, as ‘Shivaji’s Army’ (the literal meaning of Shivsena – referring to a seventeenth century warrior king who fought the Moghul armies in Maharashtra). Combativeness lies at the core of the party‘s ideology. Violent practices not only serve to construct a community by drawing borders and defining friend and foe; they are, moreover, employed as a critique of the state, a critique of the political establishment and the modes of governance entailed in the developmental state and parliamentary democracy. Violent actionism is justified with claims to its ‘honesty’ and ‘efficacy’; ‘getting things done’ is the credo of the movement. Violence here is public. It is a message and a means. Violence – and the threat of it – is the method to get things done and to achieve populist successes through immediate intervention 1

The research on which this chapter is based was made possible by the funding of the VW foundation of the research project ‘Konflikttreiber - Konfliktschlichter’ at the Free University of Berlin. The author is grateful to Roland Eckert, Georg Elwert, Theodor Hanf, Thomas Hansen, Werner Schiffauer, Thomas Zitelmann for comments and suggestions as well as discussions that have inspired the ideas presented here. 2 See Randeria (1995), Ludden (1995). 3 Hindutva, or the idea of Hindu-ness, postulates an authentic Hindu order constitutive of social harmony. It refers to a specific construction of Indian history, religion and culture in which it defines the authentic and the alien and calls for the ‘authentic’ to prevail. When the assertion of ‘Hindu culture’ to save Hindu civilisation from its demise caused by Islamic imperialism, Westernisation and so on entered the nationalist discourse at the turn of the last century, it connected to earlier formulations of Adhikari bheda, the concept of unity (of Hindus) in diversity of ritual practices and beliefs of the various castes (jati) and sects. It is first and foremost a unifying project, which considers the threat to the community to lie in disunity, internal dissent or contestations of the social order. While early formulations of Hindutva explicitly referred to the threat of lower caste assertion), subsequent formulations, for example in the radical Hindu party’s ‘Rastriya Swamyamsevak Singh’ (RSS) founding father Sarvarkar’s ‘Hindutva’, rendered such ‘internal’ differences irrelevant. To unify the otherwise so dangerously fissured structures of society, Hindutva, the idea of ‘Hindu-ness’ and of a united Hindu community, propounded a singular and paramount opposition, namely that of Hindus and Muslims. Constructing the Muslim as the ‘other’, the assumption of a basic identity of interest of the various social groups constituting the Hindu nation in the RSS’s conceptualisation is the basis for the claim to representation of the Hindus of the world espoused by the ‘Vishwa Hindu Parishad’ (VHP), the World Hindu Council.

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and the provision of civic services. Violence is also the method to raise funds: to ‘collect donations’, provide protection and the services of the ‘contract rough’. It serves to become indispensable to those who make use of the party’s extra-legal services. Violence is the method to achieve tangible power; via power violence becomes empowerment for those who take part in it. Violence creates the difference to the discredited establishment since the latter lays claim to the legacy of non-violence. Violence affirms, through its conflation with masculinity, the much-pronounced virility and constructs the new self-image of the combative Hindu. Violence – in riots, pogroms and agitations –draws the border between the in-group and ‘the others’ and thereby relocates the concept of the legitimate citizen. Through violence claims are laid to rule Mumbai, to represent the common people. It is the claim that violent direct action is a more authentic representation of the ‘people’s will’ than parliamentary democracy, a more effective mode to organize the ‘common good’ than the developmental bureaucracy and a necessary defence against the ‘threats to the nation’.

Vigilante Saviours ‘Our regime will bring back the rule that existed during Shivaji Raje’s time’4 declared Manohar Joshi upon his swearing-in as the first non-Congress Chief Minister of Maharashtra in 1995. Shivshahi, that is the just and caring rule, but also the autocratic rule, the monarchic rule, the rule by the warrior king. This is the idea of benevolent dictatorship that Thackeray has propagated throughout the existence of the Shivsena. Shivshahi is presented as the rescue in a situation where ‘lokshahi’, parliamentary rule, is seen as having failed. The state, or rather the Congress or centre-left governments of India, are accused of having successively ‘sold out’ their country to their personal interests, to the minorities and of having neglected the Indian – or rather Hindu people. ‘There is no dearth of Leaders in India but if each one of them tries to pull Hindustan in opposite directions for their own selfish advancement the day is not far away when we might be balkanised’, claims Thackeray on the Shivsena Website. Thackeray regularly slanders the political establishment, especially those members who are, in terms of the Hindutva discourse, ‘pseudo-secularists’, ‘secular worms’ [keed] in his language. It is the corrupted establishment, and the inability of the Indian state, as well as the Hindu society, the ‘docile Hindu’ to defend themselves against the attacks by their enemies which calls the Sena into violence. 4

Shivaji was the seventeenth century warrior king of the first Maratha kingdom. He successfully fought the Moghul armies of Aurangazeb with what is likened to guerrilla tactics. It was Bal Gangadhar Tilak who first made use of the popular legend of Shivaji for nationalist purposes (Spear, 1990: 172); ever since, Shivaji has been considered the first nationalist of India. Shivaji and his Maratha kingdom have been the paramount explicit reference for all Maharashtrian regionalisms, which are thus uniquely compatible with Indian, and also, Hindu nationalism.

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The Sena’s foremost legitimation of violence – and its official justification – is and has always been the claim that violence is necessary for the defence of the community. ‘The right to self-defence is bestowed upon every citizen by the constitution.... The nation is in danger. The traitors have eaten into the vitals of this country.’5 ‘Nations which do not raise even a finger to resist, perish’.6 ‘Shiv Sena’s terror is the only guarantee of public safety’.7 In its words and above all in its deeds, the Shivsena postulates an existential conflict which has to be mastered by militancy and violence. The call to violence refers back to the orientalist theme of Hindu tolerance paramount in the discourse of the Hindu Right, where the allegedly inborn and limitless tolerance of the Hindu is equated with the Hindu’s alleged effeminate weakness that has to be overcome. There is frequent reference to the image of the spiritual and peaceful Hindu within the Sena and beyond.8 Deduced from the idea, that ‘Hinduism is not a religion but a way of life’ and its alleged related ability to integrate people of all denominations without missionising them, tolerance towards the ‘other’ is seen as the inherent nature of all Hindus. The other side of the coin of tolerance is, in this view, that the tolerant Hindu is incapable of defending himself against those who are so utterly different: The Muslims above all, whose religion is allegedly aggressive, hegemonic and intolerant. This orientalist confrontation of Hinduism and Islam leads to the call to become as Muslims allegedly are; to throw off the ‘congenital defect’ of all Hindus and to prove one’s own courage and virility. ‘Tolerance beyond reasonable limits is demeaning and ...the language of retaliation is the only language comprehensive to aggressive zealots’.9 Bal Thackeray justifies the violence against Muslims with the words: ‘The tolerant Hindu reached the limits of his patience. That is why he came to the streets to fight the treacherous fanatics...’.10 Constructing the new and martial Hindu, the Shivsena demonstrated its claims in the agitations and riots that targeted those identified as the ‘public enemies’. Most brutally its stance was enacted in the Bombay riots of the winter of 1992–93 when the city was shaken by weeks of violence, arson and looting. Bal Thackeray justified the riots in an interview with Time magazine in January 1993: ‘Do you expect Hindus to turn the other cheek? I want to teach Muslims a lesson. ... They are not prepared to accept the rules of this land. They don’t want to accept birth control. They want to implement their Sharia in my motherland. Yes, this is the 5

The Shivsena’s mouthpiece Saamna, 9 January 1993. Saamna, 15 December 1992. 7 Reported by the Sri Krishna Commission, the commission of Inquiry into the riots of 1992–93 in which the Sena was instrumentally involved (p. 162). 8 Of the total sample of interviews conducted during the field research, 43 per cent of the respondents voiced the conviction that Hinduism was characteristically defined by tolerance. All of these were also convinced that Islam was defined by aggression. If one considers only the non-Muslims among the respondents the percentage is 60 per cent. 9 Shiv Sena Website ‘The Sri Krishna Report – to what purpose? ’. 10 Saamna, 14 January 1993. 6

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Hindus’ motherland. ... Have they behaved like the Jews in Nazi Germany? If so, there is nothing wrong if they are treated as Jews were in Nazi Germany. ... I hope the Muslims have understood the lessons well. ... Yes, I am the person fighting for justice. [The mobs] are under my control. ...’ Enemy images have been the mainstay of the Sena’s stances. It has always attributed the ills it detected in society to specific social groups. The culprits of scarcity and threat to one’s status are always ‘the others’. Social and political problems are thus personalised. The Shivsena does not call for structural changes, revolution or reform; rather, it calls for the elimination (in whatever way) of those it holds guilty for the identified malaise. The targets are interchangeable: it is the mode of distinguishing between friend and foe rather than the specific public enemies which characterises the Sena’s ideology. What matters in this cult and practice of actionism is the modus of distinguishing between friend and foe, rather than the content, or essence of either group. In terms of content, the Shivsena is vague, if not to say ‘flexible’. In terms of modus it is staunch, militant and violent. The modus of distinction is radical and militant a) in that it poses always an existential conflict, a conflict which is won by one side at the cost of the survival of the other; it is militant b) in that it principally leaves no room between the categories of friend and foe, since a friend of a foe is a foe, and every enemy of the enemy is incorporated – voluntarily or involuntarily – into the in-group supposed to be defended; and c) the modus of distinction is militant and radical in that it is acted out violently, not annihilating but ‘hinting’ at the annihilation of the other. Vague militancy has the clarity of violence with real victims. What remain constant are the crassness of the border and the militancy of its defence. It is the existential conflict, ‘the struggle’, the continuous latent and open conflict between ‘us’ and ‘them’, friends and foes which form the movement’s ideology. What is common to the depictions of all of its enemy images is that they are made out to be existential threats to the lives and livelihoods of every ‘good Indian’. The justification for the urgency to fight them lies in their portrayal as being connected with larger threats, be they Pakistan, or the Soviet Union or the general category of ‘evil’ (in the form of decadence, dishonesty, poverty, crime, dirt, scarcity). And it is their alleged hold on the Indian state that is the real threat to the legitimate citizens of that state. Who these threatening ‘others’ are has often been related to the Sena’s electoral strategies. Especially since its expansion into the Bombay Municipal Corporation they are frequently those who, ‘... won't be able to cause us damage since they haven’t been included in the voting list’, as Manohar Joshi explained when he was still Chief Minister.11 In all cases the Sena retains the claim to define the legitimate in-group and affirms this claim with violence. What the Sena suggests is not only that those who vote for the party will not be attacked, but more: it promises them to become part of the in-group of entitlement, the legitimate participants in the city of aspirations. It is an entitlement formulated against the ‘usurpers’ (the ‘others’, the 11

Manohar Joshi in an interview in the Indian Express, 17 January 1998.

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‘pets of the state’) as well as against the ‘occupants’: against the political establishment, which is attacked as corrupt and pampering the ‘pets of the state’, namely the minorities. Belonging to the Sena is a means of belonging to the legitimate (potential) participants in the city’s largesse and a means to distance oneself from those who the Sena holds guilty for the malaise of state and body politic. Belonging to the Sena is a means of belonging to the in-group defined by the Sena. The power to define the legitimate in-group is constituted largely by threat. The Shivsena produces both the danger and the protection. In this role to recapture the state for the people and save it from the hands of the ‘traitors’, the ‘foreign hand’ and other threats to the nation, the Sena heroises clashes with the state (Heuzé 1995: 224) (although since its victory in the BMC in 1985 and especially since the Assembly elections in 1995, the movement has had little opposition from the agents of the state in such confrontations.) The party propounds to defend what it terms the proper order of society by breaking the laws of just that society; ‘Fie upon the law that does not protect us’.12 ‘This law can‘t give justice to the people.’13 ‘Where the law and police are unable to do anything, the Shivsena has to show its chamatkar (magic)’.14 Thackeray has often insisted that: ‘Our fight is not against any caste or community. It‘s against the government which has consistently humiliated Hindus’.15 However, in order to protect the Hindu community from the disrespectful government, it has mostly been those identified as the ‘enemies’, the ‘pets of the state’ who had to die.

Thokshahi: Violence and Direct Action The legitimacy awarded to violence in its role to save the Hindu nation is employed in the Shivsena’s vision of politics and of ‘the good society’. It gains the nimbus of effectivity in an environment that is presented – and often experienced – as chaotic: Violent action is considered the only sincere and effective way to deal with the ailments of the Indian society and the Indian state. The Shivsena suggests that its own activities are not politics; that they are beyond the calculated power plays that determine parliamentary procedures and are, instead, based on ‘nationalist and human’16 concepts of what is good and what needs to be done. First and foremost it is the idea of effectiveness, of acting without much ado. ‘I decided to fight. I visited offices, hit a few managers. Militancy, like I said, is constructive for me. It is used to fight injustice, corruption, black marketeering, discrimination’, recounted a now prominent Sena leader. ‘Getting things done’ is the credo of a counter project of politics: Direct action 12 13 14 15 16

Saamna, 9 January 1993. Bal Thackeray, quoted in Purandare (1999: 56). Interview with a leader of the Sena student wing. Thackeray at a rally in 1988, quoted in Purandare (1999: 309). Saamna, 29 April 1998.

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replaces politics and is projected as superior in efficiency and moral rectitude. As much as parliamentary politics is seen as dishonest and corrupt, direct action is referred to as honest since it allegedly offers definitive solutions to equally clear cut problems. The inherent reduction of social relations is consciously accepted as any complex analysis is denigrated as ‘ideology’. ‘All that political talk is ideology. Even the BJP just talks ideology’, complained many a Sainik. This is the claim to the purity of violent action, its honesty proven by its uncompromising stance, its effectiveness tangible in the face of a state perceived as ineffective. The location of this counter project of politics is the Shakhas, the local branches of the Shivsena. Shakhas are to be found in every part of Bombay, as well as in the towns and villages of Maharashtra.17 They are manned mainly by young men providing them with a place to meet, to spend time, to get involved. Shakhas offer a wide array of local services: Courts of arbitration, employment exchanges, credit schemes, crèches, infrastructural improvements and dealings with the police. Ever since its inception in 1966 the Shivsena has laid importance on its ‘social work’ – a term which denotes a variety of activities in the city’s context and may be used by political cadres to describe anything short of electioneering. Infra structural matters have been at the top of the agenda: Sena activists have organised ‘clean up’ drives and medical camps, have pressured the Municipality on behalf of their ward for water connections and other civic amenities, have organised local self-help activities and the collection of funds for these. The Shakhas organise leisure activities and training in vocational skills for young people. Rooms have been made available for school studies and preparation for examinations. Shakha Pramukhs offer assistance with job applications, school admissions, and other formalities that require recommendations. Pramukhs also step in with advice and support when there are illnesses, births, deaths or marriages. Sometimes funds are collected to meet emergency situations in a family; at other times Sainiks stand in when there is ‘need’. Pramukhs usually pride themselves on their intricate knowledge of their area, their street or chawl. They are the ones who witness problems, disputes and tensions closely; they have an immediate reach to gather the neighbourhood Sainiks. Shakhas operate in many areas with the powers of judiciary, executive and legislative bodies. This predominance of the Shakha corresponds to the Sena’s claim of superior efficacy. ‘The Shivsena draws its strength from identifying problems quickly. They started local shops. The Shivsena benefits from the Shakhas. No other party has a Shakha and they do not listen to the grievances of the people. Not one other party has a Shakha’, explained a social worker who feared this evident advantage of the Shivsena. It is a reality in some areas, a story, a representation of the organization beyond that, but believed not only because of the loud and manifold performance of the story, but the comparative weakness of most alternatives. 17 There are by now also Shakhas of the Shivsena in other Indian states, in Delhi, in Chennai, in Coimbatore etc.

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The story of efficient pragmatism answered felt needs in many areas of the city. ‘With the Shivsena we can solve problems. They were the first ones to bring water pipes. They did it in five years. I don’t know where the money came from. The roads are so bad that you fall in the night. Now they are paved. We got electricity from a dam. All children like the Sena, they love Bal Thackeray... The Congress has not managed this in 40 years’, felt a mill worker. A slum leader said: ‘Shrikant paid two lakhs himself to pave the roads here. Previously we belonged to the Congress. Now we are with the Shivsena. The previous Congress only talked but didn't do anything. They were leaders. ...I joined the Shivsena because locally they have the strength. They are very dangerous persons. They killed so many Muslims, threw bombs and so on. Now they are leaders... Congress let us down. The Congress has been worked away from the hearts of the people’. And a Muslim social worker said: ‘The Sena candidate needs our votes. He can’t win without us. So he will look after our area well. He will be able to do something when the Sena is in power. He can get money.’ The Sena’s services are mostly short-term, spectacular, action related. Its image of efficiency is born less from long-term lasting results than from spectacle, directness and the accessibility of its agitations. They are intricately and inextricably linked to various criminal activities through their funding. The funds acquired range from the small-scale extortion from small businesses and petty traders that contribute to the fund of ‘donations’ to big business contributions. Mahindra & Mahindra and Bajaj are said to be regular contributors; the Mittal family also pays.18 The threats to large companies vary between personal threats, the threat not to hold unions in check, the threat to cut off electricity, not to issue licenses or to disrupt production in any other way. Many a time it will simply be a fee which the Sena charges for the services it can provide for industry or business. Many of the voluntary activities are financed by such practices and they provide a livelihood for active members. One Sainik, who had just been promoted, planned to give up his job since he ‘can now make money as a Shakha Pramukh’. This referred not only to funds acquired as ‘donations’, but also to the potential for bribes inherent in the influential position of a Pramukh. One of his female colleagues enviously observed how unfortunate she was since ‘the gents go and ask for money, you know (in a lower voice): extortion. But we women can’t do that. It is not befitting’. One of her male colleagues put his expectations simply: ‘The Sena will make me rich’. Such sources of revenue are obviously fiercely fought over. The Sena competes with purely economically active gangs for territory. Competition over territories among the various gangs of Mumbai as well as among Sainiks escalates and stabilises in recurring cycles. Territory is turned into money via protection, land18

The sources of the information insisted on not being disclosed. These companies will most likely pay not only to one extortionist but to several and use the services of one to make a deal with the other.

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clearing activities for builders and real estate deals. In many areas the Shivsena has successfully replaced small criminal gangs. When, for example Liladhar Dake, the former Minister for Industry of the Sena government, established himself in Sion, the goondas apparently moved out. According to one resident of the area, ‘costs have not gone down. What we now give as donation we gave as protection money before. They say it’s for cleaning up the area. And they say that they cannot guarantee security otherwise. We all know what that means! But we still prefer them [the Sena]. At least you know who you are talking to.’ The needs that the Sena’s services answer to are tangible but also shaped by the expectations and norms of governance that the promise of development by the state had affirmed. The state’s ambiguous delivery of its developmental promise opened spaces for the substituting of the state by institutions, which formed in themselves bases of (local) power. The more citizens are excluded from civic institutions, the stronger is their dependence on alternative sources of the services usually provided by the administration or expected from it. Their story of pragmatism, of efficiency, organized in the Shakhas and their counter-project of politics provided the organization with votes and brought a democratic victory over those allegedly responsible for the failure of the state to provide for the Common Man. Since 1985 the Shivsena has governed the Municipal Corporation of Mumbai. The hold of governmental powers can protect the illegal activities of the movement, a practice not confined to the Shivsena. Moreover, this pre-eminent position in local politics has enabled the Shivsena to have access to considerable funds that promote the local services. Since the Shivsena can thus fund its grassroots projects from various sources and help them along through control of the formal institutions of the state, its informal power structures are reaffirmed. These alternative institutions, the Shivsena’s Shakhas, supplement various functions of the state and were legitimated by their accessibility as well as their short-term efficiency. Activities and services in turn create the grounds of support, or at least a following – whether motivated by conviction or dependence – which provide the necessary votes to enter formal positions of political power by legal (democratic) means.

Local Modes of Governance The Shivsena has thus successfully integrated itself into the institutional constellation of local governance. Like many institutions of the articulation of local concerns and the state‘s agencies, or the state’s concerns and local subjects, which have accompanied the city‘s politics ever since its massive growth during industrialization, the Shivsena established structures of power by establishing institutions which at first targeted an identified failure of the local state. The character of this institutional integration is quite novel and differs from the earlier versions (Chandavarkar, 1981; 1994: 168-238) of the complementation of the state

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agencies in governance by alternative institutions. The Sena’s competitors and its forerunners and models in urban governance systems have all operated as intermediaries between the locality and the state (or industry). They have mostly earned their incomes from both sides and many have integrated activities of control and those of provision or articulation. The Shivsena certainly did not fill a void but competed with various alternative providers of services like local self-help groups, NGOs, local gangs, political parties, all addressing the management of everyday affairs of work and living, housing and infrastructure, welfare and education, conflict mediation and associability and supplementing the local state. In the competition for clients and territory important for political clout and revenue respectively, the Sena has engaged in various activities and often brought about short-term results. Within their actionist, participatory modus and their institutional integration the Shivsena’s Shakhas integrate the role of Mandal (neighbourhood club), dalal (middleman), dada (strongman) and often that of Sarkar, the state and its administration, too. It has integrated these various functions within one institution, namely the Shakha and its Pramukh. Possibly because of this integration it has evolved into a particularly apt provider of services to various and diverse interests in the city: to the state in supplementing and aiding its governance, to the ‘deprived’ in providing them with services unattainable from the civic authorities or simply with access to the administrative agencies; to industry and business as contract rough; and generally to parties in various local conflicts. Because of this institutional integration it has been so effective in extending its networks in various neighbourhoods of the city and beyond – it has adapted its offers to the local needs and local tensions and reintegrated them within its loose but loud overall party structure.

Participation Presented as a critique of paternal modes of governance the Sena’s short-term spectacular, often failing but always directly accessible practices suggest an explicit alternative to bureaucratic organization, an explicit rebuff to legitimacy through procedure, an explicit rebuff also to the norms of the Indian state and its Nehruvian idea of a developmental bureaucratic ethos. Although the Shivsena retains the paternalism of ‘providing’, it overcomes this paternalism at the same time, as it is not merely a system of patronage but also a movement. Its actionist modus of operation which relies on the involvement of members and clients and which shifts the border between members and clients constantly as both are organized informally, creates a structure of participation. Thus, for Sainiks – but not only for Sainiks – the Shakhas’ services are something like a communitarian organization, as particularly Heuzé (1995) and Patel (1997) have often stressed: they establish community solidarity, and provide room for the active citizen. Thackeray has always emphasised that his Shiv Sena is

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made by the Sainiks, that the Sena’s power is that of the people who are part of it.19 This is on the one hand a rhetorical device which constructs such an immediate representation of the people by their leader, the latter being ‘one of us’, that the boundaries between the levels of power seem blurred. On the other hand it is an ideologisation of the particular style of politics the Sena professes, namely that of direct action which relies entirely on the participation of the members, on their numbers and their muscle power. The politics of violent action does not confine itself to the discursive construction of legitimacy and empowerment of the Common Man. All the services organised by the Shakhas as well as the party’s violent agitations are carried out by the party’s local members, the Shivsainiks. It is here, that mobilisations beyond the activist core are undertaken. It is here that the organisation lives its unity and where the individual Sainik can feel part of the larger movement. It is here that the Shakhas are united practically. In these actions Sainiks do experience collective power, and collective power of a sort, which is not merely handed down to them via the political power of their leaders, but which actually rests on their force, their numbers and their muscle power. They experience a reliance on their participation and its fundamental role for the power of the Shivsena. Thus, Sainiks feel themselves to be an intrinsic part of that power. At the neighbourhood level, the collective power of the Sena translates into individual power as Sainiks refer to the collective power as the fact that induces people to comply with their commands. Their own, individual power is characterized as enforcing decisions against the will of the concerned: power over husbands who have to follow the decision of a Pramukh in a family dispute; power over political opponents who can (sometimes) be silenced by threats; power over public space which can be brought to a standstill by a Sena bandh; power over Mumbai, where Bal Thackeray, the unelected leader – in their representation – has the say and Sainiks have the power of execution; power over the police and the law who dare or do not prosecute the extra-legal activities of Sainiks. The Shivsena provides a frame, more than other parties, for acting. Most of its activities rest on the participation of its local members. These activities are hardly formalised although many are part of an everyday routine. They do not rely on experts as technical or ideological expertise is not required for carrying out the Sena’s activities. Rather, they rely on everyday knowledge, on putting in a lot of time, often on muscle power and on numbers. It was the involvement in the organisation‘s activities, the centrality of their participation in the running of the everyday affairs, as well as the local power derived from it. This largely uninhibited and unsanctioned power of Sainiks is part of the attraction of the Sena. The joy of acting is not specific to Shiv Sainiks, but the possibilities of action are specific to the Shivsena. They are inherent in the movement’s internal organisation as well as its established positions of power. They are inherent, too in the space for action granted by the movement’s environment.

19

At the victory rally in 1985, Indian Express, 6 May 1985.

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Shifting Limits The space for action which the Shivsena is offered and which in turn it offers to its members has been largely related to the many utilizations that various social and political forces could make of the party’s activities. The space for action was granted – by default so to say – because of the usefulness of the Sena for their own ends. Various organisations employ the Shakhas for their diverse needs. They have been utilised to fight off unfavourable unions, but also to clear land for builders, intervene (on one side) in business or political rivalries. The Sena was instrumentalized by Congress politicians not only to combat communist unions and parties in the 1960s and 70s (Gupta, 1982: 176) but also to settle their internal power struggles. To many the services provided by the Shakhas thus also include those of the ‘contract rough’. The Sena could, however, expand its influence exactly because of this space granted to it which made possible its symbolic agitations, its networking and its local structures of power. These are not merely enforced through the use of violence but gain acceptability and support exactly within the context of a political sphere in which the rule of law is so frequently replaced by the rule of force (or the rule of money for that matter). The support attained and the institutional expansion established went so far as to provide the Sena with the powers of government, so that it could grant itself the space for action. After 1985, that is, ever since the Sena held power in the Bombay Municipality, it has become rare that the organs of law enforcement inhibit the Sena’s agitations. Frequently no action is taken, and if Sainiks are arrested they are quickly released on bail, they are seldom charged and if they are charged then the cases are pending in court. The initial explanation of police inaction against Shivsainiks is frequently that such action would lead to the escalation of violence. It is a preventive caution, a fear to arouse Bal Thackeray‘s anger and threaten escalation. As police officer V.N. Deshmuk explained: whenever Sena leaders were arrested, bandhs and violence followed. ‘The anticipated consequences were a deterrent to taking preventive action against leaders of the Shiv Sena.’20 Bal Thackeray himself has frequently warned the authorities: ‘If you arrest me Maharashtra will burn. ... the repercussions will be felt all over the country.’21 However, this analysis of the inaction of the state agencies assumes a clear separation of the fields of the Shivsenas practices and those of the state agencies. It does not examine the thorough interrelations between the establishment of the Sena’s Shakhas as modes of governmental organisation in the city and the practices of other actors active in the field of governance. The Sena’s incorporation into, appropriation of and merger with various state agencies is far more intricate than such spaces of default suggest. The Sena has always walked a tightrope between 20 21

Reported in The Afternoon, 24 February 1997. Quoted in Evening News, 23 October 1986.

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cooperation and conflict: it has stylised itself as the conscientious offender, the vigilante protecting the (national) order by breaking its law; however, it has always collaborated with state agencies, with the Congress party, industrial management and other forces in the field that determine the shape of the state. The division of labour evolving at the local level take the forms of delegation, of cooperation and appropriation. It is firstly the delegation of many of the state agencies’ tasks to the Shakha: In many areas, for example, the police delegate the resolution of disputes to the Shakhas: ‘If you want to solve anything with the police you have to be with the Shakha. The police will send you to the Shakha’, explained a Muslim resident of Bombay. As Madhokar Sarpotdar, a prominent Shivsena leader, explained: ‘Some people go to the police, some go to the Shakha. We then cooperate with the police.’ The police likewise cooperate with the Pramukhs, the leaders of the Shakhas and are legitimised, as former Police Commissioner Tyagi22 put the matter in an interview, by the new policy of ‘community policing like in America’. In matters of control and law and order, too, the police frequently cooperate with the Shakhas and rely on their executive powers. The various constellations of ‘illegality’ present in the so-called informal economy of the city are ‘supervised’ and managed by the Shakhas: licenses or tenure are granted, checks placed on certain activities and access is channelled by the Pramukhs. Moreover, the police often operate according to the orders of the Shakha Pramukhs. It is not only the police, but also other agencies. The employment ministry for example, made good use of the Sena’s own employment exchange, the Shiv Udyog Sena of Raj Thackeray. Initially launched with the funds of a Michael Jackson concert,23 at a time when a) the Shivsena was itself in government and thus responsible for the governmental job exchanges, and b) when the Shivsena-BJP government was witnessing and politically accompanying the further dissolution of the textile mills, the further de-industrialisation and further losses of employment in the formal sector, the Shiv Udyog Sena served to dissociate the Shivsena from the dysfunctional government institutions, or rather: the failure of the Shivsena government to tackle the problem of unemployment. Such practices of delegation and cooperation abound in the everyday organisation of governance in the city. The re-structuring of the public space effected by the specific practices of the Shivsena, its redefinition of the legal and 22

Former Police Commissioner Tyagi has become a member of the Shivsena. He also has a case of murder pending against him in relation to the killing of nine unarmed Muslim youths during the Bombay riots of 1992 on his orders. 23 About four crores, which is 40 Million Rupees, were donated by Wizcraft, the organiser of the concerts in October 1996. The Times of India reported on 23 October 1996 that Michael Jackson performed for free and several charitable organisations had been shortlisted for the funds raised. Witzcraft selected the Sena’s employment exchange. Two debates ensued, one questioning the validity of a governing party’s organisational branch fulfilling supposedly government tasks as a charity; the other relating to taxes paid for the largesse. This indicates the helpless inadequacy of discussion of formal rules to come to grips with the unease which emerged with the entangled structures of governance.

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illegal corresponded to the organisation of economic life in Mumbai, to the many forms of ‘informality’ and to the needs and practices of, above all, industrial management, the Congress party and the globalising business community. All in all there appears to be a rather ingenious fit of the Shivsena’s institutions to changes of governance in India. The Shakhas appear as institutions supremely equipped to engage with the underbelly of economic liberalisation. In a situation which is defined by increasing ‘informality’ that is firstly the dissolution of the organised sector, secondly the increasing privatisation of development; and thirdly the possibilities of the liberalised economy both for riches and for destitution, the Sena’s location in the neighbourhood, its capacities of patronage organise the new world and establish continuities. The Sena’s Shakas always have something to offer: neighbourhood centres, self-help, cultural activities, job exchanges. These institutions organise the processes of dissolutions accompanying liberalisation in an ideological way: defining the legitimate participants in the new world’s largesse; defining the terms of participation in this largesse. But they also organise the new world in a practical manner establishing subsistence level networks which replace those of social security made obsolete by the informalisation accompanying liberalisation. They integrate their clients into a structure of patronage and a system of participation within local institutions. These practical networks are structured around non-material issues like the local celebration of religious and regional festivals, connecting home and place of work and thus potentially encompassing the whole social reality of its clients. Of course, Thackeray does not talk about equality and revolution. Ideologies of self-made-men concurring with the rhetoric of regional entitlement introduce reservation policies to the city’s promises of wealth. They further particularise success and failure and at the same time create new structures and opportunities of power. Thus it is a stance that opens the space for aspirations and at the same time monopolises the dream of social mobility, power and wealth. Its delineation of legitimacy answers to both the rise of the Hindu-nationalist idiom and to the swan songs of the Indian state. Thus, the Shivsena’s establishment was embedded in a specific organisation of the state that preceded it; it rose within and fed off prevalent modes of informal social and political organisation. Once it had gained a certain space for action, it could actively restructure the organization of the state; it could reshape the modes of incorporation and shift the field of power that characterises the Indian body politic.

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Participation and the Politics of Violence Explanations towards the emergence of anti-democratic movements have frequently attributed their appeal to their potential to provide (collective but also individual) ‘identity’. The fact that identity provision is strongly related to the provision of group status has led many analyses to see the conditions of the ‘demand’ for the provision of identity and status in historical situations that are marked by the loss of status of social groups, the loosening of previous markers of identity and status and generally situations of anomy – as they have been attested, too, to the state that India is in. In the sociological tradition originating in the writings of Durkheim, rapid socio-economic change, migration, urbanisation, individualisation, the devaluation of traditions and religion (Weber’s ‘Entzauberung der Welt’), or modernity as such (as a process of social differentiation) have been held responsible for experiences of anomy and, consequently, the appeal of identity politics. This has been the main explanatory trajectory also in respect to neo-nationalist and religious nationalisms emerging in the last decades. Current movements of the politics of identity have thus often been considered a defensive reaction against particularly the processes of transformation subsumed under the term ‘globalisation’. ‘Religious fundamentalism, cultural nationalism, territorial communes are, by and large, defensive reactions... Reactions against globalisation, which dissolves the autonomy of institutions, organisations, and communications system where people live. Reactions against networking and flexibility, which blur the boundaries of membership and involvement, individualize social relationships of production, and induce the structural instability of work, space, and time. And reactions against the crisis of the patriarchal family ...’ (Castells, 1997, II: 65–67). The Shivsena, too, or rather popular support for the party, has been analysed predominantly in relation with the (false) offers of status and identity it provides in the anomic situation of globalising Mumbai (Heuzé, 1995: 216; Patel, 1995; Hansen, 1996a: 157). Authors disagree as to what actually constitutes the capacity of the Shivsena and similar parties or movements to provide such status and identity. In the case of the Shivsena some authors, above all Gérard Heuzé, assume that identity politics factually establish community. They stress the experiential side of collectivity, of solidarity, and the home provided in grass-roots cells like the Shakhas, in which a concrete desire for identity and solidarity is taken up and realised. This is probably one of the particular appeals of the party but it leaves open the question why is it that the specific mode of operation of the Shivsena and its offers of community should have been so much more effective than others. Collective identity and experiences of community could be provided by various forms of collectivities: In Bombay, Mitra Mandals (youth clubs), workers unions, Mahila Mandals (women’s clubs) and other such organisation could provide ample opportunity for collective activities and community solidarity – and the Shivsena has made many attempts to associate with and appropriate local community institutions. The other explanatory trajectory has thus focussed on the specific instrumental

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rationalities of communal, regional or ethnic mobilisation. The earliest academic study of the Shivsena by Katzenstein, for example, clearly set the appeal of the movement in relation to the demands of organisation in the competition for resources (controlled by the state) and the increasing relevance of formal institutions of power for socio-economic positions. Katzenstein analysed the Shivsena and its original regionalist stance as an ethnic movement claiming group rights on the basis of ‘nativeness’ in a competition over the spoils of the modern state (Katzenstein, 1979: 212–13). Similarly, analyses of the expansion of the Shivsena in rural Maharashtra have focussed on the instrumental rationality of identity politics to construct, invent and create communities as viable forms of electoral mobilisation and integration. Ethnicity, regionalism and communalism can be viable forms of opposition in a situation of de facto monopolization of the state because regionalism and ethnicity provide support bases that can numerically counter other claims to positions of power and thus introduce the logic of ethnic or regional communities (Kohli, 1998: 7–8). Such an instrumentalisation of the creation of collective identity was relevant in the process of the dismantling of the Congress system. However, the politics of violence directly competed with and opposed other challenges to the blockade of political mobility inherent in the stronghold of the Congress Party. The many democratic mobilisations of lower caste groups (often also mobilising on the grounds of ascriptive communities) effectively pluralised the party system. The Shivsena’s appeal and electoral rise, and its specific form of politics is not determined by a lack of possibilities of other forms of political mobility, but stands in direct opposition to such alternative challenges.

Participating in the Making of Power The specific interpretation of situations and of change offered in the practices of violent actionism, this here is the contention; integrate the creation of community and the promise of ascension and participation. They unify individual aspirations and solidarity, and realise both in action. Their appeal lies in their specific potential to create the space for action, and thus their specific offers of opportunities for action. Their specific offers of opportunities for acting relate directly to their specific mode of operation and their organisational dynamics. The politics of direct action rely centrally on the direct, immediate and unmediated participation of its members. Actions are made by participation; they are immediate in organisation, in terms of time and space. Participation is created in their unmediated directness, but also in their accessibility produced in localness, in informality of membership and the rules and promises of ascension, in the personalness of internal relations, the personalization of the relation also to the central authority legitimised by the unifying charismatic myth. Participatory action achieves an expansion of the space for action individually and collectively. Within movements like the Shivsena it is violent actionism which generates

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that sort of participation which, this is the claim here, constitutes their appeal for their members and members-to-be: violence generates participation symbolically, as it affirms the borders between the in-group and the ‘others’ that are potentially legitimate targets of violence. The singular boundary drawn between ‘us’ and ‘them’ integrates and homogenises the ‘us’ and thus transgresses – possibly – conflicting boundaries within a group. By propounding the paramount role of community identity it subsumes overlapping individual identities. It thus provides ‘integrated’ identities (Shah, 1994: 1133; Elwert, 1989: 451), reinforces ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson, 1983) and, moreover, by devaluing the ‘other’, it provides group status in which even, or rather particularly, lower rank members of the defined in-group can partake (Elias and Scotson, 1990). However, and this is significant, the project of violent action is not confined to the symbolic level: If an analysis were to examine only the symbolic level and the symbolic potentials of the politics of actionism, it would miss the essential characteristic – and maybe appeal – of the politics of direct action. Actions do not simply symbolically reify categories of friend and foe, of good and evil. They do not merely generate ‘involvement’, that is community and solidarity. They also, through violence, potentially shift the relations of power. This is not merely a matter of re-introducing physical violence into the analysis of processes of establishing power, although that would well-nigh seem to suffice for an analysis of the Shivsena. Rather, the analysis of social movements as reactive to given conditions and triggered by the power relations inherent in a status quo takes a view of power which sees it as rather firmly and immutably established in the structures of the modern state and its organisation of society, where it attains a pseudo-substantial character. The study of the Shivsena seems to suggest that what needs to be examined are the proactive practices of such parties and movements. They effect an institutional (re-) structuration, sometimes the monopolisations of public space, of the opportunities for acting, of the rights to participation. In the case of the Shivsena, this is the claim, new spaces for action and new relations of power are created by violent action. Violent action has frequently been denied creative potential as it has been interpreted as not only destructive, but moreover as resulting from the oppression or inhibition of creative action (Joas, 1992). The hesitation to include violent action in the realm of creative action possibly arises from the fact that the theories that have done so (as for example Sorel, Jünger, or Fanon) have idealised violence as having a specific potential for renewal. Such an idealisation of violence has legitimised the most terrifying sort of rule. However, the history of fascism should warn not only against idealising violence as having a specific potential for renewal, but also against relegating it to the realm of defensive reaction: The appeal of fascist movements, too, lay not simply in the idealisation of violence, nor simply in the violent act, but also in the power established thus. The analysis of the Shivsena, too, seems to suggest that violence can in itself constitute a form of participation, and set new structures of power and institutional settings. Moreover, the Shivsena creates new structures of participation via violent action not because of a lack of other attempts for renewal,

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or because of their failure (when violence becomes a last resort), but in direct opposition to such alternative attempts. Violent action as (only) one form of creative action, that is action which creates new structures, is not restricted to conditions which are marked by stagnation (as the proponents of violent action would have it), nor to those which are marked by anomy (as most theories of ‘violence as compensation’ would see it).

From Claims to Conflict The occupation of spaces, places, rights, symbols and relations (Popitz, 1992: 185– 231) is achieved not simply by violent action but by the reaction of the environment to the threat and offer of permanent excessive conflict readiness demonstrated in the actionism of the Sena. It is precisely ideologies of existential conflict that propound a perpetual excessive conflict readiness as they turn every issue into a symbol, an expression of the existential conflict, and this then has to be fought as extremely as if it were in itself a question of life and death. ‘What is feared is not so much the conflict force, but the conflict readiness’ (Popitz 1992: 97; translation JE). Avoidance, preventive obedience (‘vorauseilender Gehorsam’) as well as utilisations of the demonstrated excessive conflict readiness can be the reactions; they can be witnessed in the Sena’s case in the reluctance to sanction the Sena’s illegal activities for fear of escalation. The transition of the Shivsena from its regionalist (quasi-ethnic) stance to its Hindu-nationalism in the 1980s, and the turn from particularist protest to vigilantist majoritarianism implied not merely an expansion of the community to be represented to that of all Hindus for mere electoral purposes (although it certainly had that aspect). It indicated not only a quantitative but also a qualitative shift as it transferred the conflict from the level of competition within a political system – however fierce, it is a ‘more or less’ conflict – to an ideology of irreconcilable conflict, to an ‘either or’ conflict. This is not a result of the shift in ideology from region to religion, from ethnicity to nation. Although religious ideologies lend themselves to the construction of exclusive claims as they imbue issues, places and objects with ‘sacredness’ and thus make them potentially indivisible, they do not necessarily, or by the very nature of religion, produce irreconcilability. Religion has at times also provided the basis of universalistic criteria of justice as well as of models of coexistence. The qualitative shift from competitive conflict to an essential irreconcilability is, therefore, not ‘caused’ by the thematic change from regionalism to Hindu-nationalism. It is the shift from minority particularism, demanding from a larger whole its alleged dues, to majoritarianism. Majoritarianism more than simply claiming exclusive rights for a majority create this very majority by defining the nation, or any other entity, as an inclusivist whole and homogeneous unity (and thus seek to replace alternative pluralistic definitions). Their anti-pluralist construction of the body politic consists in the propounding of the interest of a unitary community against (arbitrary but)

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particular others (Gupta, 1993: 131–133). External confrontation correlates to internal homogenisation not simply in the name of the nation but in the name of ‘a people’ or in this case ‘the common people’. The shift from regionalism to Hindu-nationalism was, at the same time, a functional shift, not determined by its theme, but instrumentalizing it. With this shift, the Shivsena was able to preserve its movement character beyond the resolution of its regionalist demands and also, until now, beyond its role as the government (at least of Mumbai). For a movement that stylises itself as a force of protest and rebellion it is possibly as problematic to win hold of the formal positions of power as to lose them. The possible formalisation and routinisation inherent in the professionalisation in office threatens the spirit and mode of operation as much as failures damage the charismatic myth. The Shivsena‘s power rests on its being a movement. Movements need issues (Edelmann, 1988; Luhmann, 1988, 1998). Issues are the reason, the legitimisation for their existence and their appeal to followers. However, issues can be negotiated, they can even be resolved – as were some of the Sena’s regionalist demands. That can be the end of a movement and it nearly was the end of the Sena when it lost most of its electoral support after its regionalist issues had been incorporated into mainstream politics. Hence, blessed is the movement that has an issue. And even better: an issue that is not resolvable; a potential perpetuum mobile of movement. The postulation of an irreconcilable conflict precludes negotiation. Ideologies of irreconcilability usually claim either an essential incompatibility, or a natural opposition. ‘Issues’ which are fought over are here only the expressions of a fundamentally irreconcilable conflict. Such chosen symbols are potentially countless. The fact that this conflict can be assumed to be a ‘non-realistic conflict’ as defined by Coser, that the ‘real conflict’ lies within the group which is supposed to be unified by the common enemy constituted by the ‘unrealistic conflict’, and the latter serving just this purpose, makes the non-realistic conflict even more easily an irreconcilable one: Since nothing is really at stake, nothing needs to be negotiated. So the impossibility of negotiation attributed to the conflict is, for those who postulate the conflict, without any detrimental consequences. On the contrary, the resolution of the unreal conflict would be detrimental to the obfuscation of the real one. This is an old story. But how can the postulation of a non-realistic conflict make sense, particularly when it is posed as an existential conflict? There are limits to the degree to which the ideology of movements can frame collective choices, because they have to be assessed in the light of the empirical reality of the social structure (Berejikian, 1992: 653–654). Without elaborating on the entrenched status of anti-Muslim sentiments in India and their manifold institutionalisations, the claim here is that what ‘makes sense’ is not necessarily the issue. The issue legitimises the practices; the end is a means to the means. The motivation for participation lies, this is the claim suggested by the empirical findings, as much in the specific form of organisation as a movement as in the ‘framing’ of the issue. In fact, the frames can be changed according to circumstances. What remain constant are the crassness of the border

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and the militancy of its defence. The organisational structures as movement achieve integration, participation and differentiation. Their consistency lies in their modus of distinguishing between friend and foe, of participatory militancy. Militant enmity can, in the case of the Shivsena, circumvent the contradiction between essentialist ideology and opportunistic practice because the inherent reduction of complexity favours vagueness. Vague militancy has the clarity of violence with real victims. At the same time, vagueness can integrate diverse interpretations of situations and objectives, of necessities and causes, as well as motives and gains (Elwert, 1989: 449). It can therefore subsume different interests under one banner. It could seem that such strategies of violent action to create the space for action would have their limits as they will diminish their possibilities of co-operation and possibly trigger counter-coalitions. It could be considered the short term rationality of Sen‘s ‘Rational Fools’ (Sen, 1979). However, the power relations affirmed by the posing of a permanent threat are never binary; they are at least triangular; they evolve in social groups which are structured by them and which in turn restructure them in their variously interrelated asymmetrical interdependencies. In the case of ideologies of irreconcilable conflict excessive conflict readiness poses a threat (of violence) confined to specific ‘enemies’. It therefore always creates a third group of ‘unconcerned others’. These may simply be glad to be spared (and thus face the secondary form of threat: the promise to be exempted); or, and this is amply evident in the case of the Shivsena, they may instrumentalise the permanent excessive conflict readiness demonstrated by such movements. They may make their own use of the threat entailed in excessive conflict readiness. (In this way excessive conflict readiness was the professional role of the Berserkers in medieval Scandinavia.) Therefore, strategic alliances with those who are excluded from the threat posed by constant excessive conflict readiness make such seemingly counterproductive strategies rational also in the long term. The symbiotic division of labour between various agencies of the state, but also the Congress party and other forces that dominate the power relations shaping governance in India and the Shivsena, are an apt example of this. The creation of a situation and its subsequent toleration as factual – which is not necessarily dependent on its legitimation but possibly on the above mentioned complex situational strategies of avoidance of conflict and instrumentalisation – entail a potentially permanent shift in the norms and rules of legitimate action. The Shivsena successfully included the independent institutions of the state in its efforts to shift the limits of legitimacy that restrict the conversion of violence into (political) power. The shift in legitimacy happens in three processes which collectively produce new relations of power but which are independent from each other. They are the actual occupation of spaces, symbols or relations, its translation (Latour, 1986)24 into acceptability and normalcy (consisting for example in the 24 While the perspective on power as produced by translations is useful as it stresses the sociality of power, it merges power and its legitimacy in the course of establishing the

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absence of sanctions against what was previously considered illegal) and the legitimation of the process of conversion or the context of exertion as legitimate, its representation. This is where translation and occupation are re-integrated. The normativity of the factual sets in. This is the completed occupation as it potentially creates the legitimacy for the punishment of, or sanctions against violations of the new order. This institutional (re-) configuration entailed in the practice of the politics of violence constitutes its transformative potentials for the re-structuration of social space. This leads us to the question of the changes that are effected in a social system by the emergence of such new structures. As we have seen, such a process can be anti-pluralist in effect and is potentially and intentionally so, as it aims at unifying participatory claims and effectively destroying pluralist, or alternative claims to legitimate participation. This can, nonetheless, signify an increase in the differentiation of the social system simply in the systemic sense that the organisation of anti-pluralist interests within a pluralist system is one more stance of plurality. Whether anti-pluralist agitation leads to systemic differentiation or the reduction of differentiation (systemically) and pluralism (politically) is an empirical question of its success.25 This understanding of differentiation views it as a process related to, or rather produced by the actions of people. The conceptualisation of social change as structured contingency created by contingent former’s sociality. Because these recent theories of the practices of making power assume that power is made only by its translation by others that is by obedience, they likewise assume that any act of disobedience, of non-translation of power is a. always possible, and b. demolishes power and sets new power when in fact it might at most transform it. This hints at two fundamental limitations of the translation model, which are intricately related to each other. Firstly, it does not reflect on the increasing structuration of the possibilities of acting out power, of translating it. Power is indeed made by obeying. If people do not obey there is no power of the order, or of the ordering body. Although in principle obedience can thus be analysed as a form of practice which makes power, this analysis forgets the possible mutually exclusive interests of avoiding sanctions and ‘dropping’ the translation of the order. The theories of power as a product of acting thus partly describes the obedience of the environment, that is the lack of sanctions against the breaking of norms and laws as constituting the power of the Shivsena, because with this non-response the rules set by the Sena are ‘translated’ and those previously governing the environment are superseded. The model cannot explain the process of extension of power appropriately, however, because it does not look at the initial setting of what is then translated, responded to, or not responded to. As it conflates power with acceptance, with using and practising it, it does not take into view that the setting of power and its translation are two processes which are dependent on each other but nonetheless distinct from each other. 25 The processes by which such politics can evolve a vibrant civil society cannot be discussed within the scope of this book. But the possibilities are there, as is evident from the organisational pluralisation within the Hindu-nationalist camp. This demands a reconceptualisation of the vague term of the civil society which is often – in an approach of modernisation theory – equated with pluralist democracy. Civil societies, however, are not necessarily democratic or governed by pluralist values; they might just as well adhere to majoritarian definitions of substantive rights.

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innovation implies its openness in terms of ‘direction’. Thus contrary to assumptions that conceptualising social change as a result of innovative creativity leads inevitably to a theory of democratisation, as both have at their core the idea of self-determination (Joas 1992: 347), here the claim is that (unfortunately) the end to which ‘freedom’ of creation is put is open. Neither political pluralisation nor systemic differentiation is a one-way street. They, too, are contingent.

Conditions and Contingency The generation or rather: transformation of such relations of power and the modes of incorporation and articulation is not independent of previous structures, as discussed above. As the success of movements of violent action depends largely on the success of their violent actions – as these create involvement, participation, the possibilities of funds (which can be invested in other services) and power – we have to ask under what conditions their violence is successful. However, ‘success’ of violent action cannot be measured simply in terms of its material achievements but has to be considered also in terms of its ‘signifying work’ which is not limited to ideological constructions but includes the framing processes in tactics and actions (McAdam, 1994: 409). This multifaceted ‘success’ of the Shivsena‘s actions and the shifts in the norms of legitimate action that it achieved, derived in many ways from its interaction with the state and political institutions governing the state. For once, the ethos of the independence struggle and the introduction of universal franchise established as a right the idea of the people as the sovereign (Frankel, 1990: 484). This participatory ethos met with an increasing disillusionment with the paternal modes of the distribution of development. Established initially as a quasi-individual right, development was practised in the sense of an étatist idea of the ‘common good’. The Nehruvian developmental state never fulfilled its promises. Its aspirations to bring not only liberty and democratic franchise, but also prosperity and distributive justice were the foundational myth of independent India. It was the specific post-colonial and anti-colonial legitimisation of the state as the provider of ‘development for the people’ (Chatterjee, 1995: 216). It always stood in a peculiar relation to the factual organisation of the state, to the practices governing the so-called Congress system (Kothari, 1964) that ruled that state for so many decades. That system consisted in a vast network of alliances integrating local patronage systems, and rested on the accommodation and incorporation of local élites (Lele, 1990, Frankel, 1990).26 The idea of the Indian 26

Its demise was related to the fact that the latter could not accommodate or incorporate the diverse claims to access in its strategy of solving all conflicts between particular interests in an economic way (Chatterjee, 1995: 214). The centralisation of command under Indira Gandhi and the simultaneous abolition of inner-party democracy reacted to growing participatory demands and the diversification of power blocks. However, the authoritarian blockade which excluded the possibility of new (regional) elites to articulate themselves in

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state thus clashed with the ‘blurred boundaries’ (Gupta, 1995) between the public and the private entailed in that system, but at once was embedded into it as it was the means by which the state – and the idea of it – were extended into the furthest reaches of society. However, Gharibi Hatao (Abolish Poverty), Indira Gandhi’s electoral slogan did not materialise; the ambiguities of the developmental promise – often too little and sometimes too much of the state – de-legitimised the Congress system. The Sena eroded the blockade of the Congress system effectively and more, it stylised its mode of actionism as the immediate representation of ‘the people’s will’. Its anti-democratic rhetoric refers precisely to the themes inherent in the democratic legitimations of the people as the sovereign, to an identified crisis of representation attributed to the parliamentarian system and its alleged incapability to deliver the developmental promise. On one hand the Sena answered to and reaffirmed understandings of politics as provision, on the other it posed as a critique of both the paternalism inherent in the developmental state and its bureaucratic organisation, a critique that resonates with the choir of such critiques. The Shivsena employed its actionist modes of operation as an explicit rebuff to bureaucratic administration and political deliberation at the same time, thereby propounding to overcome the shortcomings of the developmentally legitimised state. However, as the many democratic mobilisations of lower caste groups demonstrate: such a blockade is not necessarily undermined only by the politics of violence as practised by the Shivsena. Participatory ethos and developmental expectation produced at the same time discontent with established modes of paternal politics as well as various alternative modes of political mobilisation, including the active use of parliamentarian organisation. Diverse political claims established themselves within the framework of representative democracy and have been rather successful in changing the distribution of parliamentary representation. They differ in the extent to which they have been able or wanting to turn this representative power into material (access, money) benefits for their constituencies. These assertions of democratic practice have been overshadowed by militant subversions of the latter and have led to gloomy predictions on the fate of Indian democracy. Assessments of the unsuitability of democracy to the Indian citizen, especially those of the Indian citizenry who are in an urban bias often relegated to the realms of rural traditionalism, are starkly contradicted by the democratic assertion of the latter and the active use they make of democratic institutions.27 the Congress machinery, further immobilised the state because it dis-empowered local elites which had to some degree more effectively executed its programmes (Kohli, 1990: 386; see also Mitra, 1991). 27 ‘The sections of society that were previously kept outside of political power – backward classes, Dalits, women, tribal people – are participating much more in the electoral process. Although the urban, educated elite is experiencing depoliticisation, the upsurge of the lower orders has kept the overall voting levels fairly high’, states the report of the CSDS on the

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Thus, rather than blaming the failures of the parliamentarian system on the alienness of the idea to the culture of the people who use it (see Nandy and Seth, 1996, Saberwal, 1997), these processes show that there is an extensive use of the institutions as well as the ‘ethos’ of democracy and little evidence of the cultural alien-ness of both. Their failures have to be sought not in culture but in power. Hindu-Nationalism attempted to counter the increasing success of the political mobilisation of lower castes by propounding as existentially necessary the unity of all Hindus – and all those who Hindu-nationalists considered to be part of this community – against their enemies as ‘one people’. At the core of their vision as well as their practices is an anti-pluralist construction of the body politic. Against ‘casteism’ it posed on one hand the harmony of diversity in hierarchy and on the other the equation of pitribhoomi (fatherland) and punyabhoomi (holy land) that is the idea that only those and all those whose sacred places, holy lands are within the territory of India are true, legitimate Indians. In their vision of the organic body of a people, this people are defined by a Rousseau-ian volonté general, a generalised will that implies a fundamental homogeneity – even in diversity. It could be said that when the statist ‘volonté general’ called ‘development’ was questioned by pluralist claims and interest aggregations, it was promptly replaced by the Hindunationalist idea of the volonté general. Hindu-nationalism, while being a part of the dismantling of the Congress system was also a reaction to this democratic revolution. For the politics of violence to succeed, however, it needed the space granted above all by the undermining of the rule of law within the political sphere. The ‘criminalisation of politics’ (Kothari) could be instrumentalised by the Shivsena in two ways: First, the indecisive limits posed by the movement’s environment and its competitors made its action rather risk-free, often profitable and it forged the strategic alliances with those who made good use of the movement‘s services. The institutional expansion made possible thereby went so far as to provide the Sena with the powers of government, so that it can now grant itself the space for action. Second, the state of ‘lawlessness’ served as a legitimation of exactly that action which breaks the law in order to defend order within the context of a political sphere in which the rule of law is so frequently replaced by the rule of force. Within this context, the breaking of norms and laws whereby the Sena set new rules was ‘translated’ into normalcy and possibly even more: into justness. The replacement of a formal law deemed illegitimate – and thus deemed to violate the idea of ‘the people’ as the sovereign – with the claim to substantial rights imbued in an assumed majority is the construction on which such movements base their legitimacy. This duality of violent action is the vigilantist legitimation of violence (Waldmann, 1998: 93). Vigilantist violence is not deviance. Deviance deviates; it breaks the norms that are valid ‘around’ it and continues to be valid. Vigilantism, on the contrary, propounds to protect the norms that it breaks (in order to protect 1999 election (Frontline, 26 November 1999).

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them). It practically excludes certain actions and certain targets from the validity of the norm system. It limits the validity of the normative order to a specific community – it is thus anti-universalist – and defines the limits of that community by means of the limited validity of norms, condemning all those beyond the boundaries to the state of outlaws. It is that Schmittian distinction between friend and foe. Vigilantist violence does not suffer from normative anomy.28 The relation of the politics of violent action to democracy thus shows itself to be manifold: Through the opportunities of action which political movements of violent action create and which their actions perpetuate, they fulfil some of the ethos and practice of participation and empowerment which the (anti-colonial) democratic discourse has established. Their claims to mass representation and their stylisation of the sovereignty of the people explicitly connect to patterns of legitimacy which are the base also for democracy namely equality29 and participation. Their anti-democratic ideologies frequently refer specifically to an identified crisis of political representation attributed to parliamentarian systems. (Violent) action then is stylised as the immediate medium of the representation of ‘the peoples’ or ‘a People’s’ will. Violent practices acting out enemy images symbolically create a unitary homogeneous idea of a ‘People’ and connect to imaginations of directness, spontaneity and renewal, of self-determination and virility which become the centre of fundamentally oppositional forms of politics and representation. It is not only the question of the sovereign in a democratic order, ‘the people’, which they define in their ideological constructions, but also a (per-) version of the idea of direct participation which lurks behind democratic theory and is not realised by representative democracy. So such politics offer not only identity and not even only status but opportunities for acting and for power. They are, at the same time, strictly anti-pluralist and therefore clearly antidemocratic. They propound a unitary (anti-democratic) vision of the body politic and of the representation of ‘the people’s will’. They realise the demand for participation in power while at the same time unifying this demand against pluralist claims. They practice participation instead of democracy. The vigilante production of the state of India is thus not simply reactive but projective in Castells’ sense that ‘social actors, on the basis of whichever cultural materials are available to them, built a new identity that redefines their position in society and, by so doing seek the transformation of overall social structure’ (Castells, 1997, II: 8). Because identity politics often come in the garb of protective, preservative ideologies they might be considered not to fulfil the latter criteria of the transformation of the social structure. However, the transformative elements within their ideologies and, above all, in the practices legitimised through preservative rhetoric are decisive: they actively re-structure institutional settings as 28

Compare Offe (1996: 267). Dahrendorf has demonstrated this point in respect to the value of equality in the case of National Socialism in Germany (Dahrendorf, 1968). 29

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well as their legitimations. They potentially shift, as we have seen, norms of legality and legitimacy, of equity and distributive justice. At the same time it remains open to what degree the shift in norms, in the modes of incorporation and articulation will endure. Their force was entailed in the modes of organisation and the practices that they were promoted by; it was entailed in the offers of possibilities of action and participation related to those modes of operation; it was entailed in the instrumental uses of these practices that various interested parties employed. It was thus entailed in the potential to integrate different motives and expectations in a particular manner that related to prevalent modes of social and political articulation. The possibilities of monopolisations of the Indian state have decreased for good as was dramatically demonstrated in the 2004 parliamentary election: That pluralisation of the political sphere that the establishment of the Shivsena relates to in so many contradictory ways – fighting it with calls to unity, but also being a child of it; relating to its promises of representation and transforming them – that pluralisation itself shapes and structures the ways in which the party can succeed. It binds the contestant in this transformation to the rules of success generated within this pluralism; it has thus an effect on which means succeed and which means fail in the endeavour to possess the state.

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Bildung von Wir- Gruppen’, in Kölner Zeitschrift for Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, vol. 41(3), pp. 440–464. Frankel, Francine (1990), ‘Decline of a Social Order’, in Francine Frankel and M.S.A. Rao (eds), Dominance and State Power in Modern India, vol. II, Delhi, pp. 482–517. Giddens, Anthony (1985), The Nation-State and Violence, Oxford. Gupta, Akhil (1995), ‘Blurred Boundaries: The discourse of corruption, the culture of politics, and the imagined state’, in American Ethnologist, vol. 22(2), pp. 375–402. Gupta, Dipankar (1982), Nativism in a Metropolis: The Shiv Sena in Bombay, Delhi. Gupta, Dipankar (1993) ‘Between general and particular ‘others’: Some observations on fundamentalism’, in Contributions to Indian Sociology, vol. 27(1), pp. 119–137. Hanf, Theodor (1990), Koexistenz im Krieg: Staatszerfall und Entstehen einer Nation im Libanon, Baden-Baden. Hansen, Thomas Blom (1996a), ‘Recuperating Masculinity: Hindu Nationalism, Violence and the Exorcism of the Muslim Other’, in Critique of Social Anthropology, vol. 16(2), pp. 137–172. Hansen, Thomas Blom (1996b), ‘Becoming a Light onto Itself: Nationalist Phantasies in the Age of Globalisation’, in Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 10, 9 March, pp. 603–616. Hansen, Thomas Blom (1999), The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India, Oxford University Press, Delhi. Heuze, Gerard (1995), ‘Cultural Populism: The Appeal of the Shiv Sena’, in Sujata Patel and Alice Thorner (eds), Bombay: Metaphor of Modern India, Bombay, pp. 213–247. Hirschman, Albert, O. (1982), Shifting Involvements, Princeton University Press, Princeton. Humphrey, Caroline (1999), ‘Russian Protection Rackets and the Appropriation of Law and Order’, in Josiah Heyman (ed.), States and Illegal Practices, Oxford, pp. 199–232, Oxford. Jayal, Niraja Gopal (2001), ‘The State and Democracy in India or What happened to Welfare Secularism and Development’, in Niraja Gopal Jayal (ed.), Democracy in India, pp. 193–223, Delhi. Joas, Hans (1992), Die Kreativität des Handelns, Frankfurt am Main. Khilnani, Sunil (1999), The Idea of India, Delhi. Kohli, Atul (1990), Democracy and Discontent, Cambridge, Mass. Kohli, Atul (1998), ‘Can Democracies Accommodate Ethnic Nationalism? The Rise and Decline of Self-Determination Movements in India’, in Amrita Basu and Atul Kohli (eds), Community Conflicts and the State in India, pp. 7–32, Delhi. Kothari, Rajni (1964), ‘The Congress “System” in India’, in Asian Survey, vol. 4, 12 December 1964, pp. 1161–1173.

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Kothari, Rajni (2001), ‘The Crisis of the Moderate State and the Decline of Democracy’, in Niraja Gopal Jayal (ed.), Democracy in India, pp. 101–127, Delhi. Katzenstein, Mary Fainsod (1979), Ethnicity and Equality: The Shiv Sena Party and Preferential Policies in Bombay, Ithaca and London. Latour, Bruno (1986), ‘The Power of Association’, in John Law (ed.), Power Action and Belief, London. Lele, Jayant, (1990), ‘Caste, Class and Dominance: Political Mobilisation in Maharashtra’, in Francine Frankel and M.S.A. Rao (eds.) Dominance and State Power in Modern India, l. II, pp.115–211, Delhi. Lele, Jayant (1995), ‘Saffronization of the Shiv Sena: The Political Economy of City, State and Nation’, in Sujata Patel and Alice Thorner (eds), Bombay: Metaphor for Modern India, pp. 185-212, Oxford University Press, Bombay (Abbreviated Version in Economic and Political Weekly, 24 June, pp.1520– 1528). Ludden, David (1997), Making India Hindu: Religion, Community, and the Politics of Democracy in India, New Delhi. Luhmann, Niklas (1988), Ökologische Kommunikation, Opladen. Luhmann, Niklas (1998), Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, Frankfurt am Main. McAdam, Doug (1994), ‘Taktiken von Protestbewegungen. Das “framing” der Amerikanischen Bürgerrechtsbewegung’, in Friedhelm Neidhardt, Öffentlichkeit, öffentliche Meinung, soziale Bewegungen, Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, special issue no. 34, pp. 393–412. Mitra, Subrata, K. (1991), ‘Room to Manoeuvre in the Middle: Local Elites, Political Action, and the State in India’, in World Politics, vol. 43(3), pp. 390– 413. Nandy, Ashis and Sheth, D. L. (1996), The Multiverse of Democracy, New Delhi. Neidhardt, Friedhelm (1986), ‘Gewalt - soziale Bedeutung und sozialwissenschaftliche Bestimmungen des Begriffes’, in BKA (ed.), Was ist Gewalt? pp. 111–141, Wiesbaden. Offe, Claus (1996), ‘Moderne “Barbarei” Der Naturzustand im Kleinformat’? in Max Miller and Hans-Georg Soeffner (eds), Modernität und Barbarei, pp. 258– 289, Frankfurt am Main. Patel, Sujata (1995), ‘Shiv Sena’s Base in Bombay’, in The Hindu, pp. 27–28. Patel, Sujata (1997), ‘Contemporary Bombay; the Power Base and Popular Appeal of the Shivsena’, NCSAS Discussion Paper No. 3. Popitz, Heinrich (1992), Phänomene der Macht, Tübingen. Purandare, Vaibhav (1999), The Sena Story, Mumbai. Randeria, Shalini (1995), Hindu-Fundamentalismus: Zum Verhätnis von Religion, Politik und Geschichte im modernen Indien, Sozialanthropologische Arbeitspapiere 67, Berlin. Randeria, Shalini (2002), ‘Glocalisation of Law: Environmental Justice, World Bank, NGOs and the Cunning State in India’, paper presented at the conference Mobile People, mobile Law, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology,

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Halle/Saale. Saberwal, Satish (1997), ‘On the Diversity of Ruling Traditions’, in Sudipta Kaviraj (ed.), Politics in India, pp. 124–140, Delhi. Schlichte, Klaus, and Wilke, Boris (2000), ‘Der Staat und einige seiner Zeitgenossen’, in Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen vol. 2, pp. 359– 384. Schmitt, Carl (1926), Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parlamentarismus, München und Leipzig. Schmitt, Carl 1983 (1928), Verfassungslehre, Berlin. Sen, Amartya (1979), ‘Rational Fools: a Critique of the Behavioural Foundations of Economic Theory’, in H. Harris (ed.), Scientific Models and Man, The Herbert Spencer Lectures Delivered at the University of Oxford, pp. 1–25, Oxford. Shah, Ghanshyam, (1994), ‘Identity, Communal Consciousness and Politics’, in Economic and Political Weekly, pp. 1133–11407, May. Srikrishna Commission Report (1998), Mumbai: published by Jyoti Punwani, Vrijendra. Volkov, Vadim (2000), ‘Gewaltunternehmer im postkommunistischen Russland’, in Leviathan, vol. 29(2), pp. 173–191. Waldmann, Peter (1998), Terrorismus, Provokation der Macht, München.

Chapter 3

The ‘Privatization’ of the State: North Africa in Comparative Perspective Béatrice Hibou1

The debate over the nature of the state in Third World countries, after having been devoted to its ‘importation’ or its ‘transplant’, is now centered on its retreat, or even its demise. This is doubtless due to more general reflections on the ineffectiveness of ‘the political’ in the face of the market and the forces of globalization. But it also results from specific discussions that arise in reference to developing countries. These reproduce, in new forms, old arguments. It is said, for instance, that these states, being caught between the conditionalities of international institutions and domestic upheavals, are increasingly constrained, leading to a severe contraction in their sovereignty.2 Thus, it is said, we witness the retreat of the state, or its decay, in the developing world. This involves not only the reduction of state regulatory authority on the economic front, but also the state’s failure to exercise its ‘regalian’ functions (collecting taxes, maintaining order) in a consistent way. Naturally, some countries are said to be less affected than others, but the demise of the state is referred to as a general tendency in Third World countries. This chapter seeks to refute this interpretation of these recent tendencies of contemporary states. In it, I hope to propose an alternative view: that is, the privatization of the state. This apparently paradoxical expression is intended to evoke the ambivalence that characterizes the present context. Certain facts used to argue for the demise of the state are undeniable: the state does increasingly delegate its regulatory, or even ‘regalian’ functions to private intermediaries; ‘markets’, ‘networks’, and private actors have become increasingly important; and pressures from the international economy have become more direct. And it is clear that recourse to violence for private appropriation has become a predominant mode 1 2

Translated by Janet Roitman.

On the imported state see Badie (1992); on the graft of the state Bayart (1993); on the retreat of the state Porter (1990), Reich (1991), Drucker (1993), Strange (1996), Chavagneux (1998). For developing countries see Zartman (1995) and Kaplan (1994).

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of governing in many countries. Nonetheless, the state not only resists these changes, but it continues to structure itself through constant negotiation between the ‘public’ and ‘private’ realms, and through the processes of delegation and ex post facto control. In other words, the ‘privatization’ of the state does not necessarily mean the loss of its capacities for control or its cannibalization by private energies. It does, however, refer to its reconfiguration and the modification of modes of governing that are induced by national and international transformations. The actors, networks, and economic and political powers that I study in North Africa (but also in Africa or in Asia) are constantly transgressing boundaries, displacing them and playing off of them: some belong to networks of contraband or the drug trade; others compromise the monopoly over the legitimate means of violence; and others subvert taxation. Nonetheless – and this is the point I will demonstrate in this chapter – these myriad practices do not necessarily undermine state power insofar as the latter is not a fixed and stable entity. On the contrary, the exercise of state power is intermittent, fluid, and multiple. And state power is not exogenous to the societies in which it is deployed, and to which it belongs.

The ‘Vulgarization’ of Privatization Privatization is at the heart of liberalization reforms that have been applied to all developing countries. But this is not limited to public enterprises, public services, and other economic actors (following the ‘promotion of the private sector’); this orthodox aspect of the reform process – the gist of the dominant discourse of the international community – is only one element in the ‘construction’3 of economic policy. Privatization has also diffused to other domains and other state interventions. And this is not simply the product of incentives taken by the bureaucracy or political power. Instead, it is the effect of at least two highly interconnected movements. First, the reforms themselves have produced lateral, unintended, and often undesired consequences that enabled this diffusion. These include: the reduction of budgetary expenditures, which imperiled national administrations; the delegitimation of public authorities; the fragmentation of decision-making processes; the primacy given to international legitimacy over domestic legitimacy; the emphasis put on the speed of modalities for action and on results over means. Second, through specific strategies, conflicts, and compromises and negotiations undertaken between different social groups, various economic and 3

The distinction between ‘state building’ and ‘state formation’ was put forward by Berman and Lonsdale. State-building is a ‘conscious effort at creating an apparatus of control’ while its formation is ‘an historical process whose outcome is a largely unconscious and contradictory process of conflicts, negotiations and compromises between diverse groups whose self-serving actions and trade-offs constitute the ‘vulgarisation’ of power’ (1992: 5). For a systematization of this distinction, see the review of that book by Bayart (1994).

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political actors have transformed the context and the substance of the reforms. In doing so, they have etched out a new outline of the state and new contours of modes of governing (cf. Linz/Stepan, 1996; Hibou, 2000). Thus, today, privatization also – or perhaps especially – involves development policies, economic resources, regulatory functions, and the regalian functions of state. As diverse as they are, both programmed and spontaneous processes of privatization have certain points in common: they are well-regarded by the reigning liberal discourse, they make increasing use of private means for governing, they modify both economic and political regulation, as well as forms of sovereignty. In this sense, they displace and blur the frontiers between the public and private domains. This ‘vulgarization’ (or popularization) of privatization is now a dominant form of government in countries of the South, the ‘formation’ of privatization having largely overtaken its ‘construction’. It should be underscored that reference to the privatization of the state, even if it has an ironic dimension in respect to donors’ discourse, is not simply a play on words; this expression reflects the generalization of both the use of private intermediaries for what were, until now, state functions and the reconfiguration of the state itself.

Privatization: A Vector for State Formation For many observers, these negotiations, skillful modes of management, and methods of renewal are not proof of state vitality. They are simply the various ruses of those in power. This is the viewpoint of Zartman, who argues that inept leaders are responsible for state collapse. This is also one of the arguments put forth to refute the idea of the ‘transplant’ of the state in Africa and Asia. Tenets of this perspective maintain that the elite’s capacity to capture or monopolize the state has prevented it from being rooted in society. But this thesis seems flawed by its normative stance, or its having presupposed the nature of the state, which is defined in advance and in functionalist terms. To avoid this pitfall, we can evade definitions that are necessarily circumstantial, normative and reductionist by putting emphasis on the observation of original processes of power (cf. Bayart, 2005). We can analyze economic and political trends in developing countries by avoiding a priori definitions about what the state is (or what it is not), which allows us to think about the possibilities for new modes of power and government, to capture or foresee new representations of the political. In other words, we give ourselves the opportunity to consider state strategies that seem in retreat, in decline, or even in decomposition, as part of the continuous process of state formation, or as new modalities for the construction of the political. Those authors who support the thesis of the retreat or even the collapse of states do so by drawing on certain ideas like the rupture between the modes of government or the hypothesis of the ‘bad guy’-factor, which means that leading political figures destroy the foundations of states by their own strategies, or the disappearance of the idea of a ‘public interest’, and so on. By adopting the position

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elucidated above, that is to analyze the state without a prior definition, I want to show that these arguments could be read in a quite different manner. They can support the idea that the privatization of the state constitutes a modality for state formation and state consolidation, as opposed to the mere maintenace of power by a particular governing regime. First, processes of discharge and ongoing negotiations are inscribed in the longterm and constitute a fundamental aspect of the historical trajectory (specific to each country and each region) of the political entities involved. The delegation of powers to private agents is an age-old phenomenon. Today, it appears to be a new technique because of the adoption, over the last decade, of normative representations (the rational-legal state, the providential state, the developmental state) and the occulting (for archaic purpose?) of past forms however efficient. The overlapping of state and elite strategies extends so far back in time that it is futile to try to distinguish between the two. Nonetheless, these practices intensify after regime changes and the institutionalization of democratic politics. One example, among many, illustrates this historical point. In Morocco, present-day practices (the privatization of patronage and allegiances through the distribution of rents and access to economic activities; political management of criminal activities; the emergence of a parallel administration; the discontinuity and arbitrary manner of the makhzens, especially with respect to taxes) are a ‘modern’ modality for the exercise of makhzenian power. In a context where it is impossible to control the entire national space, the sultan encourages, or even contributes to, the establishment of dissident spaces; ‘controlled dissidence’ is exercised by the harka (troop movements) and by ongoing conflicts and confrontations with influential personalities. This organization of space through ploys and negotiations, as opposed to violence and command, extend to the fiscal domain and control over economic activities. This not only increases possibilities for the private enrichment of privileged persons, it also allows for control. In all of these societies, straddling cannot be regarded as an anomaly or a transitional phenomenon. It is, rather, a specificity of the political field. This is why private management often follows the model of public management. In Tunisia, for example, the ‘mise à niveau’philosophy of intervention (a policy designed to prepare companies for the liberal environment, born of the free trade agreement with Europe) has an uncanny resemblance to the previous interventionist period of planning. The second argument is that this mutual dependence between public instances and private interests or intermediaries (which is not necessarily uniformity or symbiosis) structures the state itself. As we have noted, it is impossible to differentiate between the economy and politics, the particular and the general, or public and private. The political role of private interests or the monopolization of wealth by the elite or a restricted group of political leaders does not subvert or undermine the state since these private actors are also public actors. In that sense, they are part of the state itself; their practices of appropriation become political practices, or a mode of government unto itself. Privatizations are inscribed in this framework. Particular political figures or factions reinforce their power through the

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appropriation of economic resources, which is, of course, a means of creating alliances through short-term tactics in order to reinforce contested or illegitimate power. But, more than that, privatization is a way of etching out the potential limits of political action. This must mean contributing to the paternalism and patrimonialism that characterize the authoritarian regimes in place. Having recourse to violence or war for private economic ends means contributing to political change and the reconfiguration of the state, even if only unintentionally. Of course, the use of private foreign firms to manage customs services, exploit resources or assure security reinforces reigning regimes and fills the pockets of a few leaders. But it is also a means of managing dependency relations according to certain historical specificities. According to Jean-François Bayart, in sub-Saharan and North Africa, extraversion has always been a state resource or even a ‘rent’ (even though this is expressed in myriad ways on the continent). The use of external resources to manage internal conflicts, alliances with foreign actors to reinforce central power, the transfer of exterior conditionalities onto the masses, the instrumentalization of great-power conflicts to extract new resources – these have, for centuries, been methods for insertion in the international political economy and modes for domestic political action. Today, this way of managing extraversion has become more and more privatized. In Algeria, for example, about twenty oil and gas companies are now based in the Sahara, which means that foreign aid coming from France, Europe or the Bretton Woods institutions are no longer as important for the financial survival of the regime. Finally, the third argument is that the redefinition of public/private relations and the transformation of modes of government are two sides of the same process. Privatizing the fiscal domain means modifying logics of extraction and redistribution which, in turn, modifies the modes of unequal accumulation, or redistribution that legitimate the political relations. This is also a question of renegotiating relations between values, norms, and different rules that involves: privileging the monetarization of social relations and the commodification of politics (de Sardan, 1999); legitimating influence bargaining and clientelism;4 expanding forms of value and wealth (Roitman, 1998, 2004); acknowledging the latter as the basis of politics, even if its perception remains extremely ambivalent. And, as Achille Mbembe, Roland Marchal, Christine Messiant or Janet Roitman have explained,5 the development of violence (war, pillage, riots) for economic ends transforms, through this process of unbridled private appropriation, notions of property, thus participating in the renegotiation of public and private spaces and, in the end, state formation.

4 5

On the issue of clientelism cf. Bayart (1993) and Banegas (1998, 2003). Cf. Mbembe (1993, 1996), Marchal/Messiant (1997, 2002, 2003).

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The Case of North Africa The case of North Africa can be analyzed in both ways. Following the decay of the state’s interpretation, the ‘events’ in Algeria (as the civil war was modestly called) were described as revealing anarchy; they were analyzed as the last stage in the breakup of the State (with the appearance of internal boundaries and autonomous territories in the heart of the Algerian State), the collapse of the political community and the confrontation between to clear-cut groups. The civil war was thus explained in terms of the combined effects of an economic crisis and the deficiencies of an imported State, which was never able to find its roots in society and to adapt to local conditions of political life, or ‘the political’, more generally.6 In Morocco, the development of criminal activities (clandestine migration, drug traffic, counterfitting, prostitution, commerce in stolen vehicles) since the 1980s is most often analyzed as a loss of control over economic activities, or as the efforts of social forces to respond to the state’s failure to handle the economic crisis, as the only means available for social mobility. And for most of the countries of the region, including the very authoritarian Tunisia, tax evasion, fraud, and contraband have taken on huge proportions (official sources refer to 50 per cent tax evasion and 30–50 per cent illegal imports for North Africa). These so-called ‘informal’ activities are said to be instances of the populations’ defiance vis-à-vis the state and, inversely, the incapacity of the state to counter this subversive behavior. This illicit manner of insertion into the world economy, and into the regional and national economies, is perceived in terms of the state’s failure to master local populations and its own security. It is also seen as a loss of control over the state’s economic and financial bases, or the incapacity to command respect for prevailing rules and norms. In sum, the present state of affairs in the three countries of the Maghreb are most often analyzed in terms of the state demise, the impotence of state power (most notably in the economic domain), and contestation of community affiliations that constitute the North African Nation-state. When observing economic as well as social practices in the Maghreb today, one must admit that, when compared to past periods, there is a fragmentation of state power: numerous breaks in the traditions of centralized political authority and bureaucratic power (again, especially in the economic realm), a loss of complete and direct control of the state over the national economy, the increasing importance of external constraints and the apparent supremacy of the market, growing inadequacy of the administration, and so on. However, the ‘privatization’ point of view gives us the opportunity to consider state strategies that seem in retreat, in decline, or even in decomposition, as part of the continuous process of state formation, or as new modalities for the construction of the political.

6

Cf. Cote (1996), Nouschi (1996) and Badie (1992).

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Algeria and the Privatization of Violence The work of Luiz Martinez has clearly shown how the state and armed groups in Algeria became ‘complementary enemies’ (Braudel) due to their common economic interests in the war, as well as because they share the same imaginaries, or the same values.7 Since the early 1990s, the splintering of spaces of power allowed for both the privatization of violence for economic ends and the privatization of economic resources through violence. Far from being proof of state weakness, this double process of privatization can be interpreted as a particularly astute manner of managing conflict. Indeed, this modality allowed the state to ensure direct control (through the army) as well as indirect control (through private security companies) of the strategic points of the Algerian economy (oil and gas regions, most notably). It allowed for the delegation of power over other zones, inhabited by the local population (through indirect support given to the militias). It partially contributed to the overcoming of social barriers by fostering social mobility (the war and violence in general, having, for the protagonists of the Algerian conflict, served as an instrument of accumulation of resources and power). Economically speaking, this mode of indirect government is beneficial to the actors at whole. Power elites benefit from the redistribution of former public monopolies to the private sector, as well as from opportunities offered by the liberalization process and the modernization of infrastructures (especially housing construction). Moreover, this group has promoted the privatization of the administration – giving special attention to customs and tax collection – which granted them supplementary political and economic resources. The state profited from the unhoped-for acceleration of liberalization programs thanks to attacks led by armed groups on indebted or bankrupt public enterprises, as well as the forced privatization of many sectors, such as transportation, cement, foodstuffs. It benefited from the reconstitution of its material base due to its having enclaved the petroleum industry. Through this, its relations with the international financial institutions continued to improve. Finally, the armed groups’ opportunities for survival – and for some, even enrichment – multiplied due to the implicit tolerance of their trafficking and rackets, and especially because of freedom of trade, which allowed them to convert illegal goods and launder money through trading companies. Given this, one can paradoxically maintain that by manipulating and sustaining violence, by encouraging the entry of international firms in the petrol sector, and by offering opportunities for enrichment and prestige to the ensemble of protagonists in the conflict, the Algerian state was able to proceed with its ongoing consolidation. Likewise, I would like to argue that, given these logics, the present-day privatization of the economy and the state in Algeria can only be understood in terms of certain imaginaries: those shared by the different protagonists of the civil war, and the imaginaries of conflict and violence. The latter are perceived as 7

The best work is Martinez (1995, 1997, and 1998); see also Rousillon (1996).

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economic opportunities insofar as they are seen as vectors for social mobility and are deemed to favor the redistribution of wealth. Today, the model of the emirs are the raïs (the pirates of the Ottoman Empire), the caïds (indigenous functionaries during colonization), and officers of the National Liberation Army – all three being decisive actors in the founding of the Algerian state. Through the light of these historical models, the contemporary moment reflects not so much the weakening of the state and political dissipation as the pursuit of their ongoing construction through ‘de-bureaucratization’, militarization (violence being generated for the consolidation of state power), and the delegation of the regalian functions of state (especially in the domain of security), development programs, and economic redistribution to the private sector. And what is worth mentioning, is that all the actors, the GIA as well as the FLN generals, the rural citizens as well as the urban ones, share the same conception of the state power. Morocco and Privatization of Patronage In Morocco, the privatization of patronage and allegiances is even more wellestablished since it dates back to the end of the Protectorate and, more significantly, the reign of Hassan II.8 The distribution of rents (for example, licenses to exploit mines and quarries), and the possibilities for access to economic enrichment were, from this period on, ‘de-bureaucratized’ and delegated to the sovereign’s close relations. But this process of the delegation of power was amplified over time, being applied to the entire economy. Today, the explosion of criminal activities (counterfitting, drug traffic, commerce in stolen vehicles, clandestine immigration, prostitution) and ‘informal’ activities (contraband, nonregistered production) is perhaps the ‘revenge’ of the market economy, as some claim. But in no way does it result in the impotence of the state and ‘the political’, more generally. Even if certain downward spirals can be noted, state power contributed to the development of these activities through its tolerance with regards to illegality (in the name of social peace, but also as an alternative mode of social mobility; this tolerance is illustrated by the laxity of legislation), on the one hand, and through the active participation of certain state actors (high-level functionaries, protection by those close to the Palace, the financing of parties and public life), on the other. The ‘clean-up campaign’ (campagne d’assainissement) undertaken in February 1996 (this campaign was aimed at putting an end to corruption, drug traffikcing and tax evasion), is a perfect illustration of the subtlety of this modality of the exercise of state power. Those who were called in for corruption, tax fraud, drug trafficking or contraband were not marginals; they had benefitted from highlevel protection. And the condemned activities were not at all proscribed since they continue today with the same benevolent tolerance of the authorities. It was the arbitrary nature of the campaign that allowed the state to avoid the spread of 8

Interviews and personal observations (February 1996, January and March 1997, January and June 1998). See also Hibou (1996), Henry (1996), Waterbury (1975) and Leveau (1985).

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potential dissidence, to attempt to redefine new forms of allegiance. It was able to reaffirm its power, its primacy in the definition of the norms and rules, its initiative in the renegotiation of relations with social forces, and its capacity for intervention and influence in the political and economic fields. The present process of privatization does not present a challenge to the Makhzenian logic of power. Rather, it is part of the continuity of its exercise.9 This form of power never really disappeared; it was perhaps occulted by colonial state practices and then, at independence, by the development and interventionist ideologies that prevailed during the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, the role of the Makhzen had already been modified and became widespread due to the effects of the colonial episode (the heritage and appropriation of colonial organization, especially administrative) and nationalism (the expansion of interventions of the Makhzen in the economic sphere). In the Cherifian kingdom, the discontinuity of the power of the Makhzen implied another modality of government, which distinguished itself from the traditional centralized and interventionist model. The distinction between bled al Makhzen (spaces of submission) and bled al Siba (spaces of dissidence) was characteristic of the political organization of the kingdom: while the first instance recognized the authority of the state, the latter only recognized the religious authority of the Sultan. But numerous historical studies have shown that the frontiers between these two spaces were instable and fluid. They also indicate that the spaces of dissidence were not devoid of the presence, being irregular and often invisible, of central political power, which appeared from time to time through allegiances, negotiation or violence.10 In a context where central power is not able to permanently control all of Moroccan space, the sovereign encourages and often contributes to the construction of dissident spaces: the latter allow for the preservation of an internal status quo and for the exercise of authority by both division and distant, or indirect, control. The ‘controlled dissidence’ or ‘normalized’11 dissidence was thus part of state engineering, which was manifest (apart from the harka and the mehalla) by constant conflict and confrontation between local notables. This organization of space by ruse and negotiation more than by violence and command was not restricted to politics: it was applied to the fiscal domain12 and to the control of economic activities (cf. Zaïm, 1990, Schroeter, 1988). With the onset of liberalization programs and practices of privatization, the actuality of the Makhzen appears most bluntly. The blurring of referents is a mode of government: maintaining fluidity between legal and illegal borders is an instrument of power (largely used in the realm of criminal activities and fiscality), as is the playing off of two criteria of government – legality and allegiance – which are incompatible 9

For the permanence of the mazhenian logic and for the consequences of historical experiences in Morocco cf. Tozy (1991, 1999) and Hibou (1996) for economic aspects. 10 See Brignon et al. (1967), Ganiage (1985), Geertz (1986). 11 Expressions of Tozy (1999: 69, 71). 12 See for example Guillen (n.d.) and Mansour (1990).

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but coexist. The Palace ensured indirect control through protection, mediation, negotiation, and ‘arrangements’, and this was the rule, not the exception.13 Arbitrariness is always used as a mode of intermittent government, but it is particularly efficient. In this context, today’s ‘campaigns’ recall the harka of the past which, as Mohamed Tozy reminds us, constituted one of the most important moments of the exercise of power: they allowed the latter to express its strength and to guide negotiations, as is evident in the case of the ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ signed with entrepreneurs after the ‘clean-up campaign’ (campagne d’assainissement) of 1996. They give power the opportunity to demonstrate its mastery over society, including in the heart of the zones of dissidence (which now include certain economic activities, both legal and illegal) and its capacity to remain master of the rules of the game: the state can, at any time, ‘break’ a powerful figure; but it can also enable their ascension or maintain one’s social status. There is no way to talk about a weak state in the case of the Makhzen: its power is exercised in piecemeal and partial fashion; its presence is not always visible according to international norms; and its mode of control is discontinuous. But it does not allow for other forms of centralized power which might defy it, even if the latter remains economic. Tunisia and the Privatization of Fiscality The Tunisian case is especially interesting for its system of imposition, which is characterized by both tolerance of tax evasion and great difficulties in modernizing the fiscal apparatus. But, given that, it is nonetheless impossible to conclude that the capacity of state control, and even the administration, is eroded. Indeed, since 1992, a veritable private fiscal system has been instituted.14 The National Solidarity Fund (which totes the now famous account number 26.26) is supplied by ‘voluntary’ contributions from businesses and influential individuals; it is never accounted for in the national budget. This fund, which belongs to the President of the Republic (who manages it personally) is theoretically destined for social works (electrification, housing, social assistance) and, as an aside, the glory of the benefactor. As such, the 26.26 account constitutes an instance of the privatization of fiscality (some talk of racket; and the Parliament as well as the Cour des Comptes had no access to its accounts). But it is also the manifestation of a great mastery over society and a particularly impressive capacity for the consolidation of central power. In fact, the donors are inventoried and they receive a receipt for their ‘gifts’. Industrialists or influential businessmen who do not pay their voluntary contribution cannot access public markets or even private economic 13 See Waterbury (1975), Leveau (1985) and Tozy (1999). On mediation in the Arab world see Leca/Schemeil (1983). 14 Interviews and personal observations in May and November 1997 and April 1998. On state and political situation, see Benedict (1997) and Camau (1997). On the control of politics on economic and social activites, see Zartman (1991). On political control over financial activities, see Henry (1996), Zamiti (1996).

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opportunities. In the same way, tax evasion is tolerated but largely known; in the case of untimely behavior or an overly whet appetite, arbitrary fiscal control – or payment of back taxes – is always possible. As in Morocco, arbitrariness and fluidity between distinctions – such as tolerated and accepted, legal and illegal, public and private – constitute modes of government unto themselves; again, they are not necessarily indicators of state weakness. In Tunisia, this governmentality is not new. Even in the very distant past, during the Ottoman domination, central authority was limited to fiscal contributions, the protection of cities and peasants, the defense of Islam, and the administration of justice (Valensi, 1977). The centralization of the state was inseparable from the autonomy of tribes, and modes of ‘indirect enforcement’ (faire-valoir indirect) were diffused through the entire society. ‘The nation is fully subjugated to the Bey de Tunis, but it governs itself’, was the comment of an eighteenth century observer.15 But commercial exchanges with the Western world, following the examples of the Course, jihad, pirating, and the use of militias (Braudel, 1949) constituted a principle as well as important resources for the formation of the Tunisian state (cf. Camau, 1996). The great factories and manufactories of the Ottoman Empire, and especially taxes, were leased.16 At the same time, social and cultural activities were privatized by the ulamas, most notably through the waqf, but also through the practice of education and justice. But links between religious figures and central power were tight:17 the former were ‘intermediaries’ or ‘liaisons’ between society and the state. Tunisia was thus ‘a society of private law, in which activities rested on contractual agreements between partners; state interventionism was marginal.’18 Here also, state control of the economy was exercised in an indirect manner: through pirates, brigands, and the then dominant interests of local communities, on the one hand, and through religious figures, on the other. Today, privatization cannot be understood without reference to the processes of centralization and statization engaged upon by the reformers of the end of the nineteenth century.19 This does not mean that we are witnessing a return to the past or that we are in a new phase of a hypothetically alternating cycle of centralization and privatization. The point is that the referents by which actors interpret and understand the contemporary process of privatization are historically grounded. At the end of the nineteenth century, Reformation (le réformisme) was, in Tunisia as 15

French traveller quoted by L.Valensi (1977: 81). Cf. Hénia (1980: 101-114) and Chérif (1898). 17 See Khayr ed-Din (1868), Brown (1974) and Hourani (1991). 18 M.Morsy, ‘Présentation’ de 1987 in Khayr ed-Din (1868: 61). 19 See Khayr ed-Din (1868), Hourani (1991) and Brown (1974). The contemporary changes are without any doubt a ‘new mode of existence for the nation-state’ which challenges the reformist model characterised by ‘three principles… capture of power into the hands of those managing the res publica, development of that power by establishment of administrative tutelage over the nation (statisation) and promotion of legislation as the special – and coercitive – mode of relations between the citizen and the state’ (Morsy, 1987: 65). 16

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in Egypt, a challenge to this mode of indirect administration, and an attempt at recentering state power on the administrative apparatus. Today, privatization of fiscality and, above all, of social and cultural activities can be interpreted as a refutation of this recentering and as the reinvention of institutions which take their principles from the waqf and other private organizations of the beylicat. The return of the privatization of certain economic and social functions is not, in this instance, synonymous with a loss of control. On the contrary, it allows for closure of the gap between the perceived ‘practical necessity’ of state tutelage and the material possibilities for the exercise of central power (Camau, 1996: 32-37). In the name of profitability and rationality, the privatization of the economy and the state allows state authority to modify power relations and, most importantly, to avoid, by fragmentation, the constitution of strong economic poles. Likewise, it allows state authority to encourage non-official, informal, and illegal relations, in the hopes of diminishing administrative and managerial power that might be susceptible to autonomization.

The Extension of ‘Discharge’ These examples are not unique. They are only an illustration of a larger movement, which is both global and local. The privatization of the state should be seen as a new mode of what Max Weber called ‘discharge’.20 According to him, ‘discharge’ was the dominant mode of government in contexts characterized by weak bureaucratization and undeveloped mechanisms for management. But this situation is in no way synonymous with the absence of the state or government. Today, these characteristics, which can be attributed to many countries, are supplemented by novel phenomena: the internationalization and financialization of the economy and, by consequence, the loss of direct state influence on the economy; the expansion and transformation of capitalism; the myriad consequences of technological innovations, the increasing complexity of societies, and so forth. These factors help explain how, in developing countries, modes of government are transformed from direct, permanent, predictable, and bureaucratized modalities to indirect, discontinuous, ex post facto, and often fairly non-institutionalized ones. Today, discharge is characterized, above all, by the use of private means as the predominant mode of government. As the examples of Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco have suggested, this use spread itself all over differents domains of public intervention.

20 See Weber (1927) and Weber on the connection with ideas of appropriation (1968, 1: 122 ff), forced loans (1968, 1: 194 ff), tax farming (1968, 1: 194 ff) and concessions (1968, 1: 231 ff). I use the French translation (décharge, which means discharge) of the German terms Verpachtung and Überweisung.

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The Farming of Taxation Privatization has struck one of the most important and symbolically charged functions of state: the fiscal domain. The process of the leasing out (or farming, as during the Ancien Régime) of fiscal actions is both intended and unexpected. The privatization of the fiscal regime was, of course, favored by international lending agencies (starting with the World Bank and the IMF) with respect to specific areas. One of the prime examples of this manner of delegating powers was the Indonesian customs service. Here, a private firm took responsibility not only for controlling customs receipts, but also for evaluating the nature of duties to be imposed and the collection of such duties. This experience, like many Asian experiences, was put forth as a success story, thus serving as a model for other developing countries. Since then, similar private companies (SGS and Cotecna, Veritas, Inskape, Crown Agence) are present in some form or another in most countries of sub-Saharan Africa. The contracts that they forge with the various governments are not made public, but we know that their mandates are short-term and generally involve remuneration in approximate proportion to results obtained. Also, financing is obtained through levies on importers (which generally vary between 0.5 and 1 per cent of official receipts), and personal retribution of the leaders of governing regimes. Furthermore, the fiscal reforms proposed by international lenders tend to privilege the question of profitability. This is why fiscal actions are concentrated on the large firms of the formal sector. More importantly, local governments solicit such firms so as to maximize receipts. In that sense, the state discharges on these companies for the collection of tax. This is the case, for instance, in the Ivory Coast, where the large companies of the formal sector centralize employers’ contributions and taxes on firms and licenses, as well as taxes on salaries, the value-added tax and other indirect duties, real estate taxes and so forth. However, this intended privatization process has been successful in ways that go way beyond the aims of its original promoters. Indeed, a spontaneous form of privatization is taking place in the wake of this formal process. This involves private actors who appropriate parts of the national port or sections of the national border. We find such scenarios in Cameroon and Cambodia with respect to forestry, in Mozambique for fishing or in the Chad Basin (Sudan, Libya, Cameroon, Centrafrique, Niger, Nigeria) with regards to arms, petrol, ivory, and stolen cars. And sometimes recourse to private firms is pushed beyond the exigencies of the international institutions. Since 1996, the Cameroonian government called on the ‘Revenue Management Associates, Ltd.’ – a Swiss firm by law, which is based in London and yet a subsidiary of ‘Lazard Frères’ – to institute, manage, and collect the main indirect tax, the sales tax, without having consulted international lenders. The contract thus established was particularly beneficial for the private firm, which was remunerated according to a progressive percentage of receipts beyond a particularly low baseline (7 billion FCFA per month). And it was equally profitable for President Paul Biya, who signed the contract himself. This last example illustrates the advantages to be had in recourse

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to private agents: the discharge of an entire level of administrative work, access to modern techniques at a low cost, the edification of a screen for public powers, supplementary resources for the most well-placed leaders, and so on. The privatization of the fiscal domain as an instrument of extraction and redistribution can take on the most elaborate forms. I have shown, above, how President Ben Ali privatized fiscality. In China, in the same way, private enterprises are encouraged to finance public services and banquets at the communal and regional levels so as to gain political favor (charity being one of the modalities by which the private sector negotiates its place in society and in political life) and as counterpart to favors accorded by the state (if a private entrepreneur has succeeded, this means that the state granted him, as a private person, opportunities such as the contracts or a hand in state firms). And we can also cite the cases of Congo-Brazzaville and Angola, where, in the name of the state, the oil companies reimburse monthly international debt payments and finance a part of the budget deficit (cf. Vallée, 1999, Messiant, 2001). The Privatization of Regulation Privatization also touches upon other functions that were once attributed to the state. This is the case for the definition of certain economic policies in sub-Saharan and North Africa. In this instance, the qualified administration (with its ensemble of rules and regulations on customs duties, quantitative restrictions, compliance with regional commercial agreements, and so on) does not determine international trade policy. Instead, it is decided upon by a certain number of influential actors emanating from both the public and private spheres, who are guided by the possibilities for fraud and contraband, which ensures their control over access to parallel markets and fraudulent practice (cf. Hibou, 1996a). Once again, this is a matter of discharge or delegation insofar as parallel markets and contraband are not anti-political, or the expression of the revenge of the market and private forces against the state and the public realm. The main actors of the ‘informal economy’ are, in one way or another, connected to the dominant political system (cf. Roitman, 1998, 2004). This runs from total symbiosis (for example, trafficking organized by President Deby and Air Tchad or much of the fraud taking place in Cameroon) to simple levies on exchanges (for example, the commercial networks running through Niger) and including alliances and mutual participation between political figures and businessmen (most notably in Morocco, Algeria, the Ivory Coast or Senegal). We can extend these considerations to most public policies and the interventions of public agents. When the director of immigration services in Mozambique sells vrais-faux (‘real-fake’) diplomatic passports, international representation is obviously being privatized. Likewise, diplomacy and, in a more general sense, the attributes of sovereignty are privatized when the leaders of Sierra Leone or Liberia use international recognition of national statehood to

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private ends, or when large private firms use private police forces to maintain the law (cf. Reno, 1995). Furthermore, both the very definition and modalities of development have been privatized. First, the increasing presence of NGOs in international cooperation is a quasi-general phenomenon which, by dispersing sites of decision and action, make the coordination and management more difficult, thus exacerbating the administrative difficulties already known to less developed countries. However, the seeming impossibility of controlling private actors should not lead to false conclusions. As soon as the latter’s activities become significant or valuable, functionaries create NGOs so as to insure that relevant administrative work is carried out to their benefit. Typically, the national elite and their associated strawmen seek to appropriate profits made from these schemes, which can be found on all continents. In authoritarian countries, like Tunisia, this process of discharge is even more explicit since NGOs must be registered with the state (ironically, they are called TGOs21 or truly governmental organizations), which sometimes chooses to forgo financial resources rather than authorize new organizations. This blurring of the lines between what is governmental and what is not extends beyond the NGOs of ‘the South’; it is now well known that most northern NGOs obtain revenues from their respective governments and that they are often called upon by these governments for sub-contracting. Furthermore, assistance provided for by international public institutions are often privatized as well. This can take place directly (the arrogation of vehicles, construction materials used for schools or hospitals, or even money), but it is most often an indirect phenomenon; by oiling the gears of an already privatized economy, the international institutions further the interests of the leading political classes. The laxity, naivety, and bureaucratic constraints of donor institutions aggravate this tendency; often, donors do not verify the exact usage of financing and they must apply conditionalities to ever more elusive public figures. The Private Appropriation of Economic Resources for Political Ends Finally, privatization extends to all economic resources in two main ways. First, private actors monopolize national assets. Second, almost all economic activities are privately appropriated by public leaders so as to further political control. These appropriations take place in many ways. The instrumentalization of political positions for private ends is the most common practice. This is a generalized phenomenon in Africa today, which involves forestry, fishing, mining (especially diamonds), the oil industry, and even the traffic in art objects. But these practices are also current in Asia, involving natural resources and especially forestry in the past, and being more concentrated on financial resources today, with the overlapping of public and private interests. The development of economic criminality is one form of this private appropriation by powerful public figures. 21

In French, OVGs, or ‘organisations vraiment gouvernementales’.

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The skyrocketing of criminal activities on a global scale spares none of the developing countries, whether this involves the drug trade or other substances considered to be illicit by international legislation (such as ivory) or financial criminality. And even if we can only rarely speak of criminal- or Mafia-states, the links between crime and politics are now largely recognized. Last but not least, recourse to violence is a means for the private appropriation of resources which, while hardly referred to in the economic literature, is very widespread, especially in Africa. The privatization of coercion is one aspect of political strategies for the control of the invisible; and the economic significance of these strategies is revealed, for example, by the great increase in sorcery trials relating to economic objects. The development of ‘neo-traditional’ militias (such as the Dozos in the Ivory Coast; the Poro in Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia; or the Zangbeto in Benin) belongs to this register. These ‘men of the night’ assure security on behalf of certain political factions, often exercising various expropriations. Most often, however, violence is more visible and expresses itself in racketing (for example, road blocks erected by law enforcement officials on almost all roads in Africa; in Kenya, the pillage of private enterprises by the President’s cohorts), extortion and terror (for example, the forced mobilization by law enforcement agents, of economic items, such as vehicles; levies on firms to finance militias or even armies, as in Djibouti, Eritrea, Somalia, and Mozambique), banditry (for example, the laxity of officials vis-à-vis the ‘coupeurs de route’ in Cameroon, Centrafrique, Chad, and the Ivory Coast), theft (for example, land in Mozambique and Cameroon by political leaders), pillage and rioting (for example, during the political events in Zaire in September 1991, but also more systematically with respect to strategic goods, as for petrol in Cameroon or the Congo). All of this destabilizes the notion of property and the frontiers between public and private. Warfare thus represents an extreme form of this process of appropriation. In this instance, the fragmentation of sites of power gives way to the privatization of violence for economic ends and the privatization of economic resources through violent means. As is made clear by the Algerian, Angolan, Sierra Leonian, Chadian, Liberian, Latin American or Cambodian experiences, war is often taken to be a means like any other to access resources or to climb the social ladder. The protagonists of war become, in the words of Fernand Braudel, ‘complementary enemies’, due to the economic interests of, and stakes in, conflict. In that sense, the privatization of violence is an economic resource as much as a strategy of power. As an expression of political competition for the effective exercise of power, it contributes to the re-negotiation of public and private spaces.

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The Privatization of Public Enterprises The privatization of public enterprises must be understood in this more general context. Privatization certainly involves sometimes a new manner of managing enterprises, giving priority to efficiency and profitability, the realization of a true ‘market economy’, the modification of relationships between supervisors and employees, and the influx of money that was not necessarily produced out of property transfers. But of much more importance, as political endeavors often (or especially) take place in the economic field, the modalities and results of the privatization of public companies are indicative of the state of the political and economic communities in the societies concerned. In other words, the privatization of public companies in the developing world is less a matter of recourse to market forces than political reorientation. In sub-Saharan Africa, these privatizations represent either strategies for the management of factional struggles or strategies for plunder and the private appropriation of economic resources by the political elite. Such strategies accompany the redeployment of the economic opportunities (towards hidden, illegal and even criminal activities) available to the political order. But these privatizations also reflect strategies for the displacement of rents produced through the international realm. For almost all operations made in favor of foreign investors, a part of the capital is set aside for national investors or for the state itself (once again, this is a very old practice). The fortunate beneficiaries are not merely profiting from a rent made through alliances with foreign partners; it is also an opportunity to reinforce ones power, thanks to financial and human resources guaranteed by the ‘good’ management of foreign capital. In Morocco, the privatization of state-run companies has reinforced Makhzenian22 modes of government in the economic domain, which entail the manipulation of vagueness and uncertainty between rules and incompatible or conflicting norms. This has served to further tighten the circle of influential personalities. In Tunisia, privatization has followed an older strategy of fragmenting and dividing potential rivals in the context of a hardened regime. More recently, these ploys have been integrated into a strategy for the management of dependencies and alliances with foreign actors in an ongoing situation of very strong indirect control. This is the case, for instance, in the cement industry, where state control is maintained through two instruments: on the one hand, through the Tunisian partners of foreign buyers and fairly restrictive specifications; and, on the other, through direct state interventions in the national cement market (prices, regulation). In fact, all cement factories are to be sold except one, which will remain in the state’s fold, serving in some ways as the government’s Trojan horse. In China, privatization reflects the will to centralize an economy that has become fragmented, or even anarchic, at the regional level. It is also a modality for the formation of the ‘distended state,’ (Chevrier, 1996) through constant blurring between public and private,

22

See Hibou (1996b), Catusse (1999), and Khosrowshahi (1997).

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inconsistency in juridical distinctions, and the role of intermediaries or interfaces between specific firms and their respective environments.

Privatization: The Dominant Means of Negotiation and the Reconfiguration of Power Relations As we have attempted to show, discharge and privatization are in no way synonymous with the retreat of the state or even the primacy of private forces over the public realm. As the various examples have shown, beyond the expanding role of so-called private actors, privatization entails constant negotiation between leading figures (whether they be private or public), the incessant redrawing of the limits between the public and private realms, and the persistent hold of political relations and power more generally. Negotiations are always at the center of this process for delegation and control, which is characteristic of a mode of indirect government that is becoming more and more private. Constant Negotiations Today, privatization seems to be the dominant manner of negotiating and formalizing power relations. Certain characteristics of this process of discharge allow us to better understand the political function of private intermediary actions. In the case of Africa, mutual agreement over the primacy of ‘tender sale offers’ (TSO) and other contending modes of privatization suggests that negotiation and bargaining are particularly important to devices. The examples referred to above show that both formal and informal agreements made between the state and private actors are far from being permanent or even long lasting. To the contrary, they are intentionally unstable, secret and always renegotiated. This is the case for leasefarming, contracts with national or foreign private security firms; or toleration of private appropriations, illegality or criminality. In Cameroon, for instance, President Biya, who himself signed a lease-farming contract with the company, RMA, for the management of sales tax, is now in conflict with other members of the political leadership (most notably, the Minister of Finance, who is not satisfied with the performance of this now privatized company). This was also the case for a contract signed, in the same situation of non-transparency, between certain political personalities and the ‘Société Générale des Surveillance’, a private Swiss firm. Under these conditions, fortunes are made and unmade quite rapidly, which is proof of the place of politics in the procurement of contracts. This instability does not result from poor management or other inadequacies. Nor is it the expression of submission to an external dependency. It issues from the heart of politics and is in no way specific to Africa. We find this same situation in China, for example, where ongoing political instability with respect to the private sector is a means of controlling wealth. Indeed, it necessarily incites those associated with the private sector to ‘reassure themselves’ by reinforcing their networks (which are a mix of

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public and private actors) and multiplying contacts and relations with the public sector. As Montesquieu noted in Book XIII of the Spirit of Laws on this privileged relationship between sub-contracting, political negotiation, and instability: the state selected its general farmers and centralized power maintained the right to oversee finances, the farmers’ success – and their failure. To be sure, the kind depended upon financial networks for his revenues, and credits were sometimes refused. But the general farmers and traders themselves depended upon the royal court and its counselors for protection in order to access desirable and yet unstable positions. To do so, they had to be affiliated with a particular personality and a political faction so as to obtain information, authorizations, and opportunities for enrichment (Dessert, 1984). Sustaining uncertainty in the process of delegation is a response to the same sorts of concerns; ambiguity about the limits between what is authorized, tolerated, and reprimanded and blurring of the rules of the game create the space for political interventions and the exercise of arbitrary power at all times. This leads to permanent negotiations among partners. Thus, in Morocco, for example, the distortion of referents is a mode of government. As Mohammed Tozy has demonstrated, the blurring of limits between legal and illegal is an instrument of power that is largely used with respect to criminal activities and fiscal relationships. This is also true for the play on the two criteria for government that coexist without always being compatible: legality and allegiance. For lack of bureaucratized and consistent control over society and its most influential members, discontinuous control has emerged as an equally efficient mode of power. This is the reason for the multiplication of rules, which allow for constant negotiations and transactions and thus provide the means to control economic activities (Kopytoff, 1987). In Asia as in Africa and the Maghreb, practices of straddling between positions of power and economic accumulation make it difficult to distinguish clearly between public and private, state and market, networks of power and networks of accumulation, and so on. Both national and foreign private intermediaries are rarely without public affiliations. The case of private security firms is exemplary in this regard. While not formalized, the largest international security companies maintain close relationships with Western countries. The nebulous Strategic Resources Corporation has links to South Africa and Great Britain, MPRI and Wackenhut are linked to the United States, and Africa Security and Secrets are both linked to France. In their quest for respectability and international legitimacy, these firms proclaim their willingness to respect the priorities and preferences of the great powers, which, as Richard Banegas has shown, are tempted to delegate certain operations. But private security firms are more directly affiliated with the leaders of client states. The son of President Arap Moi (Kenya) and the halfbrother of President Museveni (Uganda) benefit directly, as local representatives, from profits made by Executive Outcomes in their country. A former defense minister in Cameroon runs the company for rapid intervention and tries to control this entire sector by lobbying for ‘nationalization’ law. In the Ivory Coast, the allpowerful Tanny, at the head of the National Security Counsel, accredits and

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controls these companies, whose directors are often former or present members of the police service. Privatization and Political Control Privatization can be said to be a new form of state interventionism. Contrary to expectations, it does not hamper control over society and even the capacity for the consolidation of power. Once again, this mastery should not be equated with total and exclusive control since it does not prevent individuals from becoming increasingly autonomous, nor does it hinder the capacity for states and political leaders to apply political programs. Private actors can always invent the means to circumvent regulation, and collusion does not mean that relations are harmonious or symbiotic. However, behind conflict and competition, the possibilities for indirect government and indirect control are more significant than one might imagine. The historical trajectories of each respective state or region play an important role in this process. In sub-Saharan Africa, the delegation of state functions is well controlled due to the hierarchical structure of networks and the shrinking of political space. The process for the appropriation of state property, or public and collective goods, is not a free-for-all; it is part of a strategy of power that excludes actors who have nothing to offer or who are too ambitious. Furthermore, the fairly systematic solicitation of foreign private actors should not be seen as a new form of colonization. Instead, it constitutes a new-found form for the management of extraversion. Recourse to foreign security firms and the summoning of multinational firms (oil and mining companies) help maintain networks of power and predation. They also compensate for the loss of political legitimacy experienced by many countries since leaders are able to create new margins of manoeuvre vis-à-vis potential competitors and local populations, as was the case during the Atlantic slave trade. In Tunisia as in Morocco, fiscal evasion (which is very significant, even if the official rates – curiously identical in both countries: 50 per cent – are contestable and politically charged) should not be seen as absence of control; it is both acknowledged and tolerated. In instances of untimely behavior or overly large appetites, fiscal control and payment of back taxes are always available. And, in Asia, the overlap of public and private financial resources, on the one hand, and corruption, on the other, is part and parcel of the politics of authoritarian regimes. Discharge, as a particular mode of government also applies to situations of violence and war. The Algerian case illustrates this point.

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Conclusion The elaboration of these examples allows us to underscore the permanence of state power in spite (or even thanks to) economic, political, and social practices that appear to erode and counter state power, but are in fact part and parcel of the latter. In other words, we witness continuity despite or because of practices that play on clear and stable political boundaries that are generally thought to be constitutive of the state. To the contrary, the preceding analysis attempts to demonstrate the ambivalence of socio-political practices (Bayart, 1997). This is the case for tax evasion, which is as much a practice that undermines economic policy (by diminishing fiscal receipts, undermining commerical policy, and so on) as a founding practice of state power (by engendering economic and political inequalities; enclaving resources for political figures; ensuring relations between ‘public’ and ‘private’, which are constitutive of the state, in North Africa, as elsewhere). In the same way, contraband and fraud undermine state regulation by challenging foreign economic policies and officially proclaimed industrial policy. But these phenomena do not imply the demise of the state as such insofar as the latter is able to encompass them through its own strategies of accumulation, control of rent-seeking behavior and social mobility, and redistribution (we must remember, once again, that powerful figures are the principal actors in this shadow economy). Furthermore, both those involved in fraudulent activities and the state contribute to the same political economy and share the same values, or the same modalities and representations of the exercise of power (Roitman, 2004; Hibou 1996a). The spread of war and violence, by transforming notions of propriety; legitimacy, wealth, and the signification of economic, social, and political practices contributes to the renegotiation of public and private spaces and, in fine, state formation.23 These examples demonstrate that what is often analyzed as a loss of power, competition between non-state actors, or the erosion of the state must be reconsidered in terms of the multiplication of the points of the exercise of power. In the context of political fragmentation, relative autonomization constitutes a modality of power: central power cannot control the ensemble of administrations and its ‘auxiliaries’ – to use a colonial term – if it masters local relays. It can manifest itself through intermittent and often arbitrary acts, remaining distant, if it is able to maintain mastery of the rules of the game, or if it produces current norms and values. It can sustain competition if it encompasses its own economic programs, strategies of accumulation, redistribution, and social mobility. Moreover, these examples underscore the importance of straddling between positions or practices of power and economic accumulation, which belie a clearcut distinction between public and private, state and market, networks of power and accumulation.

23 Against the explanation of the war as revealing the collapse of the state as Zartman (1995) suggests it see Bayart (1998), Marchal/Messiant (19976) and Mbembe (1996).

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References Badie, B. (1992), L’Etat importé: essai sur l’occidentalisation de l’ordre politique, Paris. Badie, B. and Birnbaum, P. (1978), Sociologie de l’Etat, Paris. Banegas, R. (1998), ‘Bouffer l’argent: politique du ventre, democratization et clientélisme au Bénin’, in J.L. Briquet and F. Sawicki (eds), Clientélisme politique dans les sociétés contemporaines, Paris, pp. 75–110. Banégas, R. (2003), La démocratie à pas de caméléon : transition et imaginaires politiques au Bénin, Paris. Bayart, J. F. (1993), The State in Africa. The Politics of the Belly, London. Bayart, J. F. (ed.) (1996), La greffe de l’Etat, Paris. Bayart, J. F. (1996), L’illusion identitaire, Paris (in English, Fictions of Cultural Identities, in press), Paris. Bayart, J. F. (1998), ‘La guerre en Afrique: déperrissement ou formation de l’Etat?’ in Esprit, pp. 55–73. Bayart, J.F. (1994), ‘Rendu compte Berman/Lonsdale, Unhappy valley’ in Revue Française de Sciences Politiques, vol.44 n°1, February 1994, pp.136–139. Bayart, J. F. (2005), ‘Foucault au Congo’, in M. C. Granjon (ed.), Penser avec Michel Foucault: théorie critique et pratiques politiques, Paris. Benedict, S. (1997), ‘Tunisie, le mirage de l’Etat fort’, in Esprit, mars-avril, pp. 27– 42. Berman, B. and Lonsdale, J. (1992), Unhappy Valley. Conflict in Kenya & Africa, Vol.1: State and Class, London. Braudel, F. (1990), La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, Paris. Brignon, J., Amine, A., Boutaleb, B., Martinet, G. and Rosenberg, B. (1967), Histoire du Maroc, Paris. Brown, C. (1974), The Tunisia of Ahmed Bey, 1837–1855, Princeton N.J. Camau, M. (1997), ‘D’une République à l’autre : refondation politique et aléas de la transition libérale’, in Monde arabe, Maghreb-Machrek, n°157, juillet-septembre, pp. 3–16. Catusse, M. (1999), L’entrée des entrepreneurs en politique au Maroc, PhD. IEP Aix-en-Provence. Chavagneux, C (1998), ‘Peut-on maîtriser la mondialisation?’ in Economie et Sociétés 4, série P. Cheriff, M. H. (1982), ‘Document relatif à des tribus tunisiennes des débuts du XVII ème siècle’, in Revue de l’Occident Musulman et de la Méditerranée, n°33, pp. 82-101. Chérif, M. H. (1898), ‘Fermage (lizma) et fermiers d’impôts (lazzam) dans la Tunisie des XVII-XVIII siècles’, in Etats et pouvoirs en Méditerranée, Les Cahiers de la Méditerranée, Université de Nice, 1898, vol.1, pp. 19–29. Chevrier, Y. (1996), ‘L’Empire distendu : esquisse du politique en Chine des Quing à Deng Xiaoping’, in J. F. Bayart (ed.), La greffe de l’Etat, Paris.

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Cote, M. (1996), L’Algérie, Paris. Dessert, D. (1984), Argent, pouvoir et société au Grand Siècle, Paris. Drucker, P. (1993), Post-Capitalist Society, Oxford. El Mansour, M. (1990), Morocco in the Reign of Mowlay Sulayman, Wisbech. Ganiage, J. (1985), ‘North Africa’, in R. Olivier and G. N. Sanderson (eds.), The Cambridge History of Africa, vol.6 (1870–1905), Cambridge. Geertz, C. (1986), Savoir local, savoir global: les lieux du savoir, Paris. Geschiere, P. and Konings, P. (eds) (1993), Itinéraires d’accumulation au Cameroun, Paris. Guillen, P. (no date) Les emprunts marocains: 1902–1904, Paris. Hénia, A. (1980), Le Grîd, ses rapports avec le beylick de Tunis (1676–1840), thèse de doctorat, Tunis, Université de Tunis. Henry, C. M. (1996), The Mediterranean Debt Crescent. Money and Power in Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia and Turkey, Gainesville. Hibou, B. (1996a), L’Afrique est-elle protectionniste? Les chemins buissonniers de la libéralisation extérieure, Paris. Hibou, B. (1996b), ‘Les enjeux de l’ouverture au Maroc. Dissidence économique et contrôle politique’, in Les Etudes du CERI, n°15. Hibou, B. (2000), ‘The Political Economy of the World Bank’s Discourse: from Economic Catechism to Missionary Deeds and Misdeeds’, in Les Etudes du CERI, 39 (May 1998 for the French version). Hourani, A. (1991), La pensée arabe et l’Occident, Paris. Kaplan, R. D. (1994), ‘The Coming Anarchy’, in The Atlantic Monthly, vol.273 n°2 pp. 44–76. Khayr ed-Din, (1987) Essai sur les réformes nécessaires aux Etats musulmans, Paris - Aix-en-Provence. Khosrowshahi, C. (1997), ‘Privatization in Morocco: Politics of Development’, in Middle East Journal pp. 242–255. Kopytoff, I. (1987), ‘The Internal African Frontier: the Making of African Political Culture’, in I. Kopytoff (ed.) The African Frontier: the Reproduction of Traditional African Societies, Bloomington, Ind. Leca, J. and Schemeil, Y. (1983), ‘Clientélisme et patrimonialisme dans le monde arabe’, in International Political Science Review, n°4. Leveau, R. (1985), Le Fellah marocain, défenseur du trône, Paris. Linz, J. and Stepan, A. (1996), Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation. Southern Europe, South America and Post-Communist Europe, Washington. Mbembe, A. (1996), La naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun (1920–1960), Paris. Marchal, R. and Messiant, C. (1997), Les chemins de la guerre et de la paix. Fins de conflit en Afrique orientale et australe, Paris. Marchal, R. and Messiant, C. (2002), ‘De l’avidité des rebelles : l’analyse de la guerre civile selon Paul Collier’, in Critique internationale, 19 July 2002, pp. 58–69.

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Marchal, R. and Messiant, C. (2003), ‘Les guerres civiles à l’heure de la globalisation : nouvelles réalités et nouveaux paradigmes’, in Critique internationale, 18 January 2003, pp. 91–112. Martinez, L. (1998), La guerre civile en Algérie, Paris. Martinez, L. (1995), ‘Les groupes islamistes entre guérilla et négoce. Vers une consolidation du régime algérien?’, in Les Etudes du CERI, n°3. Martinez, L. (1997), ‘L’économie de guerre: un obstacle à la paix’, in La Revue des deux mondes, pp. 20–33. Messiant, C. (2001), ‘Angola: une victoire sans fin ?’ in Politique africaine, vol. 81, pp.143–161. Nouschi, A. (1996), L’Algérie amère, 1914–1994, Paris, edition de la MSH. Olivier de Sardan, J. P. (1999), ‘A Moral Economy of Corruption in Africa’, in Journal of Modern African Studies, vol.37 n°1, pp. 25–52. Planel, A. M. (1997), ‘Etat réformateur et industrialisation au XIX siècle’, in Monde arabe, Maghreb-Machrek, n°157, juillet-septembre, pp. 101–114. Porter, M. (1990), The Competitive Advange of Nations, New York and London. Reich, R. B. (1991), The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st-Century Capitalism, New York. Reno, W. (1995), Corruption and State Politics in Sierra Leone, Cambridge. Roitman, J. (1998), ‘The Garrison-Entrepôt’, in Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines, 150– 152, XXXVIII (2-4), pp. 297–329. Roitman, J. (2004), Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa, Princeton, NJ. Roussillon, A. (1996), L’Egypte et l’Algérie au péril de la libéralisation, Le Caire, CEDEJ. Schroeter, D. (1988), Merchants of Essaouira: Urban Society and Imperialism in Southwestern Morocco, 1844–1886, Cambridge. Strange, S. (1996), The Retreat of the State: Diffusion of Power in the World Economy, Cambridge. Tozy, M. (1991), ‘Les enjeux de pouvoir dans les ‘champs politiques désamorcés’’, in M. Camau, (ed.) Changements politiques au Maghreb, Paris, Editions du CNRS. Tozy, M. (1999), Monarchie et islam politique au Maroc, Paris. Valensi, L. (1977), Fellahs tunisiens. L'économie rurale et la vie des campagnes aux 18 et 19 emes siècles, Paris. Vallée, O. (1999), ‘La dette publique est-elle privée?’ in Politique africaine, vol. 73, pp. 50–67. Waterbury, J. (1975), Le Commandeur des croyants. La monarchie marocaine et son élite, Paris. Weber, M. (1927), General Economic History (trans. F. H. Knight), London, George Allen & Unwin. Weber, M. (1968), Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretative Sociology (trans.E. Fischoff et al.) (ed.) G. Roth and C. Wittich, 3 vols, New York.

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Zaïm, F. (1990), Le Maroc et son espace méditerranéen: histoire économique et sociale, Rabat. Zamiti, Kh. (1996), ‘Le Fonds de Solidarité Nationale: pour une approche sociol que du politique’, in Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord, XXXV, pp. 705–712. Zartman, I. W. (1991), Tunisia. The Political Economy of Reform, Boulder and London. Zartman, I. W. (ed.) (1995), Collapsed States. The Disintegration and Restoration of Legitimate Authority, Boulder and London.

Chapter 4

The State Against Itself: Market Reforms and the Judicialization of Politics in Mexico Tom Lewis

Mexico’s courts are involved with fundamental economic and political issues like never before and their expanding purview is an important and recent development. However, the growing autonomy of Mexico’s judicial system represents much more than the nascence of judicial checks and balances. This chapter examines the processes behind the increasing autonomy of Mexico’s courts – really an unintended consequence of market reforms – using the cases of four societal actors to explain when courts are likely to help societal actors turn back market reforms. Moreover, in explaining why state and societal actors increasingly utilize the judiciary to settle conflict, this chapter brings up an interesting anomaly: in light of conventional analyses of developing states and economies, the changes surrounding Mexico’s judiciary at once bolster democracy and weaken the effectiveness of the state. Indeed, the Mexican state seems to be rebuilding and decaying at the same time. This anomalous condition brings into sharp focus a central weakness of the many books and articles that have claimed over the last forty years, that Mexico is at a crossroads between collapse and renewal. The central theme of this volume is that a new approach to state theory is needed. Such an approach, which places a fragmented yet centralized state entering into evershifting alliances with societal actors at the fore, causes the view of the anomalous Mexican state, forever at a crossroads, to melt away.

Markets, States and Courts By now, the terrain of market reforms, also known as neo-liberal reforms and encompassed under the current buzzword globalization, is a familiar one. Due to the requirements of international financial institutions, the transnational character of capitalism, and the desire to produce goods and services efficiently, states in Latin America and throughout the developing world (Grindle, 1995; Grindle & Thomas, 1991; Nelson, 1990) have greatly reduced their long-standing presence in

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their own economies. One would assume that this widespread diminishment in the scope of state economic activity is spurred by the success of such endeavors, but the economic legacy of market reforms in Latin America is decidedly mixed. One can, observing its results, come to hold two completely opposite conclusions. Examining the fruits of market reforms, its champions might see that treasury burdening state-owned enterprises were sold, bloated and corrupt social spending programs were reduced and inefficient businesses were winnowed by international competition; this is essentially a process of creative destruction that has allowed globally-competitive industries to emerge, generated new wealth and set in place a foundation for long-term economic growth (Friedman, 1999; Thurow, 1999). Detractors however, can rightly point to imports of consumer goods once locally manufactured, mounting poverty coupled with almost no social safety net, a decline in wages and jobs over the last twenty years, wealth concentrated in fewer and fewer hands and a return to a dependent economic position vis-à-vis the developed world (Galeano, 1992) as evidence that market reforms are amiss. Curiously, both are correct, for market reforms have helped and hurt economies throughout Latin America in exactly these ways (Skidmore/Smith, 1997). What do market reforms mean for the state in Latin America? All agree that the scope of state activities has shifted; there has been a great deal of destruction, creative or otherwise, that has transformed the way states do business. Yet once again, we are confronted with a messy legacy – market reforms have both helped and hurt Latin American states. Having shed many layers of statist bureaucracy and instituted more transparent political processes favored by international capital, states as organizations are certainly leaner. Nevertheless, states undergoing market reforms are not necessarily more effective and better able to get things done. Consider conventional indicators of state performance such as ‘the capacities to penetrate society, regulate social relationships, extract resources, and appropriate or use resources in determined ways’ (Migdal, 1988: 4). Even proponents of market reforms observe that reforms have often severely limited these state capacities (Naim, 1995; Nelson, 1994). Still, this is no surprise; long-established patterns of political and social interaction rooted in the state-centered economy have been swept away. States can no longer rely on their huge economic presence to buy political support, tame societal actors, penetrate social relationships, or help carry out its policies in a determined manner. Top-down control of parties, legislatures, bureaucracies, the judiciary or local officials is simply not tenable absent the leverage of huge economic resources. As a result, states must find new means to regulate social relationships, gain political support and implement policy. Political officials in many states have, owing to bargaining with the opposition, enacted incremental judicial reforms to maintain political support. For their part, societal actors, no longer guided by economic incentives tied to the state’s economic presence, are searching out new arenas for political activity. Both of these trends are evident in Latin America and the judicial system has now become much more open to meaningful contestation of

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political and distributive issues. As a result, both public officials and societal actors are now pursuing their political and economic ends within the judicial system. In Chile for example, the Supreme Court has recently upheld indictments against former president and military leader Augusto Pinochet for covering up crimes committed during his regime and against two of his security chiefs for assassinating a dissident labour figure in 1982. The indictments, made at the behest of societal actors and politicians on the left and in the face of substantial Congressional opposition, are a remarkable sign that the judiciary has arrived as an arena for political contestation. Brazil’s Congress, searching for ways to legitimize the state via political reform, has lately considered a huge overhaul of the country’s corrupt judiciary to make it much more independent. At the same time, the Brazilian Supreme Court, heeding the hue and cry of government workers, has handed down rulings that hinder market reforms of the public employee pension system sought by President Fernando Cardoso. Even in Peru, with the government facing a legitimacy crisis so severe that strongman president Alberto Fujimori decamped to Japan, far-reaching reforms of the legal system are underway. Public officials hope to renew legitimacy for the state, as the reforms provide the greater judicial autonomy demanded by opposition leaders. These empirical events point to a phenomenon termed the judicialization of politics, defined simply as the expansion of judicial power relative to that of politicians (Vallinder, 1994). This phenomenon, as argued above, is often a direct consequence of the market reforms that have diminished state control over economic resources. Furthermore, the judicialization of politics illustrates a dynamic that I term ‘the state against itself’. Readers may rightly ask: ‘so what’? Since the dynamic of the state against itself seems like the typical checks-andbalances of a healthy democratic state. If this dynamic only represented simple checks-and-balances that would be interesting, as it is these checks-and-balances have been present in theory but rarely in fact in Latin American states. That they seemingly exist now, even if incipient and inchoate, stems from forces set in motion by market reforms, forces that states cannot easily control. Yet it is exactly because of these intractable forces that the dynamic of the state against itself is more than just the different branches of a more or less unified state checking and balancing one another. Rather, the dynamic fundamentally represents a state that is centralized and fragmented at once entering into ever-shifting alliances with societal actors. The state is centralized in that it is trying to regulate social relationships, gain political support and implement policy, but it is also fragmented in that different actors within the state, along with their societal allies, are doing battle within and through the judicial system whose members are often part of the battle too. So, herein lies the anomaly. With the judicialization of politics, there are more opportunities for meaningful contestation of political and economic outcomes – a good thing for democracy – but this contestation, according to conventional state theory, weakens the state and hinders its effectiveness at promoting economic development. To explain this anomalous outcome, I will now turn to Mexico, a

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country that rapidly and completely embraced market reforms during the 1980s and early 1990s and where the judicialization of politics is in full swing.

The Terrain in Mexico Mexico’s recent administrations have staked on the nation’s long-term economic future to neoliberal market reforms (Garrido and Peñaloza, 1996; Moreira, 1994). Reeling from a financial crisis that began when Mexico nearly defaulted on its international debts in 1982, a declining standard of living and depressed prices for oil its key export, Mexico moved from a protectionist, import substitution economy to embrace market reforms. The privatization of state-owned businesses, elimination of trade barriers and cutting of subsidies to consumers and business allowed the state to drastically reduce the scope of its economic activities over a roughly ten-year period. By 1992, when Mexico signed the North American Free Trade Agreement accords, market reforms were nearly complete. Most restrictions on foreign investment had been removed, communally-owned lands were opened to privatization and the state had sold off nearly 1000 public enterprises. In only ten years, spending on state-owned enterprises and economic development, as a percentage of the total state budget, fell from 31 per cent to 13 per cent, while social spending dropped from 39 per cent to 29 per cent (World Bank, 1984; 1994). In the early 1990s, the Mexican state privatized banks that it had nationalized during the 1982 financial crisis, hoping to create a stable financial sector to attract more foreign investment. The IMF and World Bank heralded this move as an example of the free market policies that diminish the role of developing states in their own economies. But, a federal court ruled in favor of a debtors’ group challenging these banks, potentially invalidating the legal existence of fifteen out of Mexico’s sixteen newly privatized banks. During 1995, the mayor of Mexico City began privatizing a city-owned bus company by firing its employees, all of whom belonged to a union widely known for corruption and inefficiency. Yet, with the courts as an ally, this union eventually gained control of two of the new private bus services and the inefficient ways of old returned. In 1997, a federal court awarded a telephone company that was once a state-owned monopoly advantages over a competitor, an outcome seemingly at odds with the free market goal of efficient production and cheaper services. The privatization of Mexico’s social security system has also faced court challenges from a national organization of lawyers. Scholars have long recognized that Mexico’s highly centralized political system, dominated until recently by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), has allowed its president great power to make and impose policy unfettered by political, social or judicial pressures (Camacho, 1980; Fox, 1996; Klesner, 1996; Lustig, 1992; Valdes, 1996). In fact, party and state were essentially one, as the Mexican president used the state’s economic presence to reward his constituencies and maintain political stability. Given this capability, the challenges

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and setbacks described above seem anomalous. Why did societal actors fight the reforms? Why was the judiciary involved in economic matters as never before? What forces drove these challenges to the reforms meant to revive the long-term viability of Mexico’s economy? The answers lie in an inner contradiction of the transition to a market economy. In Mexico, the state has led the drive to create autonomous market forces (Centeno, 1994; Middlebrook, 1995; Teichman, 1995). Market forces require rule of law to protect property rights for international and domestic capitalists and an independent judiciary is needed to protect these rights (Bartell/Payne, 1995). But market reforms also create pervasive economic insecurity that can de-legitimize the state and its reforms. Under such circumstances, steps towards democratization, including a more independent judiciary, may re-legitimize the state and its reform efforts. A more independent judiciary however, can also become an arena or ally for those wishing to resist or turn back the market reforms. Here lies the inner contradiction of the transition to a market economy: the state-led project to create a free market economy requires a more independent judiciary that can then disrupt market reforms!

Explaining the State against Itself Comparative literature about neoliberal reforms generally delves into the input side, focusing on technical issues such as the shape and scope of particular policies (Ramamurti, 1996; Ramamurti/Vernon, 1991). The political consequences of reform receive scant attention, although conflict is identified as an obstacle that policy-makers must manage when implementing market reforms. If conflict is managed successfully, then reforms are implemented completely; when conflict is managed poorly, reforms are abandoned (Haggard and Kaufman, 1995; Haggard et al. 1995; Haggard/Webb, 1994). This focus on the ingredients and management of reform is useful but still, the issue of post-reform outcomes – and conflict – goes begging. The conflict inherent in the dynamic of the state against itself requires one to investigate what free market policies ultimately accomplish. Mexico specialists are more attuned to these outcomes. They recognize that free market policies, by diminishing the state’s economic presence, have removed the basis for protective relationships where PRI officials traded jobs in state-owned businesses, contracts, targeted subsidies and protectionist trade barriers for financial support and votes (Krooth, 1995; Otero, 1996; Teichman, 1995). Although these relationships often led to an inefficient allocation of resources (Palacios, 1989), they tended to provide a measure of economic security for those involved and served as the basis for Mexico’s political stability (Lewis, 1996). Conflict has emerged exactly because market reforms have severed the relationships that once provided security and stability (Ibid). Still unexplained though, are both the means of conflict resolution and how resolution can alter free market policies.

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To get at these issues, one must first consider a troublesome dilemma that confronts Mexico’s political officials: when implementing free market reforms that disrupt longstanding economic relationships and practices which provide security and stability, officials must balance the long-term economic reforms with shortterm survival and political stability. This is a common dilemma in developing nations and officials have frequently chosen survival and political stability over the long-term economic and political reforms that are held out as the sine qua non of state-building and economic development. In African nations for example, government officials and their allies among urban elites have manipulated markets to create the political and financial resources needed to buy-off powerful opposition forces (Bates, 1981). Yet these market interventions have robbed Africa of its agricultural self-sufficiency, leaving many nations with crippled economies. Latin American political executives have long engaged in survival strategies that employ market interventions and expenditures targeted at societal actors whose support is necessary for maintaining power (Ames, 1987). Invariably, these short-term responses to political crises run counter to the practices associated with long-term economic development. Absent relative parity between two competing political parties, political officials in Latin America have pursued survival strategies – patronage, expenditures and market interventions targeted to specific societal actors – that hinder the growth of an effective state which can promote economic development (Geddes, 1994). Again, when confronted with this dilemma, political officials typically chose political survival and survival entails granting or allowing changes that either provide an outlet for societal pressures or afford societal actors relief from the effects of reform policies. This returns us to the inner contradiction of Mexico's state-led project to create market forces. A grant of judicial autonomy may relegitimize the state and its project by providing an outlet for societal pressures – as Tilly notes the judiciary can be the central legitimating basis for the state (1990) – but this opens the door to the judicialization of politics and the dynamic of the state against itself which can endanger reforms. A growing body of literature on the judicialization of politics examines both the events that lead to the expansion of the judiciary’s power as well as the impact of this expansion on policy (Jackson & Tate, 1992; Shapiro & Stone, 1994; Tate & Vallinder, 1995). This literature however, analyzes mainly developed democracies. What little literature there exists on developing or semi-democratic nations, including those in Latin America, does not deal with judicialization or is merely descriptive (Brown, 1997; Newberg, 1995; Oisel, 1995; Tate, 1994). Even literature on Latin American democratization largely ignores the judiciary, concentrating instead on the viability of the regime instituting change, the relative powers of the executive branch versus the legislative branch, the formal electoral rules or the nature of the party system (Casper/Taylor, 1996; Diamond & Plattner, 1995; Dominguez/Lowenthal, 1996; Mainwaring/Shugart, 1997; O’Donnell et al. 1986). Evidence presented here not only sheds light on the little-understood

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judicialization of politics in Mexico but also moves beyond the narrow regimedimensions of democracy, pointing to other ways of thinking about the state.

Unintended Consequences and Mexico’s Judicial Autonomy As in many Latin American nations, Mexico’s courts have had limited autonomy from the executive (González, 1997; Huchim, 1996). The president essentially chose Supreme Court justices and the senior judges of the federal courts, who in turn held the power to hire and fire judges within their realm. Thus, it is no surprise that the decisions of the Supreme Court and other courts for that matter, never intruded into the province of legislative authority. The writ of amparo, a prohibition of a government act issued in response to an individual claim that a legally guaranteed right had been violated by that act, provided the judiciary with some independence. Still, the top-down, political appointment of judges and the huge expense of mounting a case for a writ rendered amparos against the government on fundamental social, political or economic issues quite rare. Now, in the wake of market reforms, conflict over these fundamental issues is increasingly played out in the courts. The mixed legacy of market reforms had led, by the mid-1990s, to a precipitous devaluation of the peso that drove many businesses into insolvency, to a poverty rate that was as high as it had been thirty years earlier and to a massive and growing foreign debt. Newly elected, President Ernesto Zedilllo needed to do something, anything, to bolster his regime’s legitimacy. One of his initial moves was outlined during his first message to the nation in September 1995, when he claimed: ‘For the first time in our history, the Supreme Court of Justice is a truly autonomous body...I reiterate that the times of political appointments and influence of the President over the Supreme Court have come to an end.’ Faced with declining popularity, demands from both the public and many businesses for a cleaner judiciary – a demand that helped boost the electoral successes of the opposition Partido Accion Nacional (PAN) and Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) – an international investment climate favoring rule of law and factions within PRI desiring more political liberalization, Zedillo initiated three judicial reforms which passed Congress in January 1995. First, the entire Supreme Court was relieved, replaced by justices chosen by the President but approved by the Senate. Second, all new federal justices, after passing written tests, would be appointed by a Federal Judiciary Council, comprised of members of the executive, legislative and judicial branches. Finally, Article 105 of the Constitution was changed, giving the Supreme Court greater power to review legislative acts. By appearing to fight corruption with these changes, Zedillo hoped to bolster his fortunes, enabling him to continue neoliberal economic programs while maintaining a strong influence over the judiciary. Supreme Court justices were still selected by the president and approved by a PRI-dominated Senate, while the

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federal judiciary remained stocked with political appointees. In fact, Zedillo’s actions closely paralleled those taken the previous year by President Carlos Menem in Argentina. Menem oversaw the Pacto Olivos, a series of reforms that seemingly improved the institutional independence of the judiciary but ultimately rendered it more likely to bow to Menem’s wishes (Larkins, 1998). Nevertheless, this small grant of autonomy snowballed. For example, the Supreme Court in 1997 broadened the scope of the amparo, applying it not just to the distinct acts of the government bureaucracy but also to the decisions of courts and tribunals in all jurisdictions. Next, the Supreme Court declared that it could review all legislative changes in the Constitution. In this time of flux, we see a state that is at once strengthened and weakened by market reforms. It is strengthened in that the judiciary has more space for autonomous activity and it is weakened in that judicial reforms have created a climate where the courts can be more receptive to the claims of societal actors seeking relief from the vagaries of life under the market. Actors from within the fragmented state now ally with societal actors fighting market reforms and hence other public officials, within the courts, forming ever-shifting alliances to perpetuate both their own position and that of the Mexican nation, the centralized state. This is the state against itself.

Hypotheses on the Judicialization of Politics in Mexico These hypotheses involve two variables that affect the judicialization of politics in Mexico. One, the potential for judicial autonomy, in courts of all sizes, is influenced by three factors. First, if an opposition party controls the area where the court resides, whether rural or urban, then judicial independence is much more likely (Rodríguez and Ward, 1994). Next, if there are splits among elite policymakers over the issues at hand, then the court has more space for autonomous action (Tarrow, 1996; 1994). Last, if the demand before the court is particular and specific rather than broad and systemic – relief from a certain reform versus a challenge to the entire fiscal policy, for example – then the court is more likely to judge independently (Frieden, 1991). To overcome judicial inertia and the fact that many judges are still political appointees, a high potential for autonomy requires the presence of at least two factors. The second variable, also shaped by three factors, is the organizational strength of the societal actor mounting a case against a particular reform. Given the expense of court actions, a well-funded societal actor will likely register a more effective case. Second, if the actor has sectoral or corporatist-like organization, then it will present a more forceful challenge (Tarrow, 1996/1994; Weyland, 1996). Third, a group with allies in the government, particularly in agencies involved with the issues at hand, will sustain a stronger case than a group lacking these ties (Tarrow, 1996; 1994). With the barriers to collective action still substantial in Mexico, high organizational strength requires the presence of at least two of these factors.

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Table 4.1 Explaining the judicialization of politics

Organizational Strength of the Societal Actor

Strong (2-3) Weak (0-1)

Potential for Judicial Autonomy High (2-3) Low (0-1) Telmex SUTAUR (victory) (partial, tangible victory) El Barzón, Round 1 (partial, symbolic victory)

ANAD & El Barzón, Round 2 (loss)

The outcome is the alteration of market reforms from their original policy statements and goals. There are several different outcomes: (1) A high potential for judicial autonomy together with a strong societal actor increases the probability of a victory where the societal actor's demands are met completely; (2) A high potential for judicial autonomy combined with a weak societal actor increases the probability of a partial victory where the societal actor has some symbolic demands met, that is the actors claims are somehow legitimized during the process; (3) A strong societal actor paired with a low potential for judicial autonomy increases the probability of a partial victory where some tangible demands are met; and (4) A weak societal actor coupled with a low potential for judicial autonomy increases the probability of a societal actor losing all its demands.

Fighting Markets through Mexico’s Courts El Barzón Round 1 Mexico’s market reforms have cut the purchasing power of the middle-class Barzonistas, especially after the economic crisis following the December 1994 peso devaluation that sent interest rates skyrocketing. Translated literally, barzón is an oxen yoke and Barzonistas found themselves weighted down with unmanageable loan payments on their houses, farms and businesses like oxen with a yoke. Thus, El Barzón grew from its modest rural origins in three states to well over 500,000 members with grassroots organizations in 29 out of 31 states and growing support among opposition parties and sympathizers within the state. Their primary demand centered on a radically altered financial system underpinned by a huge state presence; in other words, they sought the return of the very system that market reforms had swept away. To fight loan foreclosure by the newly privatized banks, Barzonistas employed public demonstrations and mounted a series of legal challenges. Over 300 lawyers helped El Barzón slow foreclosures by clogging the courts with an avalanche of usury and null contract complaints against the banks. For a time, this strategy of

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filing specific demands while government officials, some of whom supported the Barzonistas’ demands, bickered over debt relief plans delayed foreclosures. Then, in November 1996, El Barzón won a victory that stunned Mexico’s top state officials. The Fifteenth Circuit Court in Mexicali, Baja California, a PAN stronghold and consequently relatively free from pressures by the PRI pressures, ruled that according to federal laws governing privatization, Banco del Atlántico did not legally exist. So, the bank’s loans were momentarily null and void. This symbolic victory sent a chill through Mexico’s financial markets, which had not yet recovered from the devaluation. The dynamic of the state against itself loomed large. El Barzón Round 2 Using this legal precedent, El Barzón attempted to extend this ruling to the 15 out of Mexico’s 16 banks which ran afoul of the federal privatization regulations. Needless to say, the President’s circle feared that such a ruling would jeopardize one of the main goals of bank privatization – attracting more foreign investment. The Supreme Court stepped in however, before the ruling could be extended in other courts. Its decision in March 1997 sidestepped the question of the banks’ legal status while affirming the validity of their loans. Soon thereafter, the banks began foreclosures, auctioning the possessions of those who could not renegotiate their loans. So, despite the tenacity and numbers that made it a force in electoral politics, El Barzón ultimately lacked the money and the connections to influential sectors of the government needed to prevent foreclosures. Further, their drive to radically alter the financial system and renew state economic intervention proved their undoing. The Supreme Court, pressured by Mexico’s political and financial elite, was unwilling to allow such systemic change. What is quite striking though, is the fact that the challenge went that far, certainly farther than was ever possible before market reforms and the resultant judicial reforms. Sindicato Unico de Trabajdores de Autobuses Urbanos Ruta 100 (SUTAUR) This union representing the 12,000 workers of Mexico City’s Ruta 100 bus company had a reputation for corruption. With the Distrito Federal providing twothirds of the company’s operating costs, the union maintained a closed shop, charging workers for their jobs. In return, the workers were allowed to skim from the fares; in fact, the union actively fought the imposition of fare boxes on the busses. To maintain state support, the union funneled money to ruling PRI officials, though union members participated in grassroots political opposition and even supported the Zapatista rebel movement. In a move to punish SUTAUR for opposition activities and rid the government of a money-losing enterprise, the PRI mayor Oscar Espinoza liquidated the company and fired its entire workforce in

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April 1995. Additionally, a Distrito Federal Superior Court, noted for its lack of autonomy from the mayor, ordered the arrest of 11 union leaders. Utilizing its corporate organization and financial resources, SUTAUR began a campaign of public protests – over 450 before matters were settled – coupled with lawsuits. Their demands were very specific: release our leaders and give us our jobs back. The first judicial ally was a member of the Superior Court, Abraham Polo Uscanga, who resigned after complaining of political pressure to fabricate charges against SUTAUR’s leaders. He blamed Saturnino Aguero Aguirre, the head of the Superior Court and a political ally of top PRI officials, for the pressure and was later murdered for his trouble. Public outrage over Polo Uscanga’s charges and death deepened divisions among government officials over the fate of the union leaders. This allowed space for another Superior Court chamber to grant an amparo against their arrest, setting them free and securing an important victory for SUTAUR. With the leaders freed, the cases over jobs continued, but a united front among top city officials worked against judicial resolution and in favor of negotiations. The union nevertheless, had the organizational strength to persevere, continuing its public protests and legal challenges. Cases clogged a number of different courts and future court rulings seemed unlikely to consistently favor the government. Finally, in April 1996, city officials caved in and allowed SUTAUR to run two of the new private bus companies, gaining many of the best routes and up to four thousand jobs. This partial but tangible victory was a blow against the goals of privatization, for the inefficiency and corruption continued unabated in the new companies. Again, if not for the judicialization of politics, the leaders of SUTAUR, now bitter enemies of ruling PRI officials from the Distrito Federal, would never have come this far. Telefonos de Mexico (Telmex) When President Carlos Salinas privatized the state-owned telecommunications company Telmex in 1993, he sold it to a consortium headed by Grupo Carso in 1993. Moreover, the terms of the sale protected Telmex from competition until 1997 and then its exposure would be gradual. Many say this prohibition was granted to give Telmex time to modernize for the inevitable competition with US telecommunication companies. The head of Grupo Carso, Carlos Slim, the wealthiest man in Mexico, a close associate of President Salinas and a big contributor to PRI, always seemed to secure such sweet deals when acquiring stateowned enterprises (Concheiro, 1997). When competition finally arrived, Telmex had to rework its local circuits at great cost to accommodate the transferal of calls to long-distance service rivals. This cost would be passed on in fees charged the rivals, with the Comisión Federal de Telecomunicaciones (CFT) setting the fees. One rival, Avantel, balked at the fee 425 million dollars – and struck back at Telmex by filing for an amparo against the fee set by the CFT. Estimates by another government agency placed Telmex’s

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actual costs vis-à-vis Avantel at 200 million dollars and some officials charged that Telmex’s status as a former state-owned enterprise together with its owner's connections to top political and CFT officials secured Telmex an unfair advantage. In August 1997, a Federal District Court turned down Avantel’s request, forcing them into negotiations with Telmex to pay the exorbitant fee. Responding to the rift between government agencies over a very specific reward, the court awarded the well-connected Telmex substantial protection from the market forces sought by the state and international investors, a prime example of the state against itself. International investors were still so aggrieved in fact, that the United States filed a complaint against Mexico with the World Trade Organization. Asociación Nacional Abogados Democráticos (ANAD) ANAD, for a time, became an ubiquitous presence in Mexican politics. This group of loosely organized lawyers filed amparos on behalf of students from the national university, acted as a watchdog over the state-run oil company and consistently criticized the government over its failure to adequately investigate the questionable activities of numerous political officials. Some of its members even worked on behalf of SUTAUR and the Zapatistas. In the late 1990s, ANAD headed a group of unions fighting the privatization of Mexico's social security system. The unions feared that an absence of state involvement in administering the funds left them with little recourse if the pension monies were mishandled. In a suit filed with the Supreme Court in August 1997, ANAD sought an amparo against the new Ley de Seguro Social, charging that it violates numerous constitutional guarantees from articles 49, 50, 73 & 123. Of course, the court was less than receptive to this attempt to dismantle the fledgling private pension system that policy-makers had so carefully crafted. ANAD’s episodic organization, its status as an antigovernment fringe group and its absence of resources doomed this court challenge from the outset.

Whither Mexico? Whither the State? These events in Mexico fit with empirical developments noted and theoretical conclusions drawn in other chapters from this volume. For example, Migdal and Schlichte, in the opening chapter of this volume, observe that the modes of political domination that once characterized developmental states are no longer possible. States have not only transformed their modes of domination, they have, at times, become unable to meet or control the rising expectations of their populations. This is certainly true in Mexico, where the state’s previous mode of domination was grounded in its huge economic presence. Lacking economic resources, the state, or more properly state officials, have had to find ways to maintain at least the image of a coherent, controlling entity that stands over its

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population while their practices actually involved highly fragmented alliances with societal actors, alliances that at least help them maintain their positions. President Zedillo’s judicial reforms were one such attempt to reinvigorate state domination. Mounting pressures from restive societal actors and opposition political forces could have provoked hard-line elites with an affinity for statecentered economy to quash these actors and market reforms (Eisenstadt, 1999; Loeza, 1994), so President Zedillo and his circle enacted piecemeal reforms of electoral and judicial institutions to diffuse social tensions without allowing any fundamental political change. Nevertheless, societal actors used the piecemeal reforms to pry these institutions open, making them genuine arenas for contesting power. Once opened, the institutions developed their own prerogatives (Ibid.), in part helped along by state officials whose survival was more easily assured in the open political environment. As a result, we have the Supreme Court enlarging its space for autonomous action and some clear instances of the state against itself: El Barzón, Round 1 and SUTAUR. Moreover, in all of the cases detailed here, the judiciary served as an arena or ally in the battles among and between societal and official actors in ways impossible under the old form of domination in Mexico. Though the Telmex case is a perfect example of the state against itself, it also points to a different tactic of domination described in the chapter by Hibou. According to Hibou, privatization may be used by governing elites to buy political support or reward supporters. This is certainly true of Telmex, which was sold quite cheaply to PRI stalwart Carlos Slim and then granted protection from competitors by the courts. Quid pro quo, Slim donated a huge amount of money to both PRI and Zedillo’s 1994 campaign. With the previous form of domination, all of this chicanery would have happened behind the scenes. That Telmex received its protections from the judiciary indicates the new prominence of the courts in the survival strategies of government officials. So, what does this mean for Mexico? Is the judicialization of politics a positive development for the Mexican people? Does the (sometimes) dynamic of the state against itself represent a nascent but blooming democracy? Again we are confronted with a confusing legacy. The El Barzón Round 2, ANAD and Telmex cases do not exactly make one optimistic, while the victories for the Barzonistas and SUTAUR are modest. Still, there is room for hope. Even in the most oppressive and authoritarian conditions, the very existence of rules or small spaces for autonomous action can have important and real benefits for societal actors (Scott, 1990; Sharansky, 1988) and Mexico is no longer highly oppressive or authoritarian given its uneven efforts to transform its basis of domination. To borrow from Scott (1985, xvii), just as ‘millions of anthozoan polyps create, willynilly, a coral reef’, perhaps so does every case brought by a societal actor before an increasingly independent judiciary eventually create a developed democracy. The election of Vincente Fox from PAN as president, the first opposition president in the history of modern Mexico who himself is promising more autonomy for Mexico’s judiciary, seems proof positive. Also telling is the current use of the judicial system by PRI political officials to fight many of the reforms proposed by

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President Fox, activity that formerly would have been entirely hidden from public view and thus, public scrutiny. We must distinguish between two things: what is written in the Law, and what I have discovered through personal experience; you must not confuse the two (Kafka, 1937: 153).

So says the painter to Joseph K who is desperately trying but cannot understand the rules and actions of the state that has arrested him because nothing that happens to him fits with his ‘logical’ understanding of the world. I began this chapter with a discussion of dual legacies: market reforms that have helped and hurt Latin American economies and states. And the same is true of Mexico, its economy and state. In fact, the same is true of the judicialization of politics; it has helped and hurt both the Mexican state and societal actors. But can we not say something more than this? Perhaps, like Joseph K, we are examining the state through the wrong lens. Rather than think of Mexico’s state in terms of what has been written, perhaps personal experience could be a more proper guide. Describing the capacity of his state after a recent round of institutional reforms, a Mexico City professor once told me:

It is more a matter of atmospherics, and I think Americans just have to live in Mexico for a while to absorb the system’s surreality. I could tell you stories about Raul Salinas’ prosecution, or Roberto Madrazo’s election, or NAFINSA’s loan portfolio, or a friend’s career problems, or any number of instances that illustrate how Mexico works. One aspect is quite clear, though – you can never get to the bottom of things (Personal Interview, February 1998).

There is something ineffable about the Mexican experience after market reforms, something surreal, something that one must experience and something that cannot be described using conventional terms. Migdal and Schlichte make exactly this point. It makes no sense any longer to think of the state as an autonomous and unified actor that imposes social and moral order by enforcing an ultimate set of rules. Nor does it make sense, as theoreticians of globalization do, to shout out that states are decaying because they fail to do these things. Sometimes the Mexican state appears to be a centralized entity enforcing its rules in a determined manner. El Barzón Round 2 or the ANAD cases are good examples, as is the Telmex case where the state is strong enough to stand up to the wishes of global capital. But with El Barzón Round 1 and the SUTAUR case, it is clear that the state is fragmented and some state officials, together with societal actors, are fighting market reforms. Certainly, these two clear instances of the state against itself and the judicialization of politics in general, demonstrate that there is a great deal of competition and perhaps co-existence between the rules of the state and societal actors, that is, the multiple normative orders mentioned by Migdal and

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Schlichte. Yet, as Hibou notes in an earlier work (1999), all of this competition and co-existence, the building of networks and alliances, is crystallized vis-à-vis the image of the state, of state power – the state is still there! Rather than a state collapsing, or a state rebuilding, or even a state poised at the crossroads between decay and renewal, the Mexican state is best thought of as something else. Following Migdal (2001), I would say that the Mexican state is both an ‘image of a coherent, controlling organization in a territory, which is a representation of the people bounded by that territory’ and ‘the actual practices of its multiple parts’. This fragmented and centralized state, comprised of and sustained by ever-shifting alliances among public officials and societal actors perpetuates itself and the Mexican nation. Thought of in this way, the current Mexican experience makes a bit more sense. Market reforms have robbed the state and state actors of an important bargaining resource for creating and maintaining alliances, so new survival strategies have arisen. Some of these, like judicial reforms, have at times increased the bargaining resources of societal actors and their allies in the government, but the state is most definitely still there.

References Ames, Barry (1987), Politicians & Public Policy in Latin America, Berkeley, Cal. Bartell, Ernest and Payne, Leigh (1995), Business & Democracy in Latin America, Pittsburgh, Penn. Bates, Robert (1981), Markets & States in Tropical Africa: The Political Basis of Agricultural Policies, Berkeley, Cal. Brown, Nathan (1997), The Rule of Law in the Arab World: Courts in Egypt & the Gulf, Cambridge, Mass. Camacho, Manuel (1980), El futuro inmediato, Siglo XXI. Casper, Gretchen and Taylor, Michelle (1996), Negotiating Democracy: Transitions from Authoritarian Rule, Pittsburgh, Penn. Centeno, Miguel (1994), Democracy within Reason: Technocratic Revolution in Mexico, University Park, Penn. Concheiro, Elvira (1996), El gran acuerdo: Gobierno y empresarios en la modernización salinista, UNAM, Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas, Mexico City. Diamond, Larry and Plattner, Marc (1995), Economic Reform & Democracy, Baltimore. Dominguez, Jorge and Lowenthal, Abraham (1996), Constructing Democratic Governance: Latin America & the Caribbean in the 1990s, Baltimore. Eisenstadt, Todd (1999), ‘From Post-Electoral Confrontation to Electoral Competition in Mexico’s Political Opening, 1988–1997’, in Andreas Schedler, Larry Diamond and Marc Plattner (eds), The Self-Restraining State: Corruption & Accountability in New Democracies, Boulder, Col.

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Fox, Jonathan (1996), ‘National Electoral Choices in Rural Mexico’, in Laura Randall (ed.), Reforming Mexico’s Agrarian Reform, New York. Frieden, Jeffry (1991), Debt, Development & Democracy: Modern Political Economy & Latin America, 1965–85, Princeton, NJ. Friedman, Thomas (1999), The Lexus & the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization, New York. Galeano, Eduardo (1992), We Say No, New York. Garrido, Celso and Webb, Tomás Peñaloza (1996), Ahorro y sistema financiero en México: Diagnóstico de la problemática actual, Editorial Grijalbo, MexicoCity. Geddes, Barbara (1994), Politician’s Dilemma: Building State Capacity in Latin America, Berkeley, Cal. González, José A. (1997), Distrito federal: Sociedad, Gobierno y Justici, Procuraduría General de Justicia & Porrúa Grupo Editorial, Mexico-City. Grindle, Merilee (1996), Challenging the State: Crisis & Innovation in Latin America & Africa, Cambridge, Mass. Grindle, Merilee and Thomas, John (1991), Public Choices & Policy Change: The Political Economy of Reform in Developing Countries, Baltimore. Haggard, Stephan and Kaufman, Robert (1995), The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions, Princeton NJ. Haggard, Stephan, Lafay, Jean and Morrisson, Christian (1995), The Political Feasibility of Adjustment in Developing Countries, OECD, Paris. Haggard, Stephan and Webb, Steven (1994), Voting for Reform: Democracy, Political Liberalization & Economic Adjustment, The World Bank, Washington, DC. Hibou, Beatrice (1999), ‘The “Social Capital” of the state as an Agent of Deception’, in Jean-Francois Bayart, Stephen Ellis and Beatrice Hibou (eds), The Criminalization of the State in Africa, Bloomington, Ind. Huchim, Eduardo (1996), El sistema se cae: Últimos escenarios de la crisis Política, Editorial Grijalbo, Mexico-City. Jackson, Donald and Tate, Neal (1992), Comparative Judicial Review & Public Policy, Oxford. Kafka, Franz (1937), The Trial, New York. Klesner, Joseph (1996), ‘Broadening toward Democracy?’ in Laura Randall (ed.), Changing Structure of Mexico, New York. Krooth, Richard (1995), Mexico, NAFTA & the Hardships of Progress, Jefferson, NC. Larkins, Christopher (1998), ‘The Judiciary & Delegative Democracy in Latin America’, Comparative Politics 30 (4). Lewis, Tom (1996), ‘Breaking the State-Society Bargain: Neoliberal Market Reforms & Resistance in Mexico’, Journal of Public & International Affairs 7 (Spring). Loeza, Guadalupe (1994), ‘Political Liberalization & Uncertainty in Mexico’, in Kevin Middlebrook, Juan Molinar and Maria Cook (eds), The Politics of

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Economic Restructuring: State-Society Relations & Regime Change in Mexico, San Diego, Cal. Lustig, Nora (1992), Mexico: The Remaking of an Economy, The Brookings Institution, Washington DC. Mainwaring, Scott and Shugart, Matthew (1997), Presidentialism & Democracy in Latin America, Cambridge, Mass. Middlebrook, Kevin (1995), The Paradox of Revolution: Labor, the State & Authoritarianism in Mexico, Baltimore. Migdal, Joel (1988), Strong Societies & Weak States: State-Society Relations & State Capabilities in the Third World, Princeton, NJ. Migdal, Joel S. (2001), State in Society. Studying How States and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another, Cambridge, Mass. Moreira, Héctor (1994), Entendiendo el TLC. ITESM, Centro de Estudios Estratégicos & Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico-City. Naim, Moises (1995), ‘Latin America: The Second Stage of Reform’, in Larry Diamond and Marc Plattner (eds), Economic Reform & Democracy, Baltimore. Nelson, Joan (1990), Economic Crisis & Policy Choice: The Policy of Adjustment in the Third World, Princeton, NJ. Nelson, Joan (1994), ‘The Linkages between Politics & Economics’, Journal of Democracy, 5 (4), pp. 213-233. Newberg, Paula (1995), Judging the State: Constitutional Politics in Pakistan, Cambridge, Mass. O’Donnell, Guillermo, Schmitter, Philippe and Whitehead, Laurence (1996), Transitions from Authoritarian Rule, Baltimore. Oisel, Mark (1995), ‘Dialogue with Dictators: Judicial Resistance in Argentina & Brazil’, Law & Social Enquiry 20 (2), pp. 133-156. Otero, Gerardo (1996), Neoliberalism Revisited: Economic Restructuring & Mexico’s Political Future, Boulder, Col. Palacios, Juan (1989), La política regional en México, 1970–1982: Las contradicciónes de un intento de redistribución, Universidad de Guadalajara Departmento de Investigación Científica, Guadalajara. Ramamurti, Ravi (1996), Privatizing Monopolies: Lessons from the TeleCommunications & Transport Sectors in Latin America, Baltimore. Ramamurti, Ravi and Vernon, Raymond (1991), Privatization & Control of StateOwned Enterprises, The World Bank, Washington, DC. Rodríguez, Victoria and Ward, Peter (1994), Political Change in Baja California: Democracy in the Making?, San Diego. Scott, James (1985), Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, New Haven, Conn. Scott, James (1990), Domination & the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, New Haven, Conn. Shapiro, Martin and Stone, Alec (1994), ‘The New Constitutional Politics of Europe’, Comparative Politics 26 (4), pp. 311-341.

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Sharansky, Natan (1988), Fear No Evil. Translated by Stefani Hoffman, New York. Skidmore, Thomas and Smith, Peter (1997), Modern Latin America, Oxford. Tarrow, Sidney (1994), Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action & Politics, Cambridge, Mass. Tarrow, Sidney (1996), ‘Social Movements in Contentious Politics’, American Political Science Review 90 (4), pp. 287-308. Tate, Neal (1994), ‘The Judicialization of Politics in the Philippines and Southeast Asia’, International Political Science Review, 15 (2), pp. 155-178. Tate, Neal and Vallinder, Torbjorn (1995), The Global Expansion of Judicial Power, New York. Teichman, Judith (1995), Privatization & Political Change in Mexico, Pittsburgh. Thurow, Lester (1999), Building WEALTH: The New Rules for Individuals, Companies & Nations in a Knowledge-Based Economy, New York. Tilly, Charles (1990), Coercion, Capital & European States, AD 990–1990, Basingstoke. Valdes, Francisco (1996), ‘The Private Sector & Political Regime Change in Mexico’, in Gererdo Otero (ed.), Neoliberalism Revisited, Boulder, Col. Vallinder, Torbjorn (1994), ‘The Judicialization of Politics: A World-wide Phenomenon’, International Political Science Review 15 (2), pp. 91-99. Weyland, Kurt (1996), ‘Obstacles to Social Reform in Brazil’s New Democracy’, Comparative Politics 29 (1), pp. 31-56. Williams, Heather (1996), Planting Trouble: The Barzón Debtors’ Movement in Mexico, UCSD Center for US-Mexican Studies, San Diego, Cal. World Bank (1984), World Bank Development Report 1984, Oxford. World Bank (1994), World Bank Development Report 1994, Oxford. Many specifics on the judiciary and cases come from personal interviews and the following periodicals: Alto Nivel: 8/1/97 & 12/1/96. Corre La Voz: 10/31-11/6/96. El Dia: 4/27/96, 4/26/96 & 3/22/96. El Financiero: 3/19/97, 3/7/97, 3/1/97, 2/18/97, 1/3/97 & 4/12/95. El Universal: 8/5/97, 7/28/97, 7/3/97, 6/25/97, 2/28/97, 2/13/97, 1/31/97, 11/5/96, 10/8/96, 8/29/96, 8/26/96, 7/31/96 & 7/25/95. Excelsior: 7/28/97, 3/7/97, 2/25/97, 6/26/97, 11/23/96, 11/19/96, 11/7/96, 10/8/96 & 8/23/96. La Jornada: 8/28/97, 8/12/97, 7/15/97, 7/4/97, 3/31/97, 2/25/97, 2/5/97, 12/10/96, 11/23/96, 6/24/96, 4/18/96, 8/19/95, 7/16/95 & 4/20/95. Mundo Ejecutivo: 5/1/96. Novedades: 8/28/97. Reforma: 6/26/97 & 12/3/97. Unomasuno: 7/24/97.

Chapter 5

The Phoenix State: War Economy and State Formation in Liberia François Prkic1

The end of the Cold War affected sub-Saharan Africa in a number of ways since 1990. With regard to conflicts on the continent, some observers saw it as a positive dynamic leading to the resolution of ongoing conflicts – in Angola, in Mozambique or in the Horn of Africa. Conversely, others also noticed that concomitantly there was an intensification, rather than a multiplication, of internal – often ethnic – conflicts.2 But the disappearance of Moscow from the African scene and the subsequent withdrawal of Washington from a continent no longer relevant to its primary interests changed drastically the modalities of internal conflicts. Indeed, internal conflicts are nothing new in sub-Saharan Africa, and some works emphasize the continuity between the Cold War and the post-Cold War periods as far as conflict occurrences are concerned as Didier Bigo (1992) and others have noticed. But, if not in the number, there is at least an apparent change in the nature of these conflicts, even though academics do not yet agree on whether this change is a change of behavior, a change of actors or a change of objectives.3 As a matter of fact, ‘what causes a problem to the analysis are the other forms of conflict, those which can be labeled neither in terms of war, nor in terms of indirect strategy conducted by two identified actors, nor in terms of revolutionary attempt’ (Bigo, 1996: 403). And the reason for this might well be the inadequacy of this Cold War era grid of analysis.

1

Note by the editor: After the author completed this manuscript, he left it at the editor’s disposal as he quit academic life. This made some up-dates and complements necessary for which the author granted his allowance in advance. As a consequence of this unusual constellation, both, the editor and the author share the responsibility of what is said in this text. 2 Cf. for example the analysis at the time by Kühne (1991), Rothchild (1991) and Russett/Sutterlin (1991). More pessimistic were Hassner (1993) and Schlessinger (1991). 3 See for example the different assessments in Collier (2003) and Messiant/Marchal (2001). Here as in the following, all quotations from French sources are translated by the author.

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In this light, war economies seem to be an interesting clue and, in fact, the economic aspect of internal wars is the origin of an increasing concern in academic circles and in the practitioners’ community, NGOs in particular, both from a thematic perspective and from a monographic approach, as the contributions in Jean and Rufin (1996) indicate so evidently. What is striking, looking at internal conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1990s, is that ‘though the causes of wars in Africa and the aims of the combatants are still almost exclusively phrased in terms of achieving state power and affecting constitutional change, the realities on the ground reflect more intense predatory behavior by soldiers’ (de Waal, 1997: 6). What is happening thus appears to be an ‘integration of commerce and violence (...) in rebel movements and militias’ (ibid: 9). This in turn led directly to the theory of the ‘Mafia State’ (Bayart, 1993), even though we agree with JeanChristophe Rufin that it would be false to consider Cold War conflicts as purely ideological and today’s conflicts as ‘purely economical, of a Mafia type’ (Rufin, 1994: 46). Conflicts always had an economic dimension, but it was hidden behind the ideological objectives, whereas today, the ideology being far less preeminent, the economic aspect is simply more visible. In other words ‘if something seems to have changed recently, it is not due to a transformation of the conflict from a political nature to an economic one, but rather to a change of nature of the structures of war economies’ (ibid). The National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL)4 presented an accomplished model of the way fighting groups adapted to the new international system. Shortly after the beginning of their uprising in December 1989, their efforts were thwarted by the intervention of a West African peace-keeping force, ECOMOG, and decisions from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to set up an interim Government independent from the warring parties. It then became obvious for the NPFL leader, Charles Taylor, that the conflict was going to be far longer than expected. As a matter of fact, barely a month after ECOMOG’s landing in Monrovia, in October 1990, the West African force engaged in battle with NPFL forces and pushed them outside the city of Monrovia. It is against this background that the NPFL, at times controlling 95 per cent of Liberia’s territory, organized in the early 1990s an economic system which could be viewed as a model of rebel economies. In order to fully comprehend how such a system operates, we will successively consider the exploitation of the national resources and then the exploitation of the war resources. The former regroups resources traditionally used by the Liberian state prior to the war, and benefiting whoever controls them during a civil war. These were in the case of Liberia iron ore, timber and rubber. The latter consisted in resources born of the war during the 1990s, either directly – as it is the case with revenues extracted from humanitarian assistance – or indirectly, due to opportunities offered by the war context – as it is the case with traffics in drugs and weapons. However, none of these resources would be useful to the factions’ war economies if they were not coming with an 4

On the history of the Liberian war and the NPFL cf. Reno (1998) and Ellis (1999).

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extended network of political influences and international business partners. Both types of resources taken together were at the basis of the NPFL’s economic system. But this system in turn, however accomplished, diversified and effective it is, needs to be understood along with two other concomitant developments affecting post-Cold War conflicts: The transnationality of post-Cold War African conflicts – and therefore of there economy – and the creation of rebel states. Rebel economies are thus important to the understanding of today’s internal conflicts – an issue challenging all conceptions of a New World Order – in that they are the backbone of transnational rebel states and became to a large extent what factions are fighting for. When considering the finality of today’s conflicts, we will then conclude this presentation of the NPFL economy with the hypothesis of wars being fought for themselves, that is warfare as the primary objective of wars. We will finally consider briefly the implications of the concept of perpetual wars, born of the ways rebels’ economic systems are set up and run, on conflict management and conflict resolution.

1. The Exploitation of National Resources In order to compensate for the withdrawal of the two Great Powers from peripheral conflicts, the easier resort for the NPFL in Liberia was to steal some of the state resources. Since by June 1990 rebel forces had already taken by force all centers of natural and mineral production, it was only a matter of reorganizing the traditional trade flows and diverting them. It was not surprising then, that in Liberia most of the revenues of the NPFL came from what provided for most of the state income prior to the war: Iron ore, rubber and timber. Apart from these three main products, armed groups exploited other agricultural and mineral products like coffee, cocoa, diamonds and gold. What is striking though are the meticulousness and the level of organization of the exploitation of these resources. For the past four decades iron ore has been one of the pillars of the Liberian economy, providing more than half of the export income. But in the 1980s the golden age of the Liberian iron ore was nearly over: Two of the four concessions that had been opened in the country since 1951 were closed, one was extracting its last deposits, and most of the better ore from the remaining one, the Yekepa mines exploited by the ‘Liberian-Swedish Minerals Company’ (LAMCO), had already been extracted. Nevertheless, it was still obvious in 1990 that ‘the extraction of iron ore in Yekepa is vital for the Liberian economy’.5 Therefore, as soon as 1987 the Liberian Government started to look for alternative ways to pursue the exploitation of iron ore in northern Liberia despite the exhaustion of the site. When LAMCO finally declared in 1989 that it was closing down, a new project was ready to take over: It was called the MIFERGUIProject. It had been signed that same year by the Governments of Liberia and 5

Economic Intelligence Unit, Country Report Liberia, 1990, No. 1, p. 35.

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Guinea, the French ‘Bureau de recherches géologiques et minières’ (BRGM), partners to the Guineans, and the ‘British African Mining Corporation’ (AMC), partners to the Liberians, with an aim to exploit the Guinean side of the Nimba Range using the Liberian facilities. Indeed, there were more than 500 million tons of very high grade iron ore which had never been exploited by the Guineans since it would have required the laying of 350 km of railway line through a thick rain forest to Kankan station, the upgrading of the 650 railway lines linking Kankan to Conakry, and the building of the relevant facilities in the port of Conakry. The idea beneath the MIFERGUI project was then to build a 17 km railway line between the Guinean side of the mountain and Yekepa in Liberia in order to use the railway laid out by LAMCO between their mines in Yekepa and the deep water mineral port of Buchanan. The agreement created a new company – ‘Nimba International Mining Company’ (NIMCO) – shared by the Guinean government which provided the mining rights, the Liberian government, which provided its facilities, and private investors which provided the 240 million dollars necessary to start the project through a joint-venture between AMC and Euronimba. Other parties were also involved: The Guineans had teamed up with French, German and Japanese interests, the Liberians with the Swedish group Wallenberg. AMC seemed to group rich Liberians in exile in the USA, and Euronimba was comprised of the bigger names in the metallurgic industry, like the Japanese Sumimoto, the American Cyprus Minerals, the Italian Finsinder, and some other investors such as the French BRGM or the Kuwaiti Emirate for example (cf. Soulanges, 1993). While waiting for the first Guinean ore to come, it was then crucial for the Liberians to keep railways and port facilities in a good state since they were the only justification for their participation in the project. For this purpose they decided that mining activities should go on a little longer in Yekepa in order to keep using the facilities and to sell enough iron ore to cover the wages of the remaining staff as well as the cost of all necessary minor repairs. The ‘Liberia Mining Corporation’ (LIMINCO) was thus created specifically for this linking project. But the invasion of NPFL troops from the neighboring Ivory Coast in December 1989 began from this very part of Liberia and thus threatened the whole plan. As early as April 1990, production was stopped in Yekepa, and besides obvious risks of damage beyond repair caused by the ongoing war, it was clear that a prolongation of the crisis in Liberia would not allow the linking project to go on. By October some partners in the project started negotiations with the NPFL leadership and it was agreed that the whole linking project should go on. As a sign of good will and as an indication of the importance in his eyes of this multi-billion dollar project, NPFL leader Charles Taylor appointed the brother of one of his most trusted men at the head of LIMINCO, Nathaniel Richardson. The first objective of LINIMCO under NPFL control was to look for the 6.3 million dollars necessary to repair or replace what had been damaged by the conflict. This was when foreign interests started to assist the rebel faction in the

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iron ore sector. AMC in particular, as a partner in the whole MIFERGUI project, granted LIMINCO the amount of 800.000 dollars, and in 1991 LIMINCO managed to borrow 3.2 million dollars from three foreign banks, namely ‘Sifida Investment Company Ltd.’, ‘Credit Suisse’ and the French bank ‘Société Générale’. Additional funds came from the sale of the iron ore stocked at port Buchanan when the port fell into NPFL hands. Here again providential assistance came from European businesses which, strictly speaking, contributed to finance the rebel faction: In 1991, one million tons of iron ore was sold abroad, for a total amount of 16 million dollars, three quarters of which were bought by the French company SOLLAC on behalf of the state-owned company USINOR for 11.2 million dollars (Le Figaro, 8 January 1992). However, the 16 million dollars were used to pay wages, to buy small spare parts and fuel, and to pay back part of LIMINCO’s debts. The new funds were not enough to finance the linking project. By the end of 1991, it became necessary to start exploiting the mines again. But to make sure the very small quantities of iron ore still left in the Yekepa mines would last longer, the ore sold on the international market in 1992 was a mixture of two thirds from there and one third from Tokedeh mines, almost as good as the Yekepa one. Once again SOLLAC was one of the major buyers of this ore, with three shipments made in May, September and December 1992. But through Eurofer, the other major buyer, most European companies in this business benefited from the Liberian iron ore, including companies from Italy, Germany, Belgium, Spain and Portugal.6 Another flaw in the project came as a result of the World Bank’s decision in 1992 not to support it because of its Wildlands policy, leading some of its investors to withdraw their participation. Indeed, to start with, it was hard to imagine Guinea alienating the World Bank and taking any other decision than giving up the idea of exploiting their side of Mount Nimba. Furthermore, the length of the war in Liberia, together with the unlikeness of any short term resolutions led to more and more concern about the state of the Liberian facilities at the end of the war. However, the new agreement reached in 1994 to replace the departing partners strengthened the importance of European interests. The French BRGM in particular increased its participation in Euronimba to 31 per cent at the same level as a newcomer, the South African group Gincor; while Kuwait and Sumimoto reduced theirs. Also, within the joint-venture the share of Euronimba was up ten points to 60 per cent while that of AMC was brought down to 40 per cent (Kieffer, 1994). Apart from the sale of iron ore to European companies and the money borrowed from banking institutions by the NPFL-controlled LIMINCO, the mining activities in the Nimba region were beneficial to the rebels thanks to an array of taxes on production and export. It would appear that for the right to exploit the mines LIMONCO had to pay the NPFL 10,000 dollars a month, and more was paid

6

‘Briefing on the Mount Nimba Project’, in: Mine Watch, 30 June, 1991.

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in railway lines between the Nimba region and Buchanan across the country, allowing the NPFL to use it for other exports as well as for military purposes. Timber also became very early in the conflict one of the major sources of income for the Liberian factions. William Reno (1993) also points to the Forestry Development Agency, responsible for collecting taxes on the exploitation and the export of timber, as one of the main sources of revenue for the NPFL. However, only rough estimates of the volume produced under NPFL control and exported from Liberia are possible, not least since an unknown part of the production was first carried to the neighboring Ivory Coast and then exported as Ivorian timber to get around the ECOWAS, and later UN, embargoes. Some companies like ‘Maryland Logging Company’ and ‘Togba Timber Company’, even moved their offices to Ivorian villages half-way between their Liberian concessions and the Ivorian ports. The only way to get any idea of the kind of revenues the factions generated from the timber business is to look at the buyer’s side – that is, for timber as well as for iron ore, mostly European countries. The Independent on Sunday reported in its issue of 22 November 1992 that 142,900 cubic metres were exported to seven European countries in 1991, 68 per cent of which went to France. The French magazine ‘Marchés tropicaux et méditerranéens’ seems to confirm these figures since it estimates 94.000 cubic metres as the volume exported to France in 1991. If that represents 68 per cent of the total, expors to Europe should be around 138,800 cubic metres, a number very close to that states in the ‘Independent’. Further in line with this data, the London-based ‘Economic Intelligence Unit’ reported that the NPFL exported 200,000 cubic metres of timber to France, Germany, Italy and Turkey between November 1991 and November 1992. According to this data, the NPFL should then have received around 40 million dollars in the sole two years 1991 and 1992.7 As opposed to iron ore, two factions controlled south-east Liberia where most of the logging companies were located and benefited from this trade: The NPFL since 1990 and the Liberian Peace Council (LPC), opposed to the NPFL since 1994. Companies like the ‘Cavalla Timber Company’, and the ‘TIMCO Logging Company’ which operated under NPFL control between 1990 and 1994, operated under LPC control after it took their concession in 1994. Indeed, one of the rare documents recording what was exported from Liberia during the war attests that LPC managed to have the same companies exporting their logs to the same European customers. According to the author’s documentation, the M/V Alcyone left the port of Sinoe in December 1994, then under LPC control, for Leixoes, Portugal, where it deposited 687 cubic metres of timber sold by Cavalla Timber Company and another firm to a local unnamed buyer, finally stopping in Bordeaux, France, the remaining 899 cubic metres on board were sold by the same two 7

Liberian timber was sold at 117,70 dollars per cubic metre in 1991, according to a 1992 document emanating from the Monrovia Interim Government, entitled ‘An Appraisal of the Impact of Ecowas Economic Sanctions on the Liberian Economy’.

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companies to another unnamed buyer. Again in March 1995, the M/V Jetty left the port of Buchanan with 735 cubic metres of wood on board sold by the TIMCO Logging Company to a buyer named E.A.C. in Nantes, France. It is also interesting to note that European buyers of Liberian timber were sometimes directly linked to the factions’ arms supplies. The Independent on Sunday reported for example that the NPFL’s wood revenues were deposited in two bank accounts at the Banque Internationale du Burkina Faso and were used to buy weapons, ammunitions and fuel. In the case of LPC, its founder and leader, George Boley, claims that forestry activities in his territory helped him to buy weapons from CEPII, a French company located near Paris. According to him, he managed to get a 300,000 dollar letter of credit from the French bank Crédit Lyonnais which paid for the weaponry bought from CEPII; later on LPC shipped wood worth this amount to a friendly company in France which in turn paid back the bank.8 Blessed at the time of the civil war with the biggest rubber plantation on earth – Firestone plantation in Harbel, and two other major plantations – the ‘Liberian Agricultural Company’ (LAC) belonging to the American ‘Keene Industries’ and Guthrie plantation as well as some fifty smaller ones, Liberia has been a major rubber exporter for most of the twentieth century. Not surprisingly, rubber played an important part in the financing of the rebel factions which were in control of Firestone, LAC and to a lesser extent Guthrie plantations. As far as rebel economy is concerned, the trade in rubber was very similar to the trade in timber, at least because the two main beneficiaries were once again the NPFL and LPC. Indeed, both Firestone and LAC managements entered into negotiations with the NPFL as soon as 1991 in order to pursue their activities under their leadership despite the ongoing internal crisis (Reno, 1993). Another similarity with timber trade is the lack of precise sources regarding both the destination of the Liberian rubber and the volumes concerned. It is unclear whether the main destination of Liberian rubber during the war was Europe or the USA. William Reno (1993) for example claims that France was the first buyer of Liberian rubber, while a Liberian Government report considers the USA to be its first destination. This possibility is also somehow confirmed by data from the American Trade Information Center which, for the year 1995, considers rubber as one of the first products imported from Liberia with pearls and diamonds.9 Again, what accounts for this imprecision, apart from the unwillingness of the buyers to be identified, is that a large part of the Liberian production under NPFL control was exported through the Ivory Coast as Ivorian rubber. Prince Barclay, a NPFL general, who made the first contacts with international buyers and 8

Source: Author’s discussion with George Boley in Monrovia, 2 and 5 June 1995. According to its registration, CEPII was exporting industrial material and traded food items before it was officially declared bankrupt on 22 May 1990, three years ahead of the events reported by Boley. 9 Unpublished transcript of a telephone discussion between the Trade Information Centre of the United States and a European NGO, June, 1996.

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organized the sale of available stocks found on the plantations as soon as 1990, exported them through Bouapleu, Ivory Coast.10 For the same two reasons, it is also difficult to evaluate the total volume of rubber exports. From available information, it can only be guessed that an average of 20.000 to 30.000 tons of rubber were sold every year during the crisis, compared to the 118.000 tons exported in 1989, as estimated by the Economic Intelligence Unit in the early 1990s. As for timber, data from the port of Buchanan under LPC control provides some idea of the volumes and destinations of rubber exported from LAC plantation after LPC took it from the NPFL in early 1994. According to these documents, LPC exported 4,660 tons of rubber between September 1994 and February 1995 on board five vessels. Buyers were mainly from Malaysia and Singapore but also from London and the USA, even though all the ships but one went to Singapore according to their declarations. The only exception was the ‘Pont Lisas’, which left Buchanan in November 1994 for London where it unloaded eleven containers of rubber and Malaysia where, according to the authors documentation, it left the remaining 33 containers on board. Profit for the factions was based, as was the case for iron ore, on production and export taxes levied on the companies by the NPFL and LPC. It is impossible though to get any idea, even an approximation, of the revenues generated by rubber exports, but the fact that LPC leader George Boley appointed his most trusted confident and head of the military wing, General Ruth Atteelah, to overhead all rubber trade, is a clear indication of its importance for the faction’s economy.11 The NPFL economy was also based upon other agricultural products, especially coffee and cocoa. For both of them the NPFL leader, Charles Taylor, used to buy the whole production of local farmers at a price he fixed himself. Coffee and cocoa produced in NPFL territory was then transported by road to the Ivory Coast and sold there to foreign buyers. The produce of the sales was then deposited in a bank account in Abidjan and a receipt brought back to Charles Taylor. All this was the responsibility of businessmen appointed by Charles Taylor. Most of them were Ivorian nationals, as was the most important and trusted of them, Touré Abou Dramané. Buyers were either Ivorians – one of the major coffee buyers was an Ivorian named Bambadjan Bamba – or foreigners based in the Ivory Coast. Most of NPFL cocoa was bought by an Iranian national based in Danané at the border with Liberia. It would seem that the revenues of these sales were used mainly to buy necessary small commodities like rubber sandals, rice, tools, and so on from the Ivory Coast. In some cases, the middle-man appointed by Charles Taylor to organize the sale was also instructed to use part of the money collected to buy what

10

Author’s interview with an Ivorian businessman close to the NPFL, Danané, the Ivory Coast, April 1995 and Abidjan, July 1995. 11 Author’s interview with Octavius Walker, Secretary General of the LPC, Monrovia, 25 May 1995.

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was needed in NPFL territory and to bring it back to NPFL’s capital city, Gbarnga, along with the corresponding receipts and the bank receipt. Gold and diamonds were particular resources in the Liberian conflict since they did not contribute a lot to the faction’s economy, except for the anti-NPFL ‘United Liberation Movement for Democracy in Liberia’ (ULIMO), a fighting group virtually deprived of any other commodity, but lucky enough to control the diamond-rich western part of Liberia. Ivorian businessmen reported that the NPFL was not even using the little production of gold at their disposal directly to finance its war efforts but seems to have used it as a way to keep up its network of influence, especially among Ivorian officials. Diamonds, produced in small quantities in the Bong area by NPFL until 1992 and by ULIMO afterwards, became a prominent asset of the rebel economy after the invasion of Sierra Leone in 1991. Within a few weeks, the NPFL, constituting the bulk of the invading forces, and the still small group of the ‘Revolutionary United Front’ (RUF), in the name of which the action was conducted, managed to take control of the whole eastern part of Sierra Leone, including the diamond-rich districts of Bo and Kenema. To some observers controlling these areas it even appeared to be the main objective of the rebels despite their proclaimed intention to overthrow the governments of Sierra Leone (cf. Misser/Vallée, 1997). As a matter of fact, the NPFL territory expanded afterwards deep inside Sierra Leone; diamonds from these areas where usually brought back to Liberia from where they were exported (Richards, 1995). These government sales fell from 150 million dollars per annum prior to the war to a mere 30 million dollars after 1991, indicating a profit of roughly 100 million dollars a year for the rebels.12 However, foreign and local companies alike were not only participating in the rebel economy through taxes. LIMINCO, for example, was not only paying the exploitation tax mentioned earlier on. As the owner of a small electric plant at the outskirts of Buchanan, the company was also compelled by the NPFL leadership to supply the city with electricity. Even though this was not profitable for the company, the NPFL leadership gained a lot of political credit for the decision. Indeed, while another company with an electric plant was also compelled to provide the same service to the city of Greenville, only parts of Monrovia – and only once in a while – were supplied by the legitimate Liberian government (Weissman, 1996). Liberian and foreign businesses in NPFL territory were also useful to the faction’s economic system in that some of them were allowed to provide strategic services or needed supplies instead of the usual taxes. Ships coming to Buchanan to take on board Liberian mineral and agricultural resources were often asked to bring in bags of rice as part of the payment. Likewise, Firestone was required to pay part of their taxes in rice (Weissman, 1996).

12

These numbers are given in the French business journal ‘Marchés tropicaux et méditerranéens’, 14 October 1994.

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Transport is a crucial sector for both the economic and the military capacities of the factions. As such, many services required from companies working in NPFL territory concerned its development and upkeep. ALTCO, a small logging company from south-east Liberia, was asked to import two buses in order to create a regular line between Gbarnga and Ganta instead of paying its taxes in cash. An American citizen in charge of another logging company was asked to repair the road between Gbarnga and Buchanan in 1990. Vincent Tarr, LAC Managing Director under the NPFL, repaired the port of Buchanan. And Brian Garnham, Director of the building company EXCHEM, was required to repair the runway at Robertsfield airport after every ECOMOG bombardment.13 The greatest achievement of the NPFL in order to sustain both its military efforts on the battle-field and its political efforts inside and outside conference rooms was the quality of the network it managed to set up in West Africa as well as in the industrialized world. First of all, it is likely that without the necessary connections in the business sector, it would have been difficult for the NPFL to be as efficient in selling the mineral and agricultural resources of its territory: But the links with businesses, politicians and generally speaking people of influence abroad, were far more diversified. In the Ivory Coast for example, the assistance the NPFL could get at a local level in the border area was based upon close relationships maintained between numerous key personalities in both the economic sector and in Ivorian politics. Based in Abidjan, members of the NPFL leadership reflected the concern of Charles Taylor for economic and political support in the Ivory Coast. They included many officials with economic charges – Norwood Langley, NPFL’s Minister of Commerce, William E. Dennis, its Minister of Finance, Cyril Allen, Director for Public Corporations, Benoni Urey, Chairman of the Rubber Marketing Council – as well as officials with relations in the political arena.14 One of the most resourceful of them was certainly Ernest Eastman, NPFL’s Foreign Affairs Minister at the beginning of the crisis. He was in particular a close friend of a French businessman and long-time resident in the Ivory Coast, who himself had all the necessary connections. Among the latter’s friends were in particular Jean Koneu Bany, mayor of Yamoussoukro and businessman, and Zinsou, a son-in-law of President Houphoüet-Boigny who owned a shipping company. Now, the ‘MV Sea Rose’, chased without success by ECOMOG Navy in September 1992 for supplying the NPFL despite a UN embargo and finally hailed later on, was one of his boats.15 NPFL connections outside West Africa shared the same characteristics: they were influential either in the economic sector or in the political arena, and 13 Author’s interview with an expatriate who stayed in NPFL territory between 1990 and 1995, Buchanan, June 1995. 14 ‘Taylor’s cabinet in Côte d’Ivoire’, West Africa, 29 March–4 April 1993. 15 Source: Author’s observation in Abidjan in 1993, and letter from Momolu Sirleaf, Taylor’s minister for foreign affairs, to the UN Secretary General on the incident, dated from 18 September 1992.

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sometimes in both of them. A very close confident to Charles Taylor for example, supposedly had contacts with alleged ‘Mafia people’ in Nice, France, where she went several times during the crisis.16 Even though it is most likely that these contacts had business relations with the NPFL, their main function seems to have been to supply the rebel group with intelligence on the positions of governments and political forces regarding the ongoing crisis in Liberia. Charles Taylor apparently also managed to get a few preeminent supporters in France. His mentor, Burkinabese President Blaise Compaoré, introduced him to a group of representatives from the French National Assembly while they were on a visit to Ouagadougou.17 Jean-Christophe Mitterand, advisor for African Affairs to the President, his father, allegedly met Charles Taylor and other NPFL officials during the war and benefited from expensive gifts in exchange for France’s assistance. Some observers of the Liberian crisis consider France as one of the main supporters of the NPFL, both at the economic and at the political level (cf. Tarr, 1993). The role of France might not have been as preeminent as it looks and if the NPFL benefited from contact in that county, France was only one of several places were the NPFL managed to expand its network of influence. Connections were made for example with Japanese companies in Ougadougou by a Ghanaian businessman close to Blaise Compaoré who used to reside in Japan. In 1990, as soon as the port of Buchanan was taken from the national army, a group of Japanese came to that city on board a Burkinabe plane and rushed to the port to evaluate the damage; until some shells from AFL positions around the city cut short the visit.18 Liberia has been a relatively rich country since the middle of this century thanks to its iron ore deposits, its vast forests of precious wood and huge plantations of rubber trees. The success of the NPFL in taking control of most of these resources along with its ability to create a wide network of international business partners, certainly accounts for its capacity to sustain a seven year war effort, a six and a half year opposition to ECOWAS military force and a four and a half year survival despite an UN embargo. As a matter of fact, traditional resources of the Liberian state were the backbone of the NPFL economy. However, they were completed with the exploitation of other resources made available by the war itself.

16 Author’s interview with George Boley, and with three deserted NPFL generals in Abidjan, July 1995. 17 Author’s interview with a witness in France 1995. 18 Author’s interview with a participant in that visit, July 1994.

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2. The Exploitation of War Resources The necessity to look for alternative ways to finance their political and military efforts in a changing international context led fighting groups in Liberia to extract revenues from the conflict itself. In fact, they exploited two opportunities brought by the warring context: Humanitarian assistance and illicit traffic in drugs and weapons. The extraction of revenues from relief assistance brought into Liberia was the direct consequence of the awareness of the factions that they were in daily contact with the financial and material wealth they were lacking. Predatory behavior incurred due to the coexistence of factions and well endowed relief agencies took on a variety of forms; from manipulation to the use of violence. Apart from its financial aspect, it also appears that a conception of relief aid as a resource by the rebels not only benefited their leadership in terms of economic gain but was also beneficial in that it proved valuable in enhancing political reputation, both internally and externally. The participation of rebel groups in illicit trafficking, always profitable, was however based essentially on economical grounds. In Liberia, as in many other contemporary conflicts, from Afghanistan to Senegal, from Sudan to Lebanon, the trade in narcotics and arms, facilitated by the complete failure of law and order generated by the conflict, contributed in no small ways to the rebels’ economy. Humanitarian organizations play an increasing role in today’s conflicts and most fighting groups saw in them the opportunity to extract a substantial part of the resources they lacked; as the end of the Cold War had deprived them of any significant external support. It has been acknowledged by some relief agencies that in order to operate in conflict areas they need to accept some level of compromise with both the factions and the governments in order to carry on their efforts. In some cases they are even forced to provide some form of assistance to the operational capacities of the fighting groups. Thus, as a ‘Doctors without borders’ (DWB) executive puts it ‘a better knowledge of the impact of humanitarian assistance on war economies is crucial [because] humanitarian assistance which still played a minor role not too long ago, plays nowadays a crucial role in the conflict dynamics’ (Jean, 1996: 490). Indeed, in the Horn of Africa, Christopher Clapham already pointed in 1990 to the ‘food war’ which consists of trying to get as much international assistance as possible while trying at the same time to deprive others of it (Clapham, 1990: 417). When it comes to Sudan, Gérard Prunier revealed that as much as 20 per cent of the relief assistance coming into the country as part of Operation Lifeline Sudan was used directly by the Sudan People Liberation Army’s fighters (Prunier, 1996: 355). In Somalia Ramesh Thakur also found that relief assistance provided by the UN helped soldiers, rebels and bandits likewise (Thakur, 1994: 395). In the case of Liberia, three types of coercive strategies have been used by the factions to extract resources from relief agencies operating in rebel territories: taxation, diversion and aggression.

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Taxation is the most direct way to extract financial and material resources from relief agencies. In its more elaborate form, it consisted of imposing a local NGO to the relief community as the necessary intermediary for all operations conducted in the faction’s territory. In that case the faction not only controlled all relief operations in its area but also requested some form of payment for the service provided. In September 1994 the NPFL created an office that used to require a fee of 15 per cent of the budget for every mission undertaken in NPFL territory and on the use of all equipment needed for the mission after it was accomplished. Besides this system, there was a wide variety of ways to tax the relief community at every stage of their action: when entering one’s territory, while traveling inside, when food was distributed and even after the distribution. The NPFL for example used to require DWB to pay a 5,000 Liberian dollars (LD) entry tax for every ship berthing in the port of Greenville. After that the convoys were taxed at every one of the numerous check-points monitoring all internal roads in the faction’s territory. Relief agencies were also compelled to pay for a detachment of security guards provided by the faction itself, even though this blatant form of racketeering never prevented the convoys from being taxed at the check-points. The LPC in the Greenville area even organized this system to such an extent that an organization was officially created to this effect: The ‘Sampson-Philipp International Agency’ (SPITA), named after Generals Sampson and Philipp, the two LPC officers in command of the area. Of course no relief convoy could travel to or from Greenville without a guard provided by SPITA and paid 1,500 Liberian Dollars a month. Finally, during distributions of food, factions used to mix their fighters among the civilian population, thus getting another part of whatever was left, and when the NGOs were gone it often happened that fighters came back to the villages to steal from the civilians whatever they had not yet consumed, often employing large scale violence. Diversion is a strategy very close to Clapham’s ‘food war’ aimed at attracting as much assistance to one’s territory while depriving other parties in the conflict. It usually consists of the faction itself alerting the relief community about a humanitarian crisis in its territory, and exaggerating both the number of civilians affected and the importance of the situation in order to increase the level of assistance given by the relief community. In most cases though, the factions act on the population they control in such a way as to baffle preparatory missions from the aid agencies. The forced displacement of civilian populations to make sure they stay in one’s territory despite enemy offensives and counter-offensives is one of such actions. But sometimes factions themselves seem to create the required humanitarian crisis, isolating a large group of civilians in a given area and depriving it of food until the time comes to alert NGOs. Thus, DWB observed in Liberia hunger areas ‘created’ by the NPFL in 1993 (Weissman, 1996). Finally, the relief community sometimes faced violent predatory behavior towards their goods – plundered or destroyed when in enemy territory – as well as their staffs who were taken hostage as a way to attract temporary media attention or to be used as human shields. For example, in the course of a major offensive in

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1992 the NPFL kidnapped the United Nations Special Coordinator in its capital city Gbarnga, and the whole DWB-Belgium team in Lofa County. In 1994 again, when Gbarnga was attacked by a coalition of anti-NPFL forces, the NPFL kept five relief workers as prisoners. At the first level of analysis, most of these predatory behaviors – taxations at the check-points and on the beneficiaries as well as most of the robberies and lootings – were beneficial to those who were perpetrating them: the fighters. In this regard, humanitarian assistance participated actively in supplying the troops either directly when it consisted of food, or indirectly when the stolen goods were sold by the fighters. However, this behavior was seldom planned in advance and usually resulted from platoon leaders or even individual fighters taking advantage of the opportunities offered by the presence of relief agencies in their sector. When perdition was organized by the leadership of the fighting groups, they were clear strategies intended to provide the factions with necessary supplies as well as an increase of their operational capacities. As such, humanitarian assistance participated actively, albeit unwillingly, in the factions’ economy. When for example, the NPFL was preparing the invasion of Sierra Leone in 1991, it alerted the relief community about the critical needs of the civilian population in the border area and used the food brought there later on to feed the fighters during their operations in Sierra Leone (Weissman, 1996: 51). Likewise, when robberies and plunders were organized at the faction level they often aimed at items which could easily be turned away from their original use in order to increase the military capacities of the fighting groups. Vehicles and communication sets for example were particularly favored by the looters. It is indeed interesting to note that massive robberies often took place before major military operations. In early 1996 NPFL officers even warned ‘Action Internationale Contre la Faim’ (AICF), a French NGO, that whenever the military situation would require the use of their vehicles, they would come and take all of them. And when Gbarnga fell to anti-NPFL forces in September 1994, looting in the midst of offensives and counter-offensives was so important that in a few days the relief community lost ‘5 million dollars worth of equipment, 74 light vehicles, 27 trucks, 18 motorbikes, more than 4.000 tons of food and an unknown number of radios and computers’. The International Committee of the Red Cross, used for some time to the losses in conflict areas, suffered what it considered to be the biggest loss in its whole history (Weissman, 1996: 43). Narcotics are not a new component of today’s African conflicts: ‘War activity (...) is usually associated with the use of narcotics, as was the case during the great Congo uprisings of 1964–1965 or during the Biafra war. Today, fighters from the various armed groups in Liberia, in Sierra Leone, in Somalia smoke or chew abundantly’ (Bayart et al., 1997: 32). In Liberia and possibly in other conflicts, too, this fact is even more salient, since apart from the voluntary use of drugs, some fighters, especially the young ones, were pushed to smoke marijuana as a way to overcome fear and increase their fighting capacities (cf. Furley, 1995). Apart from

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the medical aspect of the use of drugs, narcotics also played an important role in the factions’ economies. In Liberia, two factions seem to have induced local farmers to grow marijuana: The NPFL in Ong, Nimba and Grand-Gedeh counties, and ULIMO in Lofa County.19 There is however no indication that this production was taxed and participated in the rebel economy as is the case in Senegal. Nevertheless, producers sometimes sold marijuana outside the faction’s territory and thus created internal traffic within Liberia. In April 1994 for example, ECOMOG discovered four packets of cannabis at a checkpoint that market women were carrying among other goods from NPFL-controlled Bong County to Monrovia. It is not clear if the traffic was organized by the NPFL; it is more likely that the small quantities involved were sold for the sole benefit of the producers. But drug sales were not limited to the national level, and when exported in larger quantities, they constituted another source of revenue for the NPFL and ULIMO. Indeed, it appears that ‘the link between drugs and wars is essentially at the economic level’ since drugs ‘represent an unchallenged economic potential’ (Labrousse, 1996: 468). In the particular case of Liberia, it seems that narcotics became a part of NPFL’s source of revenue very early in the conflict, at the same time as other resources like timber and iron ore. Similarly, they were exported through Buchanan until the NPFL lost the port to ECOMOG in 1993 and through San Pedro in the Ivory Coast until the emergence of the LPC in south-east Liberia. The exports to the Ivory Coast or through the Ivory Coast seem to have been so important that they led to both a clear rise in drug seizures in Abidjan and a significant drop in street prices (Labrousse, 1996: 468). NPFL’s partners were mainly Greek and Lebanese dealers, and cannabis was often used to pay for shipments of fuel, arms and ammunitions. In most cases, drugs were then only one part of the outgoing shipments, alongside some logs or containers of rubber. It has proved however impossible to reach any estimate of the volumes produced and traded by the NPFL or ULIMO. Arms and ammunitions acquired by the NPFL were sometimes paid for with shipments of marijuana produced in NPFL territory. Conversely, there were instances where the NPFL sold weapons abroad, both at the individual level and at the faction’s leadership level. And it is most interesting to note that in the latter case drugs were sometimes received in payment for the arms exported from Liberia. Most of the weaponry sold by NPFL fighters, individually or in small groups, were the personal weapons of deserters or weapons captured on the battle field. In both cases they were usually sold in the neighboring Ivory Coast, one of the main 19 ‘Liberia: Trafficking in a Forgotten War’, The Geopolitical Drug Dispatch, no. 28, February 1994, pp. 6–7; and author’s interview with Colonel Abraham Kromah, Deputy Director of the Liberian Police Force in charge of criminal enquiries and Interpol, Monrovia, 1 June 1995.

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escape routes for fighters on the run as well as the NPFL back-shop. It could be estimated that half of the weapons reaching NPFL forces through the Ivory Coast came back to this country later on,20 threatening public order in the country to such an extent that the Ivorian and other Governments could hardly hide their concern. By 1992, the American Embassy in Abidjan was even worried that the Ivory Coast could become a loser in the ongoing Liberian conflict and that the war could cross the border. In March 1995, a special representative of the UN Secretary General even met then President Henri Konan Bédié about the alarming rise in weaponry available in the country.21 But the NPFL also sold weapons in larger quantities to at least one other fighting group: MFDC in Senegal, and this places weapons alongside drugs as one of the faction’s resources. In 1995 for example, an officer of the Casamance separatist movement claimed that he was expecting arms and ammunitions from Liberia to be used by Fally Basséne’s group on the south-eastern front and Ousmane Foubula Sambou’s group on the south-western front. This deal was allegedly struck in Abidjan by the Ivorian branch of the Casamance’s separatist movement, as the Senegalese daily Al Fadjiri reported (21 August 1995). Drugs and weapons trafficking, apart from both being illegal, seem to be even more intertwined as in this particular case the MFDC paid the NPFL with marijuana. And when Alain Labrousse mentioned the fact that the Casamance separatist group was supplied by ships from Guinea-Bisseau and Liberia, he also claimed that ‘these weapons could be changed on the high sea for marijuana’ (Labrousse, 1996: 488). As it is drugs and marijuana thus play virtually the same role in the faction’s economy: Cannabis grown in NPFL territory helps to buy weaponry from international arms dealers, and when these weapons are later sold on to other fighting groups, they can be paid for with drugs, which may possibly be sold to arms dealers for more weaponry. Humanitarian assistance and illicit trafficking participated in the NPFL economy to a lesser extent than traditional resources of the Liberian state. However, the former provided it with much needed equipment that the NPFL did not have to buy abroad, and played an important role in the redistribution of resources to the lower levels of the rebel organization: the fighters. Also drug trafficking might not have been important in terms of financial revenues, but drug deals seem to have been associated with arms deals in most cases and, in this light, narcotics were also a strategic resource for the NPFL.

20 ‘Ivorians worry over war spill-over’, New Democrat Weekly, vol. 1(54), 1–3 November 1994. 21 Audience du Chef de l’Etat – la prolifération des armes au centre des discussions, Fraternité Matin (Abidjan), 6 March 1995.

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3. Rebel Economy, Transnational Rebel States and the Finality of Internal Conflicts The economic system set up by the NPFL in Liberia, as efficient as it was, only displays all its importance when seen in the light of two other new developments of internal conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa: their transnational character and the constitution of rebel states by the fighting groups. Indeed, both of them are products of an efficient economic system as well as the condition of its efficiency. It is because rebel factions considered their territory as being transnational and organized its administration in a state-like manner that their economic system was so efficient. Conversely, without an efficient rebel economy it would have been impossible for fighting groups to organize state-like structure in their transnational territory. As a matter of fact, in Liberia, only the NPFL out of a total of six major factions managed to organize itself as a state and only the NPFL benefited from a highly elaborate economic system. With resources plundered deep inside Sierra Leone and economic assets implanted in the Ivory Coast, the NPFL’s economic system cannot be understood solely within the limits of the Liberian state territory. Rather, it is tantamount to a successful de facto regional economic integration and illustrates vividly the fact that today, much more than in the past, conflicts need to be understood in the context of transnationality (cf. Bigo, 1992). In this light, fighting groups are basically doing no more than re-appropriating for themselves ‘the informal economy’ which usually flourishes between contiguous African States. For several years analysts of the ‘spontaneous dynamics of integration’ in sub-Saharan Africa have pointed at processes of deterritorialisation (Bach/Vallée, 1990). They insisted in particular on the rising importance of forces contesting existing territorial frames and the dynamism of informal flows which jointly led to a regress of State territorial framing. Fighting groups’ economic systems and the territory over which their economical, political and military influences expand are thus transnational first and foremost because it enhances both their economic capacities and the decay of the state they challenge. Indeed, ‘the State loses its efficiency since it forces itself, by definition, to deploy its actions within the territory which is the very mark of its identity and its sovereignty, while on the contrary the transnational actor gains in terms of performance because it frees himself from this constraint’ (Badie/Smouts, 1992: 78). It can thus be argued that the advantages of the transnational actor over the State are precisely what led rebel groups to create ‘their’ state at the fringes of existing states. Since transnational flows induce a ‘deconstruction of state territory, as opposed to their aggregation, Max Weber’s classical definition of the State no longer applies in numerous parts of the continent. In Liberia, Zaire, Somalia, Angola or Mozambique, the State is no longer the sole agency which, within society, possesses the monopoly over legitimate violence’ (Bach, 1997: 109); rebel territories emerge as empirical States against judicial States no longer alone on their own territory (cf. Clapham, 1996: 226). Thus, ‘proliferation of gang

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economies do not only result in the birth of parallel economy, (...) it also generates a real state within in state, with its own resources, sometimes its own army and very often its own social services’ (Badie/Smouts, 1992: 89). NPFL’s ‘greater Liberia’ can then claim to be an archetype of these ‘phoenix states’ which rise within decayed judicial states and challenge their authority as well as their sovereignty in the context of internal conflicts. And the economic system at the basis of the constitution of these rebel states contributes to a new form of African patrimonialism and the emergence of what William Reno terms the ‘shadow state’: ‘Taylor has to exercise his authority ... or he would not exist’ (Reno, 1993: 175). Seen in the light of the terminology in the introductory chapter of this volume, Charles Taylor’s ‘shadow state’ is nothing else than the reemergence of statehood out of the ashes of the old state. Taylor as well as other African rebel leaders had no other scheme than to reproduce the idea of the state, and his new state, legitimized by elections in 1997, resembled the old one to an astonishing degree. From traditional state resources and specific war resources, factions thus organized in the post-Cold War era a rebel economy allowing them to subsist, at the military level as well as at the political level, despite drying financial and material supplies from external backers. Furthermore, the particular case of the NPFL in Liberia shows that behind what could be simply considered as an alternative strategy lies a much deeper evolution: the constitution of a rebel state on the ruins of the Liberian state. But as such, the economy of the conflict brings to question the finality of the conflict. What differentiates contemporary conflicts from Cold War conflicts is that at times the exploitation of a territory does not aim at assembling the necessary means toward the capture of power but rather constitutes the objective of war itself. In this light, the way NPFL exploited and organized its territory is not very different from the case of the ‘Terras Libres de Angola’ by the ‘União National para a Independência Total de Angola’ (UNITA) (cf. Heywood 1989) or that of the Khmer Rouges’ territory in Cambodia (Lechery, 1996). A careful study of rebel economies could reveal that what is new about postCold War African conflicts is in some cases the lack of interest for the central government as a political goal. Some researchers look at them in this light, but they usually see the renunciation of state power as a necessary decision imposed by ongoing events rather than as a deliberate choice. For example, Bigo, who has been conducting important theoretical work to comprehend the logic at work in these new forms of conflicts, asserts that ‘the struggle for central power can be marginal (...). To survive as a fighting group, or to exist, are objectives which prevail over the conquest of power. Even when the cause is lost, or sometimes forgotten, they will fight to exist (...). The Government does not matter in this case’ (Bigo, 1996: 406). The implication of this view seems to be that groups which abandon the government as their major objective are necessarily groups so powerless that they can only exist if they fight, and therefore are not likely to be in any position to take on the government.

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Ghassan Salamé offers a more attractive theory while trying to characterize what he terms as ‘(un)civil wars’. According to him, factions retire within their own territory as a result of a military balance on the ground which makes unlikely the victory of any of the parties contending for power. In this case, factions ‘set up a war economy (...) and help the development of a “war society” (...). Their central objective is to continue the war’ (Salamé, 1996: 90). Indeed armed groups like the NPFL no longer use war for political objectives. War itself is the essence of their being because war gives them the opportunity to create for themselves a state with all its political and economic advantages. War is what makes them what they want to become – state leaders – and gives them what they want to have – power– and that only lasts for as long as the conflict itself lasts. The corollary of this situation, as far as conflict management is concerned, is that now rebel groups tend to strive for a continuation – even a perpetuation – of conflict. Since political and economic powers no longer pursue a military victory and therefore the end of the war, warring parties like the NPFL no longer seek victory or any other end to the conflict. Thus there is no doubt that rebel economic systems will hinder the resolution of internal conflicts for as long as conflicts will be considered on principles valid during the Cold War, but suddenly made obsolete by these new developments. In Liberia in particular, the failure of ECOWAS and later on the UN and the OAU to implement the numerous peace plans they conceived was due less to the capacity of the warring parties to sustain their war efforts than it was to the inability of these organizations to comprehend fully the logics and the finality of the conflict. Power sharing, which was from the onset at the heart of ECOWAS peace plans, could not bring peace to Liberia since these plans were based on an illusion. Parties to the conflict did not have any interest in accepting a formula which was granting them some parts of state power for the duration of the transitional period when the condition for that was to give up the absolute power they were exerting in their respective territories. Only the whole state power would have been considered an advantageous offer as far as they were concerned, and clearly that was not a realistic solution since only one party would have been satisfied to the detriment of all others. More than theories on the instability of Charles Taylor’s mind and his allegedly insane taste for going back on accords he had signed, this explains why he never implemented the different peace plans negotiated under ECOWAS aegis. Embargoes set up by ECOWAS and later on by the UN were also very unlikely to help restore peace to the country, and they proved in fact as inefficient as those imposed on Cuba, Libya or Iraq. It is possible to ruin a business by boycotting its products, or a faction with an efficient isolation, but experience proves that it is almost impossible to subdue a head of state with the implementation of an embargo on his country. As Jean-Christophe Rufin puts it ‘it is an illusion to pretend (...) that the suppression of one type of resources condemns armed groups to ask for mercy (...). Economic weapons like embargoes, when used against armed groups, can only be efficient when these groups’ war economy is taken into account’ (Rufin, 1995: 25). And when the faction’s war economy was as diversified as that

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which has been shown in the case of the NPFL, be it in terms of supports, of forms or of actors, an international embargo was very unlikely to be fruitful in any way. The NPFL organization and its international political and economic links reached far beyond the monitoring capacities of ECOWAS and the UN. Despite the embargo, Charles Taylor was indeed able to continue exerting his power in ‘his’ state as if there was none, thus prolonging the conflict.

4. Conclusion The constitution of a transnational territory and its organization as a state was born of the need for insurgent groups to replace foreign backers, especially their financial and material assistance. But, when doing so, today’s factions are not doing less than creating a state with all its advantages. Their struggle becomes thus as much a struggle to keep control of their ‘own’ state as a struggle to take the other one – the ‘legitimate’ one. In Liberia in particular, factions ‘fight for power – to control resources and people. The war has been as much a battle over commerce inside and beyond Liberia’s borders as it has been a war for territory or control of the government’ (Reno, 1995: 110). But internal wars appear to be struggles for resources before they are struggles for power, based upon the constitution and organization of a transnational territory. Groups fighting these wars consider worthless the capital city and the power it represents at one stage during the conflict. Furthermore, these wars are to be considered in long term perspective because they give birth to ‘war societies’ (Weissman, 1995: 121), and because some factions’ leaders can only have access to the resources of their territory for as long as the war lasts. In terms of conflict management and opportunity for political changes in collapsed – or collapsing – states led by authoritarian regimes before the war, this perspective requires some traditional solutions to be reconsidered. Indeed, even when they proved valuable, useful, and efficient in past experiences throughout the world, they are now made obsolete by the changes in the nature of today’s conflicts. In particular, it seems relevant to assume that since government power is no longer always the major objective, power sharing is no longer in itself a useful bargaining tool when addressing warring parties. The same goes for solutions which would rely on the exhaustion of warring parties, especially the insurgent side facing the hardship of surviving in the bush. Indeed, some conflicts which lasted for decades as in Angola, Mozambique, Somalia and Ethiopia, to name but a few in Africa, because of Great Powers’ involvement did show the limits of this option. But the end of the Cold War, and the end of foreign assistance which goes along with it, might make it an option deemed valuable again. If we believe it should not, it is mainly because today’s rebels have control over the country’s resources. The problem is not even that they can thus sustain a long war effort, rather that they want the war to be long, and possibly perpetual.

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It is certainly too soon to offer any solution to problems which are still currently unfolding but some of the Cold War principles and solutions are undoubtedly obsolete because they were meant for conflicts which are themselves obsolete. What rebel economic systems of the kind the NPFL set up in Liberia show is that the modalities of internal conflicts changed. And in as much as they changed, conflict management theories also need to be reformed an adapted to new contexts and new logics.

References Bach, Daniel (1997), ‘Frontiers versus Boundary-Lines: Changing Patterns of State-Society Interactions in Sub-Sahran Africa’, in Welt-Trends, No.14, pp. 97–111. Bach, Daniel and Vallee, Olivier (1990), ‘L’intégration régionale: espaces politiques et marchés parallèles’, in Politique africaine, No. 39, pp. 68–78. Badie, Bertrand and Smouts, Marie-Claude (1992), Le retournement du monde – Sociologie de la scène internationale, Presses de la FNSP and Dalloz, Paris. Bayart, Jean-Francois (1993), ‘Fin de partie au sud du Sahara? La politique africaine de la France’, in: Serge Michailof (ed.) La France et l’Afrique, vademecum pour un nouveau voyage, pp. 112–129, Paris. Bayart, Jean-Francois, Ellis, Stephen and Hibou, Béatrice (1997) La criminalisation de L’Etat en Afrique, Paris. Bigo, Didier (1992), ‘Les conflits post bipolaires: dynamiques et caractéristiques’, in Cultures et conflits, No.8, Winter, pp. 3–14. Bigo, Didier (1996), ‘Guerres, conflits, transnational et territoire’, in Cultures et conflits, No.21/22, pp. 397–418. Clapham, Christopher (1990), ‘The Political Economy of Conflict in the Horn of Africa’, in Survival, vol.32(5), Sep–Oct, pp. 403–419. Clapham, Christopher (1996), Africa and the International System – The Politics of State Survival, Cambridge: UP. De Waal, Alex (1996), ‘Contemporary Warfare in Africa – Changing Context, Changing Strategies’, in IDS Bulletin, vol.27(3), July, pp. 6–16. Furley, Olivier (1995), ‘Child Soldiers in Africa’, in Furley (ed.) Conflict in Africa, pp. 28–45, London. Hassner, Pierre (1993), ‘Beyond Nationalism and Internationalism: Ethnicity and World Order’, in Michael E. Brown (ed.), Ethnic Conflict and International Security, pp.125–141, Princeton, NJ. Heywood, Linda M. (1989), ‘Unita and Ethnic Nationalism in Angola’, in Journal of Modern African Studies, vol. 27(1), pp. 47–66. Jean, Francois (1996), ‘Aide humanitaire et économie de guerre’, in Jean and Rufin (eds), Economie des guerres civiles, Paris, pp. 467–494. Jean, Francois and Rufin, Jean-Christophe (eds) (1996), Economie des guerres civiles, Paris.

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Kühne, Winrich (1991), ‘L’Afrique et la fin de la guerre froide: de la nécessité d’un “nouveau réalisme’, in Etudes internationales, vol. 22(2), June, pp. 287– 306. Labrousse, Alain (1996), ‘Territoires et réseaux: l’exemple de la drogue’, in Jean and Rufin (eds), Economie des guerres civiles, Paris, pp. 467–494. Lechervy, Christian (1996), ‘L’economie des guerres cambodgiennes: accumulation et dispersion’, in Jean and Rufin (eds), Economie des guerres civiles, pp. 189–232, Paris. Misser, Francois and Vallee, Olivier (1997), Les gemmocraties – L’économie politique du diamant africain, pp. 127–147, Paris. Prunier, Gérard (1996), ‘L’économie de la guerre civile au Sud-Soudan’, in Jean and Rufin (eds), Economie des guerres civiles, pp. 341–381, Paris. Reno, William (1993), ‘Foreign Firms and the Financing of Charles Taylor’s NPFL’, in Liberian Studies Journal, vol.XVIII (2), pp. 175–188. Reno, William (1995), ‘Reinvention of an African Patrimonial State: Charles Taylor’s Liberia’, in Third World Quarterly, vol.16(1), pp. 109–120. Richards, Paul (1995), ‘Rebellion in Liberia and Sierra Leone: A Crisis of Youth?’ in Olivier Furley (ed.), Conflict in Africa, pp. 134–170, London. Rothchild, Donald (1991), ‘Regional Peacemaking in Africa: The Role of the Great Powers as Facilitors’, in John W. Harbeson and Donald Rothchild (eds), Africa in World Politics, pp. 284–306, Boulder. Rufin, Jean-Christophe (1994), ‘Les économies de guerre dans les conflits de faible intensité’, in Défense nationale, December (part one), pp. 45–62, January 1995 (part two), pp.15–26. Russett, Bruce and Sutterlin, James S. (1991), ‘The U.N. in a New World Order’, in Foreign Affairs, vol.70(2), Spring, pp. 69–83. Salame, Ghassan (1996), Appels d’empire – Ingérences et résistances à l’âge de la mondialisation, Paris. Schlessinger, James (1991), ‘New Instabilities, New Priorities’, in Foreign Policy, No. 85, winter 1991–92, pp. 3–24. Tarr, Byron (1993), ‘The ECOMOG Initiative in Liberia: A Liberian Perspective’, in Issue, vol.21(1-2), pp. 74–83. Thakur, Ramesh (1994), ‘From Peacekeeping to Peace Enforcement. The U.N. Operation in Somalia’, in The Journal of Modern African Studies, vol.32(3), pp. 387–410. Weissman, Fabrice (1995) ‘Vers la notion de société guerriére. Une étude comparée de la Résistance nationale mozambicaine (RENAMO)’, Dissertation, Institut e’études politiques de Paris. Weissmann, Fabrice (1996), ‘L’aide humanitaire dans la dynamique du conflit libérien’, in Fondation Médecins sans frontiéres, internal document, May 1996, Paris.

Chapter 6

The Rise of the Social and the Banalization of the State in China Jean-Louis Rocca

The common viewpoint asserting a waning of the state has also reached China. The rapid transition from a totalitarian state controlling all aspects of social life to a state which has marketized the economy and which has met increasing difficulties in fulfilling its basic tasks (public order, collecting taxes and so on), has led many scholars to emphasize the decay of the Chinese state. Nonetheless, a new question has arisen: what is filling the void left by the so-called ‘waning state’? Some analysts believe that the socialist state can only be replaced by the victory of democracy and the market. The road to heaven will be a long and difficult one but China does not seem able to avoid the road leading to a modern world.1 According to other specialists the destiny of China may be far less positive. China could be undergoing a period of chaos comparable to other periods of Chinese history; the era of mafias and of jungle law could return to the middle kingdom.2 Yet none of these analyses seem to fit the complexity of post-reform China. The picture of a China ‘in transition’ to a situation in which private and public interests would be clearly separated is at odds with the systematic straddling between political and economic positions which Chinese society is witnessing. Not only does this straddling allow economic growth, it seems, to a certain extent, to have boosted economic development. As we will see, numerous scholars insist on the role of officials in the economic success. Identically, the picture of a stateless China is not in accordance with a society which proves to be relatively stable and prosperous. Even with the embezzlement of tax resources, the state treasury is far from being completely empty. Although most cadres seem corrupt and have set up efficient systems of protection for their activities, each year an increasing number of them are condemned and sometimes severely punished. Furthermore, while we have been witnessing the emergence of a strong local power for years, cadres who are too independent are systematically dismissed. Finally, although the economy seems to be plagued by extensive collusion between private and public positions of power, 1 2

See for example, Nee (1996). For further information see Andrieu (1996).

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standards of living levels have increased considerably in urban as well as rural areas. Obviously, there is still one form or another of institutionalized power in China. Of course, the distinction between public and private realms in China does not correspond to the definitions in most western analysis that is based on Weberian ideal-types. Does that mean that China must be considered an exception in the apparent convergence of the different countries towards the Weberian model? Would it be a new expression of the specificity of the Chinese culture, the uniqueness of Asian values? Under such a perspective, how should we interpret the fact that the Chinese way of life is increasingly close to that which dominates in Western countries; that the Chinese state is more and more integrated into the international system (be it legal, geo-strategic or political), or that, as in Western countries, the ideological conflict seems to have been replaced by a consensual aspiration to a better, longer and more comfortable life? Clearly something is changing in China and this change is not without relation to the imaginary of modernity: the importance given to individual wealth and personal life, behaviour defined by rationalism and pragmatism, the distinction between private and public spheres and so on. In fact, the only way to solve the paradoxes of Chinese modernization is precisely to consider modernization as an imaginary according to the meaning given to this term by Cornelius Castoriadis. For him, the imaginary is a universe of significations giving birth and meanings to societies. It is not only a mental construction it also has implications in reality ‘History is impossible and inconceivable outside of the productive or creative imagination (...) as this is manifested indissolubly in both historical doing and in the constitution, before any explicit rationality, of a universe of significations’ (Castoriadis, 1997: 46). Yet the imaginary does not coincide entirely with reality and although there is no doubt about the fact that Weberian paradigms influence and determine to a certain point the nature of the modern state, the latter does not correspond completely to the former. The calling into question of the adequacy between modernity and the ideology of modernity is not new. Different authors have extensively criticized the image of the modern world.3 According to Hannah Arendt, far from being structured around the concept of spheres, modern societies have destroyed public, private and even the realm of intimacy in favour of the new ‘social sphere’. According to Jürgen Habermas, the notion of public and private spheres has been a fundamental moment but only a moment in the creation of the modern world. At a more recent stage (in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), we have witnessed the end of the public sphere of debate and the reign of passive public opinion. Finally, the findings of two academic schools converge in the same direction. The new economic sociology emphasizes the embeddedness of the economy in social

3

See for example: Horkheimer and Adorno (1944).

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networks and the impossibility to separate spheres, while the historical sociology insists on the continual straddling between realms which characterizes the modern history of western countries. These criticisms of the paradigm of the modern state enable us to draw a new and hopefully fruitful hypothesis: the Chinese state is more and more banal compared to Western states but in a very different way than is usually considered. If we want to understand this process it is necessary to reconsider the characteristics of modern states. It is not my intention to conclude that China has lost any kind of specificities, on the contrary, convergence does not exclude particularities: the rise of the social sphere enables society to express its proper point of view and then its particularities.

I. Modern World According to Habermas, political modernity is connected to the emergence of a ‘bourgeois public sphere’ which is built in opposition to those in power in order to discuss with it the rules of exchange (Habermas, 1962:39). The emergence of this public sphere leads to the distinction between private and public spheres and then to the birth of the modern state. However, this analysis only concerns the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Habermas explains that the public sphere was undergoing a process of decay in the nineteenth century and disappeared in the twentieth century. This process of the decay of the public sphere takes the form of a double process of socialization of the state and of the statization of society. The society is increasingly controlled by the state through social policies while the objective and the functioning of the state tends to be more and more under the influence of the demands and needs of the society. The state becomes an arena of confrontations between social interests which contribute to weaken and after a while eliminate the ‘publicization of debate’ (Habermas, 1992). Hannah Arendt analyses the modern world in different but convergent terms: The emergence of society – the rise of housekeeping, its activities, problems, and organizational devices – from the shadowy interior of the household into the light of the public sphere, has not only blurred the old borderline between private and political, it has also changed almost beyond recognition the meaning of the two terms and their significance for the life of the individual and the citizen (Arendt, 1958:69). We know that the contradiction between private and public, typical of the initial stages of the modern age, has been a temporary phenomenon which introduced the utter extinction of the very difference between the private and the public, the submersion of both in the sphere of the social (Arendt, 1958:69).

The consequence of this phenomenon on the state apparatus is determined by ‘what we traditionally call state and government gives place here to pure administration’

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(Arendt, 1958: 45), that is to say, ‘the rule of nobody’. The state is under the influence of the needs and conflicts of the society – represented by social interests – and gradually loses its autonomy. As for private interests, they are also victims of ‘the Rise of the Social’. Property ‘lost its private use value which was determined by its location and acquired an exclusively social value determined through its ever-changing exchangeability whose fluctuation could itself be fixed only temporarily by relating it to the common denominator of money’ (Arendt, 1958: 69). Here, we are very close to the analysis of Peter Drucker who considers the development of modern capitalism as a ‘socialization of capital’, as most big enterprises belong increasingly to institutions like pension funds (Drucker, 1996). Besides, in his attempt to analyze the development of capitalist societies, Polanyi reveals the interconnected influence of both state and society. The building of national markets has been realized through deliberate mercantilist state policy. Moreover, the commodification of labour, land and money, which is a condition for the setting up of a market society, did not lead to the supremacy of the market but to the emergence of a counter-movement: It can be personified as the action of two organizing principles in society, each of them setting itself specific institutional aims, having the support of definite social forces and using its own distinctive methods. The one was the principle of economic liberalism, aiming at the establishment of a self-regulating market, relying on the support of the trading classes, and using largely laissez-faire and free trade as its methods; the other was the principle of social protection aiming at conservation of man and nature as well as productive organization, relying on the varying support of those most immediately affected by the deleterious action of the market-primarily, but not exclusively, the working and the landed classes – and using protective legislation, restrictive associations, and other instruments of intervention as its methods (Polanyi, 1944:132).

Thus, modern societies are not based on the supremacy of market but on equilibrium between the ‘antisocial’ logic of a liberal economy and the state logic of protection of society. Finally, the notion of ‘embeddedness’ developed by Granovetter contributes to the calling into question of the pretension of modern societies to fit completely within the imaginary of modernity (Granovetter, 1992: 53–81). The economy does not become an autonomous sphere determining the other ones. Capitalist societies are characterized by a mixture of state and market and contemporary capitalist institutions are embedded in society.4 The question of corruption is a good example to illustrate these theoretical statements. In the history of modern societies, corruption appeared as a typical by4

For further information see Hollingsworth and Boyer (1997); Weiss (1998).

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product of the emergence of the two separated public and private spheres. When an activity or an action trespasses the boundary between the two spheres, this activity or action belongs to the world of corruption. These different distinctions were meaningful at the time when the opposition of the two spheres was real. However, the encroachment of the two spheres by the concomitant ‘rise of the social’ has completely blurred the nature of corruption. As the main element which determines state action is social need and in particular economic need, the notion of public interest which dominated the birth of the modern world tends to disappear. The public debate has been replaced by state mediation between social interests regarding the repartition of wealth and power. As a consequence, the judgement on what is a corrupt activity and what it is not depends on political struggle between social forces. In other words, modern societies lack an objective distinction between corrupt and non corrupt behaviours, because a great part of social life is based on a blurring of the boundary between the two spheres we are still used to calling private and public. Of course, in certain cases the existence of corrupt behaviour can be demonstrated clearly. For example, when a power-holder exchanges money for power and uses the money for personal purposes, everybody agrees he is corrupt, but in most cases where an exchange between money and power is concerned, the assessment is not easy to make and state, judicial power and popular morality are generally very hesitant when judging such behaviour. Is a bribe still a bribe when it is redistributed to a part of the population? Does a slightly corrupt but efficient mayor deserve to be punished by the law? Can a company which has been given illegal preference by a town government to build public equipment be accused of corruption if, thanks to this decision, the company created a lot of jobs for locals? Is a professor who helps his daughter to get a summer job corrupt?5 Generally speaking the criteria on which assessments are made is based on the consequences of the act. When that which dominates in the political field is the social effects of any phenomenon, corruption can only be perceived through the consequences for the society of behaviour, actions and activities. Besides, the judgement passed on them lacks objective grounds and depends on subjective points of view. The decision will depend on the degree of influence of the different social forces (local inhabitants, concurrent firms, regional powers, opponents to ruling leaders and so on). In other words: Even in what Joel Migdal calls ‘strong states’, ‘the politics of survival’ and ‘the accommodations with strongmen’ are widespread and challenge the pretension of the state to regulate society according to universal and transparent procedures (Migdal, 1988). In order to understand the very nature of a state; ‘there is a need constantly to look back and forth between the top reaches of the state and local society’ (Migdal, 1988: Prologue).

5

For discussions on these different topics see Heidenheimer, Johnston and Levine (1989).

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Consequently, corruption becomes a by-product of the political context and of the power struggle between social interests. Corruption has to be ‘built’ as a subject of research and reflection the same way it is ‘built’ by a specific society itself. It is obvious, for example, that cases of corruption appear more frequently when a society is experiencing an economic crisis or when political competition is more open. In that case, the accusation of corruption can become an important argument in order to discredit a political challenger. Nevertheless, even in cases where corrupt behaviour is clear, the decision to sue the power-holder will depend on political decisions (Heidenheimer et al., 1989).

II. Public/Private: The Rise of the Social in China If one of the main characteristics of modern societies is the progressive waning of the public and private sphere in favour of the emergence of the dictatorship of the ‘Social’, China is on the verge of becoming a modern society. The way the question of corruption is treated by Chinese society seems to justify this hypothesis. During the pre-reformist period, there was no difference between private and public spheres. The class controlling the state was also the proprietor of the means of production. After the decision to open up Chinese society to the imaginary of capitalist society it has appeared necessary to Chinese leaders to implement a distinction between the two spheres. The problem is that the distinction has remained an abstraction as Chinese society did not experience the historical trajectory related to this notion. On the contrary, the Chinese historical experience as well as the economic success recorded since the beginning of 1980s is precisely based on a systematic intermingling between private and public spheres. The cadres use public money and their official position to do business and entrepreneurs when they are not political insiders must acquire protection from power-holders. For example, when Chen Kejie, vice-president of National People's Congress, was the strongman of Guangxi autonomous region, he arranged things so that the major projects in the region were contracted to companies set up by his followers and parents.6 Some officials sell everything they can from land7 to diplomas to reductions in sentences;8 they build houses, buy cars and travel abroad

6

Ming Pao, 22 October 1999, B13. Meng Qingping the vice-governor of Hubei province accepted bribes for approving land, Summary of World Broadcasts, Far East (hereafter SWB FE) 3709, G/11, 4 December 1999, G/11. 8 Zhengming, n°203, September 1994, pp. 42–45, Zhengming, n°251, September 1998, pp. 55–56. 7

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at the expense of the state.9 In cases concerning fraudulent bankruptcies, embezzlement of public money, financial scandals, and so on, the main wrongdoers are high cadres and their offspring.10 It is very common among judges and prosecutors to accept bribes11and numerous cases of corruption are noticed by the Chinese press in the ranks of the police.12 The tax collectors ask for money to diminish the level of taxation (Rocca, 1992:77–140) while peasants suffer under rackets run by cadres which increase their fiscal burden to a great extent.13 Powerholders also use their prerogatives to organize illegal trafficking of products14 and to speculate in stocks and shares.15 Military and police institutions are involved in illegal activities such as prostitution, the reselling of stolen goods, real estate and share speculation, cars, cigarettes and drug smuggling, the confiscation of land and of natural resources and so forth.16 In such a situation how does a state deal with the question of corruption? How does it determine what is corrupt behaviour and what is not? The answer to this question is connected to two new phenomena; the first one is the emergence of ‘social pressure’ in China. It is still difficult to speak of a public opinion but it is beyond doubt that the criticisms expressed by the ‘society’ against bureaucratic malpractice have an increasing influence on the political apparatus. Consequently, political legitimacy has changed in nature. Since the 1980s we are witnessing a reshaping of the relations between state and society. While the society is acquiring room for manoeuvre in social and economic matters, the regime is supposed to provide a certain number of ‘services’: social welfare, infrastructures, wealth

9

Jiangxi ribao cited by SWB FE/2450, 2 November 1995, G/7, Hubei Radio cited by SWB FE/ 2378, 10 August 1995, G/10, Zhengming , n°202, August 1994, pp. 42–45. Zhengming, n° 248, June 1998, p.32, Zhengming, n° 259, May 1999, p. 21 Xinhua Agency cited by SWB FE/2379, 11 August 1995, G/8–9, Zhengming, n°251, September 1998, pp. 55–56. 10 Zhengming, n° 252, October 1998, p.18, Zhengming, n° 253, November 1998, pp. 8–10, Zhengming, n° 254, December 1998, pp. 15–17, Zhengming, n° 256, February 1999, pp. 14– 16, Zhengming, n° 256, February 1999, pp. 17–18. 11 Shandong Radio cited by SWB FE/ 2403, 8 September 1995, G/2–3, Tianjin Radio cited by SWB FE/ 2417, 25 September 1995, G/1.Zhengming, n° 259, May 1999, pp. 15–17. 12 Xinhua Agency cited by SWB/ FE/2192, 4 January 1995, G/11–12. 13 Remin ribao, 1 September 1995, p. 2. 14 Wen Wei Po cited by SWB FE/2378, 10 August 1995, G/10. 15 Xinhua Agency cited by SWB FE/2415, 22 September 1995, G/4. 16 Zhengming, n° 190, August 1993, pp. 35–37. Zhengming, n° 196, February 1994, pp. 91–92. Zhengming, n° 219, January 1996, pp. 14-16 and Zhengming, n° 226, August 1996, pp. 16–17. See Far Eastern Economic Review, 4 February 1993 p. 40 and 14 October 1993, pp. 64–68, Far Eastern Economic Review, 2 September 1993, p. 26.Guan Jie, Zhengming, n°250, August 1998, pp. 19–20, Zhengming, n° 251, September 1998, pp. 52–54, Zhengming, n° 162, February 1999, p. 58–59. Zhengming, n° 196, February 1994, pp. 91– 92. Zhengming, n° 208, February 1995, pp. 33–35.

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redistribution and so on. Social criticism tends to focus on whether these services are fulfilled or not and in recent years, the occasions to protest have been numerous. For most people, the reasons for the non fulfilment are more or less related to ‘corrupt behaviour’. In fiscal matters, many protest movements demand the abolition of the san luan (three arbitraries): illegal taxes, fines and fees. The increasing gap between the haves (political relations) and the have-nots in the competition for wealth is a continual reproach addressed to the power-holders. In particular, many voices criticise the exorbitant privileges possessed by the high cadres’ children which enable them to accumulate a huge fortune. The second element which determines the way corruption is perceived in Chinese society concerns the new form of political struggle. The conflicts between cliques are no longer limited to a small circle of people opposed by personal ambitions; conflicts also have a social background. Particularistic interests – local, kinship, clique, enterprise – now have a certain influence on political decisions. Of course, social interests – workers, peasants, and entrepreneurs – are not directly represented by independent bodies but within the party and governments by some kind of official body. At every level, the leadership has succeeded in its attempts to avoid ‘aggregation of interests’ and organisation of autonomous interests. However, the fact that the society-state relations are henceforth defined through a deal – the bureaucracy preserves its power but must assure a steady improvement of standard of living and a certain level of redistribution – compels the state to take into account the needs of the society. As a consequence, the notion of corruption is formed in a specific way. The structural straddling between wealth and power – which is the price of modernity – impedes the eradication of ‘corruption’. Besides, the definition is restricted to a set of behaviours: social criteria have to be determined and for that purpose two elements are put at first place. The first one is the degree of greediness of the cadre. The power-holder who does not redistribute to the population they are supposed to protect and to the clients and patrons they are supposed to provide financial and symbolic resources to, is corrupt. The assessment of a cadre’s behaviour depends partly on objective elements such as the ‘development’ of the region, the standard of living, the situation of employment and so on. The emergence of economic problems is often considered as the sign of a predatory attitude. Nevertheless, subjective elements like life style (size of house, type of car, food, spending) and the reputation of the cadre are also taken into account by popular and bureaucratic assessments. It is important to remark that popular assessments are expressed through informal means like gossip or jokes but also through protest movements criticizing the corruption of leaders and illegal levies. When the central leaders decide to launch a ‘cleaning’ campaign this kind of unpopular cadre is in great danger. The other source of ‘production’ of corruption lies in the political battlefield. To accuse a political enemy of corruption is an easy way to get rid of him. Here too, the launching of an anti-corruption campaign represents an opportunity to

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settle political problems. From this point of view the case of Chen Xitong is very interesting, not only is he the first prominent leader condemned for corruption but the way his case has been dealt with is highly representative of the formation of the notion of corruption in China. In April 1995 the dismissal of Chen Xitong, member of the political bureau and the boss of Beijing municipality was announced. He was accused of having protected the illegal activities of one of Beijing’s vice-mayors and those of the leader of Capital steel company. He was also accused of leading a dissolute way of life. In fact, the true reason lies in Jiang Zemin’s will to get rid of a firm and long-term opponent; Chen never accepted the choice of Jiang as party secretary instead of him in 1989 and had systematically criticized Jiang’s policies.17 This explanation of the case has been confirmed by documents transmitted to high cadres which accuse Chen of having attempted to set up an ‘independent kingdom’ in Beijing.18 It is striking to note that it took more than two years to see Chen Xitong excluded from the party membership which demonstrates that it was not a simple criminal case. Another example of the ‘political management’ of corruption cases concerns the anti-princes (children and grand-children of high leaders) campaign which took place in 1995. The increasing power monopolized by these princes (in China and abroad) and their lack of respect for bureaucratic hierarchy have led the central authorities to take measures. The financial company Venturetech, which was supposed to attract foreign investment in the high-tech sector but was actually used as a means for financial operations in international markets, was dismantled. The company was headed by Chen Weili, daughter of Chen Yuan and grand-daughter of Chen Yun and the son of a former minister of health.19 Some weeks before Guan Jinsheng was arrested a financial scandal broke at the Shanghai Stock Exchange.20 This very ambitious person was close to numerous high cadres’ children.21 In March, Zhou Beifang, son of a Capital steel company owner, Zhou Guanwu a close friend of Deng Xiaoping, was arrested in connection with an inquiry into a Hong Kong consortium of the steel company, he was accused of having invested too much money abroad and of having organized gold traffic and other illegal financial deals.22

17

Zhengming, n° 212, June 1995, pp. 15–18. Lien He Pao cited from SWB/FE/2445, 27 October 1995, G/3–4. 19 Far Eastern Economic Review, 19 January 1995, p. 47. 20 Far Eastern Economic Review, 28 September 1995, pp. 95–96. 21 Juishiniandai, n° 306, July 1995, pp. 30–31. 22 On this case see Xinhua Agency cited by SWB/FE/2233, 21 February 1995, G/3–4, Lien He Pao cited by SWB/FE/2234, 22 February 1995, G/3–4, Lien He Pao cited by SWB/FE/2264, 29 March 1995, Lien He Pao cited by SWB/FE/2292, 2 May 1995, G/8–9, Ming Pao, 20 February 1995, p. A2, 4 March 1995, p. B1, 28 April 1995, p. A2, Zhengming, n° 211, May 1995, pp. 24–25 and pp. 25–26. 18

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At first glance it is possible to consider these cases as state reactions aimed at restoring a minimum of morality to economic activities. This interpretation based on the existence of a substantialist nature of the state23 – the state as a neutral and objective agent – would be satisfactory if illegal activities were sanctioned whoever the persons involved were. However, the analysis of cases seems to attest to precisely the opposite. Of course, the princes’ companies lost astonishing amounts of money and the flight of capital is clearly a question of sovereignty. Nonetheless, in accusing the princes the ruling leaders kill two birds with one stone: they limit the influence of the emerging power of the young generation and they publicize their determination to fight against corruption.24 As most of the princes’ success in business is due to the political advantages they enjoy, it is logical that their failure should be due to political reasons. For example, the fall of the Zhou family cannot be explained other than by the decline in health of Deng Xiaoping. Less privileged competitors have taken advantage of the opportunities. What has been striking in the last two years is the increase of anti-corruption activities. In particular we can remark that many very important cadres have been sanctioned and some of them sternly punished. In other words the case of Chen Xitong is no longer exceptional. In addition to the case of Chen Kejie, the former vice-governor of Hainan and then Hubei provinces Meng Qingping was jailed for bribery in 1999; Xu Bingsong the vice-chairman of the Guangxi autonomous region was given a life sentence for taking bribes and Hu Changqing the deputy governor of Jiangxi province received a death sentence for economic crimes. It is beyond doubt that this radicalization of anti-corruption campaigns aims at gaining a new social legitimacy for political leaders. In showing that it really has the intention to clean the Aegean stables, the government wants to appear as a servant of the people’s will.

III. The socialization of property The blurring of the boundaries between public and private spheres can also be analyzed through the question of property. Far from leading to the consolidation of the private sphere, the introduction of capitalism in China has destroyed it as well as the public sphere. This destruction has been eased by the fact that the private sector – including petty capitalism – was eliminated in the 1950s. It has only been necessary to avoid the emergence of a new private sphere. The notion of a private sphere has two meanings. The first one concerns the private sphere as an economic sector independent from the state, the second as the sphere of privacy impermeable to the public eye. In both cases, Chinese society

23

As opposed to the notion of embeddeness. Lien He Pao cited by SWB/ FE/2375, 7 August 1995, G/8, see also Zhengming, n° 214, pp. 14–15. 24

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does not seem to reveal an affirmation of the ‘private’. In the Chinese economy, the role played by the private sector is marginal (Nolan, 1996: 1-29); most enterprises are state-owned or collective-owned by administrative or official (trade-unions for example) entities. Of course, certain scholars insist on the fact that numerous state-owned or collective enterprises function as private enterprises. They aim at getting profits which are monopolized by individuals. Based on this kind of consideration, the World Bank states that 33 per cent of the domestic product is due to the ‘private economy’. This assessment however is based on two analytical mistakes: the first mistake is the result of confusion between management and property. Even though the main objective of state-owned and collective enterprises is to make the maximum profit, most of them are the property of public institutions (provincial administrative bureaus, municipalities, local administration and so on). Considering this phenomenon, Jane Duckett develops the notion of ‘entrepreneurial states’ (Duckett, 1988). She shows that ‘departments have taken up opportunities provided by market reform and created new businesses to earn income for themselves and to cut their staff. Thus, while the central leadership envisages a minimal state that plays only a macro-economic role in the market economy, urban state agencies, like those in other parts of the state system have remained involved in micro-economic activities’ (Duckett, 1988: 42–43). These activities are at the same time profit-seeking and risk-taking businesses and remain under the control of the departments and are therefore included in political strategies. They are elements of collective bargaining between political forces (Nolan, 1994: 25–31). In the countryside, economic activities are dominated by what Jean Oi calls ‘local state corporatism’ in which the bureaucrats play the role of entrepreneurs. (Oi, 1995: 1132–1149, 1992: 99–126) In other words, in China like in Western societies officialdom and entrepreneurship are not completely opposing notions. The second mistake concerns the monopolization of profit. Although a part of the wealth is confiscated by individuals, generally these individuals are themselves part of collective groups and therefore cannot act solely as private persons. In other words, we could sum up the situation by saying that the Chinese economy is characterized by the determinant role played by collective interests even though they appear as individual interests. In small or medium-sized businesses, numerous specialists emphasize the emergence of interest groups comprising cadres and entrepreneurs (Rocca, 1992). David Wank shows that in Xiamen the most important asset for business is social capital. Social capital enables people to access state resources (licenses sate controlled goods, commercial channels, information and so forth). Social capital is obtained and maintained through different processes of ‘conversion power’ (matrimonial strategies, the use of relations, gift giving) (Wank, 1999a, 1999b). In rural enterprises, the constant straddling between public and private interests gives rise to the emergence of social

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interests based on clan, familial and bureaucratic ties.25 It seems better, therefore, to speak of social interests rather than an ‘entrepreneurial state’ as the economic activities of cadres and entrepreneurs pursue social objectives more than ‘statist’ objectives. The aim is neither to control for controlling-sake nor to make money for making money but to fulfil social tasks: accumulate wealth, create jobs and protect social stability. It is also important to notice that if ‘bureaucratic business’ is to be distinguished from the ‘abuse of office for private gain’ (Duckett, 1998:171), it is not easy to draw a clear line between the two. Individual strategies of survival and of accumulation are part of ‘bureaucratic business’. Besides, ‘in sharp contrast to the transition orthodoxy, the Chinese government has attempted to support the growth of powerful, autonomous big business that can compete with the global giants. Large enterprises, initially purely state-owned, maintained their leading role throughout the reform process’ (Nolan and Xiaoqiang, 2000: 20). The holding has become the dominant form of organization of Chinese firms (cf. de Trenck et al., 1998). The result is an increasing role played by bureaucratic cliques and clientele ties (cf. Phearson, 1997). Within such a context, the role played by private initiatives is very limited. As for daily life, it seems at first that since the beginning of the reform policy, Chinese people have enjoyed a certain degree of privacy. Political constraints concerning life style, mate choice, professional careers have drastically diminished. However, if political constraints have diminished, social constraints have increased. The objective of control over private life is no longer to change people’s behaviour in reference to a political ideology but to compel individuals to respect social necessities through the use of discipline.26 The best example of this shift is that of birth control. There is nothing political in a measure such as this, as the objective is to control the demographic imbalance of Chinese society in order to increase the standard of living. The waning of the life tenure system in employment which concerned the great majority of urban dwellers has also had paradoxical consequences on people’s daily life. If workers can choose their job, they also have to fulfil new kinds of obligations to the society as represented by the state. For example, when they are unemployed, they have to respect the new regulations concerning the welfare system.27 Finally, the consequence of urbanization on daily life is a good expression of the situation of private life. In every big Chinese city, the people living in the centre have been compelled to move out to the suburbs to give way for shopping arcades and office buildings. In every case, social needs and the necessity of economic development were called upon to justify the decision.

25

For further information on rural enterprises in China see Findlay et al. (1994); Samuel and Ho (1994); Odgaard (1992). 26 See Foucault (1975). 27 Further information on this matter can be gleaned from the results of fieldwork conducted in Liaoning, October–November 1998 and Sichuan, October 1999, Rocca (2000).

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IV. The Socialization of the State Between 1949 and the end of 1970s the Chinese state had two main objectives. The first one was to develop a centralized and powerful economy in order to impose China as a military superpower. The second objective was to transform social structures and individual behaviour in order to create a new humanity. State developmentalism and social rebuilding supposed a strict differentiation between state and society. The state was above society and the influence of society on political power was reduced to a minimum. Even though the regime has never succeeded in its attempt to eliminate subjective and particularistic ties between people and between cadres and people, the limitation of interaction between state and society remains an unquestioned dogma. Everything has changed since the end of the 1970s. Development is no longer solely a state matter. A laissez-faire strategy has been launched in which social dynamics are considered as the main ingredient of economic growth. In removing administrative controls on material resources as well as on labour and in liquidating the state-owned sector the state has renounced its role as the deus ex machina of the Chinese economy. Likewise, the state has abandoned any attempt to reshape society. This phenomenon has had two consequences. On one hand it leads to the increasing power of local cadres and on the other, it gives rise to the appearance of social constraints on state policies. The appraisals and the careers of cadres are officially dependent on their abilities to fulfil a certain number of criteria such as increasing economic prosperity, standards of living, assuring social stability and so on (Findlay et al., 1994). Even though it is still possible for an inefficient and corrupt official to retain his position, especially if he enjoys some protection, it is less and less easy to do so. The population has legal (village elections, petitions), illegal (demonstrations) and informal (gossips, anonymous denunciations) channels at their disposal to destabilize the cadres. In rural areas, the movement of the socialization of the state is well documented even though the concept itself is not used. Through the de-collectivization of land, the development of rural enterprises and the relaxing of control on migration, we are witnessing a de-concentration of power and an increasing role played by interest groups. The political vacuum produced by the waning of the planification has not been filled by the return of tradition. What has taken its place is a reinvention of the traditional ties and hierarchies and an adaptation of this sociality to the present necessities of wealth accumulation. Familial, clan and religious networks are used as a means of access to political and economic resources. Numerous public tasks such as those of public order, local infrastructure and basic education, are taken in charge by the different interest groups. Besides, at the individual level, social capital is not restricted to the local solidarities. Migration, business or military service enables rural inhabitants to develop new sets of personal relations. In parallel the de-concentration policy has given extensive

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prerogatives to the local administration, notably in taxation and land management matters.28 It is because of these two phenomena that it is possible to speak about the privatization of the state. However, for the different reasons given above it is more accurate to use the term socialization of the state. The interest groups, inside and outside the bureaucracy, is not private but somewhere between the public and private realms, that is to say: the social realm. The new local state is the product of the peasants struggle against predatory cadres. During recent years numerous conflicts, some of them violent, have broken out in the countryside,29 but are however, often solved by way of negotiation and everyday pressures between different administrations and between different segments of ‘society’ as well as between society and administration. As Isabelle Thireau has shown in a recent paper: The decreasing dependence of villagers on rural officials supports the development of all kinds of formal and informal discussions regarding village affairs, and eventually of criticisms regarding the official decisions taken. The cooperation needed between officials and those ‘who matter in the village’ requires negotiations in order to establish compromises favoring all parties’ interests. The new institutional forms transmitted from the upper levels are often contradictory, difficult to interpret and implement, or needing some adjustment to the local context. Such adjustment is made through discussions held in various arenas (Thireau and Linshan, 1999).

Barriers between society and state are thus in continual flux and the framework of the conflicts is not based solely on a clear opposition between cadres and population. In urban areas, the process of the socialization of the state is less emphasized. At first glance, society and state seem to have kept the same position on the battlefield. The autonomy of society is limited to economic activities and the influence of social demands on public policies seems strictly reduced. Yet, the example of the employment policy tends to attest to the fact that in cities social necessities also take first place in state preoccupations. Since the mid-1990s, massive redundancies have occurred in state-owned enterprises and administration. From 1994–2000, between 36–55 millions workers were sacked; (Rocca, 2000) most of them do not have new stable jobs. To survive, they depend on the allowances given by enterprises and, above all, on the state as well as on the opportunities to get temporary jobs supported by a reemployment

28 These new prerogatives pave the way for illegal activities like extra taxes and fees, land speculation and so forth. For further references on these matters see Oi (1990: 15-36, 1992: 99-126, 1996); The World Bank, Occasional Paper n° 20, Dec 1995. 29 For more information see O’Brien and Lianjiang (1995: 756–783, 1996: 28–61); O’Brien (1996: 31–55).

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project financed by the state.30 Here, we have a perfect example of the double process of statization of the state and of the socialization of the state. On one hand, the state has abolished the socialist ‘working unit system’ in which the workers were completely dependent on their employer in all aspects of life. This old system has been replaced by a new one based directly on the state agencies. The social is ‘bureaucratized’ and every worker must enter into a national framework of welfare which, from unemployment funds to health and pension funds, is supposed to cover all welfare needs. For example, the enterprises are compelled to set up ‘reemployment service centres’ (zaijiuyefuwu zhongxin) when they lay off workers. These centres must take charge of all aspects concerning laid off workers: payment of basic allowances, acquiring new professional skills and so on (Rocca, 2000). On the other hand however, state policies are not implemented along administrative channels from the top to the bottom. The reemployment project operates at grassroots level, mainly at municipality level where the local labour bureaus are in charge of the coordination of the multiple activities of the project. Above all though, what is striking is the importance of the role played by the institutions which are supposed to ‘represent’ the society (like the residents’ committees), and by para-public organizations called mass movements (the women’s federation, trade-unions and so on). They organize training sessions for the unemployed, set up employment service centres, finance petty jobs and community jobs for laid off workers and they collect money for helping families in need (Kernen and Rocca, 2000: 35–51).These initiatives do not replace relations (guanxi) as the main vector for getting a job and financial support. It is more efficient to rely on family and friends than on local state or para-public organizations but for people with few relations or living in remote areas it is often the only solution. The labour market is dependent on social networks in two different ways. First, social relations remain the best way of getting a job, taking advantage of the petty jobs offered by the reemployment project or even receiving the allowances due to laid off workers. Second, in the struggle against corruption, the opportunities to get a job, to keep it or at least to receive allowances (and pensions) are the criteria on which the actions of cadres are judged. Consequently, officials must show obvious success with these two matters. This is a very important change compared to the pre-reformist period where the influence of social needs and of social appraisals on officials was not nil but limited and indirect.31 In the present times, the state must

30

Refer to the fieldwork conducted in Liaoning, October–November 1998 and Sichuan, October 1999, Rocca (2000). 31 Even during the most totalitarian phases of the socialist period, social groups and individuals succeeded in limiting the impact of the most extreme policies supported by the central leaders. In this respect, local leaders played every role to try to satisfy both central demands and local necessities. However, at that time room for manoeuvre when dealing with the central policies were very small in comparison to the present situation. See Oi (1989); Shue (1988).

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satisfy demands from urban dwellers when these demands appear as socially legitimate and from the point of view of Chinese social morality it is legitimate to have a job or at least to receive pensions and allowances enabling people to survive. The characteristics of protest movements which have broken out during recent years in big cities contribute to the state’s legitimacy. Unlike what goes on in rural areas the protest movements rarely try to popularize their struggle by contacting the media or by referring to the law to justify their demands. In other words the protesters do not seem to have the intention of breaking the organic ties which link them to the regime. What is most striking in the protests which have taken place in central and northern State Owned Enterprises’ (SOE) is their standardized aspect.32 Whatever the reason for the incident, it usually starts by a gathering in the centre of the town in front of the municipal government. This fact witnesses the growing importance of municipal authorities which have become the main interlocutor with the angry population. The protesters block a main crossroad in order to be received by officials to give them a petition or documents stating demands. The incident usually lasts a short time because officials agree to receive representatives and to deal with the problem or, (rarely), because the police and the armed police intervene and, usually peacefully, disperse the crowd. In some cases, the scenario is different and demonstrations sometimes lead to riots. Officials are beaten and some demonstrators and cadres are killed. Usually however, the troubles are dealt with in a relatively ‘soft’ manner, especially if we compare them to the way the authorities deal with rural troubles (Rocca, 1999). Arrests are not frequent except when the protest is violent – but even in this case usually only the leaders are put into custody – or when dissidents are involved (Rocca, 1999). Most movements are marked by spontaneity and lack of organization. Few sources give examples of

32

The following statements are based on the analysis of over one hundred cases of protest movements which took place in over thirty towns in 1996, 1997 and 1998. It is only a small sample of the impressive number of incidents reported by witnesses. These limited cases have been chosen because, through different means (Chinese and western newspapers, internal documents, interviews) I could obtain details about the incidents. They took place in Nanchong, Dujiangyan, Zigong, Yibin, Suining, Mianyang Chengdu in Sichuan, Achang, Jiamusi, Qiqihaer, Mudanjiang, Yichun in Heilongjiang, Anshan, Fushun, Shenyang in Liaoning, Zhengzhou, Xudang, Kaifeng in Henan, Changsha and Shaoyang in Hunan, Baoji and Xi’an in Shaanxi, Taiyuan and Datong in Shanxi, Hefei in Anhui, Lianyungang in Jiangsu,Wuhan in Hubei, Zunyi in Guizhou, Shizuishan in Ningxia, Anyuan in Jiangxi, Jinan in Shandong, Maotai in Guangdong, Baotou in Inner Mongolia and Shijiazhuang in Hebei. The frequency of incidents varies greatly from place to place. In certain cities like Wuhan, Shenyang and Fushun, troubles are very frequent. In other places like Mianyang or Zigong they have been punctiform but very violent. Sometimes, there is a unique incident. Some protest movements concern the first group; because, as I have already mentioned, the classification proposed is quite ‘rough’. Within the first group, some cities or some regions are probably in a similar situation to those in the second one and vice-versa.

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organized strikes and demonstrations by structured organizations.33 However, if they exist, they do not seem to have developed to a great extent as they remain very discreet and are rarely noticed even in internal documents and informal discussions with researchers. The demands of the protest movements are usually not connected to political objectives. Even when redundancies or closing down are contested, the aim is not to contest the policies themselves but the social consequences of the reshaping such as the non-payment of wages and pensions or the absence of social and financial protection for the laid-off. Most of the slogans are pragmatic: ‘we want to eat’, ‘we want food and work’, ‘we must exist, we need justice’, ‘save the people’, ‘we want wages’, ‘respect for the old workers’, ‘we need money to live’, and ‘we want our pensions’ (Rocca, 1999). Apart from standardized modes of action, the analysis of protest movements brings another process to light: a ritualization of social anger. It seems that in the provinces where the reshaping started earliest the protesters have adopted a mode of action based on frequent and peaceful demonstrations. In particular, in industrial cities of north-eastern China and in big industrial centres like Wuhan, the protesters gather in front of the municipality building or in the centre of the town on a weekly and sometimes daily basis.34 Their tactic consists of putting the retired in the first line in order to avoid repression and to be present as often as possible to create a quasi permanent pressure on officials. The demands are very basic: the protesters claim for money and food. Thus, the analysis of the contents of slogans reveal that most workers seem to accept the idea that state decisions have to be based not on political principles but on the socio-economic interests of the ‘society’. As a consequence, now the question at stake for protesters is no longer to know whether or not the socialist system needs to be replaced but to know how to cope with the consequences of what we could call the ‘de-politicization of the state’. Under such a context, the most rational and pragmatic form of protesting is to ‘blackmail’ authorities; to reach this objective the workers can play two cards. First of all: the ideological card. As the regime is still pretending to be socialist, it can not refuse to help the workers. Second: the ‘socialist stability’ card: In most places SOE workers or exworkers still represent the great majority of the population. In order to protect social stability, local authorities must limit the consequences of the reshaping. This tactic is quite efficient, not only do local authorities try to avoid violent confrontation35 but are usually very keen to make a deal with the protesters. The 33

According to Zhengming (n° 230, December 1996:11–13), several secret organizations of workers formed in different places. Refer also to Zhengming (n° 241, November 1997:36). The Hong Kong press noted certain cases of terrorism see Ping Kuo Jih Pao cited in SWB, 2873, G/5, 21 March 1997. 34 Refer to fieldwork conducted in Liaoning, October-November 1998, Rocca (1999). 35 Of course, repression is far from being absent from the strategies of control of social unrest. For example, the Zhengzhou authorities set up anti-riots corps composed of young soldiers, see Henan Ribao cited in SWB, 2960, G/5, 2 July 1997. According to internal information similar corps have been set up in Sichuan and in Liaoning. Nevertheless, the

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fact that the negotiations take place at grassroots level eases the dialogue and improves the efficiency of popular pressure.

V. Conclusion The evolution of the Chinese state cannot be analyzed in terms of the waning of the state or even in terms of ‘strong state’ or ‘weak state’. As the European experience tends to show, the blurring of the frontiers between public and private spheres and the ‘rise of the social’ does not mean the waning of the state. The other face of the socialization of the state is a statization of the society. The statization of society means that in modern societies there are an increasing number of situations in which ‘conflicts between interests have led to political conflicts’ because ‘it has not been possible to solve them in the private sphere’ (Habermas, 1992: 150). Consequently the state becomes a place of mediation but not one using public interest as a reference. The notion of public interest disappears at the very moment when the public sphere loses its proper substance as hovering above private interest and becomes a space of struggle between social interests. The general interest is the result of the confrontation of the most powerful interest groups. According to Habermas, the state is gradually led to set up a bureaucratisation, a routinization of procedures of confrontation. Besides, new channels of communication and negotiation (trade unions, professional association, lobbies) between state and interest groups emerge. It is not a question here of a ‘civil society’, a notion which supposes a ‘private’ terrain against or beside the state. In fact, the question at stake is one of gradual colonization of the state by the society. From such a perspective, it is difficult to characterize the Chinese state as strong or weak. It is weaker than during the socialist period as it has a low level of ‘capacities to penetrate society, regulate social relationships, extract resources, and appropriate or use resources in determined ways’ (Migdal, 1988: 4–5). Yet it is stronger as its policies meet much less resistance from the ‘social organizations’ which are ‘the settings within which people have had structured, regularized interactions with others’ (Migdal, 1988: 25).36 From now on, the state is very close to social demands. However, this process cannot be a simple imitation of the process as it took place in Western societies. The ‘imaginary’ of the modern state influences the Chinese society but cannot meet the constraints of the historicity of China. In this

objectives of these organs are less to ‘militarize’ the society than to isolate the protesters in order to avoid the spreading of unrest. 36 In fact analysis in terms of the strong and weak state can be considered a first and very fruitful attempt to take into account the failure of the ‘imperialist’ vision of the state as an independent and ‘above the society’ structure. On this point the analysis of Joel Migdal is of key importance.

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respect, it is tempting to explain the difficulties of the building of a social state by the weight of the historical trajectory of China. For Yves Chevrier, when the Chinese state had lost its grip on society it was only in conceding a limited autonomy. According to his view, it was impeding any kind of institutionalisation of society that is to say any kind of direct and official representation of social interests within the political apparatus (Chevrier, 1996: 263–395). Today, even though the reform policies compel the regime to take the path of the socialization of the state, it continues to refuse to allow the social interests to aggregate. Professional associations continue to be controlled more or less directly by state institutions. This is obviously the case for the Individual Entrepreneurs Associations and for the Private Business Association.37 Independent worker and peasant associations are still strictly prohibited. Besides, when protest movements occur, the first reaction among the bureaucratic apparatus is to avoid any kind of contagion among other segments of population. Finally, the Chinese NGOs dealing with environmental or social problems are under the control of an official structure or serve the interests of a national leader most of the time. In other words, the appearances of horizontal interests are limited and the voice of lobbies is controlled through internal and informal channels. The case of the workers is the most interesting; the organic ties linking the workers and the regime – workers as the country’s master are a privileged class – are maintained. On one hand it is beneficial to workers as they can take advantages of this preferential relationship, but on the other hand, the existence of organic ties impedes any autonomous expression of workers. Only geographical interests have the ability to be expressed in a formal way as they do not challenge the regime basis. Another point which justifies the emphasis on the importance of the historical trajectory of China is the difficulties met in the routinization of the state. A social state needs to have more or less independent procedures of conflict regulation. In the Chinese case, because of the domination of the state by a few cliques, arbitrary decisions are still the main channel of regulation. In recent years, the National People’s Congress has played a certain role but more as an echo chamber than as an organ where rules of the game are adopted.38 However, there is a risk in seeing history as playing the same role as culture played in some analysis of the Chinese political culture.39 In limiting the analysis to the influence of one structure, one confines the Chinese state within an over-rigid figure. Moreover, a certain number of elements tend to show that the Chinese state is leaving the ‘traditional’ path; in particular, the state has renounced its power

37

For further information on these issues see Wank (1995: 153–183, 1999b); Nevitt (1996: 25–43); Solinger (1999). 38 Each session is used by deputies to express the different interests they are in charge of and sometimes to protests against certain decisions. The legislative powers of deputies are minimal but they are not without influence on the most important political decisions. 39 On the cultural analysis of the Chinese political rules of the game see Pye (1988, 1992).

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over moral values. The fact is not new, as early as the 1950s the socialist regime, by putting the economy in first place, broke with tradition and adopted the imaginary of modernity. In introducing the ‘Rise of the social’, the 1980s have only contributed to putting the finishing touches to the process. Now, the state has renounced changing the social structures and has adopted the point of view of the society, in Arendt’s language, the point of view of ‘housekeeping’. Consequently, social demands have acquired legitimacy. The local powerholders are supposed to guarantee a certain standard of living to the population and economic activities are legitimate. Questions related to taxation, justice and access to public services are publicly debated in the newspapers. Examples of questions asked to leaders by readers, journalists and angry peasants and to which Beijing authorities have difficulty in replying include:40 How to develop a region if the cadres raise taxation to such a level? Why do the central authorities adopt protection regulations for peasants if they are not applied by the local bureaucracy? The reign of housekeeping has two consequences. First, it compels local and national leaders to attain material results which represent a constant pressure in their day-to-day activities. Second, in developing villages’ elections, in supporting political expressions at grassroots level and in giving legitimacy to certain popular demands, central government compels local cadres to respect the new framework. Finally, we have to insist that obstacles to the building of a social state are also linked to factors on which the Chinese government has little influence. For example, it is important not to neglect the impact of the bad historical environment in which the building of the social state takes place. Whereas welfare states in Europe appeared in a context of rapid growth of employment opportunities, the Chinese state has to build a welfare system in a situation of unemployment, a collapsing industry and of economic uncertainties. This phenomenon, external to China’s own ‘historicity’ and culture is nevertheless, one of the main obstacles to the modernization of the Chinese state.

References Andrieu, Jacques (1996), ‘Chine: une économie communautarisée, un Etat décomposé’, in Revue Tiers-Monde, tome XXXVII, n°147, juillet–septembre, pp. 669–687. Arendt, Hannah (1958), The Human Condition, Chicago and London. Castoriadis, Cornelius (1997), The Imaginary Signification of Society, Cambridge. Chevrier, Yves (1996), ‘L’empire distendu: esquisse du politique en Chine des Qing à Deng Xiaoping’, in Jean-François Bayart (ed.), La greffe de l’Etat, Paris, pp. 263–395.

40

For further information see O’Brien and Lianjiang (1995, 1996); O’Brien (1996); Rocca (1999).

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Drucker, Peter (1996), The Pension Fund Revolution, New Brunswick and London. Duckett, Jane, (1998), The Entrepreneurial State in China. Real Estate and Commerce Departments in Reform Era Tianjin, London and New York. Findlay, Christopher; Watson, Andrew and Wu, Harry X. (eds) (1994), Rural Enterprises in China, New York. Foucault, Michel (1975), Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison, Paris. Granovetter, Mark (1992), ‘Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness’, in Richard Swedberg and Mark Granovetter (eds), The Sociology of Economic Life, Boulder, pp. 53–81. Habermas, Jürgen (1992), L’espace public (first German ed. 1962), Paris. Heidenheimer, A.J; Johnston, M. and Levine V. (1989), Political Corruption: A Handbook, New Brunswick. Hollingsworth, J.R. and Boyer R. (eds), (1997), Contemporary Capitalism: the Embeddeness of Institutions, Cambridge. Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor W. (1944), Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente, New York. Kernen, Antoine and Rocca, Jean-Louis (2000), ‘The Social Responses to Unemployment and the “New Urban Poor”. Case Study in Shenyang City and Liaoning Province’, China Perspectives, vol.27, January–February, pp. 35–51. Migdal, Joel (1988), Strong Societies and Weak States. State-Society Relations and State capabilities in the Third World, Princeton. Nee, Victor (1996), ‘The Emergence of a Market Economy: Changing Mechanisms of Stratification in China’, American Journal of Sociology, vol. 101(4), pp. 908–949. Nevitt, Christopher (1996), ‘Private Business Associations in China: Evidence of Civil Society or Local State Power’, China Journal, vol.36, pp. 25–43. Nolan, Peter (1996), ‘Large Firms and Industrial Reform in Former Planned Economies: the Case of China’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, vol.20, pp. 1–29. Nolan, Peter (1994), ‘The China’s puzzle: touching stones to cross the river’, Challenge, vol.37, January–February, pp. 25–31. Nolan, Peter and Xiaoqiang, Wang (2000), ‘Reorganizing Amid Turbulence: China’s Large-scale Industry’, in Sarah Cook, Yao Shujie and Zhuang Juzhong (eds) The Chinese Economy under Transition, Basingstoke, pp. 9-34. O’Brien, Kevin (1996), ‘Rightful Resistance’, World Politics, vol. 49(1), October, pp. 31–55. O’Brien, Kevin J. and Lianjiang, Li (1995), ‘The Politics of Lodging Complaints in Rural China’, The China Quarterly, n° 143 (September 1995), pp. 756–783. O’Brien, Kevin J. and Lianjiang, Li (1996), ‘Villagers and Popular Resistance in Contemporary China’, Modern China, vol. 22(1), January 1996, pp. 28–61. Odgaard, Ole (1992), Private Enterprises in Rural China. Impact on Agriculture and Social Stratification, Avebury, Aldershot. Oi, Jean C. (1989), State and Peasant in Contemporary China. The Political Economy of Village Government, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford.

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Oi, Jean C. (1990), ‘The Fate of the Collective after the Commune’, in Deborah Davis and Ezra Vogel (eds), Chinese Society on the Eve of Tiananmen: The Impact of Reform, pp. 15–36, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass. Oi, Jean C. (1992), ‘Fiscal Reform and the Economic Foundations of Local State Corporatism in China’, World Politics, vol.45, October 1992, pp. 99–126. Oi, Jean C. (1995), ‘The Role of the Local State in China’s Transitional Economy’, The China Quarterly, vol.144, (December 1995), pp.1132–1149. Oi, Jean C. (1996), Rural China Takes off: Incentives for Industrialization, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles. Phearson, Margaret M. (1997), China’s New Business Elite. The Political Consequences of Economic Reform, Berkeley and Los Angeles, London. Polanyi, Karl (1944), The Great Transformation, New York and Toronto. Pye, Lucian W. (1988), The Mandarin and the Cadre. China’s Political Cultures, Ann Arbor. Pye, Lucian W. (1992), The Spirit of Chinese Politics, Cambridge, Mass. and London. Rocca, Jean-Louis (1992), ‘L’Etat entre chiens et loups. Résistance anti-taxes et racket fiscal en Chine populaire’, Etudes chinoises, vol. XI, n°2, (Autumn 1992), pp.77–140. Rocca, Jean-Louis (1999), ‘Old Working Class, New Working Class: Reforms, Labour Crisis and the Two Faces of Conflicts in Chinese Urban Areas’, paper presented at ECAN annual conference Economic Reforms, Social Conflicts and Collective Identities in China, Madrid, 21-22 January 1999. Rocca, Jean-Louis (2000), ‘The Rise of Unemployment in Urban China and the Contradictions of Employment Policies’, to be published in China perspectives, no. 30, pp. 15–30. Samuel, P. and Ho, S. (1994), Rural China in Transition. Non-agricultural Development in Rural Jiangsu, 1978-1990, Oxford. Shue, Vivienne (1988), The Reach of the State. Sketches of the Chinese Body Politic, Stanford. Solinger, Dorothy (1999), Contesting Citizenship in Urban China. Peasant Migrants, the State, and the Logic of Market, Berkeley. Thireau, Isabelle and Linshan, Huan (1999), ‘Spaces of Discussion, Forms of Decision: the Plurality of Power Premises in the Chinese Countryside’, paper prepared for the conference Wealth and Labour in China: Cross-cutting Approaches of Present Developments, CERI, Paris, 6–7 December 1999. Trenck, Charles de et al. (1998), Red Chips and the Globalisation of China’s Enterprises, Asia 2000 limited, Hong Kong. Wank, David (1995), ‘Bureaucratic Patronage and Private Business: the Changing Networks of Power in Urban China’, in Andrew Walder (ed.), The Waning of the Communist State: Economic Origins of Political Decline in China and Hungary, pp. 153–183, Berkeley. Wank, David (1999a), ‘Power Conversion in the Re-emergence of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1979–1995’, paper prepared for the conference Wealth and

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Labour in China: Cross-cutting Approaches of Present Developments, CERI, Paris, 6–7 December 1999. Wank, David (1999b), Commodifying Communism: Business, Trust and Politics in a Chinese City, New York. Weiss, Linda (1998), The Myth of the Powerless State, Ithaca, New York. World Bank, The (1995), Cadre Networks, Information: Diffusion, and Market Production in Coastal China, Occasional Paper n° 20, December 1995.

Chapter 7

Uganda – A State in Suspense Klaus Schlichte

It is commonly asserted (in international relations’ textbooks, by journalists and politicians) that the political world is divided into states. Indeed, few ideas have spread as successfully as that of statehood. The Western ideal of the territorial state with its functioning bureaucracy, efficient services and committed officials, has a tremendous appeal for all political actors throughout the world. However, the representation of the world as a world of states is inadequate. As shall be shown in this article, even when state actors who have a classical understanding of their role (as in the case of Uganda’s current head of state Yoweri Museveni) undertake the task of state building, the outcome under current global circumstances is not a state in the classical sense but something else. The aim of this chapter is to draw some conclusions about changes in the nature of ‘statehood’ using the example of the political life of Uganda and by characterizing the political and social contradictions of Uganda as practical dilemma for the current head of state Yoveri Museveni.1 Museveni came into power in 1986 when his ‘National Resistance Army’ (NRA) entered the capital Kampala after five years of civil war. The end of this war2 is considered to be a turning point in the post-colonial history of Uganda, as the decay of the state during the rule of Idi Amin and Milton Obote in the 1970s and early 1980s had led to an unrestrained rule of violence. During this period almost every family lost members. The formal economy vanished and was replaced by a system of informal survival strategies known as magendo. From 1986 onwards, Museveni’s NRA steadily consolidated its position of power and Uganda became the ‘cherished child’ of international financial institutions. According to official figures Uganda’s economy is still growing at a rate far higher than the sub-Saharan African average. This, coupled with political 1

The most important accounts on Uganda’s post-colonial history are Mutibwa (1992), Sathyamurthy (1986) and the various volumes edited by Hansen and Twaddle (1988, 1991, 1994 and 1998). A good insight into various issues of Ugandan history and politics is also given by the contributions in Prunier and Calas (1994). 2 The capture of the capital was not, of course, the end of the war for the entire population. The new monopoly of violence remains contested in certain parts of the territory (particularly in the Northern districts) though to differing degrees.

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consolidation after long years of political turmoil and civil war, has led to what has become known as the ‘Ugandan success story’. Uganda’s president, who aims to transform his country into a powerful state, is facing at least six dilemmas resulting from the specific historical heritage of Uganda and its current political constellation. These dilemmas stem from contradictions of expectations, historical experiences and contemporary institutional structures. The result of these contradictions is a highly ambiguous political situation. In Uganda, the development of statehood does not follow one single pattern. Indeed, while the scope of the state has grown considerably in some respects, there is a real stagnation and a loss of institutionalized power in other areas. The main line of argument in this chapter is that the Ugandan state is suspended – unable to break the deadlock of power relations between semi-autonomous intermediaries, the pressure of international institutions and popular expectations. Thus, the analysis of structural dilemmas leads to insights into the dynamics of statehood in the case of Uganda. Far from having obtained the degree of autonomy that is conceded to modern Western states, the state of Uganda shows contradictory features that cannot be explained by relying exclusively on the classical vocabulary of political science.3 The argument will unfold as follows: The first section is an attempt to clarify the meaning of the term ‘dilemma’ in this chapter. The subsequent sections tackle the six dilemmas uniformly, first by stating the kind of contradiction of which the dilemma is composed and then by showing how it is currently dealt with. In the last section, Museveni’s dilemma is considered alongside the question of the transformation of the Ugandan state within a theoretical framework.4 As will be seen, the boundaries of the Ugandan state are drawn according to internal dynamics and the ambitions of the political leadership, as well as by an international environment.

3

Cf. chapter one by Migdal and Schlichte in this book. The author is grateful for a research grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft that made the research for this study possible. Apart from the literature and sources mentioned in the bibliography, this text is based on a variety of interviews with government officials, members of parliament, NGO-representatives, and business representatives of various levels during research stays from February through April 1999, February and March 2001 and October 2004. The author is grateful to Frank Schubert (Hannover) Jean-François Médard (Bordeaux), William I. Zartman (Washington DC) and Dietrich Jung (Copenhagen) for comments on earlier versions of this article.

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I. The President and his Dilemma In formal logic the term ‘dilemma’ refers to a double proposition. That is, a logical situation in which an assertion is covered by two different and independent premises.5 In everyday life however, the word is used to denote a ‘quandary’ describing situations in which there are two options of action both resulting in negative consequences. Here, the term dilemma is used in the latter sense. As with all problems, it is necessary to indicate for whom a dilemma exists and in this article the dilemmas presented are those of the president of Uganda. The contradictory political situation in Uganda might appear in a different light for somebody else. However, the following dilemmas only apply to Yoweri Museveni and their relevance and political significance stem partly from the president’s political orientation, as personal patterns of evaluation decide whether consequences of actions are seen as negative, positive, or neutral. The president of Uganda is a regular, but ambitious, political leader who can briefly be characterized as a ‘Realpolitiker’. This term might best be elucidated using a historical analogy between Otto von Bismarck, the ‘founder’ of the German Reich in the nineteenth century and Museveni.6 To be a ‘Realpolitiker’ in this sense means that the actor’s supreme political aim is to create a powerful state. This aim is to be pursued by all means, including military, and, if necessary, to the detriment of neighbouring countries.7 Any attempt, however, to transform Uganda into a powerful state, is confronted by a whole series of obstacles, resulting from the specific social and historical context. Emerging contradictory expectations and necessities appear from the president’s perspective as dilemma. The presentation of these dilemmas will be guided by three questions. The first inquiry will establish what the dilemma consists of and which contradictions constitute their basis. The second question probes the current state of efforts to solve them and the last concerns the stability of the solution.

5

If A then C, and if B then C, and either A or B, therefore C. The classical explication is: Either to die in honour or to win with fame. Both mean to fight. Ergo: fight. All this is valid under the condition of tertium non datur. 6 This analogy is not totally arbitrary as Bismarck’s political actions are well-known among Uganda’s intellectuals and nineteenth century Germany is often referred to in Museveni’s own writings (1995). On Bismarck’s political habitus cf. Gall (1997). 7 This is not of course an exhaustive description of Museveni’s political habitus. It must be added that he shares most of the convictions that form the ruling National Resistance Movement’s political doctrine, neatly presented in Banégas’ study (1998). Our interpretation is also based on Museveni’s own writings (1995). One could, of course, question the empirical validity of this supposition altogether. However, the main point here is its use for heuristic purposes.

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II. The Two Sides of Modernization At the heart of the dilemma of modernization is the fact that a powerful state (Machtstaat) cannot be created without social modernization. Yet such modernization causes social dislocations that can endanger the envisaged aim: the strong state. Thus, the dilemma consists of two aspects: first, not modernizing results in failure to achieve a stronger state. Second, modernization requires the confronting of major social faults that might result in politically dangerous situations. There exist a variety of reasons why it is impossible to establish a Machtstaat without economic and societal modernization; not least the perceived competition between states that necessitates the enlargement of the state’s means. From the perspective of the president, Uganda is in a power competition with other states, a perception very close to that held by nineteenth century European statesmen in Europe.8 This competition alone necessitates the accumulation of power means by the state, an aim that depends largely on the productivity of the ‘national’ economy. In line with this perception, success in state competition presupposes economic development.9 Furthermore, social modernization helps create a strong state because the state’s efficiency and strength depend on at least two resources: skills and capital. The formation of a reliable bureaucracy is inconceivable without skilful state employees. In addition, a national economy must be developed so that the state can extract resources for its own purposes. A necessary condition for a strong state is, thus, a capitalist mise en valeur with all its consequences; such as the individualization of land property, the commoditisation of labour, general monetarization, and so on. The issue of land tenure alone shows clearly that the process of modernization is highly conflictive. State politics will easily be targeted as the root cause of these conflicts if the state or its employees – a distinction that is normally not drawn – are evidently pursuing policies that serve these ends. Simultaneously, the state is expected to deal with all the negative consequences of modernization. It has to accommodate the losers as well as to contain the ambitions of the winners. If it does not achieve both ends, strong political resistance is not only certain, it may become insurmountable. The solution currently applied to this dilemma in Uganda is to redefine the role of the state. The state should function as an ‘activating’ agency, a ‘lean’ state, 8

Historical analogies are often problematic. The point here is that the idea of raison d’Etat must be acknowledged by political actors. They consider this idea of ‘state rationality’ as a kind of natural law that entails all kinds of subordination of the population for the sake of the political rationality. The basic idea of this ‘gouvernementalité’ in Foucault’s sense (1991) is: State leaders have a project. 9 This refers to the old and well-known war-tax link, so dear to all theories of state building. Most just reformulate Otto Hintze’s ideas (1931).

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detached from the old ideal of the developmental state that dominated the imagination of the post-colonial era. According to these new labels, the state should no longer be seen as the general agent of social and economic development, but only as the guarantor of certain conditions. In keeping with the attitudes of Western donors, the state should only deliver services such as juridical reliability (‘rule of law’), a stable currency, political stability and a few basic services. The rest, those services provided by the state in previous decades, is redefined and reassigned as the ‘task of the civil society’ or of ‘the market’. For as the official, liberal doctrine goes, these forces develop much better without interference from the state. However, this solution is not really effective since the new definition of the ‘lean state’ is not socially accepted. For while international organizations (particularly the IMF and the World Bank Group), insist upon an understanding of the role of the state that keeps expectations about state activities to a minimum, the majority of the population does not share this view. The state is held responsible for any faulty developments and any shortcomings. Part of these attitudes toward the state are transformed ideas of reciprocity and redistribution that go hand in hand with conceptions of political power in Africa and elsewhere (cf. Bayart, 1989: 107, 281). Hence, the dilemma of modernization remains unsolved. The social costs of modernization are high and diverse and it is ultimately the regime in power that is held responsible for these costs. The ability to meet the demands on the state depends on the means available for public investments, salaries and the like. Thus, other than the efficiency of the apparatus at the disposal of the president, it is simply the amount of the state’s means that matters.

III. The Fiscal Dilemma A strong state not only presupposes a modern society but also a modern state structure. This requirement has two aspects: a material and an organizational one. The material aspect concerns the budget of the state and the organizational, the rules of administration. Considering first matters of the budget and fiscal questions in general, the problem is clear: there cannot be an efficient state without effective taxation. Yet in order to reach a considerable level of taxation, the state must deliver something in return. Otherwise nobody will be willing to pay taxes. This connex can be seen as a dilemma for the president. If the level of taxation is too high, economic development may be hindered or there will be a considerable growth of informal practices; the so-called shadow-economy. High tax pressure increases the likelihood of informalization and criminalization. Alternatively, a low level of taxation means scarcity of state income so that even a willing government cannot create the necessary conditions for economic growth. If there is one universal principle in the history of states, it is the fact that people do not like taxes. And the right level of taxation is perhaps not to be found

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by calculation but rather by trial and error. Indeed, the tax system in Uganda appears to a certain extent to be groping its way.10 The main lines of fiscal structural development in Uganda do not seem to be particularly exceptional and the fiscal problems are well known and, of course, the focus of lively debate.11 While the fiscal situation in Uganda cannot be characterized as ‘relaxed’ it does not, when compared to other African states, occupy the worst position. There are two ways in which the Ugandan state deals with its fiscal dilemma. First, there are efforts to strengthen the tax enforcement regime. The creation of a semi-autonomous tax administration known as the ‘Uganda Revenue Authority’, the introduction of new taxes that are easier to collect and a rigid control of the tax administration have apparently led to an increase in tax revenue in recent years. Second, tax structures have been adapted to circumstances. According to the dominant theories on taxation in developing areas (cf. Tanzi, 1991), taxation should encourage production and investment. Therefore, the current aim of Uganda’s official tax policy, formulated by international institutions rather than through internal political deliberation, is to tax income and consumption rather than production or trade.12 This general orientation has led to the total abolition of export taxes, formerly the most important source of the state’s recurrent revenue. With the liberalization of the coffee market, exports no longer comprise the main source of state income as was the case in the 1960s and 1970s. As is shown in table (1), efforts to base the state’s revenues on the taxation of income have had some success. However, indirect taxes are still much more important. If the share of direct taxes of a state’s recurrent revenue is considered as an indicator of the respective state’s strength, then Uganda’s current tax structure largely resembles those of other African countries and ‘weak’ states in other regions.

10

On Uganda’s tax system and its historical development cf. Kakongoro (1996), Kibikyo (1996), Mukasa (1992) and Obaikol (1995). The following assertions should be taken with some reservation as fiscal history in general and in so-called developing countries in particular, has not yet been written. However, as a case study on Uganda illustrates: the theory of taxation that only draws on the theorem of exchange of private resources for the delivery of collective goods (cf. Buchanan, 1985:140) is as unable to explain the historical development of taxation in the European context (cf. e.g. Kennedy, 1913; Laufenberger, 1959; Schwennicke, 1996) as it is for other regions. State building projects, the concrete form of relations between private capital and political power and general attitudes of the public are inter alia, much more important for the institutional pathways of taxation. 11 On the effect of taxation on social inequalities in Uganda see Mamdani (1990) and the ensuing debate (Tumusiime-Mutebile, 1991; Jamal, 1991). 12 Part of an interview conducted by the author with officeholders in the ‘Uganda Revenue Authority’ and the ‘Ministry of Finance, Planning and Economic Development’, March 1999.

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Table 7.1 The sources of recurrent revenue of the Ugandan state (In percentage of total recurrent revenue, Uganda central government’s budget only) Fiscal year 1961/62 1969/70 1982/83 1991/92 2002/03

Income tax 30 16.5 4.8 10.7 23.9

Export tax 10 13.0 30.7 2.3 0.0

Indirect taxes 36 41 17.6 58.6 69.6

Licences, fees 5 … … … …

Rents

Other

12 … … … …

3 … … … …

In comparison to other African states, the share of income tax in total recurrent revenue has been low for a long time. In the early 1990s, sub-Saharan African states attained on average, a share of taxes of GDP of about 20 per cent (Chambas, 1994: 7). In Uganda, for almost ten years after the end of the major civil war, the respective share was only 8 per cent (Kasumba, 1996: 22), a ratio that IMF-experts assessed as ‘exceptionally weak’ (Shaver et al.,1995: 27). There are several ways to explain this extraordinary low level of taxation. First, it could be argued that it represents a long-term consequence of the years of turmoil and civil war; the government had to ‘start from scratch’ regarding taxation efforts. Second, Uganda’s comparatively weak and rural economy, with its small, formal sector in a yet to be monetized economy, could also form part of a valid explanation. Furthermore, one could hint to the weakness of the bureaucracy which inhibits any efficient and effective tax administration. The shortcomings in tax surveillance and administration are, in fact, the official reasons given for why the tax system is so focussed on indirect taxes, particularly sales taxes on petrol which are much easier to collect than taxes on income and property. Another argument points to the fact that during an extended period of time the normal ‘tax culture’ disappeared or could not develop. During the 1970s when the state was perceived as a ‘bunch of crooks’, as one Ugandan shopkeeper put it, all readiness to contribute to the state’s budget vanished. The state did not deliver anything, so there was no point in anyone paying taxes, even if taxation was in principle seen as legitimate.13 This perception is consolidated by the observation that many ‘public’ services are no longer offered by the state but by private agencies. Health care is provided by private doctors or NGO’s, secondary schools are run by religious communities or as a private business, and even protection from physical violence is organized by means other than state agencies. Additionally, the tax system is highly regressive. High incomes are hardly taxed as the option to ‘bribe one’s way out’ of the system is frequently taken. Although official data is not available, the general weakness of the administration 13 This is indeed the attitude of the majority of almost twenty shopkeepers and wage earners the author interviewed.

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vis-à-vis wealthy and influential individuals and families, leads to the supposition that here taxation is particularly ineffective. Foreign investors and expatriates often enjoy tax breaks and exemptions. The ‘ruling class’ of political entrepreneurs (cf. Médard, 1992) is only carefully taxed as this class is still in the making and any disturbance caused to their practices of accumulation could endanger a finely tuned political balance.14 Finally, the state of Uganda relies heavily on grants and loans from foreign donors. Almost a third of the annual budget is generated from these sources and currently the recurrent revenue (the state’s income from taxes and customs) only covers the recurrent expenditures, which are the salaries and maintenance costs of the public sector. A third of the entire public expenditure is funded by grant or loan from international organizations or bilateral donors. Apparently, dependency on external debts develops a particular logic for state revenues; politically it is easier to rely on grants and loans than to enforce taxation. In present day Uganda, the means from external sources cover the entire public investment underlining how important it is for the president – indeed for anyone within the state apparatus – to be on good terms with Western governments, without whose support not even schools and roads could be built. At this point, it also becomes clear that the Ugandan state as a field of power is deeply internationalized. No further public investment can be undertaken without the prior consent of Western donors and no program is implemented without a muzungu, a ‘white expert’, as consultant or supervisor. However, there are other significant aspects regarding Uganda’s state income. For example, during the course of the policy of decentralization other efforts of taxation have developed. Most districts and political units on the lower levels are facing problems in funding their budgets as the arrival and amount of so-called ‘block grants’ (redistributed money from the central government) have become increasingly unreliable. Frequently these grants take months to arrive or amount to much less than originally announced. This uncertainty has forced district administrations to look for other sources of income not always in line with the central authority’s policies. Other than grants from the central government, the main source of income for local authorities is a ‘graduated tax’, that is a slightly graduated poll tax which all adult male citizens have to pay. These taxes are locally assessed in advance and based on estimations without any central supervision or recalculation on the basis of real incomes. According to the general opinion, this is – if enforced – the only effective tax in Uganda. Its effectiveness is due to envy and mutual inside knowledge of wealth and income sources (particularly in rural areas) between neighbours on the local level, which increases the compliance and

14

Thus income tax in Uganda is only paid by those wage earners who are on the state’s payroll or by some of the few greater employers within the formal sector. Taxation is as socially unjust as it was in the 1960s or 70s, cf. Jamal (1978).

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reliability of tax payers. In urban areas and particularly in the capital, Kampala, this mutual social control is far less developed.15 The fiscal dilemma, however, is not solved or soothed. The large amount of foreign loans and grants, while offered as a solution, only shifts the problems. With this dependency on foreign support and the mixture of activities, new dilemmas (referred to in the following section as the dilemma of inclusion and communication) arise. The requests that are presented to the state from inside are to some extent in contradiction with the demands that the state is confronted by from the outside.

IV. Who is Part of the State? Problems of Inclusion and Communication In order to create a state, Museveni wants to modernize a society that is not yet modern in the Western sense. This ‘deficit’ of modernity first applies to the state’s institutions in an abstract sense. In Uganda as in other African countries, the social memory is not organized in archives and files but in personal memories. The state’s knowledge about its population, places of residence, economic activities and incomes is not bureaucratic but personalized.16 This distance from the ideal-type of a modern bureaucratic state applies equally to the state’s employees and to the members of Uganda’s political class. In order to modernize the state, the president depends on personnel who obey other imperatives than those of Weber’s modern, legal-rational state. The great majority of state functionaries do not act according to Max Weber’s ideal type of the modern state official, who works in accordance with a neatly defined set of rules and who has no personal influence on the distribution of state means. Neither do the politicians fulfill the ideal type of a politician suggested in Western contexts.17 For a considerable number of politicians, the recourse to violent means is always a last ‘exit-option’ available in normal political life. Indeed, physical violence, or at least the threat to employ it, is still of considerable importance in the political life of Uganda and not only in those northern and western parts of the country where armed conflicts have endured for some time. The dilemma of inclusion involves the decision of whether or not to include this ‘problematic personnel’ or whether to exclude them from sharing political

15

Source: author’s investigations in Kabarole district and Kampala, March 1999. The role of ‘bureaucratic knowledge’ for the formation of states is a field of study not yet well covered, either in historical sciences or for contemporary states. For a case study on Prussia see: Spittler (1983). 17 This, as well as the statements above, shall not include any normative judgment. What counts here is the analytical insight. 16

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power. Local strongmen, corrupt officials, radical politicians – all these types are at the same time necessary and dangerous for building a strong state. In general, inclusion is desirable as any enlargement strengthens the power base of a regime. The higher the number of clientele chains and circles participating in the distribution of resources, the more stable the president’s position will be. Yet, apart from the problem of generating the respectively growing amount of resources necessary to satisfy all these groups, the inclusion of a higher number also increases the likelihood of practices that are commonly referred to as ‘corruption’.18 These practices entail two dangers: first the loss of means, that is the money that simply ‘vanishes’ and second, the loss of the legitimacy as these practices might be rendered public. Both are counterproductive to the endeavour of establishing a strong state. Exclusion of the ‘problematic personnel’ is also dangerous due to the fact that the more groups and factions excluded, the more likely it is that the regime in power will face violent resistance. The practical solution to this dilemma in Uganda is the partial denunciation of corruption. Public criticism of the regime in terms of ‘revealing corrupt practices’ is allowed within certain boundaries and is even included in the official discourse of the president and the regime. In everyday political life this means that ministers who are proven to be corrupt might be ‘censured’ by the Parliament, as has happened repeatedly in recent years. Nevertheless, quite in accordance with the constitution, it is ultimately the president who decides whether the stigmatized official can remain in office or whether they must resign. Stigmatized office-holders are usually also prominent local strongmen, the leading members of long clientele chains that connect the regime with the wananchi, the local people. This means that the president must carefully weigh up in each and every case whether the cost of continued inclusion of the problematic person/s is higher or lower than that of losing the political support. The dilemma of inclusion exists somewhat similarly at the local level. Here the misuse of offices and illicit or exaggerated enrichment becomes evident much sooner and leads to earlier debates about the personnel. As a consequence, the central ministry in charge of the supervision of local administration does not escape the dilemma. It is always necessary to assess whether the gain of a ‘neat image’ counterbalances the loss of direct support when corrupt or criminal practices of local strongmen are discovered. It is not always the ‘clean image’ that counts more than anything else. Kampala’s mayor, for example, was arrested in the United States in spring 1999 and was sentenced to several months in prison for using forged cheques. While in jail he remained the mayor of Uganda’s capital. The Ministry of Local government, while in principle able to remove him from office, hesitated to do so for months on account of the popularity of Mayor Sebbagala. After his resignation Sebbagala became a running-mate of Kizza

18

See the remarks on the semantics of corruption in the next section.

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Besigye, Museveni’s unsuccessful opponent in the presidential elections of March 2001. Selective denunciation, however, is not sufficient. It does not solve the problems of inclusion of problematic personnel and neither is that inclusion sufficient to avoid violent contestation of the regime. As a result, the Ugandan state is perceived as highly corrupt and is also involved in violent conflicts. The dilemma of inclusion arising from the contradiction between external expectations of ‘accountability’ and the necessity to generate loyalty through patronage is not solved. The external dependency of the Ugandan state has one very significant consequence: the president – like almost anybody among the political personnel – needs to master at least two different discourses. One discourse is the dominant global one and involves adopting the arguments and patterns of thought of Western politics. The other discourse is local, and in this case quite different imperatives and other lines of reasoning are frequently used and obeyed. To the outside world, the president must appear as a liberal modernizer, he has to present himself to the international political scene as a reliable statesman, seeking compromise and mutual understanding. In internal discourse, however, the president has to be able to speak the language of resentment and stage the mighty generous and allknowing patriarch. He is thus caught in a communication dilemma: if he chooses the external pattern of reasoning, he risks alienation from the internal; if he employs the internal discourse, external supporters might be puzzled. In practice, this contradiction is mostly avoided as both spaces of communication can be separated to some extent. In the case of Museveni – and probably equally of other heads of state – rhetoric is important. There is an external discourse in English and an internal one in Runyankole, directed towards the wananchi. The issue of corruption is telling in this regard. In Western political language corruption is a term that designates a wide variety of practices all sharing the fact that an advantage is seized and formal regulations ignored. In Uganda, the term corruption is less abstract and legalistic and is rather a question of degree. In this popular sense a person is corrupt if he ‘eats too much’. The term for those who enriched themselves immoderately during the Amin and Obote years was ‘mafutamingi’, literally ‘those who became fat too fast’. ‘He ate too much’ is still the current complaint about an official who has used public resources for private ends beyond ‘reasonable’ limits.19 The separation of public spheres is, of course, a shaky solution to the communicational dilemma, even if it appears more stable in comparison to other 19

Oil, fat and girths deliver the metaphoric language for power; cf. Bayart’s (1989) metaphorical conceptualizations of ‘la politique du ventre’. It would be worth a comparative investigation on how far analogies can be drawn with the symbolic language of the years of the ‘economic miracle’ of post-war Germany and within the society of the GDR (cf. Engler, 1999). Periods of economic reconstruction seem to favour the blossoming of nutritional metaphors in politics.

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solutions. In reality, both communicational spaces overlap. Yet hitherto this has not led to any debate about apparent contradictions in the president’s pronouncements. This situation may only be temporary as linguistic competences, due to state policies and as a result of social mobility, change quickly.

V. Watching the Watchdog: The Militarization Dilemma Any state leader presiding in a country like Uganda faces an inner security dilemma. While a large and effective army is needed in order to keep violent contestations at bay, this is at the same time a political danger in itself. The men in uniform, having the advantage of organizational skills and structures, could take power.20 In addition to this potential threat, a huge security apparatus consumes a large proportion of the state’s means which could be used for other tasks. These problems, of course, do not apply to the army alone, but include the entire security apparatus, police force and secret service. In Uganda part of the solution to this dilemma is a tendency towards the privatization of the means of violence. The state’s security apparatus is too small and too inefficient to be able to administer violence in Ugandan society. Instead, private actors intervene and take over those tasks which, according to classical conceptions, fall within the boundaries of the sovereign state. This privatization occurs in many areas, of which only some will be mentioned here. All enterprises, offices and residences belonging to the formal economy, (including enterprises run by foreign investors and non-governmental organisations), are guarded by private security services. Former soldiers, who were demobilized as a result of a World Bank led program begun in the early 1990s, often comprise the personnel of these companies. In this new market, local political entrepreneurs have built joint-ventures with foreign companies. The brother of the president himself is a shareholder in such a Ugandan-South African company, but a former minister too has joint ownership of a US-British-Ugandan security company.21 The regime introduced throughout the country a deputy recruitment system that is a method of basic militarization. Many young people have undergone four weeks of training in which a mixture of political education and military training is

20 The dilemma of militarization is a variant of Joel Migdal’s state agency-dilemma that deals with the danger of ‘autonomization’ of state agencies that had been created to overcome certain central political problems (Migdal, 1988: 209–211). In opposition to Migdal’s case of Nasser’s Egypt, in Uganda the army is the only agency that could pose such a problem. 21 The functioning of the ways of accumulation sometimes becomes particularly apparent. In February 1999, a demonstration by bus drivers who protested against high fees on the central bus station was dispersed by the Minister’s private ‘Delta Force’ troops. The same Minister also holds the concession for the central bus station.

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taught.22 The graduates can then be recruited in ‘Local Defence Units’ who serve, for an extremely modest pay, as ready-to-hand experts on violence at the village level. Inserted into the ‘Local Council’ system, they comprise a kind of part-time deputy troop. Simultaneously, both in urban and rural areas, the system of mob-justice survived. This system of ‘popular justice’, allegedly a tradition from the days of Idi Amin’s rule, is a direct complement to the Ugandan police forces. During the period of political turmoil and civil war the inactivity of the police force and the corruption of the entire judicial branch became the rule. In 1984 for example, the police station in Wandegeya, a popular quarter of Kampala, registered almost six hundred charges and arrested 113 people. Of these only 20 were eventually convicted and most judicial procedures were stopped as ‘records got lost’ (Mugisha, 1986:70). Mob justice developed in Uganda as a functional supplement to state security agencies too ineffective and unreliable to serve as guarantors for the physical security of the citizens. As salaries for police officers still do not suffice to cover real living costs, the ‘settling on the spot’ of any legal offence is current practice. Police officers demand ‘chai’ (tea) from car drivers as a fee for the alleged (or real) technical defects of the vehicles. In 1999 the constant rumours that the police might be involved in organized robbery were substantiated when police officers were arrested for lending arms to criminals at night. 23 Practices of mob justice, however, can easily be manipulated for personal ends. In talks and newspaper reports intrigues are frequently given as background to mob justice actions, the aim being that of personal enrichment or the elimination of local political rivals. Whatever the conception of justice and the real functioning of mob justice might be, it is hard to hide its effect on the image of the state. Few incidents make the absence and non-functioning of state agencies more evident and obvious than the public execution of a suspect by lynching. As neither the police force nor the judiciary can be considered effective, other functional equivalents such as the privatization of security in the form of commercialization and communitarization emerge. However, neither of these solutions are without costs. As a result of the commercialization of public goods, the degree of protection one can get depends largely on personal wealth. Although this is conventional wisdom in Uganda, hitherto the topic has not become a political issue. Criticism arises instead on account of the inability of the army to bring armed conflicts in the Northern and Western regions to an end. Both conflicts have led to

22

These seminars, called ‘chacka-mchacka’, have led to serious criticism as reportedly in a number of districts people have been forced to participate. 23 Cf. ‘Arms Racket Inquiry Targets Senior Police Officers’, The East African (Nairobi), 15 February 1999; ‘Two cops held over bribe’, The Monitor, 4 October 2004; ‘RDC condemns graft in police’, The Monitor, 11 October 2004.

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a considerable number of casualties among civilians.24 As these instances prove, the monopoly of violence is still not consolidated. It is not only frayed along the territorial frontiers, there are also several developments that might render the achievements of the monopolization of violence even more precarious in the future. The solutions to the dilemma of militarization might develop their own dynamic, surpassing the containment capacities of the regime in power. The government for example has started to militarize the Karimojong, nomads living in the districts bordering Sudan and Kenya. Originally armed by the regime in order to be used as a buffer against the forces of the ‘Lord’s Resistance Army’ (LRA), who were operating across the border and supported by Sudan, the Karimojong have repeatedly pillaged villages south of their traditional herding areas. These incidences have resulted in serious clashes between different segments of the local population without any effective control by regular forces. The dangers of the dilemma of militarization are also visible in the Ugandan armed forces involvement in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo (Zaire). Officially started in 1996 to secure the bordering areas and to stop the infiltration of members of the ‘Allied Democratic Forces’ (ADF) into some Western districts, the involvement in the civil war has quickly led to well-known coalitions of interests, typical in civil war situations. Army officers as well as lower ranks have started to realize the economic opportunities offered by the war. Those districts of Uganda bordering the Democratic Republic of Congo have become the gates to a blossoming war economy in which Uganda’s armed forces are deeply involved.25 Once these economic opportunities develop into stable business relation, their transformation after the ending of the war cannot be achieved without the sharing of political power.26 The militarization dilemma may then be reformulated as a demilitarization dilemma. As this presentation makes clear, the ‘success story’ of Uganda has unwritten chapters. The institutional capacity of the coercive apparatus of Museveni’s Uganda is not developed enough to enforce the state’s monopoly on the use of violence. The precariousness of the ‘solutions’ found for the contradictions that appear in the social and political history of Uganda affect the very nature of the state in the classical understanding of the term.

24 The background of most armed conflicts during the NRA-rule (1986–present) is not yet covered by serious research. Heike Behrend’s work (1993) on the ‘Holy Spirit Movement’ of Alice Lakwena is the exception. On the Karimojong question cf. Mamdani et al. (1992), on the Rwenzori-Movement cf. Syahuka-Muhindu (1991) and on the current situation of the war of the ‘Lord’s Resistance Army’ cf. van Acker (2004). 25 Source: Local press reports; author’s interviews in Kabarole and Kasese district, March 1999; cf. Prunier (1999). 26 On this nexus of economic opportunities and political power as a result of wars cf. Genschel/Schlichte (1998).

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VI. The Dilemma of Democratization The fundamental background of the democratization dilemma is: if the political system is liberalized, it could mean a possible or real loss of control over power means for the president. If the political system is not liberalized the danger of violent and/or massive political contestation increases and pressure grows from external supporters – Western powers and international organizations alike. Those who are currently sharing power want to see that the system, so advantageous to them, will at least prevail for the immediate and medium term future. They only deliver support as long as they think that their enjoyment of prebends will endure.27 On the other hand, political strongmen who do not yet participate need to believe that they have a real chance of inclusion, whether through the current system or as winners of a democratic competition. Essentially, this dilemma emerges because of the importance of the state in the economy, at least in the modern, monetarized sector. On account of this position, even the weak state of Uganda is of central importance as it is the battlefield for the accumulation of political and economic chances, in terms of offices and public investments.28 In contexts where political and economic power are so closely connected, democratization is not only about ‘power’ in the sense of legislative authority, representation and participation, but also about career chances and privileges, about the chance to generate political support and to foster it by satisfying the aspirations of followers. Museveni’s solution to this dilemma can be termed ‘restricted political competition’. Even the description of that system is a matter of intense debate and this fact raises and highlights the question of: who is entitled to compete with whom and about what? The official formula for solving the contradiction is the ‘movement system’, a transformation of the victorious ‘National Resistance Army’ into a countrywide broad-based political organization. The system had its roots in the liberated areas during the civil war and expanded – with differing degrees of regional success – to the entire territory. ‘The movement’ has a president and a general secretary and every Ugandan is a member by birthright. Officially however, the movement is not a party, as political parties are still banned in Uganda, officially it is ‘a system’. The solution, of course, is not genuine, as it only allows a very limited degree of democratic participation. Its main disadvantage however is that competition has simply shifted from between parties to within a single one. The movement is open to everybody but it is strongly controlled by the president who steers and 27

Max Weber’s remark should be recalled: apart from any form of legitimacy, system stability also relies on the ‘fulfilment of the mere material interest of the administrative staff’ (my translation, cf. Weber, 1985: 823). 28 The implementation of privatization policies in Uganda has only sharpened this competition as political influence decides the chances of receiving a slice of the cake. The most lucrative parts of state owned enterprises regularly come into the ownership of members of the emerging ruling class.

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counterbalances the factions that emerge within it. These factions are grouped partly but not openly along regional lines, as regional origin is always easily interpreted in ethnic terms. Ethnicity has remained an anathema because of the experiences of ethnically coded violence in the 1970s and 1980s and also because of the latent question about the relationship between Uganda’s traditional kingdoms and the modern state. Regional origin though is not the only separating principle within the movement. There is also an obvious division between ‘staunch movementists’ (mostly those who had participated in the war that brought Museveni and the movement’s precursor to power) and ‘multipartyists’ (those who sympathize with a multiparty system, presenting themselves as young, open-minded entrepreneurial personalities). It was among this political milieu that Museveni’s main opponent, Kizza Besigye, found most of his support in the presidential elections of 2001. Apart from this precarious solution of restricted competition, the political reforms under Museveni have brought about a unique change in Uganda, namely the abolition of chieftaincies. Instead of being forced to accept the incumbent of a hereditary office, the adult population is able to elect its own council by direct vote.29 The representatives of the lowest level, the ‘Local Council 1’ (LC 1), elect the members of the next level up and so on until ‘LC 5’ on the district level. Although local councils have few competences and extremely limited budgets, this institutional innovation has increased the legitimacy of the regime to a considerable degree. They have become important agencies of litigation for all kinds of social conflicts on local levels. Thus, efforts to solve the dilemma of democratization have led to a proliferation of contradictions as the establishment of the LC-system can be interpreted in two ways, either as an instrument of state control or as a channel of popular participation, in so far as LC’s fulfill executive and representative functions at the same time. The contradictions that the invention of the movement as a political form was supposed to overcome can now be found within it.

VII. Conclusions: The State in Suspense This analysis of the inner contradictions of state dynamics in Uganda can be used as a reference for hypotheses on different levels. First, its evidence allows for a reconsideration of general conceptions used to define statehood (a). Second, it sheds some light on the issue of state decay and state formation on a somewhat less general level (b). Third, it raises some empirical questions, which should be kept in mind when further investigating the dynamics of contemporary states (c). a) When it comes to the more general aspect of a critique of commonly used conceptions, the typical insight is that the usage of these conceptions is limited to contexts in which the state is developed to a degree that it can impose its own 29

On the ‘Local Council’ system cf. Bertrand/Kauzya (1994) and Banégas (1998).

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register of meanings.30 In all contexts in which the state is not thoroughly institutionalize, the boundaries between public and private, between legal and illegal, between state and society and also between criminal and political are blurred. They only crystallise with the institutionalization of the state. This does not mean that they cannot be renegotiated – as occurs in even the most rigid states.31 However, in weak states these demarcations are still in the making and there is not yet a fixed set of rules around which the debate revolves. The very dynamic of social change directly affects the boundaries of the state. New groups and new expectations emerge within and beyond the state, altering the conditions of its shaping. From this analysis, it could be shown that the state and its dynamic cannot be thoroughly analyzed using a theoretical apparatus that reduces politics to the level of a game based on the costs and benefits of social actors. The state has, in fact, at least two sides: it is both an organization and a mentality. Any theoretical concept that reduces the state to the stochastic result of utility curves of the actors involved misses the point. The inclusion of hermeneutical means that can discern the historically rooted patterns of perceptions and the world of meanings is as indispensable for the study of the state as figures and tables.32 b) The processes of state building and state decay that have marked the history of post-colonial Uganda are also useful starting points for reflections on the issue in general. First, the dynamic of a state is neither a linear process nor a homogenous one. It depends on the length of time periods taken into consideration as to whether a state’s fate is seen as a story of decay or as one of construction, with loops, recessions, and gaps. The current state of statization (Durchstaatlichung) of the Ugandan society is, perhaps, more advanced than ever in the region’s history as the success of the ‘Local Council’ system indicates. On the other hand, when it comes to some core elements of statehood in the modern Western sense, the achievements of Uganda under Museveni are much less impressive. Second, whereas in some areas the state can grow and push against other agencies of social control, it can at the same time shrink in others. Institutionalization and de-institutionalization can occur simultaneously. The issues of taxation and of the administration of violence indicate an erosion of the state or at least its stagnation; simultaneously the politics of restricted democratization have led to a culture of political participation that had been unknown in Uganda. It is remarkable, however, that even during and after the years of turmoil and civil war the idea of statehood as such has never been questioned by any party 30

These meanings would amount to the ‘image of the state’, referred to in the introductory chapter of this volume. 31 Here, the shifts between public and private spheres in the GDR, certainly one of the most rigid states the world has seen, are telling (cf. Engler, 1999: 235–254). 32 With these sentences the study formulates a standard it does not fulfill itself. Here, only a construct of the president’s political imagination was presented. Richard Banégas’ work (1998) can be seen as a complement, as he focuses on popular attitudes.

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involved. This seems unexceptional in so far as even secessionist movements, which account for the majority of violent conflicts today, do not condemn the idea of statehood as such. They simply struggle against particular states and for the territorial re-ordering of a political unit. Even though the problem-solving capacity of states becomes ever more questioned, the necessity of statehood is deeply rooted in the habitus of the world’s political actors. This also applies to the international actors that co-shape Uganda’s political life. Third, the obvious importance of the external linkages of the Ugandan state does not seem to be particularly exceptional when seen from the broader context of sub-Saharan African states. The dependency on external support is not only manifest in the share of state revenues that comes from external sources, but also in the general level of economic flows across Ugandan borders. The formal part of these exchanges is the single most important source of income, as the state is unable to monitor its interior economic life. The shift from taxation of exports to other forms of indirect taxation does not mean any change in this regard. Nowadays taxation simply concerns a broader part of the society, but this does not imply that the state has improved its capacities. The estimations of informal international flows and transfers indicate a still considerable institutional weakness.33 This is a perfect illustration of the contradictory movements of contemporary states’ dynamics: political mobilization and integration can go hand in hand with institutional incapability. c) The Ugandan state is a heterogeneous set of agencies that show quite different degrees of institutional capacity. In some respects, the Ugandan state’s ability to monitor and control has increased dramatically. In other respects, no monopolization by the state has occurred. This is particularly true for the two aspects that have been at the centre of this chapter: the development of state revenues and the question of the control of violence. Instead, parts of former state responsibilities have been organized into new arrangements. Health care and education used to be major areas of state policies in the first decade of Ugandan independence, since then they have experienced a rapid privatization. Today secondary schools and health centres are predominantly run by private entrepreneurs or non-governmental organizations. The state has transformed in so far as its self-understanding (expressed in the dominant view of state responsibilities and achievements) has dramatically changed in the course of its post-colonial history. This does not mean of course, that the Ugandan state has become the dominant agency of social control. Measured in terms of state activities, or its extraction capacity, the Ugandan state is still far behind the level it had achieved in the late 1960s. Change has occurred in so far as the competitors of the Ugandan state are different from those in the early 33 A last figure might indicate the proportions: according to the Bank of Uganda statistics, non-taxed net private transfers to Uganda during the fiscal year 1997–1998 amounted to 441 million US-dollars, which is approximately the central governments expenditure of the same year (‘Kyeyos boost forex earnings’, The New Vision, Kampala, 18 March 1999).

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years of independence. The state has changed its appearance and so have other organizations. The growing importance of international organizations, the autonomization of political entrepreneurs and the emergence of a whole economy of non-governmental organizations posit the state in an entirely different landscape. The Ugandan state resembles a patchwork quilt much more than it does a unitary actor. It is deeply embedded in a conflictive network of agencies that are sometimes at odds and sometimes in line with the idea of unitary statehood. Without its numerous supporting agencies, be they international agencies, nongovernmental organizations, or the political apparatus of the NRM-movement, the state of Uganda would probably not exist. In this sense the state is not only dependent, it is suspended between international agents and local expectations. It remains unclear whether this state in suspense will ever get closer to its social ground or whether its power will continue to reside in its external linkages as well as in its local nexus. If the latter is the case then rule will become even more internationalized than it is already. The current political constellation of Uganda proves that such ‘global governance’ is already in place. The division of former state competences between a whole variety of institutions – national, local, and international – is a reality. Yet if one shares Max Weber’s viewpoint – that conflict remains at the core of politics – then it also becomes clear that this is not pure romance. A state however, in the sense that Weber imagined it – as an achievement in Western modernity – does not seem to be the result of these struggles. The gap between the image of the state and its actual practices will remain. This finding can also be read as encouragement towards the investigation of the change of power and domination in world society by surpassing the analytical focus on the state. It is quite often the case that the reconfiguration of authority, particularly but not exclusively in post-war societies, does not coincide with the state’s boundaries. If political spaces differ from how the conventional wisdom of political science views them, it could be worthwhile finding new lines of inquiry instead of endlessly insisting on the preciousness of the old ones.

References Banégas, Richard (1998), ‘Entre guerre et démocratie: l’évolution des imaginaires politiques en Ouganda’, in Denis-Constant Martin (ed.), Nouveaux langages du politiques en Afrique orientale, Paris, pp. 187–262. Bayart, Jean-François (1989), L’Etat en Afrique. La politique du ventre, Paris. Behrend, Heike (1993), Alice und die Geister: Krieg im Norden Ugandas, Trickster, München. Bertrand, Joël and Kauzya, J.M. (1994), ‘Vers une nouvelle Constitution en Ouganda’, in Afrique contemporaine n° 171, pp. 17–33.

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Brett, E.A. (1995), ‘Neutralising the Use of Force in Uganda: the Role of the Military in Politics’, in Journal of Modern African Studies, vol. 33(1) pp. 129– 155. Buchanan, James (1985), Public Finances: An Introductory Textbook, Irwin Publications, Homewood, Ill. Campbell, John A. (1996), ‘An Institutional Analysis of Fiscal Reform in Post communist Europe’, in Theory and Society, vol. 25(1), pp. 45–86. Chambas, Gérard (1994), Fiscalité et développement en Afrique subsaharienne, Economica, Paris. Elias, Norbert and Scotson, John L. (1965), The Established and the Outsiders. A sociological Enquiry into Community Problems, Sage, London. Engler, Wolfgang (1999), Die Ostdeutschen. Kunde von einem verlorenen Land, Berlin. Foucault, Michel (1991), ‘Governmentality’, in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, London. Gall, Lothar (1997), Bismarck. Der weiße Revolutionär, Berlin. Genschel, Philipp and Schlichte, Klaus (1998), ‘When wars get chronical’, in Law and State, vol. 58, pp. 107–123. Hansen, H.B. and Twaddle, Michael (1988), Uganda Now: Between Decay and Development, London. Hansen, H.B. and Twaddle, Michael (1991), Changing Uganda, London. Hansen, H.B. and Twaddle, Michael (1994), From Chaos to Order: The Politics of Constitution Making in Uganda, London. Hintze, Otto (1931), ‘Wesen und Wandlungen des modernen Staates’, in Staat und Verfassung, Ges. Abhandlungen Bd. 1 (1970), Göttingen. Jamal, Vali (1978), ‘Taxation and Inequality in Uganda, 1900–1964’, in Journal of Economic History, vol. 38(2), pp. 418–438. Jamal, Vali (1991), ‘Inequalities and Adjustment in Uganda’, in Development and Change, vol. 22(2), pp. 321–337. Kakongoro, Fred M. (1996), Responsiveness of tax revenue to economic growth in Uganda 1987–1996, M.A. Thesis, Makarere University, Kampala. Kasumba, Stephen R. (1996), Fiscal Adjustment and the real exchange rate in Uganda 1981–1995, M.A. Thesis, Makarere University, Kampala. Kennedy, William (1913), English Taxation between 1640 and 1799: An Essay on Policy and Opinion, London. Kibikyo, David L. (1996), The impact of tax incentives on tax revenue and foreign direct investment in Uganda, 1991–1995, M.A. Thesis, Makarere University, Kampala. Laufenberger, Henri (1959), Histoire de l’impôt, Paris. Mamdani, Mahmood (1990), ‘Uganda: Contradictions of the IMF Programme and Perspective’, in Development and Change, vol. 21, pp. 427–467. Mamdani, Mahmood (1991), ‘A response to critics’, in Development and Change, vol. 22(2), pp. 351–366.

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Mamdani, Mahmood (1996), Citizen and subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism, Princeton University Press, Princeton. Mamdani, Mahmood, Kasoma, P.M.B. and Katende, A.B. (1992), ‘Karamoja: Ecology and History’, Working Paper n° 2, Centre for Basic Research Kampala. Médard, Jean-François (1992), ‘Le Big Man en Afrique. Esquisse du “politicien entrepreneur”, in Année sociologique 1992, pp. 167–192. MFPED, Ministry of Finance, Planning and Economic Development, Rep. of Uganda: Background to the Budget, various issues, Kampala. Migdal, Joel S. (1988), Strong Societies and Weak State: State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World, Princeton. Mugisha, Anne (1986), ‘The Role of the Police in the Enforcement of Law’, Diss. Faculty of Law, Makarere University, Kampala. Mukasa, Faisal (1992), ‘Taxation policy, the law and development: The case of the URA’, Makarere University, Faculty of Law, Kampala. Museveni, Yoweri (1995), Sowing the Mustard Seed, Kampala. Mutibwa, Phares (1992), Uganda since Independence: A story of unfulfilled hopes, London. Obaikol, Ester (1995), ‘Tax Administration in Uganda. An inquiry into tax evasion, 1989–1994’, M.A. Thesis, Makarere University, Kampala. Prunier, Gérard (1999), ‘L’Ouganda et les guerres congolaises’, in Politique africaine, n° 75, pp. 43–59. Prunier, Gérard and Calas, Bernard (eds) (1994), L’Ouganda contemporain, Paris. Report of the Ugandan Fiscal Commission (1962), Uganda Protectorate 1962, Entebbe: Government Printer. Sathyamurthy, T.V. (1986), The political development of Uganda: 1900–1986, Gower, Aldershot. Scott, James C. (1998), Seeing like a State: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed, New Haven, Conn. Schwennicke, Andreas (1996), Ohne Steuern kein Staat. Zur Entwicklung und politischen Funktion des Steuerrechts in den Territorien des Heiligen Römischen Reichs (1500–1800), Frankfurt am Main. Shaver, Robert L., DeZaysa, Hema R. and McDonald, Calvin A. (1995), ‘Uganda: Adjustment with Growth 1987–1994’, IMF-Occasional Papers (121), Washington DC: IMF. Spittler, Gerd (1983), ‘Abstrakt Wissen als Herrschaftsbasis. Zur Geschichte bürokratischer Herrschaft im Bauernstaat Preußen’, in Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, vol. 32, pp. 574–604. Syahuka-Muhindu, A. (1991), ‘The Rwenzori Movement and the Democratic Struggle’, Working Paper n° 15, Centre for Basic Research Kampala. Tanzi, Victor (1991), Public Finance in Developing Countries, Aldershot. Tumusiime-Mutebile, Emmanuel (1991), ‘Uganda: Contradictions of the IMF Programme and Perspective: A Comment’, in Development and Change, vol. 22(2), pp. 339–349.

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Van Acker, Frank (2004), ‘Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army: The new order of one ordered’, in African Affairs, vol. 103, n° 2, 335–357. Weber, Max (1985), Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriß der verstehenden Soziologie, 5th ed. (first ed. 1922), Tübingen.

Chapter 8

Boundaries of State and Military in Pakistan Boris Wilke

Pakistan’s Latest Predicament1 The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon brought Pakistan back into the spotlight of international attendance. Again, Pakistan seems to be at a crossroads. The decision of President Musharraf to back the United States’ ‘war on terrorism’ amounted to a dramatic turn in Pakistan’s foreign policy, with wideranging domestic repercussions. For years, Islamabad had supported the Taliban politically and militarily. Mutually beneficial to both, close ties and common interests developed between the military establishment, religious scholars and merchant capitalists in Pakistan on one side and the Taliban leadership on the other. These strategic relations provided Pakistan’s leaders much needed ‘strategic depth’ vis-à-vis its arch-rival India, vital political elbowroom to handle internal pressures and economic space to promote business interests. However, confronted with the ‘choice’ to be either America’s friend or foe in the years to come, General Musharraf could no longer afford to turn a blind eye to the international costs. Proclaiming a ‘Pakistan First’ policy, the Head of State and Commander of the Armed Forces had to take decisions that ran counter to the vested interests of 1

The results presented here are part of a research project in state dynamics in the Third World which has been funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) from 1998 to 2001. To some extent, the following arguments are based on observations which were obtained during two research trips in Pakistan. A draft of this paper was presented at the XVIIIth World Congress of the International Political Science Association, Quebec City, 1– 5 August 2000. Among others, the author is indebted to the participants of the panel and to Dr Ayesha Siddiqa-Agha and Dr Peter Lock for valuable comments. The usual caveats apply. The final version of the manuscript was submitted in July 2002. Since then, there has been a new surge in Pakistan-related literature. However, most of the new work focuses on Pakistan’s connection to international terrorism, proliferation of WMD, and its potential to become a ‘failed’ or ‘rogue’ state. In contrast to the line of argument presented here, these articles tend to look at Pakistan from an international security perspective, limiting domestic issues to the question of ‘stability’ – for which reason they have not been considered here. For a brief account on the question of stability, see Wilke (2004).

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powerful domestic groups. The long-ignored domestic costs of Pakistan’s Afghanistan policy such as ‘gun culture’, sectarian strife and rifts inside the military came to the fore. Unveiled threats to Pakistan’s military dictator even aroused fears of an outbreak of civil war and the break-up of a nuclear power.2 The events triggered by 11 September 2001 not only exposed the latest political predicament of the world’s seventh most populous nation, they also demonstrated that decisions and policy still matter in a country which had been labelled a ‘failed state’; they highlighted that the fate of Third World states and the international order in general seems as uncertain now as it was more than thirty years ago, when the ‘political order of changing societies’ (Huntington, 1968) was acknowledged for the first time as a key problem in world politics; and they revealed that civilmilitary relations are still decisive in shaping the nature of governance and political domination, at least in ‘Third World’ countries. Pakistan’s latest crisis ran its course in May 1998, when the government under Prime Minister Mian Nawaz Sharif, trailing its arch-rival India, conducted five nuclear tests, thereby adding a new sort of fuel to the already volatile geopolitical scenario of the region. One year later, Pakistan’s attempt to capture the ‘Kargil’ territory in the Indian part of the disputed territory of Kashmir brought the subcontinent to the brink of a major (potentially nuclear) war. Even Pakistan’s long-time allies, the United States and China, withheld their support, at least publicly: Islamabad found itself isolated on the diplomatic front of the Kashmir conflict. As there was no let up in Pakistan’s support for militants in Indian Kashmir, Pakistan’s opponent India labeled Pakistan a ‘terrorist state’. The military coup against the government of Prime Minister Sharif on 12 October 1999 did little to enhance Pakistan’s reputation. Although the takeover did not claim any casualties, the international community unanimously condemned it and called for the immediate restoration of democratic and civil rule. The coup d’état deserves a closer look. The reaction of the Pakistani public was mixed. Some people cheered the army and sighed with relief that a democratically elected, but authoritarian government had been ousted. As a matter of fact, in unseating the government, the Pakistani Army reacted in its particular way to the Prime Minister’s decision to sack Pakistan’s top military officer, Chief of Army Staff (COAS) General Musharraf. The Prime Minister’s move was perfectly legal, but the Pakistani public regarded it more as the culmination of a power struggle between the Prime Minister and the General rather than a constitutional issue. In the months before the showdown, the Prime Minister had been on a collision course with almost every political actor. He had shown no respect for the independence of the President of Pakistan, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, the press or – finally and fatefully – the army’s top brass. Many considered that Mr. Sharif’s style of governance amounted to a ‘democratically elected

2

For an account of Pakistan’s political predicament after 11 September 2001, see Lieven (2002).

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dictatorship’. The Prime Minister preferred to rule through loyalists and members of his family, bypassing his cabinet, the parliament and putting pressure on the press and the judiciary. Nawaz Sharif’s handling of political affairs was not democratic, nor was it efficient: under his rule, the state’s capabilities had come to a new low. Paradoxically, before taking on the COAS, the Prime Minister had relied to an unprecedented extent on the army for civilian tasks (Chengappa, 1999a). Eventually, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif decided to let the army take control of the ‘Water and Power Development Authority’ (WAPDA), a stateowned enterprise which suffered heavy losses due to a remarkable degree of corruption. It was against the backdrop of this decline in democratic and efficient rule that some Pakistanis hoped that this time the Generals would be the only ones left to do the right things. After the military takeover, the military government seemed to be more eager than any of its civilian and military predecessors to pursue good governance targets: the documentation of the economy (tax survey), the broadening of the tax base, an anti-corruption and accountability campaign, a crackdown on smugglers, the de-weaponization of society and the devolution of power to the grassroots level, including a thirty per cent quota for woman in local parliaments, were all part of the agenda of a military government which has, surprisingly, involved a number of non-governmental organizations in decision-making. All in all, it echoes well the recent neo-institutionalist parlance of the World Bank3 – except for the military’s control, of course. Although in the meantime, most erstwhile supporters of the military ‘counter coup’ have become critical of and disillusioned with the government’s willingness to implement the measures, these findings still raise well-known questions about civil-military relations in governance. 4 If we take the long view, we can easily see that the same military coup, which took many people by surprise in this post-cold war era of global and good governance, has done little more than to shed new light on an old story: the persistent intervention of Pakistan’s military in politics. Throughout half of Pakistan’s history, the military has been running the country. Three times before the October coup, the army had toppled a civilian government by military force. In the post-cold war era of good and global governance, however, these questions must be addressed in a different way. At least in the case of Pakistan, we can no longer assume that the military involvement in politics is a transient deviation incited by powerful external actors who pursue their own interests. The unprecedented involvement of Pakistan’s military in today’s civilian affairs raises questions about the nature of military, political and economic spheres and their delineation. Is it still possible in Pakistan to discern military from civilian realms and has it ever been possible to do so? What do we make out of the apparent 3

Cf. North (1995) and for a critique: Fine (1999) and Hugon (1999). For a recent account on civil-military relations, see Mares (1998). For some of the classics cf. Finer (1975), Huntington (1957, 1968), Janowitz (1964), Johnson (1962), Perlmutter (1977) and also Clapham and Philip (1985).

4

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economic involvement of the military? Do recent findings hint at the dissolution of boundaries between public and private, civil and military, or do we just witness a shifting of these boundaries? On the following pages, these questions will be addressed by a reconstruction of Pakistan’s process of state formation. Taking a historical perspective is pertinent to account for the dynamics of the Pakistani state. The focus will be on the armed forces as a corporate actor, their involvement in this process and their relationship to other actors on the political field. The dynamics of state formation and civilmilitary relations in Pakistan will be analyzed methodically by observing two kinds of boundaries: the external boundaries separating the state field from other parts of society and other states, and the internal boundaries separating the civilian form of political power from the military forms. The external boundaries are marked by the use of violence; their actual shape is influenced by the images and actual practices of Pakistan’s political actors. The internal boundaries are marked by the practices of the armed forces on one hand and of other state actors such as the bureaucracy, the politicians and the police, on the other. The aim is to show the shifting demarcation of both kinds of boundaries over time and the interrelation of both processes. Since the questions addressed in this article are closely related to current debates on state failure and state decay, it will be of particular interest to see if the external and internal boundaries of the state close up, that is, if the corporate actor ‘military’ tends to assume the role of the one and only uniform actor on the state field. The general aim of this study is to contribute to a better understanding of Pakistan’s state formation process and the dialectics of military and civilian governance. This is considered important for learning more about Pakistan’s trajectory and its persistent ‘defiance’ of civil and democratic rule: the political role of the military as a corporate actor and the recurrence of intra- and inter-state violence. I will determine how Pakistan’s armed forces and their ‘overdeveloped state’ (Alavi, 1979) tried to accommodate pressure arising from newly mobilized social forces and a more and more hostile international environment. I will argue that they succeeded only at the expense of the coherency, strength and autonomy of both the armed forces and the state apparatus as a whole. The current crisis presents itself in this context. Finally, I will explain why this does not mean that Pakistan necessarily ends up a failed state. The military as the most powerful corporate actor may well be able to ‘redeploy’ the state apparatus for the twenty first century’s competition of lean states (cf. Hibou, 1998).

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State Formation and the Processing of the State’s Boundaries If one defines the state in terms of a field of power that is marked by the threat and use of violence (cf. Midgal and Schlichte, Chapter 1), the focus on the military is not an unusual choice. As specialists for the control and the use of violence, the military personnel forms an essential part of the ‘coherent controlling organization’ that shapes the image of the state. It guards the external boundaries of the state and their field of action is marked further by the internal boundary between the external and internal specialists of violence: the military and the police (in the broader sense). The internal boundary between the military and the civil has been chosen as ‘Leitdifferenz’ to study the dynamics of the state. For this reason, the process of state formation will be split analytically into ‘war-making’ and ‘state-making'. War-making refers to ‘legitimate’ practices of the military, whereas state-making is supposed to be the business of other political actors. But war- and state-making are constitutive for the state formation process as such. Military action, organized violence and war are thus not treated as external, disruptive factors or intervening variables, but as integral constituents of a continuous process of state formation. Furthermore, war-making and state-making are not identical with external and internal factors. Although it is commonplace, such a conception would obscure more than elucidate: no external factor can operate separately from its own internal manifestation or transformation. This is all the more true for the societies of the Third World, where hybrid social and political forms prevail. Nevertheless, it seems to be appropriate to differentiate between war-making and state-making, because this dichotomy is vital to the common understanding of the military’s role in society. Military personnel are accepted as specialists in the exercise of violence directed to the external threats, and they are rejected if they exercise their power for political or economic ends. The structure of the argument enables us to identify a military spill-over from external to internal functions or a mixture of both aspects. Many scholars have studied the historic processes of state formation, providing a wide range of tools and concepts to study how complex political-societal set-ups emerge. Three will be briefly mentioned here since they have had some influence on the general approach used in this article. Heide Gerstenberger (1990) has shown that, historically, the essence of the formation of the modern state is the expropriation of means of domination (‘Enteignung von Herrschaftsbesitz’). Separate spheres of ‘the political’ and ‘the private’ are established. Bereft of their inherited rights to dominate the countryside, local rulers and power holders are reduced to private citizens. To conceptualize state-making as the expropriation of means of domination enables us to understand how, historically, the use of violence has been a precondition for the transformation of violence itself. To some extent, the power struggles among state makers had already been analyzed extensively by Norbert Elias (1976) as the ‘monopoly mechanism’. Elias insists that the monopolization of power is just one side of modern state formation. Effective rule depends on particular mindsets of the ruled. There is a structural

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correspondence between forms of political domination and the mental disposition of subjects. The concept of ‘habitus’ provides this essential link between the coercive and the subjective sides of the civilizing process. Another attempt to establish a conceptual link between different types of domination and the corresponding mindsets of rulers has been developed by Michel Foucault. In his late studies he favoured the concept of ‘governmentality’ (Burchell, 1991, Dean, 1999) to look at how people think about governing themselves, governing others and being governed. Governmentality links the material development of government – files, knowledge about territory and population – to understandings about how to use this knowledge, for which ends and in which ways. Correspondingly, the ruled have their own idea about what the state should do for them and what they should do for the state. Concepts like ‘expropriation of means of domination’, ‘monopoly of the legitimate use of violence’, ‘habitus’ and ‘governmentality’ have all been developed against the backdrop of European state formation. Using them here does 5 not imply that state formation in the Third World just echoes the European past. Accordingly, although the paper’s preoccupation with the control and use of violence follows some claims about the European experience (Tilly, 1985, 1990; Hintze, 1962), no claim of a rerun of the European experience is made here. The conceptual linkage of war-making and state-making as developed by Charles Tilly is helpful to get a proper understanding of Pakistan’s trajectory.6

The Formation of Military and State in Pakistan In order to make the state formation process more transparent, I will make use of four arguments which describe basically the same phenomena, albeit in different languages. Treating them as Pakistan-specific middle range theories, I have arranged them in an ascending line of complexity: The ‘ideological state’ thesis sums up best the pre-conditions of Pakistan’s state formation process, whereas the ‘migrant state’ model describes best the early stages of Pakistani state formation. The ‘overdeveloped state’ thesis provides the best account for Pakistan’s temporary consolidation as a peripheral capitalist state. And, finally, if we think about Pakistan as a ‘state of martial law’ (Jalal, 1990), we will be able to understand the crisis of the state that led to its transformation, which will be outlined in the next section of this text.7 5

An analysis of the divergent conditions of state formation processes in Europe and South Asia can be found in Doornbos and Kaviraj (1997). 6 According to Tilly, states also engage in extraction-protection business, which brings them close to rackets and mafias. Fiscal and police matters (in the narrow sense), however, are beyond the scope of this study. 7 I will not account for critical discussions or appraisals of these arguments. I will rather make use of what I conceive as their core argument, maybe even against the authors’ intentions. Hence, speaking about the ‘limits’ of the approaches does not indicate a

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Since 1940, the ‘Pakistan Movement’ had demanded a separate homeland for South Asia’s Muslim population. The rationale for its claim was provided by the ‘two nations theory’, which applied the principle of national self-determination to religious communities of the subcontinent: Hindus and Muslims, it was stated, were two nations which could not live together peacefully in one state. When the British left South Asia in 1947, they finally endorsed that theory and divided their heritage ethnographically into two states: Those provinces with a Muslim majority population were to form Pakistan; the rest would remain with India. Since the Muslim majority provinces were located in the East and West of British India, the new state was made up of two wings, which were at a distance of more than 1,500 kilometers: (West) Punjab, Sindh, Baluchistan and North-West Frontier Province in the West and (East) Bengal in the East. According to the state architects, the binding forces should be religion (Islam) and the shared belief in the need for a sovereign state that could safeguard the interests and lifestyles of the subcontinent’s Muslims. An ideological state (Hussain, 1979) was born. This leads us to the second peculiarity of Pakistan’s state formation. After partition, the two nations theory remained bitterly contested by the Indian leadership. Secularism had become India’s raison d’être, whereas the two nations theory was much of the same for Pakistan. For that reason, any discourse on Pakistan’s identity as a nation or a state refers – implicitly or explicitly – to its Indian counterpart. Pakistan ‘lives’ vis-à-vis India. This ideological divide determines the hostile relations between the two successor states of the British Raj until the present day. As India is more populous and more powerful in military terms, the Pakistani Army easily assumed, as we will see, a crucial role in defining and defending the nation and the state (Khatak, 1996). The roots of the Indo-Pakistani antagonism must be traced back to colonial rule (Barlas, 1995, Ganguly, 1986): The closer self-rule came, the more the feeling grew among the Muslim middle class that an independent India would be dominated by ‘Hindu interests’ at the expense of other communities. Hindus dominated India’s freedom movement and its main organization, the ‘Indian National Congress’. Although the Congress had also attracted some Muslims, it remained a predominantly Hindu organization, and since about three quarters of the subcontinent’s population were Hindu, this was unlikely to change much with further democratization. Thus, to safeguard their interests, middle class Muslims founded the ‘All-India Muslim League’. Unlike the Congress Party, however, which had been transformed from an elitist organization into a mass movement, the Muslim League’s support base remained confined to the small educated middle class of the Muslim minority provinces in North and West India. This weakness not just radicalized the Muslim League; it created a heavy burden for state

comprehensive critique. For reasons of convenience, the four arguments will be presented in a diachronic order. This does not indicate, however, that ‘in real life’ the migrant state had been followed by the overdeveloped state by the state of martial law.

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building, since the League’s support base in the territories which constituted Pakistan was tenuous. Even after independence, support for the Pakistan idea and the new political entity came mainly from the migrated middle class of what was now India. Pakistan was not just an ideological state, it was also a migrant state.8 Hence, the two most salient features of Pakistan’s state formation process are the significance of the symbolic side and its constituting ‘imaginary’ (Castoriadis, 1975), and the non-recognition of Pakistan’s physical and symbolic boundaries by internal and external challengers. Both aspects will play a prominent role in the following analysis of war-making and state-making. It will be argued that the combination of both aspects contributed to a peculiar imaginary of the Pakistani state (Jalal 1995), which had a lasting imprint on both domestic and international aspects of state formation. War-making as State Formation and the Genesis of a Corporate Actor From 1947 until the 1950s, Pakistan was a ‘new state’ (Geertz, 1963) in the literal sense. Its territorial and non-territorial boundaries were contested by neighbouring states – and by internal challengers: the local and rural population at large did not share the belief that there should be a Pakistani State. Some traditional rulers and strongmen in peripheral areas of what had become Pakistan resisted what they considered a foreign imposition of central rule. Regional pulls became a constant factor in Pakistan (Samad, 1995). As long as the Pakistani state was not territorially integrated and consolidated and as long as local strongmen openly resisted political expropriation and a centralized monopoly of the legitimate use of violence, the boundaries between these challengers of central rule and the state resembled more frontiers than borders. If we take the view of Pakistan’s state builders, these challengers were not internal ones in the strict sense. In the 1970s and 80s, conflicts in Baluchistan and in Sindh escalated into civil wars (cf. Amin, 1988; Banuazzi; Weiner and Myron, 1987, Rupesinghe and Mumtaz, 1996). In the case of East Pakistan, Indian forces intervened and turned a civil war into an international conflict, leading to the secession of East Pakistan which became Bangladesh (Sisson and Rose, 1990). Each civil war put strains on the military, not just the secessionist conflict over Bangladesh. Designed to defend the nation, the armed forces had to use violence against compatriots. Consequently, the military leadership became actively involved in drawing the line between those Pakistanis who stood by the state and those who did not, that is, between loyal and disloyal compatriots.9 The home front was not the only source of conflict. External relations with immediate neighbours, particularly India, remained strained. Although the British and their colonial apparatus presided over it, partition had not been peaceful. In 8

See Waseem (1994, 2000) on this feature of Pakistani state formation. For these and other practices of Pakistani military public relations work in and outside warfare, see Siddiqi (1996).

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order to meet the criteria of South Asia’s post-colonial settlement, that is, to live on the ‘right’ side of the religio-political divide, more than 15 million people had to flee across the newly drawn border. In an atmosphere of distrust and fear, more than one million of them were killed in massacres, some of which were spontaneous, but others well-planned. At least in the border regions of the partitioned province of Punjab, almost every family was affected by the bloodshed. The religio-political divide between Hindus and Muslims, Indians and Pakistanis drew not just a political map, but those of individuals and families as well. Since the Punjabis constituted almost 50 per cent of West Pakistan’s population and more than three quarters of the Pakistan Army, the bloodshed during the partition had a strong effect on the army and the state in Pakistan. Furthermore, the army’s stake in defending the nation was accentuated by the Indo-Pakistani conflict over the former princely state ‘Jammu and Kashmir’. This territory belonged to the part of British India in which the colonial masters ruled indirectly through local intermediaries. At the time of partition, the rulers of these 500 semi-autonomous princely states had to opt for either India or Pakistan. In most cases, numerical superiority of either religious community, the religious affiliation of the ruler and the adjacency to either of the successor states coincided. The case was different in Jammu and Kashmir, where the majority of the population was Muslim, but the ruling Maharaja was a Hindu. Since this strategically important state was adjacent both to India and to Pakistan, both countries wanted to integrate Jammu and Kashmir into their territory. Their claims were reinforced by contradicting imaginaries: for India, the integration of a Muslim majority province would give evidence to her claim to be a secular state; for Pakistan, such an outcome would have run against the two nations theory and the spirit of partition. As the Maharaja was unhappy with joining either of the successor states, the conflict escalated into the first all-out war between India and Pakistan, just two months after independence. As a result, Jammu and Kashmir were divided along the ‘line of control’, giving India about two thirds of the territory and the bulk of the Muslim population, and Pakistan the remainder.10 However, the conflict was far from being resolved. Both countries fought two more wars for the disputed territory. This territorial dispute lies at the heart of the Indo-Pakistani conflict and became the focal point for both state and military in Pakistan. Numerous cleavages overlap here: the territorial dispute over Kashmir, the two nations theory and the religio-political divide. Defending the borders of Kashmir, including those effectively ruled by India, means defending the external and symbolic boundaries of the Pakistani state, even if this involves the direct or indirect use of force; war- and state-making converge. As a vital national issue, the Kashmir question provided an entry point for the Pakistan Army into the national discourse about the nation and state of Pakistan. Until today, no government can

10 For the Indo-Pakistani conflict over Kashmir, cf. Bose (2001), Cloughley (1999), Ganguly (1997), Lamb (1991) and Schofield (1996).

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make any decision about Kashmir without the explicit or implicit consent of the army. In addition to regional pulls, bloodshed at partition and the initial phase of armed state-building, there is a fourth factor which favoured a prominent role of the military: South Asia’s inclusion in the map of the Cold War. After a major shift in US foreign policy strategy in 1954, Pakistan turned into a key state in the American containment strategy. Pakistan became one of the largest recipients of US economic and military aid and was seen, at least temporarily, as Washington’s ‘most allied ally’.11 The principal beneficiary of US aid was Pakistan’s military, particularly the army and the air force. With US assistance the Pakistan Army grew in size, morale and skill (Cloughley, 1998: 36). Educational standards became higher than in popular civilian institutions (Matthews, 1994: 327). Army officers easily adapted to world politics: Through their American counterparts, Pakistan’s top military brass gained exclusive access to decision makers in Washington, bypassing civilian offices and elected politicians. They even became familiar with western theories and political concepts of the time, which regarded the state – and under certain circumstances even the military – as the principal agent of political development (Shafqat, 1997: 43; cf. Huntington, 1968: 203). The military became an integral part of (West-) Pakistan’s ruling ‘pro-state’ alliance, which included the civil bureaucracy and the emergent bourgeoisie as well. The partners in the alliance had an interest in a strong state, capable of pushing through a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence, and in close links to the United States. What emerged in the 1950s was basically a double conversion of interests and subsequent acculturation of elites: within Pakistan and between Pakistan and the United States (Alavi, 1998, Gardezi, 1998). This double conversion of interests, which has become blurred since the 1960s when the USA and Pakistan clashed on the China policy, provided the foundation for the ‘pro-state’ alliance.12 All four factors – the regional pulls, the bloodshed at partition, the IndoPakistani conflict and the inclusion of South Asia into the map of the cold war – contributed to the genesis of the Pakistani military as a strong corporate actor. It was reinforced by the recruitment patterns and the dominant political thinking within the army. Army recruits are taught that Pakistan’s geopolitical position calls for an outstanding role in what is perceived as its strategic ‘core area’ and industrial ‘heartland’: the Punjab (Cohen, 1998: 115). Since about three quarters of all army soldiers come from just five districts in Punjab and neighbouring North-

11

Conversely, Washington’s influence on Pakistani politics grew steadily, ranging from military matters and economic policy measures to the personal level. Reportedly, US officials had their say in all decisive policy issues, including the assignment of key positions in the federal government and administration (Alavi, 1990: 25) 12 This is not to deny that, despite its ‘pro-state’ stance, this alliance relied heavily on informal networks and personal interdependencies, fostered by marriage policy and other forms of power consolidation (Duncan, 1989). However, the state apparatus provided the principal source of wealth for these classes.

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West Frontier Province, the call for soldier’s mission to be the defence of the nation’s core area which has been, as it happens, the prime battlefield in conflicts with India, falls on futile ground (Waseem, 2000: 10). An analysis of war-making thus shows how the external (physical) boundaries of the Pakistani state were contested by internal and external competitors. The symbolic boundaries were contested by the same powers. This particular feature called for an exceptional role by the Pakistani Military in the building of the Pakistani state. By linking physical and non-physical boundaries, practices and images, a dynamic of its own was created which led, as will be argued in the next chapter, to the blurring of the internal boundaries between civil and military spheres. State-making as State Formation and the Genesis of an Overdeveloped State As outlined at the beginning of this section, Pakistan was founded as an ideological state for South Asia’s Muslim community. The circumstances of partition and the post-colonial legacy, however, sharpened Pakistan’s profile as a migrant state. The apparatus upon which the migrant state founded its rule was comparatively strong. Pakistan inherited a share in probably the most powerful colonial bureaucracy in the world, which had provided the ‘steel frame’ for the British Raj. The BritishIndian Army was a highly professional organization with strong roots in Indian society (Noor ul Haq, 1993). However, both civil and military bureaucracies were divided at the time of partition, creating more problems for Pakistan than for India. Both parts of the Pakistani state apparatus operated in a new, at times hostile, environment, since the majority of the officers, especially in the civil services, came from what was now India. At large, the state remained at a distance from society. A dualism of state and society was established. The core of the ‘migrant state’ argument can be summed up as follows: The supporters of the Pakistan idea belonged almost exclusively to the urban Muslim middle classes of those territories of North and Central India which remained part of the Indian Union. They came to the Muslim majority provinces, which became Pakistan, as Muhajirs (refugees) and found themselves in an environment which was much more backward in terms of social and political development. Although Muhajirs managed to acquire an outstanding position in business and public administration, they remained isolated as politicians, acting in a political landscape which was dominated by powerful regional and rural actors. The Pakistan Muslim League, successor to the All-India Muslim League, could not count on a strong party infrastructure. The educated and urbanized Muslim League leadership was forced to strike compromises with landlords and feudal bosses of regional parties, many of whom were, if anything, merely lukewarm supporters of the Pakistani

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state.13 Since their life worlds had barely been touched by colonial rule, they found it difficult to adapt swiftly to a new governmentality. They had no particular interest in establishing a modern state and a centralized monopoly of legitimate use of violence. So this mission was left to the state whose functionaries were, to a large extent, migrants. The early death of Pakistan’s ‘great leader’ (Quaid-i-Azam), Mohammad Ali Jinnah, made the footing of these migrants even more tenuous. When the charismatic President of the Muslim League and first Governor-General of Pakistan died in 1948, he left a void in the Muslim League’s and Pakistan’s political elite. It is a popular interpretation of Pakistan’s political history to cite Jinnah’s early death as one of the main causes of Pakistan’s failure in democratization. A close reading of the ‘migrant state’ argument stands against this claim: Jinnah was at best a lukewarm democrat,14 and the Muhajirs in general had no interest in a democratic political form, in which feudal ‘anti-state’ forces would prevail thanks to their sheer numerical superiority (Waseem 1994: 106). In an attempt to thwart centrifugal tendencies of feudal forces from the outset, the Muhajir-dominated political and administrative elite fell back on so-called viceregal colonial practices. Similar to colonial rule, political power was concentrated in the office of the Governor-General, who monopolized the decision-making process and persistently bypassed Prime Minister, cabinet and legislative assembly. Out in the field offices, he could rely on the Deputy Commissioner of the District who acted directly under his authority. Hence, many scholars trace the origins of Pakistan’s authoritarianism back to this continuity of colonial administrative practices under Jinnah and his direct successors.15 Pakistan’s political predicament cannot be reduced to the lack of skillful leadership or to organizational matters: It has a class dimension. As a class of traders, industrialists and civil servants, the Muhajirs needed a functioning state apparatus which was able to maintain the monopoly of legitimate use of violence and give some degree of predictability to social and economic life. However, even the bureaucracy, unlike its Indian counterpart, could not simply carry on with the ‘job already done’ in the colonial era, since the steel frame had been rather fragile in those indirectly administered territories which were now part of Pakistan. Lacking a political party network and an experienced civil service, the government’s writ was tenuous, particularly in rural areas. For this reason, the Muhajirs needed the collaboration of other segments of society. The Punjabi leadership, who represented almost fifty per cent of West-Pakistan’s population, 13

Even in (West-) Pakistan’s largest province, the Punjab, the Pakistan Movement had to rely on local intermediaries with hierocratic charisma, who owed their position to colonial divide and rule policies. As Gilmartin (1988: 226–233) has argued convincingly, this had a lasting imprint on how Pakistanis think of nation, state, community and citizenship. 14 On the political life of Pakistan’s father figure, cf. Wolpert (1984) and Jalal (1985). 15 On vice-regalism, cf. Sayeed (1996: Chapter 10) and Talbot (1998: 54ff. and 132f.). See also Ahmed (1997), Alavi (1983) and Barlas (1995).

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was the best partner available. Punjabis were strong in the countryside, strong in business and, most importantly, they dominated the army, being joined there by the Pathans. Both Pathans and Punjabis had assumed the habitus of ‘martial races’ under British rule. Since they had experience inside the colonial apparatus, they shared many features of the Muhajirs’ governmentality. That made them ideal partners for the Muhajirs, who were regarded not as a martial race, but as ‘sissy’. Since both were ‘sons of the soil’ local people, the incorporation of Punjabis and Pathans already transcends the ‘migrant state’ model, leading to the ‘overdeveloped state’ model.16 This model is crucial for learning more about the social basis of the state, to comprehend how the military as a corporate actor entered the political arena and why the state was able to become and remain strong in a hostile environment. Before army officers reached higher echelons of the state apparatus, politicians-turned bureaucrats had been actually in charge of running the country. Democracy was held in abeyance. Vital and far-reaching decisions, such as the US-Pakistan military alliance and economic policy strategy, had been taken by top bureaucrats (Kapur, 1991). Already in the 1950s the bureaucrats came under fire from politicians and the masses. Politicians from East Pakistan, where the majority of Pakistan’s population lived, were particularly at odds with economic and foreign policy designs, which undoubtedly patronized development in West Pakistan. Against this backdrop, a ‘civilian coup’ was staged in 1954, to be followed by a military takeover in 1958, the beginning of the era of Field Marshall Ayub Khan. The coups must be classified as veto and guardian coups (cf. Huntington, 1968, Clapham and Philip, 1985). As the spearhead of the ruling West Pakistani power coalition, the top civilian and military leaders intervened in order to thwart a possible ‘takeover’ by predominantly East Pakistani forces, which could be described at the same time as democratic, pro-society, anti-state and antimilitary. Ayub Khan’s coup also represents a critical juncture in the intra-elite power struggle: Military officers grew from junior partners of civilian bureaucrats to guardians of the state. In contrast to rurally-based politicians, the civil and military bureaucratic elites had ideas and concepts of how to direct the state, the economy and the society as such (Shafqat, 1997: 32). The army personnel in particular acquired a governmentality which can be found up to the present day: According to the Pakistani ‘military mind’ (Huntington, 1957), army interventions in state affairs are pertinent to keep the state apparatus working smoothly. Since politicians are narrow-minded, the masses uneducated and many civil servants corrupt, the men in uniform have to step in from time to time in order to safeguard Pakistan’s economic and social development: People have to be led, since they cannot take care of themselves and they have to be led by the army, because Pakistan’s politicians are too corrupt and selfish. This implies an exceptional role for 16

Since the bulk of refugees had come over the new border of divided Punjab, not all Punjabis were local people in the strict sense. However, thanks to shared language and culture, the refugees among them adapted quickly to their new environment.

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Pakistan’s army in state formation.17 It hardly needs to be mentioned that this position is sustained by the war-making factors described in the preceding section. The army’s and Pakistan’s raison d’être overlap: Ayub’s coup safeguarded a strong state apparatus, capable of keeping the monopoly of the legitimate use of force at least in core regions. By and large, the state remains at a distance from society and is therefore ‘overdeveloped’ in relation to society, to use Hamza Alavi’s words. However, it is important to note that although military men were in key positions in the government, and foreign policy was virtually in the army’s hand, the military role in day-to-day political affairs was rather limited at that time (Cloughley, 1998: 52; cf. Khan, 1967: 81). Right from the start, (retired) military personnel acquired important assets in Pakistan’s emerging economy (SiddiqaAgha, 2000; Moore, 1979), but the military as a corporate actor only accidentally controlled trade and production. Paradoxically, it was in the aftermath of Z. B. Bhutto’s nationalization policy that the military’s rise to an active economic player took shape (Cloughley, 1998: 251). The overdeveloped state became the most important actor in Ayub’s ‘developmental decades’. In close cooperation with international governmental and non-governmental actors, Pakistan’s top bureaucrats and military officers pursued a strategy of export-oriented growth, championing Pakistan’s integration into the world economy. However, this policy was only halfway successful. Spatially, growth was concentrated in core areas in Punjab and in Sindh’s capital Karachi; socially, an alliance of top bureaucrats, military leaders, a few landlords and some 22 bourgeois families were the main beneficiaries of the economy’s expansion (Alavi, 1983; Gardezi and Rashid, 1983). The economic strategy was sidelined by the policy of ‘rural penetration’ (Shafqat, 1997: 36), by which the military was anchored in rural society. Colonels and generals mixed easily with landlords and the rural political class, giving the ruling alliance a solid stand. The masses, however, remained excluded from the political field. Indirect democracy was introduced by local election of 80,000 ‘basic democrats’, who participated in local district affairs and elected, or rather acclaimed, the President (Ayub). The scheme sought to provide a popular basis for Ayub’s regime and to broaden and limit the social basis of the state at the same time. However, this policy of what amounted to ‘partial mobilization’ (Jalal, 1990: 304) was not successful: At the end of the 1960s, the overdeveloped state’s detachment from society and the mass population’s exclusion from economic growth led to social unrest and to a severe crisis of the state. The dimension of this crisis and its solution cannot be explained sufficiently by the ‘overdeveloped state’ model. Neither can it account for the violent reaction of

17 This attitude is well illustrated in the autobiographic accounts of Ayub Khan (cf. 1967: 57, 77) and General K. M. Arif (cf. 1995: 410). According to Huntington (1968: 251), the Field Marshall ‘came close to filling the role of a Solon or Lycurgus or ‘Great Legislator’ of the Platonic or Rousseauian model’.

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the political and military class, nor does it sufficiently elucidate the role of the military in state formation. It provides neither the link between state and society, nor the underlying motives of governance. For which ends and by which means does the state try to extract resources from society? A convincing answer to this question can be obtained from Ayesha Jalal’s (1990) work. She argues that, right from the beginning, Pakistan’s state formation process had been guided by defence matters. Defence spending not just posed a tremendous financial burden on Pakistan’s ‘state of martial law’, accounting for the largest part of the budget for decades. More importantly, the underlying motives for state growth have been dictated by the necessity to expand the defence budget in order to match the Indian military capacity. Inasmuch as military officers have been involved in decisionmaking and, more importantly, in securing links to international financial players from the beginning, Ayesha Jalal’s notion that a ‘political economy of defence’ provides the basis for Pakistan’s superstructure has much plausibility. One could argue that the basic law guiding Pakistan’s political economy has been to be ready for war. The failure of civil agencies to provide internal peace and prosperity prompted the army to early state-building interventions. The army’s reaction to the Lahore religiously motivated riots of 1953 is a good example: After restoring law and order, the army did not leave the scene but extended martial law for several weeks in order to make Punjab’s capital a cleaner and brighter city.18 The army action was celebrated by the local population and the national press, establishing for the first time a firm link between (internal) war-making, state-building and good governance.19 As a (govern-) mentality, a dispositif, the state of martial law has been in place from day one. But it became dominant at the end of the initial phase of state formation, leading to the first transformation of the overdeveloped state. The first military takeover in 1958 had been a move to consolidate the state. However, when the degree of ‘Punjabization’20 and exclusion of large parts of the East Pakistani population triggered, first, an autonomy movement, and then a civil war, it was not the question of consolidating an overdeveloped, detached state any more: it was the question of crushing a resistance movement with sheer and brutal military force and employing troops against those compatriots who were now simply considered hostile ‘elements’ (Siddiqi, 1996: 155-181). Whereas in the 1950s and early 1960s, the overdeveloped state had been able to transform war-making (as a means for the 18

Cf. Cloughley (1998: 43) and Siddiqi (1996: 26). Shils already mentioned (1962: 52) tidy streets as a regular result of military governance. 19 In his intriguing narrative of the Lahore riots, Brigadier (Retd.) A. R. Siddiqi (1996: 36) states: ‘The ‘53 Martial Law for the armed forces had been a giant exercise in statecraft and showmanship. The military emerged as the most dominant and versatile force in the country (West Pakistan)’ Shils (1962) hinted very early at the common feature. 20 In ethnic terms, the temporary consolidation of the Pakistani state went hand in hand with ‘Punjabization’ of the polity. The leaders in bureaucracy, military leadership and among the landlords were now mainly of Punjabi origin, with Muhajirs and Pathans as junior partners.

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expropriation of power) into a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence and to establish a certain degree of governmental predictability, the martial law state disclosed that the consolidation of the overdeveloped state had failed. The state fell back into war-making in the literal sense. Force had to be used to protect the ruling elite, blurring the boundaries between legal and illegal and bearing a new governmentality. To conclude this section, we can sum up Pakistan’s state formation as follows: The preceding chapters have shown that, right from the start, state-making and war-making were daunting tasks. The people in charge – bureaucrats on the one side, army officers on the other – were at great pains to protect and dominate the state field against adversaries from in and outside the physical boundaries. Internally, they had to confine their effort to some ‘core state’ and secure the most essential rules inside narrowly drawn boundaries. Externally, they had to be ready for war, since Pakistan’s territorial status (if, following official ideology, we include – as we must – Jammu and Kashmir) was not clearly determined. More importantly, external and internal matters were mixed right from the start, giving the army a key state-building role. The state apparatus became both overcharged and overdeveloped in relation to civil society. The groups acting on the state field used their position to create a capitalist dynamic and even a capitalist class, which became their ally. The bureaucrats built up ties with the emergent capitalist class and the landlords. However, this attempt to build up a viable economy and a stable political framework failed, as it was at odds with popular sentiment, particularly in East Pakistan. At this juncture, the army intervened openly, if we follow their governmentality, ‘in order to prevent further disarray’. Bearing in mind that the state apparatus had always been crucial as an economic asset, it is of no surprise that the army began to take formal control of more and more segments of the economy.

State Dynamics and the Blurring of Boundaries The most salient feature of the state dynamics beginning in the 1970s was the blurring of boundaries between public and private, civil and military, legal and illegal. As it happens, the transformation of the overdeveloped martial law state was triggered from outside, as a result of war-making. Once more, the external and internal boundaries, that is, the fate of Pakistan and the fate of the military, were influenced by the same forces. The transformation process started after East Pakistan’s war of secession. From the height of its esteem in the 1965, when they fought the second Kashmir war against India, the military’s image had become more and more dismal. Finally, the Bangladesh war was lost on two fronts: First the military leadership lost the war of words for the right ideology and governmentality against the East Pakistani opposition necessitating the resort to arms against its own citizens and, back in its war-making camp, it was defeated by internal (East Bengal) and external (India) adversaries. Second, the US–Pakistani

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military cooperation had proved worthless when it came to India and Kashmir and with the amputation of the Eastern wing, Pakistan’s bold stand to provide a homeland for all Muslims of the subcontinent, the two nation theory of the migrant state, had lost all credibility. However, the defeat of the all-powerful army could have provided a good opportunity to establish a fresh set of rules for the state field. For the first time in Pakistan’s history, the political field was open to politicians and – to some extent – to the people of Pakistan. There was also a chance to break the Punjabi hegemony in the West, because Pakistan’s new ruler, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was a Sindhi with widespread support in all provinces. Moreover, his ‘Pakistan People’s Party’ was much stronger than previous parties, both in organization and appeal. Bhutto took power as President and Civil Martial Law Administrator in 1972 and, one year later, he became Prime Minister under a new constitution, vested with all necessary authority to reshape the country.21 Indeed, Bhutto’s rule brought a transformation of Pakistan’s rules of the game, a new populist style of governance, a new governmentality. Bhutto favored a much more active role of the state in relation to society and to its subjects. Through ‘deliberate use of state power’ and ‘planned state intervention’ Bhutto sought to reshape the economic and political landscape of Pakistan and to redraw its internal and external boundaries (Shafqat, 1997: 125). This was reflected in his new political style. In stark contrast to Ayub’s elitist approach, Bhutto reached out to the masses, aroused their feelings and attempted to re-shape and discipline their minds and bodies (cf. Shafqat, 1997: 130, 136). Through the principle of ‘lateral entry’ to bureaucracy he tried to break the Punjabi and Muhajir domination and, concomitantly, the anti-society esprit de corps in higher echelons of the state (Kennedy, 1987). In reaction to newly mobilized social forces instigating widespread popular protest, Bhutto tried to balance social disparities and enhance the state capabilities in the economic sphere. The state nationalized heavy industry and banking services, it monopolized investment activity and other key economic decisions. All these measures could be understood as an attempt to broaden the social basis and, possibly, deepen the reach of the state. To assure the separation of military and civilian powers, Bhutto introduced the paramilitary Federal Security Service, which acted under the Prime Ministers authority. Just like the principal of lateral entry, the prime mover behind this somewhat paradoxical plan was to enhance his personal control over the political process. Using ‘dirty tricks’ in pursuit of ‘politics of survival’ (Migdal, 1988), key governmental positions were filled with loyalists, the military service was cleansed and party dissidents and potential critics were thrown out of office and terrorized. His attempt to broaden the basis of the state turned into a weakening of the state’s basis and its apparatus. Instead of broadening and deepening the state, Bhutto endangered its fundamental pillars. The bureaucracy became highly

21

On Z. A. Bhutto’s rule, cf. Burki (1988) and Wolpert (1993).

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politicized, large parts of the army antagonized and the business community resented the nationalization of heavy industry and banking services. In trying to redefine the internal and external boundaries of the Pakistani state, Z. A. Bhutto was a challenge to the establishment, which still consisted of the ruling coalition of the 1960s. Hence, strategically speaking, Bhutto’s biggest mistake was to only carry out his attempt to keep the military half-way. In his brutal suppression of labor unrest and language riots, and even more in his campaign of political expropriation against the Baluchistan autonomy movement, which escalated into a civil war from 1973 to 1977, Bhutto had to employ the army again. War-making again brought the army back to state-making (Siddiqi, 1996: 229), and in July 1977 a political stalemate between the Prime Minister and a strong opposition force was broken by a military coup d’état, led by the Chief of the Army Staff, General Zia ul-Haq. Bhutto’s policies posed a threat to both the power of Pakistan’s old ruling alliance and, in their view, to the integrity of the state itself. In line with the political economy of defence, the military considered it as its duty to perform the role of guardian of the state. It was the third military coup in Pakistan’s history, and again the military claimed that it was forced to intervene in order to save the country from further disarray, maybe even form all-out civil war (Arif, 1995: 72). The attempt to develop stronger bonds between state and society and to transform an autocratic overdeveloped state had failed. General Zia ul-Haq stayed in office as Chief Martial Law Administrator and President until his death in a plane crash on 11 August 1988.22 He established what many consider as the first genuine military rule, imposing draconian punishments against opposing political activists and letting army men assume responsibilities in key departments of the civil administration and in key sectors of the economy as well. However, Zia’s policies must be seen as a reaction and continuation of Bhutto’s at the same time. The military leadership was unable to revive the elitist Ayub years. The boundaries of the political field had been redrawn; new actors had appeared on the stage. Zia’s islamization policies were the conservative answer to Bhutto’s populism. Pakistan witnessed another far-reaching transformation of state and society. According to the military leadership, the army was forced by Bhutto’s legacy of a weakened civil administration to take direct responsibility for governing the state. For the ‘pro-state’ forces, Bhutto’s populist handling of pressures arising from social mobilization had exposed the dangers of democracy. The state apparatus had to be defended against pressures from society. After restoring law and order, the army re-established the power of the civil bureaucrats, though this time they were junior partners. In effect, Zia secured the army’s hegemony within the state apparatus and in society in general. No other political or societal actor could challenge it. Many (retired) army officials were posted at higher levels of administration, and some military institutions even assumed first and foremost

22

On the Zia era, see Arif (1995), Burki and Baxter (1991) and Hyman (1988).

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civilian tasks. Retired officers also assumed upper positions in state enterprises and in profitable sectors of the (legal and illegal) economy. All in all, about ten per cent of all top governmental and business posts were taken by retired army officers (Duncan, 1989: 282). Zia established a dense network of key administrative and business position holders, a ‘vertical’ network of businessmen of his favor, one of them being the upcoming Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif (Duncan, 1989: 94; Burki 1991: 103ff.). The objective of this network approach was to lend legitimacy to his dictatorship and to trigger economic growth: As in the 1950s, the state sidelined the attempt to generate growth by putting a new class of capitalists into place. However, this time the governmental rules did not follow the developmental state logic. Pakistan’s economy was opened to all sorts of – legal and illegal – international markets, which provided for much of the boom of the 1980s. Boundaries between state and society, the internal and external business of the state, between state-making and war-making were at large, blurred. Take the Inter Services Intelligence. Both civilian and military officers worked for the ISI, which had initially been founded as a foreign secret service after the First Kashmir War in 1949. Under Zia’s rule, the ISI assumed the role of an all-powerful agency with the capability to act almost unchallenged inside Pakistan. The political cell of the ISI infiltrated political parties and manipulated the political process, even under democratic rule (Chengappa, 2000). At the same time, the ISI played a crucial role in Afghanistan’s civil war (Yousaf and Adkin, 1992). Pakistan’s status as a frontline state had tremendous repercussions for its political economy (of defence). US governmental agencies supplied huge sums of military and economic aid, initiating a war boom throughout Pakistan. The flow of military and economic aid, in addition to the arms and drugs pipeline through Pakistan, provided multiple opportunities for diverting money into the pockets of (military and civilian) state officials and businessmen, making war profits a major source of enrichment in the Zia era (Kartha, 1999). The informal economy grew at high rates, reaching about one third of the formal economy (Hyman, 1988: 94). Pakistan had to pay a heavy price for the war boom. Since the economy’s expansion relied almost entirely on army power, the military’s share in the national budget rose steadily to more than a quarter at the end of Zia’s rule. At the same time, public investment in education and development reached new lows. Z. A. Bhutto had tried to expand the state vertically and horizontally, attaining the contrary in many respects. Zia accepted the state’s unwilling retreat from some of his functions. As far as the administration of violence is concerned, the fighting in Afghanistan had a serious fallout on the home front: The proliferation of small arms and illicit drugs led to the establishment of a ‘Kalashnikov culture’ in and around the economic powerhouse Karachi and also in other parts of the country. The smugglers and transport mafia, religious and non-religious non-state actors were provided with military hardware for several years of insurgency and terror. 23

23

For the Karachi situation cf. Kennedy (1991), Malik (1998) and Zaidi (1997).

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It is important to note that Zia’s military rule differed in many respects from the previous ones. The military’s involvement in daily administration was deeper, state-making and war-making converged more than ever. The internal boundaries were redrawn anew and blurred further. Decision-making was concentrated in informal bodies which resided neither in the civil sphere nor in the military one. Zia, as ‘Chief Martial Law Administrator’ (CMLA), rendered the Corps Commanders conference and (later, as President) the meetings of the Head of State, the Prime Minister and the Army Chief into key decision-making bodies. Sometimes, Zia chose to wear several ‘hats’ at the same time, sometimes he relied on a junta style of governance. As far as governmentality is concerned, there was the new role of Islam: As a legacy of Bhutto’s rule, Zia and his generals were forced to control pressures from a highly politicized and mobilized society. In order to reach out to and regain control of his subjects, Zia attempted to re-write Pakistan’s self-understanding as a political entity from a Muslim to an Islamic state. Pakistan’s people had to be good citizens and faithful Muslims, with the state ensuring the application of secular as well as holy rules. Islamization was a means to re-establish and potentially broaden (Malik, 1989) the state’s writ on a society which had always been indifferent to westernized concepts, even if they were in proto-Islamic shape like the two nations theory. Non-state actors who had hitherto opposed Pakistan’s state project, such as the ulema (clergy), became part of the ruling coalition, or they were at least used by it.24 As in other fields, it became more and more difficult to differentiate between state- and non-state actors. Finally, although the military as a corporate actor was more unchallenged than ever, the deep and broad involvement in governance began to cause rifts inside the military. The army pushed the Air Force and navy even more into the background of political and military decision-making. Some agencies, such as the ISI or the Military Intelligence (MI), assumed an independent but outstanding role in both the fields of war- and state-making (Chengappa, 1999a; Kartha, 1999). Aftershocks of Zia’s islamization policies are still palpable in Pakistan, for example, when, in 1995, Islamist military officers staged an (unsuccessful) military coup against their own army leadership and the government (Abbas, 1995). Despite some modest experiences with democracy in the mid-80s, it is doubtful whether Zia had any plan to end his tenure (Arif, 1995: 252); and it remained so, until his still mysterious, fatal, plane crash in 1988, after which the rules of the game changed. His successor as Chief of Army Staff, General Mirza Aslam Beg, preferred to hand over power to the civilians. He probably anticipated that with the US and Soviet involvement in the Afghan war coming to an end, the raison d’être of America’s support would disappear. International support for war-making would die under the conditions of the New World Order, so it was time for the military to step down. It is debatable whether what followed, the two governments of Benazir

24

On Islamic revivalist opposed to the idea of the Pakistani state, see Nasr (1994, 1996).

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Bhutto (1988-90, 1993-96) and Nawaz Sharif (1990-93, 1996-99), can be regarded as transition from military to civilian rule or even as an era of democratization (cf. Rais 1997; Rizvi 1998; Shafqat 1998). Elections were held several times, reasonably fair ones even, and civil society and the public sphere gained a good deal of breathing space. However, although there was a succession of democratically elected governments, this was not due to democratic change in the strict sense. No government survived its term; all were dismissed by the President, presumably on behalf of the army. At least prima facie, these dismissals were perfectly legal, for the President did have these powers under the eighth amendment of the constitution, which provided some kind of arbiter role for the Head of State. Corruption and inefficiency were among the reasons cited as justifications for the dismissals, and everybody knew that these allegations were not unfounded: politicians and bureaucrats were corrupt, inefficient, and sometimes political processes resembled racket rule more than good governance.25 On the other hand, these allegations echoed well-known statist military governmentality and for good reason – as it was the generals who remained kingmakers and arbiters in Pakistan’s longest period of democratic rule, not the Presidents. The governments of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif had to work under tutelage of the army. The army’s guardian role was half-way institutionalized in the eighth amendment, allowing the armed forces to preside over Pakistan’s state formation process. They, however, did more than just preside over it: from time to time, they became heavily engaged in the business of the state, sometimes by invitation of the government and many times against the will of elected politicians who fell victim to ISI manipulation (Chengappa, 1999a, 2000; Shafqat, 1997). Through welfare trusts, public and private enterprises, all established or expanded under Zia, they had their share in documented and undocumented businesses, adding to the blurring of boundaries between state and non-state, politics and business, public and private (Kartha, 1999).

The Pakistan Outlook: State Decay or Redeployment? In Pakistan’s process of state formation, the actual internal and external boundaries of the state were at odds with common images of state-society and civil-military relations. The dialectics of war-making and state-making, that is, the violent nonrecognition of Pakistan’s physical boundaries by internal and external adversaries, is the best explanation available for this fact. At the same time Pakistan’s symbolic 25 Summing up ten years of democratic rule, Saeed Shafqat (1998: 287) has argued that ‘democratization has strengthened the paternalistic model of administration rather than constitutional government’. Against the backdrop of a lack of inner-party democracy and an almost dysfunctional parliament, decentralization and further feudalization of the state seem to be the most important outcomes of Pakistan’s longest experiment with democracy. Both tendencies do not fit well into the military’s statist and centralistic designs.

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boundaries and its constituting imaginary were challenged by internal and external powers. Hence, the actor most capable of defending the nation’s boundaries – the military – became heavily engaged in the process of war- and state-making. However, the predominance of the military did not result in permanent and direct interference in daily administration. The military acted as a ‘guardian’ of the state and it guarded its own interests. Yet, until Z. A. Bhutto’s tenure, there was no need for the military to interfere directly into civilian affairs. Now, under Bhutto, a new political style was introduced, boundaries between state and society were redrawn, and the military as a corporate actor was challenged to an unprecedented extent. In order to secure its own survival, the military under Zia-ul-Haq began to reshape and blur the internal and external boundaries at the same time. Islamization and direct interference in legal and illegal economic transactions are the keywords for this development. In contrast to Ayub’s era, the generals did not have any design of a developmental state in mind. They did not even take much care to implement the most essential rules, as gun culture and widespread political violence demonstrate. One could argue that ‘state decay’ began under Bhutto and continued under military rule. When they handed over the Reststate to the civilian actors, the generals could count on constitutional and non-constitutional safeguards guaranteeing access to the commanding heights in case of emergency. Besides, they monopolized the key foreign policy issues and kept control over the military budget. The civilian governments worked under tutelage of the army, and the politicians continued what they had learned under Zia ul-Haq. They treated the state apparatus as an economic asset, subverting the rules used on this field to their own favor: ‘dirty tricks’ secured their survival. The undocumented economy, established by Zia’s martial law state in the 1980s, took root all over Pakistan and provided them with sources of enrichment, despite a shrinking fiscal basis of the state. Although the military as a corporate actor also made its bargain, it had to rely on state income; no state, no military. Therefore, the diminishing fiscal basis of the state became a cause for military takeover, since it threatened the professional and corporate interests of the military (cf. Rizvi, 1998). Indeed, there were even more important reasons. After having been on a collision course with almost every powerful state actor, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif took on the army and tried to create rifts in the ranks. He managed to take control of the ISI, prompting a struggle between government-controlled ISI and army-controlled Military Intelligence (MI). The clash between ISI and MI, which preceded the military takeover of 1999, indicates a new degree of intra-military divisions (Chengappa, 1999b). So what will the men in khaki do this time? Their main policies were already cited at the beginning: tax survey and reform, an accountability campaign, a crackdown on smugglers, de-weaponization of society and devolution of power. De-weaponization, tax reform and a crackdown on smugglers are all attempts to strengthen core functions of the state apparatus: administration of violence, extraction capability and the implementation of rules. Given the country’s history

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of military-led state formation, it is not very surprising that the army takes on this task; accountability suits army governmentality. Given the widespread disillusionment with politicians and bureaucrats, it is a source of legitimacy. The same could be true of the devolution of power, which is also a good, catchy governance slogan (cf. Burki et al., 1999). The new set-up, in which the Deputy Commissioner, who represented the tradition of vice-regalism, is replaced by an indirectly elected Nazim, seems to be a (modest) attempt to strengthen grass-roots democracy and to anchor the state more firmly in society. Success, however, is far from sure. Previous attempts to introduce ‘guided democracy’ from below – Ayub’s Basic Democrats – have proved a failure. Real financial autonomy for the local institutions is not in sight (Waseem, 2000). Given the heavy financial burden, military spending and the limited growth of the (formal) economy, it is unclear how a third tier of government could be financed. Considered as different parts of one strategy in a power struggle, accountability and devolution make more sense; they threaten both political parties and bureaucrats. Political parties would come under pressure from below and would lose their status as (weak) mediators between state and society. Given the fact that bureaucrats are targeted firmly by the accountability campaign, the military would be left as the sole strong corporate actor on the state’s field. There are also some economic aspects regarding recent moves. The army’s involvement in civil affairs could be interpreted as an attempt to rescue the more profitable parts of the state and the economy. The Water and Power Development Authority (WAPDA), controlled by army officers, is a good example. The privatization of these and other state-managed enterprises would not only make the state ‘leaner’, but enable key military actors to gain from such transactions. In the long run, state decay could be restricted to those regions which are of no importance to Pakistan’s economy and to those state functions which are remains of the ‘overdeveloped’ developmental state. ‘State decay’ would turn into downsizing or ‘redeployment’ of the state. Yet, in order to get there and to bring down the highly unprofitable share of military expenditures, the army would have to transform itself at least partially into a civilian actor. Those 30,000 soldiers running WAPDA could be seen as a starting point. However, it is uncertain whether profitable enterprises and a lean state would be able to trigger economic growth big enough to ‘feed’ the less profitable parts of economy and society.

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Index Accountability 171 Administration 131 Local 147 Afghanistan 184 Aid 11 Algeria 75, 76, 77 Amparo 103 Angola 84, 131, 134 Argentina 104 Armed groups 77 Autonomy 4, 9, 104, 140 Benin 86 Bosnia 33 Boundaries 2, 4, 14, 22, 28, 58, 64, 72, 177, 186, 198 Physical 98 Political 7 Temporal 29 Territorial 2 Brazil 99 Bureaucracy 144, 150, 155, 156, 167, 169, 193, 194, 200, 205 Burkina Faso (Burkinabese) 125 Caids 78 Cambodia 83 Cameroon 83, 88 Centrafrique 83 Centralization 81 Ceremonies 23 Chile 99 China 84, 87 Civil and Military 185, 186 Civil Service 193 Civil War 116, 190 Clan ties 148 Clientelism 75, 148

Concessions 117 Congo (the Democratic Republic of) 86, 174 Congo-Brazzaville 84 Conscription 11 Corruption 78, 103, 141, 170, 185, 203 Criminalization 65, 165 Cuba 133 Customs 77 Democratization 41, 175, 177 Dependency theory 3, 7 Discharge 82 Djibouti 86 Domination 15, 109 Bureaucratic 5 Donors 168 ECOWAS 133 Elections 203 Embargo 134 Eritrea 86 Ethiopia 134 European Union 1, 8, 36 Family Ties 185 Fiscality 80 Fiscal Evasion 90 Foreign Investment 106, 168, 172 France 89, 118, 120, 125 Germany 118, 120 Globalization 8 Gouvernementalitè 18 Governmentality 24, 81, 188, 195, 197 New 194

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Great Britain 89, 191 Guinea 86, 118 Health Care 178 Hinduvta 43 Historicity 21, 154 Humanitarian assistance 126 Ideal Type 10, 12 Illegal trafficking 143 Imaginary 190 India 41, 183, 189, 191 The State, of 61, 66 Indirect government 77 Informal 131, 178, 200 Informality 55 Informalization 165 Insecurity 101 Institutionalization 19, 20 International Institutions 66 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 1, 33, 165 International Organizations 179 Intervention 34 Iran 122 Iraq 133 Islamization 200 Italy 119, 120 Ivory-coast 84, 130 Japan 119 Judges 103 Judiciary 48, 98 Kenya 86, 174 Kosovo 33 Kuwait 119 Labour 151, 164 Language 23 Law 24, 31, 65 Legal and Illegal 55, 79, 81, 89, 177 Legal pluralism 13 Legitimacy 47, 52, 66, 156, 170, 176

Liberalization 79 Liberia 33, 85 Libya 83, 133 Local Authority 152, 153, 169 Local Governance 50 Madhokar Sarpodtar 54 Malaysia 122 Mexico 100 Courts 103 Military 143, 172, 184, 190 Aid 192, 201 Modern State Ideal type, of 2, 12, 42 Modernization 164 Theories of 3 Morocco 74, 78, 76 Movement 60 Protest 153 Mozambique 33, 83, 84, 86, 131, 134 Muhajirs 193 Myth 63 Narrative 22 Nationalism 56, 79 Nationalization 200 Niger 83, 84 Nigeria 83 Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) 179 OAU 133 Pakistan 46 Participation 51, 175, 177 Paternalism 75 Patrimonialism 75 Patronage 63, 171 Peru 99 Plunder 11 Police 143, 173 Portugal 120 Power 15

Index

Delegation, of 74 Field, of 15 Practices 18, 25, 61, 74 Privatization 31, 35, 72, 79, 81, 83, 100, 106, 108, 172 Public Enterprises 87, 203 Public Expenditure 168 Public Investments 165, 168 Public and Private 27, 81, 72, 75, 138, 139, 142, 146, 177, 186 Raïs 78 Rites 23 Schools 179 Senegal 84, 130 Shakhas 48 Shivsena 41 Sierra Leone 85, 123, 128 Singapore 122 Smuggling 201, 204 Social Capital 147 Social Security 108, 151 Solidarity 149 Somalia 86, 126, 131, 134 South Africa 89 Sovereignty 8 Soviet Union 32, 46 Space 27 State Apparatus 5 Conception, of 12, 42 Developmental, the 63, 108, 149, 165, 196, 201 ‘Doing’, the 14 Federal, the 5 Field of power, as a 15 The Idea, of 10 Image, of 16, 19, 111 Privatization, of 71 Socialization, of 153, 149 Society, and the 30 Theories, of 4 Western, the 7, 35

213

State Formation 76, 91, 176, 186, 197, 203 Statization 177 Straddling 137 Sudan 83, 126, 174 Sweden 119 Symbols 22 Tax Collection 77 Evasion 76, 81 Fraud 78 Taxation 11, 16, 83, 127, 143, 156, 165, 178, 185, 204 Territory 132 Thackeray, Bal 43, 53 Time 29 Trade Unions 154 Traffic in Drugs 116, 126 Trajectory 21, 142, 155 Transnationality 131 Transnational Institutions 11 Tunisia 74, 76, 80 Turkey 120 Uganda 33, 89 Unions 106, 108 United Nations 125, 128, 130, 133 United States 89, 118, 192 Vigilantism 66 Violence 16, 43, 58, 75, 127, 150, 152, 170, 172, 178, 190, 194, 198 Monopoly, on 174 Politics, of 57 War Economy 174 World Bank 33 World Bank Group 165 World historical conditions 11 World Trade Organization 8 Yugoslavia 33