Strong Societies and Weak States

State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World

Joel S. Migdal

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691212852
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Why do many Asian, African, and Latin American states have such difficulty in directing the behavior of their populations--in spite of the resources at their disposal? And why do a small number of other states succeed in such control? What effect do failing laws and social policies have on the state itself? In answering these questions, Joel Migdal takes a new look at the role of the state in the third world. Strong Societies and Weak States offers a fresh approach to the study of state-society relations and to the possibilities for economic and political reforms in the third world.
In Asia, Africa, and Latin America, state institutions have established a permanent presence among the populations of even the most remote villages. A close look at the performance of these agencies, however, reveals that often they operate on principles radically different from those conceived by their founders and creators in the capital city. Migdal proposes an answer to this paradox: a model of state-society relations that highlights the state's struggle with other social organizations and a theory that explains the differing abilities of states to predominate in those struggles.

PART ONE

States and Societies

FROM 1947 to 1965, the world witnessed a massive change, indeed a revolution, in its political map. The unraveling of empire in Asia and Africa during these years took on numerous different guises. In Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq, for example, there was an almost imperceptible transfer of authority over several decades from British officials to indigenous leaders. Other cases had sharper demarcations, but even these differed substantially. The British transferred power to Sierra Leone blacks in 1961 in as fraternal a fashion as one could imagine, but in India and Palestine their departure came only after bitter struggles and opened the way to new, even more bloody battles.

Several countries’ decolonization and independence experiences stood out in particular, and these rippled throughout what came to be known as the Third World. The dogged success of civil disobedience in India, the disorders in the Gold Coast in 1948, the ignoble defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam, Gamal Abdul Nasser’s surprising nationalization of the Suez Canal, and the battle of the revolutionary National Liberation Front (FLN) in Algeria against France’s last ditch stand for empire all had wide reverberations. From his vantage point in North Africa, Franz Fanon, echoing a refrain of Lenin, reflected the powerful influence of an experience such as Dien Bien Phu on others: “The great victory of the Vietnamese people at Dien Bien Phu is no longer, strictly speaking, a Vietnamese victory. Since July 1954, the question which the colonized peoples have asked themselves has been, ‘What must be done to bring about another Dien Bien Phu? How can we manage it?’ ”¹

To both contemporary and aspiring state leaders, these landmark cases were speeding an end to European empire and suggesting the potential political strength in poor, subjugated countries. Daring leadership, such as that of Mohandas Gandhi, Kwame Nkrumah, and Gamal Abdul Nasser, together with imaginative political organization, as that found in India’s Congress, the FLN, and the Vietnamese Communist party, could topple the rich and powerful. An imperial state could be reduced to a Gulliver among the Lilliputians. Even to Third World leaders who eluded explosive anticolonial struggles, events in distant India or Algeria lent confidence about the important role that centralized, mobilizing politics could play in their countries after independence.

Western imperial powers were not only the bêtes noires in the transition from colony to statehood, but they were also models to be emulated. The founding fathers of new states shaped their goals on the basis of those of already established states and the dominant European nationalist ideologies of the nineteenth century.² As in both the West and the Socialist bloc, the new political leaders of Asia and Africa came to believe in their states’ potential to mold their societies through virtuous planning and meticulously laid out policies. Even in Latin America, where many state organizations had been exceedingly weak and corrupt during the first half of the century, a new “can-do” spirit gripped many who aspired to state leadership. The state organization became the focal point for hopes of achieving broad goals of human dignity, prosperity, and equity; it was to be the chisel in the hands of the new sculptors. This new state, it was believed, could create a very different social order, a unified channel for people’s passions that until now had run in countless different streams.

This book is about the capabilities of states to achieve the kinds of changes in society that their leaders have sought through state planning, policies, and actions. Capabilities include the capacities to penetrate society, regulate social relationships, extract resources, and appropriate or use resources in determined ways.³ Strong states are those with high capabilities to complete these tasks, while weak states are on the low end of a spectrum of capabilities.

Have states in the Third World lived up to their billings in the generation since decolonization? Have they become strong states? Certainly, in terms of penetration, many states have demonstrated impressive capabilities, changing the very nature of institutional life even in distant villages and towns. However, the answer to the question for most states is negative when one looks at some other aspects of state capabilities, especially the abilities to regulate social relations and use resources in determined ways. The bright hopes of those heady years surrounding decolonization have faded considerably.

In all fairness, the standards set were unrealistic. As the depth of the problems to be solved became apparent, it became more and more difficult to sustain an image of these states and societies performing, as Albert Hirschman once put it, like wind-up toys lumbering single-mindedly through the various stages of development.⁴ Even by more modest standards, however, a good many states have faltered badly in building the capabilities to change their societies in particular ways. The central question in the rest of this volume is why so many states have sputtered in amassing such capabilities, although a handful of others have increased their capabilities dramatically. Beyond that question, I argue that the failure of states to have people in even the most remote villages behave as state leaders want ultimately affects the very coherence and character of the states themselves.

What kinds of capabilities have Third World states developed to achieve planned social change and what kinds of limitations have they manifested? Unfortunately, it is hard to answer that question straightforwardly. We still do not have even a generally acceptable characterization of how Third World states have fared, let alone pictures to convey the major varieties of experiences or theories to explain why things are as they are. An odd duality, or even contradiction, has marked the social science literature. One version gleaned from scholarly works shares many assumptions held by those with such high hopes about the possibilities for progressive change. It has set politics, especially state politics, center stage, kneading society into new forms and shapes and adapting it to the exigencies created by industrialization or other stimuli. This is the image of the strong state.

Scholars have described how states, for better or worse, have become the constant and formidable presence even in the most remote villages, especially in regions such as Latin America and East Asia. They have stressed how states reshaped societies by promoting some groups and classes while repressing others and simultaneously maintaining autonomy from any single group or class.⁵ Theories of corporatism and bureaucratic authoritarianism have emphasized the activism and strength of the state in regulating, even shaping, the eruptive conflicts that develop from industrialization and the mobilization of new social groups.⁶ The state, wrote James M. Malloy, “is characterized by strong and relatively autonomous governmental structures that seek to impose on the society a system of interest representation based on enforced limited pluralism.”⁷

A second perspective, in contrast, has portrayed the state as almost totally impotent in the swirl of dizzying social changes that have overtaken these societies, changes largely independent of any impetus from the state itself. Some scholars have viewed the dynamics of these changes within the country’s borders, while others have seen these uncontrollable forces coming from large powers and the world economy. In both instances, the state’s image is weak.

This portrait has come from journalists and social scientists alike, who have described the activist state as more often illusion than reality. They have remarked on the inept, bumbling nature of states as well as on the instability and ineffectiveness governing bodies have demonstrated in trying to carry out their grand designs. C. L. Sulzberger, for example, reported in the New York Times: “One remarkable feature of the two-generation period covered by my working years was the creation of new states, most of them backward and weak. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule. . . . But the majority are helpless.”⁸ Or, as Stephen Krasner summarized the situation, “Most developing countries have very weak domestic political institutions.”⁹

Planning new social orders has taken on a surrealistic quality in societies where, as Huntington put it, “governments simply do not govern.”¹⁰ Governments have been unable to achieve that which had been so widely assumed inevitable. As Wildavsky noted, “Planners begin by attempting to transform their environment and end by being absorbed into it. This pattern of failure is most evident in the poor countries of the world where glittering promise has been replaced by discouraging performance.”¹¹

Those portraying the weak states have dwelt not only on states in sub-Saharan Africa, where even some proponents of the strong state image admit the rule of state leaders has extended beyond the capital city or the main port only in the most tenuous and intermittent ways. But their image of weak states has also extended to the so-called “bureaucratic-authoritarian” states of Latin America. One serious doubter about how strong and active Latin American states have been is Linn A. Hammergren; “It is true that constitutions and legislation often accord enormous powers of control to central governments, but the question remains as to whether this control is actually exercised or exists only on paper. The limited success of Latin American governments in enforcing their own legislation suggests that the extent of this control is not great.”¹² Similar statements have come out of Asia, especially some fine recent work on India. “Three decades of democratically planned development have failed to alleviate India’s rural poverty,” writes Atul Kohli.¹³ With some variation from region to region within India, he notes, the state’s policy performance can be characterized overall as a “failure to pursue the regime’s own professed goals.”¹⁴

If we can make any sense at all from these diametrically opposed images of strong and weak states, perhaps opposing scholars are looking for strength in different realms. The major focus of proponents of the strong state image has been on capabilities involving state penetration of society and extraction of resources. Many of these researchers have written about macrolevel state policies, such as regulation and taxation of foreign corporations or certain types of income transfer. In these areas, some states have been more accomplished. These somewhat more potent states have been found most commonly in several places: in parts of Latin America, they have evolved as a presence in their societies because independence was achieved more than a hundred years ago; in parts of South and East Asia, some complex political organizations were built in the framework of anti-imperial struggles; and in parts of the Middle East, imperial forces opposing the emergence of strong state organizations were often the weakest.

Those favoring the weak state image, meanwhile, have examined capabilities involving regulation of social relationships and appropriation of resources in determined ways. They have often studied social policy implementation, especially the difficulties state leaders have had in ensuring intended widespread changes in people’s social behavior and planned overall transformations in social relations. Many states have tended to encounter particular difficulties in achieving their leaders’ aims at the local level. A number of scholars have concentrated on sub-Saharan Africa, where leaders have had grave difficulties implementing social policies that call upon individuals down to the lowest status groups and out to the most remote areas to change their behavior and beliefs.¹⁵

This dual nature of states is at the heart of any possible understanding of the Third World today. States have become a formidable presence in their societies, but many have experienced faltering efforts to get their populations to do what state policy makers want them to do. States are like big rocks thrown into small ponds: they make waves from end to end, but they rarely catch any fish. The duality of states—their unmistakable strengths in penetrating societies and their surprising weaknesses in effecting goal-oriented social changes—is my central concern in the following chapters.

Of course, significant differences exist from state to state and from region to region in the Third World in the capabilities of states—that is, in their ability to determine how social life should be ordered. All societies have changed enormously in the Third World over the last generation but not necessarily according to the designs of state leaders. States have had unprecedented revenues at their disposal; they have built huge armies, police f...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• Part One: States and Societies
• Part Two: Crisis and Reconsolidation: The Impact of Capitalism and Colonialism
• Part Three: The Continuing Impact of an Environment of Conflict on State and Society
• Appendixes
• Index