From Nation-Building to State-Building

Mark T. Berger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317997221
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines the history of nation-building during the era of decolonization and the Cold War, and on the more recent post-Cold War and post-9/11 pursuit of nation-building in what have become known as 'collapsed' or 'failed' states.

In the post-Cold War and post-9/11 era nation-building, or what is increasingly termed state-building, has taken on renewed salience, making it more important than ever to set the idea and practice of nation-building in historical perspective. Focusing on both historical and contemporary examples, the contributors explore a number of important themes that relate to 'successful' and 'unsuccessful' nation-building efforts from South Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s to East Timor, Afghanistan and Iraq in the twenty-first century.

From Nation-Building to State-Building was previously published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly and will be of interest to students and scholars of comparative politics and peace studies.

From Nation-Building to State-Building: the geopolitics of development, the nation-state system and the changing global order

MARK T BERGER

ABSTRACT This introductory article emphasises the need to put the contemporary nation-building (state-building) effort in post-Saddam Iraq and elsewhere in historical perspective. With the resurgence of a powerful international discourse on nation-building that draws very selectively on the ostensible lessons of earlier nation-building successes and failures since 1945 (in fact the term nation-building is increasingly being substituted for the less problematic concept of state-building), it is more important than ever to set the idea and practice of nation-building in the context of decolonisation, the universalisation of the nation-state system, the geopolitics of the rise and fall of the Cold War and the transformation of the global political economy between the 1950s and the 1990s. In contrast to a growing number of quantitative and technocratic studies of nation-building and political instability, the article emphasises the profound need for broad qualitative analysis that historicises and de-routinises nation-building and the international system of nation-states in order to facilitate better and more critical engagement with contemporary nation-building and the wider crisis of the nation-state system of the early 21st century.

Against the backdrop of unparalleled US global power in the post-cold war and post-9/11 era, of rising levels of inequality within, and the growing crisis of, the globalizing world economy and of the deepening crisis of the nation-state system centred on the United Nations, ‘nation-building’ has taken on renewed salience.¹ Nevertheless, the long shadow of Washington's failure in the 1960s to turn South Vietnam into a stable and legitimate capitalist nation-state continues to loom over US-led nation-building efforts specifically, and US foreign policy and international politics in the early 21st century more generally.² In the 1970s and 1980s Washington explicitly sought to avoid the nation-building of an earlier era (particularly the use of large numbers of US troops). In fact, the term itself was more or less excised from the North American foreign policy lexicon even when indirect, if not direct, US intervention in nation-states such as El Salvador in the 1980s bore most of the hallmarks, for better and for worse, of the nation-building of the Vietnam era.³

In the post-cold war and particularly the post-9/11 era the term has been reinstated, albeit reluctantly, and in the past few years a more acceptable substitute (state-building) has been increasingly relied upon.⁴ For example, on 25 September 2001 President George W Bush reassured the US public that the new ‘war on terror’ would not involve nation-building in Afghanistan. However, by early 2002 Washington was not only engaged in nation-building in Afghanistan, but the Pentagon had begun planning the military invasion of Iraq and the State Department had begun developing plans (officially known as the ‘Future of Iraq Project’) for post-war nation-building there (plans, however, that the Pentagon ignored after the fall of Baghdad).⁵

Nation-building (or state-building) is being defined here as an externally driven, or facilitated, attempt to form or consolidate a stable, and sometimes democratic, government over an internationally recognised national territory against the backdrop of the establishment and consolidation of the UN and the universalisation of a system of sovereign nation-states.⁶ Nation-building and state-building can encompass formal military occupation, counter-insurgency, peacekeeping, national reconstruction, foreign aid and the use of stabilisation forces under the auspices of the USA, Britain, France, NATO, the UN or another international or regional organisation.⁷

The 1990s saw a dramatic expansion of UN-sponsored peace keeping and nation-building, but the ouster of Saddam Hussein (1979–2003), and the subsequent occupation of Iraq, were notable initially for the complete absence of the United Nations, while its subsequent role has been relatively marginal. The initial US intervention in Iraq was organised around a ‘coalition of the willing’ and had no formal UN involvement. As is well known, this flowed from the fact that, while the UN played a long-standing role in weapons inspection in, and the maintenance of sanctions on, Iraq, the US-led overthrow of the regime in Baghdad had been preceded by increasingly antagonistic relations between the USA and the UN, particularly key members of the Security Council, over how to deal with Baghdad. The USA eventually decided to embark on the invasion and subsequent nation-building effort in Iraq without the authorisation of the UN Security Council.

This special issue seeks to put the contemporary nation-building, or statebuilding, effort in post-Saddam Iraq and elsewhere in historical perspective. To this end the articles collected here focus on the history of nation-building during decolonisation and the Cold War (and earlier in the case of the British in Iraq in the 1920s) and on the more recent post-cold war and post-9/11 pursuit of nation-building in what have become known as ‘collapsed’, ‘collapsing’, ‘failed’ or ‘failing’ states. While many of the articles in this issue focus on the US role in nation-building historically and currently, some of the contributions also discuss the role of other foreign powers where applicable, and, of course, of the UN. Overall the articles reflect an effort to link the study of US diplomatic history and international history more generally to the study of economic development, geopolitics, international relations and international political economy in the erstwhile Third World. Focusing on both historical and contemporary examples they explore a number of important themes that relate to ‘successful’ and ‘unsuccessful’ nation-building efforts from South Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s to East Timor, Afghanistan and Iraq in the 21st century.

This introductory article begins by discussing a range of contemporary theories about the US-centred post-cold war order, nation-building and statebuilding. The latter part of the introduction attempt to locate the overall dynamics and geopolitical economy of nation-building in the context of decolonisation, the universalisation of the nation-state system, the rise and fall of the Cold War and the transformation of the global political economy between the 1950s and the 1990s. The key point here is that it is more important than ever to set the idea and practice of nation-building in the context of the world-historical shift from exhausted colonialism and decolonisation to exhausted internationalism and globalisation, global changes which have been central to the universalisation and transformation of the nation-state system over the past 50 years or so. In contrast to a growing number of quantitative and technocratic studies of state-building and political instability, which will be discussed below, the introduction to this special issue and the contributions that follow emphasise the profound need for a broad qualitative analysis that historicises and de-routinises nation-building and the international system of nation-states in order to facilitate better and more critical engagement with contemporary nation-building initiatives.

The most obvious contemporary example of this problem (an example that is discussed in some detail by Toby Dodge in the last article in this issue) is the way in which the US occupation of Iraq after 20 March 2003 failed to confront the complex legacy of British-led nation-building efforts in the 1920s, which was succeeded by years of brutal and increasingly narrowly based authoritarianism in which ostensibly national institutions became overlaid by patrimonial lines of control.⁸ The US overthrow of Saddam Hussein has come at a time not only when the nation-state of Iraq is in crisis (arguably it has been in crisis since its creation in 1920), but when the wider UN-centred nation-state system itself has entered a prolonged crisis. This has taken place against the backdrop of the end of the Cold War, the uneven and incomplete transition to globalisation, and the emergence in geopolitical terms of an ostensibly unipolar world centred on US economic and political primacy and bolstered by overwhelming US military power.

‘Democratic imperialism’: geopolitics and ‘America's mission’ in the post-cold war era

In the wake of 11 September Sebastian Mallaby made an explicit call for the USA to embrace ‘imperialism’. In the pages of the prestigious journal, Foreign Affairs, he lamented the fact that ‘after more than two millennia of empire, orderly societies now refuse to impose their own institutions on disorderly ones’. In his view, however, ‘a new imperial moment has arrived, and by virtue of its power America is bound to play the leading role’. According to Mallaby, modern and civil institutions are never going to develop in a distressingly high numbers of ‘failed states’—no matter how much foreign aid is poured in—and as a result they are all potential sources of world disorder. He emphasised that international institutions, such as the UN, have also failed and it is now the duty and burden of America to make the world safe for civilisation. He prescribed a renewed effort by the USA to bring about greater global stability and reshape the world in its own image via a process that would include the establishment of new international institutions that would be focused explicitly on nation-building.⁹

Of course, Mallaby was not the first to emphasise the apparently growing chaos of the post-cold war era. Well before al-Qaeda's suicide bombers flew hijacked passenger planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon various commentators had warned that the end of the Cold War was ushering in a new era of conflict and disorder.¹⁰ Nor was Mallaby the first to suggest the need for some form of US-led imperial project following the end of the Cold War.¹¹ But, since 9/11, questions of international security, nation-building and Washington's imperial mission have taken on a new significance. For example, in 2002 the self-described neoconservative Max Boot (of the Wall Street Journal) produced a book-length study of US involvement in ‘small wars’ since the late 18th century, concluding that the USA should embrace the small wars of the 21st century in an effort to expand ‘the empire of liberty’.¹² In a similar vein the prominent historian Niall Ferguson asked rhetorically whether ‘the leaders of the one state with the economic resources to make the world a better place have the guts to do it?’. Writing in the period between 11 September 2001 and the start of US operations in Afghanistan, he concluded that ‘we shall soon see’.¹³ In his most recent book Ferguson again suggests that the USA take up the imperial burden; however, he also expresses serious doubts about the country's ability to do so, focusing particularly on what he regards as a lack of political will and social and cultural commitment to nation-building within a wider US imperial framework. He also calls into doubt the ability of the USA to meet the financial costs of a global imperium in a world that Ferguson represents as increasingly anarchic.¹⁴ Eliot A Cohen follows a similar line of reasoning: although, he says, ‘dour white men may no longer raise flags and color overseas possessions in red on their maps … that hardly changes the reality of hierarchy and subordination in international politics’; a world without the USA at its centre ‘is too horrifying to contemplate’. In his view the ‘real alternatives’ are ‘US hegemony exercised prudently or foolishly, consistently or fecklessly, safely or dangerously—and for this, US leaders must look back’ to earlier empires ‘to school themselves in the wisdom that will make such statesmanship possible’.¹⁵

From a somewhat different angle, Robert Cooper, a one-time adviser to UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, has also sought to make the case for the ‘new imperialism’. Cooper, who distinguishes between, pre-modern (contem...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. From Nation-Building to State-Building: the geopolitics of development, the nation-state system and the changing global order
• 2. Redirecting the Revolution? The USA and the failure of nation-building in South Vietnam
• 3. Congo: from state collapse to ‘absolutism’, to state failure
• 4. Nation-Building in the Land of Eternal Counter-insurgency: Guatemala and the contradictions of the Alliance for Progress
• 5. From National Development to ‘Growth with Equity’: nation-building in Chile, 1950–2000
• 6. The National or the Social? Problems of nation-building in post-World War II Philippines
• 7. El Salvador: state-building before and after democratisation, 1980–95
• 8. Haiti: the saturnalia of emancipation and the vicissitudes of predatory rule
• 9. East Timor's Double Life: smells like Westphalian spirit
• 10. Papua New Guinea at Thirty: late decolonisation and the political economy of nation-building
• 11. Peace Building and State-Building in Afghanistan: constructing sovereignty for whose security?
• 12. Iraq: the contradictions of exogenous state-building in historical perspective
• 13. Beyond State-Building: global governance and the crisis of the nation-state system in the 21st century
• Index