Apocalyptic triad: state failure, state disintegration and state collapse: structural problems of democracy in Africa

‘Africa’ refers to sub-Saharan Africa throughout this article.

For the problems of categories cf. Erdmann 2001, pp. 37 f.

With regard to the limiting of the monopoly on the use of force, it may become difficult to maintain the empirical clarity of the analytical distinction made here between state failure and state disintegration. It nonetheless seems useful to preserve this analytical distinction for the time being. In cases of state failure, the monopoly on the use of force is only limited temporarily and sporadically, while in cases of state collapse it is much more limited, with a definable territorial dimension and a longer-term time span.

Another type of state collapse, its orderly form, so to speak, is that of a secession combined with the establishment of one or more new states: Ethiopia and Eritrea are an example of this in Africa, the USSR/CIS an example outside Africa. Since this involves the founding of a new state, i.e. the result is two new states and not a collapsed state, this process is not dealt with here as a third type of state collapse.

This is not intended to assert that the development of state-nations in Western Europe and in the Third World (including Africa) follows the same pattern. The crucial difference, though, lies not so much in the coercive nature of the colonial state or in the foreignness of this product exported from Western Europe, as emphasized by Peter Gärtner (2001, pp. 39 ff.), but in the time dimension and in the social substrate on which the formation of nation states is based: the crucial factor here is the weakness of the state structures as the main instrument of formation. The African states had (and have) neither the capacity, nor the time, nor the moderately homogeneous social substrate needed to create nation-state cohesion of the kind produced in Western Europe. Thus the argument about artificiality has no counterpart of cultural “naturalness”; instead one would have to take a more nuanced look at both the time dimension and the state’s capacity for organized ideological and cultural integration.

In the first instance, this simply means that the political community is not seriously challenged from the inside by any major group. The citizens see themselves, in general, as “Malawians”, “Tanzanians” etc. Even in the Congo, which has experienced both inner collapse and destruction by outside forces, and where large areas have not been subject to any effective state control since the end of the 1970s, there are reports of a broad identification with the Congolese state or with the political community of the Congo when faced with invaders from Rwanda and Uganda (Englebert 2002; Tull 2002). We should remember, here, that the oldest democracies, Switzerland and the United States of America, are multi-ethnic states.

In fact the first two points apply to all the African states, while the other two, army and subnational movements, are only to be found in some states.

Nominally, official development assistance (ODA) only fell a little in the 1990s, from 16.81 billion USD (1990) to 15.982 billion USD (1999). ODA per capita had dropped more dramatically, from 36 USD to just 20 USD (1999), and ODA as a percentage of GNP had fallen from 9.9 to 4.1 % (1998). However: until 1997, the decline in development assistance mainly affected just four countries: Kenya, Somalia, Zaire/DR Congo and Sudan (van de Walle 2001, pp. 217 ff.; World Bank 1992, 2001, 2002; OECD 2002).

Many parts of Latin America and Asia have much longer histories as states than most parts of (sub-Saharan) Africa, even if Spanish and Portuguese colonialism in Latin America and Asia did not by any means have rational bureaucracies (cf. Reinhard 2000, pp. 482–503). This refers both to colonial history and to the native “traditional states” (Breuer 1998) or “patrimonial-state structures” (Weber 1980, p. 585), which not only encompassed much larger units, but also had more elaborate bureaucracies. There are scarcely any examples of this in the old African kingdoms, which can barely even be described as patrimonial bureaucracies. Most of the continent was not made up of states, even “traditional states”.

The continued existence of smaller state authorities or smaller territorially limited ones will certainly be possible, but their prospects for the future are less certain (cf. Eickenberg 1990‐2000; Michler 1998; Marchal 2001; Nord 2002).

In the context of state failure, a not-unproblematic response from development experts is to promote the principle of subsidiarity. This policy, which is in practice designed to push the state out of its remaining “blocking” positions in the field of local politics, is currently being debated and implemented by GTZ experts in southern Africa, but at the same time reflects a long-established practice: many development projects push aside the last remaining, ineffective state institutions and establish their own parallel structures, in order to at least be able to achieve something for the duration of the project—and to make their own actions meaningful. With regard to the legitimacy of state institutions, state order, and the rule of law, this form of “para-statehood” is highly problematic. In some areas, then, development cooperation contributes indirectly to the delegitimation of state office-holders and to the disintegration of the state.

These figures are based on surveys from the years 1998 and 2000 in Malawi und Zambia and 2000 in Namibia. The sample in Namibia comprised 1000 respondents, in Malawi there were 1056 respondents in 1998 and 1958 in 2000, and in Zambia there were 1102 in 1998 and 1108 in 2000. The surveys were carried out in the same villages and urban districts in 1998 and 2000.

Recently it has been suggested that this could be provided by private security services. This idea is not only invalidated by European experience, but also by the insufficient financial clout of the rural and urban population. Even under the most (neo)liberal governments in the West, guaranteeing public safety has been a sovereign or state function, and has not been privatized.

Cf. also the exemplary study by Johannes Harnischfeger on the militias in Nigeria (Harnischfeger 2003).

It is equally difficult to discern a trend in later elections. van de Walle (2001, pp. 257 f.) does note a slight decline in voter turnout from 63.9 to 61.3 % of registered voters, but this decline is more understandable than noteworthy, since a country’s first election is, by nature, likely to mobilize voters to a greater extent. Moreover, the reference to registered voters alone is not conclusive.

The following statements were used to ascertain support for democracy: “Democracy is preferable to any other kind of government”, or: “In certain situations, a non-democratic government can be preferable”, or: “For someone like me, it doesn’t matter what form of government we have”.

For the concept of specific and diffuse support, see Easton 1975; for more detail Westle (1989).

This is not meant to imply automatically that the states in which the surveys were conducted are in fact democracies.

Antonie Nord (2001) demonstrated the same thing for Namibia and Botswana, and at the same time observed political trust, a belief in the effectiveness of the state, and a widespread acceptance of the political community. Undoubtedly both these states are comparatively effective in African terms, so they do not seem relevant for the context under discussion here. However, the acceptance of the political order and the political community is important.

For Africa, three forms of neopatrimonial authoritarianism are distinguished: (1) military oligarchies, (2) plebiscitary one-party systems, and (3) competitive one-party systems (Bratton and van de Walle 1997, p. 77); sultanism as another possible type of system is not included.

This is not intended to conjure away the distance between the farmers and the state, which is entirely compatible with this thesis. The farmers’ attitude, like that of all taxpayers, is ambivalent: they expect certain services (security, a functioning market with infrastructure, good prices for their work and products etc.), but at the same time they do not want it to cost too much, and when things are going well the state is expected to keep its distance. This leads to individual avoidance strategies, e.g. the mobilization of personal relationships or patrons, tax evasion or tax fraud.