War and State-Making
Why Doesn't It Work in the Third World?
GEORG S0RENSEN* Department of Political Science, University ofAarhus, Denmark
Introduction
/~\ \ "TAR MAKES STATES'1 must be one of the most famous quotes \/\f from Charles Tilly's comprehensive historical work on patterns of V Y state formation in Europe. It expresses an important, yet delightfully simple and elegant idea: the activity of war-making is a vital ingredient in state-making. That is because the ability to prepare for a war and then successfully fight it requires power-holders to get involved in actions that are very frequently also conducive to state-making. First and foremost among these is the effective extraction of the resources needed for war-making. Effective extraction involves control, which in turn demands an efficient bureaucratic machinery. Control is possible in the longer run only if there is some modicum of order. Order, control and extraction in turn require a certain measure of legitimacy; without this, extraction would have to rely on coercion, and that would detract from, rather than add to, the capability for war-making. Furthermore, in many cases effective extraction is not enough, because there is not a sufficient surplus to extract in the first place. Therefore, war-making might also require the promotion of capital accumulation to provide a sufficient resource base for extraction. In sum, although there are many aspects to the argument, the notion that war makes states is straightforward and very convincing. And the idea has not only been brought forward by Tilly, of course. It has been supported by a large number of empirical studies of state formation.2
But why is it then that the connection between war and state-making briefly outlined here does not appear to be present at all in the weak states in the Third World? If we define war along conventional lines,3 then there is certainly no lack of war involvement in a great number of Third World states.4 And yet, not only has this activity failed to produce any state-building worthy of the name, but also, in a large number of cases, it has led to state decay and
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failure. How can war decisively help to make states in one part of the system and more or less systematically help to destroy states in another? That is the puzzle addressed in this article. Because any really exhaustive answer to the question will always have to be historically specific and concrete, the present undertaking will have to be less ambitious. I can merely outline some of the major factors that are strong candidates for further consideration. Before doing so, it may be helpful to look at some of the wrong, or at least partly misleading, answers so that unpromising avenues can be closed before focusing on those with more potential. First of all, however, a few additional words about the research question itself.
A Legitimate Research Question?
Are we at all allowed to ask the above research question? One immediate objection is that it is simply too big: one cannot justifiably compare The Third World' and 'Europe'; that would amount to overgeneralization. Furthermore, the neat division of the question into two sides, European history and the Third World, is itself problematic, because many salient aspects of war and state-making both here and there are not sufficiently addressed. While all this is true, my claim is that the research question remains legitimate and relevant. There are some general trajectories of war and state-making among European states and among weak Third World states,5 and a comparison of these general patterns reveals some systematic differences that need to be appreciated.
Another possible objection is that this is really an exercise in Eurocentrism, because a European experience of war and state-making is employed as a sort of role model compared with which Third World experiences are found wanting in several respects. However, this objection misses the mark: I am not at all attempting to draw a rosy picture of European state formation, which is then contrasted with some dark and miserable Third World experience. The ambition is merely that of understanding the relationship between war and state-making as they play out in different international and domestic contexts. Indeed, the core of my answer to the puzzle is exactly a demonstration of how these domestic and international contexts varied so as to help produce radically different outcomes.
A final possible objection concerns the concept of the state; that is, just how well does the European concept of the state translate to the Third World? There is no attempt in what follows to claim universal validity, lock, stock and barrel, for a European concept of state. There is universal relevance only in a specific sense: the institutional form of sovereign statehood has been the completely dominant form of political organization since the process of decolonization. Sovereign statehood has outcompeted all other forms of political
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organization, including political empires, the institutional form that has dominated most of human history.
Yet the dominance of sovereign statehood is one of institutional form, not of substance. That is to say, sovereign states all consist of a defined territory containing a population, and with some form of government recognized as such by the international society of states. But in terms of domestic social, economic, political and any other substance, as well as in terms of international relations and connections between 'inside' and 'outside', states indeed exhibit a great deal of variation. Any understanding of the relationship between war and state-making must appreciate such variation between the European experience and the Third World.
Some Wrong Answers
So it's back to the puzzle: why has war frequently led to state-breaking in the Third World when it often led to state-making in Europe? One possible answer comes from focusing on the personal qualities of European power-holders and wannabe state leaders on the one hand and the personal qualities of their Third World counterparts on the other. The reasoning might run as follows: European power-holders were always more civilized and benevolent than their Third World colleagues. Europeans were less self-seeking and much more interested in pursuit of the public good. Several reasons why this is the case immediately suggest themselves. Unlike their Third World counterparts, Europeans were steeped in a solid Christian tradition, imbued with strong norms of concern for their fellow human beings. Furthermore, they emerged from the legacy of the Roman Empire. Political rule in Rome may have had its less attractive sides, but it was from an early point based on a rule of law, and legitimacy and loyalty from citizens was tied to the public office as such, not to the concrete persons that happened to occupy the office.6 In short, European state elites were civilized, whereas their Third World counterparts are not; Europeans are the 'civilized parents', non-Europeans the 'backward children'.7 This line of reasoning is not merely 'politically incorrect', it is also wrong. Tilly forcefully argues that war-making and state-making are activities closely related to organized crime; the latter is a less successful and smaller-scale version of the former. War-making and state-making therefore qualify as 'our largest examples of organized crime.... At least for the European experience of the past few centuries, a portrait of war makers and state makers as coercive and self-seeking entrepreneurs bears a far greater resemblance to the facts that do its chief alternatives'.8 In other words, a distinction between European power-holders as good guys and Third World power-holders as bad guys does not apply. So even if the theoretical basis for the argument appears firm
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enough - that is, the personal qualities of state elites do make a difference when it comes to the promotion of state-making - this line of reasoning is empirically wrong. But it must be added that 'self-seeking entrepreneurs' can be bad apples to different degrees. In other words, there is variation, both in Europe and in the Third World. And in Europe, more than in the Third World, many of the worst rascals were annihilated, for reasons explored below.
Another possible answer to the puzzle focuses on the perceived need for sufficient time and for large amounts of violence in order to perform effectively in state-making. Whereas European state-makers were involved in processes that took 'at least four hundred years'9 and 'cost tremendously in death, suffering, loss of rights',10 those two core commodities, namely 'lots of time and a relatively free hand to persuade and coerce', are not available 'in adequate measure'11 to present-day state-makers in the Third World.
If Third World state-makers are lacking 'a relatively free hand to persuade and coerce', they are certainly not showing any signs in practice of being severely constrained in this respect. Violent domestic conflict has characterized Sub-Saharan Africa since independence. Close to four million people perished in such conflicts between 1960 and 1987. During the 1989-98 period, there were between 52 (1992) and 30 (1997) intrastate armed conflicts in progress at any one time. During this ten-year period, intrastate war took place in Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Peru, Algeria, Angola, Burundi, Chad, the Congo, Ethiopia, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mozambique, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Uganda, Afghanistan, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Turkey, Yemen, Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Russia and Yugoslavia.12 The spinoffs in terms of effective state-building have been meagre. Focusing on Europe, the argument contains another weakness: it is not at all clear that European state-builders enjoyed relatively free hands to persuade and coerce, a point that will be pursued below.
Whether 'time' will solve the problem is, of course, anybody's guess. Two considerations suggest that this might not be the case. First, it can be argued that in many cases the core processes of European state formation took much less than four hundred years; and the examples of Taiwan and South Korea demonstrate that successful state-making, even in the case of ex-colonies, can take place in less than five decades (South Korea and Kenya were at similar economic levels by 1960). Second, during that same period of less than 50 years, the weak states (primarily in Sub-Saharan Africa) made very little progress in state-making terms. It is difficult to see why 'time' would significantly change that situation.
A third argument concerns distortions due to colonialism. Artificial colonial borders created entities prone to ethnic conflict; colonial rule 'derailed the evolutionary process of economic development';13 and the use of traditional structures of authority as instruments of colonial rule 'reversed the normal process
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of political development'. It is certainly true that the legacy of colonialism was not in every way conducive to effective state-making, and in several cases the states that emerged from decolonization were very weak entities. But the reverse argument is also relevant. Colonialism basically introduced and put in place some of the basic elements of statehood, that is, centralizing institutions, control over (most of) the means of violence, territorial demarcation, police forces, bureaucracy, and so on. Seen from the point of view of state-making, there were often as many constructive aspects of colonialism as there were destructive ones. And it is difficult to see why a 'normal process of political development' or 'an evolutionary process of economic development' should have run its course in the absence of colonialism. Theoretically, such a standard - 'normal' and 'evolutionary' process - hardly exists in the first place, and empirically there is a dearth of good cases of non-colonized Third World areas with great success in state-making.
A final problematic argument is about the destabilizing effects of modernization. Modernization involves industrialization, urbanization, increased literacy, and so on. The assertion is that these processes 'heighten ethnic and communal tensions'15 and thus hinder the process of state-making. But the argument in the context of Europe is exactly the opposite: Capital accumulation (i.e. modernization), spurred by war-making, was an important factor in the process of state-making. Modernization is needed because it increases the amount of resources available to society. Such increase is a vital ingredient in state-making. It is thus certainly not modernization as such which hinders state-making; modernization may help spark conflicts over distribution, but it is always distribution of a larger pie than would have been available without it. Again, both the theoretical and the empirical basis for the argument are unsound.
I have probed some of the major answers to the puzzle that I find less promising. Let me turn to those with more potential.
Better Answers I: Different Kinds of War
European power-holders were, much of the time, involved in different kinds of war than are their contemporary Third World counterparts. Europeans always had to face up to external threat: 'Before the twentieth century, the range of viable imbalances was fairly small. Any state that failed to put considerable effort into war making was likely to disappear.'16 Many power-holders were not successful, of course. They were devoured by their stronger competitors. Fundamentally, this kind of external competition was a basic driving force in European state-making. The armed forces faced outward most of the time and were busy preparing for new wars against external enemies. The preparation
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for war forced power-holders into a series of compromises with the subject populations, which constrained their power and paved the way for rights of citizenship. Citizenship in turn meant material benefits for the population. Combined with the creation of domestic order and the promotion of capital accumulation, these processes furthered the building of bonds of loyalty and legitimacy between kings and peoples. (At a later stage, the external disciplining force of violent threat was replaced by a domestic mechanism of constraint: liberal democracy. This also did not happen in the Third World, at least not in the weak states of Sub-Saharan Africa, for reasons I have explored elsewhere.)17
Third World power-holders face no serious external threat, for reasons that are now familiar to us thanks to Jackson & Rosberg's work:18 Post-colonial states and regimes are protected from outside threat by strong international norms, created in the context of decolonization and strengthened during the Cold War. Recolonization, annexation or any other format by which strong states in the North gulp up weak states in the South is not on the agenda. Political and economic conditionalities, or even humanitarian intervention, are not an indication of any basic change in this state of affairs. Therefore, Third World armies face inward; they are much more focused on the domestic realm. This is then combined with a situation where Third World armed forces are not organically linked to their populations.19
Two caveats must be applied to this explanation. First, European power-holders were of course also involved in domestic violent conflict. The whole process of state-making in Europe has little to do with a modern image of international relations, with strong states that are domestic 'hierarchies'20 facing each other in an international 'anarchy'. There was no domestic hierarchy until relatively late, and much of the violent conflict was domestic in the sense that it was related to the struggle between would-be rulers attempting to consolidate their power and internal rivals contesting them. Before the full consolidation of state power, would-be rulers always had to think in terms of two-front battles, against 'domestic' as well as against 'international' opponents. If we make a distinction between state-making, defined as 'attacking and checking competitors and challengers within the territory claimed by the state', and war-making, defined as 'attacking rivals outside the territory already claimed by the state',21 there can be no doubt that state-making was a major activity for several centuries, even though a clear empirical distinction between the two endeavours will often be difficult.22
The point still stands: In contrast with the situation in Europe, where domestic conflict always took place in a context of facing deadly external threat (war-making), domestic conflict in post-colonial states takes place in a context of having a certified life insurance, deposited with the United Nations, which guarantees the absence of external mortal danger, no matter how bad things may look in the domestic realm. That is no guarantee for the survival of the
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scoundrels in the post-colonial context, but it greatly increases the risk that if one scoundrel passes away he will merely be replaced by another, with no constructive spinoffs in terms of state-making.
The second caveat concerns external involvement in the domestic conflicts in post-colonial states. While many analysts have demonstrated that these conflicts are indeed overwhelmingly internal,23 this does not mean that there has been a lack of external involvement. During the Cold War, the superpowers were active in many post-colonial states, sometimes to such an extent that the label of 'proxy wars' is appropriate. After the end of the Cold War, many African countries have been active in wars in adjacent states, the intricate conflict in the Congo being a recent example. But again, this is not a kind of external involvement which constitutes a life-or-death threat to the state subjected to it. It is an additional element in the struggle for power and material benefit between the contending domestic strongmen.24 In short, there was domestic conflict in Europe and there is interstate conflict in the weak, post-colonial states, but the overall context is qualitatively different: sovereign post-colonial statehood is guaranteed. That obviously decreases the salience of power-holders' long-term considerations (i.e. to build a state that will last) and, correspondingly, increases the salience of short-term considerations (i.e. to get rich in a hurry).
This is indeed a paradox: Because post-colonial states were more or less completely created from the outside, in that other states colluded to set them up, that act of external creation left domestic contenders inside the states with a free rein to do whatever they pleased to their subject populations and to each other (provided, of course, that they did not get into conflict with the major interests of the substantial states that set them up in the first place, a point pursued below).
Better Answers II: A Peculiar International Context
The international society's life insurance to post-colonial states came with a price tag. The new international order that was set up in the context of the Cold War was based on a set of rules which rejected changes of borders and the expansion of territorial control by conquest. Existing borders, including those of newly independent ex-colonies, were considered legal and legitimate; attempts to change them by force were not. That is to say, a change of boundaries had to involve acceptance by the sovereign states affected by that change.25 So far, so good. But the respect for existing borders did not mean that stronger states refrained from any kind of involvement whatsoever. Within the framework of existing territorial demarcations, they indeed felt free to pursue their political and economic interests in most any way that they
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saw fit. Yet the weakest post-colonial states, in Sub-Saharan Africa, were not of considerable interest to the Great Powers. Africa was a marginal area, a 'pole of indifference'.26 The United States left involvement to the former colonial powers of Britain and France and became active itself only in areas of perceived importance, where independence created turbulence. The major case of this was the Congo, where the CIA helped in getting Lumumba murdered and later in the taking over of power by Mobutu. Mobutu, one of the all-time major scoundrels even in the exclusive league of African strongmen, received sufficient US support over the years to earn him the label of 'America's Tyrant'.27 The Soviet Union took up the role of the most important arms supplier to tropical Africa, with Ethiopia and Angola as the primary customers.28
The pursuit of political interest by the stronger powers frequently had negative effects on state-making. The same is true for the pursuit of economic interest. The extreme view was set forth by neomarxist dependency theory writers of the 1960s and 1970s, including Andre Gunder Frank, Samir Amin and Immanuel Wallerstein. According to them, global capitalism produces development in one part of the world (the core) and underdevelopment in another part of the world (the periphery). Capitalism in the post-colonial periphery is distorted, mainly owing to the dominant position of foreign capital. According to Amin,29 the peripheral formations exhibit a qualitatively different pattern of economic development compared with the core formations. Four characteristics stand out: '(1) the predominance of agrarian capitalism in the national sector; (2) the creation of a local, mainly merchant bourgeoisie in the wake of dominant foreign capital; (3) a tendency toward a peculiar bureaucratic development, specific to the contemporary periphery; and (4) the incomplete specific character of the phenomena of proletarianization'.30
The radical dependency theorists surely went too far in condemning the periphery to underdevelopment due to economic exploitation by the core. The precise effects of external economic (and political) interest can vary; they have been very different in the case of Taiwan, for example, than in the case of the Congo. But it is certainly true that the pursuit of narrow and egoistic economic interest by core states (and companies) has often had negative effects on state-making in the periphery. The connection to violent conflict should be emphasized in the present context: Pursuing such narrow external economic (or political) interest has often led to violent conflict, but it is a kind of war-making which only rarely contributes to state-making.
In terms of the international context, then, the situation of post-colonial states is indeed peculiar: their continued existence as states is guaranteed by the international system, but the pursuit of political and economic interest by stronger states has frequently hindered the process of state-making. The situation is comparable to the 'life insurance' provided to post-colonial populations by advances in modern medicine: as a result of vaccination and medication, there is much less death from epidemic disease than earlier, but in many cases
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people are left to live miserable lives because the combination of external and domestic political and economic interests hinders a healthy process of state-making.
Better Answers III: Domestic Preconditions and Leadership Become Decisive
When there is a life insurance against extinction, and when the international political and economic context presents a combination of constraints and opportunities in terms of state-making, then it must follow that domestic structural preconditions and domestic leadership become of decisive importance. It was noted earlier that both structural preconditions and the quality of leadership vary substantially across post-colonial states. Structural preconditions may be roughly divided into two phases: the pre-colonial and the colonial periods. As regards the former, a new analysis by Jeffrey Herbst31 argues that the conditions for state consolidation are adverse in Africa because of the socio-geographical conditions, in particular the low population density combined with the serious geographical barriers to long-distance transport. It follows that the long, pre-colonial history of Africa is of decisive importance for understanding current patters of (non-)state-making. I cannot pursue this line of argument in the present context, though this should not be taken to mean that it is unimportant.32 Given the point made above, that colonialism was both destructive and constructive in terms of state-making, let me say a bit more about that.
In terms of good conditions for state-making, it appears to be an advantage to have been colonized by the Japanese, much less so by the Brits, and even less by the French and the Portuguese. It was indicated earlier that East Africa and South Korea/Taiwan were at similar economic levels in per capita terms in the late 1950s. Why then were Taiwan's preconditions so much more favourable in state-making terms than was the case in East Africa?
The Japanese took a special approach to colonization.33 Having been exposed to the threat of imperialist domination itself, Japan had from early on a comprehensive strategy for the role of colonies in the empire: Short-term economic greed of private Japanese interests was held in check by the almost omnipotent governor-general, who held 'extensive political, bureaucratic, military, and legislative powers over the colony';34 at the same time, a strategy of development designed to give Taiwan the role of Japan's supplier of food was set in motion. First, there was a land reform, whereby the complex system of double, or even triple, tenancy was replaced by a simpler structure, which removed one layer of absentee landlords and confirmed the property rights of
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another layer of landlords, who were then given responsibility for tax payment. The settling of property rights increased the incentive to make long-term investment in agriculture; moreover, the entire agricultural sector quickly became monetarized and market-orientated.
The Japanese introduced new techniques, high-yield seeds and fertilizers, and increased the irrigated area to cover 64% of the cultivated land by 1942. The peasants were forced to cooperate in this drive for innovation, and a tight system of social control made sure that they did.35 Taiwanese agriculture was second only to Japan in all of Asia by the late 1930s.
Japan had no intention of developing industry in Taiwan during the early years of its rule, but perspectives had changed by the late 1930s, owing to Japan's increasing power in the region. Taiwan was now to 'introduce some heavy industry that could process raw materials coming from Southeast Asia for stockpiling and shipment to serve the imperial war machine. Taiwan was also to increase its self-sufficiency in consumer goods'.36
Finally, the Japanese were also involved in building infrastructure in Taiwan. Led by the governor-general, the government invested heavily in railways, road-building, harbours and the extension of telegraph lines. A schooling system was set up to provide basic literacy and skills on the one hand and loyalty to Japan and the emperor on the other. The adult literacy rate was close to 60% in 1952.
In summary, the Japanese did create a dependent society on Taiwan, with an agricultural economy geared to Japan's need to import foodstuffs and decisionmaking concentrated in Japanese hands. But it was not underdevelopment; good agricultural productivity together with a sound infra-structural basis, including a comparatively high level of education and the existence of some industrial undertakings, provided a healthy basis for further advancement in economic development. While income and consumption by the Taiwanese were held down, the comparatively high literacy rate and a life expectancy of 59 years by 1952 testified to a quite decent standard of living.
The point in the present context is that the preconditions provided by colonialism cannot be immediately read off from overall figures on GDP per capita. Even if Taiwan and some African countries were on similar overall economic levels by the 1950s, it is abundantly clear that the conditions set up by the Japanese on Taiwan were much more favourable for a later process of state-making than the corresponding conditions provided by British, French and Portuguese colonizers in tropical Africa. It is of course not easy to pass overall judgement on these experiences from a state-making perspective, because they were invariably a mixture of good and bad. Yet it does appear that there were a number of constructive elements in Japanese colonial rule.37
What about leadership? We don't have very informative theories about the relevant factors which are decisive for creating effective leadership. Variation in personal qualities is involved, of course, but humans are capable of build-
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ing any kind of institution, from Sunday schools to brothels and anything in between. So ideally, we should be able to single out those decisive contextual factors which help determine whether 'good' or 'bad' (state) institutions will be sought after. In that context, some of the items discussed earlier are sure to come up again. The turnaround of Chang Kai Shek on Taiwan, for example, from super-scoundrel to effective state-builder had a lot to do with the external pressure applied by Mao and the United States. But no systematic reflections on determinants of leadership quality can be offered here. We may note that there is not a similar external pressure on state leaders in Africa. But there are some incentives: if they behave properly, as defined by the international community, they can expect more aid than if they do not. The definition of to behave 'properly', at the current time, is to create good governance. In the present context, this is the same as state-making. This is surely a much weaker kind of 'pressure' than that exerted on Chang.
Taylor in Liberia has forsaken external aid. Instead, his strategy resembles Mobutu's: rent out the prerogatives of sovereign power to the highest bidder. This includes profiteering from involvement in commerce connected to the war in neighbouring Sierra Leone (i.e. re-export of diamonds), most probably combined with drug-trafficking. The aim is personal gain, not the building of state institutions; 'very little, if any of the revenue from cross-border commerce reaches state coffers, or contributes in any way to the building of state institutions or the provision of public services. The result of this strategy is the creation of a political authority that bears very little resemblance to a state. Instead, it is organized and behaves much as a mafia.'38
Museveni continues to receive substantial international aid. Yet he is also, with his brother General Saleh, involved in war and profiteering in the Congo. In Museveni's case, this appears not to be entirely incompatible with some elements of state-building in Uganda. 'Museveni's regime manages to maintain a military that is more capable and centrally organized than most on the continent. Agents of this regime profit personally from positions in the state, but this is not automatically incompatible with maintenance of state bureaucracies. There is evidence that state agencies in Uganda have increased their capacity to provide services.'39
In sum, the relationship in tropical Africa between war involvement on the one hand and state-making on the other is highly contingent. It may lead to some state-making sometimes; most often it has not.
Conclusion
I began with the famous 'war makes states' quote from Tilly and posed the question why it didn't apply in many places in the Third World. Some wrong
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answers were rejected: European power-holders were not less self-seeking than their Third World counterparts; the lack of time and 'a relatively free hand to persuade and coerce' are not convincing explanations either. Nor is the mere pointing to 'colonial distortions' or 'destabilizing effects of modernization'. Better answers include three major items: (1) the different nature of war in Europe (one with external threat of annihilation) compared with (domestic) war in the Third World; (2) the peculiar international context where external powers can pursue narrow economic and political interests in the weak states while there continues to be a life insurance against extermination; and (3) the distinctive domestic preconditions, including the quality of leadership, in weak states.
Maybe it is not too surprising that war both makes and breaks states. Because of our fixation on Europe as the point of reference, we have been too preoccupied with the constructive effects of war-making. A better look at the rest of the world will surely yield a less attractive picture of the consequences of war. And much of the war-making in Europe has not exactly been helpful either, so both here and there a more nuanced view of the complex relationship between war and state-making is long overdue.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
* Georg S0rensen is Professor of Political Science at Aarhus University, Denmark. He wishes to thank J. Peter Burgess, Stephen J. Rosow and an anonymous referee for their valuable comments on this article.
1 Charles Tilly, 'War Making and State Making as Organized Crime', in Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer & Theda Skocpol, eds, Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 169-191, on p. 170.
2 For a recent example, see Bruce D. Porter, War and the Rise of the State (New York: Free Press, 1994).
3 As an armed conflict involving 1,000 or more battle deaths per year, where an armed conflict is 'a contested incompatibility which concerns government and/or territory [with] the use of armed force between two parties'. Peter Wallensteen & Margareta Sollenberg, 'Armed Conflict, 1989-98', Journal of Peace Research, vol. 36, no. 5, September 1999, pp. 593-606, on p. 605.
4 Ibid.
5 My primary focus is on the weak states in Sub-Saharan Africa.
6 See Walter C. Opello, Jr & Stephen J. Rosow, The Nation-State and Global Order: A Historical Introduction to Contemporary Politics (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1999).
7 M. F. Lindley, quoted from Robert Jackson, Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 71.
8 Tilly (note 1 above), p. 169.
9 Mohammed Ayoob, The Third World Security Predicament (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1995), p. 29.
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10 Charles Tilly, 'War Making and State Making', in Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 1-89, on p. 71.
11 Ayoob (note 9 above), p. 29.
12 Wallensteen & Sollenberg (note 3 above).
13 Ayoob (note 9 above), p. 35.
14 Ibid., p. 36.
15 Ibid., p. 37.
16 Tilly (note 1 above), p. 184.
17 Georg Sorensen, Democracy and Democratization: Processes and Prospects in a Changing World (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1998).
18 Robert lackson & Carl G. Rösberg, Personal Rule in Black Africa: Prince, Autocrat, Prophet, Tyrant (Berkeley, CA: California University Press, 1982); Robert lackson & Carl G. Rösberg, 'Why Africa's Weak States Persist: The Empirical and the luridical in Statehood', World Politics, vol. 35, no. 1, October 1982, pp. 1-24.
19 'European states built up their military apparatuses through sustained struggles with their subject populations and by means of selective extension of protection to different classes within those populations. The agreements on protection constrained the rulers themselves, making them vulnerable to courts, to assemblies, to withdrawals of credit, services, and expertise. To a larger degree, states that have come into being recently through decolonization ... have acquired their military organization from outside, without the same internal forging of mutual constraints between rulers and ruled.' Tilly (note 1 above), pp. 185-186.
20 Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979).
21 Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States AD 990-1990 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 96.
22 Tilly sets forth the connection between 'external' and 'internal' as follows: 'we might schematize the history of European state making as three stages: (a) The differential success of some power holders in "external" struggles establishes the difference between an "internal" and an "external" arena for the deployment of force; (b) "external" competition generates "internal" state making; (c) "external" compacts among states influence the form and locus of particular states ever more powerfully.' Tilly (note 1 above), p. 183.
23 For example, Christopher Clapham, Africa and the International System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
24 There have sometimes been real interstate wars in Africa, and in those cases spinoffs in terms of state-making appear to have been higher. Christopher Clapham has made that argument in the context of the Ethiopia/Eritrea conflict. But there is no firm basis for generally expecting that a logic of war pushing state-making will now begin to apply in Sub-Saharan Africa.
25 As emphasized by Robert lackson, this practice of respecting existing borders 'is a fundamental normative change from the basis of state jurisdiction historically, which could be determined by military force, by Machiavellian diplomacy, by commercial transaction, by dynastic marriage, and by other such means'. Robert Jackson, 'International Community Beyond the Cold War', in Gene M. Lyons & Michael Mastanduno, eds, Beyond Westphalia: State Sovereignty and International Intervention (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 59-87, on p. 66.
26 Arnold Wolters, quoted from Robert Jackson, 'The Security Dilemma in Africa', in Brian L. Job, ed., The Insecurity Dilemma: National Security of Third World States (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1992), pp. 81-93, on p. 88.
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27 Sean Kelly, America's Tyrant: The CIA and Mobutu of Zaire (Washington, DC: American University Press, 1993).
28 Naomi Chazan, Robert Mortimer, John Ravenhill & Donald Rothchild, Politics and Society in Contemporary Africa (London: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 362-383.
29 Samir Amin, Unequal Development (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976), p. 293.
30 Ibid., p. 333.
31 Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
32 In order to further evaluate the relative importance of population density for state-making, it would be helpful to make systematic comparisons between Africa and areas with a similar level of population density. The best candidate in this respect is South America, but there are also, of course, systematic differences between the two regions. In particular, the Americas are a special case in the sense that pre-colonial populations were more or less exterminated.
33 The following remarks on Taiwan rely on my earlier work: Georg Serensen, Democracy, Dictatorship and Development: Economic Development in Selected Regimes of the Third World (London: Macmillan, 1991).
34 Thomas B. Gold, State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1986), p. 35.
35 Ibid., p. 36.
36 Ibid., p. 43.
37 There were other elements too, including the quest for imperial power and control. In 1937, the Japanese butchered in Nanking (China), by conventional means, a number of men, women and children comparable to the human cost of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki eight years later.
38 William Reno, 'War, Debt and the Role of Pretending in Uganda's International Relations', Occasional Paper (Copenhagen: Centre of African Studies, University of Copenhagen, 2000), p. 29.
39 Ibid., p. 25.