Lind and other lunatics Pt. 5
Upon independence these states achieved legal sovereignty even though they lacked formal or de facto sovereignty based on institutional coherence and capacity and are thus ‘quasi-states’. State development was further affected by the export of superpower rivalry into the South via proxy wars, the creation of client states and arms transfers to friendly governments and non-state guerrilla groups which accentuated the already fragile political matrix of the region. This centre-periphery relationship continues to this day in a less overt but no less damaging manner and is vital to understanding state-failure especially in relation to the processes of globalisation.
Regarding Globalisation, understood as a largely economic process, it is important to remember that ‘every economic system must rest on a secure political base [...] the international political system constitutes one of the most important constraints on and determinants of markets’. Like Pax Britannica of the nineteenth century, Pax Americana ‘provided the political framework within which these economic and other transnational activities were taking place’. Some states do very well out of globalisation because they underpin it via a state/market symbiosis and reflect the dominance of liberal capitalist states, particular the U.S., over international financial and political organisations. Those that do not generally reside in what the U.S. neoconservative writer Thomas Barnett at the Office of Force Transformation at the Department of Defence called the ‘non-integrating gap’ which is seen as inherently prone to failure, chaos and war (the connection with Lind and Hammes is obvious).
But this is because of economic centre-periphery relations that parallel political conditions in which core imperial states, whose economies function as the centre of the world economy, exploit peripheral states who provide raw materials and resources at rates of exchange favourable to the North but not the South. Order in this region is maintained by a series of semi-peripheral client states, backed up by the core when needed, as well as through the co-optation of the elites of Southern states (the comprador class). Consequently, these comprador elites ‘behave in ways which advance the interests of the core within their own societies rather than in ways which might improve the lot of their compatriots’. In Nigeria for instance the political elite are ‘united in the philosophy of personal enrichment through access to state power’. Access to state power means access to the ‘enormous gains from the sale of crude oil, as a result of OPEC price increases in 1973 and 1978, [which] increased the impetus of the Nigerian politico-military bureaucratic class to primitive accumulation’. As an under-developed Third World ‘Petro-state’ which survives off external rent rather than a domestic tax base Nigeria contains a number of pathologies which include unaccountability to its citizens, vulnerability to domestic subversion, non-transparency, an ineffective bureaucracy and dependency upon external actors. As we have seen in the previous section Nigerian insurgencies are a complicated morass of internationally funded, state-supported and non-state actors all of whom have a complicated relationship to the state (MEND), the regime (NDPVF, NDV), the territory (MOSOP, MASSOB, MOSSIEN) and the international environment (Shell, Total, Chevron). The “non-integrating gap” is precisely so because it is penetrated to such a degree that autonomous action, the exercise of state sovereignty, benefits no-one outside it. Until these policies change insurgencies in states locked in a vicious cycle of self-predation and self-destruction will continue the downward spiral into anarchy. In other words the cause of the insurgency is partly to do with the policies of the West in accentuating and exacerbating the penetrated state as much as they are caused by indigenous and historical forces to do with a weak and in some ways artificial state. On the other hand, in Afghanistan under the USSR and now under NATO the problem is not preserving the failing state but that the Afghan state never really existed in the first place and given local hostility at being forced into the borders of an externally imposed system of governance this crisis is set to continue for some time. It is not Globalisation that is destroying the state but other states and their policies especially in the core.
Interestingly Fourth Generation warfare appears problematic for two types of states in particular; “Liberal-Democratic” and “Developing” or penetrated “Quasi-States”. For authoritarian and non-liberal states the effects of Fourth Generation warfare and its supposed domination of the media-sphere and ability to manipulate international opinion is minimal. Syria crushed the Muslim Brotherhood insurgency in 1982 by virtually destroying the city of Hama and has not faced another insurgency since. In the last Chechen war the Russian army successfully defeated a Fourth Generation (Pan-Islamist) foe with a combination of First, Second and Third generation methods and perhaps being a non-liberal state, for whom international opinion and the “rights” of its opponents were irrelevant, was a distinct advantage. Yet perhaps this is the central issue that Fourth Generation warfare theorists skirt around; the disparity in strategic culture between democracies and their opponents. Democracies, though fierce once committed to battle, are hamstrung by a lack of long-term political will and commitment which, more than brute firepower or high technology, determines the outcome of insurgencies.
Originally Posted by jmm99
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