Political Order and Political Decay (50 page)

The impact of indirect rule was thus profoundly conservative. And the one thing it never did, either in aspiration or in practice, was lay the basis for a strong, modern state.

COLONIALISM THE FRENCH WAY

While the Belgians, like the British, practiced a decentralized form of rule in the Congo, the French and Portuguese ran much more centralized administrations in their African colonies. For the French, this was second nature, since the French state itself was highly centralized administratively. The French believed that Roman law had universal validity and were unwilling to bend to customary practices.

Since indirect rule did not seem to leave much in the way of strong political institutions to postindependence Africa, did direct rule make a difference? The answer, in short, is no: whatever the theoretical differences between the British and French approaches, limitations of resources and knowledge prevented French authorities from shaping their colonies any more than the British. Indeed, the French developed a high degree of cynicism in dealing with Africans the way they were rather than the way they were supposed to be, a cynicism that has infected their policy toward Francophone Africa for decades after independence.
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The French governed through chiefs, as did the British, but regarded them not as representatives of local communities with their own traditional legitimacy but as simple agents of the French state. The relationship was “that of an officer to an NCO.”
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The rules that applied up until the 1940s were first set down in 1854 under the authoritarian Second Empire, and were implemented in the early years by military officers like Louis Faidherbe, governor of Senegal. Following a model developed in French Algeria, independent polities in sub-Saharan Africa were progressively attacked and subdued. Large areas, including French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa, were broken down into smaller “cercles,” which were in turn divided into cantons and villages. The shift from the Second Empire to the Third Republic in 1870 did not change things all that much. If anything, the French republican tradition was stricter in its desire to impose uniform rules. The stated goal was “assimilation” of the colonies into the French system. But while French language and education were imposed, there was no long-term path for most African subjects to eventually become French citizens.
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Many of the important differences between the French and British were rooted in the way their colonial services were internally administered, as well as their training and recruitment practices. All bureaucracies operating over large geographical areas have to choose between favoring generalists who are good leaders and administrators, and specialists who have developed intimate knowledge of particular places. The latter are advantaged by their local knowledge (what James Scott calls m
ē
tis, Greek for “wisdom”) but tend to get captured by local interests and often develop parochial views.
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The generalists are more reliable and often more effective but tend to apply general theories to situations where they don't apply. British administration tended to reward the specialists, while the French model encouraged generalists. Thus French colonial officers were moved around every few years, not just within Africa but to completely different parts of the empire. As a result, very few of them learned to speak indigenous languages or acquired local knowledge.
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The French and British also differed in the types of people recruited into their colonial service. In Britain they tended to come from upper-middle-class or gentry families; there was a very high proportion that attended public school (private school in American terminology) and good universities like Oxford or Cambridge. (We have already seen in chapter 8 above how reform of the British civil service began with reform of the Indian colonial service.) In France, recruits came from the bourgeoisie, which in contrast to their British peers had disdain for local chiefs as feudal or monarchical survivals. As a consequence, the colonial service found itself unable to attract sufficient numbers of quality candidates. There are numerous anecdotes about the character of those who went to the colonies. According to one doctor, “Power-crazy psychopaths are particularly numerous in the colonies—far more so, proportionately, than in France. They belong to a large class of unbalanced individuals who seek out colonial life; their psychic make-up is particularly attracted by the exotic.” As the director of the École Coloniale said in 1929, “When a young man left for the colonies, his friends asked themselves, ‘What crime must he have committed? From what corpse is he fleeing?'” The pathological Mr. Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's
Heart of Darkness
was based in the end on some reality. All of this began to change in the 1930s as the French improved the education and professionalism of their officials, while better health conditions encouraged them to serve tours accompanied by their families. But this led to a new problem familiar to contemporary development agencies: they would then spend all their time in expatriate communities with their wives and children, rather than with the locals.
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In the end, the French found that their policy of assimilation was unworkable. Officials with field experience coming out of the École Coloniale began to argue for a more flexible policy of association, in which their societies would be helped to “evolve within their own structures.” By the middle of the twentieth century, norms all across Europe were changing: there was much greater appreciation for the integrity of traditional cultures and a realization that the effort to impose foreign institutions by brute force was having a damaging impact on native societies. The discipline of anthropology, having started out as a tool of European colonialism, became a powerful voice arguing for the equal dignity of indigenous cultures.
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In the words of one French Jesuit, “Custom belongs to the community itself, but to remove from the community the right of interpretation and of transformation is an act of violence more serious, though less visible, than the confiscation of arable land or of forest.”
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The French presence on the ground, just as thin as that of the other colonial powers, had in any event failed to implant powerful French-style institutions in any of the colonies. So in the end, direct rule was as much of a failure as indirect rule.

Ironically, the failure of French policy to turn Africans into Frenchmen had the reverse effect of turning Frenchmen into Africans. The French in their postindependence dealings with Africa were more willing to play the local power games according to local rules, in comparison to the Americans and British who at least paid lip service to universal principles like democracy and human rights. Thus the French were happy to work with authoritarian rulers like Mobutu or Félix Houphouët-Boigny in the Ivory Coast, or to use their paratroopers to prop up often unsavory regimes that served French foreign policy interests. This also led to corruption at home like the Elf affair of the early 1990s in which senior business and government officials were implicated in taking kickbacks for lucrative contracts.
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Africa did not possess states that were strong or modern prior to European colonialism. This was one reason why the continent could be conquered so easily. The legacy of late colonial rule in Africa was to undercut existing social structures—even when the explicit objective of policy was to preserve them—while failing to implant much by way of modern state institutions. The weak postindependence African state was the heir to the weak colonial state.

The breakdown of Sierra Leone was one long-term consequence of this legacy. As one of Britain's oldest colonies in Africa, Sierra Leone was ruled indirectly, through a network of chiefs who were alternately bribed and intimidated by the white administration in Freetown. When the country received its independence in 1961, there was no modern state to speak of. What was left of the colonial administrative structure deteriorated, particularly after the rise of Siaka Stevens, a former police constable who took power in 1968 and was known for both his demagogy and shameless corruption.

The deterioration accelerated when the market for alluvial diamonds (i.e., those found in rivers) gave all of Sierra Leone's political actors something to fight over. Paul Collier has argued that it was greed rather than social grievance that drove this and other African conflicts.
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But rivalry over natural resource wealth does not inevitably produce conflict; Botswana used its diamonds to benefit its population. Sierra Leone's problem was its total lack of a state that could keep order and fairly and peacefully exploit its resources. The country's civil war and drug-crazed child soldiers did not constitute a return to traditional Africa, nor did they reflect any deep social or cultural traditions in the country other than poverty. They were a modern innovation in response to the economic incentives posed by a global diamond industry, and utter state failure.
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As one observer of the war, Lansana Gberie, notes, “The lesson … is that there is no alternative to the building of strong bureaucratic states that function at the social level, effectively providing services like education and thereby employment, and avoiding the kind of corrosive corruption and misuse of public funds that are such a mark of the continent's misgovernment.”
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There are many similarities between the British and French experiences in sub-Saharan Africa, and contemporary nation-building exercises in, for instance, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Haiti. In the following chapter, I will ask the question, Did anyone do any better in giving their colonies strong institutions?

 

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INSTITUTIONS, DOMESTIC OR IMPORTED

Indirect rule as a precedent for contemporary state-building interventions; “good enough” governance as an alternative to Denmark; the United States and Japan as nation builders

One might think that colonial history is irrelevant to the world that has emerged early in the twenty-first century. Most of the colonial empires were dismantled in the three decades following World War II; one of the last large ones, that of the former Soviet Union, fell apart in 1991. Why, then, be concerned with the success or failure of foreign powers to implant institutions?

The question remains relevant because both individual powers like the United States and the international community more broadly have been heavily engaged, since the end of the cold war, in trying to build states in poor developing countries. This is most evident in the U.S. occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s, where creating viable states has been central first to America's “war on terrorism,” and then to its ability to exit these countries with a modicum of credibility. But there have been numerous other peacekeeping and state-building interventions around the world: in Cambodia, Bosnia and Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Liberia, Haiti, Somalia, Timor Leste, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and others.

The moral framework of these interventions is obviously different from colonialism. Colonial powers made no pretense that they were occupying foreign countries in the interests of the indigenous inhabitants, though they tried to justify their behavior to themselves in terms of their civilizing mission. Until the last decade or so before their departure, colonial governments did not pursue overtly developmental aims—indeed, they were wary of industrialization in their colonies because their domestic manufacturers did not want competition. They were also not especially worried about democracy, since they justified their own rule on a nondemocratic basis.

This framework changed in the course of the twentieth century. Following World War I, the League of Nations (predecessor to the United Nations) granted mandates to colonial powers like Britain and France but now said that these territories had to be governed in the interest of their inhabitants. The international legal framework changed once more after World War II, with the issuance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the growing weight of newly independent former colonies in international forums like the UN General Assembly. The cold war and the Soviet veto blocked the Security Council from authorizing too many peacekeeping missions, but with its end the floodgates opened and the peacekeeping directorate of the UN Secretariat became a very busy place. By the late 1990s, in the wake of atrocities committed in places like Bosnia and Rwanda, a new doctrine called the “responsibility to protect” had emerged, which enjoined the international community to take positive action to safeguard the human rights of peoples threatened by conflict and repression.
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The goal of these new postconflict interventions quickly evolved. They began with efforts to promote cease-fires and keep the peace in conflict zones. But it soon became evident that there would be no lasting peace without institutions, and that the international community's ability to exit these troubled places in fact depended on the societies acquiring stable governments that could provide security without outside help. Thus the mandate for intervention expanded from peacekeeping to state building.

East Timor had been a province of Indonesia when it voted for independence and became a sovereign state in 1999. What little administrative apparatus it possessed was wrecked by the departing Indonesians, and the United Nations was called upon to set up a mission, UNTAET, to in effect create a new state. The United States found itself in a similar position in Afghanistan and Iraq. Afghanistan had become a haven for terrorists since the collapse of the state in the 1980s. Preventing al-Qaeda from reestablishing itself involved the uphill struggle to set up a national government in Kabul. Similarly, Iraq had a functioning state under Saddam Hussein, which collapsed following the American invasion in March 2003 and the early decision to disband the Iraqi army. As the country moved to full-scale civil war in 2005–2006, state building became a central objective of the American occupation.
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