Political Order and Political Decay (52 page)

As I noted earlier, it is not enough to create formal state institutions, whether based on borrowed or indigenous models. State building needs to be accompanied by a parallel process of nation building to be effective. Nation building adds a moral component of shared norms and culture and underpins the state's legitimacy. It is also potentially a source of intolerance and aggression, and so often must be accomplished using authoritarian methods. Two paired comparisons, between Nigeria and Indonesia on the one hand, and Kenya and Tanzania on the other, illustrate this point.

 

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LINGUA FRANCAS

How national identity is important and problematic in developing countries; how Indonesia and Tanzania succeeded in creating national identities while Nigeria and Kenya did not; whether national identity is better established under democratic or authoritarian conditions

We saw in previous chapters that existence of a strong national identity was critical to the success of state building in Europe. In the contemporary developing world, weak states are frequently the by-product of weak or nonexistent national identities. This was a particular problem in sub-Saharan Africa, whose independent states were colonial creations with arbitrary borders that did not correspond to a single ethnic, linguistic, or cultural community. As administrative units within larger empires, their peoples had grown used to living with one another, but they had no sense of shared culture or common identity. In the vacuum left by colonialism, some newly independent countries like Nigeria and Kenya made little effort to create a new national identity, and they have been plagued in later years by high levels of ethnic conflict. Indonesia and Tanzania, by contrast, had founding leaders who articulated ideas around which national unity could be created. Indonesia, of course, is not an African country, but as noted in chapter 14, there are many points of similarity between it and Nigeria, while Kenya and Tanzania share many characteristics. Both Indonesia and Tanzania face great political challenges, of course, including corruption and ethnic conflict. But relative levels matter; their governments are much more coherent and stable because of their early investment in nation building, and as a result they have achieved better social and economic results in recent years.

OIL AND ETHNICITY

Like many developing countries, Nigeria was never a historical nation. But it was also never the object of a serious nation-building project, either on the part of the colonial authorities, or by the new national leadership after independence. When the British took over Nigeria, they did not conquer a large, well-established centralized state, as when they subdued the Mughal Empire in India. The indigenous people were loyal primarily to very small tribal-level units.
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The territory now called Nigeria was first consolidated into a single political unit on January 1, 1914, by Frederick Lugard, codifier of indirect rule, who was serving as governor. It was based on a merger of the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria and the Colony and Protectorate of Southern Nigeria, the latter itself the product of a merger that had taken place between Lagos Colony and the Niger Delta Protectorate in 1906. These territories had little in common since they were divided by religion, ethnicity, and wealth, especially between the Muslim North and the South that was being steadily converted to Christianity through the work of European missionaries. The merger had been undertaken for reasons of administrative convenience—the poorer North kept running a fiscal deficit, which would be easier to subsidize in a united colony. The colonial authorities of course never thought to consult the locals themselves about the wisdom of this plan.
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What the British didn't find in Nigeria, they didn't create, either. In India, where the British had a presence since the seventeenth century, they established an army, a national bureaucracy, an educated middle class, and a lingua franca (English) that could unite the subcontinent's diverse ethnicities, religions, and castes. Sunil Khilnani argues that, in a certain sense, the very “idea of India” as a political unit was created in colonial times around these institutions and the democratic ideals that were slowly being transmitted. India was, moreover, central to British strategic purposes as the anchor of their empire.
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By the time they got to Nigeria, however, the British were in a sense exhausted by the burdens of a global empire. Indirect rule was the policy that remained once they had decided that they could not invest in Africa the way they invested in India. So they deliberately decided not to try to implant a strong state structure, or do much to develop the economy. The British had very little interest in creating a class of educated Nigerians. On the eve of independence, the literacy rate in English was only 2 percent in the North, and there were only one thousand university-educated Nigerians in the whole country. Nigerians were barred from the senior civil service; only seventy-five Africans served at other levels at the end of World War II.
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As noted earlier, one of the ways that strong state structures and uncorrupt administrations are formed is when people have to organize to fight for their freedom. What is notable about Nigeria is that it never had a strong nationalist party that contested British rule or sought to pursue a nation-building strategy once in power. Rather, sovereignty was handed to the Nigerians on a platter by the British. They wrote the new country's constitution and announced some years in advance that they would be leaving, which they eventually did in 1960. The political parties that came to power in independent Nigeria were heavily regional and ethnic from the start, more suspicious of each other than of their former colonial master, and lacking in any concept of a Nigerian nation or how to define the new country's identity. The lack of a national identity soon led to the breakdown of the country and its descent into civil war.
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The discovery of large new reserves of oil in the Gulf of Biafra gave Nigeria's competing ethnic groups a valuable prize to fight over, but it also produced a mechanism that ensured future political stability. The government controls economic resources, which are distributed to elites, who in turn distribute those resources to networks of followers (while taking hefty cuts for themselves). Whenever some disgruntled group threatens the rent-seeking coalition with violence, they are bought off by greater subsidies and payments. Political corruption and clientelism are the price that Nigerians have had to pay for stability and for their lack of an overarching national identity.

Indonesia started out much like Nigeria but developed very differently in subsequent years. Prior to the twentieth century, the country of Indonesia did not exist. Stretching over an archipelago containing more than eleven thousand islands, the area known variously as the Indian Archipelago, the Indies, the Tropical Netherlands, or the Dutch East Indies consisted of a wide variety of sultanates, tribes, trading posts, and ethnic groups speaking hundreds of different languages. Few of the indigenous inhabitants were aware of a world much beyond their village or, at most, island.
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This all began to change at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, as the Dutch extended their political control and trading networks beyond Batavia (the location of present-day Jakarta), headquarters of the Dutch East India Company. Regular steamship travel gave people a sense of the archipelago as a whole, as did the possibility of making the hajj to Mecca, which connected Indonesian Muslims to the broader Muslim community. A very small indigenous elite with access to European education emerged and began to adopt concepts like nationalism and Marxism from the West.
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By the third decade of the twentieth century, there were quite a lot of ways this colony's identity could have been defined. Since a large majority of the inhabitants were Muslim, they could have seen themselves as a Muslim state as Pakistan was to do. The Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) wanted a class revolution that would link them to the global Communist International, as the Chinese and Vietnamese parties had done. And there were many regional and local identities that could have supported their own regional political units, especially on the larger islands of Java and Sumatra.

Instead, a completely new idea for a country to be called Indonesia emerged during the late 1920s with the creation of the Indonesian National Association, the Congress of Indonesian National Political Associations, and a nationalist youth group Young Indonesia.
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The second Indonesia Youth Congress meeting in Batavia in October 1928 adopted a national anthem, “Indonesia Raya” (one of the first public uses of the word “Indonesia”), and declared Bahasa Indonesia the national language.

The adoption of Indonesian as a national language was a critical element of identity formation for the nascent country. Indonesian is a standardized version of classical Malay, one that had been in use for many centuries as a lingua franca of traders and travelers operating within the archipelago. It was the first language of only a relatively small number of the region's inhabitants, the vast majority of whom continued to speak Javanese, Sundanese or, for the educated elite, Dutch. It is more egalitarian than Javanese, the language of the colony's politically dominant ethnic group, lacking an elaborate system of registers reflecting the relative status of the speakers and those spoken to. Many of the early young nationalists could not speak Indonesian, or speak it well.

Adoption of Indonesian and the promulgation of a broad, multiethnic idea of Indonesia succeeded in trumping other concepts of identity in circulation in the early twentieth century. There had been a number of regional movements on Java, Sumatra, and the Celebes at the time, which dissolved themselves with the formation of the broader Indonesian groups. The Dutch had played the game of divide and rule, and many in the new nationalist elite recognized that formation of the broadest possible coalition was critical to winning independence.

One of the most important forces behind the idea of Indonesia was the country's first postindependence president, Sukarno, who published a short pamphlet in 1927 titled
Nationalism, Islam, and Marxism
. In it he took on the three major intellectual currents at the time and argued that there was no fundamental inconsistency among them that would prevent creation of a broad political front against Dutch rule. Sukarno claimed that the messages of Islam and Marxism were similar insofar as they both opposed usury. He criticized “fanatical” Muslims who sought a theocratic state on the grounds that this would breed conflict with Indonesia's other religious communities. Similarly, he argued against doctrinaire Marxism for its hostility to religion. The one political principle Sukarno was not interested in including in his synthesis was Western liberalism, precisely because this doctrine did not provide a justification for a strong state that would play an integrative role in forging a national identity, or engage in the redistributionist policies he felt necessary for “social justice.”

These ideas were later articulated by Sukarno as the “Five Pillars” (Pancasila) in a speech in 1945, and were to become the basis of the Pancasila doctrine that underlay the independent Indonesian state.
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Sukarno was an extremely woolly theorist, seeking to synthesize ideas that were in fact sharply contradictory. His purpose, however, was not philosophical but practical: he wanted to create an integrative national identity that would allow him to both coalesce and at the same time keep at bay the alternative political currents running through Indonesia. He defined the Indonesian nation in the broadest possible terms, without reference to any of the country's ethnic groups, while he accepted religion but neutered it by reference not to Islam but to generic monotheism.
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Sukarno's national synthesis could be implemented only in the context of an increasingly authoritarian state. Indonesia's original constitution upon independence in 1950 provided for multiparty democracy and sidelined President Sukarno as a weak figurehead. After the first general elections in 1955, Sukarno began an attack on parliamentary democracy as such, and with the outbreak of ethnic rebellions on the outer islands, martial law was declared in March 1957. Backed by the army and the PKI, Sukarno crushed the liberal opposition and created a National Front based on Nasakom. That acronym represented the three forces of his article—the nationalists, Muslims, and Communists. Increasingly dependent on support from the Communists and externally from China and the Soviet Union, Sukarno used the state to mobilize mass support on the basis of his Pancasila ideology.
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Sukarno ultimately failed because he could not in fact synthesize his three pillars, particularly the nationalist one represented by the army and the Marxist one represented by the PKI. These two sources of support became increasingly suspicious of one another. An attempted coup by Sukarno's presidential guard and the murder of a number of generals led the army, headed by General Suharto, to strike back, forcing Sukarno out of power and leading to the bloody purge in which the PKI was decimated and anywhere from five to eight hundred thousand people were killed.
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The resulting New Order of General Suharto dropped the Marxist part of Sukarno's program but retained his reliance on a strong, centralized state as a guarantor of national unity, and Pancasila ideology as the source of national identity. Indonesia's small Chinese minority, from which the PKI recruited heavily, were forced to take Indonesian names and assimilate into the broader population. The crisis had revealed a bitter antagonism between the country's Muslim majority and its Chinese minority, and the PKI's defeat strengthened the hand of various Muslim organizations. But the New Order regime continued to use Pancasila ideology as a means of keeping at bay demands for greater Islamicization of the Indonesian state. Suharto, indeed, was to come to rely on the Chinese business community as a support for his regime.
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