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Liberalization and Foreign Policy, by Miles Kahler, editor
5. Political Liberalization and the African State System
Jeffrey Herbst
Most studies of political liberalization in the Third World rightfully concentrate on the prospects for democratization or a return to the old authoritarianism. These studies assume, either explicitly or implicitly, that political liberalization may bring about wrenching changes but that the nations as currently configured will continue.
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After the breakup of Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia into ethnic republics, however, this assumption must be contested. In particular, it is important to examine the prospects that political liberalization will lead to fundamental changes in African boundaries, given the potentially traumatic ramifications of opening political systems. Africa is a particularly interesting arena in which to examine the international consequences of liberalization, because while there is widespread agreement on the continent that many of the boundaries are nonsensical, the countries on the continent have constructed an international regime that has encouraged boundary stability for more than thirty years.
This essay will first examine the origin and maintenance of the boundary regime in Africa. It will then analyze the fundamental changes in Africa and the international system that have radically transformed the incentives for Africans who contemplate altering their national boundaries. Finally, it will examine the microlevel foundations of the relationship between political liberalization and boundary change.
In the early 1960s, the Organization of African Unity (OAU) recognized that the borders drawn by the colonialists "constitute a grave and permanent factor of dissension." The OAU, and most African governments, believe that cohesive social groups were separated by the boundaries and that groups that had little to do with each other or that were nominally hostile were brought together in the same nation-state. The OAU also recognized, however, that there was no simple way of redrawing the map of Africa. The continent's topography does not provide much in the way of natural frontiers, and many social groupings are actually so fluid that it would be impossible to construct a set of boundaries that would assure ethnic homogeneity. As a result, when the dust settled after massive changes in boundaries, no African leader could be guaranteed that he would still have a country to govern. Since the OAU is fundamentally a leaders' club, it declared that the inherited boundaries were a "tangible reality," and rulers pledged "to respect the frontiers existing on their achievement of national independence." 2
Several developments at the international level helped the African leaders in their effort to continue the inherited state system. First, the Cold War had the effect of providing African countries with patrons when their boundaries were challenged. The superpowers were concerned with cultivating clients in all parts of the world and were therefore willing to help African nations crush ethnic rebellions or threats from neighbors. Thus, Zaire won crucial aid from the United States in turning back the Shaba rebellions; Chad relied on France to retain its territorial integrity in the face of Libyan aggression; and Ethiopia was given critical military support by the Soviet Union in order to resist Somalia's irredentist claims. The superpowers were also attentive to African sensibilities concerning boundary maintenance. Indeed, not once did either superpower, or any other outside power, support an African effort to overturn an existing boundary.
More generally, the superpowers created a global environment between 1945 and 1989 that made any attempt at boundary change appear illegitimate. One of the implicit rules of the Cold War was that supporting efforts to change boundaries was not part of the competition. The superpowers repeatedly expressed their preference for stability--symbolized by a bizarrely divided Berlin--over the potential chaos caused by ethnic self-determination. Thus, between the end of World War II and 1989, the only forcible boundary changes that were not related to the end of colonialism were the creation of Bangladesh, the Israeli annexation of captured territory, and the absorption of South Vietnam. 3 This was a remarkable development in a world where forcible boundary change was once a fairly common event. Indeed, the most stunning aspect of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 was not that it happened but that this sort of armed effort has not occurred more often in a world made up mainly of weak states that cannot defend their boundaries.
Also, the international community in the postwar era had greatly elevated the norm of sovereignty. Especially since the advent of African independence, the world community has allowed any country, no matter how underdeveloped its political and economic institutions, to enjoy the full privileges of sovereignty. In contrast, the norm of self-determination, which Africans relied upon in the struggle against colonialism, was largely ignored. For instance, it was felt that it would be a violation of an African country's sovereignty for the world community to support a dissident ethnic group that was disaffected with the country's government or even to protest too strongly when a government repressed a particular faction. The precedent set by the lack of international support for the Ibo during the Nigerian civil war, despite their suffering and the fact that they could make a credible claim to being a viable national unit, solidified the practice of ignoring claims based on ethnic self-determination. In the postwar era, the norm of self-determination has applied only to people under colonial rule.
Thus the interests of African leaders and those of the great powers were almost identical on the issue of boundary stability. The global community provided not only the arms but also a legal framework in the form of sovereignty to justify African leaders' taking almost any step to crush local rebellions that threatened the African state system. Anthony D. Smith was perhaps exaggerating only slightly when he argued that "given the chance, most ethnic movements in Africa and Asia would opt for outright separatism." Noting the success of the boundary maintenance regime, however, he correctly argued that whether any of these movements achieved independence was dependent on "wider geopolitical factors." 4
The system also greatly discouraged interstate war. Of course, few African countries even had the ability to invade their neighbors in the 1960s. As African militaries have become more sophisticated, however, the fear of war between nations has not increased dramatically. Rather, most of the weapons that African countries have purchased have been used either to appease the military or to turn against local citizens. The overthrow of Amin in Uganda is the only example of an African leader's being displaced by an invasion by a foreign country, and in that case it was obvious that the Tanzanians did not have any territorial ambitions. Even South Africa, which during the 1980s showed little hesitation in attacking its neighbors and had a near monopoly on military power in its region, has never threatened the territorial integrity of any state in Southern Africa.
As a result, African boundaries did not change until Eritrea voted for independence in 1993. This stability is especially remarkable given the domestic upheavals that have occurred in many nations and the fact that many African countries possess only limited military forces, which they would have trouble deploying to defend their own boundaries. Indeed, boundary maintenance among so many weak countries for such a long period of time is an extraordinary occurrence in the history of international relations.
The Changing International Context
There are now powerful forces at work that will undermine much of the international support previously given to the African state system. 5 First, the end of the Cold War means that African countries no longer have automatic patrons to turn to if they are threatened. The great powers do not have any incentive to aid troubled African countries. Indeed, Gorbachev's pressure on Angola to come to an agreement with South Africa in 1988 heralded a new era in which Moscow and Washington are willing to let old allies that have received significant aid twist in the wind. For instance, U.S. aid policy has switched from supporting countries that were once seen as strategically important (e.g., Zaire, Somalia, Sudan) to aiding those that are relatively successful in adopting political and economic reforms. As a result, in just the last few years, governments in Ethiopia, Liberia, Chad, Rwanda, and Somalia, which had been able to attract significant secu rity and financial resources from their patrons in the past, were abandoned and quickly overthrown. These upheavals were unprecedented because, while African governments were routinely succeeded by their own militaries in the past, only Museveni in Uganda (1986) was able to lead a successful insurgency from the bush in an already independent African country between 1957 and 1989.
The norm of sovereignty has also suffered significant erosion. The first, dramatic symbols of the decline in respect for sovereignty were the conditionality clauses that the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank (and, now, most bilateral aid donors) attached to their loans starting in the early 1980s. While the IMF in particular has always practiced conditionality, the new demands, fueled by a perspective that saw African governments themselves as a substantial part of the economic problem, represented a significant encroachment on areas of public policy that had previously been considered the sole province of national leaders. The now accepted presence of IMF, World Bank, and bilateral aid officials during African government deliberations about the money supply, exchange rate policy, wage policy, subsidy policy, and a host of other issues is a startling indication that African countries have implicitly ceded sovereignty on some economic issues in exchange for being put into international receivership. During the 1980s, nongovernmental organizations, especially in the Horn of Africa, also tested the bounds of sovereignty by conducting cross-border operations without the permission of the governments involved. Thus, the United States/United Nations intervention in Somalia in late 1992 was not a stunning new development; rather, it was simply the logical outcome of the erosion of African sovereignty that began in the early 1980s.
It was probably inevitable that the erosion of sovereignty on economic issues would also have implications for how the international community viewed other aspects of domestic politics in African countries. However, African sovereignty is now especially imperiled because, in the new world order, attention has been directed toward the right of ethnic self-determination, precisely the issue that had been forestalled by the emergence of the norm of sovereignty since the early 1960s. The global community, including the superpowers, has now focused on the need for certain ethnic groups to create their own national arrangements. For instance, German unification was widely perceived to be a question of self-determination, and there was widespread support for the right of the Baltic states to regain their independence. Most important for African countries is the independence achieved by the new ethnic republics in Central Europe and Asia. Baltic independence could at least be rationalized by African leaders as unique because these countries were simply regaining the independence that they enjoyed before World War II. However, the former Central Europe and Soviet republics are the first examples in fifty years of new countries based on ethnic affiliation emerging from existing nations that had once been widely recognized as viable and legitimate. Between 1945 and 1990, global boundary stability reinforced the seeming permanence of African boundaries. Now the world is sending a different message to those who might contemplate upsetting the current state system.
The new emphasis on self-determination at the expense of sovereignty is being expressed in numerous ways. For instance, in 1991, sixty groups who aspire to form new nations created the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization to press their claims for self-determination. This particular grouping would seem quixotic except that four of its founding members (Estonia, Latvia, Armenia, and Georgia) have already become independent states. 6 In the academic literature, several authors are now suggesting that some states in the Third World, including some in Africa, have failed so badly that the possibility of placing them under United Nations trusteeship should be explored. 7 It is not unreasonable to expect that at least some in the international community will soon begin to (correctly) cite the basic characteristics of African states (e.g., the fact that so many are small or landlocked) as a fundamental barrier to development and at least hint that the nature of the states will have to change if growth is to occur. Such developments, which would have been unimaginable a few years ago, suggest just how rapidly sovereignty as an international norm is falling out of favor.
These changes will become more salient to Africans now that Eritrea has voted to become independent of Ethiopia after successfully winning a long war against the Mengistu regime. Thus, Africans now have their own example of a new ethnic state that, ironically, was carved out of the oldest country on the continent.
The prediction that sovereignty will erode in the face of claims of self-determination is controversial. For instance, Robert H. Jackson has argued that "the possibility that the issue of self-determination will be reopened in those ex-colonies where it continues to provoke controversy seems very slim indeed." 8 Jackson argues that self-determination will not reemerge, in part because no group seeking to upset the international order has received backing so far. In and of itself, this means little given the profound changes in international society over the last few years. Critically, Jackson also argues that the international order will not recognize the right of self-determination because "if such claims were allowed in some cases they could very easily encourage demands for the same elsewhere and therefore threaten the territorial integrity of many other states with dissident regions." 9 However, given that international society has now accepted the right of the ethnic groups in Central Europe and the former Soviet Union to create their own states, the tipping point that Jackson so rightly warns of may have been reached.
Also, territorial integrity and international order were especially important to the superpowers because instability created the possibility that one side or another could gain an advantage in a particular territory. Now that the Cold War is over, it is much less clear that mass disorder in large parts of the strategically unimportant Third World will be that important to international society. If Europeans can tolerate the disorder of the former Yugoslavia on their own continent, the world may have developed a higher tolerance to boundary change than Jackson suggests.
Jackson makes a strong case that nonintervention will continue to be a central norm of international relations. 10 It is, in fact, unlikely that the international community will intervene actively to help those who threaten Africa's borders. All that is really needed for the African boundary system to come under stress, however, is for the great powers not to actively aid, as they did in the past, those countries that faced armed threats to their boundaries. As noted above, when African countries have been faced with a sudden loss of patrons, upheaval and change can come surprisingly quickly.
In fact, to some extent intervention is not the right issue. Rather, the real question is if the international community will countenance the kind of repression that African governments and many others across the world have used in the past to retain their territorial integrity. For instance, if Biafra were to happen today, would the world do nothing to the central Nigerian government as it prosecuted a war to defeat the rebels that resulted in the deaths of a million people? Some type of sanctions would almost inevitably be applied. Thus the international community has moved from strongly supporting the rights of states to retain their territorial integrity to a more ambiguous position that may provide rebels, especially those adept at mobilizing international public opinion, with considerable encouragement.
The Destabilizing Aspectsof Political Liberalization
Given the erosion of the international underpinnings of the African state system, the question becomes whether Africans themselves will finally end the regime by fundamentally changing their commitment to boundary stability. One possible source of this change in commitment is the wave of political liberalization currently sweeping the continent. Since 1989, dozens of countries have legalized the opposition, national conferences have replaced or neutralized longtime strongmen in Benin, Congo, Mali, Niger, and Togo, national elections have turned out long-standing autocrats such as Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, and elections that promise an end to years of military rule have occurred in several countries. In the years to come, there will no doubt be many more elections, as well as setbacks, coups, and mass confusion as dozens of countries attempt to create viable political systems. At the very least, it is clear that the old order in many African countries, characterized by one-party authoritarian rulers, is no longer acceptable to many African citizens or international donors.
In addition to the opportunity and chaos that liberalization attempts will cause on the national political scene, there is the strong possibility that political liberalization will place tremendous strain on African boundaries. At the most general level, it is hard to see how so many basic rules of African politics could change while boundaries remain unscathed. Boundary stability came about in part because the leaders, many of whom were in power for decades, were able to establish a cartel of sorts to further institutionalize their rule. Political liberalization will inevitably mean leaders in power for shorter periods of time who may have interests fundamentally different from those of their predecessors. Indeed, the boundary stability regime itself may come under attack by new rulers precisely because it was created by a club of autocrats.
Political liberalization may threaten the boundary maintenance regime in several ways. First, political liberalization inevitably raises the question of what should be the shape of the political community. For instance, in the Soviet Union outside of the Baltics, many informed observers argued that there was a commitment to the idea of the USSR. But as the pace of political liberalization increased, peoples' commitment to the Union, as opposed to their own republic, underwent sudden changes. It emerged that they were committed to the Soviet Union when they could imagine nothing else. The process of political liberalization raised for the first time the possibility of ethnic-based secession, and, almost overnight, commitment to the Soviet Union vanished. Similarly, during Czechoslovakia's "Velvet Revolution," most inside the country said that division of the country into two republics was unimaginable. Physicists might call such episodes phase transitions. That is, changes occur at the system level that are hard to predict by examining microscopic details. 11 In these cases, analysts did not understand that the ability of people to reconsider the nature of their political communities would lead to severe centrifugal pressures on the nation-state through either violent protest or, perhaps even more insidious, a complete lack of interest on the part of citizens in the perpetuity of their nations.
Second, political liberalization may lead to dramatic status reversals among different groups in a country. For instance, since elections have not been consequential in most African countries to date, the transfer of power depended on other factors, notably control of the military. Indeed, Crawford Young referred to coups as the "institutionalized mechanism for succession." 12 Thus one ethnic group could achieve power primarily because of its disproportionate representation in the military. It is now possible, however, for groups that had previously been far from the center of government to achieve real power either by leadership in the democratization movements or through elections themselves. Democratization movements open new routes to power, which may cause significant status reversals because the means of achieving control of the government has changed. For instance, in Benin the removal of President Mathieu Kerekou by the national conference and his replacement by former World Bank official Nicephore Soglo was seen by some in Benin "not as a shift from autocracy to democracy but little more than a shift of power from northern elites (represented by Kerekou) to southern elites (represented by Soglo)." 13 Not surprisingly, in Uganda, when the Uganda People's Democratic Movement returned from exile it demanded that more "northerners" be given more positions in the government. 14 These status reversals, as Young noted, may increase the possibility for ethnic conflict because "social cues carrying cultural symbols are likely to be perceived in communal terms at moments of cultural threat and insecurity" and because "when cultural communities collectively perceive serious threats to communal status in the political environment, group solidarity tends to increase." 15
The manner in which political liberalization is being implemented in many African countries may aggravate status reversals. In the natural excitement to destroy the old authoritarian system and kick the bums out, little or no attention has been paid in most countries to social pacts or transitional rules that might make the change of political systems and the transfer of power less threatening to groups that had previously benefited from control of the government. For instance, when Frederick Chiluba became the new president of Zambia, he dismissed the commanders of the army, air force, and Zambian National Service almost immediately after taking power, in a housecleaning that will surely be replicated by other leaders eager to remove those who were integral to the ancien régime. 16 It was therefore not that surprising when President Chiluba subsequently declared a state of emergency because of threats from those associated with the Kaunda regime. Except in a few cases, there has been little formal agreement on the liability of soldiers and leaders of old military governments to prosecution for corruption or human rights violations. Subsequent trials of rulers or their subordinates could, as in Argentina, prove to be traumatic and, in particular, serve as a lightning rod for newly felt ethnic grievances.
The third reason why political liberalization may place stress on African boundaries is the dynamics of elections themselves. Especially where elections have not been previously institutionalized, they may aggravate ethnic tensions by placing the question of power very much in an "us versus them" dynamic. 17 For instance, in Rwanda, the advent of multiparty democracy led to the formation of the Coalition for the Defense of the Republic, which demanded even greater Hutu hegemony over the Tutsi and reflected the increasing tensions in the country before the April 1994 genocide began. 18 Also, since sheer numbers matter in elections, it will be necessary for political elites who seek power to mobilize support among the roughly 70 percent of all Africans who live in the countryside. 19 Since the elites are gener ally not closely associated with the rural populations and since the largely peasant population is itself usually atomistically dispersed over a vast hinterland, it is highly likely that support bases will have to be constructed around a set of shared (albeit recently created) ethnic symbols, icons, and vocabulary. The result, as Anthony D. Smith notes, is potentially disastrous for African states:
| When, therefore, the disaffected intelligentsia turn to a rebellious peasantry, with which they share elements of a common history and culture, however dimly remembered, their opposition to the regime soon develops towards an open separatism; for the peasantry afford them both the social and regional base they need, to carve out a new bureaucratic unit which can accommodate their career and status aspirations. 20 |
In addition, Smith notes that the peasantry, with their" 'primordial' cultural ties and memories" and rituals "lend to a rationalist, urban, parvenu intelligentsia a cultural aura and a depth of sentiment and solidarity, which give force to their claim to a separate political identity." 21 This dynamic has not appeared yet as vividly elsewhere because most African countries that are liberalizing have yet to experience consequential elections. At the moment, the protests against the old regime are primarily urban 22 and therefore lack the separatist sentiment that could develop later, once consequential elections start to be held and leaders find it necessary to develop links with the countryside. It is quite possible, however, that--especially given the changes in international society--in the future an increase in ethnic tensions may be funneled not only into general protest but, at least in some cases, toward secessionist movements.
If those who felt that they have lost out in the ethnic conflict do decide to challenge their central governments, they may meet with a surprising amount of success. The balance of power between insurgent groups and African states is changing, making the ability of African governments to resist insurgencies much more questionable than before. Whatever their other faults, African states at independence in the early 1960s were in one respect classically Weberian: they held a monopoly on the use of legitimate force. The few weapons in each country were almost inevitably held by the police, and even they did not have an impressive amount of firepower. Now, however, African societies are becoming more militarized. In many countries, it is now relatively easy for almost any group to collect several dozen machine guns in order to start an insurgency. These weapons come from the regional arms markets that have developed from the major conflicts in Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, and Chad, as well as from the international arms markets. The enormous surplus of weapons that is being dumped on the international arms market in the wake of the end of the Cold War guarantees that easy access to weapons will continue.
The militarization of African society is particularly important because many states across the continent have atrophied after experiencing fifteen to twenty years of economic decline. Indeed, across sub-Saharan Africa, the gross national product declined at an average rate of 0.8 percent from 1980 to 1993. 23 The continuing fiscal crisis has meant that many governments do not have a significant presence in their countries outside of the major cities. Police, military, and even agricultural extension officers are not present in the countryside because they have not been paid or because the state lacks the transport and fuel to exhibit much of an institutional presence beyond the major urban areas. Of course, the chaos and uncertainty introduced by political liberalization, during which many of the state security structures will suddenly face profound change, may further weaken the ability of the central government to mobilize the repressive apparatus.
Thus, many governments are not capable of even detecting the development of a major insurgency in the rural areas, much less combating it. When they do detect the insurgency they may, as in the case of Doe's Liberia, have to use such blunt instruments of repression because of a lack of institutional contacts that they serve only to further alienate the population and accelerate the revolt. More generally, once a guerrilla movement begins, it can overrun local police stations and armories to collect more weapons. The insurgencies by the Mozambique National Resistance in Mozambique and the Rwandan Patriotic Front indicate just how easily an armed threat to an African government can develop when the local army is underpaid, remains poorly equipped, and has low morale. Thus leaders of potential secessionist movements may feel more emboldened than before to challenge the existing state system and may encourage others by their success. African states may still be able to defeat most of these secessionist threats, but only at a terrific cost in human lives.
The odds of African countries' facing increasing ethnic instability caused by political liberalization are further heightened by the nature of the economic reforms that almost all of these countries are trying to implement simultaneously. Indeed, the policies suggested by the World Bank and the IMF threaten many aspects of the political systems that have evolved over the last thirty years in many African states. For instance, economic reform involves an entirely new way by which leaders are supposed to relate to their constituencies. Under the political systems that were established after independence, most African governments were able to provide a variety of resources--jobs, low prices for basic goods, preferential access to government projects--to favored constituencies. The whole point of economic reform is to eliminate or at least significantly curtail governments' ability to offer these kinds of advantages to their constituencies. As Charles Elliott has noted, "There is a fundamental asymmetry between the way the political system [in African countries] actually operates and the way economic decision making would have to operate if the demanding conditions of equilibrium--i.e., noninflationary balances on internal and external account--were to be achieved." 24
In particular, economic reform will make it much more difficult for governments to buy ethnic peace through the distribution of patronage and resources. Some governments have established a more or less effective modus vivendi between ethnic groups by distributing resources through parastatals and rigging markets so that the major groups do not feel too alienated. As Richard Sandbrook notes, African leaders will condemn tribalism but resort to "ethnic arithmetic" in order "to suppress divisive tendencies." 25 Economic reform will make this kind of ethnic balancing much more difficult because the opportunities to provide patronage will be more limited. Further, when the ethnic balance is disturbed as a result of factors outside government control (changes in population distribution, natural disasters, fluctuations in the international market), leaders in Africa will find it much more difficult to intervene in economies to restore the old ethnic order or to establish a new one favorable to them.
In addition, economic reform programs themselves have the potential to contribute to status reversals and thereby further raise the potential for ethnic strife in African countries. For instance, many economic reform programs seek to improve the rural-urban terms of trade by raising the prices that farmers receive, abolishing marketing boards, and decontrolling the prices at which foods are sold. These changes have the potential to provide ostentatious benefits to groups based in the rural areas while causing more urban-based groups to feel discriminated against. Devaluation, with its accompanying shifts in income from net importers to net exporters, may also lead to significant status reversals.
Finally, because of a series of profound economic and technological changes, it may no longer seem unrealistic to many Africans that they should create their own state or rearrange national boundaries. Land, as an economic resource, is much less important than it once was because in the last decade of the twentieth century countries become rich by building semiconductors rather than by growing cotton. 26 Also, the current conventional wisdom that economic development will be fueled primarily by export-led growth implies that it is far less important to have a large internal market, defined by population, purchasing power, or land, than was the case under previous orthodoxies. Certainly the calculation of the Baltic states was that they would be better off as small independent countries able to export to Europe and the world than as part of a large market that has been, until now at least, dysfunctional. As a result, African leaders who previously thought (or were told) that the state they wanted to create would not be viable now can look to economic orthodoxy as well as exemplary cases (e.g., Singapore, Hong Kong) to suggest that they might not fare poorly, especially given most African countries' disastrous economic record.
Political liberalization in and of itself is very difficult and has the potential to lead to ethnic strife that could, especially given the changed international environment, spiral quickly and threaten African boundaries. The fact that so many African countries are simultaneously trying to implement economic reform programs eliminates many of the means that leaders previously had to manage ethnic conflict and may further complicate ethnic politics by creating whole new sets of winners and losers. It is certainly true that African countries are more at risk from ethnic-based secessionist movements unleashed by attempts at political liberalization than at any time since the early 1960s.
That the question of African boundary stability could be reopened at all is controversial, given the stability of the regime over the last thirty years. It is thus particularly important to examine the arguments of those analysts who believe that Africa's boundaries will not be fundamentally challenged by the profound changes occurring across the continent within the context of a new world order. Crawford Young has been the most persuasive proponent of the view that Africa's boundaries are not threatened. In his now classic study of cultural pluralism, Young argued that Africa, by and large, possessed "culturally neutral states." 27 Because of the artificiality of the states and the obvious multicultural basis of most societies, the ideology of nation building was, almost always, suffused with nonethnic symbols. As a result, "state power has never been placed behind cultural ideology-building, even in the hands of a single group (with the exception of South Africa and Ethiopia)." 28 Young therefore argued that it was "inconceivable" that ethnicity in Africa could develop a political role analogous to Tamil or Sikh nationalism in the Indian subcontinent. Indeed, Young argued that the fact that Europeans termed the Ibo, Yoruba, Kongo, and Ganda "tribes" and not "latent nationalities" (as was the case for the Tamils) buttressed his claim. 29
In later writings, Young has continued to suggest that there will not be an ethnic challenge to Africa's boundaries. He has in fact argued that "among the major regions where ethnicity is territorially rooted, Africa alone has rendered virtually taboo its articulation as grounds for sovereignty claims." 30 Young argues that the reason for this unique outcome was the effectiveness with which national ideologies asserted the bond between population and territory. As a result, he suggests, "the consolidation of the African state system is an accomplished fact" that will not be challenged even if Eritrea gains its independence in the next few years. 31
The major assumption underlying this powerful argument is that the OAU has created a public law that has "normative and empirical force" in Africa and that has been absorbed by the broader world order. 32 These laws and norms were nevertheless created under the old world order. Indeed, the assumption that the boundary-maintenance regime will survive given the profound changes occurring at both the international and the domestic levels is at least open to chal lenge for a few reasons. First, ethnicity did not fuse with separatist political identity in Africa between the early 1960s and the late 1980s, precisely because the international system provided few incentives for leaders to emerge who might threaten the existing boundaries. It is at least open to question whether, now that the incentives provided by the international system have changed so profoundly, ethnicity could not pose much more of a challenge to Africa's boundaries.
Second, there is, in fact, little evidence that the norms of boundary stability have become quite the fait accompli that Young suggests they have. It does not take a very thorough examination of diplomatic history to see that old orders have fallen remarkably quickly once a change has come about in the underlying system of incentives and support. For instance, most analysts in 1985 would have said that the continued existence of the Soviet Union was "an accomplished fact." Similarly, Bismarck's treaty structure, which served to stabilize the Europe of 1871, was rendered moot in the wake of changes fifteen years later. Indeed, Kennan's argument that Bismarck's system fell in part because it did "too much violence" to the "underlying forces for change in European society generally" should be taken as a profound warning to the African state system, given the enormous changes noted above. 33
At the very least, the African state system has not yet been through a series of traumatic changes that would demonstrate that it has become institutionalized. For instance, the system of state relations that Metternich developed could reasonably be said to have become institutionalized only when Castlereagh, a key figure in the creation of the Concert, had died and the system continued. Then, and only then, was it clear that the moral framework created by Austria had indeed become institutionalized. 34 Given the tremendous changes at the international level, it therefore is legitimate to question whether the processes of political liberalization occurring in dozens of African countries will have a destabilizing effect on the African state system.
Also, there are also at least two reasons to believe that political scientists may be systematically biased toward believing that traumatic changes that upset political orders will not occur. First, most models of predicting revolt are based on the assumption that opposition will be detectable because it will build gradually. As Timur Kuran has observed, however, citizens may falsify their preferences if faced with a political order, such as the current African state system, that is able to wield repressive force. 35 Second, critically, participation in revolt may be based on interdependence of public preferences. That is, people may not join in a revolution until they believe that a critical mass of opponents will revolt. As a result, opposition to an existing order may appear to be at a low level until a relatively small event triggers the widespread consciousness that it is now possible for such a critical mass to develop, with the result that a sudden outpouring of opposition causes a revolution. As Gary Marks notes in his stylized model,
| either every opponent of the regime protests or nobody does, depending on the information individuals have about the intentions of others. These intentions are extremely sensitive to public cues or demonstration effects. The death of the leader of the ruling elite, reports of a revolution in a neighboring state, the murder of an opposition leader--these are the kinds of cues that transform the possibilities of opposition response to suppression, not by directly altering preferences, but by changing expectations about how others will respond. 36 |
Certainly, this model of nonincremental swings in opposition seems plausible both for the Central European revolts of 1989 and for Iran in 1979. More generally, this model provides at least a partial explanation for why a revolution that "seems to be the inevitable outcome of powerful social forces" in fact "surprises so many of its leaders, participants, victims, and observers." 37 Of course, the possibility that revolt will suddenly explode without warning is particularly relevant to studying the stability of the African state system, given the enormous number of changes presently occurring throughout the world and in many individual countries. For instance, the creation of new ethnic states in Europe, Asia, and out of what was once Ethiopia may spark a consciousness in other countries that the old order has fallen and that it is possible to mount fundamental changes to the African state system. Given the artificiality of many boundaries in Africa and the rapid changes occurring in the international system, these challenges to frontiers will, in hindsight, seem inevitable.
Finally, the argument that most ethnic groups in Africa so far have not had territorial aspirations does not mean that they will not do so in the future. Ethnic movements over the last several hundred years have demonstrated a remarkable ability to create, in a short period of time, the necessary social framework to claim nationhood. As Eric Hobsbawm noted, "the nation" and "its associated phenomena: nationalism, the nation-state, national symbols, histories . . . all these rest on exercises in social engineering which are often deliberate and always innovative, if only because historical novelty implies innovation." 38 The history of Africa is replete with examples of entirely new social groupings appearing that had claims or were perceived as having origins in history's ancient mists. For instance, Ranger has documented the emergence of "Shona" and "Ndebele" identities that people are willing to kill over in the latter part of the twentieth century despite the fact that these identities simply did not exist before the nineteenth century. 39 Young has also documented the creation of an Ibo identity that eventually led to the attempted secession by Biafra in 1967. 40 Indeed, Young notes that, given the malleable nature of most ethnic identities in Africa and elsewhere in the world, it is not inconceivable that political-ethnic movements could not create themselves in the near future to claim their place in the sun. Leroy Vail argues that it may even be easier to create ethnic identities in the future:
| While the backward-looking aspects of future ethnic phenomena--concern for the glories of past history, culture heroes, the central importance of language, and the like--will remain pretty much the same as for examples in the past, the forward-looking aspect of the Janus of ethnicity has the potential of wide variation across the political spectrum. In contemporary Zambia, for example, a main focus of ethnic identity for the Bemba-speaking people who see themselves cut off from state power is the predominantly Bemba miners' union. 41 |
That the colonialists did not consider most African groupings to be nations and that they do not currently appear to have the same kind of structure that would lead to secession as movements in Asia are not particularly persuasive points. As Ranger noted, the colonialists themselves invented much of what is now considered traditional African social structure in the early part of the twentieth century. In particular, "small-scale gerontocracies were a defining feature of the twentieth rather than of the nineteenth century. . . . What were called customary law, customary land-rights, customary political structure and so on, were in fact all invented by colonial codification." 42 Certainly, Ralph Premdas's warning is relevant to those who believe that ethnic groups in Africa are not of the type to attempt secession:
| In a state of agitation, a nationalist or ethnic group attempts to rediscover its roots. It will need to anoint its language, religious or regional claims with mythical history. . . . This is all a subjective solidarity process. The scholar who seeks to question the legitimacy of the movement on the basis of the objectivity of the primordial and secondary causes will misunderstand what separatist movements are all about. What is significant is the shared belief of a group that its identity and survival are defined by these factors. 43 |
In the mid-1960s many were surprised when the Scots, Welsh, French Canadians, Flemish, Basques, and other groups in what were considered well-ordered, stable nations began to demand significant territorial autonomy, if not outright independence. 44 There is no reason to believe that Africa will absolutely escape such pressures, given that the political systems on the continent are undergoing fundamental changes at the same time that the international system is being dramatically altered.
Formal and Informal Boundary Change
It would be a mistake to believe that the only type of boundary change that could occur in Africa would be the formal redrawing of lines. Especially in Africa, where the writ of central governments has never extended throughout the nation, it may be that the lines stay the same but that a region informally secedes. The processes enumerated above do not have to lead only to formal boundary change; many ethnic minorities would be happy to continue to live in the same nation-state if the central government left them alone and they were governed essentially by local leaders. Indeed, informal secession may be easier, since a central government may not fight as hard if the ethnic rebels do not try to embarrass it on the international stage by demanding that the global society recognize the change in boundaries.
The fiction that as long as the lines remain the same the central government is still in charge is very much a Western notion that has little practical application in Africa. Where informal secession does occur in Africa, the local situation may increasingly resemble Europe in the Middle Ages, when there was overlapping sovereignty in many areas. Obviously, a major diplomatic challenge in the future will be how to relate to ethnic rebels who have suzerainty over an area that is still recognized as part of a sovereign state. A central dilemma for foreigners who promote the notion of ethnic self-determination will be the demands by precisely those whose rights are being championed to have some kind of relationship with the outside world beyond the channels provided by the central government. As with Canada, the relations that outside powers create with regions could have a profound effect on domestic politics even if formal secession is not imminent.
Not every experiment in Africa will lead to outright ethnic conflict, nor will every ethnic conflict pose a significant threat to African boundaries. In the context of a fundamentally changed global environment, however, there is the real possibility that some of the attempts at democratization will have the unintended consequence of unleashing forces that threaten once-stable boundaries. As a result, the possibility of secession will soon begin to have an impact on politics across Africa. It may be only a matter of time before other leaders, perceiving the changed international situation and encouraged by the creation of ethnic republics elsewhere, also begin to threaten secession.
If only a few African boundaries are challenged, the whole boundary maintenance regime will be threatened because the international system that the Africans created is predicated on the illegitimacy of any change in frontiers. Unfortunately, it is impossible to forecast in advance whether boundary changes will eventually lead to more viable nations or simply begin a spiral of chaos and destruction that leaves no one better off.
Even if the lines do not formally change, though, it does not mean that there has not been real change in the delimitation of power. Informal boundary change, where the central government simply gives up on ruling an area and the local leaders are content to exist without formal recognition from the outside world, is a possibility. In fact, this sort of change, perhaps prompted by political liberalization, may be more likely than the "normal" type of boundary change associated with the redrawing of lines.
Note 1: See, for instance, Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Giuseppe DiPalma, To Craft Democracies: An Essay on Democratic Transitions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); and Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991). Back.
Note 2: Organization of African Unity, "OAU Resolution on Border Disputes, 1964," reprinted in Ian Brownlie, ed., Basic Documents on African Affairs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 364.
Note 3: Given the bizarre geography of postindependence Pakistan, even the creation of Bangladesh could arguably be traced to decolonization. Back.
Note 4: Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Revival (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 138, 147. Back.
Note 5: This argument and the potential policy implications are developed more fully in Jeffrey Herbst, "The Challenges to Africa's Borders in the New World Order," Journal of International Affairs 46, no. 1 (Summer 1992): 17-31. Back.
Note 6: Scott Sullivan, "Birthplace of Nations," Newsweek, 1 February 1993, p. 28. Back.
Note 7: See Peter Lyon, "The Rise and Fall and Possible Revival of International Trusteeship," Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 31 (March 1993), and Gerald B. Helman and Steven R. Ratner, "Failed States," Foreign Policy 89 (Winter 1992/93). Back.
Note 8: Robert H. Jackson, Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 190. Back.
Note 11: James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Viking, 1987), p. 127. Back.
Note 12: Crawford Young, "The African Colonial State and Its Political Legacy," in Donald Rothchild and Naomi Chazan, eds., The Precarious Balance: State and Society in Africa (Boulder: Westview Press, 1988), p. 57. Back.
Note 13: Carol Lancaster, "Democracy in Africa," Foreign Policy, no. 85 (Winter 1991/92): 154. Back.
Note 14: "Tribalism Said Precluding National Solutions," Weekly Topic, 2 November 1990, reprinted in Foreign Broadcast Information Service-Africa (FBIS-AFR), 7 January 1991, p. 15. Back.
Note 15: Crawford Young, The Politics of Cultural Pluralism (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), p. 161. Back.
Note 16: "New President Dismisses Armed Forces Commander," Johannesburg South African Press Association (SAPA) in English, 27 November 1991, reprinted in FBIS-AFR, 27 November 1991, p. 34. Back.
Note 17: Young, The Politics of Cultural Pluralism, p. 156. Back.
Note 18: Jane Perlez, "Violence Roils Rwanda's Embryo Democracy," New York Times, 1 June 1992. Back.
Note 19: World Bank, World Development Report 1995 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1995), p. 223. Back.
Note 20: Smith, The Ethnic Revival, p. 143. Back.
Note 22: Michael Bratton and Nicolas van de Walle, "Toward Governance in Africa: Popular Demands and State Responses," in Goran Hyden and Michael Bratton, eds., Governance and Politics in Africa (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1992), esp. p. 49. Back.
Note 23: World Bank, World Development Report 1995, p. 163. Back.
Note 24: Charles Elliott, "Structural Adjustment in the Longer Run: Some Uncomfortable Questions," in Stephen K. Commins, ed., Africa's Development Challenges and the World Bank (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1988), p. 218. Back.
Note 25: Richard Sandbrook with Judith Barker, The Politics of Africa's Economic Stagnation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 80. Back.
Note 26: This point is made well by Richard H. Ullman, Securing Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 23-27. Back.
Note 27: Young, The Politics of Cultural Pluralism, p. 511. Back.
Note 28: Ibid. A similar argument is made by Patrick Chabal, Power in Africa: An Essay in Political Interpretation (London: Macmillan, 1992), p. 134. Back.
Note 29: Young, The Politics of Cultural Pluralism, p. 512. Back.
Note 30: Crawford Young, "Self-Determination, Territorial Integrity, and the African State System," in Francis M. Deng and I. William Zartman, eds., Conflict Resolution in Africa (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1991), p. 341. Back.
Note 31: Ibid., pp. 341-346. Back.
Note 33: George F. Kennan, The Decline of Bismarck's European Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 422. Back.
Note 34: See Henry A. Kissinger, A World Restored (Boston: Houghton Mifflin), pp. 312315. Back.
Note 35: Timur Kuran, "Sparks and Prairie Fires: A Theory of Unanticipated Political Revolution," Public Choice 61 (1989): 41-74. Back.
Note 36: Gary Marks, "Rational Sources of Chaos in Democratic Transition," American Behavioral Scientist 35 (March 1992): 417. See also Kuran, "Sparks and Prairie Fires," p. 70. Back.
Note 37: Kuran, "Sparks and Prairie Fires," pp. 41-42. Back.
Note 38: Eric Hobsbawm, "Introduction: Inventing Tradition," in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 13. See also Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections of the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), esp. p. 123. Back.
Note 39: Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tribalism in Zimbabwe (Gweru, Zimbabwe: Mambo Press, 1985), p. 4. Back.
Note 40: Young, The Politics of Cultural Pluralism, p. 461. Back.
Note 41: Leroy Vail, "Introduction: Ethnicity in Southern African History," in Leroy Vail, ed., The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 17. Back.
Note 42: Terence Ranger, "The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa," in Hobsbawm and Ranger, The Invention of Tradition, pp. 249-250. Emphasis in theoriginal. Back.
Note 43: Ralph R. Premdas, "Secessionist Movements in Comparative Perspective," in Ralph R. Premdas, S.W.R. de A. Samarasinghe, and Alan B. Anderson, eds., Secessionist Movements in Comparative Perspective (London: Pinter Publications, 1990), p. 23. Back.
Note 44: For a review of this phenomenon, see Robert J. Thompson and Joseph R. Rudolph Jr., "The Ebb and Flow of Ethnoterritorial Politics in the Western World," in Joseph R. Rudolph Jr. and Robert J. Thompson, eds., Ethnoterritorial Politics, Policy, and the Western World (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1989), p. 3. Back.
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