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The Nation-State and Global Order: A Historical Introduction to Contemporary Politics, by Walter C. Opello, Jr. and Stephen J. Rosow

 

10. The Postcolonial State:
Reflexive Sovereignty

 

The idea of the territorial state as it had evolved in Europe was imposed on the globe. Remember that the territorial boundaries of the vast majority of non-European states were defined by the imperial states of Europe as they colonized the planet. The anti-European nationalist movements led by indigenous elites promised a reversal of external domination, a recovery of the past, and a chance to construct an independent future. In their drive toward independence, indigenous nationalist elites in non-European states either accepted the institutions of direct rule imposed by the colonial power or created their own. In effect, indigenous elites used the instruments of direct rule as they had evolved in Europe to reimagine the state in order to achieve economic independence and political sovereignty within a global system of states. 1

 

Against Modernization Theory

Outside Europe, nationalism was bound up with programs to transform colonies into modern sovereign states. This entailed viewing indigenous peoples as living in “traditional” societies and European peoples as living in “modern” societies. Modernization theory developed in European social science to explain the process of transformation from traditional to modern societies. Traditional societies were defined as those characterized by small villages, subsistence agriculture, simple social structures, and particularistic behavior. Modern societies were defined as those characterized by cities and towns, commercial agriculture, industry, complex social structures, and universalistic behavior. Modernization scholars believed that the transition to modernity, the condition of being modern, would recapitulate the European experience. It was supposed that the former colonies would undergo the same developmental processes that European states had experienced, and would, eventually, end up looking much like them. 2

This way of understanding modernization assumes that all states would, over time, pass through a single, universal process of state formation. Further, it assumes that the original European states had reached the end of the process. The end point toward which all non-European states were supposedly evolving, albeit at different rates, was the industrialized, democratized, urbanized, bureaucratized, and culturally cohesive nation-states of Europe. Such a view is, first of all, ahistorical; that is, it sees the creation of the state as a universal, inevitable process rather than as a result of historical conditions and actions. Second, such a view is ideological in two ways. First, it hides from view, and implicitly justifies, the power, violence, exploitation, and racism through which Europeans imposed the state in non-European areas. Second, it considers the state’s positive features as a gift of a modern, rationalist European civilization to the non-European world, and its negative features as the result of the inability of non-European peoples to live up to advanced European standards. Again, the result is to justify a European global order that either eliminates or co-opts non-European ways of life, transforming them so that they reinforce the global order.

As we have shown in Parts 1 and 2 of this book, the idea that there exists an inevitable, inherent, standard series of stages, or crises through which all states must pass, grossly distorts the European state-making experience. 3   We saw that the original states emerged from a more or less common feudal and medieval basis, but owing to different situational factors, different outcomes of political struggles within them, and different pressures and influences from other states, they followed different trajectories that resulted in different forms of the state. State sovereignty is a modal feature of the modern world, that is, a model that migrates and is taken up and reworked by indigenous peoples according to particular circumstances and conditions.

Modernization theory’s effect as a discipline of knowledge about states is to mark non-European states as always lagging behind the more “advanced” states of Europe. This reinforces the dualistic political and moral structure of European-created international society, although in a way that allows for a degree of independence of those states, but which “regulates” their sovereignty. That is, this way of thinking about non-European states encourages and sanctions behaviors that limit the sovereignty of non-European states, both by European states and by indigenous elites seeking to “modernize” them. This is not to deny that many non-European states, especially postcolonial states, have been ruled by ruthless civilian dictators and military strongmen. It is to say, however, that modernization theory prejudges these states by declaring such regimes as normal, natural, and even necessary in the “young” or “politically immature” states outside of Europe. 4   Paradoxically, then, modernization theory sanctions intervention by “more advanced” or “more developed” states while simultaneously justifying military regimes and dictatorships, with all their horrors and cruelties, as necessary to these “undeveloped” states.

 

Reflexive Development

Non-European states must be understood not in terms of a presumed universal process of modernization exemplified by the original European states but, rather, in terms of how the sovereign state as a political form of hierarchical domination was constituted reflexively in the context of local cultures, power struggles among contending elites, the colonial experience, and race relations produced by the encounter between European and non-European peoples. 5   In addition, we must take into account the global system of states, as well as the world economy, both of which have pressured non-European states to develop in specific ways. European states, and the global order their colonial activities generated, influenced and controlled developments within non-European states. Sovereignty, then, in non-European states has been both contested within and limited from without.

The colonial encounters complemented and clashed with local conditions, generating certain spaces in which sovereignty was contested. One of the most important was the space occupied by ethnicity. Ethnicity provided an alternative identity around which political life could be organized in and against the new territorial state. 6   Ethnicity should not be thought of as a given attribute of people; it is an identity that people come to adopt under the conditions set by the struggles for independence, and just as with nationalism, its specific features, such as language, racial characteristics, shared histories, and religion, are constructed under modern circumstances.

In many cases, competition among contending elites for control of the institutions of the state and direct rule came to be organized around ethnicity, with different leaders drawing their support from particular ethnic groups whose solidarity they constructed and played upon. Thus, control of the state has been fiercely contested by strong individuals connected by patron-client networks to particular clans, tribes, social classes, or regions. These struggles to control the state and the concomitant ability to extract resources for oneself and one’s supporters from the enclosed subject population, fragmented into rival ethnic groups, has created much turmoil in non-European states, especially those created by direct European conquest. This turmoil has legitimized military rule as well as the frequent intervention of former colonial powers in the name of “stability.”

Some states outside of Europe were created by the mass migrations of Europeans to non-European areas of the globe, such as in North and South America, Australia, and New Zealand. In these states, the local peoples, such as the Iroquois and other tribes in North America, Incan peoples in South America, Mayan peoples in Mexico, and Aborigines in Australia, became what we can call internal exile s, “others” within a territory that was ruled by a state that kept them out by pushing them off the land they occupied. Other states outside Europe were made according to two different but not unrelated reflexive processes. 7

The first such method of reflexive state formation was by direct conquest of non-European peoples and their domination by European states. In this situation, the idea of the state was directly imposed on tribal, often nomadic, peoples whose politics were not oriented to a formalized, territorial space. Direct conquest created new politicized spaces within which complex social hierarchies based on race (white over black), religion (Christian over pagan), and ethnicity (tribe over tribe) generated new practices of domination and submission. Nationalist elites in these directly created and dominated states sought to reverse the hierarchies of dominance and submission through independence. However, nationalist elites in such states were not able simply to reject the state imposed by direct conquest and return to some precolonial past.

The second method of reflexive state formation in non-European areas of the globe was by external inducement. In this situation states developed from indigenous systems of politics in areas that were never directly conquered by European states. Externally induced states, such as Japan, which we will discuss further below, were produced through the ability of certain non-European peoples, for various reasons, to resist direct European hegemony and survive into the present by adopting the institutions and practices of the European state and grafting them to indigenous systems of rule.

 

Instituting Sovereignty in Non-European States

For European states the right of one state to be sovereign implied the right of all others to be sovereign as well. The states-system invoked background understandings of freedom, autonomy, rights, and equality, which were taken to be universal even as they justified and authorized particular states. 8   This meant that the gaining of sovereignty by non-European states was, in effect, a direct challenge to European global domination. The right to self-determination, then, although an important constitutive rule of the sovereign state and states-system, created a significant dilemma: the global system has come to depend simultaneously on the universal principles of sovereignty for all and the maintenance of dominance and control by major powers. The solution that has emerged we describe as the regulation of sovereignty. European states (including the United States) have sought to regulate the sovereignty of non-European states as a condition of the latter’s independence. Non-European states, although nominally independent, have been continuously subjected either to direct military intervention or to a panoply of less dramatic measures to ensure that they developed and maintained a particular form of sovereignty that followed the prevailing norms of the European-created system.

We have already mentioned the role of modernization theory in such regulation. More important, the integration of non-European states into the world capitalist economy has fostered the regulation of their sovereignty. It has opened non-European states (as we will see in Chapter 11), and increasingly all states, to surveillance in order to ensure compliance with the norms and principles of capitalism as set by the international economic system. It has also subjected them to daunting pressures to manage their economies and societies in ways consistent with integration into the world capitalist economy, such as conditioning loans on the adoption of deregulatory policies and reduced state subsidies and social benefit programs. Non-European states are the objects of enormous data gathering and analysis. The World Bank annual development reports, for example, are used as the basis for aid and investment decisions by European states, banks, major corporations, and investors. Subject states are constrained to do what is necessary to produce “good” reports in order to encourage investment and to enable broader access to markets for their own exports. The regulation of sovereignty through the global capitalist economy has increasingly become the case for all states. 9

From the non-European point of view, instituting sovereignty required constant wariness against direct European military intervention designed to structure sovereignty to the former colonial power’s liking, and/or toward the global agencies of the regulation of sovereignty, such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), the United Nations, and foreign aid programs. 10   It should be kept in mind, first, that for many of the former colonial states the “outside” pressures from former colonial states were already “inside” at the time of independence. That is, the act of colonization established boundaries and created state institutions that constrained and conditioned the sovereignty of postcolonial states at the outset of independence. Civil service institutions and militaries, which were initially formed as direct appendages of colonial rule, remained the backbone of the state apparatus after independence. Military advisers from the former colonial power often remained after independence to train the armies and police of the new states.

Second, nationalist leaders generally accepted both the basic principles and outlines of the European concept of territorial sovereignty, leading them to create states within the territorial borders arbitrarily established by the colonial powers and to comply with the norms of an international system that limited their sovereignty. Third, economies of the newly independent states usually remained dependent upon the economy of the former colonial power, which controlled the value of their money, provided the markets for their exports, supplied investment capital, and owned much of their land and national assets.

It should also be kept in mind that sovereignty was contested, actually and potentially, by numerous forces within these states themselves. The identity of these forces depended upon the history and circumstances of the particular state. In some cases, conservative and reactionary nationalists sought to revive precolonial kings or emperors as heads of modern states. As we will see, this was the case in Japan, where during the nineteenth century Japanese nationalists influenced by the Prussian model sought to build a militaristic state that looked back to a presumed glorious imperial past. In many non-European states, nationalist leaders imported Western models of sovereignty (usually socialist but on occasion liberal), which they sought either to meld with or to replace local traditions. It should be remembered that “local traditions” had already been modified and reconstituted by colonialism, as, for example, in the spread of Christianity, which fused with native religions.

The efforts of nationalist elites to create sovereign states were contested, then, both by forces that sought to constitute sovereignty differently from those in power and by numerous forces that resisted the imposition of sovereignty altogether, preferring indigenous ways of social organization and political practice. And, of course, these internal struggles were not isolated from “outside” influences that limited and regulated sovereignty: European powers sought to influence the outcome of these struggles in part by manipulating what remained of the colonial structures, such as the church, the military, civil service, landowner organizations, and corporations, and in part by giving military, financial, and diplomatic aid to various factions in local struggles.

Under such circumstances, a written constitution generally plays a different role in instituting sovereignty than it does for European states, but not because non-European peoples are too immature or politically undeveloped to appreciate constitutionalism, as modernization theory once argued. 11   Rather, this differing role was due to the distinctive historical circumstances that condition the emergence of non-European states. In Europe, constitutions establishing the basic institutional form of the state served to unify the subject population in time and space, as the American Constitution did for the diverse colonial society of southern planters, New England merchants, yeoman farmers, and urban artisans. Because the modern European nation-state emerged in the context of developing capitalism, constitutions served as focal points of national unity by providing the framework of laws that, above all, stabilized commercial relations and reinforced the political and social order necessary to a market economy. In many states, however, especially postcolonial states, the constitution does not perform the same function. In such states, the linkages between local and national were not established primarily by capitalist markets.

In so-called patrimonial states,. 12   for example, individuals seek to acquire power through patronage (from the Latin patron, or a person chosen as a special guardian or protector)—that is, through connections with strong individuals and a particular family, clan, tribe, village, or region within the state. In many non-European states, the political links between local and national are made by patron-client networks through which powerful politicians in the capital city (patrons) have close personal connections to less powerful politicians (clients) among certain families, clans, tribes, or villages. The relationship between the patron and clients is reciprocal. Patrons receive political support from their clients in exchange for access to government jobs, contracts, assistance with the state’s bureaucracy, and government spending programs. 13   Clients provide loyalty and political support.

In such states, then, the tremendous power and authority of sovereignty is manifested in the personal rule of the strong leader. It is significant that such a form of rule establishes spatial linkages and identities that do not necessarily conform to the territorial boundaries of the state, especially of those drawn by European colonial powers; that is, tribal, clan, ethnic, racial, religious, and other such networks and identities either do not fill completely or they overflow the borders of states. It should also be noted that personal rule and the patron-client networks it engenders have become political forces only as the result of the imposition of the state from outside and are not a given consequence of indigenous peoples’ being organized into families, clans, or tribes. 14

It is not surprising, given the historical circumstances of their emergence, that non-European states have often been ruled by the military. The military was the strongest institution in most non-European, postcolonial states at the time of independence. The military and the police were the European institutions of direct rule and thus had been in existence for an extended period prior to independence; parliaments, presidencies, and prime ministerships were usually created only on the eve of independence. Moreover, the military was reasonably well trained, well equipped, and well versed in the techniques of controlling civilians and putting down rebellion. The strength of the military as an institution was also enhanced by the fact that it was often supported with training and equipment from European states (usually the former colonial power). The military has often been able to establish itself as the “real” unifier of the nation, as the necessary bulwark against the outside dominance of European states.

 

Varieties of Reflexive State Formation

We now turn to three cases of reflexive state formation, Japan, Iraq, and the Republic of the Congo, in order to show in detail how their sovereignty was instituted, regulated, and conditioned by forced participation in the European state system, including the world capitalist economy, as well as by indigenous cultures, conditions, and political struggles.

Japan: Externally Induced State Formation

The Japanese archipelago consists of four main islands: Honshu, which is the largest; Kyushu and Shikoku to the south; and Hokkaido to the north, as well as numerous smaller islands. The original inhabitants of these islands were the Ainu, an ancient Caucasoid people. The Ainus were gradually displaced to the northern island of Hokkaido by successive waves of Mongoloid peoples, who entered the islands from the Asian mainland through the Korean peninsula. Governance among them was clan-based. Each clan consisted of a number of households that claimed to have descended from a common chieftain. Eventually, one of these chieftains, Yamato, became dominant over the others. 15

In the fifth century A.D., Japan fell increasingly under the influence of imperial China. Chinese religion, Buddhism, and the Chinese system of centralized territorial rule were imported. The chieftain of the dominant clan was proclaimed emperor, and a bureaucracy selected according to competitive examination was created to assist him in governing. Centralization was resisted by the chieftains of the clans, especially the richest and most powerful. Gradually, large areas of the archipelago fell under the rule of powerful chieftains, who gathered around themselves groups of armed retainers who helped protect their domains. These armed retainers eventually formed a warrior caste, known as the samurai, which rendered faithful service to the chieftains in return for payments of rice. The samurai, not unlike the warrior nobility of the European feudal “state,” developed a code of conduct, called bushido, which emphasized good deeds, bravery, and unswerving loyalty.


Japan, 900

Japanese feudalism sparked a long period of civil war among powerful chieftains. Finally, in 1600, Tokugawa Ieyasu (r. 1603–1616) won a decisive victory and became the most powerful chieftain in the Japanese archipelago, and assumed the title shogun, or military governor. From 1603 to 1867 the Tokugawa family ruled Japan as military dictators. The family itself directly controlled about 25 percent of the archipelago’s land; the other 75 percent was ruled by the Tokugawa shogun’s vassals. Although Japan was theoretically governed by the emperor, his position was purely ceremonial. Actual rule was in the hands of the shogun and his vassals, each assisted by armed retainers of samurai.

In the 1500s the Japanese began to encounter Europeans. Portuguese explorers contacted Japan in 1542 and were quickly followed by Jesuit missionaries. When the Tokugawa shogunate was established in the 1600s, contact between Japanese and foreigners, primarily Europeans but also Chinese, was forbidden, except for carefully regulated trade at the port of Nagasaki. The shogunate’s policy of isolation was based, first, on the fear that Christianity, which was seen as a subversive doctrine, would spread if Europeans were allowed to enter Japan in large numbers and, second, on the fear that certain of the shogun’s vassals could become powerful enough to challenge his dominance if they had access to European military technology.

The strategy of isolation succeeded for about 100 years. However, chronic financial difficulties eventually weakened the shogunate. The currency was debased and taxes were raised in order to raise revenue. Gradually, the situation of small farmers became precarious as more and more rice had to be given to the shogun’s tax collectors. Riots became common.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, Japan was under great pressure by European states—such as Britain, Russia, and the United States—which wanted to topple the shogunate and enter the archipelago. The shogunate faced a difficult dilemma. It could no longer resist the European states, which possessed superior military technology; therefore, it signed treaties with Russia, Britain, France, and the Netherlands, states that regulated trade and diplomatic relations. For this the Tokugawa shogun was castigated by primarily low-ranking samurai from western Japan assisted by certain nobles from the imperial court and by wealthy merchants. When the shogun was overthrown in 1868, governing authority returned to the Emperor Meiji. Although the Meiji Restoration, as the overthrow of the shogunate is called, transferred authority back to the emperor, he remained a ceremonial figurehead. Those who toppled the shogunate moved the emperor’s court from Kyoto to the palace of the Tokugawa shoguns, established Tokyo as the capital, and thus strengthened the central government. 16

The young samurai who led the Meiji Restoration realized that Japan’s survival as an independent entity depended upon the formation of a European-style national state. They imagined a state with a well-trained army and navy equipped with the best modern weapons available and supported by a modern industrial economy. Soon after the restoration, Japan’s new elite began to invite European experts to Japan to teach new industrial and military techniques, and Japanese students were sent abroad to acquire European scientific and engineering knowledge. Railroads were constructed and a telegraph system was created. Factories were set up and strategic industries were subsidized. Schools and universities were built and compulsory education was decreed. A banking system was established. A conscripted standing army that replaced the samurai was created. The state was reorganized: feudalism was abolished and, inspired by France’s centralized system of internal administration, the Japanese archipelago was divided into prefectures. A standard coinage was adopted and internal barriers to trade, a legacy of feudalism, were eliminated. A legal code and a system of courts were copied from those of European states.

The resources needed to build a European-style state were extracted by borrowing and from taxing the subject population, especially farmers. Farmers began to resist the heavy burden of taxation, which they saw as primarily benefiting the urban industrial sector, and resorted to armed uprisings. The restoration elite responded by suppressing these uprisings militarily, jailing the leaders, and censoring newspapers. The ruling elite eventually struck a bargain, promising to grant a constitution and establish a parliament. A commission was sent to Europe to study constitutions and returned most impressed with Imperial Germany. With the assistance of Prussian advisers, a constitution was drafted in 1889. It created a legislature, called the Imperial Diet, composed of a House of Peers and a House of Representatives, the numbers of which were chosen by a very small electorate defined by high tax-paying status. It met for the first time in 1890.

If Japan was going to compete successfully with its European rivals, a sense of nationhood also had to be developed. A national imaginary was created by nationalizing certain Japanese institutions and practices, especially those focusing on the emperor, as well as Buddhist ethics. In 1890 a law was passed that called upon all subjects to practice filial piety, to be loyal to the emperor, to obey the law, and to offer oneself to the state. 17

By the end of the nineteenth century, the Meiji elite had built a European-style state with Japanese characteristics. Evidence of the Meiji elite’s success came in 1904–1905, when Japan defeated Russia, the first time in modern history that a non-European state had defeated a European one. This victory enhanced the prestige of the military, which, during the 1930s, began to play a major role in Japanese politics. The military took indirect control of the state and launched a massive military buildup in order to counter the effects of the worldwide economic depression. They justified these policies by pointing to threats from other states to Japan’s geostrategic position in northeast Asia, such as U.S. efforts to choke the flow of oil to Japan. The Japanese state thus became expansionist. The eventual result of this expansionism was defeat in World War II and occupation by the United States, a consequence that, ironically, the state-building project from its beginning was designed to avoid.

After World War II, the United States forced upon the Japanese a constitution that eliminated much of the military and gave the United States access to military bases on Japanese soil. Under the tutelage of the United States, the Liberal Democratic Party has dominated Japanese politics and succeeded in developing a managerial state in which large corporations oriented toward economic control of world consumer markets work closely with state technocrats, especially the Ministry of Technology and Industry (MITI), to manage an export-led economy. Within major companies workers are guaranteed a job for life in return for nearly absolute loyalty to the company, but the majority of the workforce is subject to the precariousness of the world capitalist economy. Wages remain fairly low, although the state, together with major corporations, provides significant social benefits, and consumer markets are tightly restricted to limit imports.

Japan has become one of the most powerful states in the current world order. Some see Japan as a future hegemonic state, leading an Asian bloc in the world economy in competition with the United States and Europe; this view has, ironically, forced the latter two to remake themselves according to Japan’s own distinctive state institutions and practices. 18   During the 1990s journalists and scholars in the United States argued that in order to successfully compete in the global capitalist economy, the United States had to borrow from the Japanese state its distinctive forms of economic and worker management. 19   Whether the Japanese will turn the institution of the state against Europe and the United States remains to be seen. Let us note that we are skeptical of this characterization of the Japanese as the “other” and enemy of Europe and the United States. We will return to these issues in Part 4.

Iraq: State Formation by Semi-Direct Conquest

Until the end of World War I, the territorial space that eventually became Iraq existed as three administrative regions of the Ottoman Empire. In 1916 Britain conquered these and other districts, dismantled Ottoman administration, and substituted their own system of indirect colonial rule developed in India. The British governed Iraq through tribal shaykhs, or chieftains, who, in exchange for grants and privileges, collected taxes and maintained law and order. 20

In 1920 the League of Nations assigned the mandate for Iraq to Britain, sparking a revolt among the shaykhs that the British put down by force. The British decided to end indirect rule through the shaykhs and imposed a provisional government made up of Iraqis friendly to them, which they replaced in 1921 with a constitutional monarchy. The British selected Faysal (r. 1921–1933), the third son of Sharif Husayn of Mecca, to be king. Faysal, after a well-managed plebiscite produced a 96-percent approval rating for Britain’s choice, was enthroned on August 27, 1921. Relations between Britain and the new Iraqi monarchy were formalized in a treaty that allowed the British to be closely involved in Iraqi internal affairs. An Iraqi army was established with the advice and assistance of British officers, and British advisers were placed in the government’s ministries. Military and other types of aid were provided. Although a parliament was created, political life revolved around the king, a foreign monarch dependent upon the British; the British, who wanted their supporters in the king’s cabinet and parliament; and Arab politicians, who had no deep roots in constituencies outside of parliament, except to tribal shaykhs, and who formed parliamentary coalitions based on personal ties.

In 1929 negotiations between the Iraqi and British governments produced the Anglo-Iraq Treaty, which would remain in effect for 25 years. According to the terms of this treaty, the British were to promote Iraq’s membership in the League of Nations, provide help to the Iraqis if attacked, maintain close cooperation in foreign affairs, be allowed to maintain two air bases on Iraqi soil, and continue training and equipping the Iraqi armed forces.

The political instability engendered by Faysal’s death in 1933 led to a military coup d’état in 1936, which was carried out by Bakr Sidqi, an Arab nationalist officer influenced by European fascism who favored an efficient authoritarian state strong enough to reverse British domination. A series of coups followed from 1937 until 1941. Elements of the indigenous officer corp had become the main site of Iraqi nationalism and resistance to the British. They jockeyed for power with pro-British governments until the British occupied Iraq militarily after a coup by a group of pro-fascist nationalist officers in March 1940.

Under a new treaty in 1947, British troops were withdrawn and the two air bases were returned to Iraq, although the armed forces were still to be armed and trained by the British, who would also still have a say in Iraqi defense planning. Widespread demonstrations against the new treaty led to a declaration of martial law and to the installation of a pro-British military government in 1952. Arab nationalist opposition to the government went underground and spread within the army, which had become dissatisfied with the pro-British elite. On July 14, 1958, the Iraqi army overthrew the Hasimite monarchy and, on July 14, the pro-British government.

The coup was engineered by Abd al-Karim Qasim and Abd al-Salam Arif, members of the Free Officers Movement, which opposed the British-installed monarchy and its foreign policy. After a power struggle between Qasim and Arif another coup was staged by Arab nationalist army officers. They were supported by the Ba’th Party, which had originated in Syria, was strongly pan-Arab, and advocated radical social change. Initially, moderates led by Arif in the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC), as the new government was called, took control of the state in a bloodless coup in November 1963. After a period of weak rule and growing social discontent, a strong group of military men and Ba’thist politicians deposed Arif in July 1968. After this coup, the Ba’th Party established a one-party state.

An internal power struggle for control of the state ensued between civilian and military Ba’thists, eventually won by one of the civilian leaders, Saddam Hussein. On July 16, 1979, Hussein became secretary-general of the Ba’th Party, chairperson of the RCC, commander in chief of the armed forces, and president of the republic, all of which were approved by a newly elected national assembly in which delegates were either loyal Ba’th Party members or favorable to Ba’th Party principles.

The conditions of Ba’thist rule are complex. It should be remembered that Iraq was a legacy of borders imposed on a variety of groups that the British forcibly integrated into a state. Colonialism generated two fundamental forces, not only in Iraq but throughout the Middle East, which defined the possibilities and limits of sovereignty. One was Arab nationalism, a multilayered movement that politicized an ethnic identity as an anticolonial force. It emerged in part among army officers who sought control of the armed forces against the colonial advisers and officers, as well as complicitous procolonial generals. This aspect gave Arab nationalism a statist form. More generally, Arab nationalism became an anticolonial force in reaction to colonial domination of the regional economy, especially oil, and the formation of the state of Israel in Palestine by the British, the League of Nations, and European Zionists. These together politicized Arabism in complex ways.

The other force, by no means completely separate from but not reducible to Arab nationalism, was Islam. In Iraq, Islam had developed considerable complexity, offering different forms that could be translated under conditions of colonialism into various political movements. Within Iraq, sharp divisions between Shiites (primarily in the south) and Sunnis threaten to break the state apart. In the north the Kurds have struggled for their own sovereign state, often with significant aid from foreign powers. At times colonial powers used Islamic clerics to bolster their domination. On the other hand, Islam provided a moral and spiritual basis, as well as a well-established social organization, for the political mobilization of the poor and oppressed. In some forms Islam saw in colonial domination a threatening modernizing and secularizing trend. Other forms of Islam embraced modernization. Note that neither Arab nationalism nor Islam pointed unambiguously to the nation-state as the most appropriate form of political organization.

Hussein reconstituted the state in Iraq by successfully manipulating these political forces, sometimes through repression, sometimes through accommodation. Initially drawing on the Ba’thist ideology of radical social reform, based in a largely secular socialist program although tailored to the conditions of Arab societies, and pan-Arabism, which called for close alliances among Arab states, he buttressed his control over Iraq’s formal institutions through a vast network of kinship and personal ties built up since he joined the Ba’th Party in 1957. This in good part insulated the state apparatus from the conflicting social and political pressures of rival political forces, nationalist and Islamic. 21

Iraq’s position in the world economy and the states-system also conditioned state sovereignty. The British had established an economy in Iraq that was dependent on oil exports, which the British controlled first through direct ownership and then through its monopoly of technology for extracting and refining the oil. It also, along with giant U.S. (and one Dutch) oil companies, controlled the markets. Economically, this severely constrained the Ba’thist Party’s programs of social reform. Also, the type of state organization Hussein created, dependent on networks of personal contacts and loyalties, funneled money into the personal bank accounts of Hussein and his ministers. Lacking the industrial base to build and maintain an advanced military, Iraq remained dependent on European powers and on playing off the superpowers during the Cold War. Considerable sums were used to purchase weapons from abroad, which entailed taking on debts to foreign banks. From the end of the Cold War, Hussein has struggled to hold Iraq together as a centralized state.

Congo: State Formation by Direct Conquest

The area of Africa now occupied by the state known (since May 1997) as the Democratic Republic of Congo was settled over many centuries by small bands of Bantu-speaking peoples who engaged in subsistence agriculture. They encountered pygmy peoples who lived by hunting and gathering. Later, non-Bantu-speaking peoples penetrated the area from the north and settled on the fringes of the tropical rainforest. Except for contact with the Portuguese along the coast around the mouth of the Congo River during the period of European expansion, and Afro-Arab slave traders from the east coast of Africa, the peoples of what was to become the Congo lived isolated from outsiders until the 1870s, when agents of King Leopold II (r. 1865–1909) of Belgium established a rudimentary colony called the Congo Free State, which was recognized by the Berlin Conference (1884–1885) as the private domain of King Leopold. 22   In 1908, the Congo Free State was taken over by the Belgian government and renamed the Belgian Congo.

The Belgian Congo was divided into 15 administrative districts without regard to African political authority, each headed by a commissioner. An army, called the Force Publique, was organized. It was officered by Belgians and its ranks filled with Africans. The Belgian government deliberately created rifts between neighboring African peoples and established administrative hierarchies of African chiefs, who supplied the Belgians with porters, soldiers, and food.

As with other colonized areas, the process of creating a colonial state politicized tribal and regional identities, turning them into social forces around which political loyalties could be organized against others. This set a pattern for the future: to participate in the state, indigenous Africans had few options but to organize themselves around tribal identities. Ethnicity as a political force was both created and politicized by the colonial state.

In the 1890s King Leopold had opened one-third of the Free State’s “unknown” territory to private companies, which were given long-term concessions to exploit resources, such as copper, in return for payments to the king. The concessionary companies ruthlessly exploited Africans by forcing them from their villages to work on plantations and in mines, beating them and executing them if they refused, and setting impossibly high work quotas that frequently resulted in death from physical exhaustion. Accounts of the extremely harsh treatment of indigenous Africans raised humanitarian concerns, especially in the United States and Britain, but nothing came of halfhearted attempts to eliminate the forced labor.

After taking formal control in 1908, the Belgian government reduced the power of the concessionary companies and ruled the colony indirectly through African chiefs, whom they appointed and paid. Often the individual appointed as chief over a particular people was not a chief in the eyes of those people. Later, these chieftaincies were grouped together into sectors, and one of the chiefs was appointed to head the sector. These heads were usually individuals who had worked for the Belgians as low-level clerks in the colonial administration or who had served as soldiers in the Force Publique. Thus, an administrative hierarchy was established that was loyal to the Belgians and that simultaneously politicized ethnicity and generated ethnic divisions.

Despite formal Belgian prohibitions against the exploitation of Africans, labor was recruited by force with the assistance of the Belgian colonial administration, which often worked closely with the labor recruiters from the concessionary companies. The colonial authorities in Leopoldville and Belgium turned a blind eye to this practice, justifying it through the racist belief that Africans could be civilized only through regular labor. The colonial authorities also forced Africans to cultivate cash crops, such as cotton, which were difficult to grow successfully in poor African soils but which settlers or foreign markets demanded.

After World War II, the significant number of European-educated Africans in the Congo, known as évolués (French, meaning “evolved ones”), began to demand jobs in the colonial civil service commensurate with their level of education as well as equal pay for equal work. They began to organize professional, educational, mutual-aid, and ethnic societies and clubs. By the 1950s they began to demand independence. The first demands came in 1956 from a group of prominent Ngala évolués from Leopoldville. Nationalist political parties began to take shape, based on the already existing mutual-aid and ethnic associations. Only one of these parties, the National Congolese Movement (NCM), led by Patrice Lumumba (1925–1961), a prominent évolué from Leopoldville, claimed to be a colony-wide party.

In June 1959, the Belgian government announced that it was going to “prepare” the colony for independence, suggesting that Africans were not capable of governing themselves. This racist language would provide the Belgians and others with justifications for continued intervention to regulate Congolese sovereignty. Three nationalist leaders, each with a different imagining of the future structure of the independent state, emerged: Lumumba and the NCM were in favor of the establishment of a unitary state for the independent Congo. Joseph Kasavubu (1910?–1969) and his party, the Alliance of the Bakongo (ABAKO), and Moise Tshombe (1919–1969) and his party, the Confederation of Katanga Associations (CONAKAT), which was strongly supported by Belgians with a financial interest in the copper-rich Katanga province, were in favor of autonomy for their regions within a federal state. Elections were held in May 1960 for a national parliament and provincial assemblies. Lumumba’s NCM won a plurality but not a majority of seats in the Chamber of Deputies, the parliament’s lower house. Lumumba became prime minister and formed a coalition government. In June, Kasavubu was elected president.

The tranquility of the first months of independence was broken on July 5, 1960, when the Force Publique mutinied against its Belgian officers. Belgium flew in paratroopers to restore order and evacuate Europeans. Lumumba replaced Belgian officers with Africans and appointed his uncle, Victor Lundula, to be commander in chief and Joseph Désiré Mobutu to be chief of staff. The army’s name was changed to the National Congolese Army (NCA).

We need to note here the important role of the military in the independent Congo, one of the legacies of colonialism that defines and limits the possibilities of politics in the Congo and elsewhere in postcolonial states. The military was the element of the state apparatus that the colonial power often most highly developed. Soldiers were well trained, equipped with modern weapons, organized, and disciplined. The independent Congolese state initially maintained Belgian officers, depended upon supplies and training from Belgium, and cultivated a pro-Belgian officer corps. This officer corps enjoyed access to European ideas and was socialized to consider itself as members of the Congolese state with a distinctive responsibility to maintain order and stability.

It is not surprising, then, that civilian leaders would turn to the military for key allies and would give officers important political roles in their governments. This was especially the case given the combination of continued dependence on foreign arms supplies and the willingness of foreign states to back one party against another. Political success came to mean choosing between military patrons. Moreover, the combination of the politicization of tribal identities and the repression of alternative sources of political energy (unions, working class, or democratic civic organizations) that might challenge forced labor, foreign investment, or the practices of major property owners (especially copper mining by the foreign-owned copper companies) meant that mass support for military and nationalist leaders came to be based in often divisive, exclusionist visions of the state and politics.

The crisis of the early 1960s and General Mobuto Sese-Sekou’s rise to power illustrate this legacy. Tshombe, who had established a one-party government in the province of Katanga, declared it independent of the Congo on July 11, 1960. The Belgian government landed paratroopers in the Congo in support of Tshombe. Lumumba and Kasavubu, who feared that the Belgians were seeking to reoccupy the Congo, turned to the United Nations for assistance. On July 14 the UN Security Council persuaded the Belgian troops to withdraw and dispatched several thousand peacekeeping troops to the Congo.

When the UN troops refused to help him end the Katanga secession, Lumumba turned to the Soviet Union for military assistance. Kasavubu, seeking continued support from the West, dismissed Lumumba and his government and appointed General Mobutu as commander in chief of the army. Lumumba refused to accept his dismissal and accused Kasavubu of high treason. Parliament refused to act. On December 31, 1960, General Mobutu assumed power and demanded the departure of Soviet diplomatic and military personnel. Because Mobutu was unable at this time to establish a unified government, the centralized state all but dissolved. In the chaos that followed, Lumumba was arrested and murdered. In February 1961, the Security Council resolved to give the UN forces the power to bring the Congo together under a single government.

Under UN auspices, a parliament was convened and a broad coalition government, headed by Cyrille Adoula (1921–1978), was formed. Tshombe refused to cooperate, and mercenary troops in the employ of foreign copper companies in Katanga clashed with UN troops. When UN forces gained the military advantage, Tshombe requested aid from the United States. The United States brokered a deal that eventually ended the Katangese succession, brought about the departure of the mercenaries, and sent Tshombe into exile. Tshombe did, however, maintain an army of Katangese police in neighboring Angola while he was in exile.

In mid-1963 the national parliament became deadlocked over the draft of a new constitution. Kasavubu declared a state of emergency for six months, which sparked rebellions in Kuilu and Kivu in early 1964. When in the following months rebellions broke out in other northeastern provinces, Tshombe was asked by Kasavubu to return to the Congo and form a transitional government. Utilizing soldiers who had returned with him from exile, Tshombe recaptured rebel strongholds. These successes and his victory in the parliamentary elections of March 1965 made Tshombe a strong contender for the presidency. Therefore, on October 13, 1965, Kasavubu dismissed Tshombe as prime minister. But, because Tshombe’s party held the majority of seats, the new prime minister could not form a government. An impasse resulted. The deadlock was ended when, on November 24, 1965, General Mobutu once again took control of the state and forbade all political activity.

Over time, power was increasingly concentrated into Mobutu’s hands. Mobutu, who was able to stabilize the situation with U.S. support, became a ruthless, corrupt, patrimonial ruler. On October 27, 1971, Mobutu changed the name of the Congo to Zaire. Other place names were Africanized, and Mobutu changed his own name to Mobutu Sésé Sekou Kulu Ngbendu wa Zabango. Over a three-month period, foreign-owned plantations and businesses were expropriated and given to Zairens, mostly party loyalists, army officers, and civil servants. In 1974 Mobutu Sésé Sekou instituted a new constitution that gave the president control over all organs of the state. Mobutu was reelected president in December 1977 and again in July 1984.

Mobutu Sésé Sekou ruled Zaire until 1997, when his regime was overthrown in a rebellion led by Laurent Kabila, which began in the eastern provinces, primarily among Tutsis, and spread to other ethnic groups. Mobutu survived in power for 30 years because certain European states and the United States needed him. With the end of the Cold War, however, the United States no longer needed Mobutu to support Jonas Sivimbi, the U.S.-backed anticommunist client in neighboring Angola who refused to accept its democratically elected government because of its socialist programs and support by Cuba and the Soviet Union. With the end of the Cold War the United States lost interest in Angola and Savimbi. Moreover, Mobutu’s regional alliances unraveled. The white regime in South Africa was replaced and, more significantly, the genocidal Hutu regime in Rwanda, which Mobutu supported, was overthrown by a Tutsi and moderate Hutu force. The rebellion in Rwanda created a refugee crisis, sending nearly two million Hutu refugees across the border into Zaire, where they were exploited by Mobutu and the remainder of the Hutu government. Mobutu temporarily garnered renewed recognition and support from the United States, and from European states that needed his support, to supply the refugees with humanitarian aid and avoid widespread starvation and disease. He supported the remainder of the radical Hutu military, which used the refugee camps to regroup for an eventual reinvasion of Rwanda, to attack the Tutsi population in Zaire, and to repress political opposition. He also controlled the war economy in eastern Zaire, making a fortune for himself and his cohorts by selling arms and controlling oil supplies in the region. The new Rwandan government invaded eastern Zaire and attacked the remainder of the Hutu army. In doing so they joined forces with Kabila in order to overthrow Mobutu. Other regional forces backed Kabila, and, somewhat surprisingly, Kabila’s forces spread through the country easily. During the final takeover of the state, Kabila refused mediation from the United States or Europe; instead, the final negotiations were made possible by African leaders, most notably Nelson Mandela of South Africa.

 

Summary

The often turbulent ethnic politics, patrimonialism, and militarization of many postcolonial states are neither the result of neocolonialism nor the failure to modernize, that is, to live up to “modern” standards. Some non-European states, Japan most notably, have become powerful states in the current world order. All non-European states, whether formally colonized or subjected to less formal pressures to conform to the interests of the United States and European states, faced distinctive limits to their sovereignty. These limits were imposed by the historical legacy of colonialism and by continued efforts to regulate their sovereignty so that it conforms to the norms and interests of the states system and world economy. As we will see in Part 4, such regulating and disciplining of sovereignty has intensified with the globalization of the world capitalist economy.

 

Endnotes

Note 1: Sankaran Krishna, “Inscribing the Nation: Nehru and the Politics of Identity in India,” in Stephen J. Rosow et al., The Global Economy as Political Space (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1994), 189-202. Back.

Note 2: Examples of this literature include Leonard Binder et al., Crises of Political Development (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971); C. E. Black, The Dynamics of Modernization (New York: Harper & Row, 1966); Dankwart Rustow, A World of Nations: Problems of Political Modernization (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1967); A. F. K. Organiski, The Stages of Political Development (New York: Knopf, 1965); and Walt N. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960). Back.

Note 3: Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, A.D. 990–1990 (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 193-194. Back.

Note 4: Such as in Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968). Back.

Note 5: On the idea of reflexive development that draws on the writings of sociologist Anthony Giddens, see Tony Spybey, Globalization and World Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996). Back.

Note 6: See, for example, Basil Davidson, The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State (New York: Random House, 1992). Back.

Note 7: See Göran Therborn, “The Right to Vote and the Four World Routes to/through Modernity,” in Rolf Thorstendahl, ed., State Theory and State History (London: Sage Publications, 1992), 62-87. Back.

Note 8: See Sanjay Seth, “Nationalism in/and Modernity,” in Joseph A. Camilleri et al., The State in Transition: Reimagining Political Space (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1995), 41-58. Back.

Note 9: Our view of regulated sovereignty is different from Robert Jackson’s “quasi-sovereignty” in that emphasis is on regulation and control, whereas his is on creation, entitlement, and “shoring up” of states that do not measure up to the Westphalian-established criteria and norms of sovereignty. See his Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Back.

Note 10: For a recent argument that U.S. foreign aid to promote human rights operates as a form of surveillance and discipline of the sovereignty of “developing” states, see Roxanne Lynn Doty, Imperial Encounters (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), chap. 6. Back.

Note 11: The classic argument to this effect was Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies.  Back.

Note 12: Robert H. Jackson and Carl G. Rosberg, Personal Rule in Black Africa: Prince, Autocrat, Prophet, Tyrant (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982). Back.

Note 13: René Lemarchand, “Political Clientelism and Ethnicity in Tropical Africa: Competing Solidarities in Nation-Building,” American Political Science Review 66 (1972): 68-90. Back.

Note 14: Davidson, The Black Man’s Burden.  Back.

Note 15: These details on Japanese state-making and the following are from Nobutaka Ike, “Japan,” in Harold C. Hinton et al., Major Governments of Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1958), 135-154. Back.

Note 16: Reinhard Bendix, Kings or People: Power and the Mandate to Rule (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978), 476. Back.

Note 17: Sheldon Garon, Making Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). Back.

Note 18: On the influence of the Japanese model on European states, see Jacques Attalí, Millennium: Winners and Losers in the Coming World Order, trans. Leila Conners and Nathan Gardels (New York: Random House, 1991). Back.

Note 19: See Robert Reich, The Work of Nations (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1991) and Chalmers Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1982). Back.

Note 20: The historical details of the case of Iraq are from Phebe Marr, The Modern History of Iraq (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1985), 29-122; 153-244. Back.

Note 21: Ibid., 228. Back.

Note 22: The historical details of the case of Zaire are from Irving Kaplan, ed., Zaïre: A Country Study, 3d ed. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1977). Back.

The Nation-State and Global Order: A Historical Introduction to Contemporary Politics