From nation-building to state-building: The geopolitics of development, the nation-state system and the changing global order

Third World Quarterly

Volumn 27, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 5-25

  Berger, Mark T ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

DEVELOPING WORLD; GEOPOLITICS; NATIONAL POLITICS; STATE BUILDING;

EID: 31344474298     PISSN: 01436597     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/01436590500368719     Document Type: Article

References (122)

1. For example, see a recent book by William W Lewis, the Founding Director of the McKinsey Global Institute. WW Lewis, The Power of Productivity: Wealth, Poverty, and the Threat to Global Stability, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
2. See also J Rapley, Globalization and Inequality: Neoliberalism's Downward Spiral, Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner, 2004;
3. and Roy Woodbridge, The Next WorldWar: Tribes, Cities, Nations and Ecological Decline, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.
4. RA Melanson, American Foreign Policy Since the Vietnam War: The Search for Consensus from Nixon to Clinton, Armonk, NY: ME Sharpe, 2000.
5. WD Stanley, The Protection Racket State: Elite Politics, Military Extortion, and Civil War in El Salvador, Philadelphia, PA: Temple State University Press, 1996.
6. More generally, see WM Leogrande, Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, 1977 - 1992, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
7. While the increasing use of the term 'state-building' instead of 'nation-building' is clearly a way of delinking contemporary nation-building from earlier cold war failures, the growing usage of statebuilding also carries with it a certain accuracy. In the post-cold war era nation-building has become more narrowly focused, less grandly conceived: In fact, there may even be a case to be made for viewing the term 'nation-building', at least in its geopolitical usage, as primarily, if not exclusively associated with the Cold War.
8. J Fallows, 'Blind Into Baghdad', The Atlantic, 293 (1), 2004, p 56.
9. This is a geopolitical definition. The term is, of course, used more broadly to refer to the efforts by national elites to create a territorial state and mobilise the population around a shared sense of national identity.
10. During much of the Cold War the externally driven, or facilitated, nation-building efforts were primarily US- or Soviet- sponsored operations with limited actual UN involvement. UN intervention in the Congo (July 1960 to June 1964) was that organisation's largest nation-building effort during the Cold War. The Opération des Nations Unies au Congo (ONUC) was far more extensive than UN involvement in the Korean War (1950 - 53): Despite the official imprimatur of the UN, the latter was an overwhelmingly US operation. It was not until the post-cold war era that the UN intervened anywhere on the scale of its operations in the Congo. K von Hippel, Democracy By Force: US Military Intervention in the Post-Cold War World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
11. T Dodge, 'The invasion of Iraq and the reordering of the postcolonial world', BISA News, 79, 2004;
12. and MT Berger, 'From Saigon to Baghdad: Nation-building and the specter of history', Intelligence and National Security: An Inter-Disciplinary Journal, 19 (3), 2004, pp 344 - 356.
13. S Mallaby, 'The reluctant imperialist: Terrorism, failed states and the case for American empire', Foreign Affairs, 81 (2), 2002, pp 2 - 7.
14. More broadly, see Mallaby, The World's Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations, New York: Penguin Press, 2004.
15. B Anderson, 'The last empires: The new world disorder', New Left Review, 193, 1992, pp 2 - 9;
16. K Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992;
17. and M Juergensmeyer, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993. At the same time it is important to remember that there is also a tendency (sometimes bordering on the nostalgic) to exaggerate the stability of the cold war era.
18. For example, the prominent US historian of the Cold War John Lewis Gaddis famously characterised it as a 'long peace'. JL Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War, New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Gaddis's approach neglected the instability, revolution and warfare of the cold war era that was taking place beyond North America and Europe. A list of the most major conflicts would include the post-1945 phase of the Chinese civil war, the Korean war and the Vietnam wars, along with ongoing insurgency and counter-insurgency in Latin America and Africa in the 1960s and 1970s and beyond, not to mention the war in Afghanistan and the Central American crisis in the 1980s and numerous wars in the Middle East. Furthermore, some of the most perilous and destabilising events since 1945 coincided with the apex of US power in the early 1960s. In this period, the USSR, under Khrushchev, believed that it was on track to overtake the USA and the Chinese government acquired nuclear capability.
19. B Cumings, 'Still the American century', Review of International Studies, 25, supplementary, 1999, pp 271 - 272, 274 - 275. More broadly most of these conflicts were connected to the way that decolonisation and the Cold War had catapulted nationalist leaders at the head of major mass movements into positions as important players in international politics in the context of a wider effort to mobilise around reformist or revolutionary Third Worldist initiatives that challenged and destabilised a fluctuating cold war international order centred on the rivalry between Washington and Moscow.
20. MT Berger, 'After the Third World? History, destiny and the fate of Third Worldism', Third World Quarterly, 25 (1), 2004, pp 9 - 39.
21. For example, in 1999 John Lewis Gaddis lamented the growing disorder of the post-cold war era and warned of the possible need for the return of 'empires' ('the form of governance that hardly dares speak its name') as a means of restoring regional and international order. Gaddis, 'Living in Candlestick Park', Atlantic Monthly, 283 (4), 1999, pp 73 - 74. Subsequently Gaddis has offered a critical but supportive perspective on post-9/11 US foreign policy generally and the Bush administration's invasion and occupation of Iraq more specifically, while reaffirming the relevance of the notion of empire and the legitimacy of pre-emptive intervention. Gaddis, Surprise, Security, and the American Experience, Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
22. M Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power, New York: Basic Books, 2002.
23. For a sustained critical discussion of the long historical connection between warfare, empire and 'liberty' in US expansion, see F Anderson & A Cayton, The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500 - 2000, New York: Viking, 2005.
24. N Ferguson, 'Clashing civilizations or mad mullahs: The United States between informal and formal empire', in S Talbott & N Chanda (eds), The Age of Terror: America and the World after September 11, Oxford: Perseus Press, 2001, p 141.
25. See also Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, New York: Basic Books, 2003.
26. N Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America's Empire, London: Penguin Press, 2004.
27. EA Cohen, 'History and the hyperpower', Foreign Affairs, 83 (4), 2004, pp 55, 63.
28. R Cooper, 'The new liberal imperialism', Observer, 7 July 2002, at http://observer.guardian.co.uk.
29. See also Cooper, The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-First Century, London: Atlantic Books, 2003.
30. D Priest, The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace With America's Military, New York: WW Norton, 2003, pp 14, 390 - 392.
31. For a parallel, though less comprehensive, approach, see M Ignatieff, Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan, New York: Vintage, 2003.
32. J Dobbins, JG McGinn, K Crane, SG Jones, R Lal, A Rathmell, R Swanger & A Timisina, America's Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq, Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 2003, pp xxviii - xxix.
33. TPM Barnett, The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century, New York: Berkley Books, 2004.
34. See F Fukuyama, State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004.
35. Barnett, The Pentagon's New Map, p 358.
36. A Callinicos, The New Mandarins of American Power: The Bush Administration's Plans for the World, Cambridge: Polity, 2003;
37. S Halper & J Clarke, America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004;
38. and Anne Norton, Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004.
39. More broadly, see D Harvey, The New Imperialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003;
40. E Meiksins Wood, Empire of Capital, London: Verso, 2003;
41. and M Mann, Incoherent Empire, London: Verso, 2003.
42. The exemplary document in this regard is GW Bush, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, 17 September 2002, at www.whitehouse.gov.
43. IH Daalder & JM Lindsay, America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003, pp 15, 40 - 49.
44. Books by neoconservatives that reflect their 'democratic imperialism' include R Kagan, A Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicaragua, 1977 - 1990, New York: Free Press, 1996;
45. D Wurmser, Tyranny's Ally: America's Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein, Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1999;
46. D Kagan & FW Kagan, While America Sleeps: Self-Delusion, Military Weakness and the Threat to Peace Today, New York: St Martin's Press, 2000;
47. and D Frum & R Perle, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terrorism, New York: Random House, 2004.
48. George Bush and Bill Clinton cited in ME Brown, 'The causes of internal conflict: An overview', in ME Brown, OR Coté, SM Lynn-Jones & SE Miller (eds), Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001, p 3.
49. TR Gurr argues that, contrary to the 'conventional wisdom', the 'rash of ethnic warfare peaked in the early 1990s' as a result of greater resort to strategies of accommodation by the holders of state power. TR Gurr, 'Ethnic warfare on the wane', Foreign Affairs, 79 (3), 2000, p 52.
50. For example, see Z Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, New York: Basic Books, 1997;
51. and JJ Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, New York: WW Norton, 2001.
52. SP Huntington, 'The West: Unique, not universal', Foreign Affairs, 75 (6), 1996, pp 28 - 46;
53. and Huntington, 'The lonely superpower', Foreign Affairs, 78 (2), 1999, pp 35 - 49.
54. SP Huntington, 'The clash of civilizations?', Foreign Affairs, 72 (3), 1993, p 41.
55. SP Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.
56. SP Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity, New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004.
57. RD Kaplan, 'Looking the world in the eye', Atlantic Monthly, 288 (5), 2001, pp 70, 81.
58. For booklength critiques of the 'clash of civilizations' as a way of understanding post-cold war international relations and international security, see MB Salter, Barbarians and Civilization in International Relations, London: Pluto Press, 2002;
59. and G Achcar, The Clash of Barbarisms: Sept 11 and the Making of the New World Disorder, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002.
60. For example, see RD Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History, New York: Vintage, 1994;
61. Kaplan, The Ends of the Earth: A Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy, New York: Vintage, 1997
62. Kaplan, Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan, New York: Vintage, 2001;
63. and Kaplan, Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands A Pagan Ethos, New York: Random House, 2001.
64. RD Kaplan, 'The coming anarchy: How scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism, and disease are rapidly destroying the social fabric of our planet', Atlantic Monthly, 273 (2), 1994, pp 44 - 76;
65. and Kaplan, The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post-Cold War, New York: Vintage, 2000, pp 4, 7, 24.
66. For example, an editorial in The Economist in 2000 provided a primordial explanation for the chronic instability in Africa when it argued that 'brutality, despotism and corruption exist everywhere' in the world, 'but African societies, for reasons buried in their cultures seem especially susceptible to them'. 'Hopeless Africa', The Economist, 13 May 2000, p 15.
67. S Ellis, The Mask of Anarchy: The Destruction of Liberia and the Religious Dimensions of an African Civil War, London, Hurst & Company, 1999, p 19.
68. P Richards, Fighting for the Rainforest: War, Youth and Resources in Sierra Leone, Oxford: James Currey, 1996, pp xiv.
69. Kaplan, The Coming Anarchy, p 49.
70. TF Homer-Dixon, Environment, Scarcity and Violence, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999;
71. and J-F Bayart, S Ellis & B Hibou, The Criminalisation of the State in Africa, James Currey, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999.
72. For example, see I de Soysa 'The resource curse: Are civil wars driven by rapacity or paucity?', in M Berdal & DM Malone (eds), Greed & Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000;
73. Wenche Hauge & Tanja Ellingsen, 'Causal pathways to conflict', in PF Diehl & N P Gleditsch (eds), Environmental Conflict: An Anthology, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000;
74. B Lomborg, 'Resource constraints or abundance?', in Diehl & Gleditsch, Environmental Conflict;
75. and NP Gleditsch, 'Armed conflict and the environment', in Diehl & Gleditsch, Environmental Conflict.
76. D Keen, 'Incentives and disincentives for violence', in M Berdal & DM Malone (eds), Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000, p 26.
77. N Richani, Systems of Violence: The Political Economy of War and Peace in Colombia, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002, pp 3 - 4.
78. More broadly, see D Stokes, America's Other War: Terrorizing Colombia, London: Zed Press, 2005.
79. See P Collier, 'Doing well out of war: An economic perspective', in Berdal & Malone, Greed and Grievance;
80. and P Collier & A Hoeffler, Greed and Grievance in Civil War, World Bank, Working Paper Series, 2000.
81. P Collier, Breaking the Conflict Trap: Civil War and Development Policy, Washington, DC: World Bank and Oxford University Press, 2003.
82. For example, see W Reno, Warlord Politics and African States, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998;
83. and N van de Walle, African Economies and the Politics of Permanent Crisis, 1979 - 1999, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
84. K Ballentine & J Sherman (eds), The Political Economy of Armed Conflict: Beyond Greed and Grievance,Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003.
85. K Ballentine & J Sherman, 'Introduction', in ibid, pp 4-5.
86. For example, see IW Zartman (ed), Collapsed States: The Disintegration and Restoration of Legitimate Authority, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner 1995;
87. Zartman, Cowardly Lions: Missed Oppportunities to Prevent Deadly Conflict and State Collapse, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner 2005;
88. RI Rotberg (ed), State Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003;
89. and Rotberg (ed), When States Fail: Causes and Consequences, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.
90. P Bilgin & AD Morton, 'Historicising representations of "failed states": Beyond the cold war annexation of the social sciences?', Third World Quarterly, 23 (1) 2002, pp 55-80.
91. On the weakening of the internal - external distinction (the 'Great Divide') in international relations following the end of the Cold War, see M Kaldor, Global Civil Society: An Answer to War, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003, pp 6, 78.
92. See also M Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001.
93. MT Berger, 'The nation-state and the challenge of global capitalism', Third World Quarterly, 22 (6) 2001, pp 889-907;
94. and Berger, The Battle for Asia: From Decolonization to Globalization, London: Routledge, 2004.
95. E Rieger & S Leibfried, Limits to Globalization: Welfare States and the World Economy, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003;
96. and J Gillingham, European Integration, 1950 - 2003: Superstate or New Market Economy?, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
97. M Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security, London: Zed Press, 2001, pp 2-5.
98. T Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923 - 1939, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001.
99. C Thorne, The Limits of Foreign Policy: The West, the League and the Far Eastern Crisis of 1931 - 1933, New York: GP Putnam's Sons, 1973.
100. TM Coffey, Lion by the Tail: The Story of the Italian -Ethiopian War, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1974.
101. AA Kallis, Fascist Ideology: Territory and Expansionism in Italy and Germany, 1922 - 1945, London: Routledge, 2000.
102. DG Becker & RL Sklar, 'Introduction', in Becker & Sklar (eds), Postimperialism in World Politics, New York: Praeger, 1999.
103. See also DG Becker, J Frieden, SP Schartz & RL Sklar, Postimperialism: International Capitalism and Development in the Late Twentieth Century, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1987.
104. GJ Ikenberry, 'Creating yesterday's new world order: Keynesian "new thinking" and the Anglo-American postwar settlement', in J Goldstein & RO Keohane (eds), Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions and Political Change, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993, p 57.
105. West Germany's dramatic industrial success after 1945 not only built on the Marshal Plan, but on important economic structures and policies, and governmental arrangements laid down in the pre-1945 era. See S Reich, The Fruits of Fascism: Postwar Prosperity in Historical Perspective, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.
106. Nation-building also emerged as an important concern of North American political science in the context of the Cold War and the rise of modernisation theory. ME Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and 'Nation-Building' in the Kennedy Era, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000;
107. and MT Berger, 'Decolonization, modernization and nation-building: political development theory and the appeal of Communism in Southeast Asia, 1945 - 1975', Journal of Southeast Asian Studies,. 34 (3), 2003, pp 421-448.
108. G Kolko, Confronting the Third World: United States Foreign Policy 1945 - 1980, New York: Pantheon Press, 1988.
109. SG Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. The Alliance for Progress began as a decade-long programmw of land and economic reform that was expected to cost $100 billion. The USA made an initial contribution of US$1 billion and a commitment to raise another US$20 billion overall from both public and private sources. The USA set the achievement of an annual economic growth rate for Latin America of at least 2.5% as one of the main goals of the Alliance. Emphasising the importance of national development planning, the Alliance, under US leadership, sought to achieve greater productivity in the agricultural sector, eradicate illiteracy, stimulate trade diversification and industrialisation, generate improvements in housing and bring about improved income distribution in the region. A key contradiction of the US-led modernisation project in Latin America centred on the fact that successful trade diversification would undermine the monopoly of primary agricultural products and mineral extraction enjoyed by a number of US-based transnationals, while any significant land reform threatened the power of the still largely land-based ruling elites in Latin America. By the late 1960s high rates of economic growth in many Latin American countries had been achieved. However, high growth rates had served primarily to increase social inequality, while the middle classes moved to side with the ruling elites as politics, instead of becoming more democratic, moved increasingly towards authoritarianism and military dictatorship. By the time of Kennedy's assassination in late 1963, in the context of a growing emphasis on the important role the military could play in providing order and guiding national development, the reformist elements of the Alliance for Progress had been displaced by a more straightforward focus on military and economic aid to any regime, regardless of how draconian, which was committed to the maintenance of US hegemony in the region.
110. MT Berger, Under Northern Eyes: Latin American Studies and US Hegemony in the Americas 1898 - 1990, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995, pp 87-88;
111. and KC Pearce, Rostow, Kennedy, and the Rhetoric of Foreign Aid, East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2001, pp 103-116.
112. Latham, Modernization as Ideology, pp 14-15, 58-59, 68, 153, 211-215.
113. A Hoogvelt, Globalization and the Postcolonial World: The New Political Economy of Development, London: Palgrave, 2001, p 177.
114. RJ McMahon, The Limits of Empire: The United States and Southeast Asia Since World War II, New York: Columbia University Press, 1999, pp 60-79.
115. G Kolko, Anatomy of aWar: Vietnam, the United States and Modern Historical Experience, New York: New Press, 1994, pp 303-337, 341-355, 545.
116. Even before 11 September the Pentagon's budget represented over 30% of global arms expenditures and US defence spending is greater than the total combined defence budgets of the nine nation-states that along with the USA are the top 10 military powers in the world. P Gowan, 'After America?', New Left Review (II), 13, 2002, p 136.
117. G Monbiot, 'Playing the tin soldier', Guardian Weekly, 23 - 29 October 2003, p 13.
118. For a variation on this argument, see J Petras & M Morley, Empire or Republic? American Global Power and Domestic Decay, New York: Routledge, 1995, pp xi - xii, xv - xvi, 24.
119. For a generally optimistic assessment of the past and future role of the UN in nation-building, see J Dobbins et al, The UN's Role in Nation-Building: From the Congo to Iraq, SantaMonica, CA: Rand, 2005.
120. E Gottesman, Cambodia After the Khmer Rouge: Inside the Politics of Nation-Building, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003.
121. A Rashid, 'The mess in Afghanistan', New York Review of Books, 51 (2), 2004, pp 24-27.
122. AJ Bellamy, P Williams & S Griffin, Understanding Peacekeeping, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004, pp 189-275.