‘A Project to be Realised’: Global Liberalism and Contemporary Africa

Millennium - Journal of International Studies

Volumn 24, Issue 3, 1995, Pages 527-546

  Young, Tom ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84970658651     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/03058298950240030201     Document Type: Article

References (65)

1. Sir John Sinclair (1803), quoted in J.M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England 1700-1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 31.
2. Erik Erikson, Identity, Youth and Crisis (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), p. 260.
3. John Gray, Liberalism (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986), p. 82. I use ‘modernity’ in order to be understood as widely as possible. A student of mine, Aaron Sheldrick, has proposed a superb alternative-‘westemity’-which is, however, not likely to catch on, at least if the following arguments are plausible.
4. Tom Young and David Williams, ‘Governance, the World Bank and Liberal Theory’, Political Studies (Vol. 42, No. 1, 1994), pp. 84-100.
5. Wemer Levi, ‘The Relative Irrelevance of Moral Norms in International Politics’, in James N. Rosenau (ed), International Politics and Foreign Policy: A Reader in Research and Theory, Second Edition (New York, NY: Free Press, 1969), p. 197.
6. ‘[Liberalism never has been an account of the world but a project to be realised’. Margaret Canovan, ‘On Being Economical with the Truth: Some Liberal Reflections’, Political Studies (Vol. 38, No. 1, 1990), p. 16. In what follows, I do no more than tentatively explore the implications of this acute remark.
7. References would be virtually limitless, but for the terminology referred to, see Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), and Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1986).
8. More generally, my rather flat exposition glosses over all the controversies that rage within the liberal tradition: notably, at the moment, the whole argument about neutrality. See, for example, David Copp, Jean Hampton, and John E. Roemer (eds.), The Idea of Democracy(Cambridgc: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Here, I can do no more than suggest, however rashly, that virtually all these disputes turn on the point that liberalism has been and is a project, not an account.
9. ‘Tradition’ is a liberal categoiy designed to create an empty universal opposite to modernity, which may then denote and malign everything that is not modem.
10. James Tully, ‘Governing Conduct’, in Edmund Leites(ed.), Conscienceand Casuistry in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 6.
11. Charles Taylor, Sources of the II(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 171.
12. Peter Paret, Clausewitz and the State (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 32.
13. The parasitism of contemporary usages is fascinating. Whatever else they may be, the ‘international community’ and the ‘European community” are not communities in any sociological sense.
14. Thus, a conservative newspaper can suggest that the (British) parachute regiment, because it is an effective fighting force, is a ‘lost tribe'! See Sunday Telegraph (9 July 1995).
15. See, respectively, David Held, ‘Democracy: From City-States to a Cosmopolitan Order?’, in Held (ed.), Prospects for Democracy (Oxford: Polity Press, 1993), pp. 13-52; Veit Bader, ‘Citizenship and Exclusion’, Political Theory (Vol. 23, No. 2, 1995), pp. 211-46; and Nancy Fraser, ‘After the Family Wage: Gender Equity and the Welfare State’, Political Theory (Vol. 22, No. 4, 1994), pp. 591-618. All of these projects wou!d involve massive manipulation, coercion, and violence; none of which, it might be said, is foreign to the liberal tradition.
16. This point stands against those conservatives who really believe that liberalism is some sort of civic order. ‘Conservatives’ have insights into this, but seem blind to the point that all modem emancipatory projects are rooted in liberalism, and that the ‘free market’ is the key liberal institution. See Kenneth Minogue, ‘Ideology after the Collapse of Communism’, Political Studies (Vol. 41, No. 1, 1993), pp. 4-20.
17. See the discussion of land law in James Tully, ‘Aboriginal Property and Western Theory: Recovering a Middle Ground’, Social Philosophy and Policy (Vol. 11, No. 2, 1994), pp. 153-80. I note here the strong parallels with the agrarian reformers of eighteenth century England who saw common land as barbaric and, in a sense, empty. Forms of social and political order other than the state and the market become (literally) invisible. See generally the fascinating account in Neeson, in note 1.
18. Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘On State, Society and Discourse in India’, in James Manor (ed.), Rethinking Third World Politics (London'. Longmans, 1991), p. 78.
19. For a nice example, see Geof&ey A Oddie, ‘The Impact of British Rule on Religious Community: The Debate over the Hook*swinging Issue in Bengal and Madras c.1830-1894’, in Peter Robb (ed.), Society and Ideology: Essays in South Asian History (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 177-95.
20. I have in mind the absurdly naive accounts of this concept that have circulated in recent years, particularly in the literature on Africa. There are of course liberal thinkers and observers who are well aware of the points I seek to make here.
21. Can anyone who has worked in a British university in the last ten years, and witnessed the desperate anxiety of ‘administrators’ to ascertain what the state wants them to do, still entertain the notion that universities are part of a civil society ‘autonomous’ from state power?
22. Kaviraj, op. tit., in note 18, pp. 72-99.
23. Judith Shklar, ‘Alexander Hamilton and the Language of Political Science’, in Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 351.
24. For discussion of a particular case, see Yongjin Zhang, ‘China's Entry into International Society: Beyond the Standard of “Civilisation”’, Review of International Studies (Vol. 17, No. 1, 1991X pp- 3-16. For a more general discussion, see Gerrit W. Gong, The Standard of ‘Civilization’ in International Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).
25. Except where their ideological agendas overlapped, most obviously in relation to South Africa.
26. John Lonsdale, ‘Political Accountability in African History’, in Patric Chabal (ed.). Political Domination in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 144.
27. Lamin Sanneh, ‘Religion and Politics in Africa: A Thematic Approach’, in Douglas Rimmer (ed.), Africa Thirty Years On (London: James Currey, 1991), p. 111.
28. See Cristopher Clapham, ‘The African State’, in Rimmer (ed.), in note 27, pp. 91-104, and Robert H. Jackson, Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
29. In the United States, Africa policy-making is now heavily mortgaged to various middle-class pressure groups. See Todd J. Moss, ‘US Policy and Democratisation in Africa; The Limits of Liberal Universality’, Journal of Modern African Studies (Vol. 33, No. 2, 1995), pp. 189-209.
30. For an argument of implacable intellectual honesty within a liberal framework that comes close to such a position, see Richard D. Jeffries, ‘The State, Structural Adjustment and Good Government in Africa’, Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics (Vol. 31, No. 1, 1993), pp. 20-35.
31. World Bank, The African Capacity Building Initiative: Toward Improved Policy Analysis and Development Management (Washington, DC: World Bank, 1991).
32. This is the view of a leading World Bank expert on Africa, Pierre Landell Mills. See his ‘Creating Transparency, Predictability and an Enabling Environment for Private Enterprise’, paper presented at the Wilton Park Special Conference, 1992, p. 7.
33. For an interesting analysis of this literature, see David Williams, ‘Liberalism and the Development Discourse’, Africa (Vol. 63, No. 3, 1993), pp. 419-29.
34. See the interview with him in Africa Hoje (October 1993).
35. For some useful comments on this, see David N. Plank, ‘Aid, Debt, and the End of Sovereignty: Mozambique and its Donors’, Journal of Modern African Studies (Vol. 31, No. 3, 1993), pp. 407-30.
36. This quote is taken from an internal Bank-working document, dated 25 January 1993. ‘Dialogue5 needs to be understood in a rather restricted sense.
37. Peter Gibbon, Kjell J. Havnevik, and Kenneth Hermele, A Blighted Harvest: The World Bank and African Agriculture in the 1980s (London: James Cuirey, 1993), p. 42.
38. ‘Mozambique: The Cheque's in the Post’, Indian Ocean Newsletter(No. 629,25 June 1994), pp. 1 and 5.
39. Donor pledges to Mozambican NGOs greatly exceed the funds requested! See ‘Who Pays for the Next Elections?’, Mozambiquefile (No. 217, August 1994), p. 3.
40. For details, see MIO News Review, No. 172.
41. For details on an outburst of lynchings and beatings that took place in August 1991, see ‘Criminal Lynchings’, Mozambiquefile (No. 182, September 1991), p. 14.
42. See, for example, events in Zambezia province: ‘Mutinies and Rioting Spread’, Mozambiquefile (No. 194, September 1992), pp. 16-17 and 19, and ‘Danger Returns to Mozambican Roads’, Mozambiquefile (No. 200, March 1993), pp. 13-15.
43. Judith Marshall, ‘structural Adjustment and Social Policy in Mozambique’, Review of African Political Economy (No. 47, 1990), p. 32.
44. Quoted in J. Hanlon, Mozambique: Who Calls the Shots? (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 235.
45. Gibbon, etal, in note 38, p. 50. The distinction between ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ acquisition is often rather academic. For an example of the latter, see ‘Manica Land Dispute’, Mozambiquefile (No. 213, April 1994), pp. 20-21.
46. For details of such developments in the University and Radio Mozambique, see ‘Austerity Measures Bite Deep’, Mozambiquefile (No. 213, April 1994), pp. 17-19.
47. IMF, Mozambique Recent Economic Developments (22 July 1993), p. 1.
48. Plank, in note 37.
49. For details, see ‘Election Results in Full’ and ‘Election Money, Election Riots’, both in Mozambiquefile (No. 221, December 1994), pp. 4-11 and 12-13 respectively.
50. The Uniao Democratica happened to be the last party on the Assembly elections ballot papers. As a result, it clearly benefitted from the fact that Chissano was the last candidate on the Presidential election ballot forms, since some electors voted for the last name on both forms.
51. Mozambique Peace Process Bulletin (No. 12, 1994).
52. Expresso (12 November 1994).
53. Supervising and Monitoring Commission (6 December 1994).
54. Jose Louis Cabao, quoted in Financial Times (9 December 1994), p. 4.
55. Bader, in note 15, is a useful guide to this thinking.
56. See, for example, Joseph Hanlon, Mozambique: Who Calls the Shots? (London: James Currey, 1991).
57. Ben Fine, Linkage and the State: The Case of South Korea, SOAS Department of Economics, Working Paper, No. 2, 1992.
58. See, for example, Samuel Decalo, ‘The Process, Prospects and Constraints of Democratisation in Africa’, African Affairs (Vol. 91, No. 362, 1992), pp. 7-37; S.P. Riley, ‘The Democratic Transition in Africa’, Conflict Studies (No. 257, 1992); and P. Gifford (ed.), The Christian Churches and the Democratisation of Africa (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995).
59. One need only look at the bizarre shifts of France, Portugal, and Spain on these matters. See the useful study by Blanca Benet Barrios, Democratisation in the Context of International Relations: Equatorial Guinea and Guinea-Bissau, MA Dissertation, SOAS, 1995.
60. In Niger, the insurgent democrats began by depriving rural people (some 90 per cent of the population) of any vote at all and only subsequently conceded them a politically marginal role. They also forbade discussion of ethnicity, regionalism, and Islam. See Pearl T. Robinson, “Tlie National Conference Phenomenon in Francophone Africa’, Comparative Studies in Society and History (Vol. 36, No. 3, 1994), pp. 575-610. They clearly needed no lessons in the imperatives of liberal modernisation.
61. See Roger Charlton, ‘The Politics of Elections in Botswana’, Africa (Vol. 63, No. 3, 1993), pp. 330-70. Senegal is another interesting African case. See Leonardo Alfonso Villalon, Islamic Society and State Power in Senegal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
62. The total cost of the recent Mozambican elections was some $63 million, of which Mozambique contributed $4.5 million. In a review article forthcoming in Africa, Donal Cruise O'Brien suggests that ‘senegal is, in effect, being paid to look democratic’.
63. The Conference did reassert the universal nature of rights as ‘beyond question’: see UN DocA/CONF. 157/23. This is, of course, a delightfully liberal sentiment, though it should be said that much liberal argument, especially of the born-again variety, operates at this level of intellectual profundity. See Fred Halliday, Sleepwalking through History: The New World and its Discontents, Centre for the Study of Global Governance, 1993. 1 note here (enviously!) that the LSE continues its tradition of setting the pace; it already houses a centre to study something that does not yet exist.
64. Fora literal example seeNational Democratic Institute for International Affairs, ‘The 31 October 1991 Elections in Zambia1 (Carter Center of Emory University 1992).
65. I have not been able to make any substantive use of John Gray's work, but he seems to offer an important contribution. See his, ‘Agonistic Liberalism’, Social Philosophy and Policy (Vol. 12, No. 1, 1995), pp. 111-35.