be states. The problem of being too small is, if anything, even more daunting than the problem of being too large. If a continent is divided into a patchwork of tiny countries each too small to have in-
ternalized the key externalities, vital public goods will be missing.
Even for basics, such as the generation of electricity and the provi-
sion of road and rail networks, in a patchwork of small territories
the public goods are regional rather than merely national. The radi-
cally larger scale of territory of the colonial empires is one reason
that their infrastructure decisions were manifestly superior to those
of the post-independence governments: Africa is still relying on
their faded legacy.
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To get specific, Central Africa has ideal geography for hydro-
electric power: high rainfall over a massive area of high ground that
collects into the River Congo. The descent to sea level could generate
power for much of Africa and has been a development project for
decades. The project has barely moved. The Democratic Republic of
the Congo does not itself need all that power, while other countries
are not willing to put themselves at the mercy of its president, or,
for that matter, at the mercy of the presidents of any of the countries
that power lines might have to traverse. The excess of national sov-
ereignty possessed by these presidents has delivered power shortages
across the region. As a huge landmass Africa is also well suited to
railways. Many were built by the colonizing powers. Try traveling
on them now: there is an acute shortage of rolling stock. It should be
easy to finance new rolling stock: elsewhere a rail company can raise
finance by pledging the stock itself as collateral, much as you can
buy an auto on credit. But the rolling stock cannot be accepted as
collateral because it might roll away over a national frontier. There
is so little neighborhood cooperation in law enforcement that once it
is across the border it might as well have been taken to Mars.
So small is ugly as far as public goods are concerned. Being
small artificially limits the benefits of state provision, and this ac-
centuates the lack of supply: the lower the payoff, the weaker the
incentive to try.
P ot e n t i a l ly t h e s tat e s o f t h e bottom billion could themselves cooperate to supply the public goods that cannot be supplied
at the level of each state. Indeed, to the extent that they cannot ef-
ficiently be supplied because they are regional public goods, there is
an incentive to cooperate. Regional cooperation is the least invasive
challenge to national sovereignty, and so if it is feasible, it is at this
level that international supply of accountability and security should
be undertaken. Is it feasible?
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Since the societies of the bottom billion are radically less able
to supply the key public goods at the level of each state than are
other societies, it might be expected that they would rely more
than other societies upon cooperation. They have much more to
gain than the larger and more homogenous high-income coun-
tries. Among the high-income countries themselves this is indeed
the clear pattern: the two countries that have been least interested
in pooling sovereignty are the two largest, America and Japan.
The country that has been most enthusiastic, indeed providing the
home for the European Community, has been the small and di-
verse society of Belgium. I almost forgot Luxembourg, which is
equally keen. Among the plethora of countries that emerged from
the collapse of the Soviet Union, the small countries have queued
up to pool their sovereignty into the European Union, whereas
Russia has held itself aloof.
Accepting these understandable differences in the degree of
enthusiasm, over the past half century the developed nations have
started to get the hang of how to cooperate, albeit fitfully. Gradually,
sovereignty is being pooled where there are clear advantages. The
most dramatic pooling of sovereignty occurred earlier: the shift to-
ward federal power within the United States. Fifty states, nearly all of which have economies far larger than the typical economy of the bottom billion, have learned how to cooperate. The next most dramatic
is the European Community: twenty-seven states have pooled some
sovereignty, although much less than in the United States. At an-
other layer down, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development is a grouping of thirty high-income countries that has
built up a long tradition of mutual reinforcement of governance.
Even the middle-income countries have no equivalent to the
sovereignty pooling of the high-income countries. The Asian tsu-
nami was so devastating because the countries bordering the Indian
Ocean had not got around to cooperating on an earthquake-warn-
ing system. In the bottom billion the lack of cooperation is more
Better Dead Than Fed?
193
pronounced. There are many regional groupings of these countries
but they do not effectively bind their members: they are essentially
decorative.
To see the contrasting trends, compare Germany, the largest
country in Europe, with Burundi, one of the smallest countries in
Africa. Both countries have a troubled past and have been a men-
ace to the neighborhood, but think how their degree of sovereignty
now differs. One of them does not have its own currency, does not
control its own interest rate, does not control its own trade policy,
is subject to rules that limit its budget deficit, can have decisions in
its courts overruled by decisions in courts run by the neighborhood,
and cannot prevent foreign companies from taking over its firms.
The other country has total sovereignty over all these matters. The
country with the more limited sovereignty is Germany: yet the Ger-
man economy is thirty-two hundred times the size of the Burundi
economy. If we apply the concept of internalizing externalities, Bu-
rundi should be pooling its sovereignty with its neighbors far more
vigorously than Germany. Generally, small countries need to pool
more sovereignty than large countries. Everyone other than Ameri-
cans gets upset that America often refuses to pool its sovereignty, but
as the largest economy in the world America has least need to do so:
it has already internalized a huge array of externalities by pooling
sovereignty within its borders. The paradox is that despite having
the most to gain from pooling their sovereignty, the societies of the
bottom billion have pooled it the least.
Return, for a moment, to those externalities that each country
of the bottom billion has on others. Sometimes these externalities are
reciprocal, so that if two countries cooperate they both benefit. These
are the easy public goods to supply through regional cooperation.
If everyone benefits, then cooperation should be feasible, although
even here the record is not encouraging. But often the externalities
are not reciprocal. Quite commonly, in the absence of cooperation,
although one country suffers a lot from adverse externalities, the
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other country gains a little. If I were to write through the night to
music, it would help me a little but my family would not be able to
sleep. In a family it is easy to internalize that externality: I write in
silence. But if Kenya were to fix the road to Uganda and commit
to keeping it open, something that would help landlocked Uganda
enormously, it would cost Kenya a little money and Kenya would
have to sacrifice some political leverage. These public goods are un-
likely to be supplied by cooperation. In principle, economics has the
solution to such situations: the government of Uganda should offer
sufficient financial compensation to the government of Kenya that
cooperation is in the interests of both countries. It doesn’t happen
and it is not going to happen: the road linking Uganda to the coast
has been unreliable ever since Kenya’s independence. Or take the
new iron ore discovery in Guinea. Fortuitously, an existing colonial
railway links the site to a nearby port, Buchanan. But unfortunately,
Buchanan is in Liberia, so instead a new railway is to be constructed
and a new port built. The new route will be much longer, but it will
stay within Guinea. More than half of the $6 billion cost of the new
mine is due to this decision: the extra cost about equals the national
income of Liberia. For those externalities that are not reciprocal,
regional cooperation is ruled out, and so the only option is to inter-
nalize them at a higher-level international cooperation.
This is by no means the only problem faced by regional cooper-
ation. Consider specifically the provision of the missing public good
of accountability. African states are indeed currently cooperating to
provide a degree of mutual scrutiny through the African Peer Re-
view Mechanism. This is a new arrangement whereby governments
can volunteer to be assessed by other governments. I strongly support
it, but to date African governments have shown no stomach for such
criticism. Indeed, such an approach faces enormous difficulties. If,
within their own societies, none of the component governments is
individually accountable, a club to provide accountability regionally
faces two acute problems: legitimacy and incentives. The legitimacy
Better Dead Than Fed?
195
problem is that the first government to be criticized can turn around
and say, quite reasonably, “So the pot is calling the kettle black!”
The incentive problem is that interstate cooperation largely
means inter government cooperation. But why should governments
that are not accountable cooperate to build restraints upon them-
selves? Even if some governments are sufficiently farsighted to see
some gains from such restraints, cooperation can usually be blocked
by a few stubborn participants. Take the recent collapse of account-
ability in Zimbabwe. If ever there is going to be a need for account-
ability to be reinforced by the neighborhood, this is it. To his credit,
in 2007 President Mwanawasa of neighboring Zambia indeed tried
to raise concerns about the meltdown in Zimbabwe at a meeting
of the presidents of southern Africa. With several million Zimba-
bweans fleeing the country his concern was understandable. But
President Mwanawasa received little support from other presidents.
Indeed, the report comparing economic performance that had been
prepared for the meeting was not even presented, lest it cause em-
barrassment. Mugabe himself stormed out of the meeting as though
the very expression of concern was an outrage: why should he not
ruin his country if he wanted to do so? Indeed, African presidents
have generally rallied around President Mugabe. Far from criticiz-
ing him they elected Zimbabwe to the chair of the United Nations
Human Rights Committee. Even when Mugabe tried to import a
huge arms shipment, it took a strike by South African dockers to
block it. Mugabe could only have wanted the guns either to crush
the opposition or to menace his neighbors, yet without those dock-
ers, neighboring governments would have remained passive.
A final problem is that just as leadership matters in forging a
nation out of its distinct ethnic groups, so leadership matters in gal-
vanizing a group of countries into meaningful collective action. The
European Union did not just happen: it took the vision of commit-
ted leaders who saw that the long-term interests of their country
would be enhanced by pooling some sovereignty. So it is the respon-
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sibility of the national leaders within the political groupings of the
countries of the bottom billion to build cooperation. In recent years
they have been rather short of visionary and charismatic regional
leadership. The last time Africa had such leadership was in the early
post-independence phase when Presidents Nkrumah of Ghana and
Nyerere of Tanzania promoted an agenda of Pan-Africanism. The
actual content was a prisoner of its time: the agenda of unity against
the Western world. But Pan-Africanism failed not primarily because
of this content, but because forging any unity of purpose among so
many countries is difficult.
I f s ov e r e i g n s tat e s a r e t o o small, yet regional cooperation between them is too difficult, one radical alternative is to federate
them into a few larger states. This is the route that America took,
and it was briefly tried in late colonial Africa. A straightforward
obstacle to merging states is that certain personnel would become
redundant, and like all about-to-be-made-redundant employees,
they might object. If two states merge they need only one president,
one set of ministers, one army. Perhaps that is why state mergers are
so rare.
While the perks of high office might account for the reluctance
of states to merge, there is a deeper question: would it alleviate or in-
tensify the key weakness of small size, the inability to reap the scale
economies of security. However, recall that unfortunately there are
two opposing effects of an increase in size on insecurity, not just the
benefits of greater scale but the increased risk associated with any
consequential reduction in cohesion. But would state merger fur-
ther worsen the lack of cohesion? It is quite possible that given the
arbitrary nature of colonial boundaries, with straight lines carving
through societies, some mergers would not increase ethnic diversity.
Even if it did, the security gains from scale might outweigh the dan-
gers of increased diversity.
Better Dead Than Fed?
197
This is a question that is just about researchable. Christian Wig-
strom, a Swedish graduate student at Oxford, got interested, and we
decided to investigate it. We decided to replay the decolonization
process, imagining the consequences had Africa been packaged into
fewer
countries. Rather than redraw boundaries, we decided to pro-
gressively rub them off the map, first merging countries into pairs,
and continuing the merger process until we reached the African
dream of a politically united sub-Saharan Africa. You may variously
view this as social science gone mad; as an arrogant attempt to play
God with countries; or as something that might conceivably inform
the political impetus within Africa to break beyond the colonially
imposed mosaic and achieve greater unity.
One of the most exhilarating consequences of building a model
is that it enables the researcher to simulate alternative scenarios. We
had to establish some principle to guide the merger sequence: for
example, should Kenya first merge with Uganda or with Tanzania?
We decided that our guiding criterion would be to minimize the
risks facing the merged state, so we looked for states with similar
ethnic composition. In effect, these were hypothetical marriages of
countries that were as ethnically similar as possible. In the process
we discovered that because the boundaries of the old empires often
sliced through ethnic groups, it was sometimes possible to make na-
tions bigger without making them more diverse. On our analysis
such nations would have been more secure: they would have gained
from scale economies without losing from additional diversity. We
also found that state boundaries at least appear to have been drawn
as attempts to trade off scale against diversity. In places where there
was atypically high ethnic diversity, the states were also unusually
small. It is these states, small yet diverse, that face the most severe
problems of internal security. As the hypothetically merged nations
gradually came out of this process, we then estimated their risks of
violence from the simulation model that I had built with Anke and
Dominic. We could address, at least after a fashion, the question of
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how badly wrong the decolonization process had been in their pack-
aging decisions from the perspective of security.
Our somewhat eccentric research is still in progress, but it looks
as though Africa’s multitude of ethnic groups could have been bun-
dled up into around seven large states with little increase in ethnic
diversity. A seven-state structure for Africa would, on our analy-
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