Paul Collier - Wars, Guns, and Votes
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sis, have been considerably safer than the present structure. How-
ever, to crunch down from seven states to one—a United States of
Africa—would involve a high price in terms of increased diversity
and so drive the region back into danger. Perhaps the goal of greater
African unity may be best achievable through strengthening the
subregional groupings.
G i v e n t h e s e v e r e p ro b l e m s o f cooperation among the sovereign states of the bottom billion and the impediments to the more
radical strategy of state merger, the only remaining option is for
provision to come from a higher level of international cooperation
than the region. Those societies that are currently being damaged
by rule-free electoral competition have an urgent need for account-
ability, and it will need to come from others. More specifically, be-
cause of the problems of legitimacy and incentives, it will need to
come predominantly from that part of the international community
in which governments are already subject to effective accountability.
We are back to the brick wall of national sovereignty, reinforced by
the mindset that resulted in the election of Zimbabwe as chair of
that human rights committee.
Conventionally, the governments of the bottom billion are re-
garded as internationally powerless. They see themselves as victims
of an international system that is stacked against them. Having
struggled free from being colonies they see themselves as still en-
trapped by the bullying of more powerful nations. I think that this
victim-bully imagery has been hugely dysfunctional. It has masked
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a radically different reality: individually, the governments of the
bottom billion have too much sovereignty, not too little. Before the
people I most want to reach throw Wars, Guns, and Votes down in
disgust, let me stress that I am not an apologist for colonialism, and
I most certainly do not want to restore it in any shape or form. The
problem I want to address is first and foremost a problem for the
societies of the bottom billion themselves.
The countries of the bottom billion are, for the most part, the
opposite of America. Rapidly put together in a surge of immigration,
America was an instant society but is now an old nation. Americans
share not only a sense of identity but a suspicion of governmental
power and so have cooperated to build and sustain the public good
of checks and balances: government is highly transparent. America
has also been expansionist and so is now enormous, bringing with
it the scale economies of security. The societies of the bottom billion
are ancient, but as states they are instant. Their states are usually too
small to reap adequate scale economies of security, so they struggle
to keep the peace within their societies. Because they are instant,
they have seldom forged strong national identities to compete with
their ancient social identifiers of ethnicity and religion. As a result,
although too small for security, they are too large for the social co-
hesion that is hugely helpful for the provision of public goods. So
public goods are in short supply.
As we have seen, one missing public good is the accountability
of government: in contrast to America, the governments of the bot-
tom billion are not subject to many internal checks and balances. If
the societies of the bottom billion cannot supply themselves with this
public good, then it is better supplied internationally than not at all.
The argument is analytically equivalent to the provision of a vaccine
against malaria, another enormously valuable public good that is
missing. No society of the bottom billion is able to surmount the dif-
ficulties of providing this public good, and so we rightly look to in-
ternational action to fill the gap. The public goods that benefit a region
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are sometimes best supplied outside the region. The difference between supplying the missing checks and balances and supplying a vaccine
against malaria is national sovereignty. A vaccine against malaria
developed through international public finance does not challenge
national sovereignty; checks and balances developed through inter-
national public action do.
The most enduring legacy of the colonial experience is the ex-
cessive respect given both within the societies of the bottom billion,
and by those who are concerned about their fate, to the notion of
national sovereignty. The sentiment “never again” impedes serious
thought. In reality, the typical society of the bottom billion does not
have national sovereignty. It has yet to become a nation as opposed to a state: so it lacks the cohesion needed to produce effective restraints
upon either the conduct of elections or the subsequent power of the
winner. As a result, it has presidential sovereignty. No wonder presidents are jealous of national sovereignty: they are jealous of their
own power. The key struggles, that for accountability, that for se-
curity, and that for better provision of the more conventional public
goods, all depend upon facing down the shibboleth of national sov-
ereignty by recognizing it for what it really is. There is no shame in
meeting these needs internationally: they are far better met interna-
tionally than not met at all.
The international provision of accountability to the rule of law
faces a standard objection: fairness. Why should some societies sub-
ject themselves to international rules if others won’t? To be specific,
if America won’t subject itself to international rules, why should
East Timor? This sentiment is understandable, but it is fundamen-
tally wrong: it is part of the mentality that blocks serious thought, so
let’s address it head on.
I would indeed like to see America more supportive of interna-
tional rules: there are some global public goods from which it would
benefit and that even America cannot supply by itself. But quite clearly
America’s citizens have radically less need to subject themselves to
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international rules: as a nation it is already supplied with restraints
on government; as a large state it can already supply its own security
and a huge range of other public goods. In contrast, the citizens of
East Timor need to rely on international rules because they are liv-
ing in a territory that is structurally unable to meet these needs at the
level of the state: at present thousands of them are cowering in refugee
camps for fear of one another. The citizens of East Timor would, like
Americans, benefit from the global public goods, but they can poten-
tially gain far more than this from international rules. The purpose of
sovereignty is not to be a virility symbol with which presidents strut
on the world stage, it is part of the design of government: the criterion
should be the needs of citizens. The elite passion for sovereignty at the
expense of need amounts to “better dead than fed.” It sounds quite
no
ble until you realize that it is not the elite who go hungry. Today,
as I make my final revisions to the manuscript, the phrase has liter-
ally come true: President Mugabe has banned food aid to his starving
country. Errant voters will be starved into support.
Quite probably, East Timor’s need for strong international
rules is only temporary. Once such rules had successfully supplied
its citizens with the accountability and security that they now lack,
the society and economy would progress. As it did so, the tide would
start to flow in its favor. In ethnically diverse societies, as long as the
easy options for winning elections are closed off by enforced rules,
democracy does deliver faster growth. Recall that once growth takes
a society above $2,700 per capita, democracy also begins to make it
more secure. With time, checks and balances that are initially in-
ternationally enforced can become internally sustained. Just as one
coup legitimizes the next, so the accumulated history of adherence
to rules builds the practice of compliance.
The decolonizing goal of a world of nations, sovereign and
equal, was surely right. It is preferable to supply as many public
goods as possible nationally, rather than internationally. It is known
as the principle of subsidiarity: sovereignty is best lodged at the low-
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est level needed to achieve its function. States with small popula-
tions eventually become viable once they have reached a high level
of income: there economies can be quite big, and they learn to inte-
grate with neighboring countries so that a relatively small size does
not inflict significant costs. Luxembourg is the richest country in
Europe and can at some point provide a model for even the tini-
est countries among the bottom billion. But the abrupt transfer of
sovereignty from the near-global remittance of the empires to the
presidents of states that were tiny yet diverse, while reflecting the
right goal, took the wrong route. It condemned many little coun-
tries to catastrophic underprovision of the two vital public goods:
accountability and security. A phase of international provision of
these goods is needed for these societies to reach the goal.
I am now going to focus on the need for accountability. To
break the impasse a phase of international supply is needed, but is it
realistic? The international community is about as dysfunctional as
a community can get. Its core of jelly is no match for the ruthlessness
of an incumbent politician. The key move in this book is to harness
the one force that genuinely has the power to discipline them. There
are two critical dimensions in which a government needs to be held
to account: rules determining how power can be acquired and rules
determining how power, once acquired, can be used to spend public
money. How, in practice, could the international community intro-
duce effective rules?
Proposal 1: Harnessing Violence for Democracy
The legitimate route to power is through an election that is free
and fair. As the Kenyan elections of 2007 demonstrated, the so-
cieties of the bottom billion are not themselves able to supply
the vital public good that restrains electoral malpractice. Kenya
has long been regarded as the most advanced country of Africa:
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if Kenya cannot do it, few can. And so it must be supplied as an
international public good. The problem has always been how.
Quite clearly, the international community cannot enforce
democratic standards on a country whose government is unwill-
ing to adopt them. This is the jelly problem and it is not going
to change. At present it poses a debilitating dilemma for donor
governments. However badly the government of Kenya behaves
following elections, at least it has held an election. It is manifestly
better than many other governments of the bottom billion. Donors
feel that they can hardly suspend aid programs to Kenya while they
continue providing aid to all these other countries. Understand-
ably, they feel that they cannot impose double standards, judging
Kenya by tougher criteria than the rest. Yet double standards are
precisely what are going to be necessary: here is how to do it.
Proposal Version 1:
This is a proposal that might be drawn up by any con-
cerned idealist. It is for a voluntary international standard for
the conduct of elections, linked to a powerful carrot. Govern-
ments could then choose whether to sign up to the standard,
entitling them to the carrot. Once a government had signed up,
it could be monitored, rewarded, and punished on a different
scale from the rest.
Reader, I can hear you saying, “What a great idea; let’s
move on to the next problem. Oh, incidentally, what would be
the carrot?”
Proposal Version 2:
The core of an effective proposal is to design that carrot. To
be effective it would need to be big, but above all it would need
to be credible. When I explained my idea to a wise old practitio-
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ner, he interrupted at this point: “Don’t suggest aid as the car-
rot: after decades of donors not sticking to their conditions, it
just isn’t credible.” Quite right: the carrot is not going to be aid,
it is security. The international community is going to provide
a guidance system that transforms the missile of the coup d’état
into an effective domestic restraint on misgovernance.
Key members of the international community would make
a common commitment that should a government that has com-
mitted itself to international standards of elections be ousted by
a coup d’état, they would ensure that the government was re-
instated, by military intervention if necessary. This carrot is in
itself not negligible: remember that presidents face risks from
a coup that are far higher than those they face from an elec-
tion. And remember that democracy alone does not strengthen
the defenses against it. There have been more than eighty suc-
cessful coups just in Africa, versus a mere handful of electoral
defeats. But, as you will see, the key aspect of this carrot is that
it turns into an equally powerful stick. This carrot-cum-stick
may be sufficiently big, but is it sufficiently credible?
At this point modern economics becomes surprisingly use-
ful in helping us to think through whether standards linked
to coup protection would be effective. The method it uses is a
game tree. There need be nothing fancy about thinking through
a game tree: essentially it is a matter of repeatedly posing the
question, “And so if I did that, what would you do next?” The
insight brought by economics is that although you first have
to set down the game as a sequence of “What would happen
next?” you solve it by reversing the sequence, starting with the
last decision that has to be taken.
So first let me sketch the game
of voluntary standards for
democratic elections. The decision tree has many branches, but
for standards to work, one particular branch is critical, and that
is the one on which I will focus.
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S t e p 1 :
The international community promulgates a voluntary
standard for the conduct of elections. It is entirely voluntary,
but governments that feel the need for enhancing their demo-
cratic credibility can choose to commit to it. If the government
commits itself, it is rewarded with a counterpart commitment
from the international community. The commitment is to put
down any coup against the government, by military force if
necessary.
S t e p 2 :
The government of a bottom billion society now decides
whether to sign up. If it decides not to do so, end of story.
S t e p 3 :
If the government commits itself, then there are various
possibilities. The important one is what happens if it subse-
quently finds that it is heading for defeat in an election. At this
point the government must take the decision whether to abide
by its commitment to the international standard, or breach its
commitment and steal the election.
S t e p 4 :
If the government decides to break its commitment by
stealing the election, then the ball goes back into the court of
the international community. It must decide how to respond.
It can, if it chooses, publicly declare that the government has
breached the standards for conducting a democratic election
and withdraw the commitment to put down a coup.
S t e p 5 :
If the international community withdraws its commit-
ment to put down a coup, then the ball flies out of the court
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altogether, and lands at the feet of a new player: the military.
The military has to decide whether to launch a coup.
S t e p 6 :
If the military launches a coup, the ball goes back to the
international community. They can turn a blind eye and just
ignore it; they can condemn it; or finally they can welcome it on
condition that the leaders commit themselves to hold interna-
tionally verified elections within a specified period.
S t e p 7 :
The ball finally flies back to the coup leaders. If the inter-