by Parag Khanna
It is true that diffusing the world away from a rigid map of sovereign states will create confusion and costs: What country are people citizens of? How will they survive economically? But the benefits include diminishing accusations of foreign meddling and scapegoating of minorities by lazy and corrupt leaders, and the potential for sub-regions of the world to build their own stable structures from the bottom up. With autonomy comes responsibility, both to control security and to manage new infrastructure that can turn jigsaw puzzle borders into more meaningful and connected wholes. The slow and sometimes jarring mutations in the cartographic landscape will continue in search of such equilibrium. Since there is little “victory” to celebrate in wars today, this would be a good cause to pursue.
Chapter Five
The New Colonialism: Better Than the Last
Some states were never meant to be—and really never were. Centuries of Western colonialism created the modern world as we know it, but that map is unraveling as some states splinter, collapse, or seem to fall off it altogether. Terrorist cells striking from zones of chaos and mass migrations from countries with no economy or stability are a constant reminder that even if we peacefully remap volatile regions, the postcolonial world—which includes most members of the United Nations—is in a state of high entropy, fragmenting into a fluid, neo-medieval labyrinth. Globalization has filled this void with a twenty-first-century colonialism of strong states, international agencies, NGOs, and companies. Beneath the veneer of independence, these players are running a growing number of countries. From Oxfam and the Gates Foundation to Booz Allen Hamilton and DynCorp International, the new colonialists keep many states from failing—but also prevent them from becoming truly sovereign.
Building a stable global society hinges on getting the new colonialism right. There need not be a false choice between building things and building institutions: Dozens of nations—new and old—need both. And they are better off becoming hybrid states today than the traditional, antiquated type of state decades from now. There is more to taming hot spots than creating new org charts, however. For the places that seem beyond salvation, it will require intrusive public-private peacekeeping forces and even subversive plots and assassinations. Afghanistan is just the beginning—and also a warning that without smart mega-diplomacy among the new colonialists, failed states may forever stay that way.
Colonialism New and Old
As supreme commander of the Allied powers in Japan, General Douglas MacArthur iterated a clear to-do list for postwar rehabilitation: “First, destroy the military power. Punish war criminals. Build the structure of representative government. Modernize the constitution. Hold free elections. Enfranchise the women. Release the political prisoners. Liberate the farmers. Establish a free labor movement. Encourage a free economy. Abolish police oppression. Develop a free and responsible press. Liberalize education. Decentralize political power. Separate the church from state.” Just add the World Bank language of creating an “enabling environment” for the private sector and NGO-speak about “consultation with civil society” and you’d have today’s standard prescriptions for how to fix broken or despotic societies.
The trouble with historical analogies—with Japan and Germany widely rehearsed as appropriate prologues for the reconstruction of Iraq—is that they bear little resemblance to the circumstances of today’s failed states and deposed regimes. The details of demobilizing armies, reforming police forces, creating ethnic reconciliation programs, and jump-starting power plants and hospitals are unique aspects of modern state building: There is no template for them. Instead, we are mostly state-building in places where there never really was a state.
There would be no state building to speak of were it not for the aggressive European colonialism that created the international system we take for granted today. For centuries, European colonizers fanned out across the planet for commercial gain and geopolitical advantage—along the way creating one world under their hierarchy. They forced insular societies such as China and Japan to accept their consulates, compelled the modernization of the Ottoman bureaucracy, and in the name of a mission civilisatrice created coherent administrative structures in India and Africa. Even as European imperialism was dismantled through decolonization, former tribes and clans became states and parliaments, and took seats in the United Nations.
But beneath this veneer of sovereign equality, statehood never really took shape after colonialism’s retreat. Civil wars, coups, and cronyism prevented real states from emerging. Today’s optimists claim that the number of interstate and civil wars has fallen, and thus so have the number of casualties in warfare. But this has more to do with the fact that so many so-called states don’t really exist anymore. In 2005, 130 countries received food aid from a hodgepodge of missions, agencies, donors, and other charities. If a state can’t even provide food for its citizens, how sovereign is it, anyway?
Today we have no shortage of alarmist terms such as “failed states,” “arc of crisis,” “danger zone from Palestine to Punjab,” and “Eurasian Balkans” to describe these places where “fragility” is a euphemism for illegitimate or nonexistent authority. But these terms describe rather than explain. What almost all these weak states are experiencing is postcolonial entropy: decay of European-built infrastructure they haven’t upgraded, demise of administrative discipline as civil services become bastions of corruption, and fraying of cohesive national identities as the euphoria of independence fades. Identity crises occur, as Durkheim explained, when a society abandons one set of values without agreeing on the next. For at least fifty countries in the world today, from Congo to Afghanistan, the term “state” is a misnomer. Their governments’ effective power rarely reaches beyond their capitals. These countries can’t cope with high population growth and disease, social exclusion and ethnic tension, low economic growth and high unemployment, elite cronyism and widespread corruption. They exist more in name and on maps than in reality.
We often wait to act until the specter of the label “failed state” is stamped on a country’s image. But the signs of a state being in failure appear far in advance. In Pakistan, Musharraf’s 1999 coup was viewed as an effort to clean up corruption, but in fact his reign provided only a veneer of stability over a state in a continuous process of failure. Musharraf was not the antidote to state failure in Pakistan; he accelerated it. In the process, Pakistan, like so many other failing states, has lost the technical, fiscal, and even moral authority to run itself.
Failed states create the worst kind of terrorism. By far the largest number of martial casualties results not from wars between countries, but rather from civil wars within dozens of failed states. In the 1980s and ’90s, two-thirds of sub-Saharan Africa’s forty-three countries suffered from civil war—and the toll in lives from displacement and disease was far greater than the deaths during fighting itself. In failing states the leading killers are not tanks or guided missiles but AK-47s, available for as little as ten dollars on some street corners in Mexico, Central America, the Andean region of South America, central and sub-Saharan Africa, southeastern Europe, the Caucasus, and southern and Southeast Asia. Violence is the new war; the killing comes from within.
Since most of these failing states were never actually successful states, why do we pretend that they can be restored to some ideal of statehood? Is statehood itself the problem? Why is central government the metric of effective governance? Western nations now define such failing places as greater threats to their security than the mass armies of Asia’s rising powers, but they have little in the way of a strategy to deal with them. If self-determination and nation-states were the resolution to empires and colonialism, then what is the solution to the crumbling of so many nation-states?
As far back as the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant argued that it was permissible for nations to force others to join the republican league of states and adhere to the standards of civilization. Since then the bar of civility has risen from merely the “capacity
to govern” (League of Nations) to “peace-loving nations” (United Nations) to the Copenhagen criteria of democracy, human rights, and free markets (European Union). Yet today many countries still remain a long way from meeting even the League of Nations’ most basic standard of a century ago. The only way most failed states will ever meet the standards of civilization is if we abandon the quest for sovereignty in favor of hybrid statehood.
Across the world’s failing states, the weak need protection from militias and floods equally—delivering human security cannot wait for government “capacity building.” The foot soldiers of humanitarianism constantly relocate from Haiti to Afghanistan to Indonesia to confront the worst disasters, for which there is no strategy, only improvisation. After the Indonesian tsunami of 2004, the first aid to arrive in the remote Banda Aceh province came on planes and vans operated by Dutch logistics multinational TNT. Unilever distributed energy-fortified biscuits manufactured and donated by Danone, and the World Food Program used offices donated by Citigroup. Ultimately, the U.S. government’s donation was $657 million, while private American citizens and corporations gave more than $2 billion. And where was the Indonesian government in all of this? Much of the $4 billion it received from international donors remains unaccounted for.
Then there are refugee camps: islands of permanent emergency. In regions from Mauretania to Myanmar, public and private aid agencies constantly struggle to meet basic survival needs while fending off assaulting militias and preventing the theft of food and the siphoning of fuel. Chad’s best health care is found in UN camps set up for a half-million refugees from Darfur and the Central African Republic. The International Rescue Committee provides drinking water for millions and health training for tens of thousands worldwide; 90 percent of its budget goes straight into its programs, making it perhaps the world’s most efficient humanitarian force. In all these ways, the new colonialists have become woven into the fabric of governance in weak states, preventing them from failing even further.
There are clearly big differences between the old and new colonialism. As Tony Pipa, director of the NGO Leaders Forum, says, “Equating the two is like calling the Prius the new Hummer. They both get you from here to there, but the goals and values behind the design are completely different.” Unlike the previous European colonialism, which purposely sought to perpetuate dependency, the new colonialists want states to practice “responsible sovereignty” by which they protect their people and prevent threats from spilling over their borders.1 The new colonialism isn’t intentionally exploitative, condescending, or coercive—only unintentionally so. The new colonialists are certainly more committed to local ownership than either U.S. military occupations or traditional UN missions.
At their best, the new colonialists don’t displace or ignore local politics, but instead lend global resources to make local politics progressive. If Haiti is to be “built back better” after its devastating earthquake, it will have to shift from an ad hoc “Republic of NGOs” to a new system for linking global resources such as money and building designs to local businesses, civic groups, and government agencies. But so far what we have seen is a global outpouring of material and financial support that is not coordinated enough to necessarily set the country on a new course.
The biggest challenge, then, to the new colonialism is inefficiency: Everyone wants to be the coordinator, no one the coordinatee. Britain’s Lord Paddy Ashdown, the European Union’s former high commissioner in Bosnia and Herzegovina, summed it up best: “Before I started my mandate I had been told that managing Bosnia was like herding cats. What I hadn’t appreciated was that this applied to the international community too.” The United Nations, United States, and NGOs all have a vision of seamless bureaucratic harmony under their leadership—yet none can succeed alone.
The new colonialists therefore have a bigger job to do than compete with one another. From Haiti to Niger to Myanmar, the countries that need emergency help after disasters also need to be rebuilt better than before: better roads, better housing, and more competent government. The best help the new colonialists can therefore give to the refugees and hungry villagers of failed states is to team up and meddle in their domestic politics, undermine bad leaders, and empower local groups to manage their own affairs. Only then will the new colonialists leave in less time than the old colonialists did.
The Responsibility to Be Responsible
What do we respect more: people or states? During the past two decades the high idealism of humanitarian rhetoric has been buried in the pettiness of international bureaucracy. The reactions to Somalia, Bosnia, and Rwanda in the 1990s, and Congo and Darfur in recent years, were too little too late, and poorly resourced and executed. To this day the catchphrase of “humanitarian intervention” is still far more often talked about than done. Even the recently minted Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine is stillborn. It was supposed to require the international community to intervene when governments fail to protect their own people, but instead it became a victim of every nation’s claim to conduct its own “war on terror” without outside interference. Right doesn’t yet have might.
A smarter strategy is to focus on removing the heads of state that are often the roots of the problems. Ousting bad leaders—yes, violently deposing them—without punishing good people is one of the most sensitive topics in diplomacy and foreign policy, but it holds the key to liberating many societies to run themselves better. One of the new colonialists’ main tasks is therefore to take down the leaders who are medieval in the worst sense of the term.
We often forget that, from Yugoslavia to Sudan, the descent into civil war and genocide is often not about genuine grievances and mass movements, but rather the megalomania of one single leader. During the 1990s, the northern and southern no-fly zones imposed on Iraq left it in a geopolitical gray zone with Saddam Hussein still in charge of whatever his Baathist regime could reach. Sanctions between the two Gulf wars cost five hundred thousand Iraqi children their lives due to pneumonia and other preventable illnesses. Zimbabwe was once sub-Saharan Africa’s second largest economy behind South Africa, but President Robert Mugabe’s violent seizure of land from white farmers and paranoid politics plunged what was once “Africa’s breadbasket” into desperation, with hyperinflation requiring $500 million notes to be issued (enough for eight loaves of bread). Innocent people living under sanctions are twice oppressed: by their rogue leaders and by the international community.
This past decade’s revolutions in Ukraine, Serbia, and Georgia gave us false hope that all odious regimes can be changed through relatively peaceful means. Where people power fails, “lawfare” has become a go-to weapon for the Western diplomats. From Nuremberg to the International Criminal Court (ICC), universal jurisdiction has reached countries whose own laws don’t yet see it that way. But do we really live in a world where courts chase after mass murderers and armies don’t have to? ICC indictments have targeted rebel leaders such as Liberia’s Charles Taylor and Joseph Kony of Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army, rogue ex-presidents such as Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia, and even heads of state such as Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir. Yet setting up criminal courts while a conflict is still ongoing is an odd substitute for hard action—especially since indictments only further entrench despots. Bashir now restricts his movements to Khartoum and friendly countries, and Kony is hiding out in the jungles of eastern Congo. Bashir told the ICC that it should “eat” the indictment, calling it an “instrument of neocolonialist policy.”
We shouldn’t need tribunals to tell us who the bad guys are. Regimes from Sudan to Myanmar seem impervious to shame, moral appeals, and even ICC indictments. Even though Mugabe eventually entered into a nominal power-sharing agreement and made his rival prime minister (due largely to the election of Jacob Zuma in South Africa), and even if Bashir allows more aid and peacekeepers in Darfur, these revelations of decency always occur after unconscionable damage has been done. Would it not have been more sensible—both morally and
politically—to give robust support to efforts to oust the likes of Saddam, Mugabe, and Bashir?
The United States officially banned assassinations of foreign leaders in the 1970s, but since 9/11 the CIA has undertaken an expansive covert program to assassinate al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders. But rogue presidents have killed far more people than the most ruthless terrorists. Our neo-medieval world doesn’t have a common code of sovereign noninterference. Leaders can quite easily be sorted out between those who are civilized and those who are barbarian.
There are many ways to seriously harass an intransigent regime before escalation goes overboard. Kautilya, the fourth-century B.C. Indian strategist of the Mauryan empire who was part-Bismarck, part-Machiavelli, provided a four-step strategy for subduing villains: saam (dialogue of equality), daam (bribery), dand (punishment), and bhed (sowing dissent). Revoking recognition, freezing bank accounts, and imposing travel bans can curb the spending habits of rulers who enjoy lavish shopping in London and Dubai while their people starve. Flipping defecting officers and bribing junior ones are more aggressive ways to make it less fun for despots to enjoy their perch. Patrolling no-fly zones, jamming radio and TV signals, blockading weapons imports and lucrative exports, and building up rebel defenses are other ways outsiders can isolate thuggish regimes. Flooding countries such as North Korea or Myanmar with money, mobile phones, and targeted food aid could also destabilize foul regimes from within.
Rogue leaders today are more likely to hold some form of elections, but they also win 90 percent of them through vote rigging, imprisoning opposition, stuffing ballots, and intimidating voters. Outside do-gooders will therefore have to be more cunning and persistent than ever in providing tactical support to remove the despots who are a primary obstacle to political evolution. This is not an invitation for more attempted thrill-seeking coups by unscrupulous retired British officers as in Equatorial Guinea in 2004, but rather to build opposition that can break the cycles of coups and countercoups. In Africa this will take a long time. Most African rebel movements aren’t led by true revolutionaries but rather opportunists with little vision beyond profiteering from chaos. The 2008 coup in Guinea, led by officers who assassinated the long-standing authoritarian leader Lansana Conté (who had himself taken power in a coup), was followed by the public humiliation of politicians who had stolen millions. They were forced to return the money—but to whom?
