Somalia and its twin Somaliland are prototypes
of states that fail and states that recover. The difference between Somalia and
Somaliland is the difference between a peace owned and a rent-seeking peace.
Local ownership is but one aspect of the conditions for state recovery.
By Greg
Mills
Somalia and
Somaliland on the Horn of Africa are prototypes of states that failed and
states that recovered. Somaliland declared independence from Somalia on 18 May
1991 after a six-week Grand Conference of the Northern Peoples in Burao. The
conferences in Burao and later, Bomora were managed and financed by locals,
bringing their own food and shelter over many weeks, sometimes months.
These events were
“bottom-up, not top-down”, emphasised Mohamed Omar, the minister of commerce,
“unlike Somalia’s, which has been top-down, driven by donors through leadership
and taking place outside the country”. Somalilanders concentrated on achieving
peace, not on acquiring financial rents for delegates from the process, a
feature which has continually by contrast blighted Somalia’s attempts to the
south, where conflict entrepreneurs have fed off both the fighting and the
talking.
State failure; state recovery
While the absence of
international recognition might impede the consolidation of its development,
Somaliland’s home-built steadiness so far exemplifies the limits of external
intervention in stabilising countries and the necessity of local ownership. The
irony does not end there. The route to reclaiming Somaliland’s independence
lies through Mogadishu, in getting its southern neighbour to agree to a
divorce; but the Mogadishu government is barely functional, little more than a
Western-supported and African-military controlled client state.
The difference between
Somaliland and Somalia is the difference between a peace owned and a
rent-seeking peace. A lack of aid has meant that Somalilanders have had to find
their own way, and the lack of external involvement has left local structures
in place. It is a prototype for making peace elsewhere, the lesson for
outsiders being: Less is often more. Foreigners cannot after all want peace
more than the locals.
This is a first of
several lessons in understanding why states recover and the role of outsiders
in this process. State failure, of course, is not just about Somali-style collapse.
The strains of fragility – of governance, economics, politics and society –
intersect and play out differently in different circumstances. While many
states are fragile, there is a group at one extreme that threatens to explode
or implode, and is as a result prioritised by external actors.
At the other extreme,
there are authoritarian democrats; states that might work for now, but whose
lack of democratic governance threatens to undermine both their standards of
governance and prospects of long-term growth.
Getting it right
There is no single
reason or a tipping point at which a state becomes officially ‘failed’, an
imaginary dividing line between success or normality and failure. This explains
the difficulty in defining such states, and especially in categorising them.
Hence terminology including failed, fragile, weak, collapsed, vulnerable,
moribund, straggling, struggling, crisis, quasi-failed, ‘non-state’, broken,
invisible, insufficient, stillborn, phantom, or even ‘Potemkin’ states. But
these situations should be viewed on a spectrum or continuum rather than a
balance sheet of failure.
Countries that work
for some, at least for the relatively well-heeled visitor, can work against the
locals. There are those that significantly and continuously under-perform,
lurching from crisis to crisis, a roller coaster of political and economic
collapse, but do not explode into violence and become the focus of
international aid groups, one external metric of failure.
Getting it right
depends on answering why the international community so often gets it wrong in
managing transitions, from war to peace, and from poverty to prosperity. Even
so, the difference between state recovery and failure involves more than the
efficacy of external actors, no matter the attempts to plan and resource a
coherent strategy, to achieve better coordination, staffing, commu¬nication,
and to establish clear pillars, goals, objectives, systems of accountability,
and clear priorities.
The drivers of state
success include legitimacy, not just stability; soft systemic not just hard
physical infrastructure; and the emergence of issue- rather than identity-led
political and economic choices, where narrow self-interest is subsumed by
national concerns. Transforming states is about the politics, and the political
economy, and living with local solutions, however messy they appear.
Security is
imperative: indeed, it is the door through which much else follows, including
better governance and development. You can’t fix instability without fixing, first,
security. To do that effective armed forces are required, including the police.
Thinking things
through to the finish, by locals and outsiders, is also imperative.
Cost of failure
Countries are quick to
respond to emergency situations, or to engage militarily, driven often by their
own domestic political considerations. But few have the staying power, as is
evidenced by Iraq, whatever the strategic folly in getting involved in the
first instance.
The costs of failure
and the potential rewards of recovery are enormous. Today the bulk of the
world’s poor – totalling 1.1 billion of the planet’s seven billion people –
live in failed or failing states. Not only is their lack of development and
progress a missed opportunity for all, but their problems are unlikely to
remain at home in a world increasingly connected by the flows of people,
capital, goods, technology, information and news.
History teaches
however that the period of recovery for states from failure is at least as long
as the period of decline. The term ‘buy and hold’ is synonymous with taking a
long-term view; not aiming to enter low and sell high, but rather to build a
business over generations.
This approach
discourages speculative investment and promotes the practice of holding onto
shares for years in the belief that the stock is undervalued, and that sound
management and patience will not only add value for the investor, but create
wealth and jobs in the process.
Buy and hold is also
the strategy necessary to fix states. Local leaders need to adopt this
approach, investing in the future of their countries, and not simply using
their power to extract personal wealth.
Greg Mills heads the Johannesburg-based Brenthurst Foundation and is
currently a Visiting Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International
Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University. His latest book – ‘Why States
Recover’ (Picador/Hurst) – based on his assignments in three dozen case-studies
across the world, is being launched at RSIS this month.
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