When Good Governments Go Bad

Observers of the African political scene have heralded the election of President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. Under the headline "Liberia's new hope," one editorial offered the vision that this new leader-a woman no less-could finally reverse Liberia's cruel slide into violent depravity. One day earlier, the New York Times published its own editorial entitled "Mr. Good Governance gone bad," which observed how Ethiopia's prime minister, Meles Zenawi, once regarded in the influential journal Foreign Affairs as among Africa's promising "new bloc" of leaders, was now going the old way of "autocratic repression. " The international community has also now identified other countries that were at one time part of this new bloc-notably Uganda-as requiring "intervention. " The coincidence of these articles-and others like them-is remarkable. ' Yet the significance is lost on their authors who continue to have faith in the ability of individuals-and the international community-to overcome deeper problems that underlie the cycle of promise and disappointment that is Africa.The principal problem is that efforts to solve Africa's many challenges through benevolent leadership, democratization, and intervention do not address the more fundamental structural problems that have been a consequence of the African experience of state-building. Current approaches to the management of African conflicts and development emphasize several key elements: establish democracy, put inclusionists in power rather than authoritarians, give voice to minorities, protect states, and guarantee their sovereignty. But the development of states that now set the ethical standard in the west involved precisely the opposite: democratic rule was avoided; effective-if tyrannical-leaders were favoured over weak statesmen; ethnic minorities were subdued, wiped out, or excluded; and, while security was sought, it frequently came at the expense of other states.The tension between these two approaches to state-building is particularly relevant to Africa, a continent that contrasts sharply with western state formation. Africa is the least developed region in the world and it is falling further behind.2 While Africa has had few interstate wars, much of the continent has been wracked by civil wars. In no region other than Africa is the disparity between state capacity and geographic size so at odds. Nowhere else have processes of state formation differed so significantly or have there been greater efforts by Africans and the broader international community to shield African states from the unpleasant aspects of state formation. This essay argues that these relationships are not a coincidence. The formation of strong states in Europe was critical to its subsequent development, while the failure to establish effective states in Africa has much to do with its developmental decline.3 Coming to grips with African development requires Africans and the international community alike to address hard questions about issues of state formation and intervention.4 Factors associated with the state militate so heavily in favour of the status quo that efforts by the international community to do what is ostensibly right-that is, reduce conflict through intervention and encouraging good governance-may be irrelevant to these processes and, possibly, harmful to the long-term wellbeing of Africans. In making this argument, I do not mean to diminish differences in the colonial or postcolonial histories of Africa's countries or the continent's ethnic, cultural, and political diversity; rather, I want to recognize the challenge of overcoming those entrenched structural problems that are common to so much of sub-Saharan Africa.STATE FORMATION IN THE WEST AND IN AFRICAProcesses of state formation in Europe and North America have been well documented by scholars, but the basics need to be stated here in order to appreciate the challenge now facing Africa.5 Much of the discussion involves an examination of the role of violence and force in facilitating change. …