Ideas in Action: The International Community and International Statebuilding

‘The international community’ is used profusely in policy discourse. Development cooperation and particularly statebuilding stand out as pol­icy areas that resort to the term most eagerly.

The document alluded to in most development and statebuilding pol­icy texts, and one which for that very reason may be taken as the foun­dation for practical engagement in statebuilding, is the UN Millennium Declaration. Contrary to what might be expected, the declaration does not equate the international community with the United Nations. The docu­ment presents the international community as a separate being, something out there to which one can pledge and which can be motivated or urged to take action. There is no exploitation of the phrase. The international com­munity is invoked only once and with regard to a specific issue of small island states (UNGA 2000: point III/17). Discourse produced by states and organisations engaged in development cooperation, however, employs the term international community as though the international commu­nity were the Millennium Declaration’s principal author. For instance, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), one of the most important UN aid agencies, states: ‘This issue is studied in the context of UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which have been approved by the international community and which call for poverty reduction’ (UNDP 2010: 6).

The Millennium Development Goals, which range from halving extreme poverty to securing universal primary education, have worked as the key guidance in various development cooperation activities. What critical discourse analysis makes us reconsider, however, is not necessarily the content of these goals but the assumption behind the MDGs. Positing that one may set global millennial targets is an illustration of how the world is imagined as a community capable of reaching agreement on and working towards meeting the goals by a specific date of 2015. Despite the widely admitted fact that the goals have not been met by the adopted deadline, the discourse changed little. UNDP Administrator Helen Clark stated with regard to the post-2015 MDGs agenda that ‘the international community must set sights higher and leave no one behind’ (UNDP 2014). The OECD adopted a similar stance, first presenting the MDGs as targets adopted by the international community and then urging this international community to work faster:

In the target year for the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the international community will have to accelerate its efforts to complete the unfinished business of the MDGs [...] The adoption of the post-2015 agenda by the international community will be an impor­tant driver in the OECD’s work on sustainable development for the next decade and beyond.⁴

Apart from the Millennium Declaration and MDGs, World Development Reports (WDRs), influential yearly publications produced by the World Bank, have a profound impact on policies of development and statebuild­ing. The very title of the series— World Development Report—is significant from a discourse analysis perspective, as it reveals the pretence of the docu­ment authors.

The 1997 imprint was devoted to the role and effectiveness of the state. By its title alone, The state in a changing world, it heralded significant shifts in how the World Bank perceived the role of the state in development. At the same time, the 1997 report constitutes a perfect illustration of the discursive construction of the ‘international’ in terms of the ‘international community.’ The report presents development as an explicit and domi­nant value for this international community and subordinates the state to its service. The report redefines the state’s responsibilities—focusing them around ‘facilitating’ world development. Among such fundamental tasks of the state are establishing a foundation of law, maintaining a non- distortionary policy environment, investing in basic social services and infrastructure, and protecting the environment (World Bank 1997: 4).

A particular vision of the international community becomes even more explicit in the report’s discussion of international collective action. The goal of such action is to provide ‘international public goods’ and to pre­vent fragmentation of the ‘community of nations’ (World Bank 1997: 132). Such a framing is based on the conceptualization of the interna­tional as a community linked by certain values and composed of specifi­cally organised states with well-defined functions.

International Community Reified

The way policy discourse approaches the state and state weakness contrib­utes to the reification of the idea of an international community. Viewing the world in terms of a community of states allows for the identification of state ‘fragility’ as a problem. State fragility becomes a mode through which the international community is discursively constructed and repro­duced. A fragile state is constructed as a significant ‘other’, not fitting and undermining the whole. Therefore, in order to maintain the community, it becomes indispensable to ‘measure the state’ and its capabilities (World Bank 1997: 34). As a result, the World Bank report relies on and con­structs a purportedly universal reference point against which states can be assessed. Those who do not fit should undertake the necessary transforma­tion and readjustment. This logic embeds the state in a particular vision of the international and presents weak states as unable to participate in ‘global collective action’ (World Bank 1997: 12). This image of the inter­national community received a tangible form in the WDR 2011:

Regional institutions can bridge the distance between universal norms and local customs. Those customs or practices must conform, in substance, to the core international principles from which the international community derives its cohesion. Otherwise cultural diversity can simply override, and undermine, the international framework (World Bank 2011: 39).

State weakness or fragility as major threats to the reified international community is a narrative present in a wide variety of policy documents (e.g. European Commission 2007). The very starting point for interna­tional statebuilding policies is the assumption that a part, i.e. a weak state, does not fit some sort of imagined whole and as such threatens the stability of this whole and undermines international security. Only the idea of the whole allows for depicting certain parts as not fitting, fragile, weak, and threatening.

The objectification of state weakness remains a crucial element of this approach. States become the ‘object’ of statebuilding, they are analysed and meant to be cured. States are labelled as ‘in transition’ (EBRD 2013), which stipulates there is a goal for them to reach, a form of being they are transiting towards. Some of them are expected to ‘catch up’, to ‘con­verge’, particularly if they are ‘stuck’ or fail to ‘match the standards’ of more advanced economies. One simply needs to tackle, to deal with, this ‘weakest segment’ of the international community:

Least developed countries (LDCs) are considered to be the “poorest and weakest segment” within the international community, as their level of development substantially trails other categories of countries, and they have failed to emerge from poverty (UNGC et al. 2011: 11).

Ranking states is the order of the day, and derogatory language is omni­present.⁶ A state becomes an object to be judged, classified, and ame­liorated. Denigration seems justified if the intention is to ‘help’ and if the driving force of this process is ‘development’ or ‘statebuilding’. In defining what a fragile state is, mathematical and biological metaphors permeate discourse. Different institutions produce classifications and rankings which are to help determine the level of a state’s fitness. USAID, the US government agency working in the area of development coopera­tion, defines fragility as the ‘extent to which state-society relations fail to produce outcomes considered effective and legitimate, with effectiveness and legitimacy being equal parts of the equation’ (Lindborg 2014, italics added).

The classificatory language is used side by side with highly rational­ised discourse that makes frequent recourse to knowledge, expertise, and research. The World Bank presents its role as ‘one of the world’s largest sources of funding and knowledge for transition and developing countries’. ⁷ The Asian Development Bank (ADB) states that ‘sectors and themes (of ADB’s) assistance programme are selected based on the results of diag­nostic studies’ (ADB 2013). The European Union declares its ‘readiness to share its expertise’ concerning democratic reforms (European European Union 2013, italics added). The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development claims: ‘This year’s Transition Report explains why some countries may be ‘stuck’ in traps with little or no reform’ (EBRD 2013, italics added).

Statistical data and indices are believed to allow for making informed decisions and guiding policy. The measures of statehood include Fragile States Index, Democracy Index, and ‘Freedom in the world’. Fragile State Index, an annual ranking of 177 countries across twelve indicators, is com­piled by the Fund for Peace, a non-profit research and educational organ­isation funded partly by the American government. Democracy Index is compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit and measures the state of democracy in 167 countries. ‘Freedom in the world’ is produced by the USA-based Freedom House and it is often taken to be the measure of democracy.⁸

The ‘New Deal’ for statebuilding, proposed among donor states in 2011, follows the measurement trend closely:

By September 2012, a set of indicators for each goal will have been devel­oped by fragile states and international partners, which will allow us to track progress closely at the global and country levels. These will allow us to mea­sure objectively, as well as gauging people’s views on the results achieved.⁹

This process of assessment and ranking has become ubiquitous. In order to illustrate it in greater detail, I will refer to Kyrgyzstan. The 2015 Fragile States Index classified Kyrgyzstan under the label ‘high warning’.¹⁰ The USA evaluates Kyrgyzstan in terms of human rights (US Department of State 2012a), religious freedom (US Department of State 2012b), traf­ficking in persons (US Department of State 2013), and drug trafficking (US Department of State 2008). The discourse makes frequent recourse to the Millennium Development Goals and the annually published Progress Report on the achievement of these Goals. For instance, the Asian Development Bank states:

The 2011 Millennium Development Goal progress report found that the Kyrgyz Republic had reached benchmarks for several indicators, including the reduction of extreme poverty, which fell rapidly up to 2008. But it is likely to fall short of targets on maternal and child mortality; gender equal­ity; combating HIV/AIDS; and improving access to safe drinking water and sanitation (ADB 2013: 2, italics added).

Country-specific knowledge production and dissemination, usually in the form of country analyses or country backgrounds, accompany policy discourse. For example, a Country Analysis constitutes one of the annexes to the European Community Regional Strategy Paper for Assistance to Central Asia for the period 2007-2013. A Country Background is the first part of the 2013-2017 Country Partnership Strategy for Kyrgyzstan (ADB 2013).

In parallel with the presentation of particular states as weak and in need of adjustments develops the assumption of the imperative to help. Specific actors take upon themselves the task of building other states. This, in turn, allows them to construct themselves as representatives of the international community. The discourse of the international community constructs and reproduces the agential international community.

The Agential International Community

A significant part of statebuilding discourse equates the international com­munity only with a particular group of states, usually termed ‘donors’. This group consists of democratic capitalist states and includes various inter- and non-governmental bodies, mostly financed by these states. The donor-focused understanding of the international community is repro­duced in a number of ways in written documents,¹¹ but it is also com­monly shared by practitioners working in the area of statebuilding.¹² States such as China or Russia only rarely get mentioned as members of the inter­national community, which is the result of an almost immediate linking of this community to a set of liberal values.¹³

Several features of and values accorded to the agential international community can be read out of policy discourse. Texts usually convey the message that ‘something needs to be done’ or that action is immediately required. Since it is not only appropriate and responsible, but mandatory, to take action, the agential international community is presented as ready and willing to help. Activities it undertakes are for a good cause, which makes this international community an intrinsically positive entity.

The international community acts in defence or in the name of laudable values. ‘In the service of democracy, peace and development’ is the Hanns Seidel Foundation’s motto, which the foundation applies to its work abroad.¹⁴ ‘Happiness for all’, the motto of KOICA, the South Korean aid agency, is accompanied with commendable slogans such as ‘Making a better world together’.¹⁵ The concept of the international community is usually used with affirmative nouns like peace and affirmative active verbs like peacebuilding, which all construct the international community as a helpful entity worthy of trust. Commonplace usage of words such as part­ner, commitment, and cooperation presents the international community as highly engaged and caring:

We strongly believe that working together with other donors is key for the success of the New Deal in order to reduce the burden on our partner coun­tries. We would like to invite all donors to partner us in building staff skills jointly, holding training, and team building so as to be more effective and coordinated in supporting the partner country’s efforts. At the same time, EU is looking forward to contributing to developing a post-2015 frame­work with the objective of ensuring a decent life for all—ending the pov­erty and giving the world a sustainable future, as spelled out in the recent Communication of the European Commission (European Commission 2013).

The international community as a representation of the global whole and the agential international community are interwoven. As a representa­tion of the international realm, the international community is valuable as it encompasses the notion of global security, order, and prosperity. The agential international community is indispensable for preserving this global international community.

Statebuilding is portrayed as an activity undertaken in the name of the international community, and it relies on a particular understanding, description, and, ultimately, reification of this community. The need for statebuilding arises from what the international community is considered to be and the activity that is carried out by those claiming to represent it (the agential international community). The reified idea of the interna­tional community allows for the discursive construction and legitimation of a particular state-member—the right kind of state. This paves the way for devising and implementing policies directed at the attainment of this model state. The work of statebuilding discourse, however, does not stop at reification and, as the next section intends to show, takes on much broader functions.