What everybody has...

During the fifty or so years since 1945 the total number of states on this planet has more than tripled, leading to congestion and causing a second line of flagpoles to be added to the first in front of UN headquarters in New York.

As the preceding pages have shown, the spread of the state from Western Europe, where it originated, to other continents had been far from uniform. While the earliest transplants of political institutions took place in Eastern Europe and Latin America, at least until the beginning of the twentieth century the most successful ones have been those initiated by the British in North America and Australasia. As the case of South Africa shows, they owe their success not to some outstanding political genius but to the fact that the continents in question were practically uninhabited, which in turn usually resulted from the systematic exter­mination of many natives and the expulsion of the rest. More recently some states have become very successful in East Asia where they built on foundations provided by ethnic homogeneity, ancient cultures, highly literate elites, and sometimes - as in Japan - extremely strongly governed polities.¹²¹ In most other places, though, the story is at best one of mixed success. Neither in the states that came into being after the collapse of the Soviet Union, nor in Latin America, nor in large parts of Asia and Africa, do the rulers have much cause for congratulating themselves.

The doubtful value which often attaches to the term ‘‘state” is also indicated by other factors. Formally all are equal; in practice the differen­ces among them are enormous and many, indeed, never have been ¹²¹ On the authoritarian tradition in Japanese politics, see above all K. van Wolferen, The Enigma of Japanese Power (New York: Vintage Books, 1990). greater. One extreme is represented by the United States with a surface area of 3,680,000 square miles, a population of 270,000,000 (the third largest), a GNP of $8.5 trillion, and global interests as well as armed forces that enable it to bring force to bear at any point on the globe. On the other end of the scale are some states with areas measured in a few hundred (or even a few dozen) square miles, populations numbering in the hundreds of thousands or less, and GNPs that are so small as to keep most citizens close to the subsistence level.¹²² Having lost economic ground during the 1980s, many states whose representatives occupy seats in the General Assembly now have GNPs which cannot compare to the budgets of large cities or even universities in the developed world, let alone with the turnovers of large multinational corporations. No wonder the latter are often approached cap in hand by rulers of Third World countries (and not merely those of Third World countries either) eager for investment.

Since neither their police organizations nor their armed forces have achieved the degree of autonomy and cohesion necessary for functioning effectively, many are incapable of maintaining internal order, much less of defending themselves in foreign war. Nor is it at all rare for the forces and organizations in question to present a greater threat to their own governments than to anybody else: so, e.g., in much of Latin America; but so too in parts of East Asia where, to cite but one example, Thai leaders are engaged in an earnest debate as to whether the constitution, which explicitly permits the military to mount a coup, should also guaran­tee the population’s right to resist one if it takes place.

To present some of these states as if they were sovereign players in the international arena is a travesty of reality. Whether because of foreign penetration or because of their excessive dependence on a single category

¹²² Between 1970 and 1990 the gap in per capita income between rich and poor countries increased from 14.5:1 to 24:1, according to data in World Bank, World Tables 1991 (Baltimore: World Bank, 1991), table 1.

¹²³ The statistics of failure are presented in M. Meranghiz and L. A. Mennerik, ‘‘World­Wide Education Expansion from 1950 to 1980: The Failure of the Expansion of Schooling in Developing Countries,’’ Journal of Developing Areas, 22, 3, pp. 338-58. of exports, often their economies are at the mercy of others much more powerful than themselves. In addition to that, in some cases the rulers who inhabit the - often splendid - presidential palaces are not their own masters. Either they work for drug lords or, as used to be and still may be the case in several Central American and Caribbean countries, the intel­ligence services of foreign countries. In a few cases, notably Haiti under the Duvaliers (pere et fils), Nicaragua under the Somoza family, Panama under Noriega, and the Ivory Coast under Houphouet-Boigny, even the distinction between the private and the public has remained fuzzy; nor was the situation very different in the Philippines during the Marcos regime or in Zaire while it was ruled by Mobutu.

At best many of these countries continue to vegetate, maintaining some kind of stability and a more or less tolerable standard of living without inflicting any particular damage either on their own populations or on others. At worst they suffer from authoritarian government and/or chro­nic instability and civil war, ethnic strife, religious fanaticism, guerrilla terrorism, and narcoterrorism, which in turn reflect their governments’ inability to control the remote and backward countryside, the sprawling townships, the private armies of druglords and populist leaders, or all of these. Some of these conflicts, such as the Nigerian civil war of 1967-9 and the Cambodian one of 1970-95, led to the deaths of millions. Others, such as the one in Sudan, have now lasted for decades on end and have reduced entire geographical districts to a shambles. As they are too weak to play the traditional game of the balance of power, the sovereignty of some of them is conditional on their neighbors’ good will. Those neigh­bors recruit mercenaries to interfere in their internal affairs, help organize coups and countercoups, buy or intimidate presidents, and even replace their governments as they see fit.

As the twentieth century is coming to an end, the state, once a rare political construct confined to the western extension of a rather small continent, has spread its rule all over the world. Beginning with the French Revolution, which marked its transformation from a means into an end, to have a state of one’s own became something of which people used to take extraordinary pride and for which they were often prepared to make every sacrifice including, where necessary, rivers of blood. From Palestine to Chechnya, that is still true in some places; but in many of those the chances of the people in question ever establishing their own fully sovereign states are small. Conversely, and as I shall argue later in this volume, where sovereign states already exist and are long established, they are often regarded with sullen indifference, even hostility, which may be one reason why, far from attempting to guard their sovereignty, they are in the process of voluntarily relinquishing it to other entities sup­posedly more capable of serving the economic needs of their citizens. In many places, the moment of the state's greatest triumph may yet prove to be the beginning of its decline. What everybody has may turn out to be worth very little.