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Books > Business & Economics > Industry & industrial studies > Service industries > Security services
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The Myth of International Order - Why Weak States Persist and Alternatives to the State Fade Away (Paperback)
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The Myth of International Order - Why Weak States Persist and Alternatives to the State Fade Away (Paperback)
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In February of 2011, Libyan citizens rebelled against Muammar
Qaddafi and quickly unseated him. The speed of the regime's
collapse confounded many observers, and the ensuing civil war
showed Foreign Policy's index of failed states to be deeply
flawed-FP had, in 2010, identified 110 states as being more likely
than Libya to descend into chaos. They were spectacularly wrong,
but this points to a larger error in conventional foreign policy
wisdom: failed, or weak and unstable, states are not anomalies but
are instead in the majority. More states resemble Libya than
Sweden. Why are most states weak and unstable? Taking as his
launching point Charles Tilly's famous dictum that 'war made the
state, and the state made war,' Arjun Chowdhury argues that the
problem lies in our mistaken equation of democracy and economic
power with stability. But major wars are the true source of
stability: only the existential crisis that such wars produced
could lead citizens to willingly sacrifice the resources that
allowed the state to build the capacity it needed for survival.
Developing states in the postcolonial era never experienced the
demands major interstate war placed on European states, and hence
citizens in those nations have been unwilling to sacrifice the
resources that would build state capacity. For example, India and
Mexico are established democracies with large economies. Despite
their indices of stability, both countries are far from stable:
there is an active Maoist insurgency in almost a quarter of India's
districts, and Mexico is plagued by violence, drug trafficking, and
high levels of corruption in local government. Nor are either
effective at collecting revenue. As a consequence, they do not have
the tax base necessary to perform the most fundamental tasks of
modern states: controlling organized violence in a given territory
and providing basic services to citizens. By this standard, the
majority of states in the world-about two thirds-are weak states.
Chowdury maintains that an accurate evaluation of international
security requires a normative shift : the language of weakness and
failure belies the fact that strong states are exceptions.
Chowdhury believes that dismantling this norm is crucial, as it
encourages developing states to pursue state-building via war,
which is an extremely costly approach-in terms of human lives and
capital. Moreover, in our era, such an approach is destined to fail
because the total wars of the past are highly unlikely to occur
today. Just as importantly, the non-state alternatives on offer are
not viable alternatives. For better or worse, we will continue to
live in a state-dominated world where most states are weak.
Counterintuitive and sweeping in its coverage, The Myth of
International Order demands that we fundamentally rethink
foundational concepts of international politics like political
stability and state failure.
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