The Failure of State Building and the Promise of State Failure: reinterpreting the security–development nexus in Haiti

Abstract

This article critically examines the discourse surrounding fragile states in relation to the security–development nexus. I draw on the case of Haiti to problematise key assumptions underpinning mainstream approaches to resolving concerns of security and development through the contemporary project of state building. In contrast, I suggest that a focus on the social and political relations constitutive of social struggles provides a framework for a better analysis of the historical trajectory of development in—and of—fragile states. Through an alternative relational interpretation of Haitian social and political formations, I illustrate the way in which ‘Haitian’ experiences of social change have been co-produced in a world historical context. By foregrounding these relational dynamics at key conjunctures coinciding with periods in which the state, state formation and state building, were perceived to be central to Haitian development, this analysis highlights the extent to which attempts to consolidate the modern (liberal) state, have been implicated in the production and reproduction of insecurities. The article concludes by considering the salience of this relationally conceived interpretation of the security–development nexus for gaining insight into the alternative visions of progress, peace, and prosperity that people struggle for.

Notes

1 C Rice, ‘Rethinking the national interest’, Foreign Affairs, 87 (4), 2008, pp 8–9.

2 White House, National Security Strategy of the United States, Washington, DC, 2002. The higher profile given to fragile states is apparent in the policy and strategy documents produced by the aid, foreign, and defence ministries of major donor countries and the institutions of international governance. See S Patrick, ‘Weak states and global threats: fact or fiction?', The Washington Quarterly, 29 (2), 2006, pp 27–53; United States Department of Defense, National Defense Strategy of the United States, Washington, DC, 2005; usaid, Fragile States Strategy, Washington, DC: usaid, 2005; and S Carvalho, Engaging with Fragile States: An ieg Review of World Bank Support to Low-Income Countries Under Stress, Washington, DC: World Bank, 2006.

3 M McNerny, ‘Stabilization and reconstruction in Afghanistan: are prts a model or a muddle?’, Parameters, Winter, 2005, p 34.

4 Quoted in S Willett, ‘New barbarians at the gate: losing the liberal peace in Africa’, Review of African Political Economy, 106, 2005, p 569.

5 Quoted in D Cammack, D Mcleod et al, Donors and the ‘Fragile States’ Agenda: A Survey of Current Thinking and Practice, London: Overseas Development Institute, 2006, p ii.

6 Ibid, p 18.

7 In recent times, in the lead up to the war in Iraq and in discourses surrounding Iran's nuclear weapons programme in particular, we have also seen how discourses on ‘rogue’ states can articulate the manifestation of the security–development nexus based on threats to the international system posed by functionally strong, yet non-liberal states. The focus of the current paper, however, employs a distinction between ‘rogue’ states and ‘fragile’ states.

8 See M Torres & M Anderson, Fragile States: Defining Difficult Environments for Poverty Reduction, London: Department for International Development, 2004; and M Besancon, Good Governance Rankings: The Art of Measurement, Cambridge, MA: World Peace Foundation, 2003. See also D Kaufmann & A Kraay et al, Governance Matters IV: Governance Indicators for 1996–2004, Washington, DC: World Bank, 2005.

9 See S Soederburg, ‘American empire and “excluded states”: the Millennium Challenge Account and the shift to pre-emptive development’, Third World Quarterly, 25 (2), 2004, pp 279–302.

10 See H Weber, ‘A political analysis of the prsp initiative: social struggles and the organization of persistent relations of inequality’, Globalizations, 3 (2), 2006, pp 187–206. See also S Gill, ‘Constitutionalizing inequality and the clash of globalizations’, International Studies Review, 4 (2), 2002, pp 47–65; and Gill, ‘Globalisation, market civilization, and disciplinary neoliberalism’, Millennium, 23 (3), 1995, pp 399–423.

11 F Fukuyama, State Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. The linear logic underpinning this understanding of development is of course reflective of modernisation theory in general and has its genesis in Rostow's ‘stages of growth’. W Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960.

12 See MT Berger & H Weber, ‘Beyond state building: global governance and the crisis of the nation-state system in the 21st century’, Third World Quarterly, 27 (1), 2006, pp 201–208; N Brenner, ‘Beyond state-centrism? Space, territoriality, and geographical scale in globalization studies’, Theory and Society, 28, 1999, pp 39–78; J Hobson, ‘Is critical theory always for the white West and for Western imperialism? Beyond Westphalian towards a post-racist ir’, Review of International Studies, 33, 2007, pp 91–116; and S Dalby, ‘Political space: autonomy, liberalism, and empire’, Alternatives, 30, 2005, 415–441.

13 J Saurin, ‘The end of International Relations? The state and international theory in the age of globalization’, in John MacMillan & Andrew Linklater (eds), Boundaries in Question: New Directions in International Relations, London: Pinter, 1995. For more on the state's capacity to pacify through terror, see B Hindess, ‘Terrortory’, Alternatives, 31, 2006, pp 243–257.

14 M Shapiro, ‘Social science, geophilosophy and inequality’, International Studies Review, 4 (2), 2002, p 31. See also RBJ Walker, ‘International/inequality’, International Studies Review, 4 (2), 2002, pp 7–24; and Walker, ‘Sovereignty, identity, community: reflections on the horizons of contemporary political practice’, in RBJ Walker & SH Mendlovitz (eds), Contending Sovereignties: Redefining Political Community, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1990.

15 The method, ‘incorporating comparison’, illustrated and elaborated upon in the work of Phil McMichael, takes a non-state-centred approach privileging substantive inquiry of social and political formations over formal comparison. P McMichael, ‘Incorporating comparison within a world-historical perspective: an alternative comparative method’, American Sociological Review, 55 (3), 1990, pp 385–397; and R Mongia, ‘Historicizing state sovereignty: inequality and the form of equivalence’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 49 (2), 2007, pp 384–411. On the potential to engage the moral grammar of social struggles using ‘incorporated comparison’, see H Weber, ‘A political analysis of the formal comparative method’, Globalizations, 4 (4), 2007, pp 565–566.

16 For the dramatic details of Aristide's departure, see R Robinson, An Unbroken Agony, New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2007, pp 198–205.

17 W Hoge, ‘Panel backs plan to aid Haiti with troops’, New York Times, 1 March 2004.

18 K Annan, ‘Haiti: this time we must get it right’, Wall Street Journal, 16 March 2004.

19 Republic of Haiti, Growth and Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper 2008–2010, November 2007. For a country-level analysis of the social, economic and institutional context of development in Haiti produced by the World Bank see Haiti Country Management Unit et al, Haiti: Social Resilience and State Fragility in Haiti, Washington, DC: World Bank, 2006.

20 Given the limited space of this article, this historical outline of Haitian development is necessarily incomplete. For a detailed reading of Haitian history see the following. On the trajectory of Haiti from the revolution to Duvalier, M Trouillot, Haiti, State against Nation: The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990; D Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour, and National Independence in Haiti, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979; and R Rotberg & C Clague, Haiti: The Politics of Squalor, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1971. On the Haitian Revolution, CLR James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, New York: Vintage Books, 1963; C Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below, Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1990; L Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004; and DB Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, esp ch 8, ‘The impact of the French and Haitian revolutions’. On the US occupation of Haiti, M Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of US Imperialism, 1915–1940, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001; and H Schmidt, The US Occupation of Haiti, 1915–1934, Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1971. On the Duvalier era, B Diederich & A Burt, Haiti: Papa Doc & the Ton Ton Macoutes, Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2005. On the post-Duvalier era, A Wilentz, The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989; D Malone, Decision-Making in the UN Security Council: The Case of Haiti, 1990–1997, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998; R Rotberg, Haiti Renewed: Political and Economic Prospects, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1997; and Robinson, An Unbroken Agony.

21 M Trouillot, Haiti, State against Nation, p 37.

22 Ibid, p 50.

23 RK Lacerte, ‘The evolution of land and labor in the Haitian Revolution, 1791–1820’, The Americas, 34 (4), 1978, pp 449–459.

24 Trouillot, Haiti, State against Nation, p 64. For Trouillot the ‘state’ here refers to the political and military leadership. Imports supplied the civilian and military administration, as well as the luxuries enjoyed by the leadership. He notes that government revenues during the 19th century were increasingly supplied by customs duties and, by 1909, 95% of government revenue came from multiple indirect taxes targeting a single crop, coffee. For more on the inability of the state to resurrect the plantation economy, see RK Lacerte, ‘Xenophobia and economic decline: the Haitian case, 1820–1843’, The Americas, 37 (4), 1981, pp 499–515.

25 M Trouillot, Haiti, State against Nation, p 78.

26 BG Plummer, ‘The metropolitan connection: foreign and semiforeign elites in Haiti, 1900–1915’, Latin American Research Review, 19 (2), 1984, pp 119–142.

27 Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier, pp 142–164; and Trouillot, Haiti, State against Nation, pp 100–108.

28 See P Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. In particular, chapters 9–12 offer a series of essays on the 18th century Atlantic trade and the onset of the revolutionary period. R Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, London: Verso, 1997, provides a relational account of the systems of colonial slavery in the Americas.

29 Davis, Inhuman Bondage, p 158.

30 James, The Black Jacobins, pp 45–50.

31 Fick, The Making of Haiti, pp 26–27.

32 Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, p 290.

33 Fick, The Making of Haiti, p 39.

34 Ibid, pp 180, 249.

35 Trouillot, Haiti, State against Nation, p 39. See also Fick, The Making of Haiti.

36 The 1801 constitution concentrated power in the hands of the revolutionary leader, Toussaint L'Ouverture, while at the same time maintaining that the colony remained a part of the French empire. The 1805 constitution, produced by Dessalines, reflected Haiti's independence, declared in 1804. Regardless, both constitutions agreed that Haiti's economic future lay in resuscitating the plantation economy. An excellent review of the early constitutions appears in S Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, Durham, SC: Duke University Press, 2005. See also J Gaffield, ‘Complexities of imagining Haiti: a study of national constitutions, 1801–1807’, Journal of Social History, 41 (1), 2007, pp 81–103.

37 Fischer, Modernity Disavowed, p 227.

38 Quoted in Davis, Inhuman Bondage, p 169.

39 Gaffield, ‘Complexities of imagining Haiti’, p 85.

40 Fischer, Modernity Disavowed, p 267.

41 Fick, The Making of Haiti, p 250.

42 Quoted in Renda, Taking Haiti, p 116.

43 US territorial expansion from 1867 to 1900 included the annexation of Alaska, Midway, Hawaii, Guam, Tutuila, the Philippines, Wake, and other smaller islands in the Pacific which were of strategic importance to the US navy. The USA also received Puerto Rico from Spain and occupied parts of Cuba in 1898. In the first two decades of the new century US forces occupied Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. See Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, pp 4–6, 56–60. For a defence of the invasion and a look at some of the justifications appearing in the US media in advance of the occupation, see the argument presented by W MacCorkle, ‘The Monroe Doctrine and its application to Haiti’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 54, 1914, pp 28–56.

44 Renda, Taking Haiti, p 117. Trouillot, Haiti, State against Nation, p 102, remarks that the US concern with paying back Haitian debt (consolidated in US banks) left Haiti one of the few solvent countries during the Great Depression. Of course, it also left little money for development.

45 J Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900–1918, Boston. MA: Beacon Press, 1968.

46 Quoted in Renda, Taking Haiti, p 117.

47 See ibid, pp 89–130 for a thorough exposition of the racial paternalism at the centre of Wilson's world-view.

48 Ibid, p 124.

49 Ibid, pp 143–164. The violence of the occupation took many forms, including but not limited to village burnings, torture, sexual assault, the reintroduction of forced labour and killings.

50 Quoted in Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier, p 149.

51 Trouillot, Haiti, State against Nation, pp 102–108.

52 P McMichael, Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective, Los Angeles: Pine Forge Press, 2008, pp 49, 273.

53 J Smith, When the Hands are Many: Community Organization and Social Change in Rural Haiti, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001, p 24.

54 M Morley & C McGillon, ‘“Disobedient” generals and the politics of redemocritization: the Clinton administration and Haiti’, Political Science Quarterly, 112 (3), 1997, p 364.

55 Ibid, p 373.

56 Ibid, pp 377–378; and J Smith, When the Hands are Many, p 25.

57 Y Shamsie, ‘Building “low-intensity” democracy in Haiti: the oas contribution’, Third World Quarterly, 25 (6), 2004, p 1097. See also R Higgott, ‘Contested globalization: the changing context and normative challenges’, Review of International Studies, 26, 2000, pp 131–153.

58 Y Shamsie, ‘Building “low-intensity” democracy in Haiti’, pp 1097–1115.

59 Ibid, pp 1106–1107

60 Fischer, Modernity Disavowed; and James, The Black Jacobins.

61 Quoted in Davis, Inhuman Bondage, p 157.

62 JP Nederveen Pieterse, Empire and Emancipation: Power and Liberation on a World Scale, New York: Praeger, 1989, p 335.

63 James, The Black Jacobins, pp 391–417.

64 F Cooper, Colonialism in Question, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005, p 230.