Imperial governance, sovereignty and the management of chronic instability in Africa

Abstract

An important political consequence of the crisis of capital in the 1970s has been an increasing intensification of informal imperialism within Africa. This paper argues that the advanced capitalist countries again confronted the endemic problem of overcapacity alongside a decline in the rate of profit and that the major neoliberal reforms foisted upon the African continent were part of the spatio-temporal fix that followed. The quotidian management of many African states was not an intended consequence of structural adjustment, but the subsequent perturbations that beset many developing countries after following such policies has led to such a degree of institutional instability that a new form of imperial governance has come into being. Juridical sovereignty has been maintained, but political sovereignty has been severely compromised through the emergence of this neo-imperial governance. Today an array of external actors is embedded in the sinews of these states, setting the general parameters of state policy to such an extent that one can no longer speak of these countries as possessing de facto independence. The rise of these so-called ‘governance states’ and the new emphasis on ‘governance with government’ constitute a new non-territorial, political form of imperialism.

Keywords:

• imperialism
• governance states
• predatory capitalism
• structural adjustment

Notes

1. Panitch and Gindin, “Global Capitalism and American Empire,” 51.

2. Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment”; Layne, “The Unipolar Illusion”; Wohlforth, “The Stability of a Unipolar World”; Wohlforth, “US Strategy in a Unipolar World”; and Mastanduno, “Preserving the Unipolar Moment.” On power preponderance, see Brooks and Wohlforth, World out of Balance. For arguments that contend that this moment will be short-lived, see Layne, “The Unipolar Illusion Revisited.”

3. Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment,” 24.

4. For a summary of these views, see Kiely, The New Political Economy of Development, 6.

5. For example, see Max Boot’s article, “Washington Needs a Colonial Office”, in the Financial Times (July 3, 2012), arguing that the USA should establish a Colonial Office, available at http://www.cfr.org/iraq/washington-needs-colonial-office/p6096. In relation to aei and panc, see http://www.aei.org/home and http://www.newamericancentury.org for their numerous publications on the subject. See also the work of some of their members: Frum and Perle, An End to Evil.

6. Niall Ferguson, Colossus, 27–28. This call has also come from more left leaning commenters. See, for example, JK Galbraith’s prescriptions in Moore, “Leveling the Playing Fields & Embedding Illusions.”

7. Callinicos, “Does Capitalism Need the State System?”

8. Kautsky, “Ultraimperialism”; and Callinicos, Imperialism and Global Political Economy, 62.

9. Robinson, A Theory of Global Capitalism, 62.

10. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 32.

11. Panitch and Gindin, “Global Capitalism and American Empire,” 17.

12. Ibid., 26.

13. Bukharin, Imperialism and World Economy, 110.

14. Lenin, “Imperialism,” 216.

15. Callinicos, “Imperialism and Global Economy,” 1.

16. The term comes from Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence. See also Callinicos, “Does Capitalism Need the State System?”; Callinicos, Imperialism and Global Political Economy; Harvey, The New Imperialism; Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism; Rees, Imperialism and Resistance; Gowan, The Global Gamble; and Bello, Dilemmas of Domination.

17. Panitch and Gindin, “Global Capitalism and American Empire,” 4.

18. Harvey, The New Imperialism, 109.

19. On the emergence of governance states, see Harrison, The World Bank and Africa. On the shift from governance by government to governance with government, see McArthur, “Global Governance and the Rise of ngos,” 54.

20. Howe, quoted in Kiely, Rethinking Imperialism, 2.

21. Kiely, Rethinking Imperialism, 111.

22. Doyle, Empires, 12.

23. Indeed Krasner himself points out that, ‘When bargaining power is highly asymmetric, as may be the case in some conditionality agreements between international financial institutions and borrowing countries, Westphalian/Vatellian sovereignty can be compromised. External actors can influence not just policies but also institutional arrangements in target states’. However, in Krasner’s view, such infringements have not gone far enough in fragile states and he prescribes the establishment of new trusteeships through shared sovereignty contracts. Krasner, “Sharing Sovereignty,” 98.

24. Geldenhuys, Contested States in World Politics, 8.

25. Jackson, Quasi-States, 5; Jackson, “Why Africa’s Weak States Persist”; and Jackson, “Negative Sovereignty in Sub-Saharan Africa.”

26. Jones, “The Global Political Economy of Social Crisis”; Hill, “Beyond the Other?”; and Hill, “Challenging the Failed State Thesis.”

27. Harrison, Neoliberal Africa, 2.

28. Grovogui, “Regimes of Sovereignty,” 323.

29. Ibid., 327.

30. On the notion of sovereignty frontiers, see Harrison, The World Bank and Africa, 23–26; and Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War, 166.

31. Aijaz, “The Imperialism of our Time,” 53. See also Ayers, ‘Imperial Liberties’.

32. Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law, 197.

33. Aijaz, quoted in Ayers, “Imperial Liberties: Democratisaaiton and Governance in the ‘New’ Imperial Order.”

34. Radice, “Neoliberal Globalisation.”

35. Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law, 235.

36. Hill, “Beyond the Other?”; and Hill, “Challenging the Failed State Thesis.”

37. Rosenberg, “Issac Deutscher,” 12.

38. Fatton, “Liberal Democracy in Africa.” Fatton argues that a hegemonic bourgeoisie and a strong proletariat are essential because their ‘conflicts and confrontations are critical in striking the political compromises and bargains necessary to the establishment of liberal democracy’ (p 457).

39. Mamdani, Citizen and Subject, 18.

40. Moore, “Leveling the Playing Fields & Embedding Illusions,” 18.

41. Cramer, Civil War is Not a Stupid Thing, 239. On the different forms of state capability, see Mann, “The Autonomous Powers of the State.”

42. Harvey, The New Imperialism.

43. Williams, “Aid and Sovereignty,” 573.

44. Ibid.

45. Wood, Empire of Capital, 153. On states as important nodal points for stable capitalist relations, see Morton, Unravelling Gramsci, 149.

46. World Bank, quoted in Williams and Young, “Governance, the World Bank and Liberal Theory,” 94.

47. In other words, ‘a space of time within which a particular combination (or conjunction) of causes exercises a predominant (causal and imaginative) influence over the course of events and the production of ideas’. Rosenberg, “Globalization Theory,” 29.

48. The term comes from Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence. See also Smith, Global Capitalism in Crisis; and Callinicos, “Does Capitalism Need the State System?”

49. Choonara, “A Reply to David McNally.”

50. McNally, Global Slump, 29–30.

51. For analysis that refutes the argument that the 1970s represented the beginning of a long-term decline in the rate of profit, see McNally, Global Slump and his “From Financial Crisis to World Slump.” Indeed, as David Harvey points out, Marx himself is unclear about whether a long-term decline in the rate of profit actually occurs or whether capitalist restructuring (such as that outlined by McNally) averts this, thus leading to a cyclical process. Harvey, Limits to Capital, chap. 7.

52. In other words, one can have further investments in both core and periphery even if the relative level of investment is proportionately greater in the core. Kiely, Rethinking Imperialism, 78; and Kiely Empire in the Age of Globalisation, 59.

53. Although, since the financial crisis, this historical trend has reversed and in fact the majority of fdi inflows were to developing rather than developed countries, the historical trend has been around a 70/30 divide. See World Investment Report, 3.

54. Harvey, The New Imperialism, 47.

55. Included within the processes of accumulation by dispossession are ‘(1) the commodification and privatization of land and the forceful expulsion of peasant populations (2) conversion of various forms of property rights (common, collective, state, etc) into exclusively private property rights; (3) suppression of rights to the commons; (4) commodification of labor power and the suppression of alternative (indigenous) forms of production and consumption; (5) colonial, neo-colonial, and imperial processes of appropriation of assets (including natural resources); (6) monetization of exchange and taxation, particularly of land; (7) the slave trade (which continues, particularly in the sex industry); and (8) usury, the national debt, and most devastating of all, the use of the credit system as radical means of primitive accumulation’. Dunn, “Accumulation by Dispossession?,” 9.

56. Gowan, The Global Gamble, 42.

57. Harvey, The New Imperialism, 109.

58. Ibid., 31–32.

59. Ibid., 33.

60. Ibid., 26.

61. Ibid., chap.1, and afterword. Harvey’s use of the two logics is not without controversy, nor is his argument that there is an organic relationship between accumulation by expanded reproduction of capitalism and ‘accumulation by dispossession’. See the 2006 special issue of Historical Materialism 14, no. 4, which deals with these various issues.

62. Several commentators have raised issues concerning Harvey’s use of the term ‘accumulation by dispossession’. Harvey understands accumulation by dispossession as a cyclical or continual process, which may emasculate the monumental and bloody transformations of early capitalist development in Europe, and as such must be treated with caution. For Marx, this ‘original formulation’ of capital was ‘nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production’. Marx, Capital, 875. It is also unclear why the patenting of biological life forms or part of their genetic composition should not be classified under the extension of commoditisation into spheres where property rights previously did not obtain. McAfee, “Neoliberalism on the Molecular Scale”; and Ashman and Callinicos, “Capital Accumulation and the State System.”

63. Thomas, Global Governance; Winham, “The Evolution of the Global Trade Regime”; Stiglitz and Charlton, Fair Trade for All; and Kelly and Grant, The Politics of International Trade.

64. Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War, 11.

65. Earlier decades may not have been as ‘heavenly’ for developing states as the title of Alice Amsden’s recent book would suggest, but they certainly represented a period of benign neglect, during which these states pursued a largely independent path of development. Amsden, Escape from Empire. See also Snidal, “The Limits of Hegemonic Stability Theory”; Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations, 90; Gilpin, Global Political Economy; and Gilpin, The Challenge of Global Capitalism.

66. Between 1980 and 2000 ‘prices for 18 major export commodities were 25 per cent lower in real terms than in 1980. For eight of these commodities, the decline exceeded 50 per cent’. For some commodities the decline was over 70%: cocoa (71.2%); sugar (76.6%); and Tin (73%). As a result of the continent’s reliance on primary commodities, between 1980 and 2001 African exports experienced the worst decline in terms of trade (30%, followed closely by the Americas). unctad, Globalization and Development, 61. Between 1980 and 2003 the decline in terms of trade was 1.3% per annum for the whole of the developing world. unctad, Trade and Development Report 2004, 55, Table 2.4.

67. Van Acker, “Where did All the Land Go?”

68. Ibid., 87.

69. Cramer, Civil War is Not a Stupid Thing, 228.

70. Harrison, The World Bank and Africa, 15.

71. See Giddens, The Nation-state and Violence.

72. Cramer, Civil War is Not a Stupid Thing, 225.

73. Ibid., 239. On the different forms of state capability, see Mann, “The Autonomous Powers of the State.”

74. Harrison, The World Bank and Africa.

75. Ibid., 6.

76. Ibid., 3.

77. Riggirozzi, Advancing Governance in the South.

78. Clapham “The Challenge to the State in a Globalized World,” 789.

79. Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War, 29–30, 165–166.

80. Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars, 45.

81. Ibid. This is particularly pertinent in the June 2009 dfid White Paper, Building Our Common Future.

82. Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars, 121.

83. Ibid., 34.

84. Harrison The World Bank and Africa, 53; and Harrison, Neoliberal Africa.

85. Cammack, “The Governance of Global Capitalism,” 41 (emphasis in the original).

86. Shaw, Theory of the Global State, 119–120. With its commitment to the independence of hitherto colonial states, the Atlantic Charter of 1941 agreed by Roosevelt and Churchill at Placentia Bay, Newfoundland presaged the future international order, pledging to ‘respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live’ and to ‘see sovereign rights and self government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them’. For the USA the dissolution of former empires into newly independent sovereign states was not only morally right, it had the added benefit of ensuring that, outside the communist bloc, its new form of hegemony would be effective throughout the world. “The Atlantic Charter,” in Sources of British History. Accessed October 10, 2007. http://www.britannia.com/history/docs/atlantic.html.

87. Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War, 159.

88. Chandler, Empire in Denial.

89. Krasner, Sovereignty, 3–4.

90. Harrison, The World Bank and Africa, 128. For the link between economic liberalisation and instability, see Chossudovsky, The Globalisation of Poverty.

91. Harrison, The World Bank and Africa, 13.

92. Mann, “The Autonomous Power of the State,” 113–116.

93. Harrison, The World Bank and Africa, 67.

94. World Bank, quoted in Williams and Young, “Governance, the World Bank and Liberal Theory,” 94.

95. Fine, “Neither the Washington nor the Post-Washington Consensus,” 14–15. See also Standing, “Brave New Worlds?”

96. Harrison, The World Bank and Africa, 18 (emphasis in the original).

97. Ibid., 4, 18.

98. Ibid., 87.

99. Ibid., 89.

100. Ibid., 93.

101. Ibid., 111.

102. Cramer, Civil War is Not a Stupid Thing, 239.

103. Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War, 168.

104. Harvey, The New Imperialism, 109.