Nation-building
usually fails. It failed in at least 73% of cases in a study by James L. Payne that examined
51 instances of attempted nation-building in the past 150 years or so. This
included 24 U.S. attempts and 27 British attempts. A study of 12 cases of U.S. interventions
produced a similar finding: 4 success and 8 failures.
The literature on nation-building is largely empirical, that is,
a series of case studies. There are numerous factors, varying from case to
case, that researchers have identified that they think explain the failures.
Their methodology implies that if these factors are handled better the next
time around by the nation-builder, then success will result. However, after
over 150 years of trying, the formula for success, if there is one, still
eludes the nation-builders. Could it be that they are not seeing the real
reasons for their failures? Could it be that their hopes and illusions are
blinding them to the reality? Nation-building is doomed to failure because a
“legitimatized” state cannot be constructed by an exogenous nation-builder.
It should be noted that America’s nation-builders, even under
favorable circumstances in this country, failed or had limited success. The War
Between the States (1860-1865) was a strong sign of failure. Today’s nation was
“built” upon the worst war in the country’s history in which one coalition of
states (the North) defeated another coalition of states (the South). The
reconstruction after the war attempted nation-building a second time. Not until
100 years later was a substantial portion of the country, a population
subjugated by Jim Crow laws and worse, placed upon equal democratic terms with
the rest. It is not clear to this day that this nation-building has succeeded.
If the coercive apparatus of the federal government were removed, this country
would very likely break apart into a variety of nations. If the legitimacy of
the U.S. government is still contested, and our government is supposed to be a
model republic or representative democracy which knows the political situation
in America intimately, how can it possibly be expected that the U.S. government
can intervene in another land of which its knowledge is limited, and create a
government that garners the loyalty of the people(s) in that land and is
regarded as legitimate?
Why does nation-building fail? We need a theory of why this
happens in order to understand that it’s always going to be an ill-fated
project and that successes are going to be rare and due to special
circumstances that usually do not prevail.
Such a theory can be sketched out by extending the analysis of
Mises on the calculation problem of socialism and extending the analysis of
Hayek on the knowledge problem. Their work applies to exchange markets. It
needs to be generalized to political activities. Government socialism over
markets consists of interventions exogenous to markets that intervene with
compulsion and force of law. The result is to undermine a market’s
entrepreneurial activity. By the same token, government interventions upon a
country that are intended to reshape that country’s political system are
exogenously imposed by the nation-building government. The result is to
undermine that country’s political entrepreneurial activity. The nation-builder
attempts to create a certain kind of state, that is, certain political results
just as a socialist regulator or a communist bureaucrat attempts to create
certain kinds of economic results. One interferes in economic markets, the
other, in political transactions that are analogous to markets.
Nation-building
in this conception is a thoroughly socialist endeavor thoroughly infused with
coercive and distorting means. It is often said by political scientists to
be liberal interventionism, by which term the idea is
spread that it is intended to create a democracy with rule of law and rights
protections. However, if we look upon it as socialist intervention,
we emphasize instead that the centralized means being
used are not capable of attaining the ends associated with the term “liberal”.
We emphasize instead that various forms of coercion and “aid” are being used
and that these are going to disrupt the country’s politics and prevent it from
developing a state that is either liberal or democratic or legitimate.
According to Mises, the calculation problem of central economic
planning is insuperable because the economy has no prices. There is no need for
money in such an economy because all decisions are made centrally. The central
planner replaces entrepreneurs and presumes to know all preferences and respond
to their alterations. Entrepreneurial activity and the profit motive dwindle.
The nation-builder, by analogy, centrally plans the target country’s political
system and laws. He has no price to begin with since political activity is not
guided by a price system. However, just as in the case of a socialist economy,
individuals have political preferences and the nation-builder doesn’t know
these preferences and has no way of knowing them because they are expressed in
ways beyond his ever knowing them. He attempts to know them by learning what
specific individuals say, key people that he selects as knowing the turf; but
they have their own biases, preferences and political aims that color what they
believe, think and communicate.
Robert J.
Silverman headed the American Foreign Service Association recently. For a few
of his views on nation-building, see here.
He asks the vital question: “…why do we continue to get stuck in Groundhog
Day?” by which he means repeated failed attempts at nation-building. His answer
doesn’t go anywhere near the heart of the matter. He suggests that the foreign
service employee will “break the time loop when he learns how to handle the
people and the assignment well.” This is totally superficial. The question is
why, after 150 years of experience, this nation-building personnel cannot
possibly learn how to handle the native people and the assignment, why, that
is, failure is built into the attempt no matter what resources are
poured in.
Silverman’s
suggestions include having the Department of State, of which the AFS is a part,
lead the mission. Also “more language training, more and longer interagency
leadership education and more priority is given to those with multiple tours in
troubled regions.” These superficial recommendations assume that repeated
government failures are due to a lack of resources, military personnel,
training, will, organization, etc. I am suggesting that nothing can make
socialism work either as applied to market interventions or political
interventions. Socialism in political and economic theory assumes public or
government ownership and control of the means of production. This implies central planning and control. The latter too is
the key characteristic of government-planned and government controlled
nation-building. An exogenous government presumes to remake someone else’s
nation and create a state or make a state over in the desired direction and
with desired features.
Nowadays,
Special Forces are heavily involved in nation-building as this thesis attests. Its recommendations
reveal again that the people who believe in nation-building are blind to its
basic inoperability. The blueprint laid out sounds like that of a central
planning communist designing a blueprint for making an economy without private
property work:
“An interagency, agreed upon, the definition of nation building
must be established. This definition will enable each department within the
United States Government to define its role within the operation and begin the
process of analyzing the resources available within its own department to
contribute to the operation. As a result of this analysis, the United States
Government, as a whole, will be able to identify a lead agency. The lead agency
will be able to establish policy, identify shortfalls in capabilities and
resources, establish training strategies, supervise nation building training
events, clearly articulate the combined capabilities within the United States
Government to conduct nation building, and conduct both deliberate and
contingency planning for nation-building operations in the future.
Additionally, the lead agency would be able to harness the lessons learned from
past nation-building operations from each agency within the United States
Government in order to incorporate these lessons learned into future nation-building
operations.”
The main theory of how states come into being is that they arise
through conquest. They hold together by force and by establishing a degree of
so-called “legitimacy”. The latter includes a web of payoffs of privileges and
wealth. These garner enough support from those who are favored to offset the
losses being inflicted upon other elements of the population. “Legitimacy”
depends upon taxing and spending, so as to impose bearable pain and so as to
generate support. “Legitimacy” is also brought about by means of various
psychological means and propaganda. The state, as propped up by force and its
production of “legitimacy”, depends intimately on the people(s) over which it
rules or from which it springs. Although states look alike in general respects,
their detailed workings depend upon all sorts of social, economic and political
factors. The result is great variety in specific laws and specific political
structures among different countries. Exogenous central planning cannot
create “legitimacy”.
Enter the nation-builder the U.S. government, whose culture from
its inception has supported the idea that “progress” can be attained in
political as in economic matters by adopting the “right” institutions and
practices. The U.S. philosophy is that it can build a nation by a recipe, not
unlike the recipe peculiar to America, overlooking the fact that success even
in this country has been elusive and one cannot describe the political
evolution as embodying anything remotely resembling “progress”. This is a
peculiar blindness. The U.S. leaders consider the nation as exceptional, and
its productivity certainly has been exceptional, but they fail really to
understand that private property and free markets have always been the source
of the economic flowering, not central government control.
Extending the notion of America as exceptional to the political
sphere, the U.S. government is quite willing to apply its centralized power to
the goal of producing states that are more or less in its image. It thinks it
has a recipe and that the only problem is that it hasn’t hired the right cooks
or given them the right ingredients. Sometimes it grows frustrated with the
natives required to eat the cook’s undesired cuisine. Nation-building, as a
rule, involves the presence of the military forces of the nation-builder.
American nation-builders fail to grasp that a state depends on
the peculiar and individual factors present in a country. A state depends on
siphoning wealth from one set of people and transferring it to others,
including those from whom it is taxed. It depends on local notions of
corruption, laws, religions, language, peoples, tribes, ethnicity, geography,
systems of transport and communication, and a hundred other factors. States may
arise from conquest, but their maintenance and forms depend on innumerable
factors. The central political planner whose directives are implemented by the
State Department officer and the Special Forces group, and whose aid projects
enter the mix, cannot calculate their impact and cannot know their impact. This
planner cannot define the contours of “legitimacy” in the state he is trying to
build. He cannot know what such “legitimacy” entails either in the state he’s
replacing or the state he envisions. There is a severe knowledge problem in
nation-building that’s actually more severe than socialism’s attempts to
replace markets. Replacing a state is even more problematic.
Pei and Kasper write “Historically, nation-building attempts by
outside powers are notable mainly for their bitter disappointments.” The reason
is that the process is one of socialism applied to creating a “legitimate”
state, and the centralized control that’s characteristic of socialism cannot
handle this challenge in the nature of the case.
James L. Payne writes
“…Lt. Col. John T. Fishel…was…Chief of Policy and Strategy for
U. S. forces in Panama, and it was his job to figure out how to implement the
mission statement. The orders looked simple on paper: ‘Conduct nation building
operations to ensure democracy.’ But Fishel quickly discovered that the
instruction was meaningless because democracy was an ‘undefined goal.’ It
seemed to him that it wasn’t the job of military officers to figure out how to
implement this undefined objective, but, as he observes with a touch of
irritation, ‘there are no U. S. civilian strategists clearly articulating
strategies to achieve democracy.’”
“The fact that there was no clear definition of the conditions
that constitute democracy meant that the Military Support Group and the other
U.S. government agencies that were attempting to assist the Endara government
had only the vaguest concept of what actions and programs would lead the
country toward democracy …”
Central
planners could not provide a specific definition of the
goal. They could not say in advance what
“actions and programs would lead” to achieving that goal. It’s not a matter of
“would not”; they couldn’t do it without explicitly looking like fools and
conquerors. These lapses in the expression of the mission assigned to Fishel
implicitly bear out the above theory that building a state depends upon
numerous idiosyncratic local factors that cannot be known or specified in
advance. If the central planners had in fact obliged Fishel by giving him
specific guidelines, that would not have achieved the objective either, because
those guidelines could not possibly embody the localized knowledge necessary to
produce a state with “legitimacy”.
Liberal interventionism is for all practical purposes the
interventionism proposed by neocons, the only difference being in the role of
international institutions. But the term liberal interventionism fails to get
to the heart of this policy. Liberal interventionism is actually socialist
interventionism. It is central planning to replace one state by a different
state. It cannot define or measure the specific processes involved, and they
depend on specific aspects of the country whose state is being built. These
incapacities doom nation-building to failure.
Nation-building should be discarded as a U.S. foreign policy.
Michael S.
Rozeff [send him
mail] is a retired Professor of Finance living in East Amherst, New
York. He is the author of the free e-book Essays on
American Empire: Liberty vs. Domination and the free
e-book The
U.S. Constitution and Money: Corruption and Decline.
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