It is
simple. The rising middle class must
establish institutions that serve them and that they can trust. At either end we have anarchic conditions
created by disenfranchised tribes and the enfranchised tribe on top. Neither is stable nor conducive of rising
prosperity. That describes Syria
exactly.
The ongoing
problem has been to convince tribes that their best interest lays in a
democratic forum that manages such conflicts and the apparent route to the
aggrandizing of state power. It usually
needs a civil war.
The truth is
that we are still far too close to our barbarian roots and our governance
system is too easily diverted to the interests of a few. Worse, the few
involved begin to think they are special.
All this leads to misdirection of resources and a social irritant that
leads to anarchy if allowed to progress.
Why So Much
Anarchy?
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 2014 - 04:01
By Robert D. Kaplan
Twenty years ago, in February 1994, I published
a lengthy cover story in The Atlantic Monthly, "The Coming Anarchy:
How Scarcity, Crime, Overpopulation, Tribalism, and Disease are Rapidly
Destroying the Social Fabric of Our Planet." I argued that the combination
of resource depletion (like water), demographic youth bulges and the
proliferation of shanty towns throughout the developing world would enflame
ethnic and sectarian divides, creating the conditions for domestic political
breakdown and the transformation of war into increasingly irregular forms --
making it often indistinguishable from terrorism. I wrote about the erosion of
national borders and the rise of the environment as the principal security
issues of the 21st century. I accurately predicted the collapse of certain
African states in the late 1990s and the rise of political Islam in Turkey and other places. Islam, I wrote, was a
religion ideally suited for the badly urbanized poor who were willing
to fight. I also got things wrong, such as the probable
intensification of racial divisions in the United States; in fact, such
divisions have been impressively ameliorated.
However, what is not in dispute is that significant
portions of the earth, rather than follow the dictates of Progress and
Rationalism, are simply harder and harder to govern, even as there is
insufficient evidence of an emerging and widespread civil society. Civil
society in significant swaths of the earth is still the province of a
relatively elite few in capital cities -- the very people Western journalists
feel most comfortable befriending and interviewing, so that the size and
influence of such a class is exaggerated by the media.
The anarchy unleashed in the Arab world, in
particular, has other roots, though -- roots not adequately dealt with in my
original article:
The End of
Imperialism. That's
right. Imperialism provided much of Africa, Asia and Latin America with
security and administrative order. The Europeans divided the planet into a
gridwork of entities -- both artificial and not -- and governed. It may
not have been fair, and it may not have been altogether civil, but it provided
order. Imperialism, the mainstay of stability for human populations for
thousands of years, is now gone.
The End of
Post-Colonial Strongmen. Colonialism did
not end completely with the departure of European colonialists. It continued
for decades in the guise of strong dictators, who had inherited state systems from the
colonialists. Because these strongmen often saw themselves as anti-Western
freedom fighters, they believed that they now had the moral justification to
govern as they pleased. The Europeans had not been democratic in the Middle
East, and neither was this new class of rulers. Hafez al Assad, Saddam Hussein,
Ali Abdullah Saleh, Moammar Gadhafi and the Nasserite pharaohs in Egypt right
up through Hosni Mubarak all belonged to this category, which, like that of the
imperialists, has been quickly retreating from the scene (despite a comeback in
Egypt).
No Institutions. Here we come to the key element. The post-colonial
Arab dictators ran moukhabarat states: states whose order depended on
the secret police and the other, related security services.
But beyond that, institutional and bureaucratic development was weak and unresponsive to the needs of the
population -- a population that, because it was increasingly urbanized,
required social services and complex infrastructure. (Alas, urban societies are
more demanding on central governments than agricultural ones, and the world is
rapidly urbanizing.) It is institutions that fill the gap between the ruler
at the top and the extended family or tribe at the bottom. Thus, with
insufficient institutional development, the chances for either
dictatorship or anarchy proliferate.
Civil society occupies the middle ground between those extremes, but it cannot
prosper without the requisite institutions and bureaucracies.
Feeble Identities. With feeble institutions, such post-colonial states
have feeble identities. If the state only means oppression, then its population
consists of subjects, not citizens. Subjects of despotisms know only fear, not
loyalty. If the state has only fear to offer, then, if the pillars of the
dictatorship crumble or are brought low, it is non-state identities that fill
the subsequent void. And in a state configured by long-standing legal borders,
however artificially drawn they may have been, the triumph of non-state
identities can mean anarchy.
Doctrinal
Battles. Religion
occupies a place in daily life in the Islamic world that the West has not known
since the days -- a millennium ago -- when the West was called
"Christendom." Thus, non-state identity in the 21st-century Middle
East generally means religious identity. And because there are variations of
belief even within a great world religion like Islam, the rise of religious
identity and the consequent decline of state identity means the inflammation of
doctrinal disputes, which can take on an irregular, military form. In the early
medieval era, the Byzantine Empire -- whose whole identity was infused with
Christianity -- had violent, doctrinal disputes between iconoclasts (those
opposed to graven images like icons) and iconodules (those who venerated them).
As the Roman Empire collapsed and Christianity rose as a replacement identity,
the upshot was not tranquility but violent, doctrinal disputes between
Donatists, Monotheletes and other Christian sects and heresies. So, too, in the
Muslim world today, as state identities weaken and sectarian and other
differences within Islam come to the fore, often violently.
Information
Technology. Various forms
of electronic communication, often transmitted by smartphones, can empower the
crowd against a hated regime, as protesters who do not know each other
personally can find each other through Facebook, Twitter, and other social
media. But while such technology can help topple governments, it cannot provide
a coherent and organized replacement pole of bureaucratic power to maintain
political stability afterwards. This is how technology encourages anarchy. The
Industrial Age was about bigness: big tanks, aircraft carriers, railway
networks and so forth, which magnified the power of big centralized states. But
the post-industrial age is about smallness, which can empower small and
oppressed groups, allowing them to challenge the state -- with anarchy
sometimes the result.
Because we are talking here about long-term
processes rather than specific events, anarchy in one form or another will be
with us for some time, until new political formations arise that provide for
the requisite order. And these new political formations need not be necessarily
democratic.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, societies in
Central and Eastern Europe that had sizable middle classes and reasonable
bureaucratic traditions prior to World War II were able to transform themselves
into relatively stable democracies. But the Middle East and much of Africa lack
such bourgeoisie traditions, and so the fall of strongmen has left a void. West
African countries that fell into anarchy in the late 1990s -- a few years after
my article was published -- like Sierra Leone, Liberia and Ivory Coast, still
have not really recovered, but are wards of the international community through
foreign peacekeeping forces or advisers, even as they struggle to develop a
middle class and a manufacturing base. For, the development of efficient
and responsive bureaucracies requires literate functionaries, which, in turn,
requires a middle class.
The real question marks are Russia and China. The
possible weakening of authoritarian rule in those sprawling states may usher in
less democracy than chronic instability and ethnic separatism that would dwarf
in scale the current instability in the Middle East. Indeed, what follows
Vladimir Putin could be worse, not better. The same holds true for a weakening
of autocracy in China.
The future of world politics will be about which
societies can develop responsive institutions to govern vast geographical space
and which cannot. That is the question toward which the present season of
anarchy leads.
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