Review of Greg Mills, "Why States Recover, Changing Walking Societies into Winning Nations", Picador Africa, From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe," Johannesburg, 2014.
Jonathan Katzenellenbogen
In his latest book Greg Mills, who runs the Oppenheimer family-funded Brenthurst Foundation think tank, covers the roots of decline and attempts at reform in 30-odd countries. Most have failed or nearly failed and a handful have really come back to life again.
To an extent, this shortage of success stories belies the slightly optimistic question posed by the title. In truth, Mills' book serves mostly as a reminder that disasters and, at most, partial recoveries, are far more common than full recoveries.
For a South African audience, this publication is also a well-timed and a chilling reminder that low growth and high unemployment, corruption. tightening state control, suffocating laws and infrastructural decay are likely to have awful consequences that might never be cured in our time.
"A failure to deliver basic goods and services and a failure of democracy can lead to violent collapse. And despite the differences between these three types - outright collapse, a failure to build the state and authoritarian democracy - in all there is one constant," writes Mills. The one constant of these states is "the deliberate failure and neglect" of the interests of its citizens.
State failure might not take the form of total collapse, as in Somalia. It can also result in a country where the masses are desperately poor and unhappy while an elite lives the high life in its insulated enclaves.
More often than not, fragile states lurch from crisis to crisis, with their rulers knowing full well that serious reforms threaten their survival. So they hold on, often using donor funding or proceeds from the sales of mineral concessions to raise cash for distribution to those whose support keeps them in power. It often takes "a good crisis" or tragically, a war, to set the course toward a recovery, and even then the tendency is for rulers of failed states to cling on and if possible, stay in power.
The view Greg Mills sets forth is pretty straightforward and refreshingly devoid of tortuous theory. It is fatuous, he says, to blame the legacy of colonialism or the machinations of international capitalists for failures that are invariably rooted in local politics. After all, "it is local politics, customs, and rules that overwhelmingly shape their choices," he writes. The local politics and customs tend to involve patronage dispensed by insecure elites as a means of maintaining control.
Foreigners who rush to rescue failed states usually make a mess of things as their attempts distort economies and further weaken institutions. Mills believes it is best to leave locals to cure themselves. The best medicines are democratic politics and free markets, and local ownership of any reform programme.
A large number of semi-failing countries (Argentina, Haiti, Nigeria, or Zimbabwe) seem to lurch along without introducing decisive reforms or collapsing entirely. Others such as Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq and Malawi become highly dependent on external donors to keep their governments going.
There are a few partial successes, but only a handful of outright success stories in the book. After decades wracked by drug wars and corruption, Colombia achieved peace and stability and started growing its economy again. Vietnam abandoned key elements of its command economy and became a major exporter. A third success is South Africa, lauded for its 1994 political settlement.
Then there is the exceptional case of Somaliland, an old British colony that broke away from war torn Somalia in the 1990s to form what is now a stable and relatively well-managed country. As the international community has refused recognition, the country's success was achieved with virtually no foreign help. In Mills estimation, that's exactly why Somaliland was able to save itself: Somalis found lasting solutions to Somali problems through a deal by the key local players in the country.
Interestingly, Mills takes a dim view of the Asian "developmental state" model. While Singapore and others in Asia have enjoyed stellar success, he points out that in the long run, authoritarian states are more likely to fail than those who seek salvation by expanding democracy.
Much of the success of Asian authoritarians is attributable, says Mills, to leaders who realise they have a duty to deliver a higher standard of living to ordinary people. It has been difficult to replicate and there are more examples of authoritarian failure than authoritarian economic success, he writes. And there are plenty of examples of successful democratic economies. Africa's "Big Men," on the other hand, have tended to loot the national treasury and spread the proceeds among their elite friends.
Mills gives South Africa a chapter, praising the leadership of Mandela and de Klerk that yielded the big settlement of 1994 and sketching various possible future scenarios. The ANC's apparently low regard for institutions that foster accountability such as Parliament and the judiciary is one of the warning signs of a drift toward authoritarianism. So is its use of state-owned media to promote itself. According to Mills, these behaviours are typical of "authoritarian democracies" like Iran, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe, which combine repression with the language and the institutional façade of democracy.
Mills' scenarios for South Africa seem credible. There is the muddle-through one of policy inertia in which the National Development Plan becomes a casualty and the country continues on a low-growth high-unemployment track. Then there is the scenario in which the ANC responds to a threat to its rule by lurching leftward and attacking the easy targets of whites, big business and the mining companies. This would inevitably lead to failure. But Mills insists that the high-growth high-employment scenario remains viable.
Mills is firmly in the growing "get the politics right" school of development. This holds that institutions that help to ensure accountability are a precondition for good policies and technocratic solutions for development. It is broadly the same school into which Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson the authors of "Why Nations Fail" can be placed.
Both point to the problem of "extractive" societies restricting growth and development. While both books are convincing, neither quite comes to grips with China. Acemoglu and Robinson acknowledge China's success but argue that fast growth is likely to lead to growing demands for political liberalisation, but say the jury is still out on the long-term prospects. Mills barely mentions China, preferring to deal in general terms with the problems of the authoritarian developmental state model. If China's political development will one day have to catch up with that of its economy there have to be ruptures
Given its length, detail, and digressions "Why States Recover" should be considered more of a useful reference book than something to be digested in a few sittings. It offers a plethora of sound advice regarding should-dos and please-dont's for countries that are determined to thrive. The real problem is that getting into trouble is far easier than managing the politics of getting out of trouble.
This article was published with the assistance of the Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung für die Freiheit (FNF). The views presented in the article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of FNF.
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