State building and the non-nation-state.

• Author: Migdal, Joel S.

At three different critical moments of the 20th century, old empires crumbled, producing a spate of new states. In all three of those periods, leaders of newly independent states faced a distinct international environment, each creating its own unique mix of opportunities and challenges for state building. (1) The last of these three periods, the few years following the end of the Cold War, seems to have produced the most inhospitable environment of all for state leaders, threatening not only the fragile relations between the new states and their populations but the very existence of the states themselves.

In the first section of this essay, I look at the movement of world forces, hemming in the new states created in the early 1990s. On one side, rapid globalization in this period undercut the "boundedness" of states, which as one author wrote is "at the very heart of the concepts of sovereignty and self-determination." (2) And, on the other side, these states were thrust into a volatile, insecure environment in which their leaders desperately needed to mobilize their populations, based on none other than the very boundedness that now seemed so elusive. Neither of the first two periods of state creation seemed to produce as challenging an environment for state building. A reading of the literature points to the forging of a tie between state and nation, between the concepts of citizen and member of the nation, that legitimized the states created in these earlier eras and enabled them to mobilize their populations to defend the state. At first glance, then, the earlier cases of state building would not seem to provide much in the way of a model for the leaders of highly challenged contemporary new states, where the population is fragmented and the tie between citizenship and the state has unraveled.

In the following section, I look at some recent literature on two earlier states, the United States and Israel. The revisionist works on each suggest that the existing dominant model on the emergence of nation-states may misrepresent the relationship between these previously established states and their populations. Earlier assumptions about the existence of a broadly conceived nation and its loyalty serving as the basis for state building may be problematical. And, if they are, the similarities of states created in earlier periods and the new states of the 1990s may be quite striking: both have faced a fragmented citizenry, which complicated state-building efforts.

Finally, I offer some thoughts about the particular configuration of social boundaries and the relationship of the population to the state in the United States and Israel. (3) The final section offers several lessons and thoughts about state building in such a social-political configuration. I will conclude by suggesting that this configuration is not unique to these cases and, in fact, describes a good proportion of the newly created states of the 1990s.

THE APPARENT DOUBLE WHAMMY OF BUILDING NEW STATES IN THE 1990S

The 20th century witnessed three waves of state creation, each involving the collapse of empires and each generating a distinct set of issues involving the integrity and viability of the often-fragile new states. (4) After the First World War, the disintegration of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, framed by Woodrow Wilson's rallying cry for self-determination, sparked the century's first wave of new states. New, sometimes arbitrary and almost always contentious, boundaries crisscrossed central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and beyond. Then, following the Second World War, the demise of European colonial empires was accompanied by a new round of state creation, which included the radical redrawing of the world political map through the independence of multiple new states in Asia and Africa, tripling the total number of states within a generation. (5) Finally, the fall of vet another empire, the Soviet Union, set off the third surge of state creation, centered mostly in Eastern and Southeastern Europe, the Baltic area, the Caucuses and central Asia, but which included other cases as well, such as Eritrea and Namibia in Africa, as well as the death of the apartheid state in South Africa and the proto-state of Palestine in the Middle East.

In the first two waves, the creation of new states came in worlds in which changes in the boundaries of the global political map were accepted practices, part of the normative environment. Redrawing boundaries around the world was a familiar process. The first spurt of state making came on the heels of the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 and its aftermath, stretching well into the 1890s, which imposed new boundaries throughout Africa. Also, the slow crumbling in Southeastern Europe of the Ottoman Empire had resulted in new boundaries and new states there as well, in the decades leading up to the First World War. And, of course, the next wave of state creation, the massive decolonization in the generation after the Second World War, came in the wake of the First World War boundary-drawing but, even more immediately, the taking and retaking of territories across Europe, Asia and northern Africa during the war itself.

Leaders of new states that were born in these first two rounds of state creation in the 20th century, especially the first round, were profoundly aware of the uncertain environment into which these states emerged. Boundaries were far from guaranteed. These leaders' priorities had to be securing their newly won borders against avaricious neighbors and establishing a relationship with their population that would enable them to mobilize sufficient material and human resources to survive in a very uncertain world. That mobilization depended, in good part, on malting the state's borders meaningful, not only as lines on a map or arbitrary designations of the state's reach, but as a social boundary for the people in the state as well. The state's self-preservation in the uncertain world in the immediate wake of the two world wars, then, depended on selling to its people the notion that its political boundary was identical to the social boundary of the group--the nation--to which these people belonged and, thus, felt worth defending even at great personal sacrifice.

But the third wave of 20th-century state creation began in a very different environment from that encountered in the first two waves. It came after one of the most sustained periods of stability for political boundaries in the 300-year history of the modern state system. By the time of the last war by an imperial power trying to stem the tide of decolonization, France's failed last stand in Algeria in 1962, boundaries of new and old states alike remained fixed. Indeed, for the states formed in the second round of 20th-century. state creation, the new post-colonial states, the initial motivation to mobilize in order to defend their newly won boundaries soon dissipated, as state leaders began to realize that somehow they had been provided with an unusual insurance policy. Unlike many earlier periods in which states were gobbled up by others at alarming rates, after 1947 nary an established state disappeared or disintegrated. There were exceptions, to be sure--Nigeria split and then recombined, Egypt and Syria combined and then split, Pakistan split and did not recombine and Vietnam recombined and did not split again--but on the whole the post-war period was one of amazing boundary stability for strong and weak states alike.

Normatively, then, existing state boundaries took on a different guise in the generation leading up to the third round of state creation, in the 1990s, not as markers often in flux and in strong need of vigilant state defense, but as seemingly unchanging features of the state system. (6) States could be carved out of anachronistic empires but somehow, once created, they did not disappear and their borders stayed intact. State leaders no longer had the same strong compulsion to pay almost any cost in order to secure their boundaries and establish the kind of relationship with their population that would enable them to mobilize sufficient human and material resources to keep predators at bay. (7)

Border stability in the generation prior to the creation of the new states in the 1990s, of course, was one of the by-products of the Cold War. Even states more fragile than an eggshell, such as Lebanon during the long nightmare of its civil war from 1975 to 1990, in which the state often did not effectively rule even more than a few square miles in the entire country; remained formally intact. Even though many postcolonial states that gained their independence in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s had little real ability to defend their borders in case of serious attack or mobilize their population, they were born into a state system that, mostly anachronistically, still portrayed each state as the premier rule-maker for the people within its territory; as a sovereign presence largely unaccountable to outside rules or groups.

But the situation changed abruptly and dramatically for the new states of the 1990s. Gaining independence on the heels of a period in which territorial integrity was all but assured, they suddenly confronted a very different environment. Perhaps Saddam Hussein's most positive or only positive effect on international relations was that, in his conquest of Kuwait in August 1990, he signaled to the world that the era of stable--practically guaranteed--boundaries was drawing to a close. More than that, the new states of the 1990s appeared when the image of the state as a supreme sovereign entity was being challenged. They entered a beleaguered club.

Academics have cataloged the assaults on the old ideas of sovereignty. (8) Europe became now, not a paradigm of autonomous states, but the paragon of porous borders and divided authority. (9) Globalization, with its exponential increase in...