T C A Srinivasa-Raghavan: The imperatives of imperium

LINE & LENGTH

How much longer before the US comes up with its own Doctrine of Lapse for failed states?

All disreputable enterprises require reputable intellectual justifications. It is also an extraordinary fact of history that such justifications often came from wholly well-meaning sources or persons.

As we shall see below, the World Bank and Britain's Department for International Development (DFID), in spite of excellent motivation, can also unwittingly contribute .

This is the context in which I am summarising the main points of an article that appeared in the July-August issue of Foreign Policy (not to be confused with Foreign Affairs, which is published by the Council on Foreign Relations, USA).

I believe that the journal means well. But its findings are liable to misuse.

The article has been published in collaboration with the Fund for Peace and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

It presents the results of a survey conducted by Foreign Policy and the Fund for Peace.

The burden of the song is that, whereas until 1945 successful states threatened one another, now it is failed states that threaten the successful ones.

The article says that the main problem today is being able to tell which state is on the way to failing or has failed so that a potential or actual threat can be foreseen.

To help us identify the symptoms, the journal has constructed an index. It uses 12 political, economic, social and military variables, such as armed conflict, famine, disease outbreaks, refugee flows, open hostilities against state institutions, large stretches of lawless territory, episodic fighting, drug mafias or warlords dominating large swaths of territory, slow and steady deterioration of social and political institutions, and so on.

A table provides a ranking of the states it thinks are about to fail. The columns give the variables and the rows, 60 of them, rank the countries.

I would have reproduced the table here but I don't have the permission to do so. However, it is available on the website www.foreignpolicy.com.

It appears the World Bank has also identified 30 states that are "under stress". So has Britain's DFID, which says 46 are "fragile".

In terms of folks with good intentions, you can't do much better. The CIA is a different kettle of fish, though. It thinks maybe 20 are on their way to going belly-up.

Seven of the 10 countries at maximum risk are in Africa. A lot of them have huge amounts of mineral and other resources and "saving" them makes sense, whether through debt relief or more directly.

Twenty-two of the 60 countries in the ranking are in Africa, Egypt included.

But, most alarmingly, four of the seven countries in Saarc are also at risk. Bangladesh is at 17, Nepal at 25, Bhutan at 26, and Pakistan at 34.

South Asia's estranged cousin Burma is at 23. (Strictly applied, several of the criteria could apply to India also.)

The index includes Iraq also, which considering everything is odd. Iran is 57 and Russia at 59. Gambia, at 60, is least at risk. Several of the Central Asian states are also at varying degrees of risk.

Of these 60, the US has troops in about half. The rest have US bases very close by. So should emergency relief (for the US?) be required, help is at hand.

There are two instances in not-altogether-remote history that come closest to the situation that obtains now. The main characteristic, then as now, is a profound concern over who will control mineral resources and markets in the future.

The first of these was in India, when Lord Dalhousie enunciated the Doctrine of Lapse in 1848. This doctrine also pertained to failed states, except that failure was defined differently.

It consisted of the incumbent Raja or Nawab not being able to produce a male heir.

In such an event, the kingdom (or as Dalhousie would have it, state) would be annexed to Britain. Dalhousie was very clear that the rule would apply especially to the rajas and nawabs who were either British creations or who were vassals of those whom the British had defeated in war.

In all, he annexed seven states in this fashion. It might have been more but for 1857.

There is no space here to describe in detail the economic reasons that underpinned the doctrine. Suffice it to say that annexation had again become efficient economically for the British.

All that was needed was a legal and moral justification and the doctrine of lapse provided it in the case of the "failed" Indian states of the 19th century.

The other instance pertains to Africa when, in 1884, the European powers agreed to divide it up between themselves without fighting.

Again the justification was wholly moral: the civilising of Africa by converting it into an image of Europe. Even little Belgium got something: a piece of Congo, which is on the verge of "failing" again it seems.

It would be a bit excessive to suggest that the US has thought through everything in such fine detail. But it does seem to be moving in a direction that is generally recognisable by us ex-colonials.

Been there, seen that""and had it done, too, right, chaps?