[Mb-civic] Rethinking Nation-Building - Ashraf Ghani and Clare
Lockhart - Washington Post Op-Ed
William Swiggard
swiggard at comcast.net
Sun Jan 1 08:29:31 PST 2006
Rethinking Nation-Building
By Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart
Sunday, January 1, 2006; B07
In 1945 the future of capitalism as the organizational form of the
economy and democracy as the organizational form of the polity was far
from certain in the advanced industrialized world. Today there is a
remarkable consensus on both the preferred economic and political forms.
With globalization of the media, the benefits of membership in the
wealthy democratic club are beamed daily to the homes of billions of
people who in turn aspire to the economic opportunities and political
freedoms that the market economies and democratic societies have
delivered to their citizens.
Yet the daily experience of so many people in poor countries is
confrontation with the realities of failing or fragile states,
criminalized and informal economies, and the denial of basic freedoms.
It is not resentment of the West but exclusion from the right to make
decisions in their own countries that feeds the resentment of the poor.
At the same time, the networks of violence that have declared war on the
security and order of ordinary people in
the developed world are making use of the territory of failed states to
expand their bases of destruction.
The path to security is not just investment in the institutions of
security. The price tag for security in a fragile state can quickly run
into billions of dollars a year. A sustained analysis by NATO of the
best means of achieving security in Afghanistan showed that credible
institutions and public finance would contribute more to security than
would the deployment of troops. Nor is the answer money alone; in these
countries, money cannot be translated to capital, because such things as
the rule of law, transparency and predictability are lacking. The state
is the most effective, economical way of organizing the security and
well-being of a population, just as the company is the most effective
approach in a competitive economy.
Thus the need for functioning states has become one of the critical
issues of our times. Global political, economic and security
institutions must have a new goal: to promote the emergence of states
that can fulfill their necessary functions. This goal provides a unified
answer to numerous initiatives, including debt crisis, implementation of
the Millennium Development Goals, and security.
It also requires that we make clear what functions need to be performed
by a state if it is to have internal legitimacy and external
credibility. We have proposed a framework of the 10 most critical
functions the modern state must perform, which was endorsed by a group
of leaders of post-conflict transitions last year. The functions include
maintenance of a monopoly on the legitimate means of violence, the
nurturing of human capital, and creation and regulation of the market.
We have also proposed that state-building or sovereignty strategies be
devised to meet the goal of having the state perform each of the 10
functions -- strategies backed by compacts between the leadership of
countries and the international community on the one side and citizens
on the other to create capable states that deliver value to their
citizens. And instead of thousands of reports, there should be a single
global report on state effectiveness, compiled with the involvement of
global and local civil societies and issued by a credible international
organization.
For this to work, the global institutions must receive renewed
attention. Despite some obvious shortcomings of the United Nations and
international financial institutions, the fact remains that if they did
not exist they would need to be invented. We must not succumb to calls
for their abolition or further weakening.
Revitalization of these organizations will require sustained attention
from the leaders of the Group of Eight industrial nations, which need to
agree on a program of reform. It is critical to redefine their tasks and
coordinate their activities. In turn, their leaderships need to become
models of transparency in recruitment, evaluation and promotion of staff
members. U.N. agencies need the resources to tackle state-building in
fragile and conflict-ridden states. The decision at the U.N. summit in
September to create a peace-building commission provides the United
Nations with the opportunity to demonstrate its commitment and capacity
for serious reform.
The international system needs reordering, with a new role for the
United Nations, international financial institutions and security
organizations. The wars of Europe between 1648 and 1945 were made
history by collective security institutions. With that experience in
mind, the nature of current threats and opportunities can now be confronted.
Ashraf Ghani is chancellor of Kabul University. He was adviser to the
United Nations during the Bonn process and the establishment of the
first post-Taliban administration in Afghanistan, and was Afghan
minister of finance from 2002 to 2004. Clare Lockhart is a fellow of the
Overseas Development Institute in Britain.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/30/AR2005123001288.html?nav=hcmodule
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