Developing Countries and Regional Collaboration

We were recently interviewed by Ratio Magazine, an online journal which specialises in providing business analyses related to East Africa.

The subject was an interesting one - the use of branding consultants for the promotion of emerging countries to the West. The Editor was interested in our rather tough view that such activities, if they are to be taken seriously, required a certain level of administrative capability in order to be successful.

The article speaks for itself and, in fact, there was no intention to criticise those who take on such contracts in good faith - they do their best and it is generally not their fault if the client (the sovereign country) has not invested in the systems that would make external communications a success.

This raises for us another interesting question that is often overlooked - the strategic imbalance of bureaucratic resources between the G20 and the rest of the world.

Many years ago, we worked on the campaign for a major pitch by one country's candidate to become Director General of a UN organisation on an independent reform platform. Our experience then and since was that small countries were the playthings of their donors.

Progressives in the West have tried to help by offering administrative expertise but this often fails to take hold because the donations are clearly linked to the strategic and security interests of the donors (otherwise they would be not get approval from legislatures).

Take the anti-corruption expertise where policemen are brought in to bring Western standards to 'assist' local elites and then come head-to-head with political systems that rely on clientage and patronage to function and where 'corruption' is, in fact, not always what it seems.

The other route to assisting the emerging world is by giving them the first benefits of aid and assistance to the developing world through the United Nations but here we face three problems, apart from a general backlash against aid that is laundered through local elites.

The UN is already overstretched, the West has undertaken a programme of recapturing control of what it pays for so that it reproduces the same model as its national administrative aid programmes and, of course, 'fairness' means that 'corruption' and clientage is re-imported into the UN by the back door.

So, when it comes to major multilateral negotiations, the emerging countries as sovereign nations have less capable, less well trained, underpaid and confused administrators who have little independence from the political class and can be treated as cannon fodder in the disputes of the big players.

What can be done? Certainly the West has less free capital to play with now and so national aid is likely to have more rather than less strings tied to it and be more directed at aid to the subjects of the sovereign rather than support for the administrators of the subjects of the sovereign.

There is, of course, growing pressure to reform the United Nations. This must come eventually but any reform is likely to focus on a reshuffle within its economic elite to take account of global shifts of power since 1945 and this may well reduce emerging country bargaining power through 'liberal 'reforms'.

In the end, emerging country ability to negotiate from strength is likely to have to rely on one of three methods ...

• a country effectively sells itself into the orbit of a greater power and trades what it can provide to the big power for the big power's patronage when serious discussions start - this is, of course, tantamount to a form of international feudalism;
• a country diverts its scarce resources to introducing the sort of administrative reforms that underpinned the British Empire and the US Federal State and puts its brightest and its best into a position of power over and against its political class - possible but expensive and not easy;
• a country begins to pool sovereignty with similar size powers and deals (much as the EU is trying to do with minimal success at the moment) with the international community as a bloc.

We have been somewhat of a 'bear' on the European Union precisely because the levels of development between its members is so different. This is the Germany-Greece problem that might yet break the Euro this autumn.

The European Union has not been bound together, unlike the US as Federal State, on war. There has been no War of Independence, its last major Civil War (1914-1945) took place before it was formed and there have been none of the low-level social wars that have been endemic to the United States.

If emerging countries are to build administrative capability without being client-states or drawing in on themselves as administrative party dictatorships, then regional blocs work for them as much and probably far more than they work for the members of the G20.

Such blocs might have come to be bound together through the free play of war but the West refuses to countenance this option. The UN exists, in any case, as permanent block to petty imperial expansionism so the alternative is negotiation.

The most honourable (not that honour counts for much in international affairs) approach for the West to take would be to encourage blocs of continguous and similarly sized countries to come together and create the sort of administrative capability beyond tribe and locality that it is promoting for itself.

Take Ratio's own country base - Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi and the de facto statelet emerging in Southern Sudan. This is a natural bloc that may compete within itself but which has interests in dealing with the West that might be better served through collaboration than competition.

Of course, collaboration does take place on issues of shared interest but the further formalisation of this process here and elsewhere as a positive policy aim might help focus dialogue over aid and security, assist in regional stabilisation and provide the basis for a consensus on reforms.

The United Kingdom should be a natural bloc of 'these islands' and is only stopped from being so by the idiotic legacy of its past imperialist approach to the Irish people. The Nordic countries adopt their own similar 'common interests' approach.

More of this in the developing world might be central to its continuing independence of action.

Be in no doubt that imperialism is back. Indeed, it has been back for some time but as a form of informal power struggle based on trade and aid with multiple players seeking to acquire spheres of influence without the costs of stationing troops - except where necessary to protect trade routes.

Small developing countries are like mice before cats and they may need to think increasingly collaboratively if they are not to find that they are simply out-stations for low cost transfer of natural resources to the industrial zones of the developed world.

On the Minds of Nations

What are nations? Now there's a big question.

They are territorial yet their laws of domicile can cover assets far away from their homelands whether as informal or formal empire. They are certainly not the possessions of their peoples in any meaningful way despite the elaborate liberal theory claiming otherwise.

Can a nation have a mind? Nothing can have a mind existentially except an individual person (unless you are a believer in some world-soul), yet nations behave as if they have personalities or minds of their own. They appear to have essentialised existence after the fact.

Nations raise major philosophical questions about our own humanity. How can a single person or a committee of persons, elected or in power through a coup or by chance, become the epicentre of the destinies of millions - and, in great wars, hundreds of millions?

How was it that Napoleon Bonaparte could so manage his society that he could leave Poland with 690,000 men in 1812 and return with only 93,000 yet see not one assassination attempt or coup from the relations of his apparently willing victims?

It seems that we can be managed into a lemming-like state with surprising ease.

Whatever the answers, national societies, almost all of either dynastic origin (essentially the war band) or outgrowths of party-led liberation struggles against the heirs of war bands, seem to have developed 'social personalities' and something close to an organic life cycle.

National defence and security policies appear to follow the patterns of behaviour of persons in a Hobbesian universe. Every state at any time appears to be somewhere on the following continuum, each phase shading into the next ...

• the expansion of the war band into a vacuum - or rather an apparent vacuum created by the differential in technologies between a predator and the predated, with the only difference between imperialisms being whether the predation is for profit (dynastic) or ideological (liberatory)
• the settling of interstitiary vacuums between rival powers of equivalent or near-equivalent strength - this is the boundary-setting and soft power competition in a multi-power world that seems to be taking place today
• the defence of integrity, with varying degrees of fear that stronger powers might decide to become a nouveau war band (as national socialism decided to do quite consciously), instead of looking elsewhere and in other ways for profit and influence (assuming such options are available)

Although we might like to fantasise about world government and about noble democracies maintaining peace in our time, the reality is that even the most open democracies behave somewhere along this continuum in ways that are less than altruistic.

If anything, because of the need to justify their position to themselves (another 'human' trait), a hybridisation of inherited dynastic self interest and of the export of values in the Western democracies muddies the water further.

Internal contradictions will always create more heat than light in internal foreign policy debate about the precise nature of the national interest. That is why Gordon Brown appears terrified of admitting the truth about energy and strategic interests in relation to Libya and falls back on the 'war on terror' chestnut.

This is all being raised because we (TPPR) tend to take a hyper-realist view of international relations, one that emphasises that there is little new under the sun and that the primal drives of nations, like persons, are only thinly veneered by reason.

Wherever we look, we see 'histories' that are redacted to maintain cohesion and inconvenient interpretations or alternative explanations of the past and of others' pasts being edited out, much as personal memories are self-edited in order to construct personality.

Wherever we look, we see, regardless of the huge diversity of individual personalities within nations, the observable fact of a 'national character', predispositions and attitudes that are not imposed by elites on people but appear to be shared by both elites and people in a dialectic of mutual myth creation.

Mircea Eliade was a pioneer in bringing to our attention how myth was not something Greeks did but something that is omni-present in our own contemporary narratives. The interplay between past, emotion, reason, convention and obligations or guilt are present in nations as in persons.

It might even be argued that new mythic personalities have emerged for trans-national ideologies that compete within nations for control of nations and that nations themselves are constantly struggling to 'square' contradictory mythic personalities internally in order to maintain their cohesion.

International relations might also be considered analogous to relations between persons. Persons can be rational in pursuing their interests externally but the interests themselves (or 'constructed personality') are not necessarily wholly rational.

We reject, however, the idea of the psychotic State (the liberal myth of Nazi Germany) because a psychotic State would not be able to hold its own personality together. Somalia may be psychotic, interwar Germany was not - it was deeply neurotic.

But we do retain the notion of the neurotic State, the functioning State that is still highly disturbed and capable of causing friction and even a fist fight with its neighbours - or blundering into slighting the fragile ego of another State so that it throws a punch.

All this sounds like conservative pessimism but there is no reason to believe that we are doomed to centuries of Napoleonic egos leading sheep to slaughter.

As in 'real life' (international affairs has an air of fantasy sometimes little different from tales of Narnia or of Middle Earth), bad behaviour can be contained.

In 'real life', we have a police force (or a strong headteacher or parents), or we have a culture of constraint and restraint from birth or we learn to be less neurotic over time through experience, will or therapy. To some liberals, our police force might be world government or a truly dominant hegemon.

The problem here is one liberals refuse to face. Whether world government or hegemon, this single 'State' would still have a personality of sorts, would still be the creature of its history and the mythic presumptions of its constituents and would not be the rational actor of progressive fantasy.

Moreover, neither of the two great hegemons of the last two hundred years (the Pax Britannica from 1815 to 1914 or the US informal imperium which subsisted briefly over the two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union) have evidenced anything other than self interest and self regard as to values.

Like Rome, they merely expanded to fill a vacuum and they were forced to retreat when their values and claims were resisted by equal and countervailing forces and when the costs of filling the vacuum proved greater than the benefits.

On the other hand, the model of a culture of constraint that accept the neurotics and psychopaths in our midst and works around them, calling in the police only when necessary, was the ideal of the failed League of Nations and the failing United Nations.

It depends on everyone knowing the rules, everyone abiding by the rules and effective police power being in place when the rules are broken. This consensus is breaking down within liberal democracies so there is every reason to believe the situation is no better at a global level.

Unfortunately, the 'real world' analogy for our current international legal framework is village policing in the eighteenth century. The global village is run by the squire and parson with one rule for them and another for the local peasants.

Given that (to extend the analogy) the squire's sons are partial to seducing or even raping the village girls occasionally, an international system like this is doomed to create resentment and resistance.

A third way of dealing with the situation is the analogically personal - that each person/nation becomes emotionally stable in themselves, compassionate towards others but realistic about the need to retain their own reserve power when faced by others less stable and less giving.

You might call this benign nationalism, integral, non-interfering elsewhere, concentrating on economic strength and security yet supportive of any measures that remove the anarchy 'out there' within its means.

Unfortunately, many persons 'out there' have the illusion that they are emotionally stable when they are not. This lack of self-knowledge also applies to the complacent faux-democracies of the West.

If nations have minds and personalities and there is little that we as individuals can do except our bit in rewiring a few of the national neurones in competition with millions of others, where should we direct that tiny bit of energy?

Free-for-all Hobbesian international affairs, like the market, works but at immense cost. Like punctuated equilibrium in evolution, long periods of peace and trade get interrupted by horrible episodes of limbic breakdown, like the Thirty Years War or the horrors of China between 1911 and 1949 and beyond.

If we want to live like that, fine, but progressive dreams of 'world government' are no solution. In the end, without other reforms, it will become an 'authoritarian personality' that begs for its own revolt and resistance. Its eventual collapse will mean that we are back where we started.

If we want better, then there are only two ways forward. The first is the radical reform of the United Nations so that it is no longer the vehicle of the squire and the parson but acts in a more limited way than it has been doing to provide basic rule of law and justice for the peasants (the weak nations).

Second, and equally important, national personalities have to be recognised and encouraged to develop in ways that are far less dynastic, far less ideological and far more attuned to the actual life needs of the general population.

I suppose we are saying that, in order to preclude another case where 690,000 men (and women) are directed into some snowy waste and then only 93,000 return, foreign and security policy needs to be taken out of the hands of dynastic successor politicians such as Presidents and be democratised.

If liberals want to avoid the conservative pessimism of our realpolitik analysis, then they need to stop flaffing around with grand visions and get down to basics:

• a more limited in scope but stronger, fairer and more independent UN with teeth and
• the radical democratisation of their own bourgeois democracies before they interfere in the affairs of less developed states.

Strong stable and responsive democracies prepared to concede some of their own interest to the international rule of law - now that's the basis for peace and security!

This is not perhaps what the functional heirs to Sceaf of the Angles or Ascaric of the Franks want to hear but, hey, a mature personality eventually grows up and put away the toy guns and childhood gangs and so should nations.