Discourses on peace and development

Progress in Development Studies http://pdj.sagepub.com

Discourses on peace and development Björn Hettne Progress in Development Studies 2001; 1; 21 DOI: 10.1177/146499340100100103 The online version of this article can be found at: http://pdj.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/1/1/21

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Progress in Development Studies 1, 1 (2001) pp. 21–36

Discourses on peace and development Björn Hettne Department of Peace and Development Research, Gothenburg University, Brogatan 4, S-413 01 Gothenburg, Sweden

Abstract: Assuming a close relationship between peace and development, this paper analyses a succession of schools of thought in development forming part of three distinct, historically contextualized development and security discourses: the industrialization imperative in the emerging state-system in nineteenth-century Europe, the international concern with global poverty in the bipolar post second world war world and the current meaning of development in a globalized and increasingly chaotic world. The third of these discourses contains major challenges for development theory. The discourses are related to great transformations in political economy, understood in Polanyian terms as tensions between market expansion and societal response. Key words: conflict; development theory; discourse; peace; security.

I

Introduction

Once again it has become politically correct to say that development and peace are two sides of the same coin, although the problem today more often is formulated in the negative terms of poverty and conflict. The concept of development has been increasingly questioned, while the equally elusive concept of peace (beyond the conventional meaning of an end to a war) is being subsumed under a broader concept of security. Two decades ago this link was emphasized in the statement by Willy Brandt that development policy, then primarily focusing on international redistribution in a context of ‘common security‘, was bound to become the peace policy of the future (Brandt Commission, 1980). Without peace, there could be no development and without development, peace was not sustainable. This can be seen as the ‘classical view’ of the problem; with the remedy to be found in ‘peace intensive’ rather than ‘conflict intensive’ patterns of development (Hettne, 1983). At a time when development was still a national issue, the question was a matter of choosing an appropriate national development strategy. Today the certainties surrounding such statements are breaking up; not beause they are inherently wrong, but because they increasingly refer to conditions that no © Arnold 2001

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Discourses on peace and development

longer exist. Reality has become more complex. In the era of globalization, the relationship between development and peace, or security, must be reconsidered. Conflict theory is now preoccupied with ‘new wars’ (Kaldor, 1999), while development theory has become trapped in an ‘impasse’ (Schuurman, 1993, 2000), or is even considered irrelevant in a ‘postdevelopment’ era (Sachs, 1992). This paper deals with the resurgent idea of an assumed indivisibility of development and peace by focusing on a succession of schools of thought. These schools, in turn, form part of specific, historically contextualized development and security discourses. The idea brought forward is that the security component determines the development component. The discourses, in turn, are related to major changes in the global political economy, here termed ‘great transformations’ after Polanyi (1957). By discourse I mean the broader debate, reflecting a particular historical context shaped by an underlying ‘great transformation’. It is delimited through an official, politically recognized agenda, with a generally accepted understanding among theoreticians as well as practioners of what the debate is all about and, thus, what can be left out as being of no relevance. A close relationship between peace and development is more or less taken for granted in the public debate but, owing to the artificial disciplinary divisions in social science, it is obscured or neglected in the academic literature. I will focus on the concept of security rather than peace, since the former, being an ‘essentially contested’ and therefore more theorized concept, reflects the changing concerns regarding war and peace over time (Buzan, 1991). By great transformation I mean a cycle of market expansion and societal response, divided by Polanyi (1957) into a ‘double movement’. I add here the hypothesis that this dialectic change is followed by a ‘great compromise’, valid for a limited period of time. I have suggested earlier (Hettne, 1997) that the era of globalization may be interpreted as a ‘second great transformation’, often interpreted as the ultimate victory of the market principle or, in triumphalist terms, ‘the end of history’. However, we should not expect history to be quite so linear. The second transformation will most probably produce its own countermovements, another ‘second movement’ and, ultimately perhaps, another ‘great compromise’. The content of all this is still rather obscure, but it will most likely shape the future discourse on peace and development. Turning to theorizing on development, a distinction is made between mainstream and counterpoint, the former referring to the dominant view from either a state or a market perspective, the latter to certain oppositional ideas from ‘civil society’, typically arguing for an inherent superiority of small-scale, decentralized, ecologically sound, human and stable models of societal development. Often such ideas are expressed by, or rather on behalf of, those who are being excluded from the development process. Mainstream and counterpoint are (in a dialectical sense) contrasting positions within a particular development discourse. The methodology of historical specification applied here is contrary to ahistorical correlations across a large number of cases taken out of context. The relevance of this approach is particularly clear in the study of war, often mistakenly seen as a homogeneous phenomenon that changes mainly with regard to the technology of warfare: Nobody will deny that war is a social phenomenon, and all must acknowledge that societies are changing and therefore possess a historical nature . . . nevertheless, in comparative


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research on the causes of war, the historicity of war has been widely neglected (Gantzel, 1997: 138–39).

In view of the contested nature of the concepts of development and security, there is also a need for a number of conceptual clarifications and theoretical explorations in order to build some kind of framework that puts new phenomena such as ‘postdevelopment’ and ‘new wars’ in the perspective of an ongoing discourse on how development relates to conflict, and why the questions of the 1950s or 1970s (or, for that matter, the nineteenth century) are not necessarily the most important questions beyond the year 2000. One significant difference is that such concerns are raised now by the ‘security establishment’ rather than by the ‘development establishment’. Development has more explicitly become a security issue. My historical point of departure is the ‘development problem’ in the context of capitalist development and mercantilist nation-building, more particularly the economic and military rivalry among sovereign territorial states in nineteenthcentury Europe. This competitive context shaped the development problem in the First Discourse, development as power balance, which was concerned with the problem of uneven development among sovereign states, and the resultant security implications for individual countries as well as for the international system as a whole. The balance established stimulated both national and international market expansion. This ‘first movement’ covering the second half of the nineteenth century led during the first decades of the twentieth century to a ‘second movement’ of societal response: social movements, economic ideologies of regulation and war. The Second Discourse, the geopolitics of poverty, which began after the second world war, concerned global poverty and ‘underdevelopment’ as a threat to the post war world order in the context of the emerging cold war. The development issue was now subsumed under altogether different security concerns: a struggle for power between the superpowers and, at the same time, a ‘great compromise’ between national regulation and international free trade. None of the theories constituting the Second Discourse proved to be of much instrumental value for development in the poor areas; they were ultimately replaced by orthodox forms of modernization, expressed in the policy of structural adjustment, a purified modernization paradigm of disciplined economic development, seen as completely (and naively) divorced from security concerns. Of course, such concerns reappeared soon enough. The Third Discourse, globalization and chaos, which is the current and future one, is concerned with the problem of development beyond the nation-state system; what could be the meaning of development in a globalized world, where the nation-state is declining, and people have to act in a vacuum, where global inequalities are increasing, where ‘new wars’ multiply and where the poverty problem in the predominant aid philosophy is contained rather than resolved? Development aid has here been reduced to a civil form of intervention in ‘complex humanitarian emergencies’ (i.e., fundamental security crises). Globalization, seen as the first movement of deepened and extended market expansion in a ‘second great transformation’, implies a tendency for the state to become increasingly alienated from civil society. Legitimacy, loyalty, identity, function and even sovereignty are transferred up or down in the system, to political entities other than the state. This could imply some sort of regression into


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pre-Westphalianism – a world with a drastically reduced role for the nation-state as we know it. Another reaction is a reformed neo-Westphalian order, stabilized either by a reconstituted UN system or by a more loosely organized ‘concert’ of dominant powers. A third reaction, is a post-Westphalian order, where the focus of power through a pooling of sovereignty comes to rest on the transnational level, regional or global. These contradictory trends will constitute the ‘second movement’ of the second great transformation – and the new peace and development discourse, perhaps leading to another ‘great compromise’ in the future. But in order to grasp the future, let us first go backwards in history. II

The First Discourse: development as power balance

A convenient starting point for analysing the European development experience, on which development theory was founded, is the emergence of nation-states and the international system constituted by them. The predominant approach to international relations, that is, to consider the international system as a form of ‘anarchy’, took shape during the ‘modern’ phase in European history, which roughly started with the peace of Westphalia (1648) following a 30 years’ war (Tilly, 1975). Thus began the ‘Westphalian era’ of territorial, sovereign states. It was an era of stateformation and mercantilist nation-building, during which ‘development’ became a ‘national interest’, even an imperative for state survival. ‘Peace’ was synonymous with balance of power, focusing on military security at the level of the state. Internal conflicts were related to the process of nation-building, which implied the imposition of a uniform order upon heterogenous local communities. Other internal conflicts, for instance food and tax riots, were related to the deepening of the market system to include all factors of production, thus reducing social security embedded in the ‘traditional’ social structure. The best international order that, according to ‘normal science’, could be hoped for was a transformation from anarchy to anarchical society, meaning that states evolved from a primitive to a more mature security system, in which uncertainty was reduced through diplomatic arrangements of various sorts, a sort of collective learning of civilized interstate behaviour. This was the view expounded by the English School in international relations (Bull, 1977). A more comprehensive process of ‘civilization’ took place within the nation-states (Elias, 1994), which therefore must be considered civilizational achievements, hard to replace but by no means everlasting. The question of whether ‘global society’ can be civilized will be touched upon at the end of this paper. ‘Development’ in an anarchical system implied a strengthening of the material base of the state through industrialization, a process remarkably similar from one country to another, and reinforced by the security interests of the ruling elite. In the mainstream model, there is consequently a potential conflict, primarily between competing states within the interstate system and, secondly, between state power on the one hand and restive, unassimilated social and ethnic groups challenging the legitimacy of the state on the other. The concept of the nation-building project is a key to understanding what mainstream development essentially came to be about. In the nineteenth century there emerged a sharp development differential owing


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to the industrial revolution in England, which made this particular country ‘the workshop of the world’. The ‘development problem’ was then ‘industrialize or perish’, a dilemma most authoritatively formulated by the German economist Friedrich List, who therefore can be called the father of development economics (Senghaas, 1985), in opposition to the British (Ricardian) theory of comparative advantage and free trade. In order to challenge the dominant industrial power, protectionism of and support to ‘infant industries’ was needed, according to the Listian theory of ‘how to catch up with the strong’. The main challengers were France and Germany, and, since Great Britain became a global power in ‘splendid isolation’, these two rivals together created the core of the European security complex, although they actually clashed only once during ‘the long peace’ between the Napoleonic wars and the first world war. The ‘concert of Europe’ was a mechanism through which internal turbulence, typically created by nationalist movements in heterogeneous and weakly integrated states, was kept under control. These movements were particularly threatening to the fragile surviving empires who were trying to become nation states: The Austrian–Hungarian, the Ottoman and the Russian empires, shored up by the fundamentally conservative ‘concert of Europe’. Towards the end of the century the European balance of power, which came to include rivalries in the rest of the world, failed as a security order and paved the way for the great wars of the twentieth century, together constituting another 30-year period of war. They must also be seen in the context of anti-liberal ideologies forming part of the turbulent second movement. One important reason behind the similarity between various national development processes was the military needs-related character of industrialization. In the development of the typically aggressive ‘latecomers’, the military needs were even more pronounced, as was clearly shown in the important role played by the state in the early process of industrialization in those countries that followed the British lead. Military demand for standardized output, caused by the constant warfare and mass armies, hastened the logic of mass production in factories, which revolutionized the economic production system in Europe (Sen, 1984). Since ‘power’ was defined in terms of military capacity, the industrialization process was, for security reasons, repeated from one country to another. Similarities in the pattern of economic development did not reveal inherent tendencies in history towards ‘modernity’ but rather security imperatives for the emerging states, making industrialization necessary simply for military reasons. To this should be added that the ‘expansion of Europe’, which also became an ‘expansion of international society’ (Bull and Watson, 1984), was a competitive process, involving a number of corestates struggling for hegemony, with crucial repercussions in the rest of the world, subsequently divided into colonial empires. In a global perspective, the First Discourse thus coincides with the era of colonialism in Asia and Africa and neocolonialism in Latin America. The rather drawn-out state-building process in Europe was violent; people gradually learned to perceive ‘their’ state as protector and the rest of the world as a threat. Similarly, the Soviet state, ideologically a product of the second movment, was consolidated by war against both internal and external enemies. During the October Revolution Lenin had said: ‘Either perish or overtake and outstrip the advanced capitalist countries’. In the early 1930s Stalin echoed: ‘We are fifty or a


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hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it or they crush us’ (Holloway, 1981: 9). This was the modernization imperative as it appeared to the Russian revolutionaries and it led to an extreme variant of the modern project. The emergence of the Soviet system was the ultimate result, and implied the division of the world into two hostile blocs and two socioeonomic systems. To summarize the argument in development terms: once the ‘first industrial nation’ (Mathias, 1969) was born, it provided a model for the rest of Europe (as well as North America) to imitate. Not to imitate would mean danger to the other nationstate projects. This basic dilemma was, as we shall see, to be repeated more generally in the relationship between the west and the decolonized world. In order to develop and become strong, it was deemed necessary for the ‘new nations’ to imitate the western model – it was conceived as a ‘modernization imperative’ (Nayar, 1972). This difficult task was given to the state. Thus, to the security role of the state was added that of ‘the developer’, later to be followed by the ‘creator of welfare’. There was, however, also a conscious anti-modernist debate on not ‘catching up’ or imitating, since industrialization implied the sacrifice of values inherent in ‘traditional society’, a position taken, for instance, by the Russian ‘narodniks’ or ‘populists’ (Kitching, 1982) and representing the counterpoint in the debate on development. The transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft was taken to be painful for the individual. To Karl Marx alienation was a necessary consequence of the capitalist mode of production. Max Weber pointed out that the irreversible rationalization of modern society made it dull and unbearable because it lost its ‘charm’ (Entzauberung). Anarchists and utopian socialists looked for more or less radical solutions to the anomie created by the new industrial order, but the most articulate position was represented by the narodniks (Walicki, 1969). The political weakness of this position must be seen in relation to the crucial link between industrialization and conventional (military) security in the First Discourse. Problems of inequality and poverty, which today are so clearly associated with the issue of development, did not receive much attention until late in this historical phase, and then only as a consequence of the organized mobilization of dissatisfied groups in Polanyi’s ‘second movement’ of the great transformation (Polanyi, 1957). What was at stake in the First Discourse was, above all, the sovereignty of the state. Development was essentially a question of state survival and military power. The welfare state was a late innovation, constituting the last and ‘highest’ stage of the evolution of nation states. It coincided with the emergence of postcolonial states, and reinforced the interventionist quality of the Second Discourse in the Third World context, to which we now turn. III

The Second Discourse: the geopolitics of poverty

The second peace and development discourse belongs to the bipolar post-second world war order, a global security complex characterized by a competition between two political and socioeconomic systems, as well as a nuclear ‘terror balance’ that ruled out war between the major powers, but imposed a straight-jacket on the regions of the world.


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On the economic front new wars were also avoided through what Ruggie (1998: 72), has termed the ‘compromise of embedded liberalism’, and which I see as an outcome, a dialectical synthesis, of Polanyi’s first and second movements. Most significantly, it was a compromise between economic liberty and free trade outside the nation state and economic regulation for the purpose of full employment and social peace inside. Thus the Second Discourse coincides with what I called (above) a ‘great compromise’ and what both Hobsbawm (1994: 8) and Ruggie (1998: 77) refer to as the Golden Age. As we shall see, the Third Discourse coincides with a second great transformation, a new polarization between economic liberalization and social responsibility, the outcome of which will be the content of another great compromise, if there is one. But now let us return to the security concerns constituting the Second Discourse. In the cold war both superpowers defined security in terms of bloc stability, which drastically limited the principle of sovereignty, particularly for the decolonized poor world or ‘developing countries’, which responded with their littleappreciated Nonaligned Movement. Small and stable countries in the rich world, on the other hand, were allowed to be ‘neutral’. This was a hierarchical world order of centres and peripheries that, together with bipolarity, shaped the general pattern of conflict. This new conflict pattern also shaped the postcolonial world, described by President Truman in ‘point four’ of his often quoted 1949 inauguration speech, as the ‘underdeveloped areas’ of ‘hunger, misery and despair’; constituting a potential threat to what was to be called the ‘free world’ (Rist, 1997: appendix 1). For great powers this was always the main rationale behind development aid, whereas the smaller and more neutral countries could afford to develop a more extravagant Third Worldist position. In the postcolonial era, state-building became a global process, and the nation state a universal political phenomenon. In this particular respect the Second Discourse was a generalization of the First. The anti-systemic guerilla struggle, labelled ‘communist insurgency’ by the West, was the typical war during this period, particularly in Africa and Latin America. But there were also interstate tensions, for instance in East Asia, South Asia and the Middle East. Here we find interstate rivalries and occasional wars that can be related to balance-of-power politics, regional security complexes, reminiscent of the nineteenth-century European states system. These tensions had a clear impact on the development discourse, pushing the countries towards mainstream approaches, focusing on industrialization and marginalizing counterpoint positions in development thinking. There was a peculiar security logic characterizing this development discourse. The cold war system cleaved many natural regions, apart from the obvious case of Europe. This externally imposed division often also provided the stage for domestic political rivalry and conflicts, in many cases manifested in military coups as the normal transfer of power between political factions. At that time political factions often constituted rival nation-building projects, such as the Nkrumah versus Busia factionalism in postcolonial Ghana (Hettne, 1985). It is not so obvious that current domestic conflicts, sometimes referred to as ‘postmodern’, constitute similar rival nation-state projects. In the Second Discourse the poor countries were supposed to become ‘developed’


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in the same way as the rich. Poverty was usually analysed as a dimension of underdevelopment. Therefore, various supportive schemes for the poor were seen as natural components of most development strategies. Elimination of poverty was an inherent part of development as well as its expected end-result. To say that these schemes were lacking in results is not to deny the difference they actually made in a number of countries. The reconstruction of Europe after the second world war provided the model for state-directed modernization of the ‘new nations’. Development economics, inspired by Keynesian theory, was the core of this paradigm, which had its counterpart in the so- called ‘noncapitalist development’ or ‘socialist-oriented’ strategy in the rival bloc. Development was seen in an evolutionary perspective, and the state of underdevelopment defined in terms of observable economic, political, social and cultural differences between rich and poor nations. Development implied the bridging of these gaps by means of an imitative process, in which the less developed countries gradually assumed the qualities of the industrialized nations through an active interventionist state. This was the difficult art of nation-building. The neocolonial implications of this model led to the rise of the dependency paradigm, reflecting the subordinate economic position of the non-European areas in the world system as well as the limited political sovereignty implied in bipolar domination. In this perspective there were, within a given structure, certain positions that regularly and more or less automatically accumulated material and nonmaterial resources, whereas other positions were deprived of these resources. Development for one unit could therefore lead to underdevelopment for another, depending on how the two units were structurally linked. Poverty was seen as a structure, rather than as a particular stage, as in the First Discourse. These rival mainstream approaches were in turn challenged by the ‘counterpoint’, alternative theoretical positions grounded in environmentalism, endogenous and indigenous development, ecodevelopment, ethnodevelopment, human development, feminist theorizing and the like. Its main concern was the many problems created by mainstream development, as well as with those excluded from development. Another Development was defined as need-oriented, endogenous, self-reliant, ecologically sound and based on structural transformation (Nerfin, 1977). The ideas can be summed up in the three principles of territorial development, ecological sustainability and cultural pluralism (Hettne, 1995). They can also generally be described as ‘the voices of the excluded’. The green ideology can be seen as a modern synthesis of neo-populist and neo-anarchist ideas revived in the 1960s and forming part of the New Left movement in the USA and Europe. Later they merged with ecology, peace and feminist movements both in the North and in the South. These ideas bear a certain resemblance to the classical populism and anarchism in urging for community (Gemeinschaft), and in their distaste of industrial civilization (Gesellschaft). The development theories, mainstream or counterpoint, associated with political interventionism were mostly unsuccessful. The exceptions were a handful of ‘developmental states’ more or less closely following the Listian recommendations for catching up (rather inspired by the First Discourse), and supported by the west for geopolitical reasons. Elsewhere state intervention was more politically motivated and legitimized through the ideals of welfarism in the west. Most countries,


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thus, indulged in overspending that soon led them into financial crisis and the economic and political conditionalities ultimately following from this dead end. Forced by these conditionalities, the developing countries gradually began to open up. In the Soviet bloc, ‘perestroika’ was introduced in 1985, enforcing the general process of liberalization. The discourse (according to some even ‘history’) came to a close. Since the theories proved to be of limited instrumental value for development, the failure led to a ‘crisis’ or ‘impasse’ in development theorizing (Shuurman, 1993). Through what was called a ‘counter-revolution’ in development economics that gained momentum in the early 1980s (Toye, 1987), the noninterventionist, antiKeynesian, neo-classical approach, at first associated with ‘Thatcherism’ and ‘Reaganomics’, became predominant, paving the way for structural adjustment programmes (with or without a human face) and privatization, orchestrated by the Bretton Woods institutions. In this way, the domestic bases for continued globalization were created and secured. This marked the end of the great compromise and the Golden Age. The counter-revolution was partly ideology, partly a resurgence of realism, particularly as far as political realities in many Third World countries were concerned. It is undeniable that many politicians and ‘rent-seeking’ bureaucrats were enriching themselves rather than developing their countries, thereby becoming ‘development obstacles’. The structural adjustment programmes were therefore useful, but far from sufficient means to achieve sustained economic growth and in many cases, they were actually a ‘prelude to systemic crisis’ (Duffield, 1998) and brought an end to nation building. In order to succeed with a nation-building project there was a need for an economic surplus, created both internally, through productive use of existing natural resources, and externally, through participation in the world economy and, for the less successful, by qualifying for foreign aid by being poor or/and obedient. A development strategy was thus also a strategy for nation-building. The two could not be separated. In terms of nation-building functions, the surplus can be divided into three funds: a security fund, an investment fund and a welfare fund. The allocation of existing resources between these various funds differed according to the phase of nation-building and the various challenges facing it during a particular phase. Consistent failures in internal and external resource-mobilization, and continuous neglect of any one of these funds, undermined the task of nation building (Hettne, 1984). That is why I call it a ‘project’. Ultimately, it may not succeed, as we have seen from examples during recent times. Development policy thus formed an integral part of the nation-building project in the Second Discourse, which can be seen as a legacy from the First Discourse with its strong focus on the tasks of European state formation. By the creation and productive use of the welfare fund the idea was to achieve an integrated and consolidated nation state, with a sufficient degree of legitimacy. In many Third World countries the movement towards internal coherence was interrupted, and neither the investment nor the welfare funds could be maintained. Instead, these countries became increasingly militarized, that is, the shrinking surplus was spent on ‘security’ for the political elite, paving the way for the collapse of state and civil society – and subsequent chaos.


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IV

The Third Discourse: globalization and chaos

What kind of political landscape lies before us? Is the Westphalian form of state perhaps not the ultimate solution to the Hobbesian problem? Are more and more states becoming ‘black holes’ or ‘pathological anarchies’ (Falk, 1999: 74)? Earlier examples of the breakdown of states are few, and tend rather to confirm the basic perseverance of the Westphalian system. This is no longer the case. Globalization is placing a large number of nation states under a pressure they find hard to withstand (United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, (UNRISD), 1995, 2000). How can this pressure be understood? Globalization is undoubtedly a long-term historical process but, at the same time, it is qualitatively new in the sense that it is tooled by new information and communication technologies and a new organizational logic: networking (Castells, 1996; Holton, 1998). I conceive globalization as a further deepening of the market system, a continuation of the great transformation, the nineteenth-century market expansion, disrupting traditional society and provoking various kinds of political interventionism. This time the process of market expansion, including its disturbing social repercussions, takes place at a truly global scale, a ‘second great transformation’ coinciding with the last three decades of the twentieth century and putting an end to the compromise of ‘embedded liberalism’. This era can thus, in Polanyi’s terms, be seen as a ‘first movement’ of the second transformation, now paving way for another ‘second movement’, that is something corresponding to the fascist, communist and social-democratic interventionist regimes, which were provoked by the first movement in the first great transformation to act in the self-defence of society. Thus, we should not expect a uniform response to globalization but, as history shows, many forms of resistance, good as well as bad (Gills, 2000). Globalism, or ‘global adjustment’, the current hegemonic development paradigm, implies as its ideological core the growth of a world market, increasingly penetrating and dominating the ‘national’ economies. In the process the latter are bound to lose some of their ‘nationness’. Since this process is synonomous with increased efficiency and a higher ‘world product’, globalists consider ‘too much government’ as a systemic fault. Good governance is thus defined as less government. Highly contrasting political forces converge on the same neo-liberal economic policies. It must be emphasized that globalism argues in favour of a particular form of globalization, namely neo-liberal economic globalization. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that, whereas a 5-year plan was a must for a developing country expecting to receive international assistance in the Second Discourse, it would disqualify that country from reveiving aid in the Third. In accepting the neoliberal ideology of globalism the state becomes the disciplining spokesman of external economic forces, rather than the protector of society against these forces, which was the classical task of nation-building, culminating in the modern welfare state. The retreat of the state from these historical functions also implies a changed relationship between the state and civil society (Tester, 1992; Chandhoke, 1995) and, in particular, a tendency for the state to become alienated from civil society. Inclusion as well as exclusion are inherent in the networking process implied in globalization, and benefits occurring somewhere are negatively


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balanced by misery and violence elsewhere. Particularly in the South, there is an ongoing informalization of the economy and a fragmentation of society. The fundamental problem with globalization is selectiveness. Not everybody can join. The exclusivist implications lead to ‘politics of identity’, as loyalties are being transferred from civil society to ‘primary groups’ (defined as the smallest ‘we-group’ in a particular social context), competing for scarce resources. Development, as a crucial part of modernity, was traditionally seen as a rational progressive process organized by the state. The idea that the world is instead moving into global chaos (Sadowski, 1998) has been forcefully presented by a school of thought represented by Robert Kaplan (1994) and Samuel Huntington (1993). Others apply a theory of chaos borrowed from science, which seems to imply that the social system can be made to move in unforeseeable directions through minor changes occurring anywhere in the system. A related postmodern line of reasoning acknowledges the fact that globalization has undermined the nation-state order, but tries to identify some sort of logic in this seemingly turbulent situation in which domestic chaos can go on for decades, thus no longer being abnormal. The new perspective is aptly formulated by Mark Duffield (1998: 97): The idea of internal or intra-state war is misleading. It is conceptually tied to a traditional and outmoded view of the nation-state. There is a corresponding tendency to regard the present phase of political instability in the South as a temporary aberration. We need to move beyond this perspective if we are to escape its analytical and moral limitations. The idea of post-modern conflict tries to take account of those factors that conventional wisdom finds it difficult to assimilate. That is, the emergence of long-term political projects that no longer need to anchor political authority in conventional territorial, bureaucratic or consent based structures. Yet, at the same time, need to establish international linkages.

The conventional view has it that disintegration of the state implies nondevelopment. On the other hand new, nonstate-centric anthropological or other fieldworkoriented analyses of ‘real’ substantive economies suggest a more complex picture of emerging ‘local’ (or rather ‘glocalized’) economies, delinked from state control, run by a new type of entrepreneur, supported by private military protection and drawing on international connections (cf. Chabal and Daloz, 1999). All this is possible since the state is becoming unable to legally define and protect various assets and resources situated within the ‘national’ territory (Duffield, 1998). The ‘political economy of criminalization’ can be studied in many parts of Africa, in Pakistan, in Cambodia, in former Yugoslavia, in the post-Soviet area – and elsewhere. The phenomenon is not general, however. What needs to be explained is why it happens in one particular case (for example, Sierra Leone),and not another (for instance, Ghana). The turbulence following from globalization gives rise to different forms of state: fundamentalist, ethnocratic, war lord, militarized, microstate. The emphasis on contextualization underlines not only historical but also geographical differences. Each region, in fact, deserves its own framework. The crisis for the African nation state would perhaps have occurred without the impact of globalization, simply owing to inherent difficulties in the nation-building project but, when it happens, it happens in a context of ideological globalism, firmly pushing for minimal government. The poor who do not dominate the state, or the not so


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poor who face the end of patronage, rely on collective identities that not only enhance solidarity within the group, but can create hatred towards ousiders. Those who cannot control the state may turn to ‘war lord politics’ (Reno, 1998). There are also ordinary state actors involved in the new business. As the case of Sierra Leone shows (Reno, 1995), there is sometimes little difference between the state and the new militarized entrepreneurs. In contrast to the point made above regarding the Second Discourse, the rival political projects are no longer necessarily nation-state projects. In the case of Liberia one of the most successful new entrepreneurs ended up as elected president. As (or if) a power-sharing agreement is being achieved in Sierra Leone, robbers and murderers become recognized rulers. It is interesting to note that the new entrepreneurs rationalize their behaviour in accordance with the hegemonic neo-liberal ideology. Neo-liberalism and warlordism seem to travel well together. Elsewhere one can still discern a difference between the conventional nation-state strategy of maintaining sovereign rule over the national territory and local strategies of reserving local assets for local entrepreneurs disregarding claims from the official, but no longer de facto existing, nation state. Thus the description of such situations as state disintegration, ‘black holes’ and ‘failed states’ is somewhat simplified. It is not the state that disappears. It is everything else that changes. Even if ‘new wars’ are usually defined as ‘internal’, the new situation is actually characterized by the erosion of the external–internal distinction. As a state is dissolved, it can no longer be territorially defined, and occasionally neighbouring states are drawn into clashes among themselves, underlining the increasingly irrelevant distinction between ‘internal‘ and ‘external’. The phenomenon is obviously on the increase and may, as noted, not only be a simple passing crisis for the state, but a ‘durable disorder’ or, in metaphorical terms, ‘a new medievalism’ (Cerny, 1998). This can be described as some sort of regression into pre-Westphalianism – a world with a drastically reduced role for the nation state as we know it. The overall significance of this route is a downward (from the state) movement of authority to subnational regions, localities and social groups, while supranational forms of governance remain embryonic. In terms of ‘development’, durable disorder means a generalized war-lord economy with limited influence of external forms of authority on the local power-holders and social forces. The mode of development possible in such a context may, at best, be some sort of ‘primitive accumulation’. Obviously, the standard definitions of development from the Second Discourse are hard to apply in this situation. Development aid has, in this context, been reduced to a civil form of humanitarian intervention, and the major reason for intervention is violent conflict; to prevent it, to manage it or to reconstruct societies in postconflict situations. The record so far is not very impressive (Edwards, 1999). Development theory is rather silent in this discourse, which seems to falsify all grand theories about modernization. Development tends to be what development workers do and, what they do, they usually do in crisis situations. Since these situations are globalized, and ‘national development’ has lost much of its meaning, development theory is necessarily merging with international political economy into ‘Global Studies’. Globalization, however, constitutes processes of both inclusion and exclusion. Thus, in development theory the alternative tradition can still be defined as incorporating demands from ‘the excluded’ but, in the era of ‘postdevelopment’


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it is no longer so clear in what they are supposed to be included. An additional alternative development dimension in a context of societal disintegration is the ideal role of remaining ‘islands of civility’ in a sea of civil war (Kaldor, 1999). Thus, development thinking forms part of the ’modern project’, it believes in the rational human being, and remains normative. The neo-liberal ideology of globalism, marking a ‘first movement’, lacks ethical content. This can only be safeguarded by some kind of organized political will manifested in a ’second movement’, a return of ‘the political’, for instance in the form of new social movements and a ‘new multilateralism’ (Cox, 1997, 1999; Gills, 2000). We see the coming of a ‘second movement’, and the return of the ‘political’ in various forms. One possible form is a reformed neo-Westphalian order, stabilized either by a reconstituted UN system (as suggested by the international commission headed by the former Swedish Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson), what can be called assertive multilateralism, or by a more loosely organized ‘concert’ of dominant powers, assuming the privilege of intervention by reference to their shared value system focused on order. This we can call militant plurilateralism. The plurilateral model has been tested earlier in the nineteenth-century system of power balance, the European concert. Both models imply a strong great power influence, in the case of assertive multilateralism not only western powers but all regional great powers, in the case of militant plurilateralism, most realistically the Atlantic alliance. For there to be a significant difference between the two, the UN system has to undergo a major change, including a reasonable representation from various regions of the world. A strengthened Economic and Social Council would take responsibility for global development (International Commission on Global Governance, 1995). The nation states, at least the stronger of them, should remain in control of their development (Hirst and Thompson, 1996). Assertive multilateralism still only exists on paper, since the various reform proposals have met with fatigue and silence. The UN is an extension of the states system. Therefore it declines as this system declines, and may therefore simply be unreformable. On the other hand, the more realistic plurilateralism, particularly in its militant form demonstrated in Kosovo, is hardly consistent with current principles of international law. It could even pave the way for ‘international gangsterism’ on a large scale. It is true that international law is a process, and that the sovereignty argument is contradicted by the human rights argument in favour of humanitarian intervention. The question of who is the legal intervenor, however, remains. NATO’s role in this regard is due to its military strength and high degree of institutionalization, not its legitimacy as world police. Another possible form for the return of ‘the political’ is a post-Westphalian order, where the locus of power moves up to the transnational level. The state can be replaced or complemented by a regionalized order of political blocs, the New Regionalism (Hettne et al., 1999–2001) or by a strengthened global civil society with a new ‘normative architecture’ of world order values. Richard Falk (1999) and Mary Kaldor (1999) call this scenario global cosmopolitanism. Both represent a firmer step towards supranational governance either on a regional or a global basis. Regionalization as a new trend is worldwide albeit modest. In spite of that it provokes nostalgic nationalism and may itself become introverted and ‘fortress-like’. ‘Global cosmopolitanism’


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contains many attractive ideas about the role of community on the global level, but badly needs institutionalization. Humanity does not constitute a political community, much less a political actor. Humanitarian action is carried out in the name of humanity; by militarily co-operating states (sometimes in a formal UN context, sometimes in a plurilateral form); or in various nonmilitary forms by international nongovernmental organizations, representing what is somewhat prematurely referred to as ‘global civil society’. V

Regional multilateralism as the great compromise

The argument put forward so far is that peace and development discourses must be seen in their specific historical contexts, shaped by the dialectics of great transformations with the market mechanism as the primary engine. The current discussion, the Third Discourse, is characterized by neo-liberal economic globalization and by great uncertainties as far as the form and content of the societal response is concerned. The idea of ‘durable disorder’ suggests that we have to learn to live in fragmented societies, characterized by a great deal of turbulence and chaos, with threats coming from the state as well as from hostile primary groups. This postmodern perspective on the security and development problem is somewhat acquiescent and should, to my mind, be complemented with an unashamedly old-fashioned modernist concern for political rationalism, that is a continuation of the ’modern project’ in some form, and towards a new ‘great compromise’. In terms of development theory, systemic poverty should still be systematically attacked and this, again, should be a component of a wider concept of security. Peace and development still go together. In the era of globalization, new larger structures beyond the state should be preferable to political regression into micropolitics. However, a genuine global organization is simply premature. Therefore, a regionalized world order could be a stepping stone and a basis for a new compromise, not only between state and market but also between territory and function. A regionalized world order will initially still be hierarchical; the way to horizontalize it and create ‘regional multilateralism’ is for the peripheral regions to increase their level of ‘regionness’ through security and development regionalisms. The successful implementation of such strategies would horizontalize the vertical, hierarchical order. A more symmetrical world order would necessarily mean a reduced role for the West. A global dialogue presupposes that the parties to it possess a material base, which could only be guaranteed within a regionalist protective framework. A regionalized political world order rather than continued economic globalization could perhaps facilitate a genuinely global cultural pluralism. A region-based intercivilizational dialogue would give ‘history a new start’, that is, a revival of the modern project in a less utopian and less Euro-centric form, contrasting with postmodern relativism, the ‘end of history’ thesis of ultimate western dominance or the pessimistic scenario of a ‘clash of civilizations’. Acknowledgements This paper was produced within the framework of a Swedish International Development Co-operation Agency-supported project on the relationship between


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