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By Root 1377 0

frontiers of the catastrophic convergence, the state in its coherent modern form has collapsed but leaves behind many of its bureaucratic components: its uniforms, insignia, paperwork, ministries and officialdom, like the hungry clerk in Kisangani. Only now, these forces take on a strange phantom life, akin to the severed limbs of a spider, each of which keeps twitching and struggling as if the organism were still whole. The police in the Congo demand permissions, travel passes, registrations, and receipts as if they were the agents of some great, centralized despotic state. But in reality, there are no dossiers, no database, and no real oversight or project of extending sovereignty. There is not even sufficient electricity or paper.

Amidst this political rubble sprout superstition, ethnic hatred, tribalism, millenarian faiths, and violent instability. Entire national economies fall into the hands of organized crime. Conflict resources—like diamonds, timber, ore, and drugs—are the main products of these battered places. Foreign Policy magazine and The Fund for Peace maintain an index of failed states that uses thirteen criteria to determine a state’s relative failure. They look at mounting demographic pressure, massive population movements, legacies of vengeance, chronic and sustained migration, uneven economic development and inequality, sudden economic downturns, corruption, criminalization of the state, deterioration of public services, arbitrary use of state violence and human rights violations, the relative autonomy of the security forces, factionalism among state elites, and finally, external intervention by other states or parastate forces. It is a descriptive collection of indices that is also explanatory.2

Development in Reverse

To travel in failing states, the front lines of climate change, has a hallucinogenic quality, as if one were passing through, in reverse, the arguments made by Max Weber in his famous lecture “Politics As a Vocation.” In that essay Weber defines the state as “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”3 A modern state is defined by that and other features, crucial among them the depersonalization of politics. In the modern state, the head of state does not own the government, its armies, offices, equipment, revenue, and personnel. In the modern state the politicians and the administrators are legally separated from the means of administration and the real and implied repression they depend on. And they cannot, or should not, use these means of administration for personal profit. This depersonalization and legal rationalization of political power and administration gives a modern state legitimacy.

For Weber, political domination has three forms of legitimation: traditional domination rests on inherited patterns of age-old obedience; charismatic domination relies on the power, gifts, and personality of a specific leader; legal domination rests on “the belief in the validity of legal statute and functional ‘competence’ based on rationally created rules. . . . This is domination as exercised by the modern ‘servant of the state,’” and thus by the modern state itself.4

Thus, the crucial factor in modern states is that the “means of administration” are not private property. And it is the reversal of this—the reprivatization of the state and the repersonalization of politics and the privatization of war—that marks the start of state failure. Consider again the operative passages in Weber: “All states may be classified according to whether they rest on the principle that the staff of men themselves own the administrative means, or whether the staff is ‘separated’ from these means of administration. . . . The question is whether or not the power-holder himself directs and organizes the administration while delegating executive power to personal servants, hired officials, or personal favorites and confidants, who are non-owners, i.e. who do not use the material means of administration in their own right but