Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [43]
A paragraph later the old Prussian explains the evolution toward the modern form of state:
Everywhere the development of the modern state is initiated through the action of the prince. He paves the way for the expropriation of the autonomous and “private” bearers of executive power who stand beside him, of those who in their own right possess the means of administration, warfare, and financial organization, as well as politically usable goods of all sorts. The whole process is a complete parallel to the development of the capitalist enterprise through gradual expropriation of the independent producers. In the end, the modern state controls the total means of political organization, which actually come together under a single head. No single official personally owns the money he pays out, or the buildings, stores, tools, and war machines he controls. In the contemporary “state”—and this is essential for the concept of state—the “separation” of the administrative staff, of the administrative officials, and of the workers from the material means of administrative organization is completed.5
In failed states it is the reverse. Power is repersonalized, the means of administration and repression reprivatized. Executive power—by which Weber means the power of decision making and execution—reverts from a centralized, legitimate institution back out to the institutional periphery, the officialdom that controls the apparatus of state: its offices, documents, dossiers, ministries, arms, checkpoints, and jail cells. These technologies are redeployed in a fragmented and parasitic fashion.
The failed state’s bureaucratic disintegration produces a unique political geography: a patchwork sovereignty akin to the collage of authorities—king, church, cities, lords—that defined medieval Europe. The patchwork today appears to varying degrees, across parts of Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East and Central Asia. Perhaps the capital city is run by the “presidential guard” or some of the paramilitary forces of the interior ministry, itself the property of its head man. That would be a description of Kinshasa as well as Kabul or Baghdad. Outside the capital, a renegade commander’s men control some crucial road to the border; you’ll find this in Congo, Afghanistan, and Colombia. Foreign troops—perhaps wearing blue UN helmets or NATO insignia—secure the areas around their bases, a few government buildings, road links, and airports. Bandits and rebels control the areas beyond. In more distant regions or provinces with resources or lucrative trade links, one might find an armed and autonomous governor who pledges allegiance to whatever central government the great Western powers have propped up but who is, in reality, his own boss running an independent substate. In the port city, it will come as no surprise if the real power is the top import-export merchant, who, by means of his great wealth, bribes the cops and calls the shots with local politicians. These features again describe parts of Iraq, Colombia, Afghanistan, Haiti, Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea-Bissau, the DRC, and Somalia, to name a few.
These are the political patterns of fourteenth-century Europe, the political forms left by the collapse of Rome and in the wake of the plague.6 They are not the patterns of underdevelopment but rather those of social breakdown and political collapse. They are the institutional and political rubble of a past modernity. And increasingly they define the present.
We see here a strange inversion of Walt W. Rostow’s “stage theory” of development and his idea of “economic takeoff.”7 Collapse, like development, is gradual, each stage building sequentially upon the conditions created by the previous stages. Like development, it can become a self-reinforcing process. The slide toward entropy and chaos is like the virtuous cycle of modernization and industrialization imagined by the West’s postwar planners—but in violent reverse.
States, War‚ Crime
If we read Weber in reverse, we would do well to consult Charles Tilly’s classic