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From nation-building to state-building: Thegeopolitics of development, the nation-statesystem and the changing global orderMark T. Berger Visiting ProfessorPublished online: 08 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Mark T. Berger Visiting Professor (2006) From nation-building to state-building: Thegeopolitics of development, the nation-state system and the changing global order, Third World Quarterly, 27:1,5-25, DOI: 10.1080/01436590500368719

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From Nation-Building toState-Building: the geopolitics ofdevelopment, the nation-state systemand the changing global order

MARK T BERGER

ABSTRACT This introductory article emphasises the need to put the contemporarynation-building (state-building) effort in post-Saddam Iraq and elsewhere inhistorical perspective.With the resurgence of a powerful international discourse onnation-building that draws very selectively on the ostensible lessons of earliernation-building successes and failures since 1945 (in fact the term nation-buildingis increasingly being substituted for the less problematic concept of state-building),it is more important than ever to set the idea and practice of nation-building in thecontext of decolonisation, the universalisation of the nation-state system, thegeopolitics of the rise and fall of the ColdWar and the transformation of the globalpolitical economy between the 1950s and the 1990s. In contrast to a growingnumber of quantitative and technocratic studies of nation-building and politicalinstability, the article emphasises the profound need for broad qualitative analysisthat historicises and de-routinises nation-building and the international system ofnation-states in order to facilitate better and more critical engagement withcontemporary nation-building and the wider crisis of the nation-state system of theearly 21st century.

Against the backdrop of unparalleled US global power in the post-cold war andpost-9/11 era, of rising levels of inequality within, and the growing crisis of, theglobalizingworld economy andof the deepening crisis of the nation-state systemcentred on the United Nations, ‘nation-building’ has taken on renewedsalience.1 Nevertheless, the long shadow of Washington’s failure in the 1960sto turn South Vietnam into a stable and legitimate capitalist nation-statecontinues to loom over US-led nation-building efforts specifically, and USforeign policy and international politics in the early 21st century moregenerally.2 In the 1970s and 1980s Washington explicitly sought to avoid thenation-building of an earlier era (particularly the use of large numbers of UStroops). In fact, the term itself was more or less excised from the NorthAmerican foreign policy lexicon even when indirect, if not direct, US

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Mark T Berger is Visiting Professor of International History in the Department of History, University of

British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. Email: mt.berger@unsw.edu.au.

Third World Quarterly, Vol. 27, No. 1, pp 5 – 25, 2006

ISSN 0143-6597 print/ISSN 1360-2241 online/06/010005–21 � 2006 Third World Quarterly

DOI: 10.1080/01436590500368719 5

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intervention in nation-states such as El Salvador in the 1980s bore most of thehallmarks, for better and for worse, of the nation-building of the Vietnam era.3

In the post-cold war and particularly the post-9/11 era the term has beenreinstated, albeit reluctantly, and in the past few years a more acceptablesubstitute (state-building) has been increasingly relied upon.4 For example,on 25 September 2001 President George W Bush reassured the US public thatthe new ‘war on terror’ would not involve nation-building in Afghanistan.However, by early 2002 Washington was not only engaged in nation-buildingin Afghanistan, but the Pentagon had begun planning the military invasionof Iraq and the State Department had begun developing plans (officiallyknown as the ‘Future of Iraq Project’) for post-war nation-building there(plans, however, that the Pentagon ignored after the fall of Baghdad).5

Nation-building (or state-building) is being defined here as an externallydriven, or facilitated, attempt to form or consolidate a stable, and sometimesdemocratic, government over an internationally recognised national territoryagainst the backdrop of the establishment and consolidation of the UN andthe universalisation of a system of sovereign nation-states.6 Nation-buildingand state-building can encompass formal military occupation, counter-insurgency, peacekeeping, national reconstruction, foreign aid and the use ofstabilisation forces under the auspices of the USA, Britain, France, NATO,the UN or another international or regional organisation.7

The 1990s saw a dramatic expansion of UN-sponsored peace keeping andnation-building, but the ouster of Saddam Hussein (1979 – 2003), and thesubsequent occupation of Iraq, were notable initially for the complete absenceof the United Nations, while its subsequent role has been relatively marginal.The initial US intervention in Iraq was organised around a ‘coalition of thewilling’ and had no formal UN involvement. As is well known, this flowedfrom the fact that, while the UN played a long-standing role in weaponsinspection in, and the maintenance of sanctions on, Iraq, the US-ledoverthrow of the regime in Baghdad had been preceded by increasinglyantagonistic relations between the USA and the UN, particularly keymembers of the Security Council, over how to deal with Baghdad. The USAeventually decided to embark on the invasion and subsequent nation-buildingeffort in Iraq without the authorisation of the UN Security Council.This special issue seeks to put the contemporary nation-building, or state-

building, effort in post-Saddam Iraq and elsewhere in historical perspective.To this end the articles collected here focus on the history of nation-buildingduring decolonisation and the Cold War (and earlier in the case of the Britishin Iraq in the 1920s) and on the more recent post-cold war and post-9/11pursuit of nation-building in what have become known as ‘collapsed’,‘collapsing’, ‘failed’ or ‘failing’ states. While many of the articles in this issuefocus on the US role in nation-building historically and currently, some of thecontributions also discuss the role of other foreign powers where applicable,and, of course, of the UN. Overall the articles reflect an effort to link the studyof US diplomatic history and international history more generally to the studyof economic development, geopolitics, international relations and interna-tional political economy in the erstwhile Third World. Focusing on both

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historical and contemporary examples they explore a number of importantthemes that relate to ‘successful’ and ‘unsuccessful’ nation-building effortsfrom South Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s to East Timor, Afghanistan andIraq in the 21st century.This introductory article begins by discussing a range of contemporary

theories about the US-centred post-cold war order, nation-building and state-building. The latter part of the introduction attempt to locate the overalldynamics and geopolitical economy of nation-building in the context ofdecolonisation, the universalisation of the nation-state system, the rise and fallof the Cold War and the transformation of the global political economybetween the 1950s and the 1990s. The key point here is that it is moreimportant than ever to set the idea and practice of nation-building in thecontext of the world-historical shift from exhausted colonialism anddecolonisation to exhausted internationalism and globalisation, globalchanges which have been central to the universalisation and transformationof the nation-state system over the past 50 years or so. In contrast to a growingnumber of quantitative and technocratic studies of state-building and politicalinstability, which will be discussed below, the introduction to this special issueand the contributions that follow emphasise the profound need for a broadqualitative analysis that historicises and de-routinises nation-building and theinternational system of nation-states in order to facilitate better and morecritical engagement with contemporary nation-building initiatives.The most obvious contemporary example of this problem (an example that

is discussed in some detail by Toby Dodge in the last article in this issue) isthe way in which the US occupation of Iraq after 20 March 2003 failed toconfront the complex legacy of British-led nation-building efforts in the1920s, which was succeeded by years of brutal and increasingly narrowlybased authoritarianism in which ostensibly national institutions becameoverlaid by patrimonial lines of control.8 The US overthrow of SaddamHussein has come at a time not only when the nation-state of Iraq is in crisis(arguably it has been in crisis since its creation in 1920), but when the widerUN-centred nation-state system itself has entered a prolonged crisis. This hastaken place against the backdrop of the end of the Cold War, the uneven andincomplete transition to globalisation, and the emergence in geopoliticalterms of an ostensibly unipolar world centred on US economic and politicalprimacy and bolstered by overwhelming US military power.

‘Democratic imperialism’: geopolitics and ‘America’s mission’

in the post-cold war era

In the wake of 11 September Sebastian Mallaby made an explicit call for theUSA to embrace ‘imperialism’. In the pages of the prestigious journal,Foreign Affairs, he lamented the fact that ‘after more than two millennia ofempire, orderly societies now refuse to impose their own institutions ondisorderly ones’. In his view, however, ‘a new imperial moment has arrived,and by virtue of its power America is bound to play the leading role’.According to Mallaby, modern and civil institutions are never going to

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develop in a distressingly high numbers of ‘failed states’—no matter howmuch foreign aid is poured in—and as a result they are all potential sourcesof world disorder. He emphasised that international institutions, such as theUN, have also failed and it is now the duty and burden of America to makethe world safe for civilisation. He prescribed a renewed effort by the USA tobring about greater global stability and reshape the world in its own imagevia a process that would include the establishment of new internationalinstitutions that would be focused explicitly on nation-building.9

Of course, Mallaby was not the first to emphasise the apparently growingchaos of the post-cold war era. Well before al-Qaeda’s suicide bombers flewhijacked passenger planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagonvarious commentators had warned that the end of the Cold War was usheringin a new era of conflict and disorder.10 Nor wasMallaby the first to suggest theneed for some form of US-led imperial project following the end of the ColdWar.11 But, since 9/11, questions of international security, nation-buildingand Washington’s imperial mission have taken on a new significance. Forexample, in 2002 the self-described neoconservative Max Boot (of the WallStreet Journal) produced a book-length study of US involvement in ‘smallwars’ since the late 18th century, concluding that the USA should embrace thesmall wars of the 21st century in an effort to expand ‘the empire of liberty’.12

In a similar vein the prominent historian Niall Ferguson asked rhetoricallywhether ‘the leaders of the one state with the economic resources to make theworld a better place have the guts to do it?’. Writing in the period between 11September 2001 and the start of US operations in Afghanistan, he concludedthat ‘we shall soon see’.13 In his most recent book Ferguson again suggeststhat the USA take up the imperial burden; however, he also expresses seriousdoubts about the country’s ability to do so, focusing particularly on what heregards as a lack of political will and social and cultural commitment tonation-building within a wider US imperial framework. He also calls intodoubt the ability of the USA to meet the financial costs of a global imperiumin a world that Ferguson represents as increasingly anarchic.14 Eliot A Cohenfollows a similar line of reasoning: although, he says, ‘dour white men may nolonger raise flags and color overseas possessions in red on their maps . . . thathardly changes the reality of hierarchy and subordination in internationalpolitics’; a world without the USA at its centre ‘is too horrifying tocontemplate’. In his view the ‘real alternatives’ are ‘US hegemony exercisedprudently or foolishly, consistently or fecklessly, safely or dangerously—andfor this, US leaders must look back’ to earlier empires ‘to school themselves inthe wisdom that will make such statesmanship possible’.15

From a somewhat different angle, Robert Cooper, a one-time adviser toUK Prime Minister Tony Blair, has also sought to make the case for the ‘newimperialism’. Cooper, who distinguishes between, pre-modern (contemporaryfailed states) and modern states (which remain animated by a realistcalculus), goes on to argue that it is the post-modern states (such as the UKand the other members of the European Union, along with Canada andJapan, but significantly not the USA), which ‘no longer think of securityprimarily in terms of conquest’ and therefore are the most well-positioned to

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civilise the pre-modern states.16 While Cooper, for slightly different reasonsthan Ferguson, clearly has his doubts about the role of the USA in the ‘newliberal imperialism’, it is clear that for a large number of journalists,academics and policy makers 9/11 drew attention to the need for the USA toassume the mantle of a modern imperial power and develop the new orrevised institutions and processes required for it to play a central and globalrole in nation-building in an increasingly unstable world.However, some of these observers also expressed concerns (comparable to

Cooper’s) that in the post-cold war and post-9/11 order the USA was placingtoo much emphasis on the role of the military in foreign policy generally andin nation-building more specifically. In her book The Mission: Waging Warand Keeping Peace With America’s Military, Dana Priest observed that in theyears before 9/11 Washington grew ‘increasingly dependent on its military tocarry out its foreign affairs’. Over time the military ‘filled a vacuum left by anindecisive White House, an atrophied State Department, and a distractedCongress’. Following 9/11 ‘the trend accelerated dramatically’ and ‘without adoubt, US-sponsored political reform abroad is being eclipsed by newmilitary pacts focusing on anti-terrorism and intelligence-sharing’. For herthis is a major shortcoming of US foreign policy and she lamented that, after‘twelve years of reluctant nation-building’ in the post-cold war era,Washington had unfortunately still not ‘spawned an effective civilian corpsof aid workers, agronomists, teachers, engineers—a real peace corps—to takecharge of postwar reconstruction in Afghanistan or anywhere else’.17

Meanwhile, a 2003 RAND report, which also used West Germany andJapan as its benchmark cases, observed that following ‘major investments inthe combat efficiency of its forces’ during the 1990s, the USA had seen a‘dramatic improvement in warfighting’ between Operation Desert Storm(1990 – 91) and Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003). However, the report, whichwas published in the wake of a conference on ‘nation-building and Iraq’ on6 – 7 May 2003, also observes that there ‘has been no comparable increase inthe capacity of US armed forces or of US civilian agencies’ to effectively carryout post-combat stabilisation and reconstruction. The report notes that therewas ‘some limited advance’ in the overall management of ‘each major mission’in the 1990s, but since 2000 ‘this modestly improved learning curve has notbeen sustained’. The RANDdocument concludes, however, that ‘it now seemsclear that nation-building is the inescapable responsibility of the world’s onlysuperpower’ and that ‘once that recognition is more widely accepted, there ismuch the United States can do to better prepare itself to lead such missions’.18

By far the most elaborate effort to theorise the link between security andnation-building and to make the case for a sustained US effort at nation-building in the failed and failing states of the world in the name of advancingand securing globalisation and US hegemony is outlined in Thomas PMBarnett’s The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-FirstCentury, published to much acclaim in 2004.19 Barnett’s book is far moreimportant than the anodyne and profoundly ahistorical effort to talk aboutnation-building and global governance in the 21st century offered by FrancisFukuyama.20 Barnett, a one-time employee of the Pentagon and a professor

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at the US Naval War College, argues that ‘historical analogies to previousempires are not only useless, but they point us in the wrong direction’.21

More broadly Barnett effectively proposes that the US military and otherbranches of the US government take on the role of expanding and sustainingthe liberal international order to virtually every corner of the globe in thename of security and development. Barnett’s approach, while advocatingincreased and sustained US intervention, outlines a profound connectionbetween security and development.However, the most influential case for the USA to take a far more assertive

(if not imperial) role in the post-cold war and post-9/11 world came, andcontinues to come, of course, from the neoconservatives inside and outsidethe Bush administration. Their approach to nation-building involves a muchgreater emphasis on security than development and a much narrowerconception than Barnett’s of what are strategically important states orregions.22 The influence of this group of advisers and government officials(the neoconservatives are described as ‘democratic imperialists’ by Ivo HDaalder and James M Lindsay) should not be exaggerated. Their level ofinfluence is currently very fluid and will clearly be decided in both the sandsof the Middle East and the corridors of power in Washington as the strugglein Iraq unfolds over the next decade or more. (At this stage I think it is safe tosuggest that we are at the ‘end of the beginning’ rather than at the ‘beginningof the end’.) Since 9/11, and regardless of the day-to-day vicissitudes of thewar in Iraq and elsewhere, it is clear that elements of the overallneoconservative approach to foreign policy have been effectively incorpo-rated into the Bush administration’s foreign policy, particularly where theycomplement the president’s own outlook, or that of his closest senior aideswho are not themselves neoconservatives.23

As Daalder and Lindsay emphasise, the neoconservatives are fiercelycommitted to the realist assumptions that the world is inherently unstableand anarchic; that self-interested states remain the key actors in the world;that power, particularly military power, is still the primary arbiter ofinternational relations; and that multilateralism and/or liberal internation-alism may be useful, but are not necessarily relevant to the national interestof the USA. However, they also depart dramatically from conventionalrealist foreign policy because of their profound commitment to the idea thatthe USA is unique, historically and currently, among the Great Powers. Theyassume that, when Washington pursues an expansionist strategy (whether inthe military, political or economic spheres), the transcendent character of itsoverall geopolitical vision means that its use of its power is only detrimentalto those people who oppose ‘the spread of liberty and free markets’.24

Central to the wider call for the USA to take up the imperial mantle and/orembrace the nation-building mission is the assumption that the USA (andthose allies, and/or the EU and the UN if they accept US leadership), need,more than ever, to universalise economic and political liberalism—for boththe USA’s own security and for the benefits that will flow to the rest of theworld. For the Bush administration ‘freedom’ is the term most widely used todescribe what the USA has to offer the world. Furthermore, on this reading

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the instability and conflict around the world are regularly assumed to flowfrom the cultural, ethnic or religious shortcomings and/or civilisationalrigidities of those on the receiving end of the US-led pursuit of global liberalmodernity. In the popular rendition conflict and instability in the post-coldwar era are generally represented as flowing from primordial animosities andlong-standing and irrational ethnic or religious hatreds. For example, at thebeginning of the 1990s George Bush senior publicly characterised the conflictin the Balkans as grounded in ‘age-old animosities’, while his successor, BillClinton, lamented that the passing of the Cold War had ‘lifted the lid from acauldron of long-simmering hatreds’ ensuring that the ‘entire global terrain isbloody with such conflicts’.25

A particularly influential observer and policy intellectual whose work hashelped to reinforce a primordial reading of post-cold war instability is SamuelHuntington. For Huntington, as for other traditional realists, and in contrastto the neoconservatives, Washington needs to remain extremely wary of grandimperial and nation-building missions.26 In Huntington’s view Washingtonshould focus on its vital national interests and recognise the seriousconstraints on trying to create a global order in its own image.27 In a 1993article in Foreign Affairs he argued that international politics was increasinglyconverging on the often violent reaction of ‘non-Western civilizations toWestern power and values’.28 These concerns were outlined in greater detail inThe Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, whichcontributed to the culturally reductionist views which were steadily gaininginfluence in the post-cold war era.29 Huntington has recently followed up hisearlier prognostications with a book that is a corollary to The Clash ofCivilizations, in which he warns his fellow citizens that globalisation andimmigration represent serious threats to America’s ‘traditional’ values.30

‘The coming anarchy’: state collapse and ‘systems of violence’

in the post-cold war era

In the wake of 11 September the idea that civilisational, cultural and/orreligious conflict is the key to international relations has enjoyed even greatercurrency. Despite the major difficulties involved in interpreting the suicidebombings of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and their aftermathin terms of a civilisational struggle between a monolithic Islam and ahomogeneous West (the interpretation those who engineered the terroristbombings are trying to promote), the influential journalist Robert Kaplanhas argued that the 9/11 attacks ‘highlight the tragic relevance not just ofHuntington’s ideas about a clash of civilizations but of his entire life’swork’.31 Throughout the 1990s, in fact, Kaplan articulated an influentialrealist and culturally reductionist approach to post-cold war questions ofinternational security and nation-building that often paralleled the approachoutlined by Huntington.32 For example, in his book, The Coming Anarchy,the overall argument of which was foreshadowed in a February 1994 articlein The Atlantic Monthly entitled ‘The coming anarchy: how scarcity, crime,overpopulation, tribalism, and disease are rapidly destroying the social fabric

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of our planet’, Kaplan predicted that the world would increasingly be dividedbetween societies that are wealthy, healthy and technologically sophisticatedand societies in which the vast majority are condemned to a life that is ‘poor,nasty, brutish and short’. For Kaplan the inhabitants of these latter polities,as a result of cultural or ethnic shortcomings, have been unable to mastertheir environment and, as a result, these failed states have been torn apart bya violent and protracted battle for control of limited resources.33

The influence and general resonance of Kaplan’s approach, or similarapproaches, should not be underestimated.34 The Coming Anarchy has beentranslated into over a dozen languages and reprinted constantly since itspublication in 2000. Following the initial publication in 1994 of hiseponymous article the US government faxed a copy to every US embassyand consulate in the world.35 Meanwhile, top officials at the UN called aconfidential meeting to discuss the implications of Kaplan’s vision for thefuture.36 However, the wider debate to which The Coming Anarchy wasconnected focused less on the ostensibly primordial roots of post-cold warcivil conflict and more on whether the instability and violence in collapsing orcollapsed nation-states was economically based. The question that pre-occupied academics and nation builders in particular was whether thebreakdown and collapse of nation-states was/is driven by a scarcity ofnatural resources, as Kaplan argued, or was/is driven by an abundance ofresources.37 Kaplan had followed the lead of Thomas Fraser Homer-Dixon,who argued that resource scarcity drives elites to ‘capture’ natural resources,alienating powerless groups who respond by taking up arms.38 Otherobservers, while still placing resources at the centre of their explanation forcivil conflict, argue that it is the abundance, not the shortage, of naturalresources that is the key to violent conflict and state collapse.39 Furthermore,according to this latter view, the civil conflict for some participants may be ofmore economic benefit than peace. For example, David Keen has arguedthat: ‘there may be more to war than winning’.40 More recently, in hisdetailed study of Colombia, Nazih Richani has noted that, under certainidentifiable conditions, ‘war systems’, or ‘systems of violence’, emerge thatare self-perpetuating.41

The view that civil wars and endemic political violence flow primarily fromthe pursuit of economic gain by the key combatants was given its most wellknown, but also its most reductive, articulation in a series of studies supportedby the World Bank and carried out by Paul Collier, Anke Hoeffler and anumber of other collaborators. As the result of a broad statistical analysis ofvirtually all civil wars since the mid-1960s, they concluded that variables suchas regime type, economic mismanagement, political rights and levels of ethnichomogeneity or heterogeneity were statistically irrelevant to explaining thecauses of civil wars. Their study concluded that economic factors were thecrucial explanatory variable. In their analysis low economic growth rates andlow incomes predisposed nation-states to civil war, but there was, it wasargued, no strong connection between high levels of social inequality and civilconflict. They also emphasised that polities that were highly dependent on theexport of primary commodities and were populated by large numbers of

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young men, with limited or no education, were also highly susceptible to civilconflict and political instability. Their overall conclusions were that politicalgrievances were not directly connected to the outbreak of civil wars, whilenation-states that contained significant cohorts of poorly educated youths andreadily accessible natural resources were particularly susceptible to civilconflict and the emergence of rebels driven primarily by powerful economicincentives (‘greed’) to use violence to acquire wealth.42

In the wake of considerable debate about what are highly stylisedconclusions explaining political instability and state collapse primarily interms of actors motivated by ‘greed’ rather than legitimate political‘grievances’, Collier and his collaborators now emphasise the way in whichthings such as access to finances (particularly natural resources) and regionaland global diaspora networks, along with a significant number of uneducatedyouths, and opportunities for organised violence are all contributing factorsin civil conflicts that also flow from other motivating factors.43 While themodification of the ‘greed and grievance’ argument satisfied some of itscritics, its reliance on quantitative analysis and its economic determinismcontinue to be challenged (both directly and indirectly) by observers whoseek to situate their analysis of civil conflict, national instability and post-conflict transitions within an historical and politico-economic context.44

Unlike Collier and other proponents of the ‘greed and grievance’ duality whosupport their position with reference to quantitative research, these writersrely more on the qualitative research of historians and political economists. Aparticularly self-conscious effort to go ‘beyond greed and grievance’ has beenmapped out by Karen Ballentine and Jake Sherman.45 At the outset theyemphasise that, while there is considerable agreement that the dynamics ofconflict can only be understood with reference to economic factors, whatremains to be clarified is why, when and how (much) economics matters?Furthermore the highly normative character of the terms ‘greed’ and‘grievance’ has combined with their terminological imprecision to generateconsiderable disagreement about their usage. Ballentine and Shermanconclude that the ‘greed theory of civil war’ (grounded as it is in statistics)generates propositions about the role of economic factors (in relation to‘motive’ or ‘opportunity’) that ‘are probabilistic’ assessments of the risk ofconflict. But, most importantly, what Collier’s approach is not is an actualdescription of the dynamics of civil conflict in ‘specific real-world instances’.As a result, ascertaining the role of economics can only be achieved viacomparative examination and descriptive analysis of particular examples ofcivil conflict. For Ballentine and Sherman moving ‘beyond greed andgrievance’ in this fashion is ‘essential’ to any effort to devise policies for theprevention of civil conflicts, to facilitate nation-building and to enhanceinternational security and stability more generally.46

Despite the improvements advocated by Ballentine and Sherman, however,the most influential academic narratives on nation-building and internationalsecurity in the post-cold war era continue to avoid or downplay issues ofhistory, culture and identity, in favour of a quantitative and technocraticapproach. This, in turn, is linked to an even more fundamental problem: the

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dominant theories of nation-building, international security and nationaldevelopment, as they emerged and were revised in the cold war era (and asthey have been further revised in the post-cold war era), routinised, andcontinue to routinise, the nation-state as their key unit, or sub-unit, ofanalysis. The growing array of theories and policy proposals seeking toexplain and facilitate conflict resolution and nation-building continue to beoutlined and/or implemented on the assumption that nation-states are thebasic, even the natural, units of a wider international order. This is furtherunderpinned by the assumption that capitalism, or the currently dominantand highly romanticised neoliberal conception of capitalism, is an equallynatural part of the post-cold war order. Despite both the complex history ofnation-state formation and consolidation following decolonisation and theonset of the Cold War, and the significant changes associated with thereorientation of the global political economy since the 1970s, the routinisa-tion of the nation-state has remained central to the dominant narratives onnation-building and international security at the start of the 21st century.47

By contrast, a more useful approach to conceptualising nation-buildingand promoting economic prosperity, social progress and political stability inthe post-cold war era would start by historicising and de-routinising thenation-state.48 State formation and nation-building need to be set in thecontext of the history of the universalisation of the nation-state system andthe way in which the subsequent spread of globalisation has, in anincreasingly uneven and incomplete fashion, pushed nation-states in manyparts of the world to the limits of their potential as a vehicle for security anddevelopment. This is directly linked to the need to move beyond establishedconceptions of the international, which continue to examine and articulateforeign policy on the assumption that there is a coherent and readilyidentifiable distinction between the internal and the external (the ‘GreatDivide’) in international relations.49 The dramatic reorientation of nation-states and the reconfiguration and/or dilution of national sovereignty havebeen central to the consolidation of the US-led globalisation project.As I have suggested elsewhere, despite the historical specificity of national

trajectories against the backdrop of the transformation of the nation-statesystem and changing capitalist order, two generalised paths can besuggested.50 The first path involves a process of dramatic nationalreorientation or transformation, and even crisis, such as is underway inEurope, North America and some nation-states in Asia and Latin America.51

The second path involves a far more profound crisis of the nation-stateconcerned and reflects the fact that the nation-state system itself is in a periodof profound crisis. For the nation-states on this latter path the 1980s, 1990sand the dawn of the 21st century have not only been characterised bydramatic national economic reorientation and crisis, but also by escalatingpolitical struggles and social dislocation and migration, often but not alwayslinked to questions about the ethnic or religious content and/or territorialboundaries of the nation itself. This is the case for the Balkans, parts of theformer Soviet bloc, not to mention the Middle East, Pakistan and Indonesia.Other countries more obviously included in the category of polities

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undergoing a crisis of the nation-state (or that are already ‘failed states’)might be Burma, Afghanistan or Colombia. Meanwhile, the vast majority ofnational trajectories in Africa starkly reflect the limits on the nation-state’sability to deliver the prosperity and freedom that it was thought to embody inthe heyday of decolonisation. At the same time the fate of a growing numberof nations in Africa and beyond also reflects a process of regional exclusionand economic marginalisation. This has been met by the elaboration ofhumanitarian networks centred on the UN and the World Bank and on arange of government aid organisations and NGOs. These networks aresometimes complemented by ‘humanitarian’ military interventions, some-times under UN auspices and at other times operating under the authority ofa particular national government or group of national governments, or aregional organization.52

From exhausted colonialism to exhausted internationalism:

the nation-state system, the rise and fall of nation-building

and its reconfigured return as state-building

After 1945 the USA increasingly presided over a dramatic internationalmodernisation project and played a key role in the universalisation andconsolidation of the UN-centred nation-state system, with the USSR emergingas its only significant rival.With decolonisation and the ColdWar both theUSAand the USSR departed in important ways from earlier colonial or imperialprojects. Most significantly, in political and administrative terms both the USAand the USSR presided after 1945 over ‘empires’ that were made up of formallyindependent and sovereign nation-states, or of entities that were ascribed somesort of status other than that of ‘colony’. In the wake of theRussianRevolution,the Bolsheviks sought to control the different non-Russian nationalities andcontain nationalisms within the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics bypromoting accepted forms of national identity and nationhood without offeringsubstantive autonomy or independence.53

At the broadest level the USSR before World War II represented a morerigid and more brutal version of the League of Nations, both of which were,in retrospect, transitional institutions in relation to the decline of colonialismand the universalisation of the nation-state system. After World War I theLeague of Nations turned the colonies of Germany and its allies over tothe member-governments that were already established colonial powers. Thevictorious powers were granted the mandates for the administrative controlof, and responsibility for, the former colonies and territories of their rivals,but they were expected to account for their administration of the mandates toa Permanent Mandate Commission (PMC) established by the League. But thePMC was institutionally weak and the mandate system primarily benefited thecolonial powers, most of which were effectively members of the PermanentMandates Commission. For example, although the PMC examined annualreports from the colonial governments on their efforts to ‘increase the well-being of the natives’ in the mandated territories, it had no ability to carry outits own investigations into the situation in the colonies. Despite the League’s

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ostensible commitment to national sovereignty and independence, itsapproach to the mandated territories and colonial possessions generallylegitimated rather than undermined colonialism. As a result of its institu-tional and organisational shortcomings the League of Nations never playedthe role in world politics envisioned for it by US president Woodrow Wilsonand his supporters, while it was certainly never the force for decolonisationand the spread of the nation-state system that some nationalists had hoped.The League had no military force that it could call on, and none of thedisputes that it successfully settled impinged on the interests of the GreatPowers. In those disputes that did involve one or more of the Great Powersthe League proved ineffectual. For example, when the Chinese governmentrequested help from the League following Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in1931 the League failed to prevent the ensuing Sino-Japanese conflict.54 TheLeague’s efficacy was further cast into doubt when the Italian governmentinvaded Ethiopia in 1935 – 36 and Britain and France (key members of theLeague) tried to make a secret deal with Mussolini that would allow Italy toremain in control of some Ethiopian territory, rather than support theLeague’s position on Italy’s aggression.55 The League remained on thesidelines during German and Italian intervention in the Spanish Civil War,and ignored Hitler’s occupation of Czechoslovakia and Mussolini’s invasionof Albania.56

With a dying gasp the League expelled the USSR (following the latter’sinvasion of Finland in December 1939), but it did nothing to prevent theonset of the World War II, after which it was dissolved and replaced by theUN. The UN emerged against the backdrop of the continuing crisis ofcolonialism, the dramatic spread of nationalism and decolonisation in Asiaand Africa and the consolidation of the Cold War. The USA played a keyrole in this process directly, or via its establishment of, and influence over, theUN. The world after 1945 was one in which formally independent andsovereign nation-states increasingly displaced colonial empires as the keyunits of global politics. In the cold war era the relationship between therespective superpowers and their allies was increasingly mediated by systemsof military alliances, regional organisations and new international institu-tions such as the UN. In economic terms, meanwhile, US hegemony in thesecond half of the 20h century can be, and has been, characterised as ‘post-imperial’. This was particularly the case by the 1970s, by which time thenation-state system had been universalised and the overall contours of theUS-led globalisation project were just beginning, at least in retrospect, tobecome apparent. The key point is that, while the empires of the late colonialand pre-World War II era were grounded to a great degree in the regulationand control of colonial markets by the metropolitan powers, in the interestsof corporations and investors based in the colonial metropolis, the economicarrangements that were put in place under US auspices after World War IIpaved the way for large corporations increasingly to transcend dependenceon particular metropolitan nation-states for regulatory and other support.57

This trend became most apparent in the 1980s and 1990s, but it is groundedin the post-1945 settlement that sought to ‘reconcile openness’ with the

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Keynesian orientation of national leaders to ensure national and interna-tional economic stability and full employment.58

Apart from the UN, the IMF and the International Bank for Reconstruc-tion and Development (the World Bank), which had been established on 27December 1945 following a high-level meeting in Bretton Woods, NH in1944, were also central to the generation of the international framework forthe US-led promotion of modernising national – capitalist development inthe cold war era. This was linked to a growing array of initiatives by the late1940s (such as the Marshall Plan—which was seen as being central to thereconstruction of West Germany in particular, and subsequently acted as amodel for nation-building in the 1960s—and the Point IV Program) and1950s under the stewardship of the Truman and Eisenhower administra-tions.59 It was, however, during the administration of John F Kennedy(1961 – 63) and his immediate successor, Lyndon B Johnson (1963 – 68), thatUS-led modernisation and nation-building reached its apex.60

Following the Cuban revolution in 1959 there was a dramatic increase inUS interest in Latin America in the context of a growing concern that theUSSR was gaining ground in the Third World.61 The Kennedy administra-tion placed considerable emphasis on the need for a more ambitious nation-building and counter-insurgency strategy in the Third World. This involvedtaking the initiative in Asia and Latin America, as well as the Middle Eastand Africa, to counter the communist threat via the infusion of increasedlevels of military and economic aid, advice and support. As part of its wideremphasis on foreign aid and national development, the Kennedy adminis-tration formed the Peace Corps on 1 March 1961 and then set up the USAgency for International Development (USAID) in November 1961 to co-ordinate and combine government foreign aid initiatives. Established as asemi-autonomous body operating in the State Department, USAID wasresponsible for disbursing and administering aid around the world. Apartfrom South Vietnam, which was emerging as a major focus of aid, a largepercentage of the aid this new body disbursed went initially to the Alliancefor Progress, which had been set up following a famous speech by Kennedyon 13 March 1961 in which he called for all the people and governments ofthe Western Hemisphere to participate in an ambitious modernising initiativethat he hoped would transform Latin America in a decade and contain thecommunist threat to the region represented by the emergence of statesocialism in Cuba.62

The high modernist vision that was ascendant in post-1945 North Americadistinguished between backward and advanced regions, representing theUSA as the ‘summit of modernity’ with a ‘mission to transform a world eagerto learn the lessons only America could teach’.63 The US-led modernisationproject and its model of national development and nation-building reachedits peak in the 1960s and began to unwind in the 1970s. In the 1960s thepromotion of national development generally and nation-building morespecifically was grounded in state involvement in the market: this rangedfrom dual exchange rates, tariff barriers and the subsidisation of petrol andstaple foods to the attempt to provide education and health care and a range

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of other social services, not to mention land reform and the expansion ofmilitary establishments. All of this increasingly exceeded the administrativeand financial capacity of a majority of nation-states in Asia, the Middle East,Africa, Oceania and Latin America. The results by the 1970s were risinglevels of foreign debt, and bloated and ineffective bureaucracies presided overby often increasingly corrupt elites.64 The limits of US-led modernisation andnation-building were starkly apparent in the rise and fall of South Vietnambetween 1954 and 1975 (an example that is examined in some detail byMichael Latham in his article in this issue). For Eisenhower, and for hisimmediate successor (Kennedy), the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem (1955 – 63)was to be a ‘showcase for democracy’ and the site for a definitive nation-building effort that would make clear the pre-eminence of North Americaninstitutions and values.65

Ultimately Washington spent over $120 billion on the Vietnam Warbetween 1965 and 1973, while the number of US personnel killed totalledmore than 50 000 and the military and civilian casualties amongst theVietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian population numbered in the millions.Throughout the cold war era the contradiction between the USA as arepressive military power and guardian of the interests of capital on the onehand, and a liberal anti-communist defender of freedom and promoter ofostensibly progressive and even democratic forms of nation-building on theother hand, became more pronounced.66

With the end of the Cold War, and contrary to realist and neoconservativeconceptions of the post-cold war unipolar world, US primacy is not just thelatest round in the rise and fall of Great Powers in a world where statesremain the only important actors. The ‘New World Order’, proclaimed byPresident George Bush Senior, on 11 September 1990—exactly 11 yearsbefore Al-Qaeda’s suicide attack on the World Trade Center and thePentagon, and just days before the USA began ‘Operation Desert Storm’ todrive the Iraqi army out of Kuwait—was ‘new’ in important ways that werenot necessarily understood or foreseen by the 41st president of the USA. Ofcourse, the USA still possesses some of the key characteristics thatexemplified Great Power and/or imperial status in an earlier era. Forexample, the dramatic increase in the US defence budget in the wake of 11September, and the subsequent scale and scope of the US-led militaryintervention in Afghanistan and Iraq, make clear that US hegemony, like theinfluence of Great Powers before it, is still ultimately grounded in militarypower.67 Nevertheless, US hegemony, as opposed to US dominance is basedon far more than military power and the US reach has become increasinglydiffuse with the end of the Cold War. The rise of the US-led globalisationproject and the universalisation and transformation of the nation-statesystem represents the appearance of a new system, which retains importantelements of Great Power rivalry, but also contains equally important, evencrucial, new elements, that set US hegemony in the post-cold war era apartfrom the structures and sinews that supported Great Powers in an earlier era.From this perspective (even though Washington’s disregard for the UN

and its invasion of Iraq in early 2003 have weakened Washington’s political

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influence, while the ongoing US economic crisis has tarnished the overalleconomic appeal of the US model) the nation-state system and the globaleconomy continue to be centred on US power. The US trajectory itself isboth a template for and an exemplar of the dramatic reorientation of nation-states and the reconfiguration of national sovereignty (and in effect of theshift from nation-building to state-building). Since the 1980s the USgovernment has increasingly redirected government funds away from socialprogrammes and towards the promotion of economic and geopoliticalinitiatives overseas. In the Bush era the US military budget has now reacheda point where it equals or exceeds virtually all forms of US social spendingcombined.68 The socioeconomic order in North America is one in which largenumbers of people are connected to declining national institutions andeconomic networks at the same time as transnationalised elites and animportant section of the middle class have benefited dramatically from theeconomic boom of the 1990s.69 Linked to this is the growing concentration ofeconomic power in the hands of a small number of large oligopolisticcorporations. Although the focus of the Bush administration after11 September 2001 may have shifted, what has occurred is a reorientation,or a military deepening of, rather than a retreat from, the globalisationproject as such. The increased emphasis on, and the direct use of, militarypower by the USA and its allies in Afghanistan and Iraq has resulted in theeconomic opening of polities that had resisted neoliberal policies, helping todestabilise rather than stabilise these crisis-ridden nation-states.At the same time, with the shift from the US-led modernisation project to

the US-led globalisation project, the deepening of global capitalism has beeneven more geographically uneven than in the 1950s and 1960s, when nation-building and national development strategies were, in theory, more attuned toquestions of redistribution and the need to address the uneven developmentthat took place within nation-states and between them. In much of the worldgovernments and ruling elites now increasingly use the institutions of the stateto advance the process of globalisation (and their own interests) andundermine or roll back whatever institutions, if any, of national developmentwere erected in earlier decades. The rise of the globalisation project hasinvolved the coalescence of regionalised economic systems that provide themain motors of the global economy. These regions are North America,Western Europe and East Asia. Instead of the international economyexpanding in spatial terms, since the 1970s the various financial, trading andproduction networks that connect these economic regions have been gettingdeeper and stronger. The economic elites of these regions can increasingly takeadvantage of the broad range of connections to diversify their investments andbusiness operations within and between these main regions. The rapidmovement of capital also allows for a quick exit by local or transnationalinvestors from those regions, or those parts of regions, where the risks areseen as too great.The process of regional exclusion, however, does not just involve the

economic neglect of a particular region or economies, even though that is akey trend. It also entails the increasing elaboration of humanitarian networks

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and activities by the UN and a range of aid organisations. There are alsoimportant military interventions by outside governments in the marginalisedregions sometimes under UN auspices and at other times operating under theauthority of a particular national government or group of nationalgovernments, or a regional organisation. With the end of the Cold War theUN was presented with an opportunity to revive the major peacekeeping andsecurity activities that many of its early proponents had anticipated. Earlypost-cold war initiatives were thought to augur well for the UN’s new role.The major civil war in El Salvador, which had been fuelled by the Cold War,came to a negotiated end in 1992 under the auspices of the UN. Apart from ElSalvador, the countries in which the UN has provided peacekeepers andelection monitors include Angola, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cambodia, Croatia,East Timor, Macedonia, Mozambique, Rwanda, Somalia and the WesternSahara. East Timor, for example, is seen as a UN success story thus far.70

But the earlier abject failure of the UN in Angola and Somalia and itsmore qualified failure in places such as Cambodia highlight the constraintson the UN’s role in the post-cold war era.71 The prospects for post-TalibanAfghanistan look increasingly bleak (a topic that is explored in some detailby Barnett Rubin in his article, albeit from a perspective that, while notoptimistic, does hold out some hope for the future of the mountainous bufferstate in the latest round of the Great Game).72 The absence of a significantUN role in Iraq, which has all the hallmarks of a nation-building (or state-building) tragedy in the making, highlights another form that constraints onthe UN take, namely the fact that Washington’s view regarding the UN is atpresent ambivalent at best. At the start of the 21st century, and half a centurysince the UN was first established, the organisation’s weak position in thewider post-cold war order centred on the USA highlights the fact that thenation-state system itself is in crisis. At the same time the apparently risinginstability, terrorism and criminality in the marginalised regions and failingnation-states in various parts of the world have precipitated the emergence(even before 11 September 2001) of a renewed emphasis on the connectionbetween security and development, viewing poverty and underdevelopmentas a threat to global order. This shift is embodied in the growing linksbetween strategies of conflict resolution, social reconstruction and foreign aidpolicies. While the USA and other OECD governments have been engaged inthe post-cold war state-building efforts that this reorientation represents, thistask is also being shifted to new or reconfigured networks that combinenational governments, military establishments, myriad private companiesand contractors, and NGOs.73

Conclusion: from nation-building to state-building

This renewed awareness of the links between security and development isreminiscent of, though not the same as, the anti-communist nation-buildingstrategies that rose and fell during the Cold War. In the era of the new, moreprivatised and more decentralised approach to what was once nation-building and is now increasingly known as state-building, the instrumen-

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talities available in theory and in practice are far more limited than they werein the decades immediately after 1945. In the context of the deepening crisisof the UN-centred nation-state system and the wider US-centered post-coldwar and post-9/11 order, this introduction has emphasised that efforts atnation-building and state-building in Iraq and elsewhere are moreconstrained than at any previous point in the history of the post-1945nation-state system and the long and uneven transition from exhaustedcolonialism to what can increasingly be described as exhausted internation-alism. By de-routinising and de-naturalising the history of nation-building inthe context of a critical and qualitative examination of the overall history ofthe universalisation of the nation-state system in the 20th century it becomesclear that the prospects for successful US-led state-building in the MiddleEast and elsewhere are very limited. By shifting the focus from quantitativeapproaches, which either ignore the wider historical context or assume thatthe ‘right’ set of state-building strategies can succeed without reference to thespecificity of the local, regional and global context, the contributions thatfollow look at a range of specific national trajectories and draw attention tothe need for more critical, historical and creative approaches to achievingprosperity and peace in the post-cold war and post-9/11 era.

Notes

I would like to thank Kerstin Calley for her excellent research assistance. I would also like to thank aparticular group of colleagues with whom I have worked, and am continuing to work, on various jointresearch projects that relate to many of the issues canvassed here. In particular, Heloise Weber hasinfluenced my thinking on nation-building and state-building in important ways, as have Jennifer Bair,Phil McMichael, Dieter Plewe, Susanne Soederberg, Marcus Taylor and Martin Weber. This special issue,and earlier ones I have edited, has also been made easier, even fun, by the input, support and patience ofShahid Qadir.1 For example, see a recent book by William W Lewis, the Founding Director of the McKinsey GlobalInstitute. WW Lewis, The Power of Productivity: Wealth, Poverty, and the Threat to Global Stability,Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004. See also J Rapley, Globalization and Inequality:Neoliberalism’s Downward Spiral, Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner, 2004; and Roy Woodbridge, The NextWorld War: Tribes, Cities, Nations and Ecological Decline, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.

2 RA Melanson, American Foreign Policy Since the Vietnam War: The Search for Consensus from Nixonto Clinton, Armonk, NY: ME Sharpe, 2000.

3 WD Stanley, The Protection Racket State: Elite Politics, Military Extortion, and Civil War inEl Salvador, Philadelphia, PA: Temple State University Press, 1996. More generally, see WMLeogrande, Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, 1977 – 1992, Chapel Hill, NC:University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

4 While the increasing use of the term ‘state-building’ instead of ‘nation-building’ is clearly a way of de-linking contemporary nation-building from earlier cold war failures, the growing usage of state-building also carries with it a certain accuracy. In the post-cold war era nation-building has becomemore narrowly focused, less grandly conceived: in fact, there may even be a case to be made for viewingthe term ‘nation-building’, at least in its geopolitical usage, as primarily, if not exclusively associatedwith the Cold War.

5 J Fallows, ‘Blind Into Baghdad’, The Atlantic, 293 (1), 2004, p 56.6 This is a geopolitical definition. The term is, of course, used more broadly to refer to the efforts bynational elites to create a territorial state and mobilise the population around a shared sense ofnational identity.

7 During much of the Cold War the externally driven, or facilitated, nation-building efforts wereprimarily US- or Soviet- sponsored operations with limited actual UN involvement. UN interventionin the Congo (July 1960 to June 1964) was that organisation’s largest nation-building effort during theCold War. The Operation des Nations Unies au Congo (ONUC) was far more extensive than UNinvolvement in the Korean War (1950 – 53): despite the official imprimatur of the UN, the latter was an

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overwhelmingly US operation. It was not until the post-cold war era that the UN intervened anywhereon the scale of its operations in the Congo. K von Hippel, Democracy By Force: US MilitaryIntervention in the Post-Cold War World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

8 T Dodge, ‘The invasion of Iraq and the reordering of the postcolonial world’, BISA News, 79, 2004; andMT Berger, ‘From Saigon to Baghdad: nation-building and the specter of history’, Intelligence andNational Security: An Inter-Disciplinary Journal, 19 (3), 2004, pp 344 – 356.

9 S Mallaby, ‘The reluctant imperialist: terrorism, failed states and the case for American empire’,Foreign Affairs, 81 (2), 2002, pp 2 – 7. More broadly, see Mallaby, The World’s Banker: A Story ofFailed States, Financial Crises and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations, New York: Penguin Press,2004.

10 B Anderson, ‘The last empires: the new world disorder’, New Left Review, 193, 1992, pp 2 – 9; KJowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,1992; and M Juergensmeyer, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State,Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993. At the same time it is important to rememberthat there is also a tendency (sometimes bordering on the nostalgic) to exaggerate the stability of thecold war era. For example, the prominent US historian of the Cold War John Lewis Gaddisfamously characterised it as a ‘long peace’. JL Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History ofthe Cold War, New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Gaddis’s approach neglected theinstability, revolution and warfare of the cold war era that was taking place beyond North Americaand Europe. A list of the most major conflicts would include the post-1945 phase of the Chinese civilwar, the Korean war and the Vietnam wars, along with ongoing insurgency and counter-insurgencyin Latin America and Africa in the 1960s and 1970s and beyond, not to mention the war inAfghanistan and the Central American crisis in the 1980s and numerous wars in the Middle East.Furthermore, some of the most perilous and destabilising events since 1945 coincided with the apexof US power in the early 1960s. In this period, the USSR, under Khrushchev, believed that it was ontrack to overtake the USA and the Chinese government acquired nuclear capability. B Cumings,‘Still the American century’, Review of International Studies, 25, supplementary, 1999, pp 271 – 272,274 – 275. More broadly most of these conflicts were connected to the way that decolonisation andthe Cold War had catapulted nationalist leaders at the head of major mass movements into positionsas important players in international politics in the context of a wider effort to mobilise aroundreformist or revolutionary Third Worldist initiatives that challenged and destabilised a fluctuatingcold war international order centred on the rivalry between Washington and Moscow. MT Berger,‘After the Third World? History, destiny and the fate of Third Worldism’, Third World Quarterly, 25(1), 2004, pp 9 – 39.

11 For example, in 1999 John Lewis Gaddis lamented the growing disorder of the post-cold war era andwarned of the possible need for the return of ‘empires’ (‘the form of governance that hardly dares speakits name’) as a means of restoring regional and international order. Gaddis, ‘Living in CandlestickPark’, Atlantic Monthly, 283 (4), 1999, pp 73 – 74. Subsequently Gaddis has offered a critical butsupportive perspective on post-9/11 US foreign policy generally and the Bush administration’s invasionand occupation of Iraq more specifically, while reaffirming the relevance of the notion of empire andthe legitimacy of pre-emptive intervention. Gaddis, Surprise, Security, and the American Experience,Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

12 M Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power, New York: BasicBooks, 2002. For a sustained critical discussion of the long historical connection between warfare,empire and ‘liberty’ in US expansion, see F Anderson & A Cayton, The Dominion of War: Empire andLiberty in North America, 1500 – 2000, New York: Viking, 2005.

13 N Ferguson, ‘Clashing civilizations or mad mullahs: the United States between informal and formalempire’, in S Talbott & N Chanda (eds), The Age of Terror: America and the World after September 11,Oxford: Perseus Press, 2001, p 141. See also Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the BritishWorld Order and the Lessons for Global Power, New York: Basic Books, 2003.

14 N Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire, London: Penguin Press, 2004.15 EA Cohen, ‘History and the hyperpower’, Foreign Affairs, 83 (4), 2004, pp 55, 63.16 R Cooper, ‘The new liberal imperialism’, Observer, 7 July 2002, at http://observer.guardian.co.uk. See

also Cooper, The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-First Century, London: AtlanticBooks, 2003.

17 D Priest, The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace With America’s Military, New York:WW Norton, 2003, pp 14, 390 – 392. For a parallel, though less comprehensive, approach, see MIgnatieff, Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan, New York: Vintage, 2003.

18 J Dobbins, JG McGinn, K Crane, SG Jones, R Lal, A Rathmell, R Swanger & A Timisina, America’sRole in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq, Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 2003, pp xxviii – xxix.

19 TPM Barnett, The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century, New York:Berkley Books, 2004.

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20 See F Fukuyama, State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century, Ithaca, NY: CornellUniversity Press, 2004.

21 Barnett, The Pentagon’s New Map, p 358.22 A Callinicos, The New Mandarins of American Power: The Bush Administration’s Plans for the World,

Cambridge: Polity, 2003; S Halper & J Clarke, America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the GlobalOrder, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004; and Anne Norton, Leo Strauss and the Politicsof American Empire, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. More broadly, see D Harvey, TheNew Imperialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003; E Meiksins Wood, Empire of Capital,London: Verso, 2003; and M Mann, Incoherent Empire, London: Verso, 2003.

23 The exemplary document in this regard is GW Bush, The National Security Strategy of the UnitedStates of America, 17 September 2002, at www.whitehouse.gov.

24 IH Daalder & JM Lindsay, America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy, Washington,DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003, pp 15, 40 – 49. Books by neoconservatives that reflect their‘democratic imperialism’ include R Kagan, A Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicaragua,1977 – 1990, New York: Free Press, 1996; D Wurmser, Tyranny’s Ally: America’s Failure to DefeatSaddam Hussein, Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1999; D Kagan & FW Kagan,While America Sleeps: Self-Delusion, Military Weakness and the Threat to Peace Today, New York:St Martin’s Press, 2000; and D Frum & R Perle, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terrorism,New York: Random House, 2004.

25 George Bush and Bill Clinton cited in ME Brown, ‘The causes of internal conflict: an overview’, in MEBrown, OR Cote, SM Lynn-Jones & SE Miller (eds), Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict, Cambridge: MIT

Press, 2001, p 3. TR Gurr argues that, contrary to the ‘conventional wisdom’, the ‘rash of ethnicwarfare peaked in the early 1990s’ as a result of greater resort to strategies of accommodation by theholders of state power. TR Gurr, ‘Ethnic warfare on the wane’, Foreign Affairs, 79 (3), 2000, p 52.

26 For example, see Z Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its GeostrategicImperatives, New York: Basic Books, 1997; and JJ Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics,New York: WW Norton, 2001.

27 SP Huntington, ‘The West: unique, not universal’, Foreign Affairs, 75 (6), 1996, pp 28 – 46; andHuntington, ‘The lonely superpower’, Foreign Affairs, 78 (2), 1999, pp 35 – 49.

28 SP Huntington, ‘The clash of civilizations?’, Foreign Affairs, 72 (3), 1993, p 41.29 SP Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York: Simon and

Schuster, 1996.30 SP Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity, New York: Simon and

Schuster, 2004.31 RD Kaplan, ‘Looking the world in the eye’, Atlantic Monthly, 288 (5), 2001, pp 70, 81. For book-

length critiques of the ‘clash of civilizations’ as a way of understanding post-cold war internationalrelations and international security, see MB Salter, Barbarians and Civilization in InternationalRelations, London: Pluto Press, 2002; and G Achcar, The Clash of Barbarisms: Sept 11 and the Makingof the New World Disorder, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002.

32 For example, see RD Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History, New York: Vintage, 1994;Kaplan, The Ends of the Earth: A Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy, New York: Vintage, 1997; Kaplan,Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan, New York: Vintage, 2001; andKaplan, Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands A Pagan Ethos, New York: Random House, 2001.

33 RD Kaplan, ‘The coming anarchy: how scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism, and disease arerapidly destroying the social fabric of our planet’, Atlantic Monthly, 273 (2), 1994, pp 44 – 76; andKaplan, The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post-Cold War, New York: Vintage, 2000,pp 4, 7, 24.

34 For example, an editorial in The Economist in 2000 provided a primordial explanation for the chronicinstability in Africa when it argued that ‘brutality, despotism and corruption exist everywhere’ in theworld, ‘but African societies, for reasons buried in their cultures seem especially susceptible to them’.‘Hopeless Africa’, The Economist, 13 May 2000, p 15.

35 S Ellis, The Mask of Anarchy: The Destruction of Liberia and the Religious Dimensions of an AfricanCivil War, London, Hurst & Company, 1999, p 19.

36 P Richards, Fighting for the Rainforest: War, Youth and Resources in Sierra Leone, Oxford: JamesCurrey, 1996, pp xiv.

37 Kaplan, The Coming Anarchy, p 49.38 TF Homer-Dixon, Environment, Scarcity and Violence, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,

1999; and J-F Bayart, S Ellis & B Hibou, The Criminalisation of the State in Africa, James Currey,Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999.

39 For example, see I de Soysa ‘The resource curse: are civil wars driven by rapacity or paucity?’, inM Berdal & DM Malone (eds), Greed & Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars, Boulder, CO:Lynne Rienner, 2000; Wenche Hauge & Tanja Ellingsen, ‘Causal pathways to conflict’, in PF Diehl &

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N P Gleditsch (eds), Environmental Conflict: An Anthology, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000;B Lomborg, ‘Resource constraints or abundance?’, in Diehl & Gleditsch, Environmental Conflict;and NP Gleditsch, ‘Armed conflict and the environment’, in Diehl & Gleditsch, EnvironmentalConflict.

40 D Keen, ‘Incentives and disincentives for violence’, in M Berdal & DM Malone (eds), Greed andGrievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000, p 26.

41 N Richani, Systems of Violence: The Political Economy of War and Peace in Colombia, Albany, NY:State University of New York Press, 2002, pp 3 – 4. More broadly, see D Stokes, America’s Other War:Terrorizing Colombia, London: Zed Press, 2005.

42 See P Collier, ‘Doing well out of war: an economic perspective’, in Berdal & Malone, Greed andGrievance; and P Collier & A Hoeffler, Greed and Grievance in Civil War, World Bank, Working PaperSeries, 2000.

43 P Collier, Breaking the Conflict Trap: Civil War and Development Policy, Washington, DC: WorldBank and Oxford University Press, 2003.

44 For example, see W Reno,Warlord Politics and African States, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998; andN van de Walle, African Economies and the Politics of Permanent Crisis, 1979 – 1999, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2001.

45 K Ballentine & J Sherman (eds), The Political Economy of Armed Conflict: Beyond Greed andGrievance,Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003.

46 K Ballentine & J Sherman, ‘Introduction’, in ibid, pp 4 – 5.47 For example, see IW Zartman (ed), Collapsed States: The Disintegration and Restoration of Legitimate

Authority, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1995; Zartman, Cowardly Lions: Missed Oppportunities toPrevent Deadly Conflict and State Collapse, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2005; RI Rotberg (ed), StateFailure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003;and Rotberg (ed), When States Fail: Causes and Consequences, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UniversityPress, 2003.

48 P Bilgin & AD Morton, ‘Historicising representations of ‘‘failed states’’: beyond the cold warannexation of the social sciences?’, Third World Quarterly, 23 (1) 2002, pp 55 – 80.

49 On the weakening of the internal – external distinction (the ‘Great Divide’) in international relationsfollowing the end of the Cold War, see M Kaldor, Global Civil Society: An Answer to War, Cambridge:Polity Press, 2003, pp 6, 78. See also M Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era,Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001.

50 MT Berger, ‘The nation-state and the challenge of global capitalism’, Third World Quarterly, 22 (6)2001, pp 889 – 907; and Berger, The Battle for Asia: From Decolonization to Globalization, London:Routledge, 2004.

51 E Rieger & S Leibfried, Limits to Globalization: Welfare States and the World Economy, Cambridge:Polity Press, 2003; and J Gillingham, European Integration, 1950 – 2003: Superstate or New MarketEconomy?, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

52 M Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security, London:Zed Press, 2001, pp 2 – 5.

53 T Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923 – 1939,Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001.

54 C Thorne, The Limits of Foreign Policy: The West, the League and the Far Eastern Crisis of 1931 – 1933,New York: GP Putnam’s Sons, 1973.

55 TM Coffey, Lion by the Tail: The Story of the Italian –Ethiopian War, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1974.56 AA Kallis, Fascist Ideology: Territory and Expansionism in Italy and Germany, 1922 – 1945, London:

Routledge, 2000.57 DG Becker & RL Sklar, ‘Introduction’, in Becker & Sklar (eds), Postimperialism in World Politics, New

York: Praeger, 1999. See also DG Becker, J Frieden, SP Schartz & RL Sklar, Postimperialism:International Capitalism and Development in the Late Twentieth Century, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner,1987.

58 GJ Ikenberry, ‘Creating yesterday’s new world order: Keynesian ‘‘new thinking’’ and the Anglo-American postwar settlement’, in J Goldstein & RO Keohane (eds), Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs,Institutions and Political Change, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993, p 57.

59 West Germany’s dramatic industrial success after 1945 not only built on the Marshal Plan, but onimportant economic structures and policies, and governmental arrangements laid down in the pre-1945era. See S Reich, The Fruits of Fascism: Postwar Prosperity in Historical Perspective, Ithaca, NY:Cornell University Press, 1990.

60 Nation-building also emerged as an important concern of North American political science in thecontext of the Cold War and the rise of modernisation theory. ME Latham,Modernization as Ideology:American Social Science and ‘Nation-Building’ in the Kennedy Era, Chapel Hill, NC: University ofNorth Carolina Press, 2000; and MT Berger, ‘Decolonization, modernization and nation-building:

MARK T BERGER

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political development theory and the appeal of Communism in Southeast Asia, 1945 – 1975’, Journal ofSoutheast Asian Studies,. 34 (3), 2003, pp 421 – 448.

61 G Kolko, Confronting the Third World: United States Foreign Policy 1945 – 1980, New York: PantheonPress, 1988.

62 SG Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution inLatin America, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. The Alliance for Progressbegan as a decade-long programmw of land and economic reform that was expected to cost $100 billion.The USAmade an initial contribution of US$1 billion and a commitment to raise another US$20 billionoverall from both public and private sources. The USA set the achievement of an annual economicgrowth rate for Latin America of at least 2.5% as one of the main goals of the Alliance. Emphasising theimportance of national development planning, the Alliance, under US leadership, sought to achievegreater productivity in the agricultural sector, eradicate illiteracy, stimulate trade diversification andindustrialisation, generate improvements in housing and bring about improved income distribution inthe region. A key contradiction of the US-led modernisation project in Latin America centred on thefact that successful trade diversification would undermine the monopoly of primary agriculturalproducts and mineral extraction enjoyed by a number of US-based transnationals, while any significantland reform threatened the power of the still largely land-based ruling elites in Latin America. By thelate 1960s high rates of economic growth in many Latin American countries had been achieved.However, high growth rates had served primarily to increase social inequality, while the middle classesmoved to side with the ruling elites as politics, instead of becoming more democratic, movedincreasingly towards authoritarianism and military dictatorship. By the time of Kennedy’s assassinationin late 1963, in the context of a growing emphasis on the important role the military could play inproviding order and guiding national development, the reformist elements of the Alliance for Progresshad been displaced by a more straightforward focus on military and economic aid to any regime,regardless of how draconian, which was committed to the maintenance of US hegemony in the region.MT Berger, Under Northern Eyes: Latin American Studies and US Hegemony in the Americas 1898 –1990, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995, pp 87 – 88; and KC Pearce, Rostow, Kennedy,and the Rhetoric of Foreign Aid, East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2001, pp 103 – 116.

63 Latham, Modernization as Ideology, pp 14 – 15, 58 – 59, 68, 153, 211 – 215.64 A Hoogvelt, Globalization and the Postcolonial World: The New Political Economy of Development,

London: Palgrave, 2001, p 177.65 RJ McMahon, The Limits of Empire: The United States and Southeast Asia Since World War II,

New York: Columbia University Press, 1999, pp 60 – 79.66 G Kolko, Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United States and Modern Historical Experience, New York:

New Press, 1994, pp 303 – 337, 341 – 355, 545.67 Even before 11 September the Pentagon’s budget represented over 30% of global arms expenditures

and US defence spending is greater than the total combined defence budgets of the nine nation-statesthat along with the USA are the top 10 military powers in the world. P Gowan, ‘After America?’, NewLeft Review (II), 13, 2002, p 136.

68 G Monbiot, ‘Playing the tin soldier’, Guardian Weekly, 23 – 29 October 2003, p 13.69 For a variation on this argument, see J Petras & M Morley, Empire or Republic? American Global

Power and Domestic Decay, New York: Routledge, 1995, pp xi – xii, xv – xvi, 24.70 For a generally optimistic assessment of the past and future role of the UN in nation-building, see

J Dobbins et al, The UN’s Role in Nation-Building: From the Congo to Iraq, Santa Monica, CA: Rand,2005.

71 E Gottesman, Cambodia After the Khmer Rouge: Inside the Politics of Nation-Building, New Haven,CT: Yale University Press, 2003.

72 A Rashid, ‘The mess in Afghanistan’, New York Review of Books, 51 (2), 2004, pp 24 – 27.73 AJ Bellamy, P Williams & S Griffin, Understanding Peacekeeping, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004,

pp 189 – 275.

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