Why So Much Anarchy? By Robert D. Kaplan. Real Clear World, February 6, 2014. Also at Stratfor.
The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War. By Robert D. Kaplan. New York: Random House, 2000. Also here.
The Coming Anarchy. By Robert D. Kaplan. The Atlantic Monthly, February 1994.
Was Democracy Just a Moment? By Robert D. Kaplan. The Atlantic Monthly, December 1997.
Freedom vs. Stability: Are Dictators Worse than Anarchy? By Christiane Hoffmann. Spiegel Online, October 8, 2014.
Anarchy vs. Stability: Dictatorships and Chaos Go Hand in Hand. By Mathieu von Rohr. Spiegel Online, October 9, 2014.
Kaplan [Why So Much Anarchy?]:
Twenty
years ago, in February 1994, I published a lengthy cover story in The Atlantic Monthly, “The Coming
Anarchy: How Scarcity, Crime, Overpopulation, Tribalism, and Disease are
Rapidly Destroying the Social Fabric of Our Planet.” I argued that the combination
of resource depletion (like water), demographic youth bulges and the
proliferation of shanty towns throughout the developing world would enflame
ethnic and sectarian divides, creating the conditions for domestic political
breakdown and the transformation of war into increasingly irregular forms –
making it often indistinguishable from terrorism. I wrote about the erosion of
national borders and the rise of the environment as the principal security
issues of the 21st century. I accurately predicted the collapse of certain
African states in the late 1990s and the rise of political Islam in Turkey and
other places. Islam, I wrote, was a religion ideally suited for the badly
urbanized poor who were willing to fight.
I also got things wrong, such as the probable intensification of racial
divisions in the United States; in fact, such divisions have been impressively
ameliorated.
However,
what is not in dispute is that significant portions of the earth, rather than
follow the dictates of Progress and Rationalism, are simply harder and harder
to govern, even as there is insufficient evidence of an emerging and widespread
civil society. Civil society in significant swaths of the earth is still the
province of a relatively elite few in capital cities – the very people Western
journalists feel most comfortable befriending and interviewing, so that the
size and influence of such a class is exaggerated by the media.
The
anarchy unleashed in the Arab world, in particular, has other roots, though --
roots not adequately dealt with in my original article:
The End of Imperialism. That’s
right. Imperialism provided much of Africa, Asia and Latin America with
security and administrative order. The Europeans divided the planet into a
gridwork of entities – both artificial and not – and governed. It may not have been fair, and it may not have been
altogether civil, but it provided order. Imperialism, the mainstay of stability
for human populations for thousands of years, is now gone.
The End of Post-Colonial Strongmen.
Colonialism did not end completely with the departure of European colonialists.
It continued for decades in the guise of strong dictators, who had inherited
state systems from the colonialists. Because these strongmen often saw
themselves as anti-Western freedom fighters, they believed that they now had
the moral justification to govern as they pleased. The Europeans had not been
democratic in the Middle East, and neither was this new class of rulers. Hafez
al Assad, Saddam Hussein, Ali Abdullah Saleh, Moammar Gadhafi and the Nasserite
pharaohs in Egypt right up through Hosni Mubarak all belonged to this category,
which, like that of the imperialists, has been quickly retreating from the
scene (despite a comeback in Egypt).
No Institutions. Here
we come to the key element. The post-colonial Arab dictators ran moukhabarat states: states whose order
depended on the secret police and the other, related security services. But
beyond that, institutional and bureaucratic development was weak and
unresponsive to the needs of the population – a population that, because it was
increasingly urbanized, required social services and complex infrastructure.
(Alas, urban societies are more demanding on central governments than
agricultural ones, and the world is rapidly urbanizing.) It is institutions
that fill the gap between the ruler at the top and the extended family or tribe
at the bottom. Thus, with insufficient institutional development, the chances
for either dictatorship or anarchy proliferate. Civil society occupies the
middle ground between those extremes, but it cannot prosper without the
requisite institutions and bureaucracies.
Feeble Identities. With
feeble institutions, such post-colonial states have feeble identities. If the
state only means oppression, then its population consists of subjects, not
citizens. Subjects of despotisms know only fear, not loyalty. If the state has
only fear to offer, then, if the pillars of the dictatorship crumble or are
brought low, it is non-state identities that fill the subsequent void. And in a
state configured by long-standing legal borders, however artificially drawn
they may have been, the triumph of non-state identities can mean anarchy.
Doctrinal Battles.
Religion occupies a place in daily life in the Islamic world that the West has
not known since the days – a millennium ago – when the West was called “Christendom.”
Thus, non-state identity in the 21st-century Middle East generally means
religious identity. And because there are variations of belief even within a
great world religion like Islam, the rise of religious identity and the
consequent decline of state identity means the inflammation of doctrinal
disputes, which can take on an irregular, military form. In the early medieval
era, the Byzantine Empire – whose whole identity was infused with Christianity –
had violent, doctrinal disputes between iconoclasts (those opposed to graven images
like icons) and iconodules (those who venerated them). As the Roman Empire
collapsed and Christianity rose as a replacement identity, the upshot was not
tranquility but violent, doctrinal disputes between Donatists, Monotheletes and
other Christian sects and heresies. So, too, in the Muslim world today, as
state identities weaken and sectarian and other differences within Islam come
to the fore, often violently.
Information Technology.
Various forms of electronic communication, often transmitted by smartphones,
can empower the crowd against a hated regime, as protesters who do not know
each other personally can find each other through Facebook, Twitter, and other
social media. But while such technology can help topple governments, it cannot
provide a coherent and organized replacement pole of bureaucratic power to
maintain political stability afterwards. This is how technology encourages
anarchy. The Industrial Age was about bigness: big tanks, aircraft carriers,
railway networks and so forth, which magnified the power of big centralized
states. But the post-industrial age is about smallness, which can empower small
and oppressed groups, allowing them to challenge the state -- with anarchy
sometimes the result.
Because
we are talking here about long-term processes rather than specific events,
anarchy in one form or another will be with us for some time, until new
political formations arise that provide for the requisite order. And these new
political formations need not be necessarily democratic.
When the
Soviet Union collapsed, societies in Central and Eastern Europe that had
sizable middle classes and reasonable bureaucratic traditions prior to World
War II were able to transform themselves into relatively stable democracies.
But the Middle East and much of Africa lack such bourgeoisie traditions, and so
the fall of strongmen has left a void. West African countries that fell into
anarchy in the late 1990s -- a few years after my article was published -- like
Sierra Leone, Liberia and Ivory Coast, still have not really recovered, but are
wards of the international community through foreign peacekeeping forces or
advisers, even as they struggle to develop a middle class and a manufacturing
base. For, the development of efficient and responsive bureaucracies requires
literate functionaries, which, in turn, requires a middle class.
The
real question marks are Russia and China. The possible weakening of
authoritarian rule in those sprawling states may usher in less democracy than
chronic instability and ethnic separatism that would dwarf in scale the current
instability in the Middle East. Indeed, what follows Vladimir Putin could be
worse, not better. The same holds true for a weakening of autocracy in China.
The
future of world politics will be about which societies can develop responsive
institutions to govern vast geographical space and which cannot. That is the
question toward which the present season of anarchy leads.
