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Author: Oliver Moore
Date: 20050517
Some Basic Principles of State-Building
After regime-change in Afghanistan and Iraq and rebellion writhing just below the surface in many countries of the Middle East, state-building is a topical question. State-building involves the creation of national institutions, but in order to be successful, this institution-building effort must be integrated with efforts at the level of the neighbourhood and the community. This article will explore the concept of "community development" and its connection to the national-level of the state-building enterprise. The success of community development depends upon the fulfillment of two conditions. The first condition is that state-building efforts penetrate to the grassroots level, and the second is that the emerging state work to fulfill the needs of communities. This addressing of communities' needs in turn allows them to grow in prosperity and freedom. This growth is precisely what constitutes community development. I will address each condition in turn.
State-building must take place at different levels. At a higher level, it involves creating national institutions and placing them in the hands of capable people, but this cannot result in democracy without parallel achievements at a lower level. At this lower level, state-building requires that communities, that is to say social organisations at the level of the town or the clan, be brought into the new state. Democracy is bound to fail without this fusion of the masses with the national institutions. State institutions without a link of responsibility to the communities soon become dictatorial, and communal organisations without a voice in the state remain divided and parochial. Failure to develop these two levels in parallel and to link them together results in a country internally divided in the best of times, and a country at war with itself in the worst of times. Such an internally divided country is also far more likely to engage in hostilities with its neighbours. This integration of what I have called levels is the first condition of community development.
The second condition is that once integrated into the state, communities benefit from the state. In other words, once communities have begun to direct their activities and attentions "upward," so to speak, toward the state, it must then come to pass that the centralised state power direct its positive efforts downward, to the communities. The state must render service to the communities in two principal ways. First, the state may redistribute resources within the country. This allows poorer communities to benefit from the greater prosperity of others. Secondly, the state can provide the infrastructure necessary for the expansion of local economies. By providing means of transport and communication, for example, the state fosters a country wide zone of free trade where before there were only small local economies.
In more abstract terms, what I am attempting to elucidate is a notion of mutual consciousness: the communities and the central state must become conscious of each other to the point of becoming one. This national unity is both the result and the guarantor of further community development.
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