[Mb-civic] Rethinking Nation-Building - Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Rethinking Nation-Building

By Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart
Sunday, January 1, 2006; B07

In 1945 the future of capitalism as the organizational form of the 
economy and democracy as the organizational form of the polity was far 
from certain in the advanced industrialized world. Today there is a 
remarkable consensus on both the preferred economic and political forms. 
With globalization of the media, the benefits of membership in the 
wealthy democratic club are beamed daily to the homes of billions of 
people who in turn aspire to the economic opportunities and political 
freedoms that the market economies and democratic societies have 
delivered to their citizens.

Yet the daily experience of so many people in poor countries is 
confrontation with the realities of failing or fragile states, 
criminalized and informal economies, and the denial of basic freedoms. 
It is not resentment of the West but exclusion from the right to make 
decisions in their own countries that feeds the resentment of the poor. 
At the same time, the networks of violence that have declared war on the 
security and order of ordinary people in

the developed world are making use of the territory of failed states to 
expand their bases of destruction.

The path to security is not just investment in the institutions of 
security. The price tag for security in a fragile state can quickly run 
into billions of dollars a year. A sustained analysis by NATO of the 
best means of achieving security in Afghanistan showed that credible 
institutions and public finance would contribute more to security than 
would the deployment of troops. Nor is the answer money alone; in these 
countries, money cannot be translated to capital, because such things as 
the rule of law, transparency and predictability are lacking. The state 
is the most effective, economical way of organizing the security and 
well-being of a population, just as the company is the most effective 
approach in a competitive economy.

Thus the need for functioning states has become one of the critical 
issues of our times. Global political, economic and security 
institutions must have a new goal: to promote the emergence of states 
that can fulfill their necessary functions. This goal provides a unified 
answer to numerous initiatives, including debt crisis, implementation of 
the Millennium Development Goals, and security.

It also requires that we make clear what functions need to be performed 
by a state if it is to have internal legitimacy and external 
credibility. We have proposed a framework of the 10 most critical 
functions the modern state must perform, which was endorsed by a group 
of leaders of post-conflict transitions last year. The functions include 
maintenance of a monopoly on the legitimate means of violence, the 
nurturing of human capital, and creation and regulation of the market. 
We have also proposed that state-building or sovereignty strategies be 
devised to meet the goal of having the state perform each of the 10 
functions -- strategies backed by compacts between the leadership of 
countries and the international community on the one side and citizens 
on the other to create capable states that deliver value to their 
citizens. And instead of thousands of reports, there should be a single 
global report on state effectiveness, compiled with the involvement of 
global and local civil societies and issued by a credible international 
organization.

For this to work, the global institutions must receive renewed 
attention. Despite some obvious shortcomings of the United Nations and 
international financial institutions, the fact remains that if they did 
not exist they would need to be invented. We must not succumb to calls 
for their abolition or further weakening.

Revitalization of these organizations will require sustained attention 
from the leaders of the Group of Eight industrial nations, which need to 
agree on a program of reform. It is critical to redefine their tasks and 
coordinate their activities. In turn, their leaderships need to become 
models of transparency in recruitment, evaluation and promotion of staff 
members. U.N. agencies need the resources to tackle state-building in 
fragile and conflict-ridden states. The decision at the U.N. summit in 
September to create a peace-building commission provides the United 
Nations with the opportunity to demonstrate its commitment and capacity 
for serious reform.

The international system needs reordering, with a new role for the 
United Nations, international financial institutions and security 
organizations. The wars of Europe between 1648 and 1945 were made 
history by collective security institutions. With that experience in 
mind, the nature of current threats and opportunities can now be confronted.

Ashraf Ghani is chancellor of Kabul University. He was adviser to the 
United Nations during the Bonn process and the establishment of the 
first post-Taliban administration in Afghanistan, and was Afghan 
minister of finance from 2002 to 2004. Clare Lockhart is a fellow of the 
Overseas Development Institute in Britain.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/30/AR2005123001288.html?nav=hcmodule
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