The slippery road: the imperative for state formation.

Nevertheless, in pre-industrial agrarian societies a functional stratification hardly ever exists, and personal domination over groups of people often prevails. While authors like Bayart, Chabal, and Daloz describe the neo-patrimonial aspects in detail, others like Clapham or Reno are more concerned with the question of why patrons become warlords. While outreach of personal patronage varies significantly, it is worth noting that it forms an important fabric of un-integrated peasant societies. There is, however, another important distinction between the "old" Weberian patrimonialism and today's neo-patrimonialism. The source of both business and political personal rule, which can translate into military leadership, does not necessarily stem from traditional heritage such as connection to ancestral spirits or inherited duties to allocate land to members of the group. Instead, acquired wealth or political office can constitute the basis to challenge "traditional" authority. The term is used in quotations because colonial rule invented, re-organized, and politically used local authority in such a way that it cannot just be called traditional any more. The political mobilization of ethnicity in past conflicts and wars has blurred the distinction between traditional organization and the political creation of sub-national groups.

Colonial power had a further effect on institutions and organizations in post-independence states, as it created the functional structures of a modern state: administration, police, military, education, and health systems. These structures were designed to control the entire territory, and they had greater impact than did the personal rule in sub-units of the colonial state. This organizational system and its formal institutional underpinnings, however, were systems that took centuries to emerge in Europe and to eventually fit the industrialized environment in the home country.

While colonialism tried to modernize agrarian societies to a certain extent, indigenous people were generally prevented from running companies, the army, or the state administration. At best, some of them received some formal education and were able to find jobs as teachers, accountants, or priests. The large majority of colonized societies did not change rapidly in their internal organization, and they continued to live in agricultural subsistence with an extremely low level of surplus. This surplus continues to be lacking in collapsed states.

The particular ways in which colonial powers allowed their subjects to organize varied significantly. While some, like the Belgians in the Congo, only tolerated local meetings along ethnic lines, other colonies were able to set up nationwide organizations for their anti-colonial struggle. These organizations, which later became political parties such as Nyerere's Tanganyikan African National Union in Tanzania or Kaunda's United National Independence Party in Zambia, were able to establish political influence over the entire territory. They also became training grounds for the future elite to integrate across ethnic lines and form a political consensus after independence. This led to state resilience in these two countries.

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It is noteworthy, however, that rival political institutions--traditional ones and the modern state--continued to stay in place, albeit to a different extent in different countries. Some new states were able to maintain a certain stability, while others went through severe crises and collapse. While the colonial powers and their independent successors presided over islands of modernity and embryonic capitalism and introduced corresponding legal and administrative systems, traditional customs and systems of justice also remained and regulated the life of people outside the "modern" realm. Institutional multiplicity is not necessarily an antagonism in the sense of "either- or," but it does provide overlapping and sometimes conflicting frameworks for individuals in particular situations.

The bureaucratic state, or the state that collapses, is thus only one of the various organizing principles we can observe in situations with competing institutions. The modern one is characterized by capitalist elements that are too weak to force their institutional framework on the entire society. In the political sphere, such institutions might include the rules promoted by traditional authorities, who derive their legitimacy from the status they were born into and their specific connections to collectively owned ancestral land. These are also rivaled by neo-patrimonial networks that derive legitimacy from wealth or military power. These networks can take the form of military organizations, business networks or political parties. Furthermore, rival organizing principles are also introduced by the "international community": their multifaceted and fragmented interventions, be they through financial organizations, bilateral donors, NGOs, or international business, often involve the use of powerful tools for imposing rules of behavior and standards of legitimacy.

Each of these organizing principles operates according to rules which can be enforced on members of the organizations concerned. These different institutions operate in the sub-sectors of the state, often on a sub-national level. While they overlap and demand that individuals operate in different spheres simultaneously, shifts between their relative power and that of the bureaucratic state can be observed in the different phases of state decline and reconstruction.

In situations of state decline, the rival rules of warlords can gain hegemony and even legitimacy in parts of a state's territory, as long as they provide protection and survival to some communities. As a result, traditional or reinvented traditional authorities fill the gaps left by absent state organizations and poorly enforced state institutions. Any institution that attempts to stem state decline or reconstruct a state after war must consider these conditions of institutional multiplicity before acting.

The Disintegration of Public Organizations

When ruling elites were able to form a national consensus and maintain or adjust it through moments or cascades of crisis, the outcome was usually state resilience--though this did not necessarily lead to accelerated development. Alternatively, when crises hit in a way that broke the consensus, periods of disintegration eventually led to the diminishment and eventual collapse of the formal bureaucratic state.

Disintegration can happen in different ways. The most influential aspect of state collapse seems to be what Max Weber calls the monopoly of legitimate violence or what Jeffrey Herbst calls the broadcasting of power. This does not only affect the most obvious challenges like the presence of armed rivals on a territory, but also the ability to enforce unified rules or to collect taxes across the entire territory.

This is not just a question of the political will of individual rulers. It requires a variety of means, from skilled administration, military, and police to the physical infrastructure that connects the country. When roads are impassable or non-existent, when there is hardly a national radio or newspaper, when police or administrative staff is unpaid for months or years, it is very likely that subnational units will emerge to deal with the consequences. This is de facto decentralization when the center does not hold any more.

Collapsed states suffer from economic decline years before they finally collapse. The very basis of state revenue and state activity usually expands and then declines. The absence of economic growth plays a prominent role in furthering the disintegration of weak states, especially since these states did not inherit much integration from the beginning.

The Role of International Intervention

International intervention, militarily and through financial and diplomatic means, could theoretically work toward the stabilization of a state. However, recent observations suggest rather that international intervention may well have accelerated state decline through pressures for liberalization that undermined elite bargains and neopatrimonial relations that bought peace in societies. With no resources in the state, rivals to state authority could gain influence in their regions or ally with foreign powers to overthrow a government without replacing it, as the case of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) illustrates.