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Horticulture, not architecture
Lately I've been reading Michael Mandelbaum's The Case for Goliath: How America acts as the world's Government in the 21st Century. I've been struck by Mandelbaum's ability to offer a simple simile or metaphor to complement his argument. A case in point is his likening of "state-building" to organic generation, rather than it being an exertion of sheer artifice (a similitude which the best educators have realized applies to their enterprise as well).
"The term 'state-bulding' implies a similarity to architecture, in which the builder can control every part of the process: drawing up the plans, gathering the building materials, hiring the workers, and supervising the construction. State-building, however, more closely resembles horticulture. It is a collaboration between human agents and forces beyond short-term human control. In the case of horticulture, the independent collaborator is nature. The equivalent for state building is culture - the values, attitudes, and beliefs of the society in which the effort to build a state take place.
"Some cultures lend themselves to the construction of effective, decent states more readily than others. Where the cultural soil for such states is fertile, they probably already exist, which means that the American efforts at state-building [since the 1990's - Ed.] almost by definition are undertaken in the least promising places ... Cultures can and do change, but they change relatively slowly. The relevant unit of time is not the month, the year, or the life of a particular government. It is the generation.
"... While careful planning and appropriate management can help to promote the flowering of the garden or the growth of a forest, neither can occur according to a man-made schedule."
Having considered the dissimilarities between American experience with Germany and Japan at the end of World War II and more recent efforts with de facto "failed states," Mandelbaum contends
"... the German and Japanese cases suggest that there is an inverse relationship between the ease with which a country can be defeated militarily and the ease with which a new and better government can be established after its defeat."
(pp. 79-81)
The latter is a provocative assertion, which may hold true in at least a rough/ready way .
(If the Cold War had turned hot - and assuming such didn't entail nuclear annihilation - what kind of fight would the Soviets have put up, and, assuming an American victory, what would a post-Soviet reconstruction have been like?).
January 27, 2006 | Permalink
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I must say, I think the comparison with Germany and Japan utterly worthless. Germany and Japan both had working court systems. They both continued to use the kind of property law they had before, and -- in Japan's case -- they even built on the state interventionish model of picking corporations and economic sectors and supporting them -- which was not an innovation of the Meiji era, but came straight from the 1930s. In the case of Germany, of course, the U.S was not the sole occupier -- there was a little thing called Soviet occupied Germany -- and they were dealing with a nation that was pretty much destined to fill the role in the world economic system that it has filled since Bismark's time.
But U.S. statebuilding elsewhere has always been a failure. It is shortsighted, it tries to embed American advantages, and it causes, instead of prevents, violence. There has never been a good U.S. intervention in Latin America. Not one. The closest was removing Noriega. The history of failure, of entrenched poverty, of U.S. friendly oligarchs parking kleptocash in U.S. banks, is overwhelming. Only when a country gets out of the U.S.'s shadow -- as Brazil did in the early nineties -- does anything go right for the country.
It is funny that in countries where Americans think they were heroic defenders of democracy and statebuilders, Americans are disliked on a large scale -- case in point being South Korea.
There are good reasons for this, of course. One is the incredible level of American ignorance. In the 18th and 19th century, the Brits, who are no slouches at ignorance, were imbued from an early age with multiculturalism. Back then, it was called Greek and Latin.
The classics gave a certain perspective to empire builders. Americans, of course, don't have that. The furthest they reach back in history is 1952, with the first I love Lucy show.
Posted by: rogergathman at Jan 29, 2006 10:18:55 PM
Oops. I meant, 'slouches at arrogance." Sorry, Paul.
Posted by: roger at Jan 29, 2006 10:20:43 PM
First of all, thanks for the great blog. Much to think about, and I have to say that I feel miles behind all those contributing here.
Wouldn't the independent collaborator for state-building more appropriately be nation, rather than culture? Bonum ex integra causa, of course, but culture seems more an external cause in the effort, rather than a collaborator (I'm thinking agent cause).
Is the architectural version popular because of the manner of the founding of the US?
What is Mandelbaum's criteria for successful states - stability? Democracy? Meaningful participation in world affairs?
Also, trying to follow the thought of your last two questions, is it industrial development which would really stand in inverse relationship to ease of establishing a government, and military might an effect of that development?
Posted by: Nameless Nobody at Jan 30, 2006 9:59:25 AM
Roger,
As always I'm grateful for your commentary - though I regret to see that you have taken the occasion to poke a stick in Uncle Sam's eye, rather than "play with the possibilities," dialectically.
To repeat: Mandelbaum was asserting a manifest dissimilarity between, on the one hand, the German and Japanese cases, and, on the other, more recent assays at "state-building." The citation I offered was attempting to get at some of the reasons for the differences. You'll have to say more about the apparently beneficial role you seem to think the Soviet presence played - a position which, at first blush, strikes me as rather bizarre. The (West) Germans were lucky to have a financial leader who approached the statesmanly - Ludwig Erhard, who gave ear to the economic and social wisdom of Roepke. (About which see here)
So, if Mandelbaum shared your view on, say, Latin America, he could reply that the US has been, for various reasons, a bad gardener. The conclusion that I suspect you're keen to resist is that there's any defect in the "cultural soil" to which the US has applied its unwieldy spade.
Whether or not the US has "improved" any Latin American countries in which it has intervened is one question; whether any of those interventions improved things for the US is another matter.
NN,
Thanks for the praise, and your participation; you've posed some good questions.
Mandelbaum's criterion of "success" is something like "workaday, functional stability" - meaning, such polities cohere (and thus endure) in some fundamental way. The opposite would be the sham-stability of Saddam's Iraq, where there was no bottom-up principle of unity - the state didn't "grow" out of its people's mores and heritage in any organic way.
I think you're on to something by pointing to industrial development, but my sense is that the thing which generates and sustains development - rather than it being grafted onto a society from the top-down, as has been the case with many modern tyrannies - is that intangible of "culture." As De Jouvenel remarked, there was a deeper insight - and certainly deeper compliment - than Napoleon realized in the famous quip: L'Angleterre est une nation de boutiquiers.
Posted by: Paul Craddick at Jan 30, 2006 10:59:10 AM
Paul, but of course neither the architectural nor the horticultural metaphor works if the society in which 'state building' is going on is already a garden or is already built. The metaphor presupposes a viewpoint that I'd call the unredeemed conquistador position -- surveying a civilization and not recognizing it as such. Now, such Lockean, tabula rasa prospects might well appeal to Americans, but they don't appeal to those who have absorbed the Burkean wisdom about the cultural orders which are painstakingly knit in various societies. To introduce a third metaphor to your mix -- it is a question of quilting, not of horticulture or architecture -- how to add patches to a previous pattern to achieve the general design one wants.
Obviously, the wonderful thing about the Soviet occupation was not wonderful to those occupied by the Soviets, but by the lucky ones not so occupied -- America had a natural check on its power expanding tendencies. And this check also effected the rest of Europe, particularly France and Great Britain, giving them an incentive to integrate West Germany into the European "architecture."
Posted by: roger at Jan 30, 2006 12:00:15 PM
Roger,
We're going nowhere, fast - I emphatically deny that the metaphor assumes any kind of tabula rasa. Rather, it assumes three things:
1. A thing to be made - a state
2. A maker - the agency to effect, coordinate, or oversee the making (say, an outside, occupying-directing power)
3. A "material" that will shape, and be shaped by, the making - a "society" of some sort which will be both subsumed within, and expressed by, the state to be made.
In other words, owing to invasion, overthrow, what have you, there's a nominal "people" lacking a state - that is, an apparatus of command (an imperium); and there's a power somehow to husband that state into existence.
The question of what is the 'correct' metaphor comes down to: what analogue most precisely captures the nature of the work that "the maker" must undertake in "making" the state?
Far from denying the "Burkean" insight which you are eager to deploy on occasion, the simile of horticulture assumes it - as you will have noticed from the end of the first paragraph which I quote from Mandelbaum. Since much of the soil is wanting in societies where "state-building" is undertaken, to grow a new, more effective state entails evoking cultural shifts - pruning, strengthening, and the like - so that more durable institutions can take root; e.g., inspiring the emergence of quasi-bourgeois virtues and institutions.
Posted by: Paul Craddick at Jan 30, 2006 3:04:39 PM
Paul, Surely not nowhere. Metaphors are important for what they imply, and the implication of the horticultural one is that what other people – natives – count as their gardens, the Statebuilder will count as wilderness, to be plowed, planted, and pruned. An instance of this is, of course, Iraq -- which we disagree about it. You count it as a failed state – which works, to an extent, for, say, Sudan – but I don't think Iraq is, or at least was, a failed state. It was as robust as Israel, and had lasted longer, through more and different regimes. But going in and planting our own seeds has proven only that you can bust a place apart…
However, take as a more neutral state – Sudan. How would your horticultural metaphor work with Sudan? What Mandelbaum says is:
"Some cultures lend themselves to the construction of effective, decent states more readily than others. Where the cultural soil for such states is fertile, they probably already exist, which means that the American efforts at state-building [since the 1990's - Ed.] almost by definition are undertaken in the least promising places ... Cultures can and do change, but they change relatively slowly. The relevant unit of time is not the month, the year, or the life of a particular government. It is the generation."
First: is it realistic, on any reading of American history, to use this time scale for a project with no obvious profit? And second, isn't the generation that is being "seeded" as likely as not to find the process distasteful?
Posted by: roger at Jan 30, 2006 5:23:30 PM
Roger,
I think you're right that Iraq wasn't a "failed state" in the way that, say, Sudan was.
However, any state that relies on mass murder and state-terror to subjugate its populace is a "state" only in the sense of the "coldest of all cold monsters."
Thus, while I'm no cheerleader for Israel, if Iraq was as "robust" as Israel, then Israel is no more robust than Iraq - which, phrased thus, seems absurd. Saddam's "Iraq" was merely - paraphrasing Roger Scruton from The West and the Rest - a "shield for some crazy dictator." By contrast, Israel clearly is a "nation" which is subsumed under, and expressed by, the state apparatus. Given its (more or less) recent advent, that's a pretty remarkable achievement.
Mandelbaum agrees with you, by the way, that the US has no patience for the long-term, thankless work of state-building - precisely because arid cultural soil requires a "generation" to vitalize.
Posted by: Paul Craddick at Jan 31, 2006 4:31:07 PM
The architectural metaphor seems to be a Hobbesian / "modernist" metaphor of power and structure.
Though, I could be wrong.
Posted by: Aaron Nelson at Feb 1, 2006 1:53:52 PM
Aaron,
Welcome - great to have your input.
What you say seems right to me; someone with a Hobbesian outlook on the origin and nature of the state would probably be disposed to view the process of generating an imperium as "assembling" or "buiding" instead of, oh, "cultivating" or "grooming."
In one important respect I would call myself a "Hobbesian" of sorts - in regards to the character of the international scene - but not as regards "state-building."
Posted by: Paul Craddick at Feb 1, 2006 3:18:35 PM
Hi Paul,
How would you propose fixing this world's problems and what would your ideal world look like?
Posted by: nyca at Feb 5, 2006 4:19:40 PM
Once you finish with ncya's question, I have another - is the international order totally unlike state-building, or analogous?
All I do is pose questions.
Is there a limit to the number of posts on one topic, and what's the record?
Posted by: Nameless Nobody at Feb 6, 2006 6:28:18 AM
Thans, Paul!
I'm guessing that the "horticulture" metaphor comes from a post-modern analysis (viz. that there's a wider context to the state than simply it's own power... namely the webwork of power relations with the other peoples and institutions over which the State lays claim over), and thus the state-builder needs to "germinate" those other power points (no, not the Microsoft program) in order to comprehensively control them.
If I'm right (which I may not be), I'm curious as to how this all squares with religion and traditionalism... since the modernist eschews these things, does the post-modern "horticulturalist" allow them in order to accomplish state-building? Or does the horticultrualist also reject these "weeds in the garden"?
Posted by: Aaron Nelson at Feb 6, 2006 10:40:09 AM
Well, let's get the easy question out of the way first - how I, a fixer of worlds, propose to fix the world's problems.
Um - expropriate the expropriators? Restablish the Caliphate? Ask the good people of the Motley Cow to become a bridge and a crossing to the Overman? Maybe just enjoin each to attend to his own garden? Or aim for a confluence of political rule and philosophy? Maybe there's no "fix" ...
NN,
You'll have to flesh out your question, 'cause I'm not exactly sure what you're driving at. Are you asking something like this: "Is generating an international order akin to 'state-building', in the sense that such an order also needs to be viewed 'organically', rather than simply in terms of 'assembly'"? I think that's right - hence my denial that there is any international "community"; I see no community of value and interests. If I got your point wrong, set me straight.
As to how many comments, we may be approaching a record for this humble blog. You've probably seen hundreds of comments on the better-frequented sites.
Aaron,
Interesting question. Do you call the proposed framework "post-Modern" because it recognizes the inadequacies of the "Modern," but still somehow shares the latter's assumptions, viz.,, that the aim is control or subjugation of some sort?
Perhaps unwarrantedly, I took the "horticulture" idea to hearken back to an older, "traditional" understanding - under which religion would be a real social force (a pre-existing locus of allegiance, and hence power) to be integrated into the state-to-be-made.
Perhaps some believed that, in trying to alter the status quo in the Middle East, religion would simply evanesce. That view seems a bit, uh, naive - no matter what its intellectual pedigree. Maybe globalization does that, in the long run; Mammon replaces the gods of old.
Posted by: Paul Craddick at Feb 6, 2006 12:22:17 PM
I suppose I was using "post-modern" in that catch-all sense of "any critique of modernity", though my example was more inline with Foucauldian post-structuralism: /french accent "Power is everywhere and nowhere...." /french accent
/sip latte
Posted by: Aaron Nelson at Feb 6, 2006 2:10:13 PM
Hi Paul,
Thank you for your answer. I was hoping you had a more specific plan for fixing the world, though. What do you think about the Freemasons' and the Illuminatis' roles in shaping today's society and governments? What is your view about the new world order?
Posted by: nyca at Feb 6, 2006 6:42:00 PM
Hi nyca,
Maybe it would help if you more clearly stated what the problem is. I mean, of all possible worlds, this IS the very bestest.
hth
Posted by: Nameless Nobody at Feb 7, 2006 6:55:01 AM
Paul, I forgot to ask what you think about the Bones men's (The Skulls) influence in shaping society also.
NN, I agree that it would appear that we live in the "very bestest" country on earth - however, that is not to say that problems don't exist. If you don't know what they are... I am wondering where you live.
Posted by: nyca at Feb 17, 2006 12:27:50 PM
I think NN was referring to "worlds" not country. He was making a tongue-in-cheek reference to Leibniz.
Posted by: Aaron Nelson at Feb 17, 2006 1:47:53 PM
Hi Aaron, Thank you for attempting to clarify what NN meant.
Posted by: nyca at Feb 17, 2006 3:25:11 PM