Part 1

It is rare these days to have successful Hollywood productions that are six hours long. American attention spans are simply not equipped to weather such torture. I was therefore surprised at the success of the movie John Adams. To my relief I later learnt that the six hours were divided into one-hour episodes and shown on HBO before they were sold on CD. It was well worth it. The movie provides wonderful insights into the foundations of the US polity and democratic institutions while telling a personal story. I will not say much about the movie so as not to ruin the experience for those who may choose to watch it.

One of the profound revelations in the movie is how particular to a culture and history the formation of a new state can be. Despite the revolutionary leaders’ identity as aristocratic Englishmen, the system that they founded had very little in common with the governing system in London. But it did closely resemble the aspirational hopes of Britons like John Locke. Puritan discipline combined with economic transformation and cheap firearms allowed revolutionaries to refuse subordination to a foreign power and helped assert democracy. Well sort of. To the English parliamentarians these revolutionaries were insurgents led by pirates and smugglers who were desperately avoiding tax and stealing British and native Indian land and property.

The purpose here is not to advocate one view over the other but to show that both views can be factually true while acknowledging the creation of a new state with a radically different political system to its predecessor. And the new state must have been viable for it has survived for over two centuries. Africans today should therefore not be distracted from their political transformation by loud global pronunciations of which political systems are virtuous and which ones are not. All political systems are legitimate as long as they serve the purpose of those who form them and sustain the state. In other words legitimacy of a political system is ultimately measured by whether it survives or not and not its resonance with a given doctrine.

Part 2

A basic question arises here. Should Africans pursue a political system based on the concept of states or do away with them altogether? Which social groups should have the privilege of bestowing legitimacy on the political system and thus the state? Kwame Nkrumah’s answers to these questions were elaborated in his writings of the 1960s. They entailed a modernization of Africa through means of economic transformation and political integration. He envisioned a new pan-African political system and potential state that would replace the colonial states. Recently released documents show that after seven assassination attempts by US backed forces, in a private meeting, Nkrumah shed tears and pleaded with the US ambassador of the time to understand Africans’ hunger for transformation. The ambassador concluded that Africans were not yet ready and proceeded to urge the CIA to eliminate the Ghanian threat.

The environment today is different. No major power questions the right of Africans to attain economic and political transformation. In order to attain credibility external intervention now takes the form of defending Africans from threats. These threats can be environmental degradation, hunger, terrorism, lack of economic development and lack of democracy, and ultimately state collapse. Africans have to evaluate these and decipher which ones are real and which ones phantom. It may help in such evaluation to know that modern history indicates that none of these threats are based on universal truths. A community can function in a desolate desert, with little food, avoiding insurrection, industrialization, elections and even a modern state. Many US allies in the gulf amply demonstrate this.

However the modern world order is assiduously based on the existence of states as the primary actors. In their modern form the states are the institutions that control the people, land and government of a given territory. As indicated above not all of these states are viable independently. For instance within Somalia, Somaliland is a viable state that does not have the recognition of other states while a group of UN Security Council sponsored individuals in Mogadishu represent an internationally recognized but non-viable state. The rest of Africa also provides a colorful array of political systems and states, mostly composed of city states that control large rural areas de jure but do not have a monopoly on violence in these territories – as is required for de facto statehood.

Part 3

One of the most commonly discussed African political issues is how to give these states legitimacy. The western world is almost unanimous in pushing for popular sovereignty based on representative electoral democracy. Like the US after the revolution, this is a system where an apolitical government infrastructure supports the state, which is itself represented by political leaders who are drawn from influential organizations and presented to the public for competition. An important element of this system is that it retains its stability by requiring the consent of the public in law making, policy implementation and leadership selection. However it is also vulnerable to the influence of parties that may not have their interests aligned with the ‘citizens’ through the formulation of policy, lobbying and selection for candidacy of lawmakers and executive leaders. Recent elections in Iran and the US – two nations at differing levels of development – show such influence from powerful economic interests.

When John Locke, the philosopher that inspired American revolutionaries articulated his arguments, he was aiming to replace the nobility and clergy by a class of economic aristocrats [property owners] as the social group that gave the state its legitimacy. He was paving the way for a new class of secular powerful people to enter into power without destroying the state. To this end he argued that the fruits of labor rather than heredity were the only legitimate method of wealth accumulation. Following his lead it was later argued by other philosophers that the only way for the state to accumulate power was by having a social contract with such a powerful social group. Any method to achieve such popular sovereignty was legitimate and considered a ‘natural right’.

The relative economic weakness of the nobility and clergy was the primary cause for the impetus to reform. This weakness was caused by the economic transformation that had swept through Western Europe in the 17th and 18th Centuries. But the final political transformation occurred because the primary means of state power [monopoly over violence] was compromised by the parity in arms between representatives of the state and non state actors [typically the population]. It was believed that a new social contract, along with access to power for economically rising new social groups would pave the way for the population to relinquish its power so that the state could accumulate it.

Modern history shows that popular sovereignty is a result of economic transformation combined with a shift in military power away from states in favor of the population. The key catalyst in this process are economically rising social groups that can successfully challenge the old controllers of resource as providers of legitimacy for the state. Within Africa the rampant availability of small arms to non state actors clearly demonstrates that military parity is essentially in place. Many of the neo-colonial states, supported by their old colonial patrons, or the US, are finding it hard to impose their will militarily. However what is less clear is if Africans are experiencing an economic transformation. Moreover it is not yet clear if there is a rising social group that has the motivation and resources to legitimize enduring new states.

Part 4

The method of political system that Africans are to pursue can range from those that have already been tried to innovative new ones. It is important to remember that only a very small portion of the world achieved popular sovereignty under an electoral democratic system. Peripheral states in Eurasia [Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, etc…] never really attained sustainable popular sovereignty through representative elections until such a system was militarily imposed on them from the outside. The bulk of Eurasia on the other hand has established states based on political systems where elections and political participation is limited to members of one national party. In all of these cases some level of popular sovereignty is achieved providing legitimacy for an enduring state.

For instance 19th century France nationalized the social groups that legitimized the state [they achieved control of resources and the military based on the defense of an imagined and endangered nation] while 20th century Russia indoctrinated its key social group [industrial proletariat] in the promise of fast industrialization. Others such as Germany used a combination of these while modern China has reverted back to a historical state that is legitimized by a large bureaucracy that controls all resource distribution.

In all of this a few general rules are evident. For instance strong states with shallow popular sovereignty, such as occurred in the US [by limiting franchise to propertied men] and East Asia [by limiting it to party members] can result in fast economic transformation if the legitimizing social classes so desire because it promotes wealth concentration from the populace to the state. However such a system can also lead to stagnation if the state legitimizing social classes are in no need of economic transformation, as in many Latin American states where the accumulated wealth is then invested in a different state.

Most neo-colonial African states resemble the latter where participation in the political system has been reserved only for Western trained minorities and the weak state depends almost completely on outside patronage for protection. The emerging exception to this may be North and North East Africa where political Islamic doctrine has provided the people with their puritans. This region along with the wider Middle East is in such revolt that all western nations sit in stark opposition to electoral popular sovereignty as an option for the region. Economic transformation [away from a nomadic and oil based one] and military parity with existing states has brought new social groups represented by political parties as legitimizers of yet unrecognized states. For instance the West does not yet recognize among others Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine, the ICU in Somalia, the Brotherhood in Egypt and FIS in Algeria, but they have all for the most part gained more legitimacy than the older polity.

Part 5

When evaluating the rest of Africa one finds that states that have lost legitimacy are typically indicative of a political system that is also compromised. Nigeria and Kenya illustrate how a weak state has made elections in both countries an event for violence and strife. Social groups in both countries that are sustained by infusions of support from western sponsors [Kenyan parliamentarians make US $150,000 per year while Nigerian officials significantly supplement their salary with oil revenues] are now vulnerable to urbanized and sophisticated African civil societies which are challenging them. Interestingly some of these civil societies themselves are strongly attached to western governmental and non governmental organizations [such as churches and multi national organizations].

Weak states with fragile but functioning electoral political systems, such as those found in Ghana and South Africa are still struggling to identify and empower the emerging social groups within their territories. Racial imbalance in resource control in South Africa is still a major threat to the state’s viability while Ghana’s continuing inability to negotiate fair terms with western companies may yet destabilize its political system. The greatest threat to both states and political systems however lie in larger questions on which they have little if any control.

Nkrumah’s prediction that successors of the colonial states can not be viable in the long run will still challenge all of Africa. Signs of such disturbance are already evident. The challenge that South Africa will face from political developments in Zimbabwe and Angola will inevitably push Southern Africa into a regional block with a centralized polity. The same is true of Ghana and the challenges that it will face from a collapsing Nigerian state. The Horn and central Africa face similar regional political issues that can not be resolved using the existing state structures. This is essentially the political earthquake through which the emerging social and insurgent groups will come to challenge the old political system and state, and thus push for popular sovereignty and a new state.

Part 6

Western states and the US in particular, will make superficial attempts to stop this process by militarizing existing states. Such reactionary measures however will only work to shift the military balance to the benefit of insurgents. The past decade of global wars in which the US has participated clearly show that sophisticated arms no longer win wars against popular sovereignty. Small arms coupled with a committed group and an economic transformation that is in progress is too strong a force for any specialized military. In fact western countries will inevitably come to support African popular sovereignty over the next few decades as it will be their only leverage against Asian influence in Africa. This is not too dissimilar to how the US supported the communist development of Russia as a way to neutralize the threat of Germany at the beginning of the 20th century.

For those who aspire to a largely participatory electoral political system in Africa there is potential bad news. Africa’s states and political systems of the near future are sure to follow a global trend away from popular participation in politics. Most global states are now legitimized by social groups that do not participate in the electoral process. In the US economic and political decisions are now openly monopolized by unelected central banking and other ‘policy generating’ leaders, while the EU has chosen to use an appointed executive body [the EU Commission]. Across Asia single ruling dynasties control economic resources and its distribution although in that case the expansion of the social group with access to resource [upper middle class] may help to expand the political space as well. Such a fast evolution away from popular participation has occurred as states get weaker and a global ruling regime evolves into being.

That the formation of African states and political systems will be strongly privatized is therefore highly likely. Of course this means that in a way it will look a lot more like the US when it was first formed than any other modern state that was established over the past century and a half. So go watch John Adams and share your thoughts on it.