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James L. Payne: Deconstructing Nation Building

[Political scientist James L. Payne’s latest book is A History of Force: Exploring the Worldwide Movement Against Habits of Coercion, Bloodshed, and Mayhem.]

When plunging into war, hope generally triumphs over experience. The past—the quiet statistical tabulation of what happened when this was tried before—tends to be ignored in the heat of angry oratory and the thump of military boots. At the outset, it is easy to believe that force will be successful in upholding virtue and that history has no relevance.

Lately, this confidence in the force of arms has centered on nation building, that is, the idea of invading and occupying a land afflicted by dictatorship or civil war and turning it into a democracy. Alas, in their enthusiasm for nation building by force of arms, neither the theorists nor the practitioners have seriously looked at the historical experience with this kind of policy. If, after the troops leave, another dictatorship or another civil war ensues, then one has ploughed the sea. One has suffered the costs of the invasion—Americans killed, local inhabitants killed, destruction of property, tax money squandered, loss of international support, and so on—to no lasting purpose.

To see how nation building in general works out, I have compiled a list of all the cases since 1850 in which the United States and Great Britain employed military forces in a foreign land to cultivate democracy. I included only those cases where ground troops were deployed and clearly intervened in local politics. I have left aside the cases involving lesser types of involvement such as sending aid or military advisors or limited peacekeeping efforts or simply having military bases in the country.

In order to constitute a complete case of attempted nation building, troops have to have left the country (or be uninvolved politically if based in the country) so that we may see whether, in the absence of military support, a stable democracy continued to exist. For this reason we cannot use ongoing involvements such as Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghan-istan, and Iraq. The application of this definition identifies 51 instances of attempted nation building by Britain and the United States. The question is, how often did they succeed?

The meaning of success involves more than holding an election and setting up a government. Nation building implies building, that is, constructing a lasting edifice. The nation builders concur in this notion of durability. Their idea isn’t just to hold elections, get out, and have the country revert to anarchy or dictatorship. As President Bush has said, the aim in Iraq is to create lasting institutions of freedom. To call a nation building effort a success, therefore, we need to see that the military occupation of the target country was followed by the establishment of an enduring democracy. ...

Nations around the world are gradually becoming democratic on their own. Therefore, the 14 cases of nation-building “success” cannot be attributed to military intervention. These countries might well have become democracies without it....

The people who end up doing the so-called nation building are simply ordinary government employees who happen to wind up at the scene of the military occupation. Many times they are military officers with no background in politics, sociology, or social psychology—not that it would help them. For the most part, these government employees see their mission as getting themselves and the U.S. out of the country without too much egg on their faces. They have no clearer idea of how to “instill democratic culture” than the readers of this page.

A look at some specific examples of nation building illustrates the intellectual vacuum. The 1989 U. S. invasion of Panama is credited in our tabulation as a nation-building success. Was this positive outcome the result of the expert application of political science? One of the nation builders, Lt. Col. John T. Fishel, has written a book on the Panama experience that gives quite a different picture. Fishel was Chief of Policy and Strategy for U. S. forces in Panama, and it was his job to figure out how to implement the mission statement. The orders looked simple on paper: “Conduct nation building operations to ensure democracy.” But Fishel quickly discovered that the instruction was meaningless because democracy was an “undefined goal.” It seemed to him that it wasn’t the job of military officers to figure out how to implement this undefined objective, but, as he observes with a touch of irritation, “there are no U. S. civilian strategists clearly articulating strategies to achieve democracy.”...

Austria presents an instructive example of what nation building has actually amounted to on the ground. In our tabulation, Austria is classified as a case of successful nation building, but a close look reveals that the U.S. role was irrelevant, if not harmful.

After the war, Austria was jointly occupied by Russia as well as the Western powers. The Soviets brought Karl Renner, the elderly and respected Austrian Socialist leader, to Vienna to be the head of a provisional government. Renner’s provisional government declared the establishment of the Democratic Austrian Republic on April 27, 1945. For six months, the United States refused to recognize this government (fearing that the Russians were up to no good in supporting it). Finally, when it could not be denied that the provisional government was popular and functioning, the United States recognized it.

Austria thus presents a doubly ironic lesson in how nation building unfolds. The United States—the democratic power—stood in the way of local leaders who were attempting to establish a democratic regime, and the Soviet Union—the world’s leading dictatorship—unintentionally acted as midwife for the first democratic administration. Obviously, in Austria, no democracy needed to be “built.” The democratic forces in Austria were strong enough to establish a democracy on their own, and they did it in spite of the “nation builders.” ...

The recent intervention in Iraq further illustrates how haphazard and unfocused nation building is in practice. While the military campaign was a success, the occupation and administration has been characterized by naïveté and improvisation. The U.S. had no policy to check looting after victory, nor the forces to do it, and the result was a ravaging of local infrastructure, the rapid formation of gangs of thugs and paramilitary fighters, and a loss of local support for the U.S. effort. The civilian administration was first put in the hands of retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, who was two weeks late getting to Baghdad, and who naively expected to find a functioning government in the country. After a month, the hapless Garner was fired, replaced by Paul Bremer as chief administrator. Two months after the invasion, Lt. Gen. William Wallace, the V Corps commander, described the nation-building “technique” U.S. officials were applying in Iraq: “We’re making this up here as we go along.”

Nation building by military force is not a coherent, defensible policy. It is based on no theory, it has no proven technique or methodology, and there are no experts who know how to do it. The record shows that it usually fails, and even when it appears to succeed, the positive result owes more to historical evolution and local political culture than anything nation builders might have done.







Read entire article at American Conservative