Читать книгу Institution Building in Weak States - Andrew Radin - Страница 14

While the case studies find that domestic opposition is generally the best explanation for how reform efforts unfold, other factors also matter. The literature on intervention and state building identifies international resources and preexisting conditions as two other important factors shaping the success of intervention.²⁵ The domestic opposition theory recognizes that international resources are sometimes important, depending on the threat to domestic interests, and emphasizes the role of patron-client networks, which are one element of the preexisting conditions of a society. Beyond these elements, the level of international resources and the path dependence of preexisting conditions offer insight for institution building. In brief here and in more detail in chapter 2, I specify the predictions of these two alternative theories. Below, I also explain how my theory builds on existing work exploring the divergent interests between foreign interveners and domestic elites.

The first theory drawn from the literature claims that greater international resources facilitate more successful interventions. This approach draws from statistical works on peace building, policy works on nation building and failed states, and critiques of bureaucratic and organizational politics in peace operations.²⁶ Works in this literature also suggest techniques that foreign actors may use to strengthen institutions given sufficient resources, including building capacity, persuading or coercing elites, influencing electoral outcomes, shaping public opinion, and imposing changes in laws or regulations. While works in this literature do recognize limits to the power of interveners, in general they observe that with more resources foreign actors can overcome domestic opposition and build better institutions.

A second theory is more skeptical of foreign intervention because state institutions are path dependent, meaning that preexisting structures and practices influence how institutions develop. These works analyze the history of political development in Western societies to identify the rare conditions that facilitate domestically driven political development, including military competition in western Europe, elite constraint of the monarchy during the Glorious Revolution in England, and social mobilization against clientelism in the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.²⁷ These conditions are unlikely to emerge amid foreign intervention. Even if they were to emerge, the process of domestically driven political development could take decades because path dependence also means that state institutions are slow to change. By some accounts, foreign intervention has been more successful in societies with a history of strong political development, such as Germany and Japan.²⁸ From these observations, I derive the prediction that foreign-supported institution building is likely to fail except where there is a history of higher-quality state institutions. Indeed, the presence of an international mission may even hinder reform since the provision of services by foreign actors may diminish the incentive for domestic actors to seek reform on their own.²⁹

International resources and path dependence do offer some insight for most of the reform efforts studied in this book, although the domestic opposition theory usually offered the most compelling explanation. Examining these two perspectives along with my own domestic opposition theory is nevertheless useful both to isolate which factors determine success and to enable the case studies to provide the most complete explanation for the process and outcome of reform.

My theory of domestic opposition builds on a growing number of works exploring how foreign interveners and domestic actors sometimes have divergent interests and a competitive or conflictual relationship. For example, Stephen Stedman notes that some domestic actors may act as spoilers, undermining peace processes.³⁰ Michael Barnett, Songying Fang, and Christoph Zürcher use game theory to explain how the “strategic interactions between international peacebuilders and domestic actors” often leads to “compromised peacebuilding.”³¹ Zürcher and several coauthors also argue that domestic elites respond to foreign efforts to build democracy based on the perceived “adoption costs.” They note that elites may perceive a threat to their own security or to the achievement of their “primary political objectives,” some of which—such as independence, ethnic autonomy, or retaining power—are associated with the interests I identify of nationalist goals and patron-client networks.³² Séverine Autesserre explains how everyday practices of interveners can limit their ability to understand and address local conflict dynamics.³³ Recognizing the value of domestic buy-in for reform, some works cite the need for “local ownership” of foreign-led reform. Others claim that pursuing “local ownership” wrongly assumes that domestic actors typically want the same reform that foreign actors seek.³⁴ Other works have explored the specific dynamics between foreign interveners and domestic actors in particular societies or reform efforts.³⁵

This book builds on these works in several ways. First, it offers insight into an understudied but critical policy question: What demands or recommendations should foreign reformers adopt to maximize success? As mentioned above, because most existing work studies success at the country level, few works suggest theories that can explain why some reform efforts within a society succeed while others fail or why a reform effort may vary in success over time.³⁶ This makes it hard for the existing literature to answer the policy question of how to select demands or recommendations to maximize the success of reform. Second, much of the existing work focuses on local elites without exploring how elite decision-making may be shaped by mass opinion. The focus on the problematic behavior of elites sometimes seems to imply that elite attitudes are not reflective of the society and that foreign actors may be able to coerce or replace elites to achieve reform. By contrast, I explain how elite advocacy for nationalist goals is expected to receive broad popular support while elite defense of patron-client networks is less popular, which impacts the potential for reform. I also show how mass mobilization can directly undermine the effectiveness of intervention.³⁷ Third, where there is work analyzing how domestic interests may motivate conflict or collaboration between domestic and foreign actors across different reform efforts, these works typically focus on a single society.³⁸ My analysis instead spans multiple regions of the world.

Finally, scholars who study how foreign goals can provoke elite opposition typically take this behavior as the almost inevitable product of the character of the international community or a given society.³⁹ Zürcher and colleagues, for example, emphasize that some elites are likely to be implacable opponents to intervention. As a result, they argue that interveners should lower expectations and “pursue a policy of selective intervention,” pursuing intervention “only for cases likely to produce wins,” where local elites may be more supportive.⁴⁰ Similarly, in their analysis of compromised peace building, Barnett, Fang, and Zürcher do not analyze in detail how foreign interveners might be able to adjust their stated preferred outcome to account for potential opposition.⁴¹ My analysis differs by arguing that elite and mass opposition is often avoidable and that foreign reformers have the ability to limit opposition and achieve greater success by adjusting their stated demands and recommendations.