The State of State-Building

"What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know" - St Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, circa 397.

Hatfield College, April/May 2014 - getting to grips with the dilemmas of State-Building.

 by Kudakwashe Kanhutu

Use examples to outline challenges and dilemmas of international statebuilding. How can these challenges be dealt with?

Introduction:

Statebuilding is defined as “actions undertaken by international or national actors to establish, reform, or strengthen the institutions of the state and their relation to society” (Call, 2008: 5). The logic that underpins international statebuilding is a very sound one: for peace to be consolidated after conflict there needs to be an effective central state in the given territory. The devil is in the detail however, since usually; the causes of the conflict were a competition as to who should control the state in the first place. The first generic challenge, then, is that the intervener will be trying to reconcile disparate armed groups who are violently opposed to each other – a balancing act. The other challenges and dilemmas relate to the fact that once involved, the intervener becomes implicated, by act or omission, in whatever ill or good effects that will ensure from this process. 

The challenges are all the difficulties involved such as; reconciling combatants, lack of resources and expertise, legitimacy, coordination and coherence, dependency, and the destabilizing effects of economic and political reform (Paris and Sisk, 2007). The dilemmas are all those Catch-22 situations that arise once outsiders intervene such as; the footprint, duration, participation, and dependency dilemmas (Paris and Sisk, 2007). This paper will use the United States in Afghanistan as an example to outline the challenges and dilemmas that arise where an intervening statebuilder has vital interests that conflict with the core tenets of statebuilding. Also, as even those actors who can be argued to be without vital interests in the target state are not immune to these dilemmas, some United Nations’ sanctioned statebuilding interventions will also be mentioned to highlight this.

In terms of how these challenges can be dealt with, it will always be a continuous learning process. This is why authors such as David Lake and Roland Paris see succeeding generations of statebuilding, each capable of learning from the mistakes of the past.

International Statebuilding:

There is a consensus that functioning and legitimate states are the only way to consolidate peace, while ungoverned spaces create security threats in the given territory as well as for the international community (Paris and Sisk, 2007: 1; Fearon and Laitin, 2004: 6; Lake and Fariss, 2014: 2). The primary reason for international intervention to do statebuilding then, relates to state fragility and failure, insofar as failed states are seen to threaten international peace and security. This is the theme that informed the United States intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq. This kind of intervention creates its own challenges and dilemmas. Secondarily, some actors intervene driven largely by humanitarian impulses. In this bracket falls Non-Governmental Organisations (NGO), the United Nations (UN) and states such as the Nordic countries. This second kind of intervention faces challenges and dilemmas as well, but may be the better kind of intervention as the resentment towards it is not as instant as that which faces those who intervene with force. Indeed, the United States’ intervention in Iraq was even the cause of state failure in the first place.

Interventions to rebuild the state then tend to get accused of being neo-colonial/imperial projects, as there is a direct lineage between statebuilding today and colonial projects in the past, though with some marked differences. The key similarity is that it is outsiders intervening in a state’s territory to build institutional capacity for governing that territory, and as well, an aggregation of those intervening states’ interests and their proposed models, to an extent, supports the view that this is neo-colonialism/imperialism. To this effect Lake and Fariss (2014: 3) sees all statebuilding involving an element of trusteeship whereby, when states fail, the international community has had to step in to govern. Although unlike classic colonialism in the type of actors involved, goals, and envisaged endpoints, there still is a “remarkable degree of control of domestic authority and basic economic functions by foreign countries” (Fearon and Laitin: 7). This fact tends to be a source of resentment for some local actors and does raise the question of legitimacy – with implications for the statebuilding effort’s success or failure – which will be discussed below in this paper as a challenge.

Despite this possible accusation of neo-colonialism, outside intervention to rebuild a failed or failing state is absolutely necessary as there will be a lack of resources, expertise, and trust among the local groups in the target state. The outsiders are then best placed to bring in the required building blocks which Rubin (2008: 28) lists as coercion, capital, and legitimacy. Coercion refers to the security aspect of the intervention whereby foreign military forces provide physical security and assist in the Demobilization, Disarmament, and Reintegration (DDR) as well as Security Sector Reform (SSR) in the failed state (Rubin, 2008: 28). Capital is the international financial assistance for recovery and development, while legitimacy means the intervener’s legitimacy and the internal/external legitimacy of the state they will help build (Rubin, 2008: 28).

These building blocks are then deployed in what Barnett and Zurcher (2010: 23) have termed complex peacebuilding operations, aimed at ending violence as well as removing the root causes of conflict. From the same authors we then get a taste of the difficulty of the task of statebuilding when they write that: “peacebuilders are expecting to achieve the impossible dream, attempting to engineer in years what took centuries for Western European states and doing so under very unfavourable conditions” (Barnett and Zurcher, 2010: 23).

Seized with the matter of State-Building at home, Gilesgate Moor, Durham May 2014.

The Liberal Template:

Germany and Japan have been touted by Krasner (2011: 69) as two examples that inform the possibility that post-conflict statebuilding can be a success. This paper will not have the space to interrogate all the combination of factors that helped in those two cases except to note the one common feature that the United States military and post-war recovery aid were involved in both countries. This was predicated on the fact that these countries would embrace the tenets of liberalism. From this template it is inevitable that the donor state will try to build the target state in its image, or at least in a manner that will benefit the donor. All current statebuilding projects are aimed at achieving the liberal state which subscribes to the tenets of free and globalised markets, democracy, rule of law, constitutional limitations on government power and respect for civil liberties (Richmond and Franks, 2009: 4; Paris, 2004: 5). There are no serious rivals to the liberal template as a large number of the United Nations’ members are or claim to be liberal states.

The expectation is that democracy will make competition between groups peaceful in the form of elections, while marketization will foster sustainable economic development (Paris, 2004: 5). The overarching theme employed here is the democratic/liberal peace thesis which avers that “liberally constituted states tend to be more peaceful both domestically and in their dealings with other countries” (Paris, 2004: 6). Questions have been raised as to the validity of this thesis with regards interstate war but still, according to Paris (2004: 6); there is substantial evidence that supports the postulate that well established market democracies are internally pacific. It is at this stage that we encounter the question posed by Krasner (2011: 66) that how did Denmark get to be Denmark? A question that is meant to highlight the major differences in how the established democracies achieved their statehood in contrast to the current attempts to, as it were, engineer liberal states through statebuilding.

The Liberal State:

Drawing on the widely accepted Weberian conception, the state is the “collection of institutions that successfully claims the monopoly on legitimate authority and use of force over a given territory” (Call, 2008: 7). Authoritarian states, while able to claim a monopoly on the use of force, sow the seeds of future conflict because there is neither accountability nor redress for grievances. The liberal state, in contrast, is founded on the social contract between rulers and the population whereby the state fulfils the core functions of providing security, welfare and representation (Krause and Jutersonke, 2005: 450). For these same authors, this too is the sequence of how the state developed; first there was a violent struggle to establish a monopoly on the use of force, which once attained then allowed the political, economic, and social aspects to evolve normally (Krause and Jutersonke, 2005: 450). The statebuilding projects in existence are trying to achieve this endstate of a liberal state while disregarding the time it took the established liberal democracies to achieve this. A social engineering venture fraught with difficulties as it “assumes that the international community can unpack the historical process by which contemporary states were built, determine how a stable and secure domestic order was created, and apply the ‘recipe’ – with appropriate adaptation to local circumstance – to post-conflict environments” (Krause and Jutersonke, 2005: 451). 

Krasner (2011: 66) sees any such attempts that assume a final full Weberian endstate, to be unrealizable because of a variety of intervening variables such as local leaders’ incentives to impede better governance. This possibility is also accepted by Barnett and Zurcher (2010: 23) when they argue that what is most likely to be achieved is a compromised peacebuilding outcome where the peacebuilders get some stability and the local elites protect their power base from any reforms. Hardly the liberal state all the effort will have been expended towards in the first place. Krasner (2011: 66) however, goes further and says that the whole statebuilding consensus that the important task is creation of effective institutions and external actors’ role is to enhance institutional capacity is flawed. He even thinks “contemporary statebuilding is an exercise in organised hypocrisy” (Krasner, 2011: 71). His criticisms of the statebuilding consensus are valid but his prescriptions are untenable as he advocates a formalisation of external control of these target states. If classic colonialism met with armed resistance, there is no reason to think Krasner’s rebranding of it as “shared sovereignty” will make it palatable for local groups. Creating effective and legitimate local institutions in the target state is still the best possible course of action despite envisaged difficulties.

The Challenges and Dilemmas of Statebuilding:

Having established that international statebuilding is necessary, what it aims at, and also having briefly touched on how it is done, we can now turn to the challenges and dilemmas before proposing how they can be mitigated. All through our discussion, it is important to remember that all these attempts at statebuilding will be happening in an atmosphere of recently ended, threatened or continuing violence. The first challenge that arises is that of the legitimacy of the intervener which also impacts on whether the state they build will enjoy legitimacy with the local population.

Legitimacy:

The starting point then is to interrogate the nature of the intervention and the intervening state’s interests and how this may create challenges and dilemmas in its own right. David Lake (2013) argues that the reason why the United States has made limited achievements in Afghanistan and Iraq despite spending billions is due to the statebuilder’s dilemma whereby loyal leaders are preferred over legitimate ones in the target state. He says this is due to the fact that any state that is willing to commit substantial resources to statebuilding will have interests in that state so will seek to install a pliant leader (Lake, 2013). This then works at cross purposes with the attempt to create a legitimate liberal state. A loyal leader so instituted will then “divert resources from building state capacity to building his political coalition and the statebuilder will acquiesce in this diversion, even while recognizing that it undermines legitimacy…. net effect is statebuilding fails to create capable or durable states” (Lake, 2013).

This is certainly the case with Afghanistan where Hamid Karzai was installed as leader in a statebuilding enterprise whose foundation was a foreign military intervention (Suhrke, 2010: 229). The result was that the Afghan leader was thus tarnished and, further, it did not help that NATO war-fighting strategy sometimes empowered local “warlords” to the detriment of the central state any statebuilding project seeks to strengthen (Suhrke, 2010: 230). What, in this instance, will be happening is that the intervener’s actions will be undermining any chances of them reaching their goals. Suhrke (2010: 227) argues that the intervention and all the efforts expended in Afghanistan have only managed to create a rentier “state that has weak legitimacy and limited capacity to utilize aid.” 

The bottom line for Lake and Fariss (2014: 6) is that if the statebuilder is viewed as illegitimate this also taints the project and the society will reject it. United Nations mandated statebuilding projects would then be more acceptable interventions. Still, these will also suffer from difficulties of establishing legitimacy for the state owing to the incentives for local actors to resist better governance or, their competition to be in control of the state (Barnett and Zurcher, 2010: 23; Krasner, 2011: 66; Lake and Fariss, 2014: 7). This was the case in East Timor where a UN sanctioned legitimacy building project was hijacked by Mari Alkatiri’s Frente Revolucionária de Timor-Leste Independente (Fretilin) thus sowing the seeds for continual power struggles (Richmond and Franks, 2011: 96). This feeds into the next challenges of statebuilding.

Liberal Intervention Shocks on Target State:

Even the most well-intentioned, well-structured and benevolent intervention may not necessarily result in a positive outcome. According to Barnett and Zurcher (2010: 23), “shock therapy, peacebuilding style, undermines the construction of the very institutions that are instrumental for a stable peace.” The shocks Barnett and Zurcher have in mind here are the destabilizing effects of liberal economic policies as witnessed in Rwanda and other places that have experienced IMF or World Bank administered Structural Administered Programmes. In Afghanistan, attempts to introduce economic reform have faced a different but related problem. The availability of financial resources introduced by the United States, belatedly, for stimulating economic and developing capacity has spurred corruption among the elites whose interests lie in preserving their power and not state capacity (Lake and Fariss, 2014: 11; Dodge, 2013: 1208). This then leads to the challenge of dependency, whereby because the state has no capacity to collect taxes or generate any revenue otherwise, they depend on foreign aid (Suhrke, 2010: 230), with implications for legitimacy of the Afghan state. The fact that Afghanistan lacks resources and expertise is a given, but to fully draw out what this implies, a comparison with Iraq suffices. The de-Baathification of Iraq is said by Dodge (2013: 1206) to have deprived the Iraq state of around 120 000 capable civil servants which then forced the United States to expend $200.4 billion in attempting to re-establish that expertise.

There is also a consensus in the literature that, with the end of the Cold War, there was a multiplicity of actors who became involved in statebuilding; coordination and coherence therefore becomes a concern for the integrity of the project. Also, as the number of activities multiplied, timing and sequencing would also be factors to consider. These factors apply to multilateral as well as unilateral interventions as even statebuilding institutions of the same country can find themselves at cross purposes. Generally, IMF recommendations such as streamlining the civil service and fiscal restraint clashes with the UN or NGOs’ desire to get ex-combatants into government employment as part of the conflict resolution tools (Paris, 2010: 55). In Afghanistan the United States strategic imperatives which necessitated co-optation of warlords is said by Durch (2012: 89) to have undermined the multilateral efforts at statebuilding contained in the Bonn Agreement. The challenge of timing and sequencing is better viewed in Angola where the United Nations hastily introduced elections before other state capacities had been consolidated which led to renewed fighting (Call, 2008: 1). In Afghanistan it was a case of installing elections rapidly but without the accompanying accountability and legitimacy (Collier, 2008: 113).

The Dilemmas Proper:

The Afghanistan case throws up the dilemmas which are equally true in other settings. The first dilemma is the duration dilemma whereby the statebuilder needs time to complete their work but the longer they stay the more they are seen as an occupier and possible target of a violent response (Paris and Sisk, 2007: 6). The second is the footprint dilemma where a larger footprint will be viewed as intolerable intrusion by local actors while a light footprint would not be able to provide security or any other services to the whole country (Edelstein, 2010: 82). The third dilemma is that of dependency whereby because there is no expertise, the more the intervener does the more the local population become dependent on her and unable to develop their own capacity (Paris and Sisk, 2007: 6). Lastly, the participation dilemma refers to the fact the intervener will be forced to include the agents of insecurity as partners otherwise they will become spoilers (Paris and Sisk, 2007: 6).

Conclusion: A Conflict Sensitive Intervention 

The thread running through this essay is that there are really no easy ways to deal with the challenges and dilemmas of statebuilding as they are inherent to the process. The only safeguards are to follow the guidelines espoused in OECD Conflict Sensitive intervention protocols such as Do No Harm. The intervener has to understand local conflict dynamics and understand that their involvement is a possible incentive for continued conflict (OECD, 2010: 10) and thus act in a manner that mitigates their effects. The do no harm principle also extends to the “before picture,” whereby the statebuilder should not be the reason the state failed in the first place. The Afghanistan military intervention while defensible; the Iraq intervention was, by Petraeus’s admission, questionable (RUSI, 2013: 82). Regardless of all the problems highlighted above, this essay has argued that the liberal statebuilding template is both necessary and the only viable option. It will remain a continuous learning process with succeeding generations attempting to correct the manifest defects of current efforts.

The "Notebook"

Bibliography:

Barnett, Michael and Christoph  Zurcher (2010), ‘The Peacebuilder’s Contract: How External Statebuilding Reinforces Weak Statehood,’ in Roland Paris and Timothy D. Sisk (eds.). The Dilemmas of Statebuilding: Confronting The Contradictions of Post War Peace Operations. Abingdon: Routledge. 23 – 52.Call, Charles (2008). ‘Ending Wars: Building States,’ in Charles T. Call and Vanessa Wyeth (eds.). Building States To Build Peace. London: Lyne Rienner Publishers. 1 – 22.

Collier, Paul (2008). ‘Post Conflict Economic Policy,’ in Charles T. Call and Vanessa Wyeth (eds.). Building States To Build Peace. London: Lyne Rienner Publishers. pp 103 – 117.

Dodge, Toby (2013), ‘Intervention and Dreams of Exogenous Statebuilding: The Application of Liberal Peacebuilding in Afghanistan and Iraq,’ Review of International Studies, Vol. 39, No. 5: 1189 – 1212.

Durch, William (2012), ‘Exit and Peace Support Operations,’ in Richard Kaplan (ed.) Exit Strategies and Statebuilding. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 79 – 99.

Edelstein,  David (2010), ‘Foreign Militaries, Sustainable Institutions, and Post-War Statebuilding,’ in Roland Paris and Timothy D. Sisk (eds.). The Dilemmas of Statebuilding: Confronting The Contradictions of Post War Peace Operations. Abingdon: Routledge. Pp 81 – 103.

Fearon, James and David Laitin (2004), ‘Neo-Trusteeship and the Problem of Weak States,’ International Security, Vol. 28, No. 4: 5 – 43.

Krasner, Stephen (2011), ‘International Support for State-building: Flawed Consensus,’ Prism Vol. 2 No. 3: 65 – 74.

Krause, Keith and Oliver Jütersonke (2005), ‘Peace, Security and Development in Post-Conflict Environments,’ Security Dialogue Vol. 36, No. 4: 447 – 461.

Lake, David (December 2013), Why State Building Fails, University of California TV, San Diego: University of California. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5O4pusNMQ-Y Accessed 01 May 2014.

Lake, David and Christopher Fariss (2014). Why International Trusteeship Fails: The Politics of External Authority in Areas of Limited Statehood. Governance: An International Journal of Policy, Administration, and Institutions, Vol. ••, No. ••: 1 – 19.

OECD, (2010), ‘Concepts and Dilemmas of State Building in Fragile Situations: From Fragility to Resilience,’ Journal on Development, Vol. 9, No. 3: 1 – 79.

Paris, Roland (2004), At War’s End: Building Peace After Civil Conflict. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Paris, Roland and Timothy Sisk (2007). Managing Contradictions: The Inherent Dilemmas of Postwar Statebuilding. New York: International Peace Academy.

Petraeus, David H. (2013), ‘Reflections On The Counter-Insurgency Era,’ RUSI Journal, Vol. 158, No. 4: 82 – 87.

Richmond, Oliver and Jason Franks (2009), Liberal Peace Transitions: Between Statebuilding and Peacebuilding. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Rubin, Barnett (2008). ‘The Politics of Security in Post-Conflict Statebuilding,’ in Charles T. Call and Vanessa Wyeth (eds.). Building States To Build Peace. London: Lyne Rienner Publishers. 25 – 47.

Suhrke, Astri (2010), ‘The Dangers of a Tight Embrace: Externally Assisted Statebuilding in Afghanistan,’ in Roland Paris and Timothy D. Sisk (eds.). The Dilemmas of Statebuilding: Confronting The Contradictions of Post War Peace Operations. Abingdon: Routledge. 227 – 251.

Security Is Development

Diagrammatic representation of the thesis

Security In The Contemporary World

This was Robert S. McNamara's central thesis - that security is development - and; if anyone cares to notice, the world since 1966 (it is now 2012) has unfolded as McNamara predicted.

Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of Defense's Speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Montreal, Canada, May 18th, 1966.

"Security is Development" 

Any American would be fortunate to visit this lovely island city, in this hospitable land. But here is a special satisfaction for a Secretary of Defense to cross the longest border in the world and realize that it is also the least armed border in the world. It prompts one to reflect how negative and narrow a notion of defense still clouds our century. There is still among us an almost eradicable tendency to think of our security problem as being exclusively a military problem-and to think of the military problem as being exclusively a weapons-system or hardware problem. 

The plain, blunt truth is that contemporary man still conceives of war and peace in much the same stereotyped terms that his ancestors did. The fact that these ancestors, both recent and remote, were conspicuously unsuccessful at avoiding war, and enlarging peace, doesn't seem to dampen our capacity for cliches. We still tend to conceive of national security almost solely as a state of armed readiness: a vast, awesome arsenal of weaponry. We still tend to assume that it is primarily this purely military ingredient that creates security. We are still haunted by this concept of military hardware. But how limited a concept this actually is becomes apparent when one ponders the kind of peace that exists between the United States and Canada. 

It is a very cogent example. Here we are, two modern nations, highly developed technologically, each with immense territory, both enriched with great reserves of natural resources, each militarily sophisticated; and yet we sit across from one another, divided by an unguarded frontier of thousands of miles, and there is not a remotest set of circumstances, in any imaginable time frame of the future, in which our two nations would wage war on one another. It is so unthinkable an idea as to be totally absurd. But why is that so? 

Is it because we are both ready in an instant to hurl our military hardware at one another? Is it because we are both zeroed in on one another's vital targets? Is it because we are both armed to our technological teeth that we do not go to war? The whole notion, as applied to our two countries, is ludicrous. Canada and the United States are at peace for reasons that have nothing whatever to do with our mutual military readiness. We are at peace-truly at peace- because of the vast fund of compatible beliefs, common principles, and shared ideals. We have our differences and our diversity and let us hope for the sake of a mutually rewarding relationship we never become sterile carbon copies of one another. But the whole point is that our basis of mutual peace has nothing whatever to do with our military hardware. 

Now this is not to say, obviously enough, that the concept of military deterrence is no longer relevant in the contemporary world. Unhappily, it still is critically relevant with respect to our potential adversaries. But it has no relevance whatever between the United States and Canada. We are not adversaries. We are not going to become adversaries. And it is not mutual military deterrence that keeps us from becoming adversaries. It is mutual respect for common principles. Now I mention this-as obvious as it all is-simply as a kind of reductio ad absurdum of the concept that military hardware is the exclusive or even the primary ingredient of permanent peace in the mid - 20th century. 

In the United States over the past 5 years, we have achieved a considerably improved balance in our total military posture. That was the mandate I received from Presidents Kennedy and Johnson; and with their support, and that of the Congress, we have been able to create a strengthened force structure of land, sea, and air components with a vast increase in mobility and materiel and with a massive superiority in nuclear retaliatory power over any combination of potential adversaries. Our capabilities for nuclear, conventional, and counter – subversive war have all been broadened and improved; and we have accomplished this through military budgets that were in fact lesser percentages of our gross national product than in the past. 

From the point of view of combat readiness, the United States has never been militarily stronger. We intend to maintain that readiness. But if we think profoundly about the matter, it is clear that this purely military posture is not the central element in our security. A nation can reach the point at which it does not buy more security for itself simply by buying more military hardware. We are at that point. The decisive factor for a powerful nation already adequately armed is the character of its relationships with the world. 

In this respect, there are three broad groups of nations: first, those that are struggling to develop; secondly, those free nations that have reached a level of strength and prosperity that enables them to contribute to the peace of the world; and finally, those nations who might tempted to make themselves our adversaries. For each of these groups, the United States, to preserve its intrinsic security, has to have distinctive sets of relationships. First, we have to help protect those developing countries which genuinely need and request our help and which, as an essential precondition, are willing and able to help themselves. 

Second, we have to encourage and achieve a more effective partnership with those nations who can and should share international peacekeeping responsibilities. Third, we must do all we realistically can to reduce the risk of conflict with those who might be tempted to take up arms against us. Let us examine these three sets of relationships in detail. 

The Developing Nations: 

First, the developing nations. Roughly 100 countries today are caught up in the difficult transition from traditional to modern societies. There is no uniform rate of progress among them, and they range from primitive mosaic societies fractured by tribalism and held feebly together by the slenderest of political sinews to relatively sophisticated countries well on the road to agricultural sufficiency and industrial competence. This sweeping surge of development, particularly across the whole southern half of the globe, has no parallel in history. It has turned traditionally listless areas of the world into seething cauldrons of change.On the whole, it has not been a very peaceful process. 

In the last 8 years alone there have been no less than 164 internationally significant outbreaks of violence, each of them specifically designed as a serious challenge to the authority, or the very existence, of the government in question. Eighty two different governments have been directly involved. What is striking is that only 15 of these 164 significant resorts to violence have been military conflicts between two states. And not a single one of the 164 conflicts has been a formally declared war. Indeed, there has not been a formal declaration of war anywhere in the world since World War II. 

The planet is becoming a more dangerous place to live on, not merely because of a potential nuclear holocaust but also because of the large number of de facto conflicts and because the trend of such conflicts is growing rather than diminishing. At the beginning of 1958, there were 23 prolonged insurgencies going on about the world. As of February 1, 1966, there were 40. Further, the total number of outbreaks of violence has increased each year: In 1958, there were 34; in 1965, there were 58. 

The Relationship of Violence and Economic Status: 

But what is most significant of all is that there is a direct and constant relationship between the incidence of violence and the economic status of the countries afflicted. The World Bank divides nations on the basis of per capita income into four categories: rich, middle income, poor, and very poor. 

The rich nations are those with a per capita income of $750 per year or more. The current U.S. level is more than $2,700. There are 27 of these rich nations. They possess 75 percent of the world's wealth, though roughly only 25 percent of the world's population. Since 1958, only one of these 27 nations has suffered a major internal upheaval on its own territory. 

But observe what happens at the other end of the economic scale. Among the 38 very poor nations those with a per capita income of under $100 a year not less than 32 have suffered significant conflicts. Indeed, they have suffered an average of two major outbreaks of violence per country in the 8 year period. That is a great deal of conflict. What is worse, it has been predominantly conflict of a prolonged nature. The trend holds predictably constant in the case of the two other categories: the poor and the middle income nations. Since 1958, 87 percent of the very poor nations, 69 percent of the poor nations, and 48 percent of the middle income nations have suffered serious violence. 

There can, then, be no question but that there is an irrefutable relationship between violence and economic backwardness. And the trend of such violence is up, not down. Now, it would perhaps be somewhat reassuring if the gap between the rich nations and the poor nations were closing and economic backwardness were significantly receding. But it is not. The economic gap is widening. 

By the year 1970 over one half of the world's total population will live in the independent nations sweeping across the southern half of the planet. But this hungering half of the human race will by then command only one sixth of the world's total of goods and services. By the year 1975 the dependent children of these nations alone children under 15 years of age will equal the total population of the developed nations to the north. 

Even in our own abundant societies, we have reason enough to worry over the tensions that coil and tighten among under-privileged young people and finally flail out in delinquency and crime. What are we to expect from a whole hemisphere of youth where mounting frustrations are likely to fester into eruptions of violence and extremism? 

Annual per capita income in roughly half of the 80 underdeveloped nations that are members of the World Bank is rising by a paltry 1 percent a year or less. By the end of the century these nations, at their present rates of growth, will reach a per capita income of barely $170 a year. The United States, by the same criterion, will attain a per capita income of $4,500. The conclusion to all of this is blunt and inescapable: Given the certain connection between economic stagnation and the incidence of violence, the years that lie ahead for the nations in the southern half of the globe are pregnant with violence. 

U.S. Security and the Newly Developing World: 

This would be true even if no threat of Communist subversion existed is it clearly does. Both Moscow and Peking, however harsh their internal differences, regard the whole modernization process as an ideal environment for the growth of communism. Their experience with subversive internal war is extensive, and they have developed a considerable array of both doctrine and practical measures in the art of political violence. What is often misunderstood is that Communists are capable of subverting, manipulating, and finally directing for their own ends the wholly legitimate grievances of a developing society. 

But it would be a gross oversimplification to regard communism as the central factor in every conflict throughout the underdeveloped world. Of the 149 serious internal insurgencies in the past 8 years, Communists have been involved in only 58 of them - 8 percent of the total- and this includes seven instances in which a Communist regime itself was the target of the uprising. 

Whether Communists are involved or not, violence anywhere in a taut world transmits sharp signals through the complex gangli of international relations; and the security of the United States is related to the security and stability of nations half a globe away. But neither conscience nor sanity itself suggests that the United States is, should or could be the global gendarme. Quite the contrary. Experience confirms what human nature suggests: that in most instances of internal violence the local people themselves are best able to deal directly with the situation within the framework of their own traditions. 

The United States has no mandate from on high to police the world and no inclination to do so. There have been classic case in which our deliberate non-action was the wisest action of all. Where our help is not sought, it is seldom prudent to volunteer. Certainly we have no charter to rescue floundering regimes who have brought violence on themselves by deliberately refusing to meet the legitimate expectations of their citizenry. 

Further, throughout the next decade advancing technology will reduce the requirements for bases and staging rights at particular locations abroad, and the whole pattern of forward deployment will gradually change. But, though all these caveats are clear enough, the irreducible fact remains that our security is related directly to the security of the newly developing world. And our role must be precisely this: to help provide security to those developing nations which genuinely need and request our help and which demonstrably are willing and able to help themselves. 

Security and Development: 

The rub comes in this: We do not always grasp the meaning of the word "security" in this context. In a modernizing society, security means development. Security is not military hardware, though it may include it. Security is not military force, though it may involve it. Security is not traditional military activity, though it may encompass it. Security is development. Without development, there can be no security. A developing nation that does not in fact develop simply cannot remain "secure." It cannot remain secure for the intractable reason that its own citizenry cannot shed its human nature. 

If security implies anything, it implies a minimal measure of order and stability. Without internal development of at least a minimal degree, order and stability are simply not possible. They are not possible because human nature cannot be frustrated beyond intrinsic limits. It reacts because it must. 

Now, that is what we do not always understand, and that is also what governments of modernizing nations do not always understand. But by emphasizing that security arises from development, I do not say that an underdeveloped nation cannot be subverted from within, or be aggressed upon from without, or be the victim of a combination of the two. It can. And to prevent any or all of these conditions, a nation does require appropriate military capabilities to deal with the specific problem. But the specific military problem is only a narrow facet of the broader security problem. 

Military force can help provide law and order but only to the degree that a basis for law and order already exists in the developing society: a basic willingness on the part of the people to cooperate. The law and order is a shield, behind which the central fact of security – development - can be achieved.  

Now we are not playing a semantic game with these words. The trouble is that we have been lost in a semantic jungle for too long. We have come to identify "security" with exclusively military phenomena, and most particularly with military hardware. But it just isn't so. And we need to accommodate to the facts of the matter if we want to see security survive and grow in the southern half of the globe. 

Development means economic, social, and political progress. It means a reasonable standard of living, and the word "reasonable" in this context requires continual redefinition. What is "reasonable" in an earlier stage of development will become "unreasonable" in a later stage. As development progresses, security progresses. And when the people of a nation have organized their own human and natural resources to provide themselves with what they need and expect out of life and have learned to compromise peacefully among competing demands in the larger national interest then their resistance to disorder and violence will be enormously increased. Conversely, the tragic need of desperate men to resort to force to achieve the inner imperatives of human decency will diminish. 

Military and Economic Spheres of U.S. Aid: 

Now, I have said that the role of the United States is to help provide security to these modernizing nations, providing they need and request our help and are clearly willing and able to help themselves. But what should our help be? Clearly, it should be help toward development. In the military sphere, that involves two broad categories of assistance. 

We should help the developing nation with such training and equipment as is necessary to maintain the protective shield behind which development can go forward. The dimensions of that shield vary from country to country, but what is essential is that it should be a shield and not a capacity for external aggression. The second, and perhaps less understood category of military assistance in a modernizing nation, is training in civic action. Civic action is another one of those semantic puzzles. Too few Americans and too few officials in developing nations really comprehend what military civic action means. Essentially, it means using indigenous military forces for nontraditional military projects, projects that are useful to the local population in fields such as education, public works, health, sanitation, agriculture - indeed, anything connected with economic or social progress. 

It has had some impressive results. In the past 4 years the U.S. assisted civic action program, worldwide, has constructed or repaired more than 10,000 miles of roads, built over 1,000 schools, hundreds of hospitals and clinics, and has provided medical and dental care to approximately 4 million people. What is important is that all this was done by indigenous men in uniform. Quite apart from the developmental projects themselves, the program powerfully alters the negative image of the military man as the oppressive preserver of the stagnant status quo. 

But assistance in the purely military sphere is not enough. Economic assistance is also essential. The President is determined that our aid should be hard-headed and rigorously realistic, that it should deal directly with the roots of underdevelopment and not merely attempt to alleviate the symptoms. His bedrock principle is that U.S. economic aid - no matter what its magnitude - is futile unless the country in question is resolute in making the primary effort itself. That will be the criterion, and that will be the crucial condition for all our future assistance. 

Only the developing nations themselves can take the fundamental measures that make outside assistance meaningful. These measures are often unpalatable and frequently call for political courage and decisiveness. But to fail to undertake painful, but essential, reform inevitably leads to far more painful revolutionary violence. Our economic assistance is designed to offer a reasonable alternative to that violence. It is designed to help substitute peaceful progress for tragic internal conflict. 

The United States intends to be compassionate and generous in this effort, but it is not an effort it can carry exclusively by itself. And thus it looks to those nations who have reached the point of self-sustaining prosperity to increase their contribution to the development and, thus, to the security of the modernizing world. 

Sharing Peacekeeping Responsibilities: 

And that brings me to the second set of relationships that I underscored at the outset; it is the policy of the United States to encourage and achieve a more effective partnership with those nations who can, and should, share international peacekeeping responsibilities. 

America has devoted a higher proportion of its gross national product to its military establishment than any other major free-world nation. This was true even before our increased expenditures in Southeast Asia. We have had, over the last few years, as many men in uniform as all the nations of Western Europe combined, even though they have a population half again greater than our own. 

Now, the American people are not going to shirk their obligations in any part of the world, but they clearly cannot be expected to bear a disproportionate share of the common burden indefinitely. If, for example, other nations genuinely believe - as they say they do - that it is in the common interest to deter the expansion of Red China's economic and political control beyond its national boundaries, then they must take a more active role in guarding the defense perimeter. Let me be perfectly clear. This is not to question the policy of neutralism or nonalignment of any particular nation. But it is to emphasize that the independence of such nations can, in the end, be fully safeguarded only by collective agreements among themselves and their neighbors. 

The plain truth is the day is coming when no single nation, however powerful, can undertake by itself to keep the peace outside its own borders. Regional and international organizations for peacekeeping purposes are as yet rudimentary, but they must grow in experience and be strengthened by deliberate and practical cooperative action. 

In this matter, the example of Canada is a model for nations everywhere. As Prime Minister Pearson pointed out eloquently in New York just last week: Canada "is as deeply involved in the world's affairs as any country of its size. We accept this because we have learned over 50 years that isolation from the policies that determine war does not give us immunity from the bloody, sacrificial consequences of their failure. We learned that in 1914 and again in 1939. . . . That is why we have been proud to send our men to take part in every peacekeeping operation of the United Nations in Korea, and Kashmir, and the Suez, and the Congo, and Cyprus." 

The Organization of American States in the Dominican Republic, the more than 30 nations contributing troops or supplies to assist the Government of South Viet Nam, indeed even the parallel efforts of the United States and the Soviet Union in the Pakistan-India conflict these efforts, together with those of the U.N., are the first attempts to substitute multinational for unilateral policing of violence. They point to the peacekeeping patterns of the future. 

We must not merely applaud the idea. We must dedicate talent, resources, and hard practical thinking to its implementation. In Western Europe, an area whose burgeoning economic vitality stands as a monument to the wisdom of the Marshall Plan, the problems of security are neither static nor wholly new. Fundamental changes are under way, though certain inescapable realities remain. The conventional forces of NATO, for example, still require a nuclear backdrop far beyond the capability of any Western European nation to supply, and the United States is fully committed to provide that major nuclear deterrent. 

However, the European members of the alliance have a natural desire to participate more actively in nuclear planning. A central task of the alliance today is, therefore, to work out the relationships and institutions through which shared nuclear planning can be effective. We have made a practical and promising start in the Special Committee of NATO Defense Ministers. 

Common planning and consultation are essential aspects of any sensible substitute to the unworkable and dangerous alternative of independent national nuclear forces within the alliance. And even beyond the alliance we must find the means to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons. That is a clear imperative. There are, of course, risks in non-proliferation arrangements, but they cannot be compared with the infinitely greater risks that would arise out of the increase in national nuclear stockpiles. In the calculus of risk, to proliferate independent national nuclear forces is not a mere arithmetical addition of danger. We would not be merely adding up risks. We would be insanely multiplying them. 

If we seriously intend to pass on a world to our children that is not threatened by nuclear holocaust, we must come to grips with the problem of proliferation. A reasonable non-proliferation agreement is feasible. For there is no adversary with whom we do not share a common interest in avoiding mutual destruction triggered by an irresponsible nth power. 

Dealing With Potential Adversaries: 

That brings me to the third and last set of relationships the United States must deal with: those with nations who might be tempted to take up arms against us. These relationships call for realism. But realism is not a hardened, inflexible, unimaginative attitude. The realistic mind is a restlessly creative mind, free of naive delusions but full of practical alternatives. There are practical alternatives to our current relationships with both the Soviet Union and Communist China. A vast ideological chasm separates us from them and to a degree separates them from one another. There is nothing to be gained from our seeking an ideological rapproachment; but breaching the isolation of great nations like Red China, even when that isolation is largely of its own making reduces the danger of potentially catastrophic misunderstandings and increase the incentive on both sides to resolve disputes by reason rather than by force. 

There are many ways in which we can build bridges toward nations who would cut themselves off from meaningful contact with us. We can do so with properly balanced trade relations, diplomatic contacts and in some cases even by exchanges of military observers. We have to know when it is we want to place this bridge, what sort of traffic we want to travel over it, an on what mutual foundations the whole structure can be designed. There are no one cliff bridges. If you are going to span a chasm, you have to rest the structure on both cliffs. Now cliffs, generally speaking, are rather hazardous places. Some people are afraid even to look over the edge. But in a thermonuclear world, we cannot afford any political acrophobia. 

President Johnson has put the matter squarely: By building bridges to those who make themselves our adversaries, "we can help gradually to create a community of interest, a community of trust, and a community of effort." With respect to a "community of effort" let me suggest a concrete proposal for our own present young generation in the United States. It is a committed and dedicated generation. It has proven that in its enormously impressive performance in the Peace Corps overseas and in its willingness to volunteer for a final assault on such poverty and lack of opportunity that still remain in our own country. 

As matters stand, our present Selective Service System draws on only a minority of eligible young men. That is an inequity. It seems to me that we could move toward remedying that inequity by asking every young person in the United States to give 2 years of service to his country whether in one of the military services, in the Peace Corps, or in some other volunteer developmental work at home or abroad. 

We could encourage other countries to do the same, and we could work out exchange programs much as the Peace Corps is already planning to do. While this is not an altogether new suggestion, it has been criticized as inappropriate while we are engaged in a shooting war. But I believe precisely the opposite is the case. It is more appropriate now than ever. For it would underscore what our whole purpose is in Vietnam and indeed anywhere in the world where coercion, or injustice, or lack of decent opportunity still holds sway. It would make meaningful the central concept of security a world of decency and development where every man can feel that his personal horizon is rimmed with hope. 

Mutual interest, mutual trust, mutual effort those are the goals. Can we achieve those goals with the Soviet Union, and with Communist China? Can they achieve them with one another? The answer to these questions lies in the answer to an even more fundamental question. Who is man? Is he a rational animal? If he is, then the goals can ultimately be achieved. If he is not, then there is little point in making the effort. 

All the evidence of history suggests that man is indeed a rational animal but with a near infinite capacity for folly. His history seems largely a halting, but persistent, effort to raise his reason above his animality. He draws blueprints for utopia. But never quite gets it built. In the end he plugs away obstinately with the only building material really ever at hand his own part-comic, part-tragic, part-cussed, but part-glorious nature. 

I, for one, would not count a global free society out. Coercion, after all, merely captures man. Freedom captivates him.