Success and Its Lessons
Somaliland’s success so far in building its region’s most accountable and open political system holds important lessons about how states can develop and democratize—and why most countries in its region have not.
First, Somaliland’s evolution shows that states should look inward for their resources and institutional models and adopt political structures and processes that reflect the history, complexity, and particularity of their peoples and environment. Instead of mimicking a Western-style top-down system of governance, which typically ignores or suppresses indigenous traditions and customs, Somaliland has been forced by its isolation to build a state enmeshed in its surrounding society. Far too many postcolonial regimes have looked outward for their governance models and resources—often becoming dependent on foreign aid and advisors and ensuring that their domestic roots will never run deep enough.
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This means not that Western political models have no relevance to nonwestern societies, but rather that those models must be adapted to accommodate local political, economic, and societal customs and conditions. Robust states are unlikely to be built with centralized regimes, Western-style laws, and a democracy defined solely in terms of regular elections; instead, capable, inclusive, participatory, responsive, and accountable governments should be promoted no matter what form they take.
In a similar vein, international assistance efforts are more likely to succeed if they bolster rather than distort local capacities and institutions. Undisciplined injections of foreign money all too often undermine or overwhelm local processes, especially given the tendency of many international programs to focus on easily quantifiable targets for financial aid or poverty reduction and to promote the importation of generic, centralized state models. Helping underdeveloped countries should not be about propping up the state from outside, but rather about connecting it—and making it accountable where possible—to its surrounding society.
A second lesson to be gleaned from Somaliland’s experience is that a population’s cohesiveness and the success of democratization efforts are closely related. States made up of competing ethnic, religious, and clan groups—Iraq, Kenya, and Nigeria come to mind—are often torn asunder by zero-sum battles over who will control the state and its resources. By contrast, cohesive societies such as Somaliland’s, with its strong sense of common history, identity, and destiny, are more likely to reach consensus as to how the government should work, how changes in that government should come about, and how the state should spend its resources. The governments that such societies produce are also much more likely to appear legitimate and representative in their citizens’ eyes. Moreover, recent studies have shown that homogeneous populations are more likely to invest in public goods such as roads, schools, and health centers—all necessary for development.18 These cohesive states’ social glue is far more likely to accommodate the competitiveness intrinsic to democracy; the fractured societies common to divided countries are more likely to break down—perhaps violently—in the face of electoral combat.
Of course, Somaliland is not entirely free of such divisions. The country’s difficulties in negotiating a fair distribution of seats in its Parliament, in demarcating the boundaries between regional and district administrative territories, and in limiting the political space to a set number of actors all show the challenges that it must meet in order to reconcile competing clan interests. It has similarly experienced problems (reflected in disagreements over acceptable levels of media freedom and political activity) in trying to strike a balance between individual rights and group rights—a perennial problem for young states as they strive to craft the terms under which multiple identity groups can live together. Somaliland’s struggles with secessionist groups, moreover, remind us that even those new countries where most people support the national idea will face opposition to the whole state-building notion.
A third lesson that Somalia offers the international community is the importance of institutional design. Because cohesiveness figures so largely in the building of robust and democratic countries, the international community needs to do more to foster such governing bodies and systems as will best promote cohesiveness in a given context. A good first step would be for the international community to stop insisting on political models that are clearly unable to advance cohesion—or that even undermine it. Persistent efforts to reequip Somalia with a centralized state—carried out despite the repeated failures of such efforts in the past—show a lack of appreciation for the informal institutions that drive Somali society. Bolivia, Congo (Kinshasa), Iraq, Sudan, and other divided countries are unlikely to build successful democracies unless and until they shift governmental resources and responsibilities away from the center and toward local bodies that are more likely to be responsive to relatively cohesive groups of people. In practice, this will usually best be accomplished by adopting some form of federal arrangement and by accommodating diverse forms of self-government. In a few instances, however, the only way to leverage local capacities and loyalties to build a strong state may be secession.
The standard development paradigm gives “little thought . . . to the possibility that existing state structures might . . . be the cause of instability” in many postcolonial countries, even when “state-like entities such as Somaliland are more viable in terms of their ability to manage their own territory, to provide basic services, and in terms of their internal cohesiveness.”19 Such an approach to state-building disregards the many vast differences between countries and ignores the people’s desire to choose not only their leaders but also their institutions.
The international community would do better if it focused on retailoring and leveraging traditional forms of governance that have evolved to suit local conditions instead of trying to squeeze societies into inappropriate Western models of what a modern state is supposed to look like. Development and democratization work best when a state’s institutions are genuine reflections of an organic historical process.
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