During the Cold War, there was never any debate about what to do with weak, failing, and failed states. The consensus was that the U.S. should do whatever was necessary to prevent them from falling into the enemy’s orbit. Democracy was desirable but often unachievable. More often than not, the U.S. Government was willing to accept something far short of “Jeffersonian democracy” in hotspots around the world.
The end of the Cold War began a running debate about what threat failed states presented and how that threat should be dealt with. In a widely-cited article, scholar Robert H. Dorff argued that the dangers posed by failed states were understood well-before 9/11. The real challenge has been reconciling two competing imperatives regarding what should actually be done about failed states.
On one side of the debate, idealists argue that the U.S. should promote a freedom agenda to democratize the struggling states of the world. On the other, realists insist that any government is better than no government. These two camps give rise to seemingly incongruous U.S. support for flailing democracy initiatives in corners of the world that have never before known it and odious regimes in others.
Towards a “legitimacy agenda”
This disconnect can be resolved through a re-conceptualization of what it is the U.S. should be trying to do in the first place. Instead of pursuing democratization for democracy’s sake or equipping dictators to improve the internal security of their oppressed states, Dorff notes that the U.S. should be promoting the cause of legitimate governance the world over. Dorff argues that legitimate governance is simply government by consent of the governed. In other words, government that is tolerated by the people even if it is not a government of the people, by the people, and for the people (sound familiar?).
The key here is to recognize that totalitarian states and ungoverned states actually present much the same problem, albeit for slightly different reasons. When a state fails to fulfill its obligations under the most basic social contract, for reasons of commission or omission, it is bad news for global security. To begin to operationalize a legitimacy agenda, the U.S. would need to identify indicators of legitimacy (hint: if you are using gangs of motorcycle-mounted paramilitaries to beat your people into submission, you are probably illegitimate), and customize policies to facilitate peaceful, incremental change wherever possible. Sometimes, that will mean doing much. Other times, it may mean doing nothing at all.
