Reality beyond the whiteboard

A nationwide survey conducted by an NGO in July 2005 found more than 90 per cent of Solomon Islanders believed RAMSI had been a success and supported it remaining. In October 2005, the International Monetary Fund reported that the Solomon Islands returned year-on-year GDP growth of 5.5 per cent for the two years following the RAMSI intervention. Contemplating quagmires in the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan, the US State Department expressed a growing interest in learning from RAMSI’s success.

National elections were held in the Solomon Islands in April 2006. The chaotic and opaque process of choosing a cabinet and prime minister resulted in former Deputy Prime Minister Snyder Rini being voted Prime Minister by 27 votes to 23. Despite Rini’s party having won more seats than any other in the elections (nine out of 50), the announcement of the vote led to immediate anger among the crowds gathered at the parliament, many of whom began shouting “Chinese money, Chinese money”. The protests grew into rioting that lasted 11 days and left Honiara’s Chinatown in ruins.

Among the victims of collateral damage was RAMSI’s sheen of success. As calm returned to the streets of Honiara, questions began to be asked about just how much progress had been made in state-building.

A succession of post-mortems began to document problems with the progress of the mission that had been accumulating almost since the day RAMSI had arrived. Sorting through these, it is hard to escape the conclusion that RAMSI was flawed not in its execution - there is ample evidence of the talent and dedication of Australian officials involved in the project - but in its design.

From this perspective, RAMSI appears to be not the shining example of successful state-building, but rather a case study that has begun to manifest problems which have become all too familiar in other state-building missions.

Ultimately, RAMSI is trapped by the same realisation that binds other state-building missions. From Iraq and Afghanistan to Kosovo and Bosnia, all remain vulnerable to ongoing turbulence in the political and social spheres, despite interventions’ efforts to build stable systems of public administration and constituencies for reform.

If they withdraw, the unreconciled hatreds in the political sphere, unresolved resentments in the economic sphere, and unreformed traditions in the social sphere will tear apart the externally constructed state frameworks. State-building’s intention of remaining aloof from politics, economics and society while concentrating on technocratic reforms has proved unrealistic.

The story of RAMSI is ultimately a parable of a conservative government seduced by a radical belief in the capacity of wealthy, developed societies to remake the world beyond their shores in their own image. If a single thread of failure strings together Iraq and Afghanistan, Kosovo and Bosnia, East Timor and Solomon Islands, it is the misconception that the state is an independent variable, ideally divorced from politics, economics and society.

To be sustainable, agreement on the nature of the state must arise from existing social forces and understandings, from real interests and clashes of interest which lead to the establishment of mechanisms and organisational rules and procedures capable of resolving and diffusing disagreements.

Rather than treating local politics as the source of political institutions, state-building relies on Western states’ political understandings and commitments and their belief in the power of institutions to shape political behaviour, rather than vice versa.

The Solomon Islands, a state of just half a million people, is not a whiteboard picture to be erased and redrawn, any more than Iraq is. Prime Minister Howard, the careful pragmatist, should have known this. But, seduced by a vision of grand intervention in the meanderings of South Pacific history, he now owns a venture that faces many more years of haphazard progress, with little sight of an emphatic conclusion.

And what traps RAMSI more than anything is the fear that, despite years of work and billions of taxpayers’ dollars, the waters of corruption and social chaos may rapidly close after an eventual withdrawal, as if the grand scheme for change had never happened.