Reality beyond the whiteboard

As the plan for the Solomon Islands took shape in Canberra, it borrowed heavily from international blueprints for “state-building”, as applied in Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, Afghanistan and Iraq.

“State-building” is a relatively new term which has largely displaced the older term “nationbuilding”. Nation-building was a task that confronted all post-colonial states: a big, complex and inter-linked project, it implied a shaping of economy, politics and society - often from haphazardly collected ethnic groups - into a cohesive sovereign unit.

By contrast, state-building confines itself to the institutions of the state - primarily, the bureaucracy - with a view to increasing their integrity and efficiency and shaping them in way that will have positive effects on the economy, society and politics.

State-building sends a strong signal that the project is strictly limited in scope and technical in nature. It advertises the intent that either the intervention will leave local political processes and elites intact, or replace them quickly through a transparent electoral process.

State-building denotes both a willingness of the international community to impose peace and oversee some form of conflict-resolution, and a desire to disengage as quickly as possible from political and social processes and focus on the technocratic task of reforming state institutions.

The concept of state-building carries within it assumptions of what a completed state looks like, that in the end all states are constituted and function in the same way. With minor variations in emphasis, state-building frameworks concentrate on what are argued to be the key themes of state function: security and the rule of law; transparent and efficient bureaucratic institutions; the provision of essential services to the population; the operation of democratic processes and norms; and the fostering of the conditions for market-led development.

Of course, the “completed” state looks remarkably like ours. There is more than a hint of what Michael Ignatieff calls imperial narcissism, a “desire to imprint our values, civilisation and achievements on the souls, bodies and institutions of other people”.

State-building rests on the beliefs that the state as a political form can be transferred across all cultures and contexts and, crucially, that the long and bloody process of state-building experienced in the West can be both truncated and sanitised by those who hold the blueprints of the final product.

The philosophy of state-building is that external actors will initially supply what are taken to be the crucial attributes of the state - coercion, capacity, legitimacy and capital - with the intention of transferring these attributes of “stateness” to an indigenous sovereign centre of political accountability over time.

A narrow focus on the technocratic tasks of reforming bureaucratic institutions has the benefit of avoiding, as much as is possible by an intervention, resonances of neo-colonialism. By demonstrating that it wishes to operate alongside an indigenous, representative government - either left intact by the intervention or rapidly constituted through a representative process sponsored by the intervention - the state-building mission sends a clear signal that it is there to render technical advice, not to meddle in the politics of the society.

The task of imparting efficient bureaucratic practices and redesigning institutions seems much more achievable than trying to reform the processes of political representation and power in many societies.

While planners in Canberra acknowledged that corruption within the Solomon Islands political system was a major problem, this was not an issue they wanted to tackle directly. It was hoped that if the intervention could deliver an effective and scrupulous bureaucracy, this would act as a buffer against the criminality of the elected officials.

These blueprints were powerfully shaped by changes to the Australian state that had occurred over 20 years. In line with much of the rest of the developed world, Australia has pared back its welfare state to a much more minimalist “regulatory state”.

The Australian state has withdrawn from the economy and many areas of service provision, shifting the role of government from that of generating social and economic outcomes to that of establishing, through regulation, parameters of acceptable conduct and manipulating incentives, the appropriate conditions for social, political and economic forces to generate desirable outcomes.

The state is conceived as separate from the distinct spheres of the economy, politics and society - each of which, in Friedrich Hayek’s terms, is seen to be constituted as a “spontaneous order”, with an inner, autonomous dynamism. The philosophy of the regulatory state is that government’s role is to foster the inherent dynamism within the economic, political and social spheres in positive directions, not to attempt to replace those forces or compete with them in creating desired outcomes.

The blueprint for the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI) consisted of three overlapping phases. The first phase arrived on the morning of July 24, 2003 at Henderson Airfield, Honiara, in a flotilla of 13 Royal Australian Airforce C-130 Hercules transport planes and in the HMAS Manoora which had anchored off Guadalcanal Beach before dawn. Three hundred police and 1,700 soldiers from Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Samoa and Papua New Guinea deployed in an intentional display of overwhelming force.

The objective of the first phase was to restore law and order, disarm the militants who had terrorised the society, and resurrect the justice system to punish violent and criminal elements. RAMSI put its military prowess on prominent display, staging public demonstrations of military manoeuvres involving helicopters, troops and sniffer dogs finding buried weapons.

Such intimidation was crucial to restoring calm, encouraging Harold Keke to surrender, and collecting and destroying 4,000 guns - including 700 high-powered military weapons - by November 2003.

Phase two centred on governance reform. Australian officials, drawn from the Australian Federal Police, DFAT, the Department of Finance, the Treasury, the Attorney-General’s Department, the Defence Department, the Australian Office of Financial Management, the Australian Customs Service and AusAID, were placed both in line positions within the Solomon Islands bureaucracy and in advisory roles.

It was hoped that placing experienced Australian public servants within the bureaucracy would not only impart administrative skills and culture, but would also lead to enduring institutional links. Because of problems with public service recruitment in the Solomon Islands, Australian officials initially intended as advisers often found they had no counterparts in the Solomon Islands public service, and had to slot into line roles instead.

Australia’s assistance focused on the public service, cabinet, accountability institutions, parliamentary processes and the electoral system.

Significant emphasis was given to inculcating public servants with bureaucratic culture and knowledge of administrative regulations and role delimitations. Training was provided in merit selection procedures, effective leadership skills, the tracking, monitoring and storage of documents and records, and communicating within the public service and between the public service and Cabinet.

Phase three focused on establishing the conditions for economic development. Initial work was targeted at the economic functions of state. There was a heavy initial focus on budget support and financial management processes. The key areas for reform and capacity-building were identified as budget, audit, treasury, inland revenue, customs, payroll and debt management.

By mid-2005, Australia appeared to have shown the world what a successful state-building mission looked like. The military element had been drastically reduced, law and order had returned to the streets of Honiara, and over 5,000 criminal charges had been laid.

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.