Failed states are just nations that didn’t develop.
A good theory is one that accounts for opposing theories by finding crucial differences or by including the terms of others into being special cases of the general picture. So Spinoza knew he was countering Aristotle by making the crucial point that joy was unlimited rather than a golden mean and that Spinoza was also countering Descartes was wrong to think of people as mechanical when there was a great fluidity whereby emotions in consciousness could be transformed into one another. Weber subsumed Marx by showing that status, class and organization were, as we would put it, independent variables. Lesser theorists, however, do not engage their opponents, just assert their own points of view, and that occurs in a book circulating in political science circles these days called “Why Nations Fail” by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson which claim that nations like Egypt and Haiti fail is because corrupt elites are not overthrown. That is to look at a symptom rather than the cause of the problem, as happens in political science where that regularly happens as when it treats three presidents who have not been reelected, Carter, Bush and Trump, as failed Presidencies rather than as coincidence or for distinct reasons: Reagan’s stellar personality, the Bush economy, and Biden’s luck, or when, as in the present instance, corruption is an adjunct of failure rather than a cause, Ottoman Turkey corrupt and also failed while Ukraine also corrupt but winning a defensive war with a much stronger power.
Here are some reasons why a failed state is corrupt. One is economics. Corruption takes place when economic and political organizations are indifferent to the quality a vendor or official offers and so are inclined to take or offer money to avoid harsh measures or to engage in adequate services. A restaurateur does not care which concern will provide services so long as it is reliable. That means the free market system whereby vendors compete in price and service to get their business is abrogated or never developed and so violence is available as a persuader. Corruption, in that view, is the failure of capitalism to develop and so failed states are those with a pre capitalist economy, and that applies to many African states. There is also an organizational reason for corruption. A functionary may require brides to provide official documents because business is done in such a slaggard fashion that a bribe is needed to get minimum performance rather than because adequate performance is monitored by supervisors, each level of official delegating authority and being responsible for the efficiency of their underlings. So corruption is the result of a failed governance and so until recently was the case in many Latin American regimes.
Let me cut to the chase. There is a reason corrupt elites have not been overthrown by even well educated people like those in Egypt during the Arab Spring. The roots are very deep and have to do with religion. Failed states or ones that never were successful, like Haiti, were based on paganism, Black African states having only a patina of Catholicism. The authoritarian states of South America are based on Catholic hierarchies, while Northern Europe is Protestant and so expresses a point of view concerning individual autonomy. Weber presented a hierarchy of religions and that seems to meet the test of time. Scandinavia has abandoned religion but it has perpetuated that cultural point of view into its secularism. John Locke had the Protestant view that people would naturally reorganize into a social compact if an older one was antiquated. The view is compromise, which is what Ben Franklin offered to the British crown but was rejected and made him a reluctant revolutionary. On the other hand, the Egyptian progressives could not coalesce around El Baroudi, an international figure, and so the Muslim Brotherhood won the legitimate election, and soon showed their incompetence, and El Sisi, a general, took over and still reigns over Egypt. So Protestant and secular nations provide services and elections out of a respect for human dignity. The national populations which want that have to culturally evolve to that point, even though there is a backsliding to authoritarianism, as in Trumpism, and I hope it is a passing frenzy.
Another proposition of “Why Nations Fail” is that Western advanced societies are nations that do not need democracies because they have institutions, such as the courts and appointed executives, that will have them keep in line with substantive freedoms. That differs from other non democratic but not failed states such as China and Russia who are authoritarian because that is part of their culture for a thousand or more years, in the case of Russia, and for four thousand years in China. I dispute that claim about the West by remarking that democracy came into power in the 1820’s in the United States even though it is a term not used in the Constitution (and neither is the term “God” included in the Constitution). And England had posited the possibility of democracy in the 17th century though not accomplished gradually in the course of the nineteenth century.
What does it mean a state has failed? All it means is that it hasn’t developed rather than it has a fatal flaw which undermines what would otherwise be a sufficient society. I wonder whether there are such thighs as failed stages. There are nations that are proof and badly organized because they have never developed a prosperous economy or an efficient government and there are mighty few examples of well developed nations that have derogated to the point of being considered “failed”. Sudan is a possible candidate because it has fallen to anarchy in recent years and so is Somalia but those weren't well organized states to begin with. Jared Diamond lists Easter Island as having imploded, using its remaining wood to create totems, but Easter Island wasn’t a state but one island in the Polynesian culture and that remained. Diamond also cites the Mayans, but their fate is obscure. One would think that if there were failed states then one would think of a European or North American nation that met that fate, but we don’t have that. What we do have are civil wars as in Great Britain and the United States which were actively productive in those times. The United States Congress created land grant colleges and major infrastructure during the civil war and the Confederacy was defeated rather than having failed, its government in charge to the very end. Germany was also conquered after each world war and the leadership was changed but the stage survived and was soon enough engaged in independent business. Russia for a thousand years had been an authoritarian nation and after its civil war after the First World War resumed being an authoritarian nation and remains to this day being so. North Korea is not a failed state in that it imports food from China and exports armaments to Russia. It is an authoritarian state rather than a failed one however much it violates human rights stipulations.
Why are people inclined to think there are failed states despite the concept and its evidence is, at best, sketchy? The reason is that people very deeply feel that their organized peoples are subject to ca;lamatyies. Troy is overthrown and the Israelites have to rely on a miracle for them to escape from Egypt. Malthus thought a nation would come to ruin from famine and pestilence and modern day Malthusians think that climate change or toxic chemicals will do the deed of disruption to the nation or the world so greatly that the nation or the world will not recover except in a Mad Max future. Ordinary life is always in danger and Hobbes thought only a strong government can protect it while a failed state leaves behind anarchy.
There is a political angle here. Liberals tend to think that bi or multi party government can go on indefinitely, one or another putting forth an agenda that will address the problems posed by the nation and so there is no need for an advanced nation to fail. Com[plexity creates resilience rather than a fragile state of national affairs, just as happened when London and so many German cities found that separate neighborhoods near one another allowed life to survive despite intense bombing. Conservatives or Maga Republicans think that the government itself has been taken over by malign people and so catastrophe, a seriously declining state, is in the offing if a proper government is not restored and so will risk unconstitutional means to accomplish that.
Cline, a student of ancient civilizations, Eric Cline, says in “1177 B. C.”, that the end of the Late Bronze Age was a catastrophe where functioning states rapidly deteriorated as the result of foreign invasion rather than that there were technological and social advances that led civilization gto develop and evolve. That same sense of collapse is also imposed by St. Augustine and Gibbon to talk of the fall of the Roman Empire when in fact while there were no longer Emperors in the West, new places became centers of economic and administrative enterprise. Emperors were literate and Cbarlemagne was illiterate but Alcian, his counselor and biographer was, and by the Eleventh Century, St. Anselm was producing as sophisticated philosophy as there was before and since.The dark ages lasted just a few centuries and Medieval people were like Roman Empire people in having a literacy rate between ten and fifteen percent. Cline says that the present moment, which was 2020, said that there was a new perfect storm, led by Covid, that would derange civilization. But that is just apocalyptic thinking, akin to a religious view that some bad storms mean the advent of the Second Coming. Beware such thinking.
The concept of failed states is a pivotal idea for political thought. “Ideology and Utopia”, Karl Mannheim’s book of 1929, divided people who looked at social perfection as being in the past, and so endorsing an ideology that explained what happened and justified what occurred, with those whose minds were centered on the future, and so dreamt of utopias that would come. The same basic divide remains even without absolute terms. People who engage with the concept of failed states are Conservatives in that they think of perhaps inevitable decline from a time when things were better, maybe in an idealized Fifties when there were regular family values and supposedly no racial unrest and deviants who hid in the shadows or maybe the projection back into the first Trump turn when things must have been better, while on the other hand Liberals think forward to a more expanded freedom where people have more rights and material wealth/.Time can switch directions so that FDR is a model for the future just as a second trump term is a token of the past, when America was great.
The telescopes on the past or the future apply to foreign policy. Nations can emerge out of barbarism, inventing or importing ideas and institutions having to do with democracy and a mixed economy, other systems falling to the wayside as inefficient or otherwise antiquated, the forces of social evolution moving in the direction forward, societies ever more complex and intelligence driven, as is the case with biological species. Or else, nations can fall into failed states, presuming they had succeeded as states beforehand, because of cataclysms of war and disease and failures of nerve, as happened in the ancient world, a state lying among its ruins, what did not have to be and a warning that a successful state can make mistakes and turn into a ruin. Both postures can seem apocalyptic in that future progress can be sabotaged by a bad leader, like Hitler triumphing over Weimar democracy, however rocky it was, or, on the other hand, the backward urge can restore tradition and stability. More’s utopia was of a pastoral England and so not really ahead and 1984 was about a decline based on modern psychological technology. But however much we play around with time, there is the sense of whether past history or future history is best and most real, whether a romanticized medievalism in Victorian England or wings over the world making England pacific, prosperous and reaching to the stars, as in the Thirties film “Things to Come”. You can’t get much deeper than these two yearnings.