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NEWS

POLICY ADVOCACY DEBATE SERIES

Draft 1

MAIN ISSUE: Failing States "in full view" of International Community Assistance

SPONSOR: NGO Committee on Africa, *Taskforce on the Least Developed Countries (LDCs)

PARTICIPATING ADVOCACY ORGANIZATIONS: 3 Core Groups
Academia, Practitioners, Civil Society

TARGETED AUDIENCE: Foreign Policy Makers, External Assistance Organizations

PROJECTED DURATION: April 14, 2003 - June 2003(2months)

NOTE

1.- Background

September 11 gave members of the international community more than a moral imperative to prevent states from failing and to resuscitate those that fail. By failure, it is meant that the state is losing the ability to control its territory and guarantee security of its citizens, maintain the rule of law, promote human rights, provide effective governance, and deliver public goods to its populations (such as economic growth, education and healthcare). For as well as breeding misery, state disintegration can bring drugs, violence, and crime across borders, to people living many thousands of miles away at the heart of the most powerful democracies in the world.

As to addressing the problem from an international standpoint, foreign policy makers has that ability, given the reliance of so many countries on external assistance as their only vital means of life-support. It is because of this degree of leverage that promoters of democracy enjoy, usually exercised in the form aid "conditionality" or at times through direct intervention in support of state-building, that several minds find legitimacy to raise suspicions over the well intention of the international community whenever democracy fails to the point of collapse before their eyes and sometimes in their very hands.

The mixed record of success among states rushing or being rushed to join nations of "majority rule", as a key internationally recognizable standards of democratization, poses a highly relevant policy issue for foreign policy makers as well as a universal human security issue for the whole.

As the United States and Britain are getting ready to do nation-building in Iraq, unless some very basic principles outside of the standards are established, the euphoric sense of accomplishment which will be experienced in the years that immediately follow will turn out to be a disaster waiting to explode 10 or 20 years down the road when all political indifferences will have been set aside.

2.- The Debates

The taskforce will seek to engage 3 core groups, Academia, Practitioners, and Civil Society in the undertaking of debates on the issue. Their collective input will be compiled into a report forming the basis for advocacy on the issue and be taken up before foreign policy makers and external assistance organizations.

In view of the complexity of the issue, this work will be focused on a group of states to include Nigeria, South Africa, Sierra Leone, Haiti, Guatemala, East Timor, Zimbabwe which at some point in recent years shared a list of common denominators, and yet whose fate today lie each on a different course. They share, past or present, one or more of the following thread(s):
(1) States in transition to democracy
(2) States newly installed after civil war or restored through external intervention .
(3) States heavily reliant on foreign assistance or foreign markets.

The conceptual framework for this initiative is based on the ground that the potential root cause for state failure resides for the most part at the structural level in the transition process to becoming democratic. A reversal of order usually occurs, as states with centralized establishment are forced into the conventional system of majority rule without ensuring the institutionalization of the process. Where at the first extreme, there is lack of participation, at the other extreme there is a lack of representation. At neither extreme, if a hypothesis can be drawn, do states have any real chance of delivering good governance. The taskforce is of the view that in order for democracy to succeed wherever democracy is called for, the electoral process must be driven, as a rule of thumb, by institutions and the outcomes determined by the citizens. Against this argument it will be proven that failures at any other level can all be associated with this underlying cause. Debates are expected to provide an analytical framework from which the role and impact of international assistance can be better assessed.

3.- Points Relevant to Main Issue

· Why do they fail?
· What responsibility the international community is to bear?
· Internationalisation of Standards of political legitimacy. Is the emphasis Representation or Participation?
· Rule by the People or With the People? Democratic Processes in Developed Nations.
· Lessons of Governance at the Corporate Level. Can these models be transferred to nation-building?
· Lessons Learned, Successes, Failures, Best Prectices.
· Is assistance helping to fuel conflicts in Failing States? How can emergency humanitarian response be targeted in those states?
· States Which exist on Paper versus States with Social Capital Stock