Statebuilder's Dilemma: On the Limits of Foreign Intervention

New
Hardcover
2016
$184.37

The central task of all statebuilding is to create a state that is regarded as legitimate by the people over whom it exercises authority. This is a necessary condition for stable, effective governance. States sufficiently motivated to bear the costs of building a state in some distant land are likely to have interests in the future policies of that country, and will therefore seek to promote loyal leaders who are sympathetic to their interests and willing to implement their preferred policies. In The Statebuilder's Dilemma, David A. Lake addresses the key tradeoff between legitimacy and loyalty common to all international statebuilding attempts. Except in rare cases where the policy preferences of the statebuilder and the population of the country whose state is to be built coincide, as in the famous success cases of West Germany and Japan after 1945, promoting a leader who will remain loyal to the statebuilder undermines that leader's legitimacy at home.In Iraq, thrust into a statebuilding role it neither anticipated nor wanted, the United States eventually backed Nouri al-Malaki as the most favorable of a bad lot of alternative leaders. Malaki then used the support of the Bush administration to govern as a Shiite partisan, undermining the statebuilding effort and ultimately leading to the second failure of the Iraqi state in 2014. Ethiopia faced the same tradeoff in Somalia after the rise of a promising but irredentist government in 2006, invading to put its own puppet in power in Mogadishu. But the resulting government has not been able to build significant local support and legitimacy. Lake uses these cases to demonstrate that the greater the interests of the statebuilder in the target country, the more difficult it is to build a legitimate state that can survive on its own.

Synopsis

The central task of all statebuilding is to create a state that is regarded as legitimate by the people over whom it exercises authority. This is a necessary condition for stable, effective governance. States sufficiently motivated to bear the costs of building a state in some distant land are likely to have interests in the future policies of that country, and will therefore seek to promote loyal leaders who are sympathetic to their interests and willing to implement their preferred policies. In The Statebuilder's Dilemma, David A. Lake addresses the key tradeoff between legitimacy and loyalty common to all international statebuilding attempts. Except in rare cases where the policy preferences of the statebuilder and the population of the country whose state is to be built coincide, as in the famous success cases of West Germany and Japan after 1945, promoting a leader who will remain loyal to the statebuilder undermines that leader's legitimacy at home.In Iraq, thrust into a statebuilding role it neither anticipated nor wanted, the United States eventually backed Nouri al-Malaki as the most favorable of a bad lot of alternative leaders. Malaki then used the support of the Bush administration to govern as a Shiite partisan, undermining the statebuilding effort and ultimately leading to the second failure of the Iraqi state in 2014. Ethiopia faced the same tradeoff in Somalia after the rise of a promising but irredentist government in 2006, invading to put its own puppet in power in Mogadishu. But the resulting government has not been able to build significant local support and legitimacy. Lake uses these cases to demonstrate that the greater the interests of the statebuilder in the target country, the more difficult it is to build a legitimate state that can survive on its own.

$184.37

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 256
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 01 Aug 2016
ISBN 10: 1501700308
ISBN 13: 9781501700309

Media Reviews

The Statebuilder's Dilemma has an impressively clear and persuasive argument. Statebuilding is the enterprise to create stable states by intervening actors from outside the polity. Despite the treasure, time, and blood that has been spent in the name of statebuilding, every modern attempt has failed. David A. Lake develops the notion of the 'statebuilder's dilemma' to explain why this has been the case. Lake brings up fundamental aspects of political order in ways that are thought provoking and surely bound to stimulate new avenues of research and teaching. His use of a wide range of examples from nineteenth- and twentieth-century history makes his argument both solid and applicable to further in-depth studies of more cases. I highly recommended this book to scholars of state theory and international relations as well as to military and civilian practitioners who grapple with these complex issues.

-- Peter Halden, Swedish Defence University, author of Stability without Statehood: Lessons from Europe's History before the Sovereign State

David A. Lake provides in this important and timely book a strong critique of U.S. efforts to build the legitimacy and capacity of states in the wake of military interventions. In penetrating analyses of efforts to create a strong post-Saddam Hussein state in Iraq and a state arising from anarchy in post-Siad Barre Somalia, Lake carefully explains how the United States as state builder faces a fundamental dilemma: in installing regimes that are loyal to U.S. interests, these governments lose legitimacy in the eyes of their own people. This book makes an important contribution to knowledge on the fundamental dilemmas of externally led statebuilding and it implies a deeply sober caution about the utility of ambitious statebuilding efforts by great powers such as the United States.

-- Timothy Sisk, University of Denver, author of Statebuilding

In asserting that the failure of international statebuilding is 'overdetermined,' David A. Lake's critical (but also reassuring) study of U.S. policymaking adds a nice twist: the dilemma that the more we want to help the less able we are to do so. That is, unless we have the patience and foresight to put aside desires to fast forward processes that require indigenous forms of ownership, commitment, and relationship-building, led by domestic actors.

-- David Chandler, University of Westminster

Explores key trade-offs between legitimacy and loyalty in state building, explaining how promoting a leader loyal to the state builder undermines that leader's legitimacy at home, and investigates armed or militarized state building through in-depth case studies of Iraq and Somalia.

* JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC LITERATURE *

Author Bio

David A. Lake is Jerri-Ann and Gary E. Jacobs Professor of Social Sciences and Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of The Statebuilder's Dilemma: On the Limits of Foreign Intervention, and Hierarchy in International Relations and the coeditor of Politics in the New Hard Times: The Great Recession in Comparative Perspective and The State and American Foreign Economic Policy, all from Cornell University Press.