Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World

By Joel S. Migdal

Why do many Asian, African, and Latin American states have such difficulty in directing the behavior of their populations--in spite of the resources at their disposal? And why do a small number of other states succeed in such control? What effect do failing laws and social policies have on the state itself? In answering these questions, Joel Migdal takes a new look at the role of the state in the third world. Strong Societies and Weak States offers a fresh approach to the study of state-society relations and to the possibilities for economic and political reforms in the third world.


In Asia, Africa, and Latin America, state institutions have established a permanent presence among the populations of even the most remote villages. A close look at the performance of these agencies, however, reveals that often they operate on principles radically different from those conceived by their founders and creators in the capital city. Migdal proposes an answer to this paradox: a model of state-society relations that highlights the state's struggle with other social organizations and a theory that explains the differing abilities of states to predominate in those struggles.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: May 5, 2020
• ISBN: 9780691212852

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PROLOGUE

IN ONE section of France, the evening prayers of peasants long included the line, Deliver us from all evil and from justice.¹ Certainly, French peasants have not been alone in their equivocal or antagonistic relationship with justice and the state that represents the rules of justice. In the following pages, I will explore some central relations between people and the states that seek to make the rules of justice to govern their lives.

Do states actually make a difference in the lives of the people they seek to govern? Undoubtedly yes. Even in the most remote corners of those societies with the newest states, the personnel, agencies, and resources of the state have reshaped political and social landscapes. Have these contours of society been redrawn more or less as state leaders envisioned? Here I must equivocate: only in a handful of cases and in realms involving some issues more than others. This book offers a set of tools—a model and a theory—for approaching the difficult question of why some states succeed more and some less in realizing the visions of their leaders.

The main issues will be state capabilities or their lack: the ability of state leaders to use the agencies of the state to get people in the society to do what they want them to do.² Focusing merely on the direct impact of states on societies, however, would give us only a partial view of the relations between peoples and states and would miss important aspects of why some states are more capable than others. Societies also affect states. We will look at how the structure of society affects state capabilities. We will also explore how societies influence the character and style of states encountering great difficulties in getting people to follow their leaders. In addition, a full view of relations between a people and its state requires looking beyond domestic society. The calculus of state-society relations has changed dramatically, as we shall see, because of forces outside the society altogether.

All states have had limited capabilities at some time, or with some groups, or on some issues. Note a recent description of a small fringe group, the Posse Comitatus, and its disregard for laws in the United States: If you are Posse, you do not bother with a driving licence; you get rid of your birth certificate and marriage licence; you do not have a bank account and you keep your children away from school. . . . You arm yourself with a gun and several thousand rounds of ammunition, and train at weekends.³ Nevertheless, the limitations of state capabilities, including tax collection and regulation of personal behavior, have been especially acute for state leaders in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Only a mere handful of these states—China, Cuba, Israel, Japan, North Korea, South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam—have ended up on the strong states end of a scale of state capabilities. I will primarily focus on states and societies on these continents. Why have so many of these states failed so often to get their populations to do as state leaders legislate and decree, and why have a few others been so much stronger?

This book stems from two paradoxes I troubled over as I reviewed some of the vast literature on political life, particularly regarding various Third World countries.⁴ The first concerns the incredible change in the political landscape of even the most remote villages in Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the last generation. In all sizes and shapes, state institutions from health clinics to marketing boards have established a permanent presence among the populations of these countries, resulting in income transfers, a changing quality of life, new social hierarchies, and more. But a close look at the performance of these agencies reveals that often they operate on principles radically different from those conceived by their founders and creators in the capital city. The second paradox seems even more bizarre. Another close look at accounts of the political behavior of top state leaders revealed, strange as it may seem, that many have persistently and consciously undermined their own state agencies—the very tools by which they could increase their capabilities and effect their policy agendas. Primarily I sought to discover some solution to or explanation of these paradoxes.

I found the literature I studied both indispensable and frustrating. It was indispensable in helping me construct for myself broad outlines of difficult and complex processes. Numerous articles and books, many of which I do not even mention in the chapters that follow, contained important, keen insights into states and societies. I am indebted to them for countless sources of inspiration. But that literature was also full of unresolved contradictions, and I took issue with much of it, particularly the self-consciously theoretical materials. I have restrained myself (quite admirably, I think) from lengthy critiques of this literature and past approaches to the subject of political and social change in the Third World. My purpose has been to discuss, as directly as possible, the components and logic of a different approach and explanation for understanding social and political organization and the relationship between them. The reader familiar with the literature on social and political change in the Third World will note how my approach differs from those dominating the subject in recent decades.

I reject, for instance, the teleological, unilinear assumptions of modernization theory, which have been at pains to explain the various types of emergent political and social organization. I argue implicitly against modernization theory’s preoccupation with the effect of center on periphery and its lack of interest in the impact of periphery on the center. Also, I emphasize fragmented social organizations and their impact on politics, bringing into sharp relief the limitations of the concept of social class, as used by Marxist theorists and others, to explain many dynamics of Third World societies. Although I have relied on some conceptions developed in world system theory, my approach rejects the tendency of both that theory and dependency theory to see the dynamics of Third World social organization and politics almost exclusively in terms of processes in the metropolitan or core countries. World economic and political forces have presented opportunities and constraints, as Chapters 2 through 4 make clear, but the dynamics of state-society relations have a life that considerably exceeds the effects of core-periphery interactions. I have tried to show, in opposition to much scholarship on the impact of capitalism, that the social dislocations associated with the spread of the world economy did not automatically answer how society would be restructured.

My approach, too, takes issue with empiricists, those area specialists and historians who claim to lack any preconceived notions or approaches and simply present what they see. Of course, all observers are aided and limited by their mental constructs, whether explicit or implicit. So often the works of the empiricists, especially the more common literature focusing on capital city or palace politics and even those on the hinterlands, have missed intense state-society struggles in remote parts of the country as well as the pressure of forces from outside the society.

In general, the literature on the Third World falls into two categories. The first looks at societies at the ground level, focusing on peasant communities, patron-client ties, urban neighborhoods, and the like; these studies, while occasionally referring to state policies and resources, often remain enmeshed in the intricacies of social life at the local level. The second category focuses on life among the most influential elements—powerful elites, large capital, foreign investment, and so on. Studies here much too facilely assume that those at the pinnacle of politics can effectively repress or transform or reform the rest of society.

My chief complaint about the literature I reviewed was that so many prevailing approaches—modernization theories, Marxist theories, dependency and world system theories, empiricist descriptions—were both too uncritical about the power at the top and too state-centered. For the Third World, at least, a state-centered approach is a bit like looking at a mousetrap without at all understanding the mouse. Somehow the focus of attention on centerstage in so many books and articles seemed to take as given what I found so open to question: the issue of the autonomy and strength of the state. Also, I do not think the rediscovery of the state in recent years by those writing on Europe has been terribly helpful in this regard. These authors have either dismissed the state entirely outside Europe and North America, talking at times of stateless or nonstate societies, or else they have developed notions of state autonomy extended fairly indiscriminately to Third World cases.

State-centered approaches do have a certain intuitive attractiveness about them. The state’s home base in the capital city, after all, is the place where the action seems to occur—the appearance of swanky limousines, the machinations of the high politics of society, the workings of the security nerve centers for army and police, the concentration of foreign and domestic capital. In this book, I hope to convince the reader that even capital city politics can best be understood, counter-intuitively perhaps, by expanding one’s field of vision. There is a need constantly to look back and forth between the top reaches of the state and local society. One must see how the organization of society, even in remote areas, may dictate the character and capabilities of politics at the center, as well as how the state (often in unintended ways) changes society. I have been very gratified in my final examination of the literature to find a number of very recent works, some still unpublished, that reflect aspects of the new approach developed here.⁵ These studies look at both local society and the state; many stress how state policies are deflected and how state resources are redirected as they filter down to society, and the studies analyze, as well, the unexpected effects state and society have on one another.

Convincing readers to change their way of looking at political and social change and inertia is an ambitious undertaking indeed. To do that, I have written this book as an integrated general essay, one that is more suggestive than definitive. Its very scope has forced me to leave important questions open or incompletely addressed.⁶ In this manner I could develop an approach inclusive enough to digest varieties of political experiences, especially in the post-World War II era, and make some sense of them.

My model and theory should present, if successful, an approach to understanding the capabilities of all modern states, but in the essay, I have turned repeatedly to the experiences of five states: Egypt, India, Israel, Mexico, and Sierra Leone. These countries are by no means a representative sample but a selection;⁷ their examples help to give a suppleness, subtlety, and complexity to the material that would be impossible to achieve simply by presenting an abstract theory. I have not compared these countries systematically, nor have I seen each of them through all facets of the theory. My purpose is not to tell and explain each country’s story. The story here is the theory, which explains the varying capabilities of states and the character of weak states. The five countries are only illustrations, highlighting portions of the argument.

Why were these five countries selected above all others? I would be less than candid if I did not admit these are states and societies about which I knew a bit more than others or, at least, about which I wanted to learn a lot more. My selection also sought a range of cases along a spectrum of state capabilities. As a result, the five illustrative cases run the gamut of possibilities from one with a very weak state, Sierra Leone, to one with a relatively strong state, Israel.

Egypt, India, and Mexico have each displayed remarkable instances of both high and low state capabilities in different realms. Mexico, for example, has been singled out many times as a strong state with corporatist or bureaucratic-authoritarian tendencies. Similarly, researchers have pointed to the historically high penetrative capabilities of the Egyptian state or the extraordinary capabilities of the Indian civil service. All three states have developed a myriad of new governmental institutions that have irrevocably changed daily lives in towns and villages throughout their countries. Nevertheless, all three have shown astonishing weaknesses, as well, as they have attempted to mobilize and appropriate resources to change daily habits in intended ways. Mexico, for example, has been very low in its extractive capabilities, with the state share of GNP at just over 10 percent.⁸ All three have found rich peasants in rural areas redirecting state resources to effect results not at all intended in state legislation and policy. Thus, these three states are at a middle level of capabilities between the states in Israel and Sierra Leone. Together, the five cases provide the kinds of differences in state capabilities that could enrich the theory.

I also picked these particular countries because they vary in a number of other important ways. As in a most different systems research design, I sought cases different enough in certain key regards so that I could eliminate these differences as possible explanations of state capabilities because these differences did not correlate with variations in these capabilities. The cases thus range from ones displaying extreme ethnic heterogeneity in society, such as in India, to unusual homogeneity, as in Egypt; from small populations, as in Sierra Leone and Israel, to extremely large, as in India. I also wanted cases from a variety of culture areas. All these differences suggest, although I have far from proved the case, the general applicability of the approach developed here.

The selection of these five countries was also influenced by the importance of colonialism in affecting later state-society relations. I decided to concentrate on the impact of one colonial power, Great Britain. Four of the five countries were greatly affected historically by Great Britain, which played a leading role in the expansion of the European world system in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This expansion and the various direct and indirect forms it took, as I posit in Chapters 2, 3, and 4, were very important for understanding current state capabilities. Although there may indeed be important differences for societies that came under other Western influences, the sheer scope of British influence made it worth a special focus of concern. By the early twentieth century, the British ruled about two-thirds of all colonized peoples. On the eve of World War II, the British Empire embraced roughly one-quarter of the world’s population and land surface. The one case of our five that Britain did not rule directly or indirectly is Mexico. Nonetheless, I thought it important to draw illustrations from a major Latin American country as well. Also, it is worth noting that the British did dominate external economic relations with Mexico well into the nineteenth century.⁹

This book presents both a model and a theory for understanding state-society relations in Third World countries. Part I offers the model: an approach for analyzing the diverse and complex societies that make up the Third World. It emphasizes the distribution of social control among the many organizations in society that vie to make the rules about how people should behave. In Parts II and III, a theory is developed to answer the central question of the book: Why have many Third World states had such difficulty in becoming the organization in society that effectively establishes those rules of behavior? Part II delves into a critical period of history to demonstrate the circumstances that led to social control in societies being distributed as it is. The focus will be on a tandem of international forces, those paving the way for the expansion of the world economy and those involving European rule of non-Western societies, which worked somewhat independently and combined with indigenous forces to produce some very long-lasting results. Part II asks how things became what they are at the societal level. The analysis in Part III centers on why the social patterns that developed, which have impeded the growth of state capabilities, have not been overturned in the last generation. Why, even after the crumbling of Western empires, have many states continued to encounter insurmountable forces in their society and what results have such forces had on states and political life generally in these countries?

In grappling with the question of state capabilities, I have sought to treat Third World societies—but not necessarily Third World states—sympathetically, if unsentimentally. This is a book on how to understand state capabilities; it does not offer prescriptions on how to enhance them. My own bias does not run toward uncritical support for increased state strength. All too often that process has been accompanied by attacks on the identities and lives of the most vulnerable elements in society, minorities and the poor. The struggles for social control in the Third World, at the heart of the following analysis, have been over the control of these peoples. For vulnerable individuals, that struggle for control of their lives has frequently been little more than a conflict between the evils of exploitative local powers and the justice of an aggrandizing state intent on transforming them and ridding them of some of their most cherished values.

¹ Quoted in Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976), p. 50.

² Our view of the state, then, corresponds to Max Weber’s notion of the state as institutional–an organization–enforcing regulations, at least in part through a monopoly of violence. States vary in the degree to which they actually approach such an ideal type. I will expand more on the meaning of the state in Chapter 1. Here, it is worth quoting from Bertrand Badie and Pierre Birnbaum to give a glimpse of how the concept of the state and its relationship to capabilities will be developed in this study.

The progress of state building can be measured by the degree of development of certain instrumentalities whose purpose is to make the action of the state effective: bureaucracy, courts, and the military, for example. Clearly, the more complex and highly developed these instrumentalities are, the greater the capacity of the state to act on its environment and to autonomously impose collective goals distinct from the private goals generated within the social system itself. In this situation, the state’s autonomy corresponds to a tangible reality.

Badie and Birnbaum, The Sociology of the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 35.

³ The Economist, November 2, 1985, p. 22.

⁴ I tried to synthesize and review critically some of this literature in Joel S. Migdal, Studying the Politics of Development and Change: The State of the Art, in Ada W. Finifter, ed., Political Science: The State of the Discipline (Washington, D.C.: American Political Science Association, 1983). Third World here is used as a loose, inclusive term, encompassing Africa, Asia (except the USSR and Japan), the Americas from Mexico southward, and the oceanic islands (excluding Australia and New Zealand). As we shall see in Chapter 2 and thereafter, Third World societies were deeply and universally affected by the spread and intensification of the world economy in the half-century or so leading up to World War I. The changes in these societies, I will argue, had a lasting and profound impact on state-society relations until the present.

⁵ See, for example, Frances Hagopian, The Politics of Oligarchy: The Persistence of Traditional Elites in Contemporary Brazil (Ph.D. diss., M.I.T., 1986); Akhil Gupta, Technology, Power and the State in a Complex Agricultural Society: The Green Revolution in a North Indian Village (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1987); Richard H. Adams, Jr., Development and Social Change in Rural Egypt (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986); Sevket Pamuk, Government Policies and Peasant Resistance in Turkey during World War II (Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association, Boston, November 1986); Vivienne Shue, The Reach of the State: Sketches of the Chinese Body Politic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988); Donald Rothchild and Naomi Chazan, eds., The Precarious Balance: State and Society in Africa (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1987); and Victor Azarya and Naomi Chazan, Disengagement from the State in Africa: Reflections on the Experience of Ghana and Guinea, Comparative Studies in Society and History 29 (January 1987): 106-31.

⁶ Any theory of this sort should be viewed as prolegomena to more systematic inquiry. Among the issues raised (or ignored) in the book that I felt could be full studies of their own are: (1) the role of state leadership in state-society relations; (2) the influence of war and the threat of war on state and society; (3) the influence of the post-World War II, multinational-corporation-dominated world economy on state-society relations; (4) the impact of old social structure on the emergence of new social structure after exogenous, catastrophic forces have precipitated major social changes; (5) the difference of patterns of social and political change in colonial and noncolonial societies, as well as societies that experienced different sorts of colonialism; (6) a classification of state capabilities according to different sorts of policies; (7) the effect of different types of government (e.g., democracy) on state-society relations, and the opposite: the effects of different types of state-society relations on the type of government. Other questions I have sometimes approached obliquely because of my dissatisfaction with the terminology that has been commonly used to deal with important relationships. I have avoided using the words political corruption and nationalism, for example, except in a few isolated instances, although readers will immediately note for themselves their relationship to the ideas in this book. On nationalism, I agree with Arthur Waldron, who wrote, Enough is unexplained about nationalism itself as to cast real doubt upon its usefulness in explanation. Waldron, Theories of Nationalism and Historical Explanation, World Politics 37 (April 1985): 416.

⁷ See Gabriel A. Almond, Scott C. Flanagan, and Robert J. Mundt, Crisis, Choice, and Change: Historical Studies of Political Development (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), p. 23. Also, see Adam Przeworski and Henry Teune, The Logic of Comparative Social Inquiry (New York: Wiley-Interscience, 1970).

⁸ On the debate of the discretionary power of Mexico’s state leaders to make policy unencumbered by societal constraints, see Fen Osler Hampson, Forming Economic Policy: The Case of Energy in Canada and Mexico (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), p. 26.

⁹ Until the last quarter of the nineteenth century Mexico traded predominantly with Britain. In 1860, 48 percent of all Mexico’s trade was with Britain, almost three times as much as with the United States or France.

PART ONE

States and Societies

FROM 1947 to 1965, the world witnessed a massive change, indeed a revolution, in its political map. The unraveling of empire in Asia and Africa during these years took on numerous different guises. In Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq, for example, there was an almost imperceptible transfer of authority over several decades from British officials to indigenous leaders. Other cases had sharper demarcations, but even these differed substantially. The British transferred power to Sierra Leone blacks in 1961 in as fraternal a fashion as one could imagine, but in India and Palestine their departure came only after bitter struggles and opened the way to new, even more bloody battles.

Several countries’ decolonization and independence experiences stood out in particular, and these rippled throughout what came to be known as the Third World. The dogged success of civil disobedience in India, the disorders in the Gold Coast in 1948, the ignoble defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam, Gamal Abdul Nasser’s surprising nationalization of the Suez Canal, and the battle of the revolutionary National Liberation Front (FLN) in Algeria against France’s last ditch stand for empire all had wide reverberations. From his vantage point in North Africa, Franz Fanon, echoing a refrain of Lenin, reflected the powerful influence of an experience such as Dien Bien Phu on others: The great victory of the Vietnamese people at Dien Bien Phu is no longer, strictly speaking, a Vietnamese victory. Since July 1954, the question which the colonized peoples have asked themselves has been, ‘What must be done to bring about another Dien Bien Phu? How can we manage it?’ ¹

To both contemporary and aspiring state leaders, these landmark cases were speeding an end to European empire and suggesting the potential political strength in poor, subjugated countries. Daring leadership, such as that of Mohandas Gandhi, Kwame Nkrumah, and Gamal Abdul Nasser, together with imaginative political organization, as that found in India’s Congress, the FLN, and the Vietnamese Communist party, could topple the rich and powerful. An imperial state could be reduced to a Gulliver among the Lilliputians. Even to Third World leaders who eluded explosive anticolonial struggles, events in distant India or Algeria lent confidence about the important role that centralized, mobilizing politics could play in their countries after independence.

Western imperial powers were not only the bêtes noires in the transition from colony to statehood, but they were also models to be emulated. The founding fathers of new states shaped their goals on the basis of those of already established states and the dominant European nationalist ideologies of the nineteenth century.² As in both the West and the Socialist bloc, the new political leaders of Asia and Africa came to believe in their states’ potential to mold their societies through virtuous planning and meticulously laid out policies. Even in Latin America, where many state organizations had been exceedingly weak and corrupt during the first half of the century, a new can-do spirit gripped many who aspired to state leadership. The state organization became the focal point for hopes of achieving broad goals of human dignity, prosperity, and equity; it was to be the chisel in the hands of the new sculptors. This new state, it was believed, could create a very different social order, a unified channel for people’s passions that until now had run in countless different streams.

This book is about the capabilities of states to achieve the kinds of changes in society that their leaders have sought through state planning, policies, and actions. Capabilities include the capacities to penetrate society, regulate social relationships, extract resources, and appropriate or use resources in determined ways.³ Strong states are those with high capabilities to complete these tasks, while weak states are on the low end of a spectrum of capabilities.

Have states in the Third World lived up to their billings in the generation since decolonization? Have they become strong states? Certainly, in terms of penetration, many states have demonstrated impressive capabilities, changing the very nature of institutional life even in distant villages and towns. However, the answer to the question for most states is negative when one looks at some other aspects of state capabilities, especially the abilities to regulate social relations and use resources in determined ways. The bright hopes of those heady years surrounding decolonization have faded considerably.

In all fairness, the standards set were unrealistic. As the depth of the problems to be solved became apparent, it became more and more difficult to sustain an image of these states and societies performing, as Albert Hirschman once put it, like wind-up toys lumbering single-mindedly through the various stages of development.⁴ Even by more modest standards, however, a good many states have faltered badly in building the capabilities to change their societies in particular ways. The central question in the rest of this volume is why so many states have sputtered in amassing such capabilities, although a handful of others have increased their capabilities dramatically. Beyond that question, I argue that the failure of states to have people in even the most remote villages behave as state leaders want ultimately affects the very coherence and character of the states themselves.

What kinds of capabilities have Third World states developed to achieve planned social change and what kinds of limitations have they manifested? Unfortunately, it is hard to answer that question straightforwardly. We still do not have even a generally acceptable characterization of how Third World states have fared, let alone pictures to convey the major varieties of experiences or theories to explain why things are as they are. An odd duality, or even contradiction, has marked the social science literature. One version gleaned from scholarly works shares many assumptions held by those with such high hopes about the possibilities for progressive change. It has set politics, especially state politics, center stage, kneading society into new forms and shapes and adapting it to the exigencies created by industrialization or other stimuli. This is the image of the strong state.

Scholars have described how states, for better or worse, have become the constant and formidable presence even in the most remote villages, especially in regions such as Latin America and East Asia. They have stressed how states reshaped societies by promoting some groups and classes while repressing others and simultaneously maintaining autonomy from any single group or class.⁵ Theories of corporatism and bureaucratic authoritarianism have emphasized the activism and strength of the state in regulating, even shaping, the eruptive conflicts that develop from industrialization and the mobilization of new social groups.⁶ The state, wrote James M. Malloy, is characterized by strong and relatively autonomous governmental structures that seek to impose on the society a system of interest representation based on enforced limited pluralism.⁷

A second perspective, in contrast, has portrayed the state as almost totally impotent in the swirl of dizzying social changes that have overtaken these societies, changes largely independent of any impetus from the state itself. Some scholars have viewed the dynamics of these changes within the country’s borders, while others have seen these uncontrollable forces coming from large powers and the world economy. In both instances, the state’s image is weak.

This portrait has come from journalists and social scientists alike, who have described the activist state as more often illusion than reality. They have remarked on the inept, bumbling nature of states as well as on the instability and ineffectiveness governing bodies have demonstrated in trying to carry out their grand designs. C. L. Sulzberger, for example, reported in the New York Times: One remarkable feature of the two-generation period covered by my working years was the creation of new states, most of them backward and weak. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule. . . . But the majority are helpless.⁸ Or, as Stephen Krasner summarized the situation, Most developing countries have very weak domestic political institutions.⁹

Planning new social orders has taken on a surrealistic quality in societies where, as Huntington put it, governments simply do not govern.¹⁰ Governments have been unable to achieve that which had been so widely assumed inevitable. As Wildavsky noted, Planners begin by attempting to transform their environment and end by being absorbed into it. This pattern of failure is most evident in the poor countries of the world where glittering promise has been replaced by discouraging performance.¹¹

Those portraying the weak states have dwelt not only on states in sub-Saharan Africa, where even some proponents of the strong state image admit the rule of state leaders has extended beyond the capital city or the main port only in the most tenuous and intermittent ways. But their image of weak states has also extended to the so-called bureaucratic-authoritarian states of Latin America. One serious doubter about how strong and active Latin American states have been is Linn A. Hammergren; It is true that constitutions and legislation often accord enormous powers of control to central governments, but the question remains as to whether this control is actually exercised or exists only on paper. The limited success of Latin American governments in enforcing their own legislation suggests that the extent of this control is not great.¹² Similar statements have come out of Asia, especially some fine recent work on India. Three decades of democratically planned development have failed to alleviate India’s rural poverty, writes Atul Kohli.¹³ With some variation from region to region within India, he notes, the state’s policy performance can be characterized overall as a failure to pursue the regime’s own professed goals.¹⁴

If we can make any sense at all from these diametrically opposed images of strong and weak states, perhaps opposing scholars are looking for strength in different realms. The major focus of proponents of the strong state image has been on capabilities involving state penetration of society and extraction of resources. Many of these researchers have written about macrolevel state policies, such as regulation and taxation of foreign corporations or certain types of income transfer. In these areas, some states have been more accomplished. These somewhat more potent states have been found most commonly in several places: in parts of Latin America, they have evolved as a presence in their societies because independence was achieved more than a hundred years ago; in parts of South and East Asia, some complex political organizations were built in the framework of anti-imperial struggles; and in parts of the Middle East, imperial forces opposing the emergence of strong state organizations were often the weakest.

Those favoring the weak state image, meanwhile, have examined capabilities involving regulation of social relationships and appropriation of resources in determined ways. They have often studied social policy implementation, especially the difficulties state leaders have had in ensuring intended widespread changes in people’s social behavior and planned overall transformations in social relations. Many states have tended to encounter particular difficulties in achieving their leaders’ aims at the local level. A number of scholars have concentrated on sub-Saharan Africa, where leaders have had grave difficulties implementing social policies that call upon individuals down to the lowest status groups and out to the most remote areas to change their behavior and beliefs.¹⁵

This dual nature of states is at the heart of any possible understanding of the Third World today. States have become a formidable presence in their societies, but many have experienced faltering efforts to get their populations to do what state policy makers want them to do. States are like big rocks thrown into small ponds: they make waves from end to end, but they rarely catch any fish. The duality of states—their unmistakable strengths in penetrating societies and their surprising weaknesses in effecting goal-oriented social changes—is my central concern in the following chapters.

Of course, significant differences exist from state to state and from region to region in the Third World in the capabilities of states—that is, in their ability to determine how social life should be ordered. All societies have changed enormously in the Third World over the last generation but not necessarily according to the designs of state leaders. States have had unprecedented revenues at their disposal; they have built huge armies, police forces, and civil agencies. But with such resources, why have so many Third World states been so ineffective in accomplishing what their leaders and others had so eagerly expected of them, while a few others have done so much better in developing capabilities in social planning, policy, and action? That is the central question of this book.

The answers to that question, one might assert, lie in the particular events and history of each state. On one level, that is certainly true. On another level, however, propositions can be fashioned that not only help illuminate the relevant events and history in each case but also demonstrate why the question of unfulfilled expectations arises at this juncture in history for so many states. Answering the question on this level, the one used in this book, demands an understanding of the sources of resistance to the designs of state leaders and of the factors that make state leaders unable or unwilling to overcome such resistance. The next chapter offers a model of state-society relations which highlights the struggles that states face in attempting to fashion social relations. The remaining chapters of the book suggest a theory—an answer to the question of why so many formidable looking Third World states have not been able to change their societies in the ways political leaders have intended and why a few such states have succeeded. The explanation I develop in the following chapters will take note of why certain societies in the Third World came to be organized so that some social elements could resist the initiatives of their states. My aim is to explain how, despite the many advantages the state has had, these elements have managed to continue to oppose state leaders successfully, sometimes to reach unexpected accommodations with state officials, and even at times to capture parts of the state.

¹ Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), p. 70.

² See, for example, two articles by Benjamin Neuberger: The Western Nation-State in African Perceptions of Nation-Building, Asian and African Studies 11 (1976): 241-61; and State and Nation in African Thought, Journal of African Studies 4 (Summer 1976):