19
Bunce’s sense of the term), and of the “national integration” that they
were designed to promote.
19
By their very operations (powersharing
among regional bosses, politicizing land rights, creating discrete
territorial constituencies that were mobilized around local citizenship
rights and ethno-regional identities), they compromised the political
consolidation and economic growth they were intended to promote.
At the same time, liberalizations of the late 1980s and 1990s
destabilized many of the old state-made or state-enforced controls over
space, property, and resources. Liberalization also deprived the
state of the economic monopolies that central rulers had employed to
manage inter-regional, regional, and local politics in the earlier
period. The shift to the open economy opened up new competitions for
control over the central state, as well as new competitions to
reconstitute authority relations, property rights, and markets at the
regional and local levels.
In the open-economy setting, it is likely that in many African
countries, what will be put up for renegotiation is NOT the de jure
integrity of the territorial state itself. Rather, we can expect a
territorial politics involving attempts to consolidate power within
sub-units of the state and reorder relations among them, to enforce
political control within communities, and to reorder rural property
rights.
20
This section argues that the playing-out and, perhaps,
eventual resolution of these issues will be shaped by the institutional
legacies of the developmentalist era.
19
Valerie Bunce, Subversive Institutions: The Design and Destruction of
Socialism and the State (Cambridge, 1999).
20
In many places, it seems likely that the working-out of territorial politics
may NOT contribute to the democratization project in any direct way. The
citizenship and property rights questions that are the fundamental issues in
the land reform debate -- and which come, arguably, logically and historically
prior to popular enfranchisement in a democratic republic -- may be settled by
other means.
Convention