2
Introduction
Most analysts of the economic and political liberalizations of
the 1980s and 1990s assumed that the countries they studied possessed
an effective central state, private property rights over productive
resources, integrated territorial administration, and a uniform system
of national law projected evenly across the national space. When it
came to these factors, Nettl’s 1968 injunction to take the state itself
as a variable was rarely heeded in literature on the political economy
of economic reform.
1
There was little sustained attention to variation
in forms or levels of state institutionalization or territorial
integration, or to the uneven commoditization of resources (esp. land)
across space. This is even true in African studies, where large
literatures underscore basic weaknesses of both states and markets
across much of the continent. Analysis has not explored the full
implications of these facts for the course of neoliberal reform. This
paper does so by tracing some of the implications of market opening for
core-periphery linkages, local and regional politics, and the
territorial cohesion of the national state.
2
The paper argues that in Africa, economic liberalization and
deregulation of the national economy -- the move to open-economy
policies -- have eroded the capacity of central states to sustain the
political and economic integration of the national space, and to retain
1
As Robert Kaufman explained it, they were not concerned with the “deep
structural roots of state formation (Robert R. Kaufman, “Approaches to the
Study of State Reform in Latin America and Postsocialist Countries,”
Comparative Politics, 31/3 (April) 1999: 359).
2
Thomas Callaghy framed some of the issues in the mid 1980s. See for example
“The State and the Development of Capitalism in Africa: Theoretical,
Historical, and Comparative Reflections,” in Donald Rothchild and Naomi Chazan,
eds., The Precarious Balance: State and Society in Africa (Boulder, Westview,
1988: 67-99).
Convention