3
control over forms of territorial politics that were institutionalized
during the developmentalist era (1950s through the mid-1980s).
3
Rather
than simply reinforcing market-determined processes of social
interdependence and resource allocation as neoliberal reformers had
hoped, open economy conditions reveal the limits of market-formation
and market-integration in many African contexts.
In the politics of the neoliberal era, what is striking is the
continuing salience of political (non-market) controls over territory,
land, population movements, resource flows, and market access. These
political controls should not be mistaken for the vestigial residue of
pre-state (primordial) mechanisms of socio-economic regulation. They
are, as we shall argue here, mechanisms of territorial and political
control that were institutionalized during the 1950-1980 state-building
era. The new forms of territorial politics that have been unleashed by
liberalization are being shaped in decisive ways by the institutional
legacies of the state-building era. They will go far in determining
the viability and survival of the “national states” and national
economies that were consolidated during the developmentalist era.
Part I describes strategies that promoted national integration in
the developmentalist era, which came to a close with the turn to
neoliberalism in the mid-1980s. Part II identifies four institutional
legacies of the earlier state-building era now work to subvert the
“national integration” they were originally designed to promote. They
are: the institutionalization of competitive regionalisms;
consolidation of local states, regional constituencies, and sub-
national citizenship rights; regionalized and highly politicized land
3
We argue that open-economy policies “reverse-engineered” the old national
integration projects, giving rise to a new territorial politics that centers on
fights for regionally-defined constituencies, and for political control over
land and territory.
Convention