Institution Building in Weak States. Andrew Radin
indefinitely delaying negotiations for independence, but independence was the dominant Albanian nationalist goal. My theory predicts that demands or recommendations threatening nationalist goals lead to widespread and recurring public opposition, as in Kosovo, where riots in 2004 occurred in response to the threat to independence. Public opposition convinces foreign actors that the population does not support their proposed reform. Foreign actors must abandon or adjust their demands, undercutting any improvement in an institution. Public opposition can also delegitimize future international efforts in a society, as occurred in Kosovo. Most foreign reformers recognize the potential for damaging opposition and adjust accordingly. Nevertheless, as in Kosovo or police restructuring in Bosnia, some foreign actors do ultimately propose demands that threaten nationalist goals and provoke large-scale protests. These cases show how the popularity of nationalism thereby ultimately constrains foreign-supported reform.
The second important domestic interest is the ruling elites’ patron-client networks. In many societies, ruling elites use patron-client networks to exercise control, provide resources to supporters, and otherwise maintain their power. Patron-client networks often play an important role in the politics of societies where foreign actors pursue reform due to a history of violent conflict or limited political development. By seeking to improve state institutions, foreign reformers often make demands or recommendations that threaten these networks and thereby challenge the position of the ruling elite, as the book’s opening example of defense reform in Ukraine demonstrates. Because elites’ patron-client networks tend not to be popular, the theory expects that elites usually cannot rally large-scale public support. Instead, they engage in private opposition by using their networks to delay reform, extract resources, or co-opt state institutions. Private opposition is likely to be the most intense in geographic areas or components of an institution where reform poses the greatest threat to ruling elites’ networks. I expect foreign actors with extensive resources to be able to mitigate private opposition by monitoring and sanctioning noncompliance, but foreign reforms facing private opposition are unlikely to achieve dramatic success due to gaps in local knowledge and the necessity of involving local officials in state institutions.
Some reforms may include demands or recommendations that threaten both nationalist goals and the ruling elites’ networks. These reforms are expected to fail, most likely due to public opposition, which is more effective at resisting foreign reform. The most successful reforms are expected to be those where foreign demands or recommendations propose improvements that do not threaten nationalist goals or the ruling elites’ networks. In these cases, some international resources are also necessary to achieve success. For example, in defense reform in Bosnia or the development of central government institutions in Kosovo after 2004, the use of money, advice, and conditionality was essential to build more effective, accountable, and law-abiding institutions.
EXISTING EXPLANATIONS FOR THE SUCCESS OF INSTITUTION BUILDING
While the case studies find that domestic opposition is generally the best explanation for how reform efforts unfold, other factors also matter. The literature on intervention and state building identifies international resources and preexisting conditions as two other important factors shaping the success of intervention.25 The domestic opposition theory recognizes that international resources are sometimes important, depending on the threat to domestic interests, and emphasizes the role of patron-client networks, which are one element of the preexisting conditions of a society. Beyond these elements, the level of international resources and the path dependence of preexisting conditions offer insight for institution building. In brief here and in more detail in chapter 2, I specify the predictions of these two alternative theories. Below, I also explain how my theory builds on existing work exploring the divergent interests between foreign interveners and domestic elites.
The first theory drawn from the literature claims that greater international resources facilitate more successful interventions. This approach draws from statistical works on peace building, policy works on nation building and failed states, and critiques of bureaucratic and organizational politics in peace operations.26 Works in this literature also suggest techniques that foreign actors may use to strengthen institutions given sufficient resources, including building capacity, persuading or coercing elites, influencing electoral outcomes, shaping public opinion, and imposing changes in laws or regulations. While works in this literature do recognize limits to the power of interveners, in general they observe that with more resources foreign actors can overcome domestic opposition and build better institutions.
A second theory is more skeptical of foreign intervention because state institutions are path dependent, meaning that preexisting structures and practices influence how institutions develop. These works analyze the history of political development in Western societies to identify the rare conditions that facilitate domestically driven political development, including military competition in western Europe, elite constraint of the monarchy during the Glorious Revolution in England, and social mobilization against clientelism in the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.27 These conditions are unlikely to emerge amid foreign intervention. Even if they were to emerge, the process of domestically driven political development could take decades because path dependence also means that state institutions are slow to change. By some accounts, foreign intervention has been more successful in societies with a history of strong political development, such as Germany and Japan.28 From these observations, I derive the prediction that foreign-supported institution building is likely to fail except where there is a history of higher-quality state institutions. Indeed, the presence of an international mission may even hinder reform since the provision of services by foreign actors may diminish the incentive for domestic actors to seek reform on their own.29
International resources and path dependence do offer some insight for most of the reform efforts studied in this book, although the domestic opposition theory usually offered the most compelling explanation. Examining these two perspectives along with my own domestic opposition theory is nevertheless useful both to isolate which factors determine success and to enable the case studies to provide the most complete explanation for the process and outcome of reform.
My theory of domestic opposition builds on a growing number of works exploring how foreign interveners and domestic actors sometimes have divergent interests and a competitive or conflictual relationship. For example, Stephen Stedman notes that some domestic actors may act as spoilers, undermining peace processes.30 Michael Barnett, Songying Fang, and Christoph Zürcher use game theory to explain how the “strategic interactions between international peacebuilders and domestic actors” often leads to “compromised peacebuilding.”31 Zürcher and several coauthors also argue that domestic elites respond to foreign efforts to build democracy based on the perceived “adoption costs.” They note that elites may perceive a threat to their own security or to the achievement of their “primary political objectives,” some of which—such as independence, ethnic autonomy, or retaining power—are associated with the interests I identify of nationalist goals and patron-client networks.32 Séverine Autesserre explains how everyday practices of interveners can limit their ability to understand and address local conflict dynamics.33 Recognizing the value of domestic buy-in for reform, some works cite the need for “local ownership” of foreign-led reform. Others claim that pursuing “local ownership” wrongly assumes that domestic actors typically want the same reform that foreign actors seek.34 Other works have explored the specific dynamics between foreign interveners and domestic actors in particular societies or reform efforts.35
This book builds on these works in several ways. First, it offers insight into an understudied but critical policy question: What demands or recommendations should foreign reformers adopt to maximize success? As mentioned above, because most existing work studies success at the country level, few works suggest theories that can explain why some reform efforts within a society succeed while others fail or why a reform effort may vary in success over time.36 This makes it hard for the existing literature to answer the policy question of how to select demands or recommendations to maximize the success of reform.