State Building

In its most generic form, the term state building refers to the construction of an apparatus of governance defined by its monopoly of the legitimate use of violence in a given territory. Defining the modern state is a contentious project, but most scholars would recognize a core set of features, including a standing army; a diplomatic corps; a centralized bureaucracy (especially for tax collection); the replacement of ad hoc, patrimonial legal procedures with standardized, legalrational ones; the demarcation of national economies; and the incorporation of populations as citizens rather than status groups.

This constellation of features first developed in Western Europe in the sixteenth century through the mutually reinforcing, though analytically separate, processes of making war, raising taxes, and constructing a centralized officialdom to oversee and maximize success in both war and taxation. In Western Europe, these changes were marked by the transition from feudalism to absolutism to the nation-state. Statebuilding theory tends not to dwell on the differences of political regime that may accompany the statebuilding process; both democracy and authoritarianism are possible complements to modernization, but each requires a state to defend its borders, govern its citizens, and extract resources from them. An important exception to this last point is more recent scholarship on the link between democratization and state building. One influential argument is that the development of professional and effective state bureaucracies is more difficult in areas where democratization precedes the consolidation of core state institutions.

Decolonization after World War II and, later, the collapse of the Soviet Union greatly added to the number of states in the international system. The success of these state-building efforts, however, has been highly variable, ranging from failed states such as Afghanistan to neopatrimonial states such as Nigeria to developmental states such as South Korea. Changes in the international system have altered the basic dynamics of state building: The harsh selection mechanism of interstate military competition that characterized the emergence of Western Europe's nation-states no longer prevails. [Page 924]Thus, the drive for rationalization is no longer an imperative of state survival, and from the state-builders' perspective, it is no longer as crucial that growth in state size be matched by increase in state capacity—especially its capacity to stimulate economic development. Instead, a host of other factors may drive state expansion. A commonly cited factor is the need to maintain a domestic governing coalition, especially in societies with divided political elites. This may lead to rapid state expansion fueled by political patronage or targeted pork-barrel spending; it may also take the more passive form of surrendering state capacity through insider privatization and the toleration of official corruption. Some have argued that international aid to less-developed countries has also had the unintended effect of diverting resources from state-building capacity.

Given these differences between early- and latedeveloping states, state building is perhaps best understood not in generic terms but as the result of political dynamics bearing the indelible imprint of their historical moment.