A QUARANTINE FOR THE AFRICAN STATES?
The 1950s and 1960s witnessed the ascendancy of the state in theoretical and policy considerations of the African predicament, with a lot of effort being sunk into attempts to strengthen further relevant institutions as a way out of the legacy of underdevelopment. By way of contrast, the 1970s and 1980s were basically decades of disenchantment, given the reality of the profligacy, fragility, and non-performance of the African state and its managers. What was then witnessed was a conceptual and policy shift away from concerns over how to build the capacity of the state, mainly in order to mould and incorporate society in the march towards development, to a perspective informed by increasing evidence of the state's incoherence, incapacitation, and weaknesses. The 1990s, therefore, appear set to complete the swing of this intellectual and policy pendulum away from the African state towards the terrain of civil society, in the expectation that this will provide an alternate resource base for engineering and sustaining the development of the continent. Symbolically enough, the decade has opened with the publication of a volume whose editors and contributors have not only come down decidedly on the side of society, but who often appear to call for the state to be quarantined in order to facilitate meaningful development. Their collection of essays is the outcome of a 1985-6 workshop in political theory and policy analysis, led by Vincent and Elinor Ostrom at Indiana University, and is understandably informed by insights drawn from their work on theories of collective action, organisational behaviour, and public administration.
Class Formation in the Swollen African State
As the state has moved back to the centre of analysis of political change and conflict, increasing attention has focused on its rôle in forming new classes and in structuring the possibilities of class action. As Nelson Kasfir notes, both Marx and Weber ‘saw the vital role the state could play in consolidating the class position of a dominant social group’.1 Neither, however, saw the state as the inherent locus of the process of class formation and of class domination. For Marx, the state was typically the instrument of a ruling class whose origin and basis was in control over the means of production. For Weber, power, class, and status were potentially independent dimensions of stratification.
The Internet and the Changing Beijing-Taipei Relations: Toward Unification or Fragmentation?
Information and its technologies facilitate the exercise of what has been called “soft power,” a concept that differentiates information from the conventional dimensions of “hard power,” which is mainly associated with military force and economic influence. Soft power, according to Nye, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense of the United States, means that “A country may obtain the outcomes it wants in world politics because other countries want to follow it, admiring its values, emulating its example, aspiring to its level of prosperity and openness. In this sense it is just as important to set the agenda in world politics and attract others as it is to force them to change through the threat or use of military or economic weapons.”1