Homespun solutions

Roland Paris propounded the concept of ‘institutionalisation before liberalisation” in his book, ‘At War’s End’. This view was challenged by Mark Duffield in his acclaimed treatise, ‘Development, Security and Unending Wars’.

Duffield came up with the notion of a vested interest by the industrialised democracies of the developed world to export peace and stability through Western peace-building architecture premised on aid and western politico-economic institutions. Countries like Pakistan, beset by crises of governance, need to take the Wilsonean paradigm of Paris as well as Duffield’s ‘Securitised Development’ with a pinch of salt.

Since scholars like Fareed Zakaria and Roland Paris had found liberalism’s desired end objective –‘stable and lasting peace’ – adversely impacted by the absence of regulatory institutions to moderate the upheavals and intense competition engendered by rapid political and economic reforms, scholars like Duffield have come up with a contrarian narrative.

The narrative relies on development through humanitarian interventionism to induce stability in crisis prone developing nations. The first school of thought cited post-Tito Yugoslavia and present Afghanistan as classic examples where the absence of liberal institutions have led to more chaos than peace.

The second school referred to countries like Libya, Iraq, and Sudan where the humanitarian interventionism was meant to prevent instability and chaos. In both paradigms, the underlying causes of instability and conflict remained intact.

The logical conclusion emerging from both the above approaches is the need for the homespun solutions to the problems of developing nations. Duffield believes that the developing nations masquerade their desire to control and manage the affairs of the developing nations in the garb of security and development. Good Samaritan pretensions conceal a more pragmatic requirement – to influence and guide the politics and economy of developing nations to serve the interests of the developed nations.

That is the main reason that such prescriptive remedies modelled on Western institutions mostly fail to address the underlying causes of conflict and underdevelopment in poor countries. In Pakistan’s context, Paris and Zakaria’s arguments find relevance in light of endemic conflict in society engendered by bad governance and lack of institutional decision-making.

What we have here are extractive institutions with no tradition for respect of law internalised by both the elite and the common citizen. We have copied the Western political template and raised a structure without breathing an indigenous soul into it. We have received generous dollops of aid and Western institutional implants without the benefits of a stable polity and self sustaining economic growth.

It is time we understood that Western securitisation of our development is aimed at preventing a challenge to their economic prosperity and political dominance. Zakaria and Duffield cite Singapore and Russia as illiberal democracies that have elections and representative institutions but only for form’s sake.

The lesson that we need to internalise from examples of countries like Russia and Singapore is that the national interest should be kept above all instead of slavishly imitating the politics and institutions of Western nations. While there is no doubt that institutional strength is the bedrock of all sustainable development, it should also be known that the right policies and the will to implement these have been the surest recipe of success.

Examples of countries like South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, and China indicate that the right policies as well as institutions rooted in indigenous culture lead to sustainable success. Strong leadership, internal order, and discipline lead a nation out of chaos while external reliance leads towards perpetual dependence at the cost of national sovereignty.

At this crucial juncture, Pakistan badly needs an inclusive polity and economic egalitarianism undergirded through strong institutions and a democratic tradition of rule of law. Stultifying policy inaction, widespread poverty, widening income inequality, and runaway criminal violence – these are some of the wages of sin we are paying for a democracy sans soul and economic development sans equity.

In these uncertain times of economic and diplomatic isolation the calls for revolution by perturbed patriots should actually be tempered by a call to hasten to the ‘barricades of institutions’.

The country is like Titanic sailing away; blithely unaware of the icebergs ahead with deck space enough for lifeboats of the rich and mighty only. These lifeboats are the offshore investments of the elite who can jettison the sinking ship without being affected by the wanton destruction wrought as a result of their policy inaction and institutional anomie.

The writer is a PhD scholar at Nust.

Email: rwjanj@hotmail.com