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Neither Soft nor Dead: The African State Is Alive and Well

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2014

S. N. Sangmpam
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Extract

The debate about the state in the Third World has led to the emergence of different paradigms. Although still in use, the bureaucratic-authoritarian and the inherited postcolonial state theses have been superseded in recent years by new models. There has been a resurgence of Weberian analyses of the state in third world studies, especially those dealing with Africa. The African state has been referred to as weak, soft, declined, absent, decayed, juridical, or normative. Many of the writings define and explain the problem the same way. One can say these studies are based on the soft state or declined state paradigm, even though some of them rely more explicitly on Max Weber's notion of patrimonialism. Even those writings in which soft state terminology is not explicit are, in fact, linked to the soft state paradigm (see Osaghae 1989). As Robert Fatten, Jr. correctly points out, since the 1950s, all the different ideological currents in African studies have been unable to “move beyond the talismatic concept of the ‘soft’ or non-institutionalized state” (1989, 170). In the 1980s and 1990s, the concept has been even more closely identified with Africa. Although Gunnar Myrdal was the first to use the term soft state to characterize the states in South Asia (Myrdal 1968, 66, 277, 895-900) and others have recently applied it to the state in the Third World in general (see Migdal, 1988), the concept has been given a particularly African flavor by those writing about Africa. Consistent with the prevailing view that Asian and Latin American countries are different and better off than African countries, Myrdal's initial use of the concept—questionable as it was even in his hands—has been removed from Asia and almost exclusively applied to Africa. Even those writers who attempt to apply the concept to the Third World in general acknowledge this almost exclusive use of the term but still tend to reinforce it. Because of its pervasive influence through modernization theory's notion of institutionalization, the soft state paradigm and its sui generis, particularistic assumptions and explanations about Africa frame the debate on today's democratization process in Africa.

Type
Articles
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , September 1993 , pp. 73 - 94
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1993

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