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WhySoMuchAnarchy?|Stratfor

Why So Much Anarchy?

Global Aairs

FEBRUARY 5, 2014 | 10:01 GMT

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By Robert D. Kaplan
Twenty years ago, in February 1994, I published a lengthy cover story in The Atlantic Monthly, "The Coming Anarchy: How Scarcity, Crime,
Overpopulation, Tribalism, and Disease are Rapidly Destroying the Social Fabric of Our Planet." I argued that the combination of resource depletion
(like water), demographic youth bulges and the proliferation of shanty towns throughout the developing world would ename ethnic and sectarian
divides, creating the conditions for domestic political breakdown and the transformation of war into increasingly irregular forms making it often
indistinguishable from terrorism. I wrote about the erosion of national borders and the rise of the environment as the principal security issues of the
21st century. I accurately predicted the collapse of certain African states in the late 1990s and the rise of political Islam in Turkey and other places.
Islam, I wrote, was a religion ideally suited for the badly urbanized poor who were willing to ght. I also got things wrong, such as the probable
intensication of racial divisions in the United States; in fact, such divisions have been impressively ameliorated.
However, what is not in dispute is that signicant portions of the earth, rather than follow the dictates of Progress and Rationalism, are simply harder
and harder to govern, even as there is insucient evidence of an emerging and widespread civil society. Civil society in signicant swaths of the earth is
still the province of a relatively elite few in capital cities the very people Western journalists feel most comfortable befriending and interviewing, so
that the size and inuence of such a class is exaggerated by the media.
The anarchy unleashed in the Arab world, in particular, has other roots, though roots not adequately dealt with in my original article:
The End of Imperialism. That's right. Imperialism provided much of Africa, Asia and Latin America with security and administrative order. The
Europeans divided the planet into a gridwork of entities both articial and not and governed. It may not have been fair, and it may not have been
altogether civil, but it provided order. Imperialism, the mainstay of stability for human populations for thousands of years, is now gone.
The End of Post-Colonial Strongmen. Colonialism did not end completely with the departure of European colonialists. It continued for decades in the
guise of strong dictators, who had inherited state systems from the colonialists. Because these strongmen often saw themselves as anti-Western
freedom ghters, they believed that they now had the moral justication to govern as they pleased. The Europeans had not been democratic in the
Middle East, and neither was this new class of rulers. Hafez al Assad, Saddam Hussein, Ali Abdullah Saleh, Moammar Gadha and the Nasserite
pharaohs in Egypt right up through Hosni Mubarak all belonged to this category, which, like that of the imperialists, has been quickly retreating from
the scene (despite a comeback in Egypt).

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No Institutions. Here we come to the key element. The post-colonial Arab dictators ran moukhabarat states: states whose order depended on the
secret police and the other, related security services. But beyond that, institutional and bureaucratic development was weak and unresponsive to the
needs of the population a population that, because it was increasingly urbanized, required social services and complex infrastructure. (Alas, urban
societies are more demanding on central governments than agricultural ones, and the world is rapidly urbanizing.) It is institutions that ll the gap
between the ruler at the top and the extended family or tribe at the bottom. Thus, with insucient institutional development, the chances for either
dictatorship or anarchy proliferate. Civil society occupies the middle ground between those extremes, but it cannot prosper without the requisite
institutions and bureaucracies.
Feeble Identities. With feeble institutions, such post-colonial states have feeble identities. If the state only means oppression, then its population
consists of subjects, not citizens. Subjects of despotisms know only fear, not loyalty. If the state has only fear to oer, then, if the pillars of the
dictatorship crumble or are brought low, it is non-state identities that ll the subsequent void. And in a state congured by long-standing legal borders,
however articially drawn they may have been, the triumph of non-state identities can mean anarchy.
Doctrinal Battles. Religion occupies a place in daily life in the Islamic world that the West has not known since the days a millennium ago when the
West was called "Christendom." Thus, non-state identity in the 21st-century Middle East generally means religious identity. And because there are
variations of belief even within a great world religion like Islam, the rise of religious identity and the consequent decline of state identity means the
inammation of doctrinal disputes, which can take on an irregular, military form. In the early medieval era, the Byzantine Empire whose whole
identity was infused with Christianity had violent, doctrinal disputes between iconoclasts (those opposed to graven images like icons) and iconodules
(those who venerated them). As the Roman Empire collapsed and Christianity rose as a replacement identity, the upshot was not tranquility but violent,
doctrinal disputes between Donatists, Monotheletes and other Christian sects and heresies. So, too, in the Muslim world today, as state identities
weaken and sectarian and other dierences within Islam come to the fore, often violently.
Information Technology. Various forms of electronic communication, often transmitted by smartphones, can empower the crowd against a hated
regime, as protesters who do not know each other personally can nd each other through Facebook, Twitter, and other social media. But while such
technology can help topple governments, it cannot provide a coherent and organized replacement pole of bureaucratic power to maintain political
stability afterwards. This is how technology encourages anarchy. The Industrial Age was about bigness: big tanks, aircraft carriers, railway networks and
so forth, which magnied the power of big centralized states. But the post-industrial age is about smallness, which can empower small and oppressed
groups, allowing them to challenge the state with anarchy sometimes the result.
Because we are talking here about long-term processes rather than specic events, anarchy in one form or another will be with us for some time, until
new political formations arise that provide for the requisite order. And these new political formations need not be necessarily democratic.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, societies in Central and Eastern Europe that had sizable middle classes and reasonable bureaucratic traditions prior
to World War II were able to transform themselves into relatively stable democracies. But the Middle East and much of Africa lack such bourgeoisie
traditions, and so the fall of strongmen has left a void. West African countries that fell into anarchy in the late 1990s a few years after my article was
published like Sierra Leone, Liberia and Ivory Coast, still have not really recovered, but are wards of the international community through foreign
peacekeeping forces or advisers, even as they struggle to develop a middle class and a manufacturing base. For, the development of ecient and
responsive bureaucracies requires literate functionaries, which, in turn, requires a middle class.
The real question marks are Russia and China. The possible weakening of authoritarian rule in those sprawling states may usher in less democracy than
chronic instability and ethnic separatism that would dwarf in scale the current instability in the Middle East. Indeed, what follows Vladimir Putin could
be worse, not better. The same holds true for a weakening of autocracy in China.
The future of world politics will be about which societies can develop responsive institutions to govern vast geographical space and which cannot. That
is the question toward which the present season of anarchy leads.

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ARTICLE AUTHOR

Robert D. Kaplan

Robert D. Kaplan was Stratfor's Chief Geopolitical Analyst from March 2012 through December 2014. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security in
Washington, D.C., and has been a foreign correspondent and contributing editor at The Atlantic, where his work has appeared for three decades. In 2009, he was appointed to
the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, which advised former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on key issues. Mr. Kaplan served on the board through 2011. From 2006 to
2008, he was the Class of 1960 Distinguished Visiting Professor in National Security at the U.S. Naval Academy.

View Full Biography

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