The experience of nation-building

Some lessons for South Africa

Bibliographic Data

ID5115765
AuthorsMark Simpson (0000-0002-5497-1617, University of the Witwatersrand, corresponding author)
Year1994
Volume20
Issue3
Pages463-474
Publication date1994-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Southern African Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0305-7070 • E-ISSN: 1465-3893
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/03057079408708414
OpenAlexW2129968252
LanguageEN
Citations received8
References cited13

Only three or four years ago the argument of this paper would have run along more or less the following lines: the crisis of the post-colonial state in Asia and particularly Africa lies in its 'artificiality'. Alternative terms used to describe them would be 'weak', 'soft', 'suspended', or as possessing 'juridical' as opposed to 'empirical' statehood.' A more recent term much in vogue even does away with the niceties of placing these new states on a continuum 'soft' versus some standard of 'hardness', 'suspended' as opposed to some state of 'rootedness' whereby they could at least aspire to eventually conforming to the norm. Many states in the Third World are now considered to be 'failed' states.2 While the labels are often applied in terms of the failure of Third World states to initiate and sustain a process of economic development in their territories, or to develop depoliticised, rational bureaucratic/administrative structures along Western lines which would allow for the successful implementation of decisions emanating from the political centre in the peripheral areas, it is also argued that one of the main causes of their weakness lies in their inability to build nations out of the ethnically diverse societies they inherited at independence. The resulting problems of the politicisation of ethnicity, mono-ethnic control of the state apparatus and the related problems of secessionism and irredentism, are ultimately rooted in a crisis of legitimacy on the part of the state in Africa and Asia, an inability to create a central focus for the loyalties of their citizens who are seen to be trapped in their 'pre-modern' parochialisms. Any discussion of nation-building in South Africa would therefore take place against the backdrop of this pessimistic scenario. The sub-text of this discourse was that there was a finished product against which these deviants were measured, paradigmatic cases which set the norm against which one evaluated the internal cohesiveness of Third World states, namely the Western European state and its overseas offspring in North America and the Antipodes. In teleological terms the state in the West had, in a sense, arrived. Its internal legitimacy in territorial terms was uncontested

Development economics · Economic growth · Economics · Geography · Political science · Global Peace and Security Dynamics · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · International Development and Aid

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