Better off stateless: Somalia before and after government collapse

[Jacaylbaro]

Peter T. Leesona,

aGeorge Mason University, MSN 3G4, Fairfax, VA 22030, USA

Published: Feb 2008. Originally Published at Association for Comparative Economic Studies on Dec 2007

 

 

Abstract: Could anarchy be good for Somalia's development? If state predation goes unchecked government may not only fail to add to social welfare, but can actually reduce welfare below its level under statelessness. Such was the case with Somalia's government, which did more harm to its citizens than good. The government's collapse and subsequent emergence of statelessness opened the opportunity for Somali progress. This paper investigates the impact of anarchy on Somali development. The data suggest that while the state of this development remains low, on nearly all of 18 key indicators that allow pre- and post-stateless welfare comparisons, Somalis are better off under anarchy than they were under government. Renewed vibrancy in critical sectors of Somalia's economy and public goods in the absence of a predatory state are responsible for this improvement. Journal of Comparative Economics 35 (4) (2007) 689–710.

 

 

"[O]ppression by the government … has so much more baneful an effect on the springs of national prosperity, than almost any degree of lawlessness and turbulence under free institutions. Nations have acquired some wealth, and made some progress in improvement in states of social union so imperfect as to border on anarchy: but no countries in which the people were exposed without limit to arbitrary exactions from the officers of government ever yet continued to have industry and wealth."

 

 

John Stuart Mill (1848, pp. 882–883)

 

 

In 1991 Somalia's state collapsed, creating anarchy in its wake. Although, as I discuss below, there have been a handful of attempts to resurrect central government in Somalia, to date these have been unsuccessful, leaving the country effectively stateless. Somalia therefore provides an interesting natural experiment to explore the hypothesis that if government is predatory enough, anarchy may actually prove superior in terms of economic development.

 

 

There has been much hand-wringing over what to do about the situation of anarchy that has characterized Somalia since 1991. Reports from international organizations commonly express fear about the “chaos” of Somalia without a state. According to the International Relations and Security Network, for example, under anarchy Somalia has had “no functioning economy.” Instead, “clan-based warfare and anarchy have dominated” the country (Wolfe, 2005). Shortly after Somalia's government collapsed, the United Nations was similarly “Gravely alarmed at the rapid deterioration” of Somalia and expressed serious “concern with the situation prevailing in that country” (UN, 1992, p. 55). The popular press has tended to go even further in its condemnation of the “internal anarchy … [that] has consumed Somalia for the last 15 years” (Gettleman and Mazzetti, 2006). The view commonly presented by these observers is that Somalia “been mired in chaos since 1991” when statelessness emerged (Hassan, 2007).

 

 

To be sure, this concern is not without cause. In the year following the state's collapse, civil war, exacerbated by severe drought, devastated the Sub-Saharan territory killing 300,000 Somalis (Prendergast, 1997). For a time it seemed that Somali statelessness would mean endless bloody conflict, starvation, and an eventual descent into total annihilation of the Somali people. Thus, conventional wisdom sees Somalia as a land of chaos, deterioration and war, and is certain that statelessness has been detrimental to Somali development.

 

 

The reason for this belief is twofold. On the one hand, popular opinion sees government as universally superior to anarchy. Government is considered necessary to prevent violent conflicts like those that erupted when Somalia's state first crumbled, which disrupt economic activity. Government is also considered critical to supplying public goods such as roads, schools, and law and order, which are important to the process of development. From this perspective it is easy to conclude that Somalia, which has no central government, must have been better off when it did.

 

 

Second, there is a tendency upon observing problems in distressed regions of the world to see only on the “failure” of the current situation, ignoring the quite possibly even worse state of affairs that preceded it.2 This is especially easy to do for Somalia, which by international standards is far behind indeed. Educational enrollment is abysmally low—a mere seven percent for combined primary, secondary and tertiary schooling. Average Somali income is less than $1000 (PPP), and preventable diseases like malaria are a genuine threat to Somalia's inhabitants. These facts, however, say nothing about the status of Somalia before its state collapsed. Thus, forgetting Somalia's experience under government, it is easy to imagine that nothing could be more damaging to Somali development than the current state of anarchy....

 

 

Somalia remains a country with severe problems. But it appears to have fared better under recent statelessness than it did under government. A comprehensive view of the data that allow pre- and post-anarchy welfare comparisons suggest that anarchy has improved Somali development in important ways. Contrary to our typical intuition, in Somalia it seems that social welfare has improved because of, rather than despite, the absence of a central state. Somalia's government was oppressive, exploitative, and brutal. The extent of this predation created a situation in which social welfare was depressed below the level it could achieve without any government at all. The emergence of anarchy in 1991 opened up opportunities for advancement not possible before government's collapse. In particular, economic progress and improved public goods provision in critical areas flourished in the absence of a monopolistic and corrupt state.

 

 

Recognition of this is not to deny that Somalia could be doing much better. It clearly could. Nor is this to say that Somalia is better off stateless than it would be under any government. A constitutionally-constrained state with limited powers to do harm but strong enough to support the private sector may very well do more for Somalia than statelessness. Further, Somalia's improvement under anarchy does not tell us whether continual improvement is possible if Somalia remains stateless. It is possible that past some point, to enjoy further development, Somalia might require a central government capable of providing more widespread security and public goods. De Long and Shleifer (1993), for example, show that while pre-industrial European countries under “feudal anarchy” performed better in some ways than those under absolutist autocracies, countries under limited government performed better than both. But this was not the type of government that collapsed in Somalia 15 years ago.

 

 

The relevant question for Somalia's future is thus whether or not a government, were a stable one to emerge, would be more like the constrained variety we observe in the West, or more like the purely predatory variety that systematically exploited Somalis between 1969 and the emergence of anarchy in 1991. In the latter case, even if Somalia's ability to improve is constrained by statelessness, Somali development would still be better served under anarchy than it would be under government. If “good government” is not one of the options in Somalia's institutional opportunity set, anarchy may be a constrained optimum. Among the options that are available, ultra-predatory government and statelessness, statelessness may be preferable.

 

 

In August of 2000, select Somali clan leaders gathered in Djibouti at the urging of the international community. At this meeting they established the Transitional National Government (TNG) in an attempt to reestablish formal government in Somalia. The TNG, while remaining in name for three years, failed to establish authority. It was crippled by a lack of popular support and an inability to raise tax revenues. The terms of the TNG expired in 2003. This gave rise in 2004 to the Transitional Federal Government (TFG), led by Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed. The plan was for the TFG to go to Mogadishu and set up the center of the new central government. However, strong divisions within the members of the TFG initially prevented this. Instead of creating a new government, the TFG effectively fractured into two new rival faction groups that did not fundamentally differ from the “warlord”-led factions it sought to replace.

 

 

In May of 2006, the TFG and the Supreme Council of Islamic Courts (SCIC), which provided the basis of Somalia's private legal system, entered a conflict over control of Mogadishu and other key areas in Somalia. With Ethiopia's assistance, in early 2007 the TFG succeeded in taking control of the capital city where it now resides. The SCIC continues to mount small-scale resistance, but for the moment at least, is not in a position to regain control of Mogadishu. The renewed violence this most recent attempt to reestablish formal government in Somalia created has undermined the relative peace and stability that preceded it in the earlier period of Somali anarchy.

 

 

Despite the TFG's victory over the SCIC and movement to Mogadishu, Somali statelessness persists. The TFG enjoys the support of the international community, but like the TNG, lacks the domestic support needed to establish genuine authority. Surprisingly, it seems that Somalia's private sector and has not totally collapsed in the face of the new violence. As one Mogadishu-based electronics store owner commented, for example, even “After the fighting between the Islamists [the SCIC-backed militia] and the warlords [the TFG-backed militias], people are still buying computers. The security [situation] is very, very good” (quoted in Tek, 2006, p. 31). Further, while it is certain that the renewed conflict has been harmful to the progress Somali achieved leading up to this, what little updated data we have on Somalia suggests that this conflict has not totally reversed the strides toward improvement Somalia has made since 1991. The only two development indicators from Table 1 available for 2007, infant mortality and life expectancy, both show improvement not only over their levels under Somali government, but also over their levels in 2006. The improvement has been minimal in only one year, but is present nevertheless. Infant mortality has fallen from 114.89 to 113.08 and life expectancy has risen from 48.47 to 48.84 (CIA World Factbook, 2007). Whether or not this improvement is part of a larger trend remains unclear. However, it provides at least some reason to be less pessimistic about the possible impact that recent Somali fighting has had on the progress Somalia achieved under anarchy before this fighting.

 

 

Harold Demsetz (1969) famously cautioned economists to avoid committing the “nirvana fallacy,” which compares an imperfect reality with a hypothetical ideal state. Instead we should compare the situation we confront with the relevant alternatives actually available to us. The plans for a path from here to there must be grounded in an assessment of how things were, how they are, and how they realistically could be. His caution is especially useful when considering reforms in the developing world and, as Coyne (2006) points out, for Somalia in particular.

 

 

A consideration of the relevant alternatives based on realistically assessing Somalia's past and present suggests it is unlikely a new central government, at least in the near future, would resemble anything like a constrained, supportive state. The history of Somalia's experience under government, as well as the ongoing experiences of its neighbors, implies less optimism than is often projected by the advocates of recreating government in Somalia. The factional disagreements that led to civil war in the few years after government's collapse remain strong. Any ruler to come to power from one of these groups would likely turn the state's power against its rivals rather than to the good of the country, much as Barre's regime did before it ended. The TFG has sparse domestic support precisely because of this and because faction leaders recognize the strong possibility that any one faction gaining too much power could mean the virtual annihilation of the others.

 

 

Indeed, thus far in the stateless period, the three greatest disruptions of relative stability and renewed social conflict have occurred precisely in the three times that a formal government was most forcefully attempted—first with the TNG, later with the TFG, and finally most recently when the TFG mobilized violently to oust the SCIC. In each case the specter of government disturbed the delicate equilibrium of power that exists between competing factions, and led to increased violence and deaths due to armed conflict (Menkhaus, 2004). At the moment at least, it seems that in upsetting this delicate balance of power the attempted reestablishment of government in Somalia will lead to more conflict and obstacles to progress rather than less. .

 

 

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[Dhagax-Tuur]

I dont even know why you would post this cr@p. I have never heard such utter rubbish before in my life. For an economist, analyst or whatever to call an anarchy and what can only be described the worst state for a human as 'delicate equilibrim of power' is nothing but rubbish. The most important for life to survive is security and safety. Economics and the rest are nothing if there is no security for one's life and possessions. And anarchy is not good for Somalia's development. What we need is just order and law.

[Abu-Salman]

A Corrupt Governemnt can hardly better the overall quality of life, especially when that Corruption surpass any known record (ie Gedi allowed by the US to repatriate in california the misappropriated Saudi 30 m $US for the "reconciliation").

 

However, as long as that authority still abhor some Islamic appearance, and is not actively anti-Islamic by attacking core Islamic teachings, everything else is less crucial and Muslim rulers should be obeyed as long as they don't transgress over the Shariah and scholars insisted upon that obligation in order to prevent disunity and anarchy, hence indirect strengthening of Allah's enemies.

 

Ulemas could advise and actively lobby that government while occupying strategic posts in Education (of paramount importance) and Justice for instance (ie Saudi Arabia) or have some authority, wether directly or indirectly, through control over Tribal Areas etc (Malyasia, Yemen, Pakistan etc).

 

Obviously, when a so-called "Anti-Terror, Secular Government" is cobbled together by the very same historical enemies who armed and financed those Warlords, people have no choice but defend themselves as their forefathers always resisted gloriously Crusaders (Afghan tribes, Somalis under Ahmed Gurey or the "Sayyid" who averted the worst or acculturation).

 

In that light, indeed, nothing under the Sun could be worse than foreign-sponsored Warlords keen to destroy the nascent Islamic awakening widely witnessed in Muqdisho under the Shariah courts or througout Somali Areas when Islamic Preaching and Education flourished...

[Thankful]

Abdillah,

the Secessionists goal is to have the TFG fail and try and convince everyone Puntland or any other peaceful admininstration does not exist. This is part of their obession of getting independance and they believe helps their cause. So they post articles from anyone they can find, but if someone writes bad about them they call him a drunk egyptian and what not.

Get use to a lot of nonsense articles.

[Gabbal]

Originally posted by Abdillah:

I dont even know why you would post this cr@p. I have never heard such utter rubbish before in my life. For an economist, analyst or whatever to call an anarchy and what can only be described the worst state for a human as

'delicate equilibrim

of power' is nothing but rubbish. The most important for life to survive is security and safety. Economics and the rest are nothing if there is no security for one's life and possessions. And anarchy is not good for Somalia's development. What we need is just order and law.

Abdillah, greed has no limit. I advise you to read more about economics. There are economists in this world, extreme capitalists, who disdain any government influence in the markets and would be more than happy in making a case out of Somalia, despite the effect or toll for that matter that Somalia's situation has had on its people. Extreme free market capitalism is the factor behind such things as free trade and organization such as the WTO and the World Bank/IMF who facilitate it, at least in favor of the developed world. A globalized Somalia-like situation, at least in the context of zero government interference in the market, is what they advocate for and seems to be the ideology of the individual behind this piece.

[NASSIR]

Good abridged article. Thanks for posting, JB.