Questionable support

Cambodia, Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti and lastly Afghanistan - the help usually begins with military support. It is accompanied by political measures in countries in crisis, for example with police training or helping to hold elections. These are measures which are supposed to promote more democracy - at least on paper.

So-called state-building takes many forms and is generally applied in post-war societies. Its aim is stabilizing a crisis region and western democracies serve as the role models.

But in most cases, these efforts bring disputable results, said Florian Kühn, a political scientist at the University of the Federal Armed Forces in Hamburg. Kühn is very critical of state-building. He calls the artificial measures initiated from abroad "Potemkin villages."

Kühn's research showed that Afghanistan, for example, was characteristic of the difficulties involved. The measures there resemble hollow backdrops, which will collapse when the West leaves the region, he concluded.

An analysis by the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) in Berlin reached similar results. In Afghanistan, governmental and cross-departmental actions worked according to the principle of trial and error, and resembled fishing in murky waters, the SWP analysis said.

State-building as an experiment

The eagerness to experiment in state-building is a blatant contradiction to western polices toward the Arab world. For far too long, said SWP's director Volker Perthes, the West held on to what seemed to be tried and tested, in this case Arab authoritarian rulers.

"This was the case in Egypt and Tunisia, but also in Saudi Arabia or Syria, and even in Libya," Perthes said.

But old hands in politics should actually know that overestimating stability and security always promotes political stagnation. According to Perthes, Libya is a prime example of this.

"It was thought that if someone rules for 42 years, then it's a stable system and will perhaps change from within," he said. "When it's ready to change from within, we want to provide support." But the system in Libya was twisted to such an extent that this inner change required NATO military support.

Syria is not Libya

In Syria, the population's efforts against the regime continue. But even if the Syrian people manage to topple President Bashar al-Assad, state-building would not be a suitable instrument to stabilize the country, said political scientist Kühn.

"If the regime is overthrown and these institutions are filled by other people, the state has not disappeared," Kühn said. This precisely could distinguish Syria from Libya. In the North African country, the state institutions were extremely personalized, effectively tailored to the hitherto existing ruling clan.

"So it could be that many institutions, if they are not filled by Gadhafi's relatives and his own groupings, will no longer really exist as an institution," Kühn said.

However, he said this was not a call for state-building in Libya. A political instrument to stabilize and develop a crisis region is extremely questionable if the goals of the measures, as well as their duration and means for verifying success, are not precisely defined. That is why democracy can only be exported to the world's crisis regions with great difficulty.

"It is an ideal of western nations, but in practice, it doesn't function as well as this ideal," Kühn said.

A democracy out of a model building box is one of illusion. Can it not be realized because it resembles in its ideal an indeed attractive, but yet unrealistic mirage? According to Kühn, this is part of the state-building problem.

"No country comes near this archetype," Kühn said. "This is why state-building is always excruciatingly frustrating because it never leads to the desired result and could potentially take forever."

Author: Ute Hempelmann (sac)
Editor: Rob Mudge