THE POLITICS OF SURVIVAL Federal States in the Third World PHILIP MAWHOOD Less developed countries do not conform easily to the accepted patterns of federalism set out in the literature. Third World constitutions tend to be short-lived and in many cases the federations have disintegrated or have become, in real terms, unitary states. Common factors are the strong influence of ethnic or territorial élites, whether of traditional or modern type, and the difficulty experienced by the regime in reversing anti-state norms left over from the preindependence period. Even where a federal solution is successfully legitimized, as in India, Malaysia, and Nigeria, it takes a centrally dominated form. Quasi-federal states such as Sudan and Cameroon exhibit a similar problem of the regime’s legitimacy in culturally distinct peripheral areas. Federalism is chosen not for convenience but for survival.

Most of the classic writing on federalism has been centered on the conditions that make a federal constitution desirable, and the legal and administrative arrangements that are likely to make it successful. The question of the constitution’s survival under difficult circumstances, and the changing nature of demands upon a federal system, are also touched upon. But the focus of interest is upon design, and the main effort is directed to getting a design that will produce the most successful results in terms of social stability, economic growth, and political strength for the government. This brings a certain unreality into the literature from the point of view of a developing country; the world of the Federalist Papers, of Wheare, Hicks, and Friedrich, is a different place from the Third World. There, in recent times, it has been more common for a federation to collapse than to endure. Normally a federation fragments into its component parts, or becomes in reality (whether or not the name of &dquo;federation&dquo; is retained) a unitary state. Malaysia, India, and Nigeria are states that have remained federal, although the principle has come under severe attack and their constitutions have all been modified. The roll of failure is far longer, from Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela through the West Indies to the Mali Federation, Cameroon, the Central African republics, the East African Common Services Organisation,

521

522

Libya, Jordan/ Iraq, Egypt/ Yemen, Ethiopia/ Eritrea, and not to mention colonial experiments in French-ruled

Pakistan-

Africa, the Rhode-

sias/ Nyasaland, Indochina, and Indonesia. It is too early to know whether Senegambia will follow the same path. The common characteristics of nearly all developing countries are ethnic/ regional pluralism, relative poverty, and a brief period of existence as a state. As a consequence the regime possesses few political resources and must make the best use of ideology to eke out the limited material benefits that it can distribute (Nellis, 1972; Hughes, 1981). Its power to communicate through its own administrative machinery is poor, by reason of psychological obstacles as well as physical breakdowns. State boundaries have not proved as vulnerable as might be feared, but within those boundaries the work of nation building will stretch far into the future. The existence of the regime, and even of the state itself, demands the conscious and active attention of the political leaders. There is an ideology of social development and planned economic growth, but in real policymaking even these goals take second place to that of survival. The approach to federalism, then, is more dictated by history and circumstances and allows less freedom of choice between differing solutions than has been practicable in the industrialized countries. The threat of rebellion from groups in the society is always present on the one side, as is the threat of military takeover on the other. Sometimes the ruling group will have only one chance to get the solution right-if it fails, the next one will be drafted by a different set of rulers. This does not make the classical arguments about federalism wholly irrelevant, but it does dictate a certain emphasis upon the values of political survival rather than administrative convenience. According to the mythical Pilot Officer Prune in the wartime Royal Air Force, a good landing is a landing that you walk away from: In the Third World, a good federation is one that is still there after ten years have passed. EXPERIENCES WITH FEDERALISM It is not realistic to discuss the whole range of Third World countries

together at any level that is at all detailed. The environment of government in the different regions of the world is widely varied. Asian countries usually possess ancient indigenous cultures that are more fully developed; Latin America has an earlier and longer history of European colonialism; and most African traditional cultures are based on a politi-

523

cal unit that comes closer to village society than to anything as large as a modern province or district. Nevertheless there are political characteristics that prevail across the majority of new states. A ruling class or caste, or a pattern of inherited rulers, has come down from the pre-modern period and still exercises a powerful influence; being peripherally based, this element is a constant force for decentralization in some form. Modernization of the economy has thrown up a new 61ite of entrepreneurs or property owners, overlapping with the political/ bureaucratic 61ite who actually operate the structures of government. Political party activity is often based upon territorial or ethnic allegiances, as can be seen in Nigeria despite every effort of the government to &dquo;deregionalize&dquo; the parties through the drafting of the national constitution and other means. Where a single party is dominant or is the only one legally permitted, the same forces express themselves through the maneuvering of interest groups within the party. Disparities of wealth between different regions of the state reinforce the territorial allegiances, as the richer areas seek to maintain their privileged position and the other areas contest it. Where federal constitutional forms were chosen for the new states of the mid-twentieth century, this was not done as a convenient division of power within a developed national unit. Every state was deeply concerned with the problem of creating a sense of nationhood. The idea of a single nation rested upon two bases: a common structure of administration for a given territory, imposed by the colonial power, and a common spirit of resistance against the colonial power. Independence removed both of these, except insofar as the structure and spirit of resistance could be preserved in the post-independence world. But much of the drive inherent in both Asian and African &dquo;nationalism&dquo; came from the sense of identity of regional and ethnic groups. As long as colonial rule was in place as a common target, the divisions between such groups could be felt as relatively unimportant. When the new national government came into power, its interest was to suppress their sense of political identity and substitute a national sense; but this was really asking the whole movement to go into reverse (Hughes, 1981: 130-131). In some states the degree of group identity built up during the colonial period-whether through forms of territorial administration, recognized by the colonial power, or through the nationalist activity organized against it-was so intense that a unified government could not be accepted. The new central regime wanted to take as much control as possible over the whole area of the state. It faced a situation in which

524 some degree of &dquo;national&dquo; identity existed, but was matched by strong identities at a lower level. Pressure for ultimate control by the center over the essential resources and the essential areas of decision making remained strong. In India the name of the state (the Union of India), the single judiciary, and the All-India Civil Service that staffed higher posts in state as well as federal administrations, emphasized the unitary bias that was given to the new constitution (Watts, 1966: 19). Like the governments of Argentina and Brazil, the Indian central government was authorized to substitute for the government of any state that-in its opinion-was failing to perform satisfactorily, and these powers have been used. Furthermore, in an emergency, the system was designed to become a unitary system of government. Even in normal times, the center maintained its dominance over much of the economy through economic planning controls. Behind these constitutional and administrative arrangements lay the Congress Party, with its long-established insistence upon unity successfully carried over from the colonial into the postindependence period. Congress was able to persuade its own branches to nominate candidates who were locally unpopular, and beyond this to cause such candidates to be elected simply because of the Congress label. Despite these powerful structures of centralization, however, the peripheral forces were able to gain concessions from the center. The most important aim that they achieved was the linguistic reorganization into mainly single-language units, reluctantly conceded by Congress in the 1950s and early 1960s. The only multilingual states that were finally left, Punjab and Assam, remain (as of 1983) a source of problems for the federal government through dissidence between their local communities. As the years passed, both elements in the Indian federation became increasingly legitimized, with the center having the upper hand. The federation of Malaya (and later of Malaysia, with the territories on the island of Borneo included) presented different and less intense problems for the constitution makers. In particular, the population was small: less than 10 million throughout the whole period of change from the 1940s to the 1960s. The most politically aware part of the country, the Malayan peninsula, is small and compact. In colonial times it was governed centrally, but with the traditional rulers given an honored place. After the wartime Japanese occupation, 1942-1945, the colonial government attempted to operate a unitary constitution but was defeated by resistance from the Malay nationalist movement. The population was and is almost equally divided between Malays (now

525

Bumiputra, or &dquo;sons of the soil&dquo;) and non-Malays-the latter being mainly Chinese but including a significant proportion of Indians and others. Thus the &dquo;ethnic arithmetic&dquo; was relatively simple but no less intractable in a political sense. The experiment with unitary government ended in 1948, when Malay support for a strong central government, within a federal-style constitution, was given in return for a citizenship law that excluded about half the non-Malays (other safeguards for Malay interests were also incorporated). The independence constitution known

as

of 1957 was also federal, and set the pattern for the future. At the cost of slightly more equal division of legislative functions, the federal regime gained more executive authority and in particular held overriding powers to make treaties, to impose legal uniformity, and to deal with economic development and situations of insurgency. Throughout modern times the federal government has enjoyed crushing financial superiority, based upon its export revenues. The end of colonial rule in the Far East brought into being a number of other small states that could see advantage in joining the Malayan Federation. Singapore acceded to the federation in 1961, but was expelled in 1965 because of irreconcilable rivalries between its Chinese rulers and the Malay-dominated federal government. Sarawak and Sabah, on the island of Borneo, joined in 1963 and the present federation of Malaysia was formed. This is another federation of the strongly centralized type, as far as resources are concerned: The dominant civil service and the single ruling party reinforce the constitutional provisions for central influence. But there are many factions within the ruling National Front, even the leading federal politicians have to rely heavily upon grass-roots support, and the states are allowed to go their own way over significant issues such as the method of organizing representative local government. Like Switzerland and Canada, Malaysia has a federation that benefitted from external threats in its early years (Hicks, 1978: 177-178). The period of Sukarno’s rule in the Indonesia of the 1960s was one of expansion that threatened at least the status of Sarawak and Sabah, which were only defended by calling upon British assistance. Of the three leading examples of federalism in the Third World, Nigeria is the one that has undergone the most severe testing and yet survived. All three tend to refute the gloomy prediction of Carl Friedrich as to the survival-value of federations that were either inherited from the colonial period or created at the moment of national a

independence.

526

Nigeria, along with the Caribbean Federation, provide interesting cases for the hypothesis that federalism does not work when it is imposed, or at any rate urged, upon dependent territories by departing colonial administrators; that is, it is not a solution to built-in divergencies and basic disunity. The failure of each of these federal schemes can be traced to the same source [Friedrich, 1968: 175]. It is doubtful, from the record, whether inheritance has been a plus or minus factor. More probably it is neither, though a pre-federation history of decentralized administration for the regions or provinces might be a force favoring stability in these cases. This advantage was qualified in Nigeria by the imbalance of the inherited regional units, which were so large at the time of independence as to create a dangerous counter-force to the national center (Mawhood, 1980; Panter-Brick, 1980). The &dquo;independence&dquo; constitution of 1960 was federal in type, with multiparty parliamentary institutions, strong regional governments and a relatively weak federal center. Such an arrangement reproduced a system that had proved workable under colonial rule, but the removal of colonial power brought about an intensification of mutual fear and competition among regional and smaller groups. The first military coup of 1966 brought into power a regime that attempted to rule Nigeria as a unitary state. It was rapidly overthrown and replaced by the second military government of General Gowon; his policy was to recreate a system of regions but also to fragment them into progressively larger numbers of federal states. The eastern military governor Ojukwu refused to accept the partition of his own area, and there followed the &dquo;Biafran&dquo; civil war that ended after several years with the victory of the federal military government. During this period and after it, until the return of civilian rule in 1979, the balance of resources was massively shifted in favor of the centerhelped on by the rapid increase of oil revenues that came essentially under central control. Like Malaysia, Nigeria had the experience of a foreign threat during the period of fighting. African states were divided in their allegiances to one side or other in the civil war, and France gave at least material support to the Biafran side-motivated by her links with the French-speaking states that entirely surround Nigeria. The federal constitution that was finally adopted can be described as a centerdominated one, in that the federal president has an executive role, the major resources are in the federal government’s hands, and strenuous efforts are made to ensure that all political parties are nationally rather than regionally based. However, the social identities of state populations a

527

real, and in practice the parties do tend to be based on one region or another. As in India, it seems probable that both levels of the federation will gain increasing legitimacy. This picture of a central power that gains as much influence as it can, subject to the real limits imposed by regional cultural identities, is reflected in several quasi-federal countries of the Third World. The Sudan central government faces continuing problems both in the western region and the culturally distinct southern region, which-rather like northern Nigeria-was separately administered in the colonial period although still under the ultimate authority of Khartoum. After a 17-year civil war the south was settled by President Nimeri in 1972, but only at the cost of granting it autonomous status, with its own elected assembly and a regional president who was also vice-president of the whole Sudan. These arrangements maintained the peace and stability that were prerequisites for rebuilding the region’s infrastructure and administration, but have now come under new pressures. In 1981 the southern assembly was dissolved and its president dismissed, and Nimeri set in motion the &dquo;Gowon&dquo; solution of dividing up the south into three regions instead of one, which he eventually imposed in 1983. A fresh movement aiming at southern secession from the rest of the Sudan has grown up, with fighting between northern and southern army units stationed there. Leaders of a secessionist party, thought to be receiving support from either Libya or Ethiopia, have been imprisoned, and there have been desertions from the army to the southern guerilla movement, which fought the earlier civil war. Internal difficulties in handling cultural regionalism have stimulated the Khartoum government to make a new attempt at confederal linkage with Egypt, and in May 1983 a &dquo;Parliament of the Nile&dquo; was inaugurated, with equal numbers of members nominated from the two national assemblies. The new body’s functions are symbolic rather than real, but it may be more lasting than most of its kind because it expresses the current need of both parties for a solid alliance against external pressures. A case where central demands for unification triumphed, because the opposition to them was relatively weak, is presented by Cameroon. This example however, contains a number of factors that are unlikely to be reproduced elsewhere. The area of present-day Cameroon, if we go back to the precolonial period, embodied no more than a normal set of ethnic and territorial distinctions. The north was dominated by Islam, the south was more open to penetration by Christian missions, and a group of peoples with strong entrepreneurial potential existed in the Bamileke are

528

highlands to the west. It was the destruction of German rule in World War I and the subsequent political history that created the conditions making federalism one of the necessary options. In the postwar settlement two League of Nations mandates were created, later to become United Nations Trust Territories: France governed the much larger East Cameroon as something of a showpiece, while the Britishruled West Cameroon spent most of its history as an outlying province under the administration of Nigeria. At the time of national independence in 1961 West Cameroon was offered the choice, by plebiscite, of joining the East or remaining part of Nigeria. It opted for the former, despite the inherent difficulties of running in harness with a senior partner whose administrative language and administrative culture were French, as against the English of West Cameroon. There were two major reasons for the choice. West Cameroon’s largest ethnic groupthe Bamileke and associated peoples-also formed an important part of the population across the border in the East. Looking westward to Lagos however, the Cameroonians felt that they had always been neglected and could have little influence there. They also feared the growing influence of Ibo entrepreneurs from Nigeria upon their own trade. The federation of 1961 never had much prospect of lasting success, since the leaders of the two units sought irreconcilable goals. Foncha in the West hoped for &dquo;a confederation of almost autonomous states&dquo; (Johnson, 1970: 365-370), while Ahidjo in the East had never been interested even in federation, much preferring a unitary state. The two political systems, the 611te values, and the political structures and traditions were different: Hierarchy was emphasized in the East as against diffusion of power in the West (or, in David Apter’s terms, &dquo;neo-mercantilism&dquo; as against &dquo;reconciliation&dquo;). The West Cameroonians observed their Freanch-speaking colleagues’ Napoleonic style of administration under a Fifth-Republic-type constitution, and became aware of features that they prized in their own institutionsfrom the &dquo;English&dquo; style of relationships between a minister and a permanent secretary down to the freedom of action of the local councils (Mawhood,1983: 177-181). But it was too late to seek separation again, or even to preserve the federal constitution indefinitely. The structures of administration were increasingly harmonized on the model of the East, while members of the 611te in the West were rewarded with political office and status. East Cameroon had effectively been a one-party state since 1962, and Ahidjo emphasized &dquo;the Party,&dquo; &dquo;the Plan,&dquo; and &dquo;the

529

Fatherland&dquo; as unifying and centralizing symbols (Stark, 1980). In 1972, no serious opposition offered from the West, the federation was ended by a referendum and the United Republic of Cameroon declared. This is now governed by a single legislature and executive through a uniform pattern of provinces each headed by an appointed governor. Local government consists of communes organized mainly on the East Cameroon model, but with a few concessions in detail to satisfy the westerners’ feelings. Both French and English are official languages of the republic.

with

CHOICES FOR GOVERNMENTS The federations and quasi-federations discussed here were brought about essentially as a response to ethnic and regional differences within

each sovereign state, together with linguistic differences of two kindsthose relating to the indigenous languages and occasionally (as in Sudan and Cameroon) those relating to the administrative languages of the colonial period. The new ruling 61ites needed to establish their control over governmental units inherited from the colonial period-and in some instances federalism was the best means of persuading the British, in particular, to agree to early independence. Arguments that demonstrated the greater economic advantage, influence in external affairs, or administrative efficiency of a large federation were strictly secondary (Watts, 1966: 42-52). The traditional texts on federalism do not often face the issue of a state that is in imminent danger of collapse, nor of a state whose unifying links are mainly an inherited structure of bureaucracy and the interests of the small ruling group that controls it. The &dquo;federalist&dquo; writers and Wheare are infused with the idea of the voluntary choice of constitutional arrangements that will lay down the ground rules of political life and breed a federal spirit. Carl Friedrich speaks of the &dquo;spirit of unity&dquo; and &dquo;centrifugal forces of localism&dquo; as the mutually opposed factors (Friedrich, 1968: 175)-but these are factors that must be less dominant in countries where the masses possess little influence over the questions of separation or unification. When the essentials of the federal constitution have been worked out, a number of lesser choices remain for the center to take. Federal influence over the structures of administration at all levels comes next, in the order of formal and visible measures. We have mentioned the importance of India’s federal civil service elite, which is reflected in other federations. In laying down the structure for local government, the

530

center’s variable bargaining power is illustrated nicely by the cases of Nigeria and Malaysia. As a federal military government, Nigeria’s rulers of the mid-1970s were able to drive through a common system of reformed local government in all of the 19 states-even though the constitution of the time made local government a federal subject. After the arrival of civilian rule in 1979 the states reasserted themselves and the local councils were severely modified: by multiplication and fragmentation of units and areas, by replacing the elected bodies with appointed committees loyal to the state governments, by experiments with executive chairmen, by the reshuffling of functions, and in other ways. Malaysia had a civilian government at all times, and consequently the federal government did not attempt to impose a single model of local government nor even a requirement that local government of any kind should be set up for all areas. The states were asked to choose what kind of local council they would have, and in what quantity: The only federal requirement was that some local government should exist in every state. The result is a hodgepodge of different systems, but one that is nevertheless evolving. The insecurity of federal arrangements in countries of the Third World has been an important theme of this article. We do not have to conclude that, in the long run, their problems will be different from those of older federations. The legitimacy of a state depends in large part on the length of time that it has been administered as a single unit, and this lends significance to the duration of colonial rule: Arbitrarily speaking, it amounted to 160 years in India, 90 years in (mainland) Malaysia, and 60 years in Nigeria. Few national borders in the world are legitimate on purely geographic or ethnographic grounds; nearly all have acquired acceptance through the passage of time, and the same will happen in the new tropical states. At the beginning, any government is obliged to assert formal unity in the political essentials, while dealing informally with the causes of disunity that overflow from the cultural to the political sphere. The amount of formal unity then becomes the bone of public contention. As the national unit becomes more secure it obtains the elbowroom to organize and to allow cultural pluralism, as in Great Britain or the USSR, without the pressures for political secession becoming too strong for it to contain. Federalism is an expensive solution, and is adopted because there is no practicable alternative. Federal governments of the Third World are now faced with the need to decentralize cultural expressions while, to a large extent, centralizing the political and economic arrangements. It is a difficult solution, but often the only strategic choice that remains.

531

REFERENCES FRIEDRICH, C. J. (1968) Trends of Federalism in Theory and Practice. London: Pall Mall.

HICKS, U. K. (1978) Federalism: Failure and Success. London: Macmillan. HUGHES, A. (1981) "The nation-state in black Africa," in L. Tivey (ed.) The NationState. Oxford: Martin Robertson.

JOHNSON, W. R. (1970) The Cameroon Federation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.

MAWHOOD, P. (1983) Local Government in the Third World: The Experience of

Tropical Africa. New York and Chichester: John Wiley. ———(1980) "The government of Nigeria: structural change as a

response to pluralism," in S. Ehrlich and G. Wootton (eds.) Three Faces of Pluralism. Farnborough: Gower. NELLIS, J. (1972) A Theory of Ideology: The Tanzanian example. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.

PANTER-BRICK, S. K. ( 1980) "Nigeria and the uncertainties of pluralism,"in S. Ehrlich and G. Wootton (eds.) Three Faces of Pluralism. Farnborough: Gower. STARK, F. M. (1980) "Persuasion and power in Cameroon." Canadian J. of African Studies 14, 2: 273-293. WATTS, R. L. (1966) New Federations. Oxford: Clarendon.

Philip Mawhood, University Lecturer in the Department of Local Government Administration, University of Birmingham, England, has published on local government in the Third

World,

on

British local government, and

on

local government reform.