Creating Opportunity For Each Other

           

Failed State

                                                  

Social 

• Mounting demographic pressures.
• Massive displacement of refugees, creating severe humanitarian emergencies.
• Widespread vengeance-seeking group grievance.
• Chronic and sustained human flight.

Economic 

• Uneven economic development along group lines.
• Severe economic decline.

Political 

• Criminalization and/or delegitimization of the state.
• Deterioration of public services.
• Suspension or arbitrary application of law; widespread human rights abuses.
• Security apparatus operating as a "state within a state".
• Rise of factionalized elites.
• Intervention of external political agents.

What, then, is a failed state? In its terminal form, a state fails when it implodes, leaving only a shell. Max Weber defined the state as the entity that possesses "a monopoly on the legitimate use of force". This is a vital part of any definition of the state, but modern usage stretches the definition to incorporate the idea of sovereignty over a territory.

Others insist that the idea of the state embodies a commitment as the "institutional representation of the people’s will". The more limited notion of the state would exclude, as failed states, countries such as North Korea or Zimbabwe, where the state is intact, possesses a monopoly of force, but lacks the essential ingredient of legitimacy. Somalia is one of several cases where the central government has imploded and controls only a small part of the country.

South Africa is far from such extreme situations. There is no threat to its territorial integrity, no threat of a violent overthrow of the government or even of a conflict that threatens to get out of hand. It enjoys democratic institutions (however poorly they perform), the rule of law and protected civil liberties.

Overall, our picture is not a pretty one, and Sunter’s scenario-planning prognostication appears chillingly accurate. The legitimacy of the state depends on the wholehearted embrace of its value system as reflected in the constitutional dispensation in place. Our constitution is sound, but it is constantly being undermined or hollowed out by the tenets of the "national democratic revolution", which is being pursued by those in the ANC who do not genuinely subscribe to the National Development Plan embraced by the ANC in Mangaung. Without genuine fealty to constitutionalism, our slide down the ratings is likely to continue.