A Failure of What?

As Somali pirates continue to hijack more and more vessels, fingers are being pointed, but who's really to blame?

Piracy off of the horn of Africa has been rife over the past few months, but with the capture of an American vessel and the first of many British warships entering the area, the issue is once again heating up. While the temporary solution to the problem seems to be clear, the causes and thus the long-term solutions seem to be muddled and unknown.

When I was driving home today, I heard a guest on "The World" give what must surely be the most western version of the story. Namely, Somalia is chugging out pirates because it has a failed state. Because there is no overarching coercive force to force the law on desperate Somalis, they are behaving so reprehensibly. Notwithstanding that coercion doesn't work, the feeling is that if the Somalian state is unable to beat it's own citizens into doing what's right, other states will send their navies in to beat up Somalian citizens into doing what's right (we insist).

But, of course, the whole point of a state is not to force it's population into a certain set of behavior patterns through force. It is unsurprising that those states who have held such to be their mandate have all invariably failed. Put otherwise, it is the attempt to mete out law at all costs that causes states to fail, rather than the failure of a state that causes lawlessness. After all, there are many communities in the world that don't have direct, external, state-sponsored law that do just fine (like the Amish, for example), and to think that men are naturally savage and require strong governance over them to prevent rampant anarchy and death may be surprised to know that their philosophical roots were already cut out nearly 400 years ago...

The particular guest then went on to say that another reason for Somali piracy is the desperate condition of Somalis. Specifically, because they have a failed state, they don't have education, roads, or welfare. Simply put, without government giving you what you need, you are left in a world of squalor. Of course, this idea is actually absurd. People have gotten on well enough without states providing infrastructure or medical bill reimbursement or factory-produced government schools for millennia. If this hyper-statist point of view were accurate, then the entire world, pre-westphalia, would have been nothing more than barbarity and mass butchery: something we know to be patently false.

We know as fact that people can take care of themselves without a government handing them everything without immediately resorting to things like piracy. The overbearingly western idea that the failure of the state has transitively caused the problems is clearly confused. Thea idea that Somalis are risking their lives for $10 million in one go when they otherwise might make $10 over their entire lifetime seems much more at heart in this issue. We could just lump this all into a category of mass greed if it weren't for the fact that Somalis do suffer SO much and are in SUCH a state of destitution. Such want undoubtedly would drive people to float rafts hundreds of miles away from shore just for a chance at relief.

This brings us to another thing that this particular guest noted. Somalis are in a very desperate state, and we know this because almost everyone there is reliant on food aid. Once again, there is reason to believe that this line of thinking has been turned on its head. It is assuming that the Somalis are desperate (perhaps due to lack of an overbearing government), that they are required to take food aid in order just to get out of the worst of their deprivation. In fact, it may be that the opposite is true: food aid is CAUSING the worst of the deprivation.

Foreign aid is often channeled into the hands of governments who simply divert the funds for themselves. Somalia was no exception to this in the early 1990's. Those resources that DO manage to make it down to regular people undermine the fledgling ability for the people to provide for themselves. After all, what Somali farmer or pastor can possibly compete against free food from the rest of the world? What you wind up with is with a bunch of out of work farmers swelling the need for more aid, while no longer being able to help free their country from their need of it. Add to that interest payments on loans, and we can begin to see a fundamental factor for the worsening of the situation in Africa since we've started giving out aid.

So, in the end, if it's not a matter of a failure of state or a failure of aid that's causing the conditions which breeds piracy, then the question is, "this is a failure of what?" Firstly, and most clearly, this is a failure of Somalians to provide well enough for themselves. If they grew enough food, and desired political unity and economic stability (rather than the tribalism and looter-take-all attitude which has been rife in Somalia for the past few thousand years) enough, they would be able to MAKE an environment in which piracy was no longer such a good-seeming option. While a state may very well be helpful, all states rest on the consent of the governed (they are made for the people BY the people), and the governed seem to have no will to make a state. It requires little imagination to consider what would happen were a state forced on them from outside...

While the Somalis should take a lion's share of the blame (but if they don't feel guilty, then what good will it ultimately do?), the outside world certainly hasn't helped. Rather than encouraging entreprenurialism, or civil society, it encourages dependency (which, in the end is really another word for slavery), and attacks civic institutions as harbingers of terrorism. We want Somalia to step in line, and do things our way. After all, there's a profit to be had.

If we want to have any hope to change this situation, there seems to be only two real options. The first is to swarm the Gulf of Aden with warships and murder anyone caught in a boat, while at the same time colonizing Somalia and giving (forcing on) them a state which they were unable to make themselves. Extreme order through extreme coercion. Welcome to the 1800's. The second, of course, is to stop half-assedly engaging with Somalia in a system which is ultimately propagating the problem. By this, I mean that we need to wean Somalia off of its dependency that is ultimately its ruin, and we need to stop behaving like we can control a Somali state (or even that we know what it should look like), and let Somalia grow up into a strong, independent nation. Stiflement begets destitution begets retribution, now as in the past, and to simply state that Somalia has "failed" to make a state in our image that follows our laws and norms is simply continuing the problem to the indefinite future.