Op-Ed: Failed states, or how to destroy countries with lousy socioeconomics.

Sudanese who have fled fightingt in Sennar state at a displacement camp in the country’s east, in July – Copyright AFP TAUSEEF MUSTAFA

It would be so easy to define a failed state in political terms. Political terms mean nothing and never have. Let’s stick to the dictionary definitions. The reality of failed states is at foundation level, not political. Failure applies in real terms in real situations. A failed state is dysfunctional and cannot operate as a country.

Let’s skip the rhetoric. The measures of failure are unambiguous. This is a very simple checklist:

Economic failure: Poverty is a true measure of social failure, translated into visible economics. These economics destroy the state. Whatever wealth a nation may have, that wealth isn’t in public hands.

Health: A sick country is a country full of sick people. From that point onward, it’s just a matter of scale. Access to health care, however expensive and ineffectual, is a sort of door prize.

Quality of life: Any gap in quality of life indicates the actual economic condition of any state. A big gap means the society is effectively split.

Education: Lack of education means lack of economic capacity due to lack of skills. The “college divide” is a reflection of the ability to meet skills needs.  

Repression: In more extreme cases, repression causes failed states. The USSR, Nazi Germany, and most dictatorships are the simple examples. All repressive states fail, it’s simply a matter of when they fail.

Crime: Healthy societies can manage crime reasonably well. Failing societies usually can’t or are actually run by criminals. These states never survive for long.

Infrastructure: Failure to maintain infrastructure from shipping goods to roads that are safe to drive on, is a fair measure of failure. This includes food, water, energy, and the necessities of life.

Rights: Rights are not “entitlements”, or “privileges”. Rights are supposed to be supported by law and constitutions. They’re your guarantee of personal rights. If those rights no longer exist, you’re definitely in a failed state. Injustice is a hallmark of a failed or failing state.

Priorities: A classic example of a failed state is neglect of critical priorities as above. Do you know of a state with that problem? There is effectively no real governance. Clashing priorities leads to polarization, which leads automatically to failed states. Dumb enough for anyone to understand, you’d think.

After that merry little checklist, here’s the current news about failed states. You notice some of the headlines are highly politicized and equivocal.

The slightly missed message in this familiar cacophony of headlines is that state failures aren’t theoretical.  Sudan isn’t a theory, it’s a fact. Nor are the other impoverished nations and peoples around the world. Other states are really more a matter of degrees than definitions.

There are a few interesting examples. The UK has recently started describing itself as a potential Third World country since the Brexit lunacy.

The USA doesn’t know if it is or isn’t a failed state and is either still trying to make up its mind or not interested. Just for the record, you deranged psychotic gerbils, what’s “patriotic” about poverty, homelessness, and population-wide sickness?

The rest of the world generates quite a list of failed states. You’ll note quite a lot of political content in those headlines.

It’s called ducking the issues. Failure of whole countries is discussed much the same way as a not-so-good hairstyle, depending on which country us under discussion.

People?

What do people have to do with it?

Not much, apparently. Not so you’d notice, anyway.

Happy?

Now let me generously donate one further bit of information which is missing from this rhapsody of reality:

None of these were failing states 60 years ago.

The world was in reasonably OK, if not brilliant and certainly not spotless condition back then. Only Africa had the dubious privilege of being sabotaged by the rest of the world’s greed and politics.

Other continents are now enjoying “the African experience” and that’s where those hundreds of millions of immigrants are coming from.

These failures are the products of politics. Everyone knows how useful politics are. They’re the cause of most of human misery since the beginning of recorded history.

Failes states don’t “just happen”. They’re created.

See any issues?