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Of States and Taxes...
I've been reading an interesting book by Jeffrey Herbst entitled "States and Power in Africa", and it's given me a couple of interesting revelations about the nature of state consolidation of power. The premise of his book is that Africa's underdevelopment and instability can in part be explained by the manner in which states were forged, and the relationships they maintain with their people. He concludes that the ability of a state to project enough power to tax a population fairly and efficiently is both a mark of stability and development. Obviously this is something that doesn't exist in any real sense in Africa, so it makes for a provocative argument. But it's one that I'm beginning to sense has real merit.
Herbst begins by analogously examining Europe's political development in order to show that taxes form the fundamental social contract between Western populations and their states. The people agree to give up a portion of their capital in exchange for specific services provided by the state - namely, security, various civil liberties, infrastructure, sanitation, electricity, etc. Now, this would make sense to replicate in Africa, except that the historical structure of African society is not conducive to instituting such a system.
Europe's political consolidation took a very long time - centuries of conflict and political division have sliced and diced the continent into political entities of varying duration. Herbst argues that it was this seemingly endless process of conflict and political jockeying that created the modern state. Leaders in a city sought to secure their position against external threats. The easiest way to do this was to acquire geographic space between their metropole and the metropole of the enemy. To do this, power had to be extended into the periphery. Armies were sent into the hinterland of states, determined to deter invasion. In exchange for this protection from pillaging and conflict, the population of these territories were expected to pay tribute. This early form of taxation marked the first time that elites in the metropole were able to exact any real control over remote rural areas. And it also marked the beginning of democracy (rural populations denounced taxation without compensation, and in some cases demanded representation to secure desired compensation).
As time passed and the threat of conflict subsided, the relationship (taxation) between the state and the people remained. However, the people demanded that the state provide other services now that security was no longer paramount. Thus, the beginning of public funding for infrastructure development, education, etc. The social contract between state and society has endured.
Now, African states were born into the same borders created by the 1885 Conference of Berlin. These artificial colonial boundaries were adopted by African leaders as a necessity in order to ward off the sort of violent shifting of political allegiances implicit in actual self-determination. On this both the international community and African nationalists were united - to open the discussion to a re-drawing of borders would only invite chaos and instability. And to date, Africa has remained stable in that sense. There has only been one real intrastate conflict (well, depending how you count - Libya's incursions into Darfur in the 1980's pissed off Sudan but didn't amount to much; Ethiopia technically owned Eritrea for the duration of that conflict; Ethiopia invaded Somalia in the last year or so, but did so at the behest of the internationally-recognized government there; and South African troops did fight against the Angolan government in the early nineties, but not under the South African flag) in the whole of Africa's independence period, a pretty remarkable record given the bloodshed in the formative years of Europe's political development.
That said, internal conflicts are common. Herbst argues this is because African states don't have the capacity to tax. Or rather, the security of their borders has never compelled states to develop the same relationship with their populations that has been cultivated in Europe and America.
For the literary gurus, think of the African state in the same way that Dante considered Hell (not a far stretch of the imagination for most whose familiarity with Africa is one of conflict and death). Concentric circles emanate outward from the metropole, only in Africa, chaos increases further away from the center. The state is able to exert control over the capital out of necessity, and as such, taxation there is common. However, out in the bush the state is non-existent. Why devote state resources to protecting a border that is in no danger of violation?
Well, perhaps because failure to control one's own hinterland is the greatest threat to political stability in Africa that we can identify. In the absence of the state providing public services and security, it is common for rural populations in Africa to turn elsewhere. In some cases the international community can step in and prop up local economies through aid. And in others, warlordism rises to challenge the state. Regionally-based entrepreneurs, eager to sever linkages between the state and resource accumulation or capital extraction, make bargains with local populations, providing basic services in exchange for allegiance to movements that rise in opposition to the state. By capitalizing on the human insecurity of population centers outside the sphere of influence of the metropole, these warlords are able to challenge state authority and legitimacy. You can imagine how states take this - they seek to crush any and all threats to supremacy, and war is created. And then if the warlords emerge victorious power shifts and there is a new hinterland and a new metropole, and soon new opposition.
Furthermore, underdevelopment is perpetuated by this cycle in two distinct ways. First, inequality is created through the unequal distribution of aid and capital accumulation by the state. Clientelism and rent-seeking in the metropole is unfortunately exceedingly common, creating distortions in income distribution and aid disbursal. Economic growth (however slow) serves the elite few and not the poor - in fact, when inflation rises faster than wages, it can actually hurt the poor. Healthy social service institutions can alleviate this cleavage in society. Second, conflict only serves to destroy all sorts of indicators, from economic (inflation, etc.) to human development (life expectancy drops, education rates plummet as children become soldiers instead of students, local economies are destroyed by pillaging, and infant mortality increases as sanitary medical facilities become rare). In fact, the World Bank has acknowledged that conflict is the biggest "trap" keeping underdeveloped states poor.
So maybe it's time to re-evaluate the exercise in liberalist state building going on in Africa. Politically, the continent is still in its infancy, and despite criticism there are signs that its development may still be more rapid than its European forefathers. But in lieu of the fundamental force that drove state consolidation in Europe, some creative engineering may be in order. In other words, the key to development in Africa just may be a good tax policy. All this time we've been sending members of the World Health Organization and the International Monetary Fund to Africa when we should have been sending representatives from the IRS. 
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