Marina Ottaway, Africa’s new leaders: Democracy or state reconstruction? Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, DC, 1999, 146 pages.

This book, published at the beginning of 1999, reviews the course of Africa’s second liberation – the second experiment with multipartyism undertaken by several states on the continent – through the prism provided by the experiences of five countries: Uganda, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The choice of the first three countries in this list was motivated by assumptions commonly made about their transitions in policymaking circles in the United States, where their importance in the strategy of containing the Sudanese regime gave them a prominence shared by few other African states. Indeed, it is fairly obvious that Washington was willing to overlook substantial flaws in their record of domestic governance in exchange for assistance with its regional policies. There was also a considerable degree of wishful thinking about the prospects for economic and political change in these countries.

The public emphasis was on the leaders of these three countries — Uganda, Eritrea and Ethiopia — as dynamic and assertive protagonists of an African Renaissance, a new generation of statesmen willing to reject and condemn the failed policies of their predecessors and to address the economic and political problems assailing the continent. Ottaway is too experienced an Africanist ever to have shared in this imagined parody based on claimed ‘first world’ norms. She realises that much of the ‘hype’ came from aid agencies and donors eagerly seeking a success story to assuage the cynics now revisiting the employment of external assistance during the Cold War era.

Ottaway begins her assessment with a reminder to those whose self-proclaimed mission is to promote liberal values in Africa, "that what is most desirable is not necessarily possible." Her study of these states and their leaders is firmly located in their historical and political context. She concludes that far from being states in transition to democracy, "[a] democratic transition is not conceivable in countries like these — countries that still have not solved the problems of power and authority and thus are not stable, de facto states that could become democratic" (page 117). None of the three states on which she focuses most of her attention have shown signs of making a transition from a leadership dominated to an institution dominated system, a fact that makes them all quite brittle.

She also notes that all five of the states visited in this book have become engaged in serious conflict over the past few years, and that African solutions to African problems are not necessarily pacific by nature.

This is obviously a book aimed at a broader audience of non-Africanists. Until the final two chapters, where the true work of synthesis and extrapolation take place, the writing is workmanlike rather than elegant, with few allusions to stir the imagination. These days there are few policymakers who will read a book of greater length than this, and lawyers and bankers seem to enjoy their fare, intellectually at least, plainly served. The final sections gather pace, and with considerable dexterity, the author shows how to reconfigure the ingredients she has collected. The results will contain some surprises for the uninitiated and the unwary.

With luck, this little book will clear away many of the common misperceptions about the nature of political change in Africa, dispelling the myth of Africa as some sort of aberration from a Western normative model, and persuading people that, if they wish to comprehend this continent, they need to do so by viewing it in its own terms, and by seeing the globe from an African perspective. Who knows, it might even contribute to the formulation of sensible Africa policy in Washington.

Richard Cornwell
Institute for Security Studies

V S Sheth (ed), Globalisation and the third world state, Somaiya Publications, Mumbai 1999, 128 pages

Suggestions of an increasingly globalised world have become common, but the understanding of what it is, is not as clear. The concept has inevitably sprouted many competing definitions, but its existence has meanwhile been accepted either with resignation, a sense of inevitability, or even fearful expectancy outside of the corridors of political power, the trading floors of the stock exchange, and the ivory towers of academia.

What it means to the so-called ‘third world’, in particular, remains unclear. Globalisation and the third world state is an attempt to come to grips with the phenomenon from a third world perspective on third world issues. The book grew out of a collection of papers presented by leading Indian Africanists on globalisation and its impact on African states. It promises from the outset to be a timely and refreshing change from the vast, but mostly monotonous literature on the topic being churned out in the developed world. Unfortunately, it does not quite deliver.

The book is divided into six chapters which covers the spectrum of politics, economics and development. The first chapter by Ramchandani focuses on the dilemma of underdevelopment in the third world, in general, before focusing on Africa, in particular. He competently covers the genesis of third world dependency, while taking into account regional variations between Asia, Latin America and Africa. In particular, he highlights the development dilemma of post-colonial sub-Saharan African states that is underscored by the impact of International Monetary Fund and World Bank-sponsored structural adjustment programmes (SAPs). He shows that the theoretical basis of SAPs can be traced to monetarist and neo-classical assumptions that put their stock in the market as the arbiter and bulwark against any external imbalances. The World Bank may be at pains to suggest a number of successful projects, but its interventions have clearly not worked in the last decade. The question is whether market signals alone could provide the most effective means for efficient resource allocation. The author convincingly shows that the fundamental flaws of SAPs are the short termism of many of the programmes and the fact that they do not address the deeper malaise in the structures of production, consumption, external trade, infrastructure capacity, long-term unemployment, and wider socio-economic problems. Still, what the author fails to do, is to question sufficiently whether African states have a choice between the market and anything else.

If Ramchandani focused on Africa’s malaise as a result of its interaction with non-statal actors such as the World Bank, Shahi’s chapter gives an even less comfortable view of Africa’s future development, based on its historical and contemporary ties with the Western world and its own poor record of good governance and management. By surveying the development experience of African states from 1980 to 1999, he argues that European connections have not helped Africa and are threatening to marginalise the continent further by pushing it even more to the periphery of global economic forces. His particular focus is the Lomé Convention, an agreement signed between the European Union and the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries. He shows that trade between the EU and the ACP countries actually declined; the share of ACP countries in EU imports has decreased from 20.5% in the pre-Lomé period to 16.6% from 1975 to 1984. He concludes that future prospects for ACP countries are hardly encouraging.

Other chapters move from the general to the specific. An interesting chapter by Sheth reveals how the third world élite had successfully manipulated Cold War conditions to receive economic and military aid from antagonistic power blocs to keep them in power by brutally repressing their own people. Somalia remains a classic case. Biswas’ chapter examines the risks of peacekeeping in a country torn by tribal feuds as an indirect consequence of the Soviet withdrawal from the region. Meanwhile, Sheth, in an effort to show the diversity of responses to and experiences of changing world conditions, shows how adept the Ethiopian ruling élite have been in adapting to regional and global changes since the time of Emperor Menelik II.

It is clear that the book as a whole is less about the process of globalisation than about south-south relations set against the historical hostility of the western powers in Africa and Asia. As one of the authors duly concedes, while south-south co-operation has lost some of its ideological charm in the post-Cold War era, it continues to hold political and economic potential. It is hard to see, however, how south-south relations can solve any of Africa’s internal problems in any way. Comparative experiences from Asia are all well and good, but Africa’s problems should be solved by Africans themselves with distinctly African solutions.

The real problem with the book lies in its omissions. It does not satisfactorily define what globalisation is, and fails to determine whether it is good or bad. Perhaps this criticism is somewhat harsh. After all, globalisation means different things to different people. To some, it refers to the impact of the accelerating current of economic and trade flows; for others, it is the breathless technological advances in communications and transport; and yet for others, it is about the rapid bridging of communities and cultures into one unifying world. No matter how it is defined and its impact is measured, there is one inescapable conclusion: globalisation is here to stay.

Perhaps, its more glaring omission is that there is no discussion of the African renaissance. At this point in time, many have already debated what the concept means with the same vigour that the meaning of globalisation has been discussed. The African renaissance may have had its genesis in the process of globalisation, but it holds exciting potential as a particularly African response to the impact of globalisation in many African lives today. A good book yet to be written is on the relationship between these two competing and complementary views. Although this book is not it, it does encouragingly point to developing world scholars and commentators increasingly coming to grips with globalisation as a truly worldwide phenomena and not another Western ‘buzz’-word to fill the depressing intellectual gap left after the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the multipolar world.

Shahzad Ahmed
Institute for Security Studies