The Foreign Service Journal, May 2004

Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire), Ethiopia, Sudan and Angola together account for about 40 percent of the population of sub-Saharan Africa. As a result, their chronic internal prob- lems have repercussions that go well beyond their boundaries. The disin- tegration of the DRC has had partic- ularly devastating consequences, affecting all the neighboring coun- tries and even pulling in some farther afield, such as Zimbabwe. Sudan and Ethiopia have been engaged in a dangerous game of meddling in each other’s civil wars for decades, greatly contributing to the instability of the entire Horn of Africa. War in the south- ern Sudan has a spillover effect in Uganda. Angola, which has the potential for rapid economic growth, instead exports refugees to neighboring countries. And Nigeria, which aspires to play the role of benevolent hegemon stabilizing West Africa, perennially teeters on the verge of an internal collapse that would have devas- tating consequences beyond its borders. The only true exception to the uniformly negative pic- ture presented by the big African states is South Africa. Though still facing a host of major socioeconomic prob- lems, South Africa is a functioning state, with the strong administrative system and the transport and communica- tion infrastructure that allow modern states to implement policies, collect taxes and deliver services in return. The unity of the state is not contested by its citizens. Although the dominant role of the African National Congress is a matter of concern, hampering true political competition, the country has developed a political system that is much more stable and demo- cratic than is the case in other large states. To be sure, many small states in Africa are also performing poorly politically and economically. And the domestic conflicts of some smaller states, for example, Liberia and Sierra Leone, are intertwined. More often, however, the problems of smaller states have little spillover effect. Somalia ceased functioning as a state over a decade ago, but its neighbors are not suffering as a result: Ethiopia, in fact, is probably better off, finally free of Somali claims on the Ogaden region. Furthermore, small and medium states in Africa do not present a uniformly bleak picture. Several are showing improvement in their economic and political performance. Although there are no truly consolidated African democracies yet, the countries that have made the most progress are small or medium-sized. The international community has been extremely reluctant to intervene decisively in big African states. The same factors that make these states so dangerous — their size and the resulting particular complexity of their problems — also make the idea of intervention daunting. Confronted with conflicts that have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths over a long period of time, the inter- national community has offered endless mediation but very little concrete help. Outsiders have also kept aloof from many conflicts in smaller countries, including the 1994 massacres in Rwanda that cost well over half a mil- lion people their lives. However, there have been examples of interventions in smaller states. At present, there are some 13,000 U.N. peacekeepers in Sierra Leone, which has a population of 5.7 million, but only about 10,000 peacekeepers in the DRC, which has a population 10 times as large. The var- ious U.N. missions to Angola in the 1990s were chroni- cally understaffed and under-resourced; Margaret Ainstee, who led the mission at the time of the failed 1992 elections, quipped, in reference to U.N. Security Council Resolution 747, that she had been expected to fly a 747 with only enough fuel to power a DC-3. If a peace agreement is finally signed in Sudan, as appears possible at the time of this writing, the United Nations will have F O C U S M A Y 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 27 The big African states have so far not succeeded in establishing political and administrative systems capable of coping with the challenge posed by their size. Marina Ottaway is a senior associate in the Democracy and Rule of Law Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Jeffrey Herbst is professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University and chair of the Department of Politics. Greg Mills is the national director of the South African Institute of International Affairs, a nongovernmental policy research institute based at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. This article is reprinted by permission of the publisher, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2004 (www.ceip.org).