a strongresearchstrong note on congo’s nationalist paradox.docVIP

A Research Note on Congo’s Nationalist Paradox Pierre Englebert, Pomona College Forthcoming in the Review of African Political Economy, September 2002 The Paradox Precious little is redeeming about the state in Congo. Created as a foreign enterprise of exploitation, it reproduced as the instrument of an extractive colonization system, in turns violent and paternalistic. Once independent, it provided the stage and the reason for five years of sheer chaos and three decades of stifling arbitrary rule, predation and economic ruin, before collapsing at the end of the 1990s into civil wars marked by ethnic polarization, displacements, plunder, deprivation and death. Yet Congo endures, and the Congolese profess unusual fervor in their attachment to it. Their support for its territorial integrity and its failed institutions is stronger even than their commitment to democratic principles and it stands in contrast with the lack of material benefits that the state has ever provided the larger mass of them. This is Congo’s nationalist paradox. The apparent willingness or desire of the Congolese to embrace their arbitrarily imposed territory and to avoid challenging their failed and predatory state institutions begs inquiry. What explains the permanence, if not the rise, of a nationalist discourse among the highly heterogeneous Congolese, both elites and the general public, 90% of whom reject the idea of partition of their country? Why the enduring allegiance to the state where the institutional void should beckon new experiments with collective action? Predation, Security, and Institutional Resilience To a large extent, Congo’s failed institutions are kept alive because they serve as resources to individuals at many levels of society. Ministries, state agencies, provincial administrations and other bureaucratic appendages of the state, whether in government or rebel territory, are maintained by state elites, their employees and citizens in general because they deriv