Commentary

Is Jamaica a failing state? Or is it merely a state that has yet to succeed? I have been thinking a lot about this question lately. Obviously, the week's shattering events have focused my mind. But I have also been writing a book on a topic I have elsewhere called the new medievalism. And one could not have asked for a more graphic example of the new medievalism than the spectacle of gang leaders - the international press even calls them barons now - trying to defend their sovereign claims over their turf.

The battle that unfolded might be a sign that the Jamaican state is growing weaker. A natural metaphor seems inescapable, as we speak of the rot that has penetrated the body politic, turning it soft, like a termite-ridden tree.

But history abounds with examples of these kinds of civil war. They are not always signs a state is growing weaker. When kings crushed their nobilities, they were in the ascendant. It may be that the Jamaican state is not growing weaker, but rather stronger.

Success was not programmed into the genetic code of any independent country. When states in Africa, Asia and the Americas gained their independence, new elites occupied the shells of disappeared regimes, the retreating colonial empires. Any successes which followed were hard-fought. Many countries were swimming against a tide, and some states soon sank into civil wars, and even broke up. Some could not replicate an alien political structure, and fragmented into neo-medieval forms. A few did succeed, but the ride was not easy, and required rapid adaptation to an evolving world.

Initially, Jamaica seemed a success. Riding the post-war economic boom, in its first decade after independence, the country's economy grew at healthy annual rates, and its ability to host the Commonwealth Games and international title fights seemed to testify that the young nation had made it on to the world stage.

But all was not well in this supposed happy valley. In that boom decade, unemployment doubled. Meanwhile, a wave of migration to the city brought countless thousands of people looking for work, and finding none. Many became restless and unattached, a painful transition captured so eloquently in the classic film The Harder They Come.

criminal activity

Unlike that movie's hero, few of these migrants gravitated towards criminal activity to make ends meet. But a nexus was born. To satisfy some of the rising demands for housing and employment, the state began building houses and developing new communities. This laid the foundation for a political adaptation that time would reveal to be ill-judged, and ill-fated. Public housing soon leant itself to political manipulation, as we all know.

From there, it was a short step to using thugs to enforce political compliance. Enterprising young men sold their services to politicians, who were anxious to marshall the votes of the growing urban population. With housing allocated to party faithful - a form of gerrymandering we all came to know as 'garrisonisation' - thugs could both ensure the loyalty of local residents, and even try to depopulate rival neighbouring areas at election time. The tools of the job were guns at election time, jobs to keep idle hands busy after the party won power. Gang leaders set up legitimate enterprises to route patronage to their followers, thereby cementing the ties between them and the political class.

So the 'modern' Jamaican state did not fail; it just didn't succeed. One of the great mistakes of the post-independence generation of politicians is that in trying to build bridges to their electorates, they allowed - even, in some cases, encouraged - this class of latter-day barons to place themselves between the citizenry and the state.

In parts of Jamaica, the state thereby became neo-medieval. When we try to identify what marks the break between medievalism and modernity - when it was that kings were able to suppress barons and create sovereign states - one thing seems to emerge dominant: medieval systems ended when the central government gained a preponderance of taxing power.

This lens helps us to understand how Jamaica's neo-medieval systems got reinforced over time. Much has been made of the growth of the transnational drug trade, which enabled the drug dons to develop independent resources bases that put them beyond the government's control. While this is certainly an important element of Kingston's medievalisation, an even greater part lies elsewhere.

loyalty

Since the 1970s, the Jamaican government has sought to build a modern state, with its full range of services, and thereby win the loyalty of its citizens. In some respects, it has succeeded - delivering a poor country extraordinary levels of health care and education, for example. However, this edifice of modernity was built atop a failed economic model. Growth imploded in the '70s, as we know, and never rebounded permanently. The result was a recourse to borrowing that turned Jamaica into one of the world's most-indebted countries.

By last year, most government revenue went to paying off debt. The Jamaican government had ceded its revenue-collection power not to the drug dons, but to bondholders, who enjoyed a claim on most of the state's revenue. If international bankers are the new barons of the world political-economy, Jamaica's king had become one of its weakest sovereigns.

Faced with this historic loss of power to financiers, governments face one of three options: scale back their ambitions and cede ground to the barons of global finance; renounce debts and fight the barons; or try to make peace with them, by persuading them to accept a lesser role in a greater kingdom.

Wisely, and thanks in no small part to the vision of some of its bureaucrats and bankers, Jamaica opted for the last course. The debt-exchange earlier this year gave the government the fiscal breathing-room needed to restore its fiscal health. Were an attack on the dons to succeed, the country now faces the real prospect of returning to a growth path for the first time in nearly two generations.

Will Jamaica finally manage to establish a modern state? At least we have the benefit of hindsight. The lesson of the 1970s is that we must maintain growth; the lesson of the 1960s is that the growth must be inclusive.

The united front that appeared to form across civil society for this assault on a neo-medieval enclave; the participation of a wide cross-section of society in partnership talks; the expressed willingness of the country's well-to-do to make their own sacrifices via the JDX; all suggest that the omens are perhaps better than they have been in a long while.

We are not out of the woods. But we may, finally, have chosen the right path.

John Rapley is president of the Caribbean Policy Research Institute (CaPRI). Feedback may be sent to columns@gleanerjm.com.