Conflict and Development

 

Ladies and gentlemen,

Allow me to start with a quote:

“The use of force plays a role, yet military efforts to capture or kill terrorists are likely to be subordinate to measures to promote local participation in government and economic programs to spur development, as well as efforts to understand and address the grievances that often lie at the heart of insurgencies. For these reasons, arguably the most important military component of the struggle against violent extremists is not the fighting we do ourselves, but how well we help prepare our partners to defend and govern themselves”.

This quote is not taken from the programme of some naive, left-wing European fringe party. It is a direct quote from the current US National Defence Strategy, launched by the Bush Administration.  It is very much an expression of the thinking of Secretary of Defence Robert Gates, and it also happens to be a perfect reflection of our thinking on the relationship between development policy, on the one hand, and our foreign and security policy, on the other.

Development policy has for too many decades been dominated by “do-good’ers”. Doing good is good, but I believe it is dangerous to think that development policy can or should be seen as something detached from general foreign and security policy interests. This is an idea that at best should be considered naive.

Development policy is not some kind of large-scale state-sponsored philanthropic endeavour.  Ever since we came into office, we’ve been very clear on development policy being an integral part of our general foreign policy.

The last person I spoke with before coming here was Tendai Biti, the Minister of Finance of Zimbabwe. In Zimbabwe they have found their solution in the form of a coalition. Biti was the mortal enemy of Mugabe. He spent time in prison and was treated badly when imprisoned. He came out of prison with the conviction that there was no way to save Zimbabwe except by joining hands with the arch enemy in a government of national unity. It is a very fragile construction, and no one knows whether the country might again relapse into violence. But it is their decision, and we cannot tell them to do otherwise.

Fragile states are at the centre of the world’s military concerns. They are the most likely scenes of violence, whether on a small or large scale. If at the end of the Cold War, somebody would have suggested that twenty years later, Afghanistan would be the main centre of Norway’s military engagement abroad, people would have laughed.

Nobody saw Afghanistan, or Chad for that matter, as natural security concerns for Norway. It is a completely new situation, where our focus has been directed towards vulnerable states.

During the Cold War, these states did not play a very important role on the world scene. The reason is rather brutal: there was no dictator in Africa or any other place that was considered too cruel to be supported by one or other of the two superpowers. Many of these dictators had no political programme beyond keeping themselves in power. Some of them switched easily from market liberalism to communism, when this seemed to be advantageous. Western concepts of ideology bore very little meaning to most of them. 

During the Cold War, there was no real fragile states, because they were all propped up by one of the two superpowers. When the Cold War was over, these states lost their strategic importance and were left to their own devices, hence the large number of fragile states the world community has to deal with today.

Fragile states come in many versions. Somalia is hardly a functioning state at all – we could label it as a failed state – and then there are states like Zimbabwe, which is a very weak state.

My interest lies very much in the relationship between poverty and war. In my view there it is a threefold relationship. The first one is the issue of legitimacy. If a society is very unjust, if there are a lot of grievances and suffering, it is much easier to justify a rebellion, whatever the real motives of the rebels might be.

In many cases it is very hard to determine whether we are dealing with a criminal organisation hiding behind an ideology, or a political organisation financing a legitimate cause by taking control of some of the state’s resources. The motives might also shift over time. So-called illegal bunkering by rebels in the Niger Delta is only one example.

The second relationship between poverty and war is the issue of recruitment. If you offered a Norwegian 12-year-old three meals a day and a Kalashnikov for joining your military rebellion, you would be laughed at. For way too many children in the world, this is a rather attractive proposition, compared with the life they are living and the bleak future prospects they see for themselves. We have to keep in mind that most wars today involve poor people fighting poor people.

The third relationship I would like to point to is that poverty and weak states seem to go hand in hand. You need resources to build a strong state. When the state is weak, rebellions have a much greater chance of succeeding. In the case of Liberia during the eighties, it started with a group of 20 junior officers grabbing power.

To sum up, the relationship between poverty and war has three main dimensions. They have to do with legitimacy, with recruitment and with the weakness of the state. Today there are no longer any wars between developed states. With a few exceptions like Iraq and Sri Lanka – both middle-income countries – nearly all wars are taking place in or between poor countries.

Let me move on to some important global trends that will influence how we handle fragile states. One trend is weakening faith in what can be achieved by military means. Twenty years back we had the first war in Iraq. It was very successful, and there were relatively few causalities.

The same was the case for the war in Kosovo. On our side, we didn’t lose a single soldier. Based on this, the Bush Administration thought military campaigns would be less costly, less deadly and much shorter than we all know is the case today. After Iraq and Afghanistan the likelihood of western powers going to war is very much reduced.

In some ways we are back to the eighties, to the time of Ronald Reagan. Reagan was always using tough language, but he hardly ever went to war, with the exception of what we could call fly-over-states. Even when 250 servicemen were killed in Beirut, Ronald Reagan pulled his forces out of Lebanon.

I believe that the debate between Powell and Rumsfeld has been resolved. Powell was right, Rumsfeld was wrong. Powell famously said that if you break the pot, you own it. That is exactly what happened in Iraq. It is also part of the problem in Afghanistan. It is basic knowledge that when you occupy a territory, you either take control with your own forces, or you exercise control through existing structures. Rumsfeld’s colossal error was doing neither, thinking that law and order would come by itself. Neither ensuring security by building on the previous system, nor by providing it through American forces. It had never been done before, and it was of course a total disaster.

So the first trend is that the faith in what can be achieved by military means is greatly reduced.

The second major trend is that we are moving rapidly towards a multipolar world, where all major decisions require multilateral agreement to be put into effect. This is a major change from the Cold War, but also from the 1990s, when the Americans were considered the only show in town.

The Americans are still the most important, then the Chinese, the European Union, India and Brazil. Whether you are trying to fight climate change, enhance global trade or restructure the global system to fight poverty, you need these countries aboard in order to achieve anything.

Global power is shifting dramatically. Let me give you just one example: trade between Brazil and China is now larger than trade between Brazil and the US. We are rapidly moving into a multipolar world.

This presents both challenges and benefits coming. The world will be more just. Hundreds of millions of Chinese are entering the middle class. Brazil has made great steps in poverty eradication. But these shifts in world power make it even more important that the world community is able to find global responses to emerging crisis.

The third trend I would like to point to is the emergence of a global middle class. The world’s population is much taller, better fed, better educated and healthier than at any other point in history. Forget about all the doomsayers who tell you that everything is moving in the wrong direction. The opposite is true, but we would of course like it to happen more rapidly.

A growing middle class makes it more likely that more societies will move in a democratic direction. There is however, no automatic link. China is a case in point. But still, China is probably more democratic today than at any other time in its history.

The fourth trend I would like to point to is climate change. We should keep in mind that there is nothing new in the consequences of climate change: drought, hurricanes rising temperatures, failing crops and floods. It is all described in detail in the Old Testament. But climate change works like an amplifier, making natural disasters more frequent and severe. It will make our efforts to combat poverty and build states all the more difficult, and it requires a coherent and forceful response from the world community.

My fifth point is how enormously difficult state-building is. There are a few examples of states being successfully built by external forces. Post-war Japan is one. But in general, the outcome of a state-building process will be defined by domestic politics.

Also, state-building takes much longer than we tend to believe. There are no shortcuts, and we should keep in mind that there are very few states that have been founded in a peaceful way.

The founder of Norway, Harald Hårfagre, most certainly did not walk around with a poverty reduction strategy paper in his hand, or a post-conflict needs assessment. Nor did he have to worry about the views of and interventions by a group of external donors. He went around with a sword in his hand.

Even though most states have been founded by the use of force, we have to make a distinction between extremely brutal and repressive methods, and milder applications of force. It is very difficult to imagine a state changing from something like today’s Somalia into something like Switzerland without the use of force. It is equally difficult to believe it can be done overnight.

We should remember that very few states in Africa have been founded on a national political base. They have more or less all been imposed from abroad. We should be much more patient and accept that when we take on the endeavour of assisting in state-building, we have to be willing to be in for the long haul.

What we often see in conflict zones is the following sequence: peace agreement, peace keeping and finally elections. Far too often, elections mean exit strategy. We tend to withdraw forces too early, and we often call elections too early. I remember speaking to a UN representative who said that the most successful elections ever organised by the UN were the elections in Angola in 1996. Everything was carried out by the book. The only problem was that it prolonged the war by another 10 years.

Let me, before I end, comment briefly on the relationship between military and civilian actors in conflict zones. There is no clear-cut, easy answer to this. Conflict zones are not an ideal world, and military contribution to reconstruction and development will be necessary in some situations. When they are, because of security constraints and limited civilian capacity, they should be limited in scope and time, and coordinated with the Government and the international agencies. Civilian capacities should be used to the extent possible.  

Both military, humanitarian and development actors need to recognise the continuum of which they are a part, and appreciate the interplay among them. We must be clearer about when we are talking about “humanitarian space” and when we are in fact talking about “development space”.

Again, there are no easy answers, but we should to the extent possible avoid using military forces for other purposes than those they are intended for.

Let me conclude by pointing to the three most important tools in the box with respect to fixing fragile states. These are the military tool, the economic or development tool and the political tool. For example, in a place like Afghanistan, it is obvious that you need all three tools, but to me it is also clear that the most essential of the three, is the political tool.

Mao once said that you should always consider politics the key. I do not agree with Mao on everything, but on this particular issue I believe he made a valid point.

Thank you.