Gruesome as we may find the histories of formal dictatorships both of the left and of the right, however, it is to be doubted that the fear engendered by such regimes ever succeeded in percolating through to a visceral level as the totally unpredictable state-in-waiting, one that repudiates even the minimal codes of accountability that are, admittedly, often breached by the formal states. It is these that constitute the quasi-states, often meticulously structured but shadowy corporations of power that mimic the formal state in all respects except three: the already noted lack of boundaries, the lack of government secretariats with identifiable ministries, and, by extension, the responsibility of governance. The quasi-state, complete with a hierarchy of elites and its own monitoring — i.e., policing and enforcement — agencies, may indeed look to a future world order, but, in the process, humanity is blatantly declared expendable, and the actualization of that new order is limited to a close cabal, proliferating through warrens and cities, and contemptuous of boundaries.
Stalin’s Soviet Union is gone. Afghanistan of the Taliban is no more. It is the quasi-state that today instills the greatest fear, a condition that becomes almost neurotic where the real state, through its renegade choices, also conducts its affairs through the cultivation of the quasi-state, and thus in effect has its cake and eats it. Allied with an agency of terror that derives from its formal powers and enjoys its connivance, it sports, Janus-like, two faces, denying its furtive ally any formal recognition but empowering it at the same time. This was a common strategy during the Cold War, when one axis created its own secretive terror machine, launched it as a virtually autonomous arm of state policy, but studiously cultivated a distancing from its existence and operations. A poison-tipped umbrella carries out its mission on a dissident in the streets of London, all the way from its origination in the Soviet bloc. The death squads of a right-wing dictatorship from Latin America reach out and blow up a haunt or offices of dissident intellectuals in Spain or Lisbon. A state deploys a relay of suicide bombers well beyond its borders. The “leader of the free world,” the United States, explores the project of assassinating the leader of an ideological enemy and irritant through a detonating cigar. A pope comes close to premature beatification from the tortuous foreign policies of a rabid member of an ideological bloc. A planeload of innocents is taken out in midair with state connivance. So much for the hybrid entity.
On its own, however, the resistance manifesto of the quasi-state can prove seductive. Only rarely does it make the mistake of showing its hand in advance, as happened in Algeria. In that nation, decades of neglect, state corruption, and alienation of the ruling elite swung the disenchanted populace at the democratic elections of 1992 toward a radical movement, the electorate remaining more or less indifferent to the fact that the change threatened to place a theocratic lid on many of the secular liberties that they had learned to take for granted. Bread and shelter are more pressing issues, in the immediate, than notions of freedom of taste. Thus: We shall ascend to power on the democratic ladder—declared the evidently popular Islamist party—after which we shall pull up the ladder, and there shall be no more democracy. Let us spend a little time on the Algerian scenario; it holds many lessons for us and, of course, occupies the tragic role of being one of the unwitting dispersal agencies of human resources for our ongoing climate of fear.
Algeria is merely a convenient example, but it is also a subjective choice for me, I am compelled to admit. My generation grew up under the indirect education of a singularly vicious anticolonial struggle — the Algerian— one that surpassed in its intensity even that of the Kenyan Mau Mau — led nationalist revolt. That struggle easily qualifies as the most brutal of Africa’s wars of liberation right up to the independence decade of the continent— the nineteen sixties. In addition, Algeria played a key role in the formation of the radical corps of African — and even black American — nationalism in the fifties and sixties, served as a source of reference, solidarity, and material aid for many African revolutionary leaders, from Guinea and Ghana to the Congo and South Africa. This North African country belonged in the radical sector of African nations that eventually closed ranks with the more conservative group for the formation of the Organization of African Unity. Given such a history, it is perhaps inevitable that my generation would take more than a passing interest in the contemporary fortunes of that nation. As a newly independent entity, its experiments in postcolonial reconstruction provided study models in the quest for the developmental transformation of other newly independent African nations.
To watch such a people plunged into a state of social retrogression, from whatever cause, is a harrowing cautionary tale, truly tragic, a reminder of the Sisyphean burden that unforeseen forces often place on the shoulders of would-be progressive movements. It is a daily reminder never to take any political situation for granted, never to underestimate the focused energy of the quasi-state whose instinctive recourse to the rule of fear as a weapon of struggle drives the best minds of a nation into exile, liquidates others, and paralyzes the creative drive of a dynamic people.
Algeria, in 1992, was a dilemma posed to try the credentials of the hardiest democrat anywhere in the world but, most pertinently, her African cohabitants across the Sahara, who, in many cases, were then struggling to free themselves from the stranglehold of military dictatorship. That dilemma can be summed up thus: if you believe in democracy, are you not thereby obliged to accept, without discrimination, the fallout that comes with a democratic choice, even if this means the termination of the democratic process itself? This was the crux of the electoral choice that was freely made by the Algerian people.Why indeed should a people not, in effect, redeem Hegel from Karl Marx? They would only be paying Marx back in his own coin, since Marx’s boast was that he began with the model of Hegel’s schema of history but then turned Hegel on his head. He replaced Hegel’s idealism with a materialist basis and the class struggle. Both are agreed on the dialectical process that leads to the fulfillment of history in the emasculation of the state order. Social contradictions are resolved and political strife is eliminated. Rulership becomes indistinct from followership — in one case, through the benevolent embodiment of enlightened rule, in the other, through the eradication of classes.
What the Islamist party of Algeria did was simply to embody the historic will, or spirit, in the Koran. Ironically, this ought to be regarded as a democratic advance on Hegel, since the process of this annulment of history was reached through popular choice, and the mantle of interpreters of the historic will — summed up by Fukuyama as “the end of history”—had been bestowed on the theocratic class by the electorate itself.Who can argue against the proposition that choice remains the bedrock of the democratic process, and if a people have made a choice that eliminates all further necessity for the ritual rounds of choosing, well… that argument appears to have reached its terminal point. History has been fulfilled.
The problem with that argument, of course, is that this denies the dynamic nature of human society, and preaches that the purely fortuitous can substitute, at any time, for the eternal and immutable. Such a position opens the way for the triumph of a social order that is based on the concept of the Chosen — a mockery of the principle of choice if ever there was one! — and totally eliminates the impulse to change as a factor of human development. On the political field, it entrusts power permanently into the hands of a clique of rulers whose qualification could rightly range from membership in a military class to that of a Masonic order, or perhaps a labor or scientific union where specific circumstances have placed such a body in a position to resolve an overwhelming catastrophe or even dilemma. Wherever history is conceded its hour of fulfillment, revelation replaces inquiry or experiment, dictation replaces debate. For us in Nigeria in 1992, these were no abstract issues, much as we wished Algeria would simply go away or choose another time to pose a dilemma that provided ammunition for our own stubborn dictatorial order.