The Colonial Origins of State Failure: The Case of Former Italian Africa

• In Event: Colonial Legacies in Africa

Abstract

Today the former Italian colonies of Somalia and Libya represent two stark examples of state failure in post-colonial Africa. Both countries witnessed total disintegration of the state (Somalia, 1991) or collapse of central state authority (Libya, 2011) at critical junctures of democratization. Both, too, continue to struggle with efforts to reconstitute the state and reimagine the national community in the face of clan/tribal factionalism, warlordism, and civil war. Is state failure in Somalia and Libya causally associated with Italian colonialism? What are the effects of Italian colonialism, if any, on long-run post-colonial state and national development in the former colonies? This paper seeks to provide a historically grounded explanation of state failure in the former Italian colonies. Existing theories of British colonialism show that institutions of indirect rule contributed to weak, underdeveloped states and to ethnic conflict during the post-colonial period. I find evidence that supports this hypothesis in the former Italian colonies using measures for state capacity and degree of national integration. Italian colonialism was characterized by indirect rule with a very limited state bureaucracy, highly rigid ethnic or clan categorizations, and absent civil society and representative institutions. After the end of colonial rule, all Italian colonies, including Eritrea, exhibited strikingly weak and patrimonailized state institutions, weak civil society suffering from ethnic or clan conflicts, and salient subnational identities that ultimately contributed to state failure in Somalia and Libya. Using process-tracing and cross-case analysis, I posit that state and national development in the former colonies was a path dependent process shaped by the institutional legacies of indirect rule and whose likely outcome is state weakness and ethnic/clan conflict. Italian colonialism is negatively associated with political development unless path-changing events, such as the national revolution that produced a strong state and high degree of national integration in Eritrea, caused a divergence from the modal political path. I further test my hypothesis through the comparison of Libya and Italian Somalia with French Tunia and British Somalia, respectively, that had similar precolonial institutions with their Italian counterparts but, owing to different experiences under French and British rule, emerged with an effective state and high national integration (independent Tunisia) or rapidly recovered from state collapse (British Somalia).

Author

• Salih O. Noor, Northwestern University