主権国家の「ラング」と「パロール」-破綻国家の国際政治学-

国際秩序と国内秩序の共振

抄録

This article offers an analytical framework to conceptualize “state failure, ” a phenomenon which has become widely recognized since the early 1990s as one of the pressing problems to be addressed by the international community today. No consensus exists as to what “state failure” means, what its causal factors are, or how it affects the international community. Factors often associated with state failure, such as economic distress, internal disputes, the ending of the Cold War, colonial experiences, types of regimes, and spillover effects from neighboring countries, do not always constitute sufficient conditions for state failure. Rather than aiming at its precise definition, it is more meaningful to examine why such a concept and phenomenon as “state failure” has emerged and why states that do not meet standard criteria of statehood have survived in today's international scene.
Two structural factors can be identified in today's international system that explain the emergence and the survival of failed states. First, increased awareness and acceptance of the norm of “good governance” by the international community has made state failure stand out as an anomaly when compared to the traditional sense of statehood. The norm of “good governance” also constrains today's countries with a burdensome state-building agenda (e. g., a short time table for development, non-violence, democracy, economic well-being), none of which was expected during state-building processes by the West European states in the earlier eras. State-failure, in this sense, was born as a synchronic phenomenon with the permeating norm of “good governance, ” just as Foucault's “madness” and Levi-Strauss's “savageness” emerged concomitantly with the development of the concepts of “sanity” and “civilization.”
Second, state failure reflects a peculiar resonance between the legal and the empirical senses of sovereign statehood in today's international system. While obtainment of legal sovereignty used to depend on the quality of a state's empirical statehood, legal sovereignty has become institutionalized and stabilized, especially since decolonization, as an independent structure that allows survival of states regardless of their empirical content.
Today's international community associates state failure with terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, epidemic disease, loss of investment and trade opportunities, refugees, and drug trafficking, to name a few. In meeting the challenges posed by failed states, some scholars advocate a new type of trusteeship or a system of shared sovereignty. Others are skeptical of the feasibility of these new arrangements, as they would undermine the universal principle of sovereign equality. While the problems related to failed states are increasingly felt urgent, sound theoretical analysis must precede the teleological. What is required in today's study of failed states is a higher level of generalization comparable to that in the study of West European state-building experiences.