Reflections on Somalia and Modern Statehood

I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the history of Somalia today, in preparation for a presentation on it next week. It’s been really interesting, so expect a few posts on it soon. For now just a few throwaway ideas.

It’s a truism that statist political systems rely on a mix of force and consent (whereas anarchic ones rely purely on consent). But you get a much stronger sense of the meaning of that truism when you look at how African societies, and to a lesser extent other non-european societies, have tried to establish working political systems.

The traditional systems (tribal affiliations, customary law, religious courts, etc.) may not be great, but they did for a long time have widespread legitimacy, and as a result they worked. But, to various extents, colonialism destroyed or suppressed them.

T-shirts: Defining the Pale

The 19th-century diplomat Prince Metternich once said that while he might feel some sympathy for Adolphe Thiers, the utter bastard who massacred a few thousand people in order to crush the glorious Paris Commune, he would not wear a T-shirt showing his face. He said the same about Augusto Pinochet, who led a bloody military coup against the elected but left-wing government of Chile.

More interesting than the sartorial decisions of a German-Austrian politician, however, is the suggestion that the same attitude should be taken by those on the sensible side of politics about that much T-shirted figure, Ernesto Guevara.

Now I thought this was interesting. What it seems to me to be about is something along the following lines: there is in some sense a range of divergent political opinions on which people can differ while remaining civil. But some political opinions are ‘beyond the pale’ and should not be respected or accepted on T-shirts.