Clare, we’re talking here about failing states, and in your own book, Fixing Failed States, you provide extensive criteria for defining them. Can you explain what you mean more succinctly here?

Well, one might say quite reasonably that you know one when you see one. In many parts of the world failing states become not only a threat to the countries which surround them, but also to their own populations. And we're not just talking about Iraq and Afghanistan, or Haiti and Somalia. I think the question of the degree of state functionality applies even to countries such as America and Britain and France and Germany which are struggling with questions of what a state does and what a state is. As we've learned painfully over the last few months, there are questions about the relation of a state to the market, and the relation of the state and the market to civil society in the 21st century.

And are we saying that the state is local and that the market is international? You distinguish between the state, the market and civil society. How do you locate these three things? What do you mean by them?

That’s a very interesting question. I think that the European Union has come up with a very useful concept, which is that of subsidiarity: this means that the citizens take decisions at the most local level. And that applies to the way that funds are organised and states are organised and the way that markets and also civil society is organised. It was John Dewey who said that the state is just a mechanism which does at any point what its citizens want it to do. And that’s my first book, John Dewey’s The Public and its Problems, which he wrote in 1927.

Dewey is saying that the key is how to organise the type of public discussion which needs to take place so that the citizens can decide what they want the state to do. This really puts at the centre of this discussion the notion of the state as essentially a mechanism whose sole function is to serve its population.

So in effect the state is, or should be, philanthropic and unselfish according to Dewey? The state does not totalise or dominate or set up its own interests against the interests of its citizens?

The state may need to dominate in that it needs to have a monopoly on the means to violence, or the legitimate means to violence, as Max Weber said. But beyond that, it is an instrument of collective power. It harnesses power in order to serve the population.

So the state is an enabling structure?

It can be. It should be. But in many parts of the world today it is a predatory structure. Because it has become captive to interest groups who use it as an instrument to oppress the population. In different parts of the world, of course, we see different kinds of abuse of the state. What we’re understanding, for example, with the present collapse of the global markets is that we need to rethink the role of the state and particularly the relationship between the state and the market in every context. I was recently at a meeting of democratic senators and they were saying we need to rethink the role of the United States in the 21st century. And they were referring to state level governance in the western seaboard of the United States.

And why were they particularly concerned about the western seaboard?

I think they’re realising the force of globalisation, which means that a whole set of assumptions that applied in the last century do not apply in this one, which requires them to rethink how the states serve their citizens and how they interface with and regulate the market. And with the globalisation of the media and civil society and the market, we need to rethink our organisational paradigms in all areas of life.

OK this takes us to our second book, James C Scott, and he’s also talking about the state and his book is called…

Seeing Like A State. He’s quite similar to Dewey in a way. He also sees the state as only a mechanism. But he thinks that the way that the state chooses to count, or the way it chooses to see, will inform how it behaves and what kind of animal it becomes. Scott explains, for example, how in France, in early modern times, the state decided to count two things. It decided to count how much salt there was and how many able-bodied men there were, because it wanted to tax the salt and send the able-bodied men off to war. Now perhaps the state decides to count other things, how many healthy people there are, how many well-educated people they are… So that what the state chooses to count determines the parameters of what the state chooses to do.

The fact is that there are always people running the state. People inhabiting and running that apparatus...

And so the key challenge is how to make them accountable. The problem in many of the countries which the institute I co-founded works in is that many revolutionary leaders who spend a long time trying to get into power continue to believe, once they get into power, that they are ‘outlaws’ or above the law and not accountable to the rule of law.

They still feel that they are the underdogs? That some injustice is being perpetrated on them?

Exactly, so that they will not submit themselves to the rules being made by the people.

So one of the problems of the state is that, should it fail, it relies on the fact that those who adjust for that failure have read and agreed with John Dewey?

Yes. But as James Scott describes, as you abstract information from people and aggregate it upwards and you move towards industrialisation and large, centrally planned cities, that information becomes abstracted from the lives of people. The state no longer understands the way in which people experience the structures that are imposed on them.

As during the Great Leap Forward in China, when in order to meet government targets, farmers invented phantom bumper harvests on which they paid tax in corn and starved.

Exactly. So one of the challenges is how to manage that kind of scale bureaucratically while permitting individuals to pursue their own lives. And that is why we created the national solidarity program in Afghanistan, which still has a national rule of law framework that gives money directly to all the villages and lets the villagers decided how to use that money. So it is possible, you see, to have the rule of law and also radical decentralisation.