Women and Politics in the Third World

WOMEN AND THE STATE IN THE THIRD WORLD 29
any particular problems for women, whether Third World women can relate such
a Western-centred debate to their own lives, and whether an analysis of Third
World states by feminists might throw up questions for feminists theorising and
debating the state, have not been asked. Are there any particular features of the
post-colonial state that need to be taken into account by Third World women
when they consider their own relationship with the state? In the next section I
discuss the postcolonial state from this perspective.
The post-colonial state
One of the most interesting developments in state theory since the Second World
War has been the theorising of the post-colonial states and the developmental
states. The latter, primarily Japan and the East Asian economies, were first
theorised by Chalmers Johnson (1982). The case studied by Johnson were all
characterised as ‘strong’ states. This description fed into and from the already
existing work of Gunnar Myrdal (1968; 1970) where he distinguished between the
‘strong’ state—in this case his native Sweden—and the ‘weak’ or ‘soft’ state—
India. The defining features of the ‘strong’ state in this literature have been ‘state
capacity’ to ‘implement logistically political decisions throughout the realm’
(Mann 1984: 189). Further, strong states are characterised by a high degree of
bureaucratic autonomy from institutions and groups in civil society. They are also
seen as corporatist—whether democratic or authoritarian—and as such there is ‘a
significant degree of institutionalised interaction and dialogue between the state
elites and autonomous centres of power within civil society’ (Onis 1991: 123). In
the soft states, on the other hand, was the ‘general inclination of people to resist
public controls and their implementation’ (Myrdal 1970: 209). The focus was
therefore on the levels of successful implementation of decisions achieved by
particular states. A discussion therefore arose about factors that would enhance or
reduce this capacity (see Charlton and Donald 1992). Michael Mann (1984)
contributed to this debate by distinguishing between ‘despotic’ and
‘infrastructural’ power. Despotic power in Mann’s scheme ‘denotes power by the
state elite itself over civil society’ within ‘routine, institutionalised negotiation
with civil society groups’ (Mann 1984: 188). Infrastructural power ‘denotes the
power of the state to penetrate and centrally co-ordinate the activities of civil
society through its own infrastructure’ and is therefore better able to implement
state policy (Mann 1984: 190). This distinction is important to emphasise that
there exists no direct, linear co-relation between ‘state autonomy’ and ‘state
capacity’ (Onis 1991: 123). The first will not automatically lead to the other.
Another distinction made between the ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ states was the clearly
defined relationship between the executive and the bureaucracy on the one hand
(‘the politicians reign, the bureaucrats rule’) and a close co-operation between the
state and the ‘peak interest groups’ in civil society on the other. In the ‘weak’
states these linkages were weak too. The bureaucracy is of particular interest in
this debate as in the ‘strong’ states its size is kept to the minimum, thus making it