From Poverty to Power Green, Oxfam 2008 - weman

2 POWER AND POLITICS I RULE, THEREFORE I AMOver time, some states have remained mired in this world of rawpower and gangsterism, more master than servant, while others haveevolved through bargains struck between classes or other interestgroups – for example, the right to raise taxes in exchange for defendingthe national territory. Bodies of law and institutions have come to actsomewhat independently of interest groups, bringing rules anddisciplines to the running of society, and providing the servicesdeemed essential for development. In all countries, the state remains awork in progress, a place of constant power battles and shiftingalliances where reverses are as frequent as advances in terms ofredistribution of power, voice, assets, and opportunities.Overall, the tendency has been for the state to grow. As long ago asthe twelfth century, Ch’en Liang, the influential Chinese politicalthinker, wrote that the human heart is ‘mostly self-regarding, but lawsand regulations can be used to make it public-minded. This is why theprevailing trend in the world is inevitably moving towards laws andinstitutions’. 128 As the state’s role has expanded, it has accounted foran ever greater proportion of the economy. In 1870, states typicallyabsorbed around 11 per cent of GDP in developed countries. Thisrose to 28 per cent in 1960 and 42 per cent in 2006. 129In his novel Nineteen Eighty-four, written at the onset of the ColdWar, George Orwell pictured a bleak future of a ‘big brother state’, ‘aboot stamping on a human face, forever’. In fact, in the twentieth centurysome 170 million people were killed by their own governments,four times the number killed in wars between states. 130 Today, however,the worst deprivation and suffering often coincide with states thatare weak or almost non-existent: half of all children who are out ofschool, and half of those dying before the age of five live in states currentlydefined as ‘fragile’. 131Public recognition of the central role of the state ebbs and flows.According to Thandika Mkandawire, an eminent Malawian academic,‘The African state is today the most demonized social institution inAfrica, vilified for its weaknesses, its over-extension, its interferencewith the smooth functioning of the markets, its repressive character,its dependence on foreign powers, its ubiquity, its absence’. 132 In the1980s and 1990s, followers of the Washington Consensus argued thatthe state was part of the problem, not the solution (see Part 5). Since91