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Conclusion Palestinian State Building and the Postcolonial State This book has focused mainly on the relationship between territorialization and modern state formation. What we saw is that national movements, like that of the Palestinians, must challenge territorial states in a politically crowded world. Likely to have to operate from the outside the territory they seek to liberate, nationalists will find it difficult to penetrate into a contested area. But given the territorial focus of the state system, they must territorialize also. As a result, the tensions between a nation's inside and outside wings will increase as diaspora leaders seek to territorialize while assuring their hegemony over the activists in the homeland. This imperative, in turn, gives birth to a dilemma. On the one hand, it is necessary to mobilize resistance on the inside; on the other hand, state formation in the homeland must be avoided at least until the diaspora leaders come home. Consequently, neopatrimonial techniques of mobilization through diffusion come into play. Power is personalized and functional agencies are bureaucratized at the center, while the outside works to diffuse, segment, and multiply those agencies on the inside in order to playoff one organization against the other. The gulf between inside and outside exacerbates strains within national movements that operate anyway in an atmosphere of crisis, pushing them toward either autocratic personal rule or organizational fragmentation. VIOLENCE AND INSTITUTION BUILDING From the foregoing, we may ask how the Palestinian experience, both similar and different from the Zionist case, may shed light on other cases of state building in the postcolonial era. To this end, our analysis can relate especially to two factors that play crucial roles in determining the success, or failure, of new state-building endeavors: (I) the role of violence in establishing prestate 147 148 COUNTDOWN TO STATEHOOD institutions, and (2) the importance of pre-independence institution building in the establishment of the state. Let us begin with violence. In his analysis of Western European state building, Charles Tilly concluded that war makes states. l It was in the process of making war that principalities developed fiscal systems to finance war and bureaucracies to assure more universal conscription. War thus became a catalyst for state building. Several scholars have used this argument to comment on the formation of postcolonial states. Sheldon Gellar argues that in peaceful transitions in Africa, the state regressed into neopatrimonial forms of rule more debilitating than the bureaucratized colonial regime they inherited. In more conflictual situations, as for example was the case in Guinea-Bissau, conflict bred indigenous institution building, which facilitated greater social transformation and nation building, as well as a higher degree of institutionalization of party rule.2 According to this thesis, conflict should facilitate post-independence state consolidation. Patrick Chabal, John Saul, and, most eloquently, Basil Davidson, concur with Gellar that, with violence, the legacy of colonial rule is considerably weakened;l and the chances for successful state consolidation are enhanced. The Communist Chinese experience provides a striking example of how conflict can positively influence modem state building. Thus, it was while waging war that the Chinese established a revolutionary state. But the Chinese experience also demonstrates that the linkage between these two can be illusory . First, the Chinese conflict was a civil war waged against a foe of equal strength, not a hegemonic one. Second, and more importantly, one of Mao Tsetung 's major strategic goals was the establishment and expansion of a liberated area, in which institution building could freely take place.4 Rather than regarding violence as the midwife of state building, then, Mao believed that it was only far away from the conflict zone that state building could take place. After all, to build institutions in virgin territory is a far easier task to accomplish than to build them in the face of a competing infrastructure. Accordingly, one may conclude from the Chinese case that it is the creation of liberated areas while in conflict, not the conflict itself, that contributes to institutionalization. This is the gist of Ronald Weitzer's critique on Tilly-like reasoning in an article on Zimbabwe. Weitzer contests the idea that mobilization in protracted conflict creates institutions that can lead to effective state building.5 He argues that there is no demonstrable evidence from modem patterns of state consolidation in Africa, even where born violently, that these states produced better governments than the colonial states they replaced. However much they waged struggle against the former colonial power, states that inherited colonial...

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