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The Cameroon Federation
Political Integration in a Fragmentary Society
By Willard R. Johnson PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1970 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-03081-4
CHAPTER 1
Integrating Political Systems
Nationalism and the independence it has won for the new African states has not and cannot satisfy their quest for modernization. Independence has revealed more clearly than anything else the extensive range of aspirations and values that lie beyond nationalism as part of the ideology of modernization. The basic motives remained the same — a desire for self-government, improved material well-being, and greater individual and collective efficacy. But the programmatic themes which supported them have changed. Economic themes have become more important, and with the failure to achieve significant progress in the economic sphere, a concern with achieving order and stability, perhaps for their own sake, has come to preoccupy the leadership.
What were and are the obstacles to achieving modernizing objectives after independence? I cannot examine here the whole range of relevant factors; I wish to concentrate on the most fundamental, the problem of fragmentation in the society — the internal divisions and discontinuities that existed and were being created in the African societies — which generates exceptional problems of integration.
Africa is the continent of diversity par excellence. It has more languages and perhaps less "communication" than any continent; it has some of the world's densest and most verdant forests and its largest and driest deserts; it harbors some of the world's richest resources and its poorest people, some of its oldest polities and most of its newest. Mere diversity is not Africa's special problem, however. Most states throughout the world harbor disparate ethnic, racial, religious, or other social groups. Nor are sharp class divisions peculiar or even very important in Africa, though its new states contain elite-mass gaps as severe as are to be found anywhere. Many countries, including the United States, wrestle with the difficult problem of creating or permitting a sense of being "in" among all important social groups in the system. Africa's problem of modernization goes beyond the need for nation-building. Not only are the societies of the new African states divided and fragmented in many respects but the divisions tend to reinforce each other.
The lines of tribal, ethnic, regional, and even religious disparities tend to coincide with those of wealth, patterns of social evolution, welfare benefits, and political power. Disparities, tensions, and conflict arising from differences in values and patterns of identity enhance those that arise from the differences between more hardcore economic and political interests. More thoroughgoing Westernization, earlier education, more turbulent and uprooting Christian impingement, denser urban settlement, greater industrialization, more lucrative and expansive cash crop agriculture — all work together to set certain peoples apart in the new African states. Within each of them there are the "up-country cousins" who most often are less well educated, closer to traditional values (often with a richer and more continuous political and religious history), poorer, but, in the modern democratic age, conveniently more numerous. The haughty disdain displayed for them by the evolués, the "black Englishmen," the "been-to's," and the racial firsts still piques the memory of many of these unprivileged folk. As the unprivileged also emerge into power, however, or become aware of the possibilities of doing so, they put the universalist and equalitarian tenets of the nationalist and modernizationist credo to their most severe tests. Where national resources are as scarce as they are in Africa, and where avenues of social and economic mobility are so limited, one seldom finds any pervasive sense of equity and munificence.
Thus in the Nigerian Federation not only were the regionally based dominant national groups different in culture and patterns of identification, they were different in the extent of their social evolution toward Western forms, in the levels of their experience with modern science and technology and Western styles of education, and most importantly, in wealth. Similarly, in countries such as Sierra Leone and the Ivory Coast, distinctive tribal groups and cultural regions are differentiated by levels of economic development and patterns of social change and mobilization as well. In Cameroon and many other new states of Africa, the fact that there are rich tribes and poor tribes is certainly as important as the fact that there are many tribes.
Confronted with the realities of this kind of fragmented society — with severely disparate levels and rates of development, and severe competition among the groups within the society for any available increments — tactical elements of the modernization effort such as a demand for sacrifice, discipline, organizational unity, and order came to be elevated to dogmas; as such, they served as ideological rationalizations of the authoritarian party-state. The fact that the rationalizations were created by the few who dominate the political systems and that they therefore often provoked dissent among those who are excluded or made the victims of harsh rule should not obscure the fact that they stemmed from an ideology that was widely shared. In Cameroon, as throughout the newly independent countries of Africa, political factions at the center or on the margins of the power system all pressed for rapid economic growth, wanted most of it in their own areas, distrusted others, and expected to be distrusted in terms of their willingness to cut the cake of wealth evenly. They all believed in unity and a certain amount of discipline, but they also believed the costs of this unity and discipline would be less under their own leadership than under anyone else's. Thus it is not at all evident that those who provided the greatest push in moving the African countries toward the commonly held objectives of the independence campaign (and in Cameroon, of the reunification campaign) would be able, through the same orientation and approach, to move them most effectively toward the achievement of the objectives of economic and political development.
Having noted these factors, I may ask: "What then is Africa, with its many Presidents, Prime Ministers, and Kings?" Is it like so many toy soldiers wound up and standing in a row, united solely by the surety of their eventual mutual collision and upending, rather than by the cadence and direction of their march? Is Africa really an awakened giant, perhaps still an ungainly titan, which will pull itself together and take its rightful place among the world's movers and shakers? Or will it remain inchoate in its sense of self-awareness, disparate in its motives, and disjointed in its movement? To answer such questions we must know what is real about the identity of Africa, what is real about its many and diverse parts. We need to know the source and significance of its unities. To know this we need to know the forms and sources of social unity, i.e. what is real about identity.
Creating the One from the Many
Identity is a matter of the significance of a thing, a question of purpose and perspective. The achievement of a sense of identity is most significant when it involves acquiring a sense of oneness from many separate distinct events or objects, when it is a question of parts and wholes. In this case it is a product of synergism, in the sense that the meaning of the parts does not give the meaning of the whole, for there inheres in the whole a quality not to be found in the separate parts. Most people can easily understand identities born of homogeneity, or the complete fusion of separate parts. We accept water as something unto itself that hydrogen and oxygen are not when considered apart. We do not search the glass for the visible properties of the sand. Complex identities are more difficult, for things are not always what they seem: "Stone walls do not a prison make,/Nor iron bars a cage." The cloud to one who views it from afar is only so many droplets of water to one immersed in it. Which is the real thing, the aggregation of droplets or the singular cloud? Are the properties of the group any less real than those of its individual components? The concept any less real than the object that manifests it?
Identities born of mere juxtaposition often resist the imagination. Juxtaposition is seldom enough, if it is only a matter of proximity, to generate a coherent and distinctive meaning. Crowds and mobs look different, though some people — the police with increasing frequency — are prone to see a mob in every crowd of people they dislike or fear. Very few people see anything more to sardines in a can, though for those few who do they become a Harlem Steak. Much larger is the group of people who can find something singular in sugar on grapefruit, salt on watermelon, oil on vinegar. These identities preserve the distinctions of the separate parts but add something new in combination.
It can readily be appreciated that complex new identities arise from the integration of separate elements. Integration is a process of interaction of things or events which permits the appreciation of a unique consequence of the interaction, an appreciation that could not be attained through a study of the properties of the separate parts. To study integration one must study not only the character of the parts, but especially the relations between them and the total effect they produce. We can appreciate neither the properties nor the character of a nation, its identity, from knowledge of the individuals in it, nor can we derive it except through a study of the behavior of these individuals. Only as we appreciate the interdependency of their actions and especially of their political loyalties can we identify the nation. And only by bringing the actions of its people into interdependent relationships can the nation come into being.
Dependent relationships between a definite set of actions constitute a system. System is simply a way of conceptualizing the interaction of things. This can be one-way or two-way interaction. If the latter, there is interdependency, a more highly integrated state than dependency, because feedback and thus the potential for coordination is involved. In addition to the idea of interdependency, system includes that of a determinate (a limited and predictable) set of actors, thus the idea of a boundary and an environment. In the real sense a boundary does not exist in a system. We mean by this only that the pattern of interaction is persistent enough to permit a determination of what is within and what is without this pattern. The relationship between the two is what the boundary is, and what is without the pattern of interdependent action is the environment. For all practical purposes we may describe this relationship as a property of the system itself.
Since the idea of system refers, among other things, to the property of interdependency between actors, it refers to integration. Integration may thus be said to be a condition, a property of systems. All interdependent relationships are integrated ones. This is nothing more than saying that the relationship is a deterministic one.
Because the essential feature of system is interdependency, all systems are deterministic at some level, though this determinism may derive from "probabilistic-based" patterns of action. Systems differ with respect to their relations to the environment, however. Some are "closed" or autonomous so that the environment produces no change in the internal pattern of interaction of the system. Others may be "open," so that they interact with the environment. The latter may be said to have incomplete or intermittent boundaries. The environment may cause changes in the internal patterns of the system, or, in other words, may contribute inputs to the system. Where such changes are persistent and patterned, however, so that once known their continuing effects may be predicted, the idea of the determinism of the system is preserved. The system may be momentarily affected by the environment and soon adjust itself to restore the old order, or it may adapt itself to a change in the environment by effecting a new and persisting order, or it may undergo continuous but patterned change and become dynamic. In each case, however, order and pattern remain; interdependency, determinism, and thus integration continue to pertain. Talcott Parsons takes this view of integration when he defines it as "the conditions of internal stability or a relational system shared by actor and object." Nevertheless, systems that are in the "open mode" may experience recurring and variant disruptions from the environment, so that it becomes impossible to predict future patterns or states of the system. Thus it is useful to speak of a "deterministic system" where its future states, in the words of Ernest Nagel, "are uniquely determined by its state at some previous time."
In durable deterministic systems, integration is a condition. But integration is also a process. It is of considerable importance in social analysis that integration can be considered both a condition and a process. Were it merely a condition, which either does or does not exist, there would be little value in the present or any other prolonged discussion of this idea with respect to social situations — for two reasons. First, in social relations there are no interactions that are strictly deterministic. Thus, strictly speaking, we would have to say that there are no social systems. Second, even if social systems did exist, strictly defined, integration studies would concern themselves only with the task of noting their presence or absence. In terms of political integration, for example, there would be only two categories of polities — identifiable and unidentifiable. One category remains intact long enough to exhibit a pattern of political life, and one does not. There would be no room for comparison and characterization of polities. There would be little utility in such an approach, since all identifiable polities would look alike according to these criteria, and it would be an enterprise futile in the extreme to look for the unidentifiable ones.
What constitutes the logical basis for considering integration to be a process as well as a condition is the fact that the concept of system arises from action. The concept of system cannot relate to a static situation. Systems exist neither physically nor only momentarily; what exists is a set Of related actors. Time and change are prerequisites to their interaction. Repeated or persistently determined interaction has order or pattern, and it is this order that permits one to conceive of the relations between the actors in question as systemic. System is thus a way of conceptualizing patterned movement. System refers to process, since process is action or change directed toward a particular result. Patterned movement, determinate movement, has direction of this sort. If one act truly determines the next, there is a "built-in" limitation to its consequences; we may thus impute to it a goal, an end toward which action proceeds.
The particular ends toward which the change or movement proceeds may be multi-faceted however, and the patterns may not be absolutely clear. According to Philip Jacobs and Henry Teune, "it might be more useful to envisage a set of relationships which are more or less integrated, or a progression of events leading to an increase or a decrease of integration." I have said that determinate movement proceeds toward a particular end, or "goal." Rather than discard the notion of social system, which might require more determinism and singularity of goals than social action ever exhibits, it is useful to consider social system (or integration, as an attribute of system) as being a tendency in various kinds of social situations. To the extent that social interaction becomes determinate, or leads to precisely predictable outcomes, it can be said that this set of social interactions becomes more systemic. The process of political integration would thus rightly be considered the process whereby political interaction becomes more systemic.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Cameroon Federation by Willard R. Johnson. Copyright © 1970 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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