Somalia and the Absence of Central Government

Yumi Kim from the Mises Blog has a very good post on Somalia and its absence of central government (see here). The author based her post on Michael van Notten’s book The Law of the Somalis.

Somalia is perhaps one of the very few successes in Africa—although it is probably too soon to tell. In Somalia, customary law is alive and well, and it offers all that is needed for conflict resolution (see Kim’s description of it). Far from being in need of a central government (which would act as most other governments in Africa do, as a stationary bandit), Somali clans have been able, since the violent disintegration of the last central government in 1991, to use the laws and customs that had governed Somali life in the distant past.

So far, the results are remarkable; trade and investment seem to be growing:

Somalia's telecommunications are the best in Africa, its herding economy is stronger than that of either of its neighbors, Kenya or Ethiopia, and […] since the demise of the central government, the Somali shilling has become far more stable in world currency markets, while exports have quintupled.

One of the puzzles economists have tried to solve in the last 30 years is to understand how impersonal trade (i.e. trading amongst strangers) emerges. One reason, it is believed, is the emergence of the nation state and a common legal system. The Somali case shows that customary law is far more important than central government to enable distant trade.

Legal systems are very much organic; they grow over time from the interactions of people. The experience with nation building in the 19th and 20th c. has been a disaster everywhere the law was imposed. It is true that statute law is now part of Western legal systems, and it is imposed by central governments. However, it is also true that the basis of Western legal systems is hundreds of years old—what some have called the “shadow of the law.” Even in the case of France, the Napoleonic Civil Code was based on French Common Law—it was not invented, and it has slowly evolved since then. As F. A. Hayek explained in Law, Legislation and Liberty, the organic aspect of the law cannot be ignored if the law is to do its job well.

It may be true that Somali clans are akin to mini governments. Also, it can be argued that one does not need to get rid of central government in order to benefit from a slowly evolving organic law system (e.g. the English Common Law). However, Africa’s record with government is appalling. Central governments have been the source of problems in most cases. Somalia, in contrast, appears to have solved many of the problems that plague other African nations. There is still some violence for the everyday person, but a decentralized solution seems to be able to overcome it better than its centralized alternative. This should be another lesson for those who think that democracy and state building are the best solutions for developing countries. But it will be a difficult lesson to admit for the central planners amongst us.

Comments

[Pablo]

You might also be interested in this 4 page note I published: "Anarchy and Invesntion", http://rru.worldbank.org/Documents/publicpolicyjournal/280-nenova-harford.pdf

It generated a very lively discussion:
http://rru.worldbank.org/Discussions/Topics/Topic56.aspx

Just in case. Best.

[Kyle R. M.]

I attended a talk from Robert Guest this summer--the author of The Shackled Continent. He definitely protrayed Somalia in a different light than you. While I don't remember the specific words he used, he portrayed Somalia as a truely horrible place. I'm pretty sure he wasn't comparing Somalia to the developed world, but was saying that it was outright a bad place. He certainly wouldn't consider it "one of the few successes in Africa".

Any ideas what accounts for this difference of opinion? To clarify, not the difference of opinion about government (or governence) but the difference of the "success" of Somalia.