The etiquette of state-building and modernisation in dependent states: performing stateness and the normalisation of separate development in South Africa

The paper reflects upon the continuing allure of state-building and modernisation in peripheral, `new' states and regions. The central argument is to suggest that our understanding of the conflicts surrounding `nation-building' can be improved upon by looking at one of the most powerful symbols of the neo-colonial, economic and institutional dependency and territorial artificiality of the `nation-state'- the South African Bantustan. As enforced state-hood projects, their `newness' and illegality in the eyes of the international community suggest that the Bantustans provide a particularly striking evocation of both the limits of state-building and, above all, the significance of recognition for `newer' states. Efforts to overturn the illegal status and non-recognition of one `independent' Bantustan, namely Bophuthatswana, therefore, illustrate what are widely held to be the modern attributes and evolutionary etiquette (`growth', `building', `development') that need to be `performed' in order to legitimise or normalise a state internationally. To be given a `voice' internationally, states are seemingly required to enact state-hood and sovereignty through a range of normalising rituals associated with state-building. In this case- study, strategies promoting neo-liberal development policies and also clandestine diplomatic and economic manoeuvres were believed by the regime to deliver international recognition. Directed at locating Bophuthatswana within its place in the world, these strenuous efforts also show how crude territorial `divide and rule' tactics alone were not responsible for underpinning the apartheid project. Rather, spaces were provided for discourses and practices of state-led `national' development in the Bantustan periphery. Thought to deliver normality for the renegade Bophuthatswana state, these international and local policies exacerbated and induced further a range of crises at the heart of the Bantustan strategy and apartheid modernisation more generally. These debilitating, and in Bophuthatswana's case, disastrous, tensions between the internal and external realms of state-building point to a more general need to rethink alternatives both to neo-liberalism as well as the rituals associated with state- building.