What is a fragile or failed state?

Those of us who live in wealthy countries tend to think of fragile states as a phenomenon occurring in poorer and, generally, hotter parts of the world. And it is true that if you look at the 2023 Fragile States Index world map, published annually by the Fund for Peace and the magazine Foreign Policy, most of Africa is covered in alarming shades of black and red, while most of Western Europe is depicted in tranquil shades of blue or green.

Countries are assigned a score between 0 and 10 on 12 indicators of fragility: the higher the score, the more fragile the state. Somalia is ranked #1 in fragility, with a score of 111.9 of a possible 120, followed by Yemen, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Myanmar, Chad, Afghanistan, and Central African Republic. Norway is the least fragile of the 179 countries covered, with a score of 14.5, followed by Iceland, Finland, New Zealand, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, Canada, Ireland, Luxembourg, and Ireland. Singapore, Germany, and Australia aren’t far behind. Few surprises on either end of the scale.

It's when we get a bit deeper into the index that things become more ambiguous. After the 30 or so least fragile countries we get the United Kingdom in 148th position with a score of 41.9, squeezed in between Qatar and Chile and trailing behind Uruguay and Costa Rica. In 141st position comes the United States trailing Israel and Poland and just edging out Argentina, Barbados, Croatia, and Oman.

To be classified as somewhat fragile does not mean that a country is necessarily repressive, undemocratic, or violent, though it points in that general direction. Let’s unpack the score of the United States. The 12 indicators that make up a country’s score are grouped into four categories: Cohesion, Economic, Political, and Social.

Cohesion, for example, comprises three dimensions: Security Apparatus, Factionalized Elites, and Group Grievance. One of the hallmarks of stability is state monopoly on the use of force. Some of the indicators of this are:

Civilian control of the military
Whether there are private militias that oppose the state.
Professionalization of the police.
Prevalence or lack of police brutality.
Availability of weapons.

There is also the political dimension:

Is leadership representative of the population and fairly elected?
Are there factionalized elites and if so, how powerful are they?
Extremist Rhetoric: Does hate radio and media exist?
Stereotyping: Is religious, ethnic, or other stereotyping prevalent and is there scape-goating?
Cross Cultural Respect: Does cross-cultural respect exist?

And, finally, the distribution of resources:

Is wealth concentrated in the hands of a few?
Does any one group control the majority of resources?
Are resources fairly distributed and does the government adequately distribute wealth through its tax system and taxes?

Does this remind you of any large North American country?

You would expect smaller countries with relatively homogeneous populations to score best on these dimensions and it should come as no surprise that small and wealthy Iceland tops the league with a composite score of 2.7, followed by Portugal at 3.5, Ireland at 4.1, and Luxembourg and Slovenia at 5.3. The United States gets a score of 18.5, worse than such places as Turkmenistan, Nicaragua, Papua New Guinea, Sierra Leone, Malawi, Paraguay, El Salvador, and Mexico.

Consider how the United States compares to Argentina, which it just barely edged out in the 2023 rankings 141 to 139. But on the measures of cohesion, described above, Argentina’s scores are uniformly lower (remember, a lower score is better).

You would expect Argentina, a country that has experienced numerous episodes of runaway inflation and has defaulted on its international debt obligations nine times since it achieved independence in 1816 (and 9 times since the 1950s) to score worse on economic measures than the United States, and so it does:

By the same token, you would expect Argentina, which has suffered several periods of military dictatorship – most recently from the mid-1970s to early 1980s when at least 30,000 supposed leftists were murdered by the regime – and has suffered chaotic rule for much of the time since then would score much worse than the United States on the political dimension. But you would be wrong.

True, the United States, a more prosperous country than Argentina, has better public services, though not by as big a margin as one might expect. That is because the fragility index considers not only “the provision of essential services such as health, education, water and sanitation, transport infrastructure, electricity…” but also the degree to which these services are provided to the entire population or disproportionately benefit political and economic elites. It also considers the level and maintenance of general infrastructure “to the extent that its absence would negatively affect the country’s actual or potential development.”

If we look at state legitimacy, defined as “the population’s level of confidence in state institutions and processes… the integrity of elections… the nature of political transitions… [and] the openness of ruling elites to transparency, accountability, and political representation”, the United States has fallen well behind Argentina in recent years, as it has also done in the area of human rights and rule of law, which consider whether there is widespread abuse of legal, political, and social rights; politically inspired violence perpetrated against civilians; denial of due process, and “current or emerging authoritarian… rule in which constitutional and democratic institutions and processes are suspended or manipulated.”

As much as I hope that Argentina continues on its trajectory of improving political and economic governance, I hope even more fervently that the United States can reverse its downward course. We are not yet a failed state, but we are becoming more fragile. Recall that Argentina, at the dawn of the 20th century, was one of the 10 richest countries in the world as measured by per capita GDP.

Rome was not sacked in a day. Like most other once-great empires, Rome’s decline was self-inflicted, rooted in the incapacity of its institutions to adapt to changing circumstances. Sometimes, it takes a major war to push an empire into irreversible decline. The First World War spelled the end of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Turkish, and Russian empires, but each was riven by internal contradictions that would almost certainly have produced a similar result sooner or later. The collapse of the Soviet empire, however, did not need that external push, much as Vladimir Putin contends that the U.S. and its allies provided one.

By the standards of the Fragile States Index, over the past 15 years the United States has gone from “sustainable” to “stable”, which means that the trend is negative and likely to worsen, absent some serious corrective action.

The current stand-off over the debt ceiling, in which the Republican members of Congress resemble nothing so much as a gang of aspiring suicide bombers, is a case in point. As we face possible financial default, increased political violence, gaping inequality, growing factionalism, diminishing liberty, dysfunctional politics, and a disappearing sense that what we have in common is more important than what divides us, we are teetering on the knife-edge between crisis and catastrophe.

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Is the United States a Fragile State?