William Reno
Department of Political science
Northwestern University, reno@northwestern.edu

Numerous essays appeal to international law to argue for recognition for Somaliland. If one looks at recent precedent, one sees that politics will likely determine how the rest of the world treats Somaliland’s claims. By politics, I mean that recognition has to be in the interests of outsiders—especially the United States—and that Somaliland’s authorities must identify and exploit such an opportunity.

International law is not irrelevant. Conformity to two basic tenets is a necessary, though not sufficient condition for recognition. These are first, an absence of conquest, and second, adoption of an existing boundary that can plausibly become an international border. The first reassures the rest of the world of the rejection of aggrandizement through territorial conquest, an enduring requirement since the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Accepting existing borders reassures outsiders that recognition will not lead to endless border skirmishes (though many in the US government now regret Eritrea’s split from Ethiopia on this score).

Those who meet these necessary conditions discover that they are not sufficient. For those who do acquire external recognition for their claims, politics reigns supreme. The stunning success of the Kosovo Liberation Army in bending NATO to its will shall result in Kosovo’s independence, scheduled for 2007. The Kurdish Government Authority convinced the US to accept its core demands that may well lead to independence. That is the expressed wish of the 95 percent who voted for independence in a referendum that was held alongside the US-sponsored election earlier this year. Both of these groups managed to make US policy in those regions hostage to their demands. The Sudan People’s Liberation Army convinced diplomats to agree to a referendum on independence for southern Sudan in 2011. The SPLA exploited the image of Khartoum as an odious and intransigent government and astutely assembled a very heterogeneous coalition of interest groups in the NGO community and in the Washington political Establishment to advocate in their favor and against Khartoum’s demands.

These successes rested first in the capacity of leaderships to identify and mobilize common interests (“good PR”). They directed their efforts to target a vulnerability of the world’s most powerful state. They had to explain how their independence was indispensable for US security and the success of its policies. Thus the “weak” were less weak than most observers would expect. But strength came less from capabilities on the ground than from learning how to carve opportunity for themselves out of a powerful supporter’s vulnerabilities.

The US now suffers from two key vulnerabilities, which in this analysis also can be seen as opportunities. They are in lesser part the result of the War on Terror and the spread of its military forces to new places, and in greater part to its entanglements in the conflict in Iraq. From the perspective of people who like international boundaries as they are now, this is destabilizing. For people who want to create new states, this is a moment of opportunity. This is akin to buying a house. The buyer needs the real estate market. But the buyer is less important to the real estate market at some times than at others. During those times of market weakness or vulnerability, if one’s financial affairs are in order it is a great time to buy a house because the market needs buyers. The buyer gets to decide at least some of the terms. But at other times, the same offer will receive no attention at all. Perhaps now is becoming a better time to buy into the world’s system of states. Partly this shift occurs for structural reasons—threats to the market emerge and the newcomer’s services become more valuable—but it also occurs because the newcomer succeeds in shaping how the seller sees this market.

More practically, I ask: what are US interests in recognizing Somaliland? It is fine to go on about democracy and women’s rights, and all of these things are important. But the Kosovo Liberation Army did not win widespread acceptance for its aims through its virtues of this score. It had to conform to some basic principles of behavior as necessary conditions, but its success ultimately comes from the US and NATO recognition that not giving the KLA what it wanted would have intolerable consequences. Looking at Somaliland, part of its problem is that the immediate neighborhood actually is “too peaceful” and successful, if one can be permitted to say such a thing in the spirit of this analysis directed at discerning US interests. There are, however, several proximate considerations drawn from the wider Somali region. US officials do think about the following:

These concerns are “drivers”, or the more general considerations that guide US policy in the Somali region. When American policy makers talk about “drivers” they think in terms of underlying trends shape the politics of places like the Horn of Africa. My argument here is that a strategy to increase support for recognition for Somaliland needs to turn this on its head and ask: What are the drivers of US policy? What underlying global trends in this policy are amenable to influence, at east insofar as US policy makers see them in relation to the Horn of Africa? These include the following two developments:

First I look at the new concern in Washington about developments in areas previously seen as marginal to US interests:

The 9-11 attacks showed how non-state actors could threaten a major state. President George W. Bush declared: “The events of September 11, 2001 taught us that weak states, like Afghanistan, can pose as great a danger to our national interest as strong states.” British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw concurred: “ no one can doubt that a primary threat to our security is now posed by groups acting outside formal states, or from places where no state functions at all. It is no longer possible to ignore misgoverned parts of a world without borders, where chaos is a potential neighbour anywhere from Africa to Afghanistan.” Even prior to the 9-11 attacks, the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania showed that weakly governed places could pose threats to the powerful. Those attacks were planned in Somalia and parts of Kenya’s Indian Ocean coast where government control is weak. The 2000 attack on the US warship USS Cole originated in Yemen, a country that had friendly relations with the US but which also had a government that exercised only weak oversight over the activities of most of its citizens. The November 2002 Mombassa attacks also illustrated this danger.

With regard to the Somali region as a whole, many US policy makers see turmoil essentially as part of a product of clan rivalry, power-sharing disagreements, and the agendas of individual leaders. They balance this against the real fact that turmoil and contention creates incentives for local groups to try to bring in outsiders, whether Ethiopian, Eritrean or al-Qaeda as leverage to help them in their struggles.

Thus the US pays attention to this region. But surveillance is difficult. There are many places in the world where non-state groups could hide and plan attacks. Direct intervention is very expensive (as peacekeeping operations show) and is likely to generate nationalist reactions. This leaves them with few options but to search for proxies.

Thus emerges the Second driver, the search for local proxies.

US concern about essentially the whole world means building a capacity to fight adversaries in territories that states do not necessarily control, or in Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s terms, the need to “ conduct war in countries we are not at war with (safe havens)” and to fight enemies that are not members of regular military forces, including organized crime and extremist groups that are enablers of terrorism. This also puts the onus on governments to demonstrate the political will to control their territory and citizens. In the long-term this is revolutionary.

From the end of the colonial era up to 2001, the US and other Great Powers were satisfied to recognize states as they emerged from colonial rule, regardless of the actual capacity of their governments to rule those territories or their manner of governance. The continued formal recognition of a State of Somalia that occupies a UN seat and unwillingness to recognize Somaliland as a successor to part of that old state’s territory is a remnant of that legacy. But the decertification of Charles Taylor’s regime in Liberia is a sign of a turn toward enforcing a standard of behavior as a quid pro quo for recognition of regimes, much less states. US officials worried that Taylor was unwilling to vet his business partners, who included associates of Middle Eastern groups on the US terrorism list, and was unable to control how his own Liberian partners did business. A few years earlier this would have been seen just as a local problem not worthy of significant attention. US pressure played a big part in getting rid of Taylor, and it marked a new level of engagement in West Africa.

US policy makers now face a quandary when recognized regimes do not control significant swaths of the territory of their states, as clearly is the situation that characterizes Somalia as a whole today. The US had some success up through 2005 in cooperating with Mogadishu-based militias to watch and in two cases, apprehend what it suspects are al-Qaeda figures. But many of these partners are at odds with each other. Yet if they were more unified, this would lend credibility to Islamic Court claims of US influence and a threat to Islam.

Thus the US becomes enmeshed in the arcane internal politics of these regions, which becomes a huge disaster to the planners and analysts back in Washington. The more clever policy makers have to seek out “native guides” who will help them to navigate through this morass. These have to be people who are intimately familiar with the goings-on in these places, and can help the confused outsider understand what is trivial and a real threat. But of course “native guides” detect dependence and use it as an opportunity to press their own agendas.

Looking back at the Kosovo War, one can see this dynamic of growing Washington dependence on their ethnic Albanian “native guides”.. Given Clinton’s domestic political vulnerabilities—Monica Lewinsky and a Republican Congress—and Europe’s absence of a coherent foreign policy, NATO ground troops were not a real option. But there was a local rebel force, still bearing the official US label of terrorist organization, well known for its clandestine economic deals. This group, the Kosovo Liberation Army, was now pressed into action as a proxy. It became more valuable as US planners discovered the Serb resistance to aerial bombardment. Now the US Air Force needed someone to flush Serb soldiers into the open where they could be bombed. Then when the Serbs were expelled, NATO, OSCE and UN administrators learned that one peacekeeper for every fifty Kosovars was insufficient to keep order. They had to rely on the KLA, which earlier they saw as part of the problem. Now the KLA could begin to integrate itself into the new police force. How else could Kosovo be pacified? The fox now guarded the hen house. Of course this left NATO vulnerable to threats and unable to respond to the March 2005 ethnic cleansing of Serbs from Kosovo as the new police stood by.

The Kurdish pesh merga militia played a largely hidden, but very important role in the early stages of the creation of an “Iraqi army” that was able to deal with insurgents. These fighters, however, have very little time for talk about a unified Iraq. They are the army of Kurdistan, a fact that US officials know but cannot admit. The situation in Iraq leaves the US more dependent upon friendly governments and local armed proxy groups in other parts of the world too. US failures in Iraq also mean that the US can be more easily challenged elsewhere (as Iran’s government knows).

What does this mean for Somaliland? In most respects, it is fortunate that Somaliland lies beyond the areas that give most anxiety to US analysts and policy makers. Its neighborhood, while no Garden of Eden, is fairly benign by regional standards and presents relatively few immediate threats to the US. Herein lies a contradiction: If regional developments were to pose a greater danger to Somaliland’s internal stability and external security, the probability of US recognition would grow. The assumption here is that these threats would be seen in the US as real threats too. Thus Somaliland’s government might have a better chance of getting what it wants from the international community just as its overall situation becomes more perilous.

Of course the other option is to be proactive, and convince officials in Washington that Somaliland’s stability is directly relevant to US concerns about the Islamic Courts and other developments to the south. This may sound cynical, but future attacks on shipping in the Gulf of Aden probably would increase US concern about the region.

In any event, the effort to attract interest will have to address the concerns of US officials. One concern is that the people with whom they talk actually represent the country in question. Analysts and some politicians point to the flawed strategy of the US Defense Department in relying on the exile Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraq National Congress prior to and after the 2003 invasion. They worry that people who do not live in the country all of the time might not represent the real attitudes of most people there. In this regard, I think that it is unfortunate that the President is not at this meeting here in Washington. There are few more important places that he could possibly be at this moment when (hopefully) there is some capital-city media attention to this event. People will say “perhaps he and the overseas Somalilanders do not see eye-to-eye” on important matters. They will know that these members of the diaspora are important players back in Somaliland, but will need to see that they really are on the same page as the people back home.

Meanwhile, the independence of Kosovo and perhaps later of Kurdistan and SPLA territories will undermine norms that currently inhibit recognition. Or a combination of southern disorder and US perceptions of threats, combined with growing US incapacity related to Iraq and other foreign policy blunders will make Somaliland more valuable not only to the US but also to the EU and to neighboring states.

It helps that Somaliland has such a solid legal case and that it can point to a growing number of precedents elsewhere. But in managing the impact of these changes, which are themselves largely beyond the influence of people in Somaliland, requires careful attention to the interests and anxieties of analysts and policy makers in the US (and elsewhere). The yearning for recognition impresses a lot of people, but this has to be turned into a matter of urgency. Unfortunately national interests are a far better predictor than the desire to see justice done to when even the most powerful countries act.

George W Bush, National Security Strategy of the United States, (Falls Village, CT: Winterhouse Editions, 2002), 3

Jack Straw, “Order Out of Chaos: the Challenge of Failed States,” Mark Leonard, ed., Re-ordering the World: the Long-term Implications of September 11, (London: Foreign Policy Centre, 2002), 98.

Department of Defense, Quadrennial Defense Review Report, 6 Feb 2006, vi.