By the spring of 1993 the warlords were trying to find a way out of the chaos. Ioseliani and Kitovani had taken over what was left of the Georgian state, but conflict was rife and they weren’t making any progress in bringing order. Just as important, they needed a respectable face to show to the international community to gain legitimacy and access to foreign aid and resources. They hit on the plan to make Eduard Shevardnadze president. Shevardnadze, a native of Georgia, had been Mikhail Gorbachev’s minister of foreign affairs for six years until resigning in December 1990. By 1992 Shevardnadze had become speaker of the Georgian parliament. It was obvious that with his many contacts and immense international experience, he’d be the ideal face for the new nation. The idea of the warlords was simple. Shevardnadze would be the head of state and they would be behind the scenes pulling the strings. They made him Interim Chairman of the State Council, initially a four-person body including Ioseliani and Kitovani that acted only on consensus. They thus had a veto over Shevardnadze’s actions. He made Kitovani minister of defense and Ioseliani head of the Emergency Reaction Corps, an autonomous part of the armed forces. One of Ioseliani’s cronies became minister of the interior, and Shevardnadze appeared regularly in public with all of them. But then the slippery slope kicked in.
The statute that created the State Council allowed new members to be admitted if two-thirds of the existing members supported it. Shevardnadze started advocating the expansion of the council, which looked innocuous enough. Soon it evolved into a much larger body of warlords and political elites, which Shevardnadze found easier to manage. He then started to promote individuals from the militia to positions within the state apparatus in an attempt to shift their loyalty from Kitovani and Ioseliani to himself. He created a web of new military units with overlapping powers and jurisdictions: the Border Guards, the Special Emergency Response Corps, the Tbilisi Rescue Corps, the Government Guard, the Internal Troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Special Alpha Unit, and the CIA-trained Presidential Guard. By 1995 the Ministry of the Interior had 30,000 people working for it, many appointed from the former militias. This went along with a huge amount of corruption and impunity as the former militia members were given carte blanche to engage in unofficial taxation and bribe extraction.
Shevardnadze’s hand was strengthened by exactly the thing he’d been put in power to do—make the regime respectable internationally so that aid and assistance would come. It did, and it came via Shevardnadze. To be really respectable you had to have a market economy, which meant privatization and regulation, all of which could be manipulated by Shevardnadze to reward his growing cadre of loyalists. In effect, Shevardnadze engaged in an immensely sophisticated high-stakes version of “divide and rule.” By September 1994 he was powerful enough to use the Mkhedrioni to arrest Kitovani, and the following year, he turned them against their own leader, Ioseliani. Shevardnadze was finally able to use a failed assassination attempt against himself as the pretext to pass a new constitution to solidify his previously mostly informal powers. The Georgian state had reemerged, and the warlords who had counted on controlling the process were swept down the slippery slope.
Why You Cannot Shackle the Will to Power
We have seen several examples of the will to power obliterating the norms meant to keep the Leviathan down. Muhammad and Shevardnadze were brought in as outsiders to resolve inherent conflicts. They played this role brilliantly, bringing better order, peace, and a firmer hand to resolve disputes. But they also turned out to be much harder to control than their initial allies had bargained for. Shaka successfully exploited his accession to the chiefdom of the Zulu to jump-start the creation of a much more powerful army and expand the power of the state and his own authority, in the process emasculating the norms meant to restrain such state-building efforts. Kamehameha managed to use gunpowder technology to subdue his rivals and build a unified and powerful state in Hawaii, unlike anything the island had experienced before.
In none of these cases, and in few of the countless others where societies previously living under the Absent Leviathan have seen the emergence of political hierarchy, do we observe a transition to a Shackled Leviathan. Nor was the point of breaking the cage of norms to create liberty; it was to eliminate barriers to greater political hierarchy. An exception is of course Dark Age Athens, which as we saw in Chapter 2 managed to build the capacity of its state to resolve conflict, control feuds, and provide public services while at the same time increasing society’s control over it and transforming the prevailing norms. So why couldn’t these other societies achieve the same thing? The answer relates to the nature of the norms and institutions in place when a society starts its process of state building. In many cases, stateless societies succumb to the will to power of a charismatic leader with an edge. What motivates many of these leaders is not a desire to create a Shackled Leviathan, to promote liberty, or to redress the imbalance between the powers of the elite and citizens, but to increase their own power and domination over society. Solon in Athens, looked at from this vantage point, was an exception because he came to power to rein in the excessive influence of rich families and elites, so building shackles on the Leviathan was part of his mandate. Not so with our other state builders.
But perhaps even more fundamentally, what set apart Athenian society at the time of Solon was that it had already developed some formal institutions that regulated the distribution of political power and the resolution of conflict. Though imperfect, these institutions provided a foundation on which Solon and then Cleisthenes and others could build to introduce greater popular participation in politics and strengthen existing norms curbing social and political hierarchy. This is how they managed to enact the hubris and ostracism laws, meant to prevent powerful individuals getting too big for their britches (and at the same time they were also able to weaken aspects of existing norms that prevented the development of the Shackled Leviathan). No such institutions existed for the Tiv, in Medina and Mecca, among the Zulu, or in Hawaii at the time of Kamehameha. Instead, stacking the cards against the Shackled Leviathan, their methods of preventing would-be strongmen from ascending to power were complex sets of norms, such as witchcraft, kin-based relations, or the kapu system, that regulated conflict and held back political hierarchy. But once the will to power pierced through these norms, not much of them was left to act as an effective counterweight to the power of the newly emerging state. State builders were also quick to reconfigure norms for their own agenda, as we have seen. Going back to Figure 1 in Chapter 2, summarizing our conceptual framework, we can see this situation as corresponding to the bottom left where both state and society are weak to start with. Without the norms and institutions of society capable of restraining the process of state building once it’s in motion, there is no corridor. Hence, in the face of the will to power, there is nowhere else for society to go but toward the Despotic Leviathan.
But this wasn’t all bad. The aspiring Leviathan in some of the cases we discussed improved conflict resolution, brought order, and sometimes even destroyed the most pernicious aspects of the cage of norms—even if it also created more hierarchy and replaced the potential for fear and violence in a stateless society with the dominance of its newly forming Despotic Leviathan. Its economic consequences weren’t bad either, because they improved the allocation of resources and made a primitive type of economic growth possible, as we’ll see in the next chapter, by studying the nature of the economy under the Absent Leviathan and its cage of norms and contrasting it to the emerging economy under the Despotic Leviathan.