The Birth of the Pseudostate

Some fifteen years ago, while writing about apartheid-era South Africa, I visited one of its nominally independent black "homelands." This crazy quilt of territories was a control mechanism the white regime had come up with in a country where whites were vastly outnumbered by South Africans of other colors. For the most part rural slums, the homelands, also known as Bantustans, made up about 13 percent of the nation's land. I was driving across miles of veldt where blacks were trying to scratch a living from eroded or unyielding patches of earth that white farmers didn't want, interspersed with shantytowns of shacks constructed out of corrugated metal, discarded plasterboard, and old automobile doors. Suddenly, looming out of this desolate landscape like an ocean liner in a swamp, was a huge office building, perhaps 4 or 5 stories high and 150 yards long, with a large sign saying, in English and Afrikaans, "South African Embassy."

I remembered that building the other day when reading about the new U.S. Embassy that will open in Baghdad this week. With a staff of more than 1,700 – and that may be only the beginning – it will be the largest diplomatic mission in the world. Just as our embassy will be considerably more than an embassy, so the Iraqi state that will officially come into being in its shadow next Wednesday, after the speechmaking and flag-raising are over, will be considerably less than a state.

With nearly 140,000 American troops on Iraq's soil, plus tens of thousands of additional foreign soldiers and civilian security guards armed with everything from submachine guns to helicopters, most military power will not be in Iraqi hands, nor will the power of the budget, largely set and paid for in Washington.

If the new Iraq-to-be is not a state, what is it? A half century ago one could talk about colonies, protectorates, and spheres of influence, but in our supposedly post-colonial world, the vocabulary is poorer. We lack a word for a country where most real power is in the hands of someone else, whether that be shadowy local militias, other nations' armies, or both. Pseudostate, perhaps. From Afghanistan to the Palestinian Authority, Bosnia to Congo, pseudostates have now spread around the globe. Some of them will even be exchanging ambassadors with Iraq.

Pseudostates, in fact, are nothing new. They have a long and fascinating history, and two notable groups of them had surprising fates near the twentieth century's end.

One collection was those "homelands" of South Africa, four of which were formally granted independence. The so-called South African Embassies evolved seamlessly out of the white-controlled administrations that had run these territories when they were still called "Native Reserves," just as the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad will begin life in the very same Republican Palace from which occupation administrator L. Paul Bremer III has run Iraq for the last year. The South African government invested large sums in equipping the homelands with everything from foreign ministries to luxurious, gated residential compounds for cabinet members and their families. Collaborating chiefs were made heads of state, and their territories were given flags, national anthems and coats of arms. But when a coup temporarily deposed the handpicked president of Bophuthatswana – seven separate islands of desperately poor land and poor people spread out across hundreds of miles – it was the South African army that promptly restored him to power.

As South Africa made its miraculous transition to majority rule in the early 1990s, the homelands as separate political entities swiftly vanished. The former foreign ministries and embassies were put to other uses and the only people to whom the past trappings of homeland independence still matter today are collectors who do a lively trade in the former territories' stamps.