Glenny on McMafia

McMafia is a catchy title for Misha Glenway’s new book and it certainly gives you a hint of what’s inside, but on careful examination, it is deeply leading. That is: the main lesson of Glenway’s account of “the global criminal underworld” is that there is nothing “Mc” about it. Tolstoy said that every unhappy family is different. So, it seems, is the world of organized crime. How else to bracket examples like:

• The successor states of the old Soviet Union, where the government is too weak not to do the underworld’s bidding;

• India and Pakistan where the governments enlisted the underworld, somewhat unwillingly, for political causes;

• Nigeria, where there never has been much of a “state” except as a son-et-lumiere show erected by westerners for their own convenience;

• Japan, where the gang members have to register with the police.

Glenway doesn’t discuss them, but he might have added, for example,

• the Central Asian states in which relatively secure governments appear to exist for no purpose other than to line the pockets of the elite. Or, of course,

• the United States of America which, as any British academic will tell you, is a vast criminal syndicate all its own.

The difficulty may lie in the concept of sovereignty itself. Weber speaks of the “Gewaltmonopol des Staates,” the state as the agency with the “monopoly on violence.” But there probably never has been a state with a monopoly of violence, and most modern states don’t even come close—in virtually every part of the world, prisoners run the prisons and street gangs run the streets, and an uncertain array of contenders jockey for position among the rest: recall that when the leader of the free world Harry S Truman fired General Macarthur, there were people who feared it would cost him his job—and Truman didn’t dare touch J. Edgar Hoover at all. Turn the point around: it’s a question of legitimacy. Ernest Gellner used to say that a “state” is an agency that protects you from every form of injustice except its own. Conrad’s Inspector Verloq never learned to understand the revolutionaries; he pined for his old days on the burglary squad, where the targets knew they were criminals. Guerillas in the mountains distribute milk and run well-baby clinics to prove that they can “govern” better than the folks behind the Steelcase desks. Yet they maybe robbing banks and running guns at the same time.

Glenny appears to have gone (almost) everywhere and seen (almost) everything. Some exceptions: Central Asia, which gets only incidental mention; United States street gangs and prisons; the whole of Indonesia which might be the world’s largest kleptocracy. He’s at his best on the Balkans, where he has spent a lot of time, and written an earlier book. He has some lovely throwaway details and some stimulating throwaway insights (maybe I’ll do a catalog in another post). One complaint: I this book is journalism, not scholarship, but still he should have done a better job of sourcing. A perfunctory bibliographic note (which he does offer) is no substitute for some running source notes (which he does not). We should probably be grateful that he didn’t try to provide any grand theory: one point of his book is that even if he wanted to, he couldn’t.