德国之声：失败国家排行榜中国第57
时事风云 | 2009.08.25
美国智库和平基金会（The Fund for Peace）和《外交政策》 (Foreign Policy magazine) 杂志自2005年以来，每年公布一个"失败国家指数列表"。一个主权国家在列表排名越靠前，表明这个国家本年度在执政、经济、民生、公共服务等方面的表现就越差。最新一期的《外交政策》杂志公布了和平基金会本年度"失败国家指数列表"。在被评审的177个主权国家里，中国排在第57名。
由美国和平基金会和《外交政策》杂志共同公布的"2009年度失败国家指数列表"上排在首位的是索马里，其次几个"榜上有名"的国家分别为津巴布韦、苏丹、乍得和刚果，伊拉克和阿富汗分列第6和第7。
美国和平基金会的马克·卢卡斯在接受德国之声采访时讲到，这一次被评比的总共有177个主权国家："我们对这些国家在政治、社会、经济、安全等12个领域进行打分，1最好，10最差，最后算总分。我们还按照得分情况，给这些国家分了几个级别，最糟糕的属于'危险'，还有'警告'，以及'稳定'等等。"
美国和平基金会同《外交政策》杂志进行打分的依据是有关各国的官方数据及媒体报道资料，考察该国在各个领域的表现。卢卡斯介绍说，去年中国获得"失败国家指数"是80.4，今年是84.6，排名第57，属于"警告"等级。
至于中国今年得分情况退步的原因，卢卡斯分析说："原因有很多。在我们评比的12个领域中，比如经济方面，中国去年发生了严重的四川大地震，之后又爆发全球经济和金融危机。这些都是影响经济发展的因素，也是可能导致不稳定的因素。"
而一个主权国家被评为"失败"，责任要归于谁呢？对于这个问题，美国和平基金会的卢卡斯认为也要区分对待："如果是发生了自然灾害，当然不能算是政府的责任。但是其他因素，比如发生经济危机，政府是否出台了有效的措施，尽量缩小损失。或是在战乱国家，政府有没有做到基本的人道主义保障，维护民众的人权。"
谈到中国2009年排名情况的退步，卢卡斯表示，这同中国去年发生"3·14"西藏事件，和今年的新疆"7·5"事件，以及中国政府的表现不无关联。另一个值得关注的现象是，中国大陆网络媒体对于"2009年度失败国家指数列表"的报道几乎为零。而前几年，在中国没有进入"警告"等级时，中国国内媒体在列表公布后纷纷进行转载评论。
另附"2009年失败国家指数列表"前20个国家排名情况以及较去年的变化 （来源：www.foreignpolicy.com）
2009年排名 2008年 国家 2009年失败指数
1 1 索马里 114.7
2 3 津巴布韦 114
3 2 苏丹 112.4
4 4 乍得 112.2
5 6 刚果民主共和国 108.7
6 5 伊拉克 108.6
7 7 阿富汗 108.2
8 10 中非共和国 105.4
9 11 几内亚 104.6
10 9 巴基斯坦 104.1
11 8 象牙海岸 102.5
12 14 海地 101.8
13 12 缅甸 101.5
14 26 肯尼亚 101.4
15 22 尼日利亚 99.8
16 16 埃塞俄比亚 98.9
17 15 朝鲜 98.3
18 21 也门 98.1
19 12 孟加拉国 98.1
...
57 68 中国 84.6
...
157 155 德国 36.2
159 161 美国 34.0
...
177 177 挪威 18.3
作者：谢菲
责编：叶宣
The Failed States Index
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/06/22/the_2009_failed_states_index
It is a sobering time for the world’s most fragile countries—virulent economic crisis, countless natural disasters, and government collapse. This year, we delve deeper than ever into just what went wrong—and who is to blame.
Yemen may not yet be front-page news, but it’s being watched intently these days in capitals worldwide. A perfect storm of state failure is now brewing there: disappearing oil and water reserves; a mob of migrants, some allegedly with al Qaeda ties, flooding in from Somalia, the failed state next door; and a weak government increasingly unable to keep things running. Many worry Yemen is the next Afghanistan: a global problem wrapped in a failed state.
It’s not just Yemen. The financial crisis was a near-death experience for insurgency-plagued Pakistan, which remains on imf life support. Cameroon has been rocked by economic contagion, which sparked riots, violence, and instability. Other countries dependent on the import and export of commodities—from Nigeria to Equatorial Guinea to Bangladesh—had a similarly rough go of it last year, suffering what economist Homi Kharas calls a “whiplash effect” as prices spiked sharply and then plummeted. All indications are that 2009 will bring little to no reprieve.
Instead, the global recession is sparking fears that multiple states could slip all at once into the ranks of the failing. Now more than ever, failed-state triage could become a grim necessity for world leaders from the United Nations and World Bank to U.S. President Barack Obama’s White House. All of which puts a fine point on an old and uncomfortable dilemma: Whom do you help when so many need it?
This is a sober question for sober times, and it is the backdrop for the fifth annual Failed States Index—a collaboration between The Fund for Peace, an independent research organization, and Foreign Policy. Using 12 indicators of state cohesion and performance, compiled through a close examination of more than 30,000 publicly available sources, we ranked 177 states in order from most to least at risk of failure. The 60 most vulnerable states are listed in the rankings.
Figuring out which faltering states to help depends in large part on what they need. After all, as Tolstoy might have put it, every failing state is failing in its own way. Georgia, for example, jumped 23 places in this year’s index due to a substantial spike in that elusive indicator, “Invaded by Russia.” Somalia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are failing because their governments are chronically weak to nonexistent; Zimbabwe and Burma are failing because their governments are strong enough to choke the life out of their societies. Iraq is failing, but its trajectory may be toward greater success, while Haiti is failing as well, and it is hard to imagine success around the corner.
It is also a harsh fact that a greater risk of failure is not always synonymous with greater consequences of failure. For example, Zimbabwe (No. 2 on the index) is technically failing more than Iraq (6), but the geopolitical implications of state failure in Iraq would be far greater than in Zimbabwe. It’s why we worry more about Pakistan (10) than Guinea (9), and North Korea (17) more than the Ivory Coast (11).
Then take the paradoxical case of Iran, which jumped 11 spots in the rankings this year. With an already faulty economy, a vampire state mismanaging it further, and a global recession on top of all that, it is no surprise that Iran is faltering. But the state is not failing—indeed, it is succeeding quite well—in one rather important respect: the pursuit of nuclear weapons. And it is this “success,” more than Iran’s myriad failings, that keeps it above the fold of other worrying news.
Answering the question of which failed states demand attention might well come down to which are deemed to pose the biggest threat to the world at large. But even the widely presumed linkage between failing states and terrorism is less clear than many have come to assume since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks sounded the alarm about the consequences of governments not in control of their territory. Take Somalia, once again the No. 1 failed state on this year’s index. A recent report by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, drawing on captured al Qaeda documents, revealed that Osama bin Laden’s outfit had an awful experience trying to operate out of Somalia, for all the same reasons that international peacekeepers found Somalia unmanageable in the 1990s: terrible infrastructure, excessive violence and criminality, and few basic services, among other factors. In short, Somalia was too failed even for al Qaeda.
Which failed states are global security threats and which are simply tragedies for their own people? This is one question that will matter most this year of living dangerously, and there are others we present in the following pages: Which countries might blow up next? Are there pockets of success within states of failure? And who (or what) is to blame when things go bad—corrupt leaders, dysfunctional societies, bad neighbors, a global recession, unfortunate history, or simply geography itself?
The Failed States Index does not provide all the answers, nor does it claim to be able to. But it is a starting point for a discussion about why states fail and what should be done about them—a discussion, sadly, that we might be having even more frequently this year.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/06/22/2009_failed_states_index_interactive_map_and_rankings
