There's a bit of amnesia in the West about some things, and that amnesia leads to abysmal policy choices rooted in some pretty choice bits of foolishness.
All the areas with problems are seriously divided by greater loyalty to small kinship or religious groups instead of to a central unifying conception of the nation. Notice I said "nation" and not "state." This is not a new situation. In fact, it's a fairly universal situation exception for a relatively small handful of areas.
France is one. All the smaller groups were assimilated linguistically and even culturally in the 1800s and early 1900s. The Bretons and the Basques are outliers, but even there they're mostly assimilated.
Germany was unified late. As was Italy. It took a rethinking of ethnicity to produce a kind of nation-state. Yugoslavia wasn't a nation-state. The other countries in Europe were unified ethnically and linguistically on ethnic borders or through ethnic cleansing--Italy, Slovakia, Poland, Czech Republic come to mind. Sweden couldn't stay with Norway and Denmark. Finland's Swedes are mostly Finns these days.
Putin's busy doing that in Russia. In the 1990s large areas of Russia wanted independence or a kind of confederation. These movements were put down economically and in a few cases by force. The "Russian Idea" has been renamed the "Russian World", but it's really Berdyaev's idea, even if the "National Idea" logo that some of the Ukrainian battalions sport is really the same idea. (One we think of as fascist; but really, it's calling for a nation-state in the face of a Europe that is trying to be post-nation-state, something that only works if you already have nation-states). It takes authoritarianism to make it stick. China did this a long time ago, assimilating and out-reproducing smaller groups. The Tibetans are the last on a long list of ethnicities to be swamped and assimilated.
The South American nations sort of managed to get far enough along that even larger units like the Aymara and Quechua know that a "Quechuanistan" wouldn't be possible. There's enough of a feeling among Bolivians that they are Bolivian first and something else second. A lot of that was fairly forced.
The kings and queens of Spain, and Franco after him, didn't create unity. And the British monarchy hasn't been in the unity business pretty much ever. Self-interest holds Britain together. Spain I'm not so sure about in the long run.
We think of all the other nations as being like Europe, when really languages and ethnicities are small and compact or diffuse and spread out enough to easily under a bit of stress to break up. Arabs, for instance. Or some of the larger tribal units in Africa or India. Europe is a piss-poor model.
I hated Qaddhafi back when a lot of DUers liked him--he was officially "socialist" in some way, if only by self-designation; he was non-aligned; he was a pro at snubbing the West. He was a despotic bastard. So was Tito. And Saddam Hussein. And Assad. The problems with all of them--one thing that Putin is not--is that they manipulated ethnic groups to be at odds with each other in order to make themselves either indispensible or unchallenged. They ruled through division, not unification (this makes Putin a bit scarier, if you ask me). Once gone, c'est la deluge. Nobody else could herd the cats and cat tribes.
This is my own personal inner conflict. Without that kind of authoritarianism, a lot of countries would shatter. Their infrastructure would be inappropriate and there'd be fighting over it. Except that a lot of lives depend on stability and on that infrastructure. It's nice to think that we could have a UN with 900 countries, but that wouldn't work: Many would be small and feeble, some wouldn't be self-sustaining, and large monolithic countries would either trample them or withdraw support. Authoritarianism could be used to help consolidate a nation--but that often is done through jingoism and xenophobia, bad things, and most authoritarians focus on their own power not making sure a stable nation survives them. My only solution sucks: It's a kind of utilitarianism.
So Saddam I didn't mind see going, even though I knew there was a huge risk of having the Iraqi state dissolve. Why? Simply because he'd been a disruptive force for years. It was the risk of lives lost in Iraq versus lives lost through conflict with Iraq.
Tito's death and Milosevic's ultimate bungling were inevitable. With Tito gone, what happened happened. Nobody caused it--neither the West nor Russia. Entropy's the law, deal with it.
Libya, Syria, some other states had help. They were pushed in odd ways to help create the mess. They weren't a problem to others in any direct way. Libya was a burr under the saddle, not a gun pointed at anybody's head. Syria was stable and, I suspect, had it continued for another 20 years might well have resulted in a consolidated Syrian state, educated and prosperous enough, to be able to survive with Assad III after a brief internal scuffle. Libya was nowhere near that point--it was far more like Jugoslavija.
Yes, this is armchair paternalism, something that's fairly harmless because, well, it's powerless old me sitting at a desk in Houston spouting off. At some point, though, I had to realize that my idealism had to give way to pragmatism. Rather like the way I love science, but realize that engineering is a more useful compromise or merger of scientific thought with how stuff is actually used by people.
= new reply since forum marked as read
