She neglects to draw the rather obvious comparison with the disintegration of the Roman Empire, and of course the barbarian issue is different this time, but otherwise this is excellent.WASHINGTON -- In the mid-'80s, after I had been covering the post-colonial Third World for rather too many trying years, I began to notice some disturbing developments across the world.
Oh no, I said to myself at first, of course it cannot be true! We were, after all, the children of the euphoric aftermath of World War II, when we rebuilt the world for the good of mankind. America assumed that the dozens of poor states of Asia, Africa and the Middle East that had emerged from years of colonialist humiliation would stand tall as new, spontaneously born, independent states -- and we assumed that we would help them.
But slowly I began to realize, instead, that we were witnessing the first stages of a massive disintegration of fragile nation-states, or what today we call "failed states." At that point, I tried to put all my fears together in a lead piece for Encyclopedia Britannica, called "Our Disintegrating World: The Menace of Global Anarchy."
"What has happened in the 1970s and 1980s," I wrote, "is that the world is quietly but relentlessly being rent by a slow-motion disintegration. The components of this dangerous new world: tribes, clans, religious fundamentalism of every faith, city gangs, death squads, terrorist movements, guerrilla movements and other narrow and rabid self-interest groups." Then, ironically, I used Lebanon as the example of the disintegration at the hands of these "irregulars," which occurred when the careful compacts that ruled the power structures in that unfortunate land broke down in the mid-'70s.
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