Sunday, January 27, 2008

Borders cause wars (or not)

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=011608E

What do people who can't have original thoughts do? They repeat the lazy groupthink of the day.

'The Allied statesmen gathered in 1919 paid little attention to the needs and wants of the people of these territories they were remaking or, in many cases, creating from scratch - drawing boundaries that today, in the next century, ware [sic] are often defending with our own blood.'

Over and over again, I read this same argument- that the British (and French, Portuguese and Dutch) colonialists created states by randomly drawing lines on the maps. According to the argument, this created artificial states that do not cohere resulting in domination by one ethnic group of other ethnicities, leading in the worst cases to intra-communal warfare. These artificial states are the cause of many conflicts round the world, we're told.

Unfortunately, it's bollocks. Firstly, there is no correlation between the likelihood a country will cause wars, and how arbitrary its borders are. Germany was formed in the 19th century from many small statelets, and immediately began a series of wars of aggression. Nobody pretends its borders are arbitrary. They do a pretty good job of including Germans and only Germans. Iraq is a highly heterogenous state consisting of three large groupings, two Arab and one Kurd. It also has large numbers of Turks. Since its creation, Iraq has initiated two aggressive wars. Russia (European Russia) is a homogenous nation which from its inception fought many aggressive wars and built a large empire. Britain is comprised of at least four groupings, English, Welsh, Scots and Irish. It has initiated many many wars. What can we deduce from this? Heterogenous nations are as likely as non-heterogenous countries of launching conflicts, but not more likely. For every example of an 'arbitrary' state causing conflict, there are many of non-arbitrary ones doing so.

Take India. The British unified it and ran India for about 150 years. What happened when they partitioned it in 1947 to allow the muslim population to have a separate country? The two entities immediately went to war with each other. Given that the British were careful to try to draw up borders that included mostly muslims on the one hand and Hindus on the other, the result should presumably have been eternal harmony, if this argument is to believed. Beyond the original partition war, East Pakistan fought a further war of independence from West Pakistan because they had no real kinship with them despite a shared religion. The British tried to create viable states based on rational criteria, and succeeded. What happened next was up to the people of those new states. My question for the sheep-like repeaters of this stupid argument is this: how many of the 'arbitrary' states created by the British colonial authorities still exist i.e. are viable? The answer is, nearly all of them, including Iraq. In fact apart from East Pakistan (Bangladesh) and West Pakistan (Pakistan) and Somalia, all of them. Which I believe reveals one of the more hidden aspects of countries- even countries arbitrarily created have a tenacity of existence few other institutions seem to.

Blaming intra-communal warfare on national boundaries also can't stand up to scrutiny. Switzerland is fairly evenly divided into German, French and Italian strands. When was the last time they tried the Rwandan method of changing the mix? Despite many conflicts between the ethnic groups in Britain, at no point have we had ethnic cleansing like in Bosnia (unless you go back to about 450 A.D., which is not too bad really). The Highland clearances were a disgrace, but had no ethnic element- lowland Scots wanted Highland Scots land for running sheep, an economic fact. Many African countries are dictatorships in 2008, despite being democracies when they became independent from Britain. Often these dictatorships are tribally based. The Xhosa in South Africa and the Shona in Zimbabwe are two examples. Tribal warfare and empire-building were very old traditions before the British (and Portuguese, Dutch etc) arrived, and are certainly not the product of cartographic activities. In fact, the Zulu empire was on a huge roll before the British came along and stole their thunder.

So why do we hear the argument over and over again that it was the British governors and their map-makers who caused the wars of the late 20th and early 21st century? Its easier than studying peoples histories, I guess, and researching long enough to find out why Arab Iraqis fight non-Arab Persians, for instance. I have another question- why is the Ottoman empire not considered arbitary, while Iraq is? Iraq, as I've mentioned before, is comprised of three of the old Ottoman vilayets (bureaucratic divisions) and a bit of a fourth. Were vilayets arbitrary? The Ottoman empire held within it perhaps two hundred different ethnic groups, from Bulgars to Egyptians. Often, Vilayets had five or six ethinicities within them. Did that mean that the Ottoman empire wasn't viable? Did it mean that it was condemned automatically to intra-communal warfare? Of course not.

What determines the stability and peacefulness of a country is not how many different peoples inhabit it, or whether its borders were determined by a Briton. It is determined by the peaceability of those people, and whether their cultures allow for peaceful co-existence or not. Africa and the middle east seem to have pervasive cultures of tribal annihilation and predatory behaviour. Being a minority in those regions is not like being a minority in Canada. Its sad but true.

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