Things Worsen in Parts of the Globe

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer 

“Why is everybody rushing towards religious obscurantism?” the eminent British political theorist and historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin asked in 1986, as he entered his twilight years. 

“Colonels, terrorists, tyrants, ayatollahs, moral majorities” were, he wrote, creating a “growing darkness” in the world.

Three decades later, things are even worse. During the Cold War, a certain civility and rationality was practiced, even between the western and the Communist worlds. As the movie “Bridge of Spies” has shown us, there was even the possibility of enemy spies being exchanged.

One couldn’t imagine this happening today between the United States and the Islamic State. Captured prisoners are more likely to be beheaded, without even the pretense of show trials.

Entire areas of the world, particularly in Africa and the Middle East, have become zones of conflict between rival religious ideologues, rebels, terrorists, criminal gangs, and the remnants of states. Some countries have become violent political vacuums – think of the Congo, Libya or Somalia, where there is virtually no effective political system.

In most of these “shatter zones,” as Robert Kaplan called them in his book The Revenge of Geography, the states are the 19^th and 20^th artificial creations of European colonial powers. 

In the Middle East, this would be true of Syria, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Iraq, for instance. In Africa, virtually all of its post-colonial states have little relation to ethnic, geographic, linguistic, or religious boundaries already in place prior to the partition of the continent in the late 19^th century. 

Indeed, they often include historically antagonistic peoples, while other groups are divided between countries that are just the legacy of empire-building by Europeans. 

Africa’s arbitrary boundaries divide almost 180 different ethnicities into two or more countries. Four in ten Africans belong to a group that has kin across borders. The Malinke in west Africa are among the most partitioned of peoples, split among six different states. 

Ethnic fragmentation across sub-Saharan Africa is so pervasive that on average just 28 per cent of the total population of a given country belongs to the majority group.

Canadians extol “diversity,” by which they mean the integration of immigrants, but in multinational states where it has always existed, it can be, at best, a mixed blessing.

In such polities, democracy can be a challenge, since parties are usually simply the vehicles of various ethnic groups, and government is little more than the victory of the larger against the less numerous.

Precisely because these types of states seemed almost designed to fail, nationalists in the colonial world often wished to sweep them away and recreate what they considered more “natural” (and stronger) units; hence the “pan” movements, such as pan-Arabism and pan-Africanism.

Yet they did not succeed.  Even supposedly weak states that perhaps make no sense have proven to be remarkably resilient institutions. Successful secessions, even in Africa, have been few -- only Eritrea and South Sudan come to mind. The Igbo attempt to carve Biafra out of Nigeria failed, as have numerous other efforts.  

On the other hand, states that are really the expression of peoples with a common, often very old, culture, can be quite formidable. Their populations do not waste energy and resources squabbling among themselves, as do the heterogeneous multinational polities.

Instead, their efforts are directed towards common economic, military and political goals, making them durable entities. This is the case regardless of whether they are autocracies, democracies or theocracies. China, Iran, Israel, and Vietnam are examples of these. 

They are far stronger than their merely “objective” metrics, such as size, population, natural resources, and other factors, would indicate.