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Old World Disorders
| Article
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20365 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1992 |
3,471 Words |
| Author
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James Clad
James Clad, a former staff correspondent for the Far Eastern
Economic Review, is research professor for Southeast Asian
studies at Georgetown University. His latest book is After the
Crusade: American Foreign Policy for the Post-Superpower Era
(Madison, 1995). |
Although the Soviet and Yugoslav disintegrations understandably have gripped the Western imagination, much more redrawing of the world map lies ahead, especially in regions that, for want of a better word, we still describe as the Third World. The magnitude of the change can scarcely be overemphasized: By comparison to the fault lines opening beneath dozens of supposed nation-states, Europe's ruptures these last few years may come to look like simple hairline fractures.
With each passing week, we realize more acutely how the old, bipolar confrontation served to prop up many rickety states, including one of the two bipolar contestants. We have yet to realize, however, that by far the greater number of feeble sovereignties lie well outside Europe. After two waves of state creation following the first and second world wars, a superabundance of cardboard governments clutter the planet's political road map. They often have little foundation.
One debatable notion has sustained their existence--the concept of the nation-state, mirroring the European model. Self-determination for colonial peoples, which became global orthodoxy, was couched in the language of a separate state for separate people. Each new sovereignty, it was thought, would prove a transportable concept for peoples having little in common other than the same or similar colonial overlords.
As a concept, it was transportable; as a working concept, it has failed the grade. Like flying buttresses of stone that hold up cathedral walls, the rivalry of the superpowers once kept many of these entities standing with a semblance of solidity. So have the dozens of conventions, protocols, and other instruments of what political scientists describe as "international regime formation." But take away the old great power rivalry, and there's little reason in realpolitik to care whether territories like Somalia, once seen as such a strategic patch of sand, fragment into warring domains. In many gathering local crises, it is up to the people inhabiting those putative sovereignties to determine the outcome. And the outcome often cannot square with the continuation of the original, decolorized state erected--often in haste--twenty or thirty years ago.
Beyond the fading of global confrontation lies another, and far more immediate, reason for the lengthening of the roll call of national "failures." The disappearance of outside buttressing occurs at a moment when decay within these flimsy sovereignties dooms many to dismemberment or chaos. In the Third World, few territorial lines correspond
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