[QUOTE=Lumpy]
On the other hand, we have places like Lebanon during the 1980s, Yugoslavia during the 1990s, or Iraq today.
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Something that all of these places have in common is not the presence of weapons, but of being invaded by an outside power and of having several ethnic or religious factions within them. The roots of the conflicts were often stewing for a long, long time before outside control was released in one way or another. In other words, it had nothing to do with the presence of guns, and everything to do with instability and grudges.
Lebanon was part of the Ottoman Empire for about 400 years. Outside control took care of any factionalism. It was under French control following the breakup of the Ottoman Empire after WWI, then got invaded by several powers during WWII. Their first elected government after being granted independence was imprisoned by the French. Guess the French didn’t like who the people chose.
A few years after Lebanon’s independence was reluctantly recognized, the country invaded Israel, in collaboration with other countries in the region. They took in a bunch of Palestinian refugees, and there was another period of unrest during the Six Day war. Only a few years later, there was a civil war, mostly because of long-standing ethnic conflicts dating back to the Ottoman days, but the influx of refugees, the PLO using Lebanon as a staging point for attacks on Israel, and Israel shelling and bombing the crap out of them didn’t help things settle down any.
The Balkans had been a pain in the ass of Europe since before WWI. Again, the Ottoman Empire was involved way back in the 1600s and served to control most of the problems through being a bigger badass than any of the locals. The region has been fragmented by strong ethnic and ideological divides, and at various times in history most of the main factions you heard about post-Cold War were guilty of oppressing some of the other factions. Before the Serbs were famous for “ethnic cleansing” the Croats were doing it during WWII. You also shouldn’t forget that WWI was started by the Austria-Hungarian heir being assassinated by a Serbian nationalist.
The only reason the whole place didn’t explode into nasty factional warfare after most of the rest of the European conflicts were winding down was because of outside control again being imposed in the form of the Soviet Union. Once their control lapsed, the various groups went right back to raping and killing each other like there hadn’t been a few decade break.
I trust you don’t need a history lesson on Iraq.
I’m generally in agreement with Alessan and Der Trihs. People either need to see themselves as part of a bigger group than their tribe, or they need to see the advantages of working together with other groups. It really, really helps if you have some things in common and aren’t so different that the usual monkey-brain “danger! outsider!” instincts aren’t tripped.
For the Colonies, the subordination of the groups meant establishing a central government, while still giving enough independence to the groups that the people didn’t balk. Note that the first loose Confederation didn’t work as the various States immediately started to fight against each other, at first economically, and going to the brink of armed conflict with each other in some cases. All those smart, influential leaders who carried them through the War got back together to create an ideology of independent cooperation, and more or less conjured the idea of Americanism out of shared experience during the Revolutionary War.
It helped a lot that there was still the outside enemy of England for them to focus on, and a horrible example in the French Revolution of what could happen if they let things get out of hand. It also helped that the Revolutionary leaders were still around and still influential, contentious but willing to cooperate with each other, and most of all that no one seemed to be willing to make a grab for power.
Also, I totally agree that respect for a rule of law is necessary. One of the reasons that countries new to democratic governments don’t always succeed at first is often because there’s no history of rule under a relatively fair code of conduct. It’s hard for people to trust laws if their creation, interpretation, and enforcement have been capricious or corrupt in the past. New democracies seem to be especially unstable if the people didn’t earn it the hard way, and it was instead imposed upon them by an outside power.