Will South Sudan Set A Precedent?

[orcenio]

@BrainGlutton

Interesting.

Say, you know what would make a good new united/federated African state? The whole of the Maghreb, also known in the old days as Barbary (because all or nearly all the people are Arabized Berbers) – that is, all the Arabic-speaking Mediterranean countries west of Egypt (which has its own pre-Arabic/Islamic national identity, not really suited for inclusion in a larger entity) – Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya – all merged to form the Republic of Barbary! That would be cool! And, if politically possible, then politically viable – very similar cultures, there, from Libya to the Atlantic.

That is an interesting thought; however, it takes a bit more then a shared ethnic identity, culture or claim to a historically defunct nation, to create a unified state. I mean Canada and the US are very culturally similar, but citizens in neither countries want to give up their sovereignty or restructure their political systems for the sake of creating a “unity state.” Brotherly states can exist without needing to share the same passport…

The “reality on the ground” is that Algeria is a socialist, one-party, military dictatorship. Do you really think they could/would want to share power with the Moroccan Crown or the absurdity that was Gaddaffi’s Libya? These current political realities are really what’s important, much more so then a shared history/culture/language/religion/ethnicity.

Take another look at Somalia, they have got to be the most homogeneous country in the world, but they couldn’t unite the country all due to the inability of the warlords to effectively share power.

I could go on pulling examples from Europe too. Germany/Austria, Norway/Sweden/Denmark; religion, language and historical/cultural ties should dictate that these countries be merged. However this ignores the historical political events that separated these countries or the current political power structures that insure they stay apart. For example, Austria isn’t going to jump into a German federation unless it’s annexed again.

Annexation is really that only way to insure a clean unification. Morocco did it with Western Sahara, China did it with Tibet, India did it with Goa, even the US did it with northern Mexico. It works great when you have uneven powers and don’t want to mess about (frankly, it’s pretty clean). “We now control this land. You’re all now citizens.”

[BrainGlutton]

@orcenio

I mean Canada and the US are very culturally similar, but citizens in neither countries want to give up their sovereignty or restructure their political systems for the sake of creating a “unity state.”

I know, I’ve never been able to make sense of that.

[BrainGlutton]

@wmfellows

They already have some entity. People tell me they can’t even agree on basics like opening road transport up.

The Arab Maghreb Union. Pretty much inactive.

@wmfellows

Grand federated states in Africa are great roads to disaster.

Why?

[BrainGlutton]

@AntiCoyote

Do you think this will set a precedent for other areas itching to change borders? If so which ones?

[url=]Michael Lind thinks so.

Tuesday, Jul 12, 2011 07:01 ET

Welcome to the second age of decolonialization
By Michael Lind

<snip>

South Sudan proves that partition beats nation-building, in countries where there are no nations to be built. A few years back, trigger-happy “humanitarian hawks” of the kind who have cheered on the unnecessary American war against Libya led a children’s crusade of college students on campuses across America to demand U.S. military intervention in Sudan. Had they prevailed, the U.S. might now be bogged down in a fourth military quagmire in the Muslim world, trying to hold the “nation” of Sudan together by force, instead of supporting the independence of the newly seceded republic of South Sudan.

A persecuted ethnic minority in a crumbling multi-ethnic regime is usually better off obtaining its own sovereign state, with its own military, as an alternative to becoming the wards of foreign protectors like the U.S. military or the UN Blue Helmets. The international community is far more opposed to cross-border aggression than it is to massacres and ethnic cleansing carried out by one ethnic group against another within a single territorial state. That is why the states of the world, from Arab monarchies to communist China, virtually unanimously condemned Iraq’s attempted conquest of Kuwait in 1990, but did little to stop the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

The replacement, preferably by peaceful means like popular referenda, of multinational entities trapping mutually hostile ethnic groups into cycles of ethnic violence by a greater number of smaller, more linguistically and culturally homogeneous nation-states protected by their own borders is a long-term global trend that should be welcomed by those who favor a peaceful and democratic world. The division of former multinational states into nation-states increases peace, because cross-border wars are much scarcer than intra-state ethnic conflicts.

<snip>

. . . The only multinational states that have been successful democracies are those with elaborate ethnic power-sharing systems based on quotas and group rights, like Switzerland, Belgium and Canada. Perhaps such complex, quota-driven systems can hold multi-ethnic countries like Bosnia and Herzegovina, Iraq, Afghanistan and South Africa together indefinitely. But to stay together, these multinational democracies require that the democratic ideals of individual rights and one person, one vote and geographic mobility be sacrificed forever to ethnic rights and ethnic brokering and official ethnic homelands.

Will the 30 million Kurds one day obtain their own, long-deferred Kurdistan? Will the 40 million Pashtuns on the two sides of the Durand Line in Pakistan and Afghanistan create Pashtunistan? Except in cases where there is a vital American interest, the U.S. should remain neutral in the secessionist conflicts of the Second Decolonization. Fortunately, now that more than two dozen new countries have been born in fewer than two decades, at the cost of temporary local violence in some cases but not World War III, overblown fears of instability appear to be fading. With them is fading the American establishment’s left-over Cold War habit of reflexively opposing all partitions of unworkable multinational states into nation-states.

[BrainGlutton]

@wmfellows

As with most such Wiki lists it throws in real movements indiscriminately with ridiculous “five guys around a café table” unserious crap. Utterly useless as a list.

So?

Which ones are for reals?