What does opt-out day and intrusive pat downs at the airport have to do with a habit of failed states in the Middle East and the Horn of Africa and one of the most notorious failings of modern American diplomacy? More than you might think. It is the purpose of this short note to examine the root problem of America’s (and the rest of the world’s) approach to dealing with unstable and shaky nation-states, and its consequences for ordinary people with little interest in international affairs and diplomacy who just want to go about their daily lives in peace. Between 1969 and 1991, the corrupt and Communist-dominated dictatorship of Siad Barre ruled over the state of Somalia. Somalia was itself a basketcase of a nation put together between two areas with vastly different colonial histories and cultures: British Somaliland and Italian Somaliland.
After decades of supporting a corrupt and bloodthirsty dictator who engaged in destructive acts against his own people and destroyed much of the infrastructure of his nation through warfare against separatists, his fall destroyed what little unity the makeshift nation had, leaving Somalia mostly a chaos of private warlords and sharia courts, with the exception of the former British Somaliland, now the de facto state Somaliland, with a functioning democracy and a stable rule of law, and even enough of a naval power (thanks to its port in Berbera) to be a force against Somali pirates.
Nonetheless, because the international community is obsessed with defending the legitimacy of a weak transitional government, for almost two decades there has been no progress or timetable in recognizing Somaliland independence, despite the wishes of its own people and its own ability to preserve stability in a very dangerous region. Ought we not to reward success instead of failure?
Unfortunately, instead of learning from its mistakes, the United States and the rest of the international community appears stubborn in repeating that error in Yemen. Yemen, like Somalia, is a makeshift state made up of two areas with very different cultures despite the same ethnicity. Southern Yemen, centered around the port of Aden, was ruled by the British, while Northern Yemen has a history of being ruled by native Sabean rulers without much interest in the outside world. Additionally, the region of North Yemen closest to Saudi Arabia (Sa’ada) is mostly Shi’ite Muslim and South Yemen is mostly Sunni Muslim. What has resulted from the forced union of North and South Yemen is a failed state with Al-Qaeda influence and a strong separatist movement in Aden to restore its independence. However, the international community still continues to support the minority Shi’ite North Yemeni rulers.
What is the result? Thanks to the attempts of some of those Al-Qaeda supporters to send mail bombs, the overly jumpy Transportation Safety Authority in the United States has increased its intrusive searches and scans of law-abiding travelers and made it even more burdensome to fly, prompting some particularly freedom-loving citizens to make today (November 24, 2010) an opt-out day, slowing air travel to a crawl to protest the indecent scans being done by government employees at the airports. Here we have a failure in diplomacy and international relations leading to unpleasant situations and hassles for ordinary American citizens who could hardly care less about global affairs but simply resent losing their own freedoms for an elusive sense of security.
So, what needs to be done to deal with the root causes of this sort of global security threat, and the way in which the innocent are punished instead of the guilty by the overreactions of Western governments who themselves are largely at blame for the insecurity they face? We need to learn very important lessons from our own history, and apply them to others. Namely, we need to learn the lesson that the legitimacy of a state is not enforced from the top down, but is built from the ground up.
In 1754, at the start of the French and Indian War, Benjamin Franklin and a few other colonial leaders, as well as the British government as a whole, wished for greater colonial unity between the (then) thirteen American colonies, stretching from the northern parts of Massachusetts (now Maine) to the port town of Savannah (in Georgia) to fight against the threat of the French and Indians across the Appalachian Mountains. The colonies were at this time too unified to do much, though the efforts of some colonies, notably Virginia and Massachusetts and the support of British troops led to victory after a long and fierce struggle against a heavily outnumbered foe. After that war, though, American colonial unity was built, ironically enough, through their growing sense of losing their freedoms in the face of a British government that did not see colonists as equals, but rather as serving for the glory and profit of the home island but without any say in how they should be governed.
Years of conflict between periphery (the colonies) and core (London, the government) led to a loose union of states and gradually the realization that a robust but Constitutionally limited central government was necessary to preserve safety and security, in 1787. It took over 50 years of effort before the American colonies to unify in a robust state by their own consent, but the result has been one of the world’s most powerful post-colonial success stories in history.
Twice during the history of the independent United States there have been serious secession movements: during the War of 1812, when New England’s states were upset at the political dominance of the South and the ruination of their own trade-based economy, and from 1860-1865, when eleven states of the South were upset at the political dominance of the North and the threat to their own slave-based economy. In both cases, the end of the cause of conflict (in 1812, the war, and in 1865, slavery) led the peaceful reunion of all section of the United States in consensual harmony once again. While secession movements can be stopped by force, if the underlying causes are not dealt with, there can be no peace within a nation, even one as presently powerful as the United States.
We have failed to apply this lesson to others, though. Having built our own nation gradually and consensually, seeking to preserve at every step of the way the consent of the governed, we do not see how this organic and natural development of unity needs to be applied to others. Successful states cannot be built and maintained by force without some kind of consensually and organic sense of wholeness underneath them. Only empires can be built by force, and they fall apart as soon as there is insufficient power at the center to hold everything together.
If we desire stable and democratic nations around the world as equal partners in the international community, we need to give them the same time that we gave ourselves to build their states. We need to give them the same freedom to choose such institutions as represent their own culture, and we need to recognize those areas as independent who have earned it through force of arms and the development of capable institutions of statehood–like Somaliland.
If we desire to see nations like Yemen and Somalia be unified and strong, it will have to be done by the will and desire of the people themselves on the ground, and we should recognize the states that they have built, and provide those law-abiding nations with every support to defend their own freedom and preserve their own security. It will cost much less to help a free Somaliland to stop the piracy of its disunited neighbors than it will cost in blood and treasure to send US troops into harm’s way in the Horn of Africa periodically to stop some warlord or to free sailors from the clutches of some ruthless pirates. Likewise, it will cost much less to recognize a free and independent Aden than it will cost to flush out Al-Qaeda terrorists in Yemen and prop up illegitimate regimes.
First, let us recognize the reality on the ground, and let the people of Yemen and Somalia build up what secure and peaceful states they can based on the current state of their peoples, and if they want to unify, let them do it on their own terms and their own timetable. To do otherwise would be to become like the British imperialists, seeking in vain to unify disunited territories, only to unify them in hostility by our own heavy-handed actions. Let us learn from our own history that unity can only be built from the ground up, by consent. Let us not hinder that process by persisting in a mistaken mindset that unity and legitimacy can be forced from the top down.
By Nathan Albright
(Nathan Albright is an American who is doing his PhD dissertation on Somaliland recognition. He intends to publish a series of editorial articles on U.S. and Somaliland media).
Source: Somalilandpress
No comments:
Post a Comment