Failing Nations: What US Response?

I. Old Maps and New Dilemmas.

Defining the "failed nation-state"

The established principles of international relations have been challenged by the multiplication of failed nation states and civil wars over the past decade. From Afghanistan to Lebanon, from Sierra Leone to Liberia, as well as in Bosnia, Haiti or Rwanda, the inability of local governments to control civil warfare - and in some cases their active will to inflame and exploit ethnic conflicts - have created conditions which produced large numbers of civilian deaths and significant refugee movements to neighboring countries¹. These cases represent examples of "failed nation states," which are defined here as governments that cannot meet a crucial test for the effective assertion of national sovereignty: the ability to pacify their national territories and protect the basic security of the people living within their borders.

A state's capacity to establish an organizational monopoly over the use of the means of violence by disarming local authorities within its territory and reserving to itself the right and military capability to make war, lies at the heart of the modern concept of national sovereignty. This coercive power was central to the definition of the modern state proposed by Max Weber at the end of the last century. According to many of the "state-centered" social theorists writing today², the administrative and police powers of the central state play the leading role in the creation story that made cohesive national societies out of the jumble of clan communities, loose empires and city republics typical of much of Medieval Europe and pre-colonial Africa.

In a similar fashion, the main paradigm used by US policy makers to orient America's national security policy during the cold war years was a "realist" one which sees the international system as primarily composed of competing nation-states that know no higher law than defending their sovereignty from outsiders and expanding the territories subject to their control³. This model assumes that governments are at least capable of asserting control over their own national territory, even when they could not protect their borders from invasion by stronger states. Postwar U.S. policy therefore aimed to help allies and neutral states protect their territorial integrity against aggression by more powerful neighbors and to prevent local wars that carried with them a risk of direct, nuclear conflict between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union⁴.

This focus on the interstate dimension of foreign policy no longer seems adequate today not only because of the decomposition of America's only superpower rival, but also because of the proliferation of failed nation states which have fallen victim to "wars of national debilitation" - that is, wars between political and ethnic factions that once belonged to common "national communities⁵," as Gerald Helman and Steve Ratner write in the quarterly Foreign Policy. America must now revise its international agenda in order to respond to the growing problem of internal wars with programs of preventive diplomacy and an active peace policy.

Of the 30 or so wars which currently rage around the world, virtually none involve clearcut interstate aggression occurring across recognized national frontiers, as in Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1991. Indeed of the 86 conflicts recorded by the UN since 1989, only three involved armed conflicts between countries⁶. The rest were internal wars and their numbers and severity are increasing. Major conflicts (ie. those that exceed the threshold of more than 1000 deaths⁷) have broken out in the Balkans, Transcaucasia, Central Asia, and Arab and Sub-saharan Africa, "destablilizing fragile new nation states, devastating their economies and decimating their civil populations⁸," according to Helman and Ratner. They have also contributed to the worldwide rise in the population of refugees qualifying for official assistance. According to the UN High Commission for Refugees, refugees have increased from 2.5 million in the mid-1970s to over 23 million in 1994⁹.

Widespread civilian deaths seem especially prevalent in the wars of the 1990s: they represent close to 90% of all war casualties in the Third World, in large part because internal wars do not have frontlines, and because civilians have become prime targets for combatants¹⁰. Not only are they "targets of opportunity" for looting and rape by poorly disciplined, irregular armies, but they have also become a strategic objective for the parties involved, in particular for leaders seeking to resolve ethnic conflicts for good by uprooting and scattering the civilian populations of enemy communities. The imperatives of "ethnic cleansing" can make war crimes against civilians seem like good policy, as the world has seen on a massive scale in Rwanda and Bosnia¹¹. In addition, the breakdown of family life and community institutions makes young male orphans available for ready recruitment as "cannon fodder" by opposing armies¹². Unconventional wars in places as different as Liberia, Afghanistan and El Salvador have been fought with large numbers of children and teenagers armed with modern weapons. This has contributed to the high number of atrocities characteristic of modern internal warfare¹³.

II: Nation States or State Nations?

From an historic viewpoint, there is nothing inevitable about the rise of nation states, or unusual about the outbreak of civil conflict and internal warfare. Before 1600 the territorial states of Europe existed in a world where broad multinational empires like those of Manchu China, Mogul India and Ottoman Middle East and Balkans were the most powerful form of political organization¹⁴. In this world of empires Medieval Europe was the exception because it consisted of a feudal patchwork of some 1,000 overlapping but autonomous political units¹⁵. By 1600 inter-state warfare had cut this number by half, unleashing a process of state consolidation in Europe which continued until there were only 25 major states left by the beginning of this century.

Most of the modern national societies which exist in Western Europe and North America today are as much "state nations" as they are "nation states." The "old" nation states such as France, Spain and the United Kingdom were created by patterns of coercive cooperation imposed by their state administrations, rather than as the political expression of a national community which pre-existed them¹⁶. They owe their common national culture and current economic integration to the steady work of generations of state officials, who imposed taxes, military conscription and their national languages on often unwilling local populations. With the possible exception of the United Kingdom, the "state nations" which emerged in 17th century Europe were first and foremost "warfare states¹⁷." Those ethnic communities which failed to build militarized states simply disappeared as independent polities¹⁸.

States with strong centralized administrations like that of France expanded the scope of their authority at the expense of neighboring states, thereby increasing their resource base, and eventually, the reach and prestige of their home cultures and languages. The pressures of constant warfare also created strong incentives for state elites to encourage the cultural modernization, economic integration and industrial development of the regional societies subject to their control. Thus state administrations helped bring into existence national economies and cohesive national societies characterized by common languages, national education systems, print and broadcast media and, finally, by parties strong enough to link local elites to the national leadership¹⁹. One result has been the creation of liberal nation states that give meaningful citizenship rights to all the peoples born within their territories. Another has been the emergence of civic nationalisms, where it was normally enough to identify with the national political community to become a member.

These modern national states have, by and large, successfully integrated their linguistic and national minorities into the culture of the majority group - so Bretons, Alsatians and Provencals today generally consider themselves French, just as most Welshmen and Scots consider themselves British. Integration occurred not only because minorities were pushed into the majority culture by exposure to national schools and armies, but also because the strong pull of national economies created incentives for minorities to suppress their distinctive cultural identities in order to gain economic opportunity and social mobility. Until very recently, politics in the old nation states has been defined more by questions concerning "who gets what?" and "how much?" rather than issues of national identity, or "who belongs²⁰."

In 17th and 18th century Europe those cultural communities that lagged behind in development of modern state systems, such as Poland and Ireland, simply disappeared from the map, and their linguistic and cultural identities were forced underground for centuries. Some communities never recovered their independent political identities - the Welch, Bretons, Basques and Corsicans in Western Europe, for instance - and this fact provides a focus for marginal mini-nationalist movements up to the present day²¹. In Eastern Europe, however, the Poles, Czechs, Bulgars, Lithuanians and Slovaks, who had been forcibly gathered into the large multinational empires built by the Austrian Hapsburgs, the Russian Tsars and the Ottoman Turks in early modern times, saw their "martyred nations" revived by state building nationalist movements early in this century. Invoking the principle of self-determination and the claim to a territorial state for all "national peoples²²," successive waves of ethnic partition have increased the number of nation states in Europe from 25 to 56 since World War I, with some 20 new states being to the list in just the past 5 years²³.

Most of these new (old) states in Eastern Europe have been characterized by a strong sense of "ethnic nationalism," that is, they define themselves ideologically as the national home of a particular ethnic group, Ukrainians, Serbs, Slovaks, Georgians, etc. Ethnic nationalist movements seek the status of a majority group within their own state rather than remain as a minority group in somebody else's²⁴. Hence demands for a "Serbian State" for all Serbs, or a Slovak state for all Slovaks, are tied to ideologies which treat nationality as a matter of blood right, and accord citizenship solely on the basis of ethnic ancestry and cultural tradition²⁵. The national states which resulted are far different from the liberal nation states of the West because their identities are defined by ethnic nationalisms that treat the issue of "who belongs" as primordial. All too often it was this model of national state and cultural nationalism which was adopted by Third World political and intellectual elites engaged in carving out new states from the remains of the late 19th century imperial regimes in the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa.

After the USSR: post-imperial states in the Caucusus and Asia

The latest wave of ethnic secession and state building in Europe and Central Asia was triggered by the break-up of the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc between 1989 and 1991 which has transformed the European system for the second time since World War II²⁶. This new "arc of crisis" stretches from the Transcaucasus and the Balkans to Egypt and Algeria.

The Russian retreat from much of Eastern Europe and Central Asia represents the end of the last of the great multinational territorial empires in Eastern Europe, the Russian Empire, which was saved from the dissolution visited on its Ottoman and Hapsburg rivals by the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. For the next 70 years, the "universalist" appeal of Communist ideology joined to the ruthlessness of the Soviet security apparatus was enough to repress the separatist ambitions of the 200 different ethnic groups and 15 official national republics co-habiting the old Soviet Union. But while the framework of the old Tsarist empire was retained, the Communists "insisted that this took the form of a voluntary federation of republics with plenty of room for formal autonomy of peoples, even within each of the republics²⁷," writes political scientist Immanuel Wallerstein. This approach to the nationality question became the model exported later to the postwar Communist bloc in Eastern Europe and adopted by many former Soviet client states in the Third world.

In fact the U.S.S.R.'s federal structure was largely fictitious, because local decisions were subject to close surveillance by "Moscow center," and subordinated to the general five year plan for the Soviet economy as a whole and to the authority of the central planning officials responsible for carrying it out²⁸. Post-war urbanization and industrialization did promote a general process of russification, but real progress toward assimilation was limited largely to the large Slavic nationalities, like the Belorus and Ukrainians who were closest in language and outlook to the Russians²⁹. Since the Great Russians (149.3 millions) only represented 40% of the USSR's total population³⁰, policies of Russian colonization were mainly reserved for strategic regions like the Baltics and for all-union institutions like the Red Army, the secret police and Communist Party and state administration.

In the Caucasian and Asian republics, the Soviet pursued another modernization strategy involving the organization of local Communist party apparatuses, the cultivation of folk cultures as alternatives to the Islamic faith, and when necessary, the invention of written national languages where none had existed before³¹, as in Uzbekistan (22 million) and Tadjikistan³² (5.8 million). Despite heavy handed centralization, the real Soviet economy could not function without reliance on an unofficial "blackmarket" sector characterized by large-scale corruption and the dominance of local mafias³³. In a similar manner, the party structures of the subnational republics left plenty of room for the rise of local party cliques³⁴ and especially, in Asia and the Caucasus, provided a cover for pursuing traditional clan and family rivalries in a new guise³⁵. Ironically, after Gorbatchov's policy of perestro‹ka produced a crisis in 1990 that destroyed the Soviet control network, the only institutions left standing were these official quasi-national structures and the local party clans and criminal mafias associated with them³⁶. In the end the Soviet strategy instead of controlling national sentiments, actually nurtured the development of local nationalisms, and provided ready-made frontiers and institutions for the emerging nation states³⁷.

In place of the former Soviet superpower the U.S. now faces an unstable "shatter zone³⁸" populated by fragmentary multiethnic federations, such as the Russian Republic, and weak post communist successor regimes such as the Ukraine, Belorus, and Kazakstan³⁹. The new national states replaced the Soviet state only to inherit its legacy of ethnic tensions, economic failure and ecological pollution. Ukraine is a country of 55 million which is the second largest in the Commonwealth of Independent States, the successor organization to the U.S.S.R. Its new leadership must not only manage some 16 different ethnic groups, but more importantly control the competition between a Ukrainian majority located mainly in the western regions of the country and the large Russian minority of 11 million located in the Crimea and the Donetsk industrial area in Eastern Ukraine⁴⁰. To a great degree, today's ethnic competition owes much to the arbitrary decision taken by Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev in 1954 to detach the Crimea, with its largely Russian population, from the Russian federation and cede it to the Ukrainian Socialist Republic in honor of the 300th anniversary of the Ukraine's union with Russia⁴¹.

In the Transcaucusus, the Stalinist policy of federating different ethnic groups within the same republic left the small republic of Georgia (5.6 million) divided between Georgians and Ossetians, laying the foundation for the civil war which destroyed the Georgian capital, Tiblisi, and displaced some 300,000 refugees⁴². Similarly the creation of the separated Armenian enclave in Nagorno-Karabakh within Muslim Azerbaijan in the 1920s created national rivalries between the Armenians (3.3 million) and the Azeris (7.7 million) that sparked the outbreak of the first regional war in 1988⁴³. All told, in nine of the member states of the Commonwealth of Independent States, local civil wars are being waged by competing political factions and ethnic groups. These include Moldavia, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and in the Chechnya region inside the Russian federation itself, producing 100,000 casualties and some 1.5 million refugees in Transcaucasia alone⁴⁴.

In most of these cases, the monopoly over the use of violence by new national governments has either broken down, or appears like it could do so. Given the presence of 23 million Russians outside Russia's new borders, the Russian government feels that it has the right and the duty to protect the well-being of its ex-nationals in Belorus, the Ukraine, Kazakstan and the Baltic republics⁴⁵. Not surprisingly, then, many of the local wars are fought with the participation of the Russian army, as in Tadjikistan and Moldavia, or with the covert support of the Russian government as in "Ossetian" region within Georgia.

Further east along this arc of crisis, the presence of Russian troops guarding Tadjikistan's frontier with Afghanistan, and factional struggles between the Rakmonov regime of Communist holdovers and local Islamic rebels within, seem to some to promise a second round of the Soviet/Afghan War of 1979-89⁴⁶. The civil war in Tadjikistan, the poorest country within the Commonwealth of Independent States, has been going on since 1990, leading to an estimated 20,000 to 50,000 deaths and to the repatriation of 200,000 Russians and the movement of 100,000 Tadjiks to Afghanistan⁴⁷. The Islamic opposition has its headquarters in Takhar province and a network of training camps in other northern areas in Afghanistan. In 1993 and 1994 Tadjik and Afghani mujahideen ("warriors of God") have made cross border attacks into Tadjikistan, leading to aformal call by the Tadjik government for Russian Troops, thereby justifying the continuing presence of the Russian armies along its frontiers⁴⁸. This tense situation is aggravated by continued fighting for control of Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, between the student militias of the orthodox Taliban religious movement and the commanders of other Islamic guerrilla groups left over from the Afghan War⁴⁹. The fighting risks regional stability through "contagion effects" on the neighboring Tadjik and Uzbek Republics⁵⁰.

The Afghan War: the first war of national debilitation

The Afghan war can be seen as the last of the so-called wars of national liberation and the first of the current cycle of "wars of national debilitation." During the cold war much of the Third World was a zone of conflict where the superpowers waged wars by proxy⁵¹. It was also in this zone that the strategic competition between them was finally played out in the 1980s with a series of conflicts in El Salvador and Nicaragua in Central America, Angola and Ethiopia in Africa, and lastly, Afghanistan in Central Asia⁵². Fought with a changing cast of characters, various Third World countries as different as Israel, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Argentina and South Africa entered into informal alliances with the U.S. and frequently provided the men, weapons and money needed to win these wars. The Afghan War was in many respects the most destructive of these conflicts: it produced some 16,000 Soviet casualties, 1 million Afghan deaths and drove 4 million Afghan refugees out of a prewar population of 16 million into neighboring Pakistan and Iran⁵³. Certainly it was the most important, because it was the Soviet military withdrawal from Afghanistan that sparked a crisis in Transcaucusus and marked the beginning of the unravelling of the Soviet Union from within⁵⁴.

Afghanistan is divided between many ethnic and language groups, including 6 million Pushtans and smaller numbers of Tadjiks, Uzbeks and Turkmen. Largely rural and traditional, Afghanistan was one part of Muslim Central Asia that had escaped Russian control in the 19th century⁵⁵ A fractured country only loosely controlled by a weak central monarchy in Kabul, prewar Afghan society was mainly held together by the Sunni version of Islam⁵⁶ preached in local villages by several 100,000s mullahs. The stage was set for internal war when local Afghan Communists in Kabul overthrew President Daoud in 1978 (the former prime minister of King Zahir's government who had sent the King packing 5 years earlier⁵⁷), and launched a top down revolution in order to modernize the countryside along the lines of Soviet Central Asia⁵⁸.

Their attempts to redistribute land and most importantly the enlightened but ultimately disastrous, decision to force young girls to attend secularized government schools alongside boys, ignited a revolt by conservative rural muslims led by the local mullahs⁵⁹. After government forces bogged down outside the cities, the Afghan war formally began in 1979 with a landing of Soviet paratroops in Kabul in an attempt to save the local Communist regime, and to apply the lessons learned from Soviet "successes" in modernizing the rest of Central Asia⁶⁰.

Between 1979-89, the Soviet expeditionary army of 115,000 was effectively opposed by local armies of mujahideen of 80,000 to 150,000 men. By the mid-1980s these armies were armed and equipped with sophisticated anti-tank weapons and ground to air missiles, including the man portable "Stinger" missile, which were supplied through a multinational covert operation organized by the American CIA and Pakistani secret services, and bankrolled by the Saudis and the Americans with some $700,000 a year⁶¹. The local mujahideen were also joined in battle by volunteers from other Islamic countries who were attracted by the chance to fight and die for the faith. Working closely with Pakistani intelligence, the U.S. channeled weapons and Saudi funds to some of the most conservative groups among the Afghan rebels - those that attracted foreign muhajideen to their rejectionist stance against Soviet Communism in particular, and Western culture in general. Once the war was over these veterans, known as the Afghanis, became available to various fundamentalist Islamic movements in Algeria, Egypt and Central Asia. The dispersal of the Afghani veterans has connected the destabilization of post-Soviet Central Asia to the slow decomposition of authoryitarian Arab nationalist regimes in the Middle East⁶².

Islamic fundamentalism in Egypt and Algeria

As early as January 1991 in Algeria 300 Afghanis had returned to form an armed group active with the fundamentalist movement - although most were quickly detained or killed by Algerian security forces⁶³. Other shadowy groups simultaneously appeared in Egypt. The religious zeal and military experience brought by the Afghani mujahideen to fundamentalist groups across the Arab world must be counted as the most important "spill overs" of the Afghan war - as well as the most dangerous legacy left by the CIA's campaign to "bleed" the Soviet army in Afghanistan⁶⁴. These fundamentalist groups represent a pan-Islamic movement inspired by the model of the Shiite revolution against the Shah of Iran in 1979, and by the militant actions of the Shi'a militias in Lebanon such as the Hezbollah.

Today's Arab nationalist regimes first emerged out of the vacuum left by the breakup of the multiethnic, multiconfessional Ottoman Empire after World War I, and were defined as much by the borders drawn between the prewar French and British colonial regimes in Iraq, Syria, Palestine and Egypt as by the nationalist struggle to overthrow them. In the post World War II period, the continuing anticolonial struggles against the Israeli state in the former Palestinian Mandate and the French settler state in Algeria provided a rallying point for state sponsored Arab nationalism. This is a macro-nationalism which like many pan-national movements⁶⁵ has the peculiarity of being a pan-arabic movement identified with an abstract "Arab nation" which includes all arabs, - and perhaps with providential leaders of the nation like Egypt's President Nasser - rather than with the leaders and national institutions of any particular territorial state⁶⁶.

In the 1960s Arab nationalist states like the Baathists in Syria and Iraq; Nasser's Egypt, and later an independent Algeria, turned to the Soviet Union importing not only Soviet weapons and advisers, but "socialist" models of economic planning and state led modernization⁶⁷. This ideological identification of the Arab revolution with a popular socialism was especially pronounced in the ideology of the National Liberation Front (FLN) movement which won Algeria's independence from France in 1961⁶⁸. The Soviet collapse in the 1980s simultaneously deprived these states of a patron and a social model⁶⁹.

Islamic fundamentalism is both a political and a religious movement, which speaks for the traditional Islamic values of the Umma, (the worldwide community of the faithful) against the moral dangers represented by the seductive modern media culture enjoyed by westernized Arab elites⁷⁰. It seeks to replace the existing "Arab socialist" regimes with a new mode of political regulation based on the reunification of politics and faith and the rigorous application of the Islamic code, the Sharia, to all the problems of modern society⁷¹. Although not strictly an ethnic nationalism because it is a pan-Islamic movement which specifically repudiates the "socialist nationalism" of the post-war Arab regimes, Islamic fundamentalism nonetheless claims to speak in the name of social justice for the masses of urban poor who live in the shadow of the modern office towers and shopping centers of Arab cities like Cairo, Egypt's capital, Algiers in Algeria and Casablanca in Morocco⁷².

This Muslim populism has brought them into conflict with ethnic and religious minorities, like the Berber minority of the Kabiyle in Algeria⁷³; the 10 million Christian Copts in Egypt and the Maronite and Orthodox Christian minorities in multi-confessional Lebanon. At the same time Islamic militants have waged a unrelenting war against Westernized arab intellectuals, journalists⁷⁴ and women activists, whom they hunt and gun down as agents of "an American Islam" in Egypt, or as members of the anti-Islamic "French party" in Algeria⁷⁵.

Islamic movements recruit heavily among devout young men, the "bearded ones" in the cities, who have little to hope for from the current regimes except continued unemployment and poverty. Populations in Algeria and Egypt have grown geometrically: Algeria's population has increased from 10 million to over 27 million since 1962, while Egypt's is projected to rise from 56 million today to over 100 million in the next 25 years⁷⁶. And their average age is dropping rapidly. Today half the population of Egypt and Algeria is aged 15 and under, and governments are hard pressed to provide education, social services or jobs for all the children now of school age or entering the labor market⁷⁷. Class inequalities within the cities and regional differences between urban and rural populations are immense. The high levels of social disparity existing between Cairo and rural Upper Egypt as well as between urban social classes, led the UN Development Agency to classify Egypt, along with Brazil and Nigeria, as one of the "societies at risk" of possible social breakdown in its 1994 Human Development Report⁷⁸.

The main response by Arab regimes to the threat of social instability has moved along two tracks: one has been the suspension of democratization and the repression of the political opposition by security forces and army. The other has seen these governments move to islamize themselves by imposing a moral crackdown in daily life in an effort to both compete with the fundamentalists on their own terrain and co-opt politically moderate, religious conservatives⁷⁹. These policies have led to a virtual state of siege in Upper Egypt, and open civil war in Algeria, where at last count 3 years of fighting between the Army special forces and the Islamic Salvation Front has left between 20,000 to 40,000 dead⁸⁰.

The Islamic diaspora and long-distance nationalism

One common response to overcrowding, economic stagnation and political repression is to immigrate - an option exercised by some 80 millions foreign workers from Third World countries⁸¹. Over 10 million Arab Muslims and Christians from North Africa and the Middle East have participated in this new wave immigration⁸², leading to the creation large Islamic communities in Western Europe and North America. The transatlantic movement of poor peasants from Upper Egypt to New York in search of economic opportunity, for example, eventually created a community of Muslim immigrants in the U.S. which supplied recruits for the struggle against Soviet occupation in Afghanistan in the late 1970s⁸³. Later this same community became an off-shore "safe area" for fundamentalist opponents of the Mubarak regime in Egypt, who ended up organizing a terrorist campaign in New York, beginning with the bombing of the World Trade Center, in order to drive home the domestic vulnerability of Egypt's principal ally and donor, the U.S.⁸⁴. A similar story is now unfolding in Europe as the military wing of the Algerian opposition, the GIA or Armed Islamic Group, uses networks within the Islamic diaspora in France and Scandinavia to cover its tracks while it conducts terrorist operations on French national territory⁸⁵. So far 10 bomb attacks have been carried out in the Paris metropolitan area against commuter trains and public markets in an effort to make the Chirac government pay a domestic political price for its support of the Algerian military regime⁸⁶. In an open global system, then, local community responses to regional social crises and political disorders, can be exported across long distances sometimes with a worldwide impact⁸⁷.

Yet another kind long-distance nationalism has been practiced by some groups in the Eastern European diaspora communities of the U.S. and Canada, communities which have acted since World War II as safe havens for emigre nationalist thinkers and activists ⁸⁸. Some 100,000 Croats were concentrated in and around Chicago where the Croatian National Council carried on a "national liberation struggle against imperialist Yugoslavia," as were equal numbers of Serb exiles. In the 1960's and 1970s another Croatian commando group, Otpor, (for Croatian Resistance), operated from Canada and Australia carrying out assassinations, bombings, and airplane hijacking, culminating in an attack on the Yugoslav UN Mission in 1977⁸⁹.

These emigre groups helped keep alive both the neo-fascist nationalism of the wartime movements and their cultures of political violence. Following the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the Diaspora communities began to export their nationalists back to the homelands - since according to the theory of blood right Serbian or Croatian residents of Toronto or Chicago have a greater right to live in the "national home" than the members of national minorities who happen to be born there. In a similar fashion irregular militia groups on both the Croatian and Serbian sides have been attracted to the symbols and accessories of the neo-fascist "Skinhead" youth culture and its explosive mix of "rock and racism." And in turn, these militias have proved equally attractive to neo-fascist "skins" from around Europe who have served as volunteers - with atrocious results if we are to judge by the dirty war now being fought in Bosnia⁹⁰.

The Balkan Wars: identity politics and mass murder

Since the beginning of the century, national movements in the Balkans and Eastern Europe have been carving out territorial homelands amidst the ruins of the Hapsburg and Ottoman multinational empires. The attempts of nationalist politicians to rearrange the mix of ethnic groups inherited from Hapsburg and Ottoman empires so that they would fit the territorial ambitions and cultural programs have an equally long history. Almost inevitably the act of national rebirth for one ethnic group has resulted in the imposition of minority status on other groups living inside the frontiers of the new state⁹¹. Since ethnic groups shared the same territories in a complex communal quilt, it has proved hard to build new national homes for ethnic majorities without provoking massive population transfers and uprooting long-settled communities of "alien" minorities. This process of national consolidation is what is now known as ethnic cleansing.

During both Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, Serb, Greek and Bulgarian armies tried to displace the Muslim populations of Albania and Macedonia in an effort to bring this Ottoman remanent into their respective kingdoms. In 1915 it was the turn of "Young Turk" nationalists to rid central Turkey of its Armenian population in one of the greatest genocides recorded in this century (an estimated 1.5 million died), and in the aftermath of World War I, it was the Greeks of Anatolia and Istanbul who were resettled in Salonika, while the Turks of Thrace were expelled to Turkey⁹². These transfers of long-established populations, and the acts of inter-ethnic murder which accompanied them, were merely a dress rehearsal for the Nazi war of extermination against the Jews and Gypsies of Central and Eastern Europe, and local campaigns of ethnic purification pursued by the Croat and Rumanian states allied with Hitler, most notably in the Croat Ustache extermination camp at Jesenovac where some 700,000 serbs died⁹³. Today in the former Yugoslavia, the carnage continues as the nationalist governments of the 4 million Croats and the 8 million Serbs fight directly (and indirectly through local proxies in Bosnia) to partition between them the remnants of multiethnic Bosnia and its Muslim government in the capital city of Sarajevo. This effort to force the territorial division of Bosnia into ethnically homogeneous statelets has so far resulted in over 200,000 deaths, 30,000 "war rapes," and the flight of over 2.5 million Croat, Serb and Bosnian Muslim refugees inside and outside the frontiers of the former Yugoslavia⁹⁴.

For Robert Kaplan, author of Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through History, as for many Western observers, this bloody history of ethnic warfare makes "the Balkans the original Third World. Whatever happened in Beirut or elsewhere happened first, long ago, in the Balkans⁹⁵." In this view the Balkan countries do not even belong to Europe, but rather are located "somewhere in the East," just as their tribal feuds do not seem to fit into the history of this century. But we should resist seeing Sarajevo as "Beirut in the Mountains," or the temptation to consign the Balkans to the "department of Barbarian affairs," as European diplomats are sometimes wont to do⁹⁶.

Certainly Balkan history does count for something in all this. For instance, it is important to know that the Balkan countries were still colonized by outside masters in the Austrian and Ottoman empires as recently as 1913, and that Yugoslavia has been split between a Catholic, middle european cultural zone in the Slovene and Croat North, and a Slavic orthodox zone in the Serbian and Montenegrin South since the 18th century. We also should recognize that decades of Soviet dominance over the Balkans tended to put national rivalries on ice, rather than resolving them. But at the same time, insisting too much on ancient character of these "tribal" injuries plays the game of Balkan nationalists who are past masters of the politics of resentment. It also paints a picture of a situation beyond hope where powerful outsiders are "helpless" to do anything constructive. As a result, the intellectual demoralization of Western governments has feed policy inaction in the face of atrocity on the grounds that the intolerable is somehow normal as long as it happens in the Balkans.

More importantly this picture overlooks the nearly 40 years in postwar Yugoslavia where the Tito regime succeeded in ending ethnic blood letting and making a start toward developing a modern economy and multiethnic society, and where most of the 25 million federation citizens felt safe. Indeed they felt safe enough to relocate to cities in different regions and to intermarry outside their ethnic group⁹⁷. The death of multiethnic Yugoslavia in 1991, and the birth of eight different nation states have left families divided, and many former Yugoslav citizens political orphans. The real question is not simply who is shelling Sarajevo, but rather who killed Yugoslavia and why?

Bogdan Denitch, among others, insists on calling post war Yugoslavia a relatively successful federal state⁹⁸, despite the fact that it remained to the end a one-party dictatorship under the control of the Yugoslav league of Communists. Tito's Yugoslavia was a mix of Soviet style federalism with a consociational system like that of Lebanon, that assigned every major ethnic group a both a territory and a guaranteed voice in the system proportional to its population⁹⁹. The Federation had six republics for the major nationality groups, (the Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Bosnians, Montenegrins and Macedonians) and two autonomous regions for the Albanian and Hungarian minorities which were carved out of historic Serb territories of Kosovo and Vojvodina.

Tito's ability to impose this territorial settlement on the various ethnic groups reflected the strength of the Communist partisan movement in wartime Yugoslavia, the one major resistance movement in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. This movement was not only a mass organization, it was also multiethnic, including Croats, Serbs, Bosnian Muslims and other ethnic groups, unlike its opponents, the orthodox Serb Chetniks, and the Catholic Croat Utasche fascists¹⁰⁰. The Communist leadership headed a genuine national mobilization which meant it did not need the support of the Red Army in order to come to power in the postwar period. This political independence led to a break in 1949 between Titoist Yugoslavia and the rest of Stalinist Eastern Europe, at which point Marshall Tito became a prominent member of the nonaligned movement of Third world countries.

Post-war Yugoslavia was not without major problems, however. The territorial settlement satisfied neither the Croat nor Serb nationalists, who remained active in exile and were kept in check by constant police surveillance and repression. Fears of a nationalist revival in the Serb and Croat republics meant that the Yugoslav league of Communists refused to hold national elections and tended to restrict independent political activity to organizations at the republican level¹⁰¹. This meant that over time subnational units became the focus of political loyalty for local party networks, thus keeping competition between the different ethnic groups alive at the national level. Finally Yugoslavia's successful drive toward economic modernization and market reforms led to uneven development between the regions, with Slovenia and Croatia rapidly outstripping the Serb and Montenegrin republics. The Serbs resented the fact that the Croats were enriching themselves in "their federation," while the Croats and Slovenes resented the idea that they were subsidizing the development of the "backward" Muslims, Macedonians and Serbs.

These ethnic rivalries became increasingly difficult for the federal government to manage after Marshall Tito died in the early 1980s, and nearly impossible in the face of the Soviet collapse and the emergence of anti-Communist nationalist regimes in the rest of Eastern Europe after 1989. The death of the Marshall and the nearly simultaneous delegitimation of Socialist universalist ideologies meant that the two main props of the Communist regime in Yugoslavia had been knocked down. The Yugoslav Federation needed gifted leadership indeed to weather the storm that followed, and it did not get this gift. Instead it was Presidents Milosevic of Serbia and Tudjman of Croatia who showed leadership. Between them they created the storm that would destroy the Federation.

Milosevic, an established figure in the Serbian Communist party, was the first to turn to nationalism as his political lifeline in 1987, when he raised the issue of the growing Albanian presence in the original Serb lands of Kosovo as a means of stirring national feeling¹⁰². The rise of Serbian nationalism provoked reactions in the other major republics, in particular Croatia and Slovenia, helping to rehabilitate Croat nationalist ideology and symbols from their wartime disgrace. The return of Croat and Serb nationalist exiles from their American and Canadian exile also contributed to the reawakening of nationalist rivalries, which pushed these republics toward confrontation and then secession in 1991. Another critical element was the use of the state-controlled broadcast media by both the Milosevic and Tudjman regimes to revive fearful memories of wartime actrocity and mobilize their respective populations. Tudjman's anti-serb propaganda, and the imposition of forced "croatization" of the Serb minority, lead the Serbs of the Kraina region in turn to feel themselves threatened and to demand the right to secede from Croatia - which led directly to the opening of hostilities between Serb and Croat forces.

Memories of wartime atrocities were made all too real when actual fighting broke out in the neighboring Bosnian republic, which had reluctantly declared its independence in March 1992. The Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina with its pre-war population of 2 million was the third largest in the Yugoslav Federation. Sandwiched between Serbs lands to the South and Croat lands to the North, the Bosnian republic was split both ethnically and sociologically. While the majority of Bosnians were members of a muslim nationality group made up of Slavs who had converted to Islam during the Ottoman occupation, Bosnia also had a large Croat minority living the Herzegovina region, and significant Serb populations living in the North and South. At the same time, Bosnian society was divided between urban populations in cities like Sarajevo and Tuzla which were cosmopolitan, modern and ethnically mixed, and rural populations which remained loyal to their ethnic and religious traditions¹⁰³. A multiethnic Bosnia could survive in a multinational Yugoslavia, but once the Federation was split along national lines, its days were duly numbered.

In the weeks following Bosnia's declaration of independence, the Bosnian moslem majority and their Croat and Serb allies in the major cities became the object of attack Bosnian Serb and Bosnian Croat irregulars. Further the withdrawal of the Federal Yugoslav Army was carried out in such a fashion that all regular troops of Bosnian Serb origin were reassigned to units of the Bosnian Serb Republic, bringing with them tons of munitions and numerous tanks and heavy artillery pieces. The Bosnian government found itself outfought and outgunned, if not outnumbered. The Serbs relied on heavy artillery barrages to clear the cities and "sweep and destroy" operations by irregular troops in rural areas. Serb militias systematically murdered civilian non-combatants, especially muslim men of military age, looted and burned muslim houses, and publicly raped women and girls. These policies successfully displaced much of the Muslim population and prepared the way for the territorial division of Bosnia between Croatia and Serbia.

III. Failed Nations and U.S. policy.

Over the past few years, awareness of the mass human suffering taking place in Third World countries (where 9O% of current conflicts and of the casualties they produce occur¹⁰⁴) has moved the problem of failed nation states to the center of the debate concerning post-cold war issues. The policy debate about failed nation states focuses attention on the unstable "shatter zone" which has emerged along the periphery of the developed world rather than the rich industrial countries. Despite the mood of retreat and isolationism which has taken hold among some American opinion leaders - others insist on the centrality of other people's "uncivil civil wars" to the future orientation of American foreign policy. Former NY Times columnist Leslie Gelb, for instance, in the lead editorial article in the November issue of the bimonthly Foreign Affairs, has called these "tea-cup wars" the "core problem in postwar politics that a new strategy must address." "The steady run of uncivil civil wars," he warns, "sunder fragile but functioning nation-states and gnaw at the well-being of stable nations."

Global risk factors

What are the forces that produce the kinds of inter-group tensions within societies that cause them to implode? If it were possible to identify the factors that put societies at risk this might allow time for early intervention and preventive diplomacy¹⁰⁵. Some social scientists point to stresses associated with overpopulation, negative economic growth and acute environmental deterioration which have accumulated in many underdeveloped countries. Given continued high birth rates in Third World countries, for example, the population of Africa alone could double in the next 22 years, while population world wide might exceed 9 billion by 2020¹⁰⁶. These analysts argue that these factors reinforce existing social divisions, making them unmanageable, and pushing fragile states to the point of catastrophic failure.

This view is shared by Robert Kaplan, author of an influential piece in The Atlantic, "The Coming Anarchy of the 21st Century." According to Kaplan, these pressures which have led to the breakdown of national societies and political orders in some Africa countries today will be the common fate we can expect for much of the Third world in the next century¹⁰⁷. Kaplan's pessimism has been echoed by a wide range of writers and analysts recently¹⁰⁸. They writers argue population pressures, and further declines in the productivity of natural biological systems, will necessarily deepen the economic deprivation of the world's poorest people and contribute to social tensions¹⁰⁹.

Other economics oriented analysts such as Labor Secretary Robert Reich link the contemporary crises of nation states to global progress towards an open market system¹¹⁰. Large areas of the former Third World have been bypassed by the emerging system of market and capital networks¹¹¹, resulting in the marginalization almost all of sub-saharan Africa outside of South Africa and areas of Latin America and South Asia¹¹². Their share of world trade has fallen and the income gap has widened between the richest and poorest fifths of the world's population, who now receive respectively 85 % and 1.4% of the world income¹¹³. A new "fourth world" has now emerged which is inhabited by over 1 billion souls who survive on less than $400 dollars a year. In this view, the redistribution of global prosperity creates adverse economic trends which place low income countries at risk of social breakdown, and weak fourth world states in jeopardy of failure.

Market forces can pull apart the social bonds which hold national societies together, especially when some groups discover they are better placed than others to profit from the new global economy. Even the advanced industrial countries, whose economies have grown richer from the expansion of free trade, now find that the rewards of growth are less equally distributed among their populations than 20 or 30 years ago¹¹⁴, a development which reawakens old class resentments, and sparks competition between established ethnic groups and new immigrants in the middle and bottom ranges of society. Globalization also encourages what Robert Reich termed the "secession of the successful:" a social pattern where the "cosmopolitan winners" in the global market sweepstakes - most often managerial or professional "bright workers" - retreat into suburban enclaves physically distant from the distressed cities where those less capable of adapting to global competition - typically blue collar industrial and service workers - are concentrated¹¹⁵. Thus "secession of the successful" can translate into actual moves toward political secession from the nation state, especially when local demands for home rule are married to the revival of subnational loyalties and identities, exemplified recently in the rise of the Lombard League in Northern Italy¹¹⁶, the Scottish National Party in Scotland¹¹⁷, or the Catalan autonomy movement in Spain.

More generally, state failures in the poorest countries may be linked to a general erosion of the nation-state as a power organization. Geoeconomic thinkers note that the ability of virtually all nation-states to monitor and manage social problems has diminished as their national frontiers become permeable to global networks of investment, trade and currency exchange¹¹⁸. Nation states - big and small - seem incapable of even monitoring let alone managing the complex flows through global markets of people, products and currency (not to speak of drugs, slaves and arms¹¹⁹) which carried on by a bewildering array of trans-national organizations - everything from currency traders to multinational corporations and international drug mafias. As the leverage exercised by these new kinds of non governmental organizations over governments has grown, so have the risks of political destabilization - even as the number of governments claiming the powers and prerogatives of sovereign nation states has mushroomed from 56 in 1945 to over 190 today.

In low and middle income countries this erosion of the capacity of nation states to cope with global market forces has even more severe than in rich ones. Uneven development and income disparities between classes and regions have undermine popular confidence in the state's ability to assure either physical security or viable economic futures for their populations. This feeds the rise of ethnic nationalist and religious fundamentalist movements which only further threaten the legitimacy of the national society and state stability.

While the identification of adverse global environmental and economic trends makes it possible to anticipate more state failures in the near future, it does not help us identify which states will fail under pressure, or account for those which don't. Success or failure in the new global environment depends on effectiveness of state institutions; the values expressed in ideological traditions and national political cultures, and most importantly, on the quality of political leadership provided by national elites.

National sovereignty and the dilemmas of intervention

The grim televised images of the violence created by other people's uncivil civil wars, or of famine victims and marching columns of refugees seem to call for some kind of humanitarian intervention by outside governments. Intervention, however, contradict the principles of international law which demand absolute respect for national sovereignty and noninterference in the internal affairs of other nations. Once set aside, the legal imperative on states to respect the sovereignty of their neighbors (a principle as old as the Treaty of Westphalia which ended the Thirty Years War in 1648) may be hard to reestablish¹²⁰. Critics of intervention ask where the erosion of state sovereignty would stop. They fear that the general recognition of a principle of humanitarian intervention will serve as an alibi for aggressor states in the future - or possibly as a cover for the reintroduction of neo-colonial trusteeships in the Third World¹²¹. But it also appears true that humanitarian interventions which occur under the old rules concerning non-interference, may only end up supporting failed nation states and their sponsors and allies in international agencies and foreign governments. This represents an important aspect of the riddle failed nations pose to policy makers.

The failing governments of failed nation-states often represent nothing more than a minority faction or clan network which has captured the national capital and bits of the broken state apparatus. Despite the fact that it may only control a portion of its national territory, a weak national regime can still wreak havoc on its hapless citizens because it holds the "franchise" on representing their country to the outside world. Indeed the regime's main political advantage over insurgent groups may lie precisely in the diplomatic recognition from foreign governments it enjoys. Survival for failed regimes - at least for those that still hold the card of international recognition - can depend as much on their ability to channel the delivery of aid from international organizations as on their capacity to mobilize support and resources from their national populations. In times of crisis, humanitarian NGOs or international agencies seeking to deliver food or medical assistance to local populations must in principle work through the national government. And all too often this allows failing and unrepresentative governments to divert resources from the foreign aid stream for their own purposes, or to use recognition by the outside world as a asset to shore up a crumbling political position. In some cases, therefore, international aid efforts have helped not only prolong the life of the regime but also the duration of the internal crisis and the agonies inflicted on local populations by warring parties.

One major policy question raised by failed states, then, turns on whether or not the human tragedies provoked by the incompetence (or madness) of local governments are so compelling that they warrant setting aside long-standing international norms concerning national sovereignty and non-interference in internal affairs. Some UN member states oppose weakening these principles for reasons that have as much to do with their own violations of human rights as anything else, while others remember their own histories of foreign colonialism. Resistance to modifying the international rules of the game, in either case, is strong¹²².

If the U.S. decides, for example, that a humanitarian emergency demands that we support the intervention by outside military forces to restore order and good government, a host of practical questions immediately arises. The U.S. must decide intervention by whom - by neighboring states, as in Vietnam's intrusion into Cambodia in the late 1970s; by regional forces, as in the intervention of the Nigerian-led West-African coalition in Liberia and the American "administered entry" into Haiti in Fall 1994, or by UN peacekeepers? And once outside forces have gone into a country, how long should they stay? Can they ever be removed? This raises the question of placing failed countries under some form of UN trusteeship, and the issue of when and how the management of local affairs can be turned back over to a reconstituted national authority¹²³? Interventions are costly, but so is dealing with the aftermath of wars which have been settled. Who will organize and pay for the demobilization of combatants and their reintegration into peacetime society in countries like Mozambique, Angola, El Salvador and Liberia¹²⁴?

These questions grow ever more urgent as the number of UN rescue missions around the world rises, increasing in the past decade alone from 1 to 25 and putting some 80,000 UN peacekeepers in harm's way¹²⁵. The conduct of these missions, especially when they have involved the deployment and coordination of large, multi-national expeditionary forces, raises significant issues concerning command and control for both the UN and NATO military commanders, while the conduct of humanitarian expeditions as in Bosnia provokes significant policy disagreements between the governments of the Atlantic Alliance. The debate over failed nation-states comes at a moment where most Western governments and policy makers are backing away from humanitarian peacekeeping missions, which they had accepted with great optimism only a few years ago. Apparently the quiet but real successes of the UN peacekeepers in Cambodia or the American "administered entry" into Haiti do not outweigh the perception of failure which hangs over the recent UN missions in Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda. U.S. Policy Options. 1. For many Americans it seems that the U.S. is at peace with the outside world and at last free to make peace with itself at home. Many strategists agree, arguing that in the absence of clear cut aggression across international frontiers, there isn't much the U.S. can or should do about the internal problems of other countries¹²⁶. Does the U.S. have a vital "national interest" in foreign civil conflicts and internal wars?

Pro: Some analysts argue that the U.S. should be concerned about internal wars because they have "spillover" effects in the form of movements of refugees or incursions by irregular armies that can overwhelm neighboring countries friendly to US. Further in an age of global immigration, political violence in one region of the world can quickly be transported to another with unforeseeable effects. The U.S. therefore can not escape their impact and should be prepared to use all the diplomatic and military resources at its disposal, including preventive diplomacy and early intervention, to help resolve these wars as soon as possible.

Con. Other analysts argue that however unfortunate the local consequences of internal wars, the U.S. can no longer afford to be the global fire brigade. U.S. involvement in foreign civil conflicts, even where friendly governments are threatened, make us an active party with the risk of ultimately dragging in U.S. forces, or needlessly making U.S. citizens and organizations the target of political violence. American national security will be protected as long as our armed services are available for "real" national emergencies and not frittered away on endless small wars. 2. Some argue that the many internal wars in the Third World are so harmful that the world community should consider revising long established rules concerning non-interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states. Do national governments have an unlimited right to dispose of their people and territory as they see fit, or are their sovereign rights now limited by global principles of human rights and human security? Do violations of the principles protecting group and individual rights also imply that outsiders have a "duty to interfere" as some now argue¹²⁷?

Pro. Tolerating internal wars or government abuse of minority and individual rights sends the signal that the international community will tolerate criminal behavior by Governments and their opponents. Local humanitarian emergencies necessarily create an obligation for outside bodies to intervene to protect human lives and rights. In order for intervention to be effective, the sovereignty of local governments must be overridden whenever they represent barriers to accomplishing the humanitarian mission. Otherwise the relief outside agencies may find themselves supporting the warring parties and not the victims they intend to help.

Con. The rules concerning non-interference in the internal affairs of countries are as old as modern diplomacy itself. Setting these rules aside will only provide local aggressors with alibis for aggression, or prepare the way for a new colonialism by the strong over the weak. Either development could harm U.S. interests in the long run and should be opposed. 3. Some analysts argue that we can not rely on ad hoc responses by national governments to the proliferation of internal wars and humanitarian emergencies. Some governments may respond, while others will wait for the U.S. to intervene, sparing themselves the costs and risks of intervention. The only rational policy from the U.S. point of view, should be to give the United Nations the financial and organizational resources it needs in order to identify societies in crisis and intervene with diplomacy and aid before they explode. Further when states fail and their populations are placed at risk, the UN Security Council should have a permanent UN Rapid Deployment Force which stands ready to intervene in a timely fashion in order to restore order.

Pro. The costs of intervention are too great for the U.S. to bear alone, and the risk that other states will act as "free riders" is too high. It is in the U.S. national interest to share the burden by encouraging a multi-national approach to "crisis intervention." The most cost-effective way to accomplish this is by reinforcing the ability of the UN to collect intelligence, and organize and maintain international peace-keeping forces on a permanent basis.

Con. The United Nation agencies are corrupt and ineffective. Its decision-making bodies are a debating society for 190 states, many of whom are anti-American. UN decisions are unpredictable are no longer subject to the U.S. control. Giving UN more resources would only waste taxpayer dollars, while increasing the authority of the UN Security Council would inhibit U.S. freedom of action in the future. We are better off acting on our own - when and if it is necessary.

Discussion questions

1. Given the world's 7,000 language and ethnic groups, does the principle of self-determination apply to all? What attitude should the US government adopt toward bids by ethnic minorities to divide existing states? Are their other ways to recognize and protect group cultures and rights that don't involve giving each minority its own territory and state organization?
2. If states fail, do we have a "duty to interfer?" What moment is best? Early on with preventive diplomacy and economic aid programs or with troops as a last resort once the crisis breaks? How should the US government proceed, through bilateral action - government to government - or in cooperation with UN Agencies?
3. Should we still play by the old international rules of absolute respect for national sovereignty and non-interference in internal affairs? If not, how do we put failing governments into "receivership?" Should we revive the idea of UN Trusteeships? Who, then, selects the "Trustee?" Who will pay the costs?
4. Does population growth really place Third World "societies at risk?" If so, how important should "family planning" be in US governmental aid programs? Is it time to rethink opposition to US participation in population control programs overseas? Should the US increase its spending on foreign aid across the board?
5. Has the rise of intergovernmental bodies like the UN, and NGOs like the multinationals or global environmental lobby fundamentally altered the dynamics of global politics? If so, what is the place of private diplomacy ? How can US government monitor and coordinate informal contacts between its citizens and foreign governments?
6. Is economic globalization the enemy of effective government? Do free trade and "market reforms" promote or weaken social cohesion? How can we marry market led economic development to political democracy and national unity?
7. How do civic and ethnic nationalism differ? Does cultural nationalism help or harm social cohesion? Are the old nationalisms of the West more constructive than new nationalisms of the Third World?

Notes

1. See Gil Loescher, Refugee Movements and International Security, Adelphi Papers 268, Summer 1992, IISS/Brassey's, pps 9-15.
2. See Ira Katznelson's description of this movement, "The State to the Rescue: History and Political Science Reconnect, Social Research, Vol 59, No 4, Winter 1992. pps 719-32.
3. See Anthony Mc Grew, "Conceptualizing Global Politics," in Anthony Mc Grew; Paul Lewis et al, Global Politics: Globalization and the Nation-State, Polity Press, 1993, pps 18-19 & 324-25.
4. See Ronald Steele's summary, Temptations of A Superpower, Harvard University Press, 1995, pps 126-39.
5. See Gerald Helman and Steve Ratner, "Saving Failed States," Foreign Policy, No 89, Winter 1992-93. page 5.
6. Human Development Report: 1994, UN Development Agency, Oxford University Press, 1994, page 47 box 3.1.
7. See Michael Renner, Budgeting for Disarmament: The Costs of War and Peace, Worldwatch Paper, 122, June 1994, page 6.
8. Helman and Ratner, op cit.
9. See Kane, The Hour of Departure, Worldwatch Institute paper 124, June 1994, page 18.
10. Hal Kane, The Hour of Departure, op cit, pps 20-21.
11. See The New York Times report on the massacres following the Srebinica "safe haven" in August 1995, October 29, 1995, page A1, and the Amnesty international report, RWANDA: Mass murder by government supporters and troops in April and May 1994, May 23 1994 MAI Index: AFR 47/11/94.
12. Of 80,000 militia men ready for demobilization in Liberia for instance, 20,000 are children. See "UN Appeal for Liberia," Reuters News Service, UN HQ New York, October 22, 1995.
13. See for instance Liz Sly, "War as a Way of Life," The Chicago Tribune, News Section page 1, July 12 1995.
14. Anthony Giddens, Social theory and Modern Sociology, Stamford University Press, 1987, pps 167-72.
15. See Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, Random House, 1987, pps 3-13.
16. Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence, University of California Press, 1985, pps 117-21.
17. Giddens, The Nation State and Violence, op cit, pps 112-13.
18. Perry Anderson, The Lineages of the Absolutist State, Humanities Press, 1974, page 200.
19. See James Kurth, "The Post-Modern State," The National Interest, No 28, Summer 1992. pps. 26-28.
20. I owe this formulation to Jill Irvine, "Nationalism and the Extreme Right in the former Yugoslavia," in Cheles, Ferguson and Vaughan, Editors, The Far Right In Western and Eastern Europe, Longman, London, 1995, page 146-47.
21. see Louis Synder, Global Mini-Nationalisms: Autonomy or Independence, Greenwood Press, Westport, 1982, pps 18-24.
22. See Rogers Brubaker, "National Minorities, Nationalizing States and External National Homelands in the New Europe,"in Daedalus, What Future for the State?, Vol.124, No 2, Spring 1995, pps 107-111.
23. For a discussion of struggles for national self-determination see Kamal Shehadi, "Ethnic Self-determination and the Break up of States," Adelphi Paper 283, IISS? Brassey's, December 1993, pps 4-10.
24. See Bogdan Denitch's discussion in Ethnic Nationalism: The Tragic Death of Yugoslavia, University of Minnesota Press, 1994, Chapter three, "When Demos becomes Ethnos."
25. See Anthony Smith, "The Dark Side of Nationalism: The Revival of Nationalism in the Late 20th Century," Cheles et al, op cit. pps 13-17.
26. See, Ian Bremmer, "The Politics of Ethnicity: Russian in the New Ukraine, Europe Asia Studies, Vol, 46, No 2. 1994, pps 261-62.
27. Immanuel Wallerstein, "National Development and the World System at the End of the Cold War," Comparing Nations and Cultures, Inkles and Sasaki editors, Prentice Hall, 1995, page 485.
28. For the history of the Soviet policy of national control see H‚lŠne CarrŠre d'Encause, Decline of an Empire: The Soviet Socialist Republics in Revolt, Newsweek Books, 1980, pps 23-41.
29. See Stephen White, After Gorbatchov, 1993 Edition, Cambridge Soviet Paperbacks, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pps 151-53.
30. See Rolf H. W. Theen and Frank Wilson, Comparative Politics: An Introduction to Seven Countries, Prentice Hall, 1996, page 283 for the 1993 population figures for the different republics, and pages 278-80 for a discussion of the population trends in the late 1970s which showed rapid demographic growth among moslem minorities in the Caucasian and Asian republics, and signs of a "population bust" among the large Slavic nationality groups.
31. see d'Encausse, op cit. pps 25-26.
32. See Shirin Akiner, "Post-Soviet Central Asia: past as prologue," The New States of Central Asia and their Neighbors, Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1994, page 12.
33. See Leslie Holmes, The End Of Communist Power: Anti-Corruption Campaigns and Legitimation Crisis, Oxford University Press, 1993, pps 45-51.
34. See White, After Gorbatchov, op cit.
35. See Shirin Akiner, "Post Soviet Central Asia" in Ferdinand editor, op cit, pps. 15-16.
36. See Jack Matlock, "Mob Power in Russia," The New York Review of Books, July 13, 1995, pps 12-13.
37. See White, op cit, pps 154-55.
38. I owe this term to Thomas Magstadt, Nations and Governments, St Martin's Press, 1994, page 167.
39. See Helman and Ratner, op cit, pps 3-20 & Bodgan Denitch ,"Tragedy in Former Yugoslavia, Dissent, Winter 1993, pps 26-34.
40. See Brenner, op cit. page 265-67.
41. See Alexander Motyl, Dilemmas of Independence: Ukraine after Totalitarianism, Council On Foreign Relations Book, 1993, page 83.
42. Besik Urigashvili, Georgia: "Damn this War...," Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, January/February 1993. pps 21-23.
43. Arif Yunusov, "Azerbaijan: Malicious Mapmaking," Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, January/February 1993, pps 25-27.
44. See Besik Urigashvili, "The Transcaucasus: Blood Ties," Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, January/February 1993, page 19.
45. See William Jackson, "Imperial Temptations: Ethnics Abroad," Orbis, Winter 1994, pps 1-3.
46. Anonymous author, "Another Afghan War?" Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, January/February, 1994. pps 56-58.
47. Anonymous, Another Afghan War, op cit. page 55.
48. See Another Afghan War, op cit. pps 56-57.
49. See "The Taliban Eye the Big Prize," The Economist, October 28, 1995 pps, 38-39.
50. For a discussion of "demonstration and contagion" effects see Shehadi, op cit. pps 54-57.
51. For an historical review see John Prados, The Presidents' Secret Wars, William Morrow & Co.,New york, 1986, pps 167-201.
52. See Michael Klare, "The Interventionist Impulse: U.S. Military Doctrine for Low Intensity Warfare," in Klare & Kornblum editors, Low Intensity Warfare: Counter Insurgency, Proinsurgency and Antiterrorism in the Eighties, Pantheon Books, New York, 1988, pps 63-66.
53. See Anthony James Joes, Modern Guerrilla Insurgencies, "Afghanistan: The End of the Red Behemoth," Praeger, 1992, pages 174 & 193.
54. See Anthony Hyman, "Central Asia's relations with Afghanistan and South Asia," in Ferdinand, editor, op cit., pps. 76-79.
55. See Joes, op cit, pps 162-64.
56. See Olivier Roy, the French specialist for background on the role of religion in prewar Afghan society, L'Afganistan: Islam et modernit‚ politique, Editions du Seuil, Paris, May 1985, pps 74-91 & 95-100.
57. See Joe's on the 1973 "republican" Saur revolution, op cit. pps 164-65.
58. See Joes, op cit. pps 167-68.
59. Roy, op cit. pps 120-26 & 206-10.
60. Joes, op cit. pps 168-70 & 179-81.
61. See Joes, op cit, pps 174 & 190-92.
62. Fuller and Lesser, op cit. page 62.
63. See Claire Specter, The Maghreb in the 1990s, Adelphi Paper 274, February 1993, page 25 & endnote page 62.
64. See Graham Fuller and Ian Lesser, A Sense of Siege: The Geopolitics of Islam and the West, A Rand Study/Westview, 1995, pp 22 & 48-50.
65. See Synder, op cit, page XV.
66. See. Edward Mortimer, Faith and Power: The Politics of Islam, Vintage Books/Random House, 1982, pps 230-36 for a discussion of pre-war Arab nationalism.
67. For an overview see Fouad Ajami, The Arab Predicament, Canto, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pps 14-16 & 96-115.
68. Claire Spencer, op cit., pps 12-23.
69. See Ajami's comments on the "Saudi era" of the late 1970's and 1980s, in The Arab Predicament, op cit. pps. 199-204.
70. See Ajami, op cit, pps 206-10 & 219-229.
71. See Joseph Ma‹la, "Les Avenirs de l'Islam," Esprit, No 8-9, August/September, 1993, page 64.
72. For a description see Amos Alon, "Crumbling Cairo," The New York Review of Books, April 6 1995, pps 32-34 and the special issue on Algeria, Le Nouvel Observateur, op cit below.
73. See Tahar Touda, (El Watan), "R‚sistance: Ygoujdal a donn‚ l'example," Le Nouvel Observateur, special edition, op cit. pages 32 & 35.
74. See the description of the grip exercised by the "bearded ones," the militants of the Algerian Islamic Salvation Front, over the popular neighborhoods of Algeria's cities by Hassan Benamar (a journalist at the daily El Watan), "Bab El-Oued by Night," and Boualem Yacine, "Oran: Le Defi … la Mort," in Le Nouvel Observateur, No 2228, special edition, " l 'Algerie: Le Dossier Terrible," January 19, 1995, pps 44-45.
75. See Lahourari Addi, "Les intellectuels qu'on assassine," in the special issue on Algeria, "Avec l'Algerie," Esprit, No 1, January 1995, pps 130-38.
76. See Paul Kennedy, Preparing for the 21st Century, Times Books, 1993, pps 42-43. Also Pierre Lellouche, Le Nouveau Monde: De l'ordre de Yalta au d‚sordre des nations, Grasset, Paris, 1992, pps 284-87.
77. See Claire Spence, op cit. pps 19-20.
78. See Human Development Report, 1994, op cit. pps 39 & 98-99.
79. See Fouad Ajami, "The Sorrows of Egypt," Foreign Affairs, September/October 1995, pps 75-79.
80. See Mireille Duteil, "L'Algerie, Sanglante Confusion," Le Point, No.1200, September 16, 1995. page 30.
81. See Human Development Report, 1994, op cit. page 62 & 65.
82. See Fouad Ajami on the emigration abroad of young Egyptian graduates, in The Arab Predicament, op cit. pps 150-51.
83. See the reports in The Village Voice in February March 1994 on the CIA connection to Sheikh Rakhman.
84. See the summary of the prosecution case against Sheikh Rakman during the Twin Towers Bombing Conspiracy trial as reported in the New York Times in October 1995.
85. See Mireille Duteil, Le Point, op cit.
86. See Mireille Duteil, op cit.
87. See Agnew and Corbridge, op cit. pps 188-205.
88. See Yoshi Shain, "Ethnic Diasporas and US Foreign Policy," Political Science Quarterly, Vol 109, No 5, Winter 1994-95, pps. 819-21.
89. See Synder, op cit. 124-25.
90. See Bogdan Denitich, Ethnic Nationalism: The Tragic Death of Yugoslavia, University of Minnesota Press, 1994, pps 73-75.
91. See Roger Brubaker's discussion, op cit.
92. See Robert Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History, Vintage Books, 1994, pps. 62-65 & 246-48.
93. Kaplan, op cit. page 5.
94. See the discussion of the Bosnian conflict in The True Cost of Conflict: Seven Recent Wars and Their Effects on Society, Michael Cranna, editor, The New Press, New York, 1994, pps 160-78.
95. Robert Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts, op cit. page 23.
96. I was told in Paris that "Beirut in the Mountains" was a description of Bosnia which was current in French Army circles.
97. See Bogdan Denitch, Ethnic Nationalism: The Tragic Death of Yugoslavia, University of Minnesota Press, 1994, pps 69-72.
98. Denitch, op cit, page 51.
99. See Shehadi, op cit. pps 69-71. and Denitch, op cit, pps 37-40.
100. Denitch, op cit, pps 34-36.
101. Dentich, op cit. page 67.
102. See Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts, op cit. chapter 3?
103. See the portrait of Sarajevo in the New York Review of Books, Summer 1995.
104. Hal Kane, The Hour of Departure, op cit. page 22.
105. See Barbara Harff, "Rescuing Endangered Peoples: Missed Opportunities, Social Research, Vol. 62, No 1, Spring 1995, pps. 37-38.
106. See Paul Kennedy's discussion of global population trends in Preparing for the 21st Century, Times Books, 1993, Chapter one.
107. Robert Kaplan, "The Coming Anarchy," The Atlantic Monthly, February 1994, pps.48-54.
108. See for instance, the exchange over population issues between Matthew Connelly and Paul Kennedy, "Must it be the West against the Rest," and Virginia Abernathy, "Optimism and Overpopulation," The Atlantic Monthly, December 1994, pps 61-91.
109. See Paul Kennedy's discussion of the relevance of Malthus thought to the current population crisis in his introduction to Preparing for the 21st Century, op cit,, pps 4-13.
110. See Robert Reich, "What is a Nation?", Political Science Quarterly, Vol 106, No.2, Summer 1992, pps 199-203.
111. See Paul Kennedy, Preparing for the Twenty-first Century, Random House, 1993, pps 48-50, and Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld, Times Books, 1995, pps 12-20.
112. See, Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, Pantheon Books, 1995, pps 422-24.
113. World Development Report: 1994, UNHDP, op cit. page 35.
114. See UN DP, Human Development Report: 1994, op cit. pps. 25-26.
115. See Robert Reich, The Work of the World, 1991 pps.
116. See John Torpey, "Affluent Secessionists, Italy's Northern League," Dissent, Summer 1994, pps 311-15.
117. See John Darnton's article, "Nationalist Winds Blow Hot in the Highlands," The New York Times, October 17, 1995, page A6.
118. See Agnew and Coldridge, op cit. pps 96-100.
119. See the editorial for critical comment, "The Myth of the Powerless State," The Economist, October 7th, 1995, pps 15-16.
120. See J. Bryan Hehir, "Expanding Military Intervention: Promise or Peril," Social Research, Vol 62, No 1. Spring 1995, pps 44-45.
121. The answer is that it very well might. Michael Waltzer, for one, thinks that we should revive the idea for situations like Rwanda and Bosnia, see Waltzer, op cit. page 61.
122. See Jarat Chopra's discussion in, "Back to the Drawing Board," The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, March/April, 1995, pps. 21-23.
123. See. Chopra, op cit. pps 24-25.
124. See Michael Renner, Worldwatch Paper 125, op cit. pps 17-21.
125. See annex to Peacekeeping Under Fire, Center for War, Peace and the News Media, Working Papers Vol. XX, March 1995, page 144-45.
126. See Ronald Steele's summary, Temptations of A Superpower, Harvard University Press, 1995, pps 126-39.
127. See Michael Waltzer, "The Politics of Rescue," Social Research, Vol. 62, No 1, Spring 1995, page 54.

Bibliography

1. Gidon Gottlieb, Nation Against State: A New Approach to Ethnic Conflicts and the Decline of Sovereignty, Council on Foreign Relations Book, New York, 1993. Gottlieb, the Director of the Middle East Peace Project in Washington, thinks about how meet the challenge of mini-nationalism and suggests innovative ideas about how demands for national recognition might be answered by the world community.
2. Paul Kennedy, Preparing for the 21st Century, Times Books/Random House, 1993. Kennedy, the well-known Yale Historian, thinks about the challenges to the global society represented by over-population, environmental and climate change, and their likely impact on different national societies in the developed and underdeveloped world. A sobering look at the near future.
3. Robert Reich, The Work of Nations, Vintage Books/Random House, 1992. Labor Secretary Reich looks at the impact of economic globalization on the cohesiveness of national societies and asks how national governments can respond.
4. See Robert Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History, Vintage Books, 1994, Kaplan, reporting for The New Yorker, takes us through the countries of Eastern Europe as they are awakening from four decades of Communist rule, only to confront older national and ethnic conflicts.
5. Bogdan Denitch, Ethnic Nationalism: The Tragic Death of Yugoslavia, University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Denitch, C.U.N.Y. Professor and an expert observer of postwar Yugoslavia, examines Yugoslavia's descent into internal warfare, and asks what the spread of ethnic nationalism implies for the other post-communist regimes of Eastern Europe and Russia.
6. Graham Fuller and Ian Lesser, A Sense of Siege: The Geopolitics of Islam and the West, Westview, 1995. Fuller and Lesser, two Rand researchers, look at the challenge Western society has posed to the Moslem world and the ways in which Islamic societies have responded. They hope that we can avoid a "clash of civilizations."
7. Basil Davidson, The Black Man's Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation State, Times Books/Random House, New York, 1992. Davidson looks at African nation states defined by colonial boundaries and institutions and examines their failure to win the loyalties of their populations. He draws fascinating parallels between post-cold war Eastern Europe and post-colonial Africa.
8. Hal Kane, The Hour of Departure, Worldwatch Institute paper 124, June 1994. Kane provides a detailed look at the global movement of over 100 million refugees, displaced persons and economic migrants from Third World societies. He examines the political, economic and environmental factors which force people to abandon home for uncertain futures abroad.
9. See Gerald Helman and Steve Ratner, "Saving Failed States," Foreign Policy, No 89, Winter 1992-93. A strong statement by two foreign policy analysts concerning the issues internal wars raise for the US and the international community.
10. Robert Kaplan, "The Coming Anarchy," The Atlantic Monthly, February 1994, Kaplan makes a forceful argument that the number of societies and states in crisis will increase dramatically in coming years. This article has had a real impact on official thinking about the problem of failed states.

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