The chopping school of international relations
Shlomo Avineri of Hebrew University in Jerusalem proposes in Thursday’s issue of conservative German daily Die Welt that Iraq be partitioned. “The problem,” he writes,
is not the constitution as such, but the idee fixe that Iraq is a sustainable, modern nation state.
Based on that diagnosis, Avineri continues:
Let’s be honest: Iraq is following the same path of dissolution Yugoslavia took in the early 1990s. Despite all traditional diplomatic rules on the territorial integrity of states this should be recognized and ultimately welcomed. Constitutions can only work if all sides are interested in living within that framework, which is evidently not the case in Iraq.
The appeal to honest realism is a trope found in much partitionist writing (Chaim Kaufmann, John Mearsheimer et.al.); I’m prepared to admit that in Avineri’s case it may be mixed in with regret, but that doesn’t make it any more “realist,” or compelling for that matter. Partitionists tend to be romantics — adherents of the idea that there are quasi-natural nation states — and utopians: they believe that the ideal of the pure nation state can be achieved. Of course this is nonsense. Anyone trying to partition Iraq will find that millions of people would end up on the wrong side of whatever lines will be drawn, not to mention the problem of groups other than the Kurds, the Shia, and the Sunni Arabs. (The problem of individuals who, for whatever reason, do not want to identify with any one group we may also leave aside here.)
Take Bosnia, which Avineri brings into the debate as an example of a futile attempt to artificially prolong the life of a country that shouldn’t even exist, according to this logic. But where would you draw the lines? How would you separate the people? What are you going to do with people who don’t want to leave their ancestral villages — or even just a place of their choosing, where they want to live? It is certainly true that we need to take a long and hard look at whether Bosnia, or Iraq, can survive in their current make-up. If the Serbs and the Kurds (groups with very different histories within their former and current countries) want to leave, what justification does anyone — but especially we, as outsiders — have to keep them? But simply drawing lines in the sand will not solve the problem of either country, and of either group. Just ask the Cypriots.
Generally, it’s best to keep things as they are as any changes in borders, or creation of new states, will cause a lot of trouble. However, if a large and geographicaly concentrated group of people in a country absolutely do not want to be a a part of that country, then it takes some pretty harsh methods to keep them in, which aren’t acceptable in a democracy.
Hence, if the Basques want to leave Spain and Spain doesn’t want to revert to fascism, it will have to let them go in the end. Likewise, if the Kosovo Albanians and the Bosnian Serbs don’t want to remain part of their respective countries and these countries want to remain truly democratic, they’ll have to let them go in one way or another.
The alternative is to go the way of Israel, ethnically cleansing the native population and keeping the remainder occupied, slowly turning yourself into a state which is not quite as democratic as you’d probably like it to be.
In summary, occupation kills democracy!
Comment by Oskar L. — December 1, 2005 @ 11:42 am