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Title: The Breakdown of States Author: Richard Griggs Date: 1999 Language: en Topics: Fourth World, indigenous, anti-state Source: Retrieved on 20th May 2021 from https://cwis.org/wp-content/uploads/documents/statebrk.txt Notes: Published by the Center for World Indigenous Studies
The role that Fourth World nations play in state breakdown and collapse
is little studied and yet vital to understanding how to create stable
political structures. Most multinational states are short-lived and
fragile because they are incapable of generating a single cultural life
that is sustainable. Every state has three basic functions: (1)
expansion (securing new sources of wealth and land); (2) consolidation
(assimilating captive nations, refugees, and immigrants); and (3)
maintenance (managing income, resources, infrastructure, and defense).
The failure of nations to resist expansion and consolidation leads to
assimilation and the destruction of that nation. On the other hand,
state failure to capture and consolidate these nations can contribute to
a failure of state maintenance resulting in break-up (two or more states
emerge from one state) or break-down (federation within state
boundaries).
Assimilation is far less common than break-up. More than ninety percent
of all states that have ever existed ended in collapse. For instance,
the expansion of the city- state of Rome into a multinational empire
embracing thrice the number of non-Romans as Romans eventually collapsed
as long repressed nations reemerged and the costs of putting down these
rebellions exceeded the revenues of the state. Modern history repeats
the pattern: in 1945 there were forty-six international states but by
1993 there were 191. On average, nearly three states per year have
emerged since 1945. This shows that large states are rapidly fragmenting
into smaller states and nation-states. In the 1990s alone we have
witnessed this process twenty-five times beginning with Namibian
independence in 1990, the collapse of the Soviet Union into fifteen new
states in 1991; the break-up of Yugoslavia in six states in 1992; the
New Years Day 1993 separation of the Czech and Slovak nations, and
finally last year’s separation of Eritrea from Ethiopia.
On average, nations outlast states. Out of 191 states, 127 are less than
fifty years old. A generous figure for the geographical and political
continuity of a modern state is 500 years old (Spain). Compare that with
Euzkadi (Basque Country) that may be 10,000 years old. Friesland
predates all the states that claim her by more than a thousand years.
The aboriginal nations of Australia can claim 40,000 years of history.
This means nations endure beneath the boundaries of states like bedrock
as ephemeral state boundaries shift like wind-blown sand over the
surface. Latvia offers a modest example of nation endurance. The Baltic
nation lost its independence to the Teutonic Knights in 1242, only to
recover it again 727 years later with the collapse of the Soviet Union,
the sixth occupying state. Albania presents a more dramatic example
since 2,537 years elapsed between occupation by Greeks in 625BC and
independence in 1912.
The observation that nations generally outlast states does not explain
state collapse but the endurance of old nations and the pace of state
breakups does suggest that nation resistance to consolidation plays a
role. To isolate nationalism in single factor analysis is not very
useful for understanding state collapse. It also contributes to the
newspaper portrait of an “ethnic scourge” that destroys states. In
reality the assertion of national identity is one of a complementary set
of structural problems incurred by the state in the process of annexing
and occupying nations:
Soviet occupation).
Israeli colonization).
one that evolved elsewhere and is usually inappropriate (eg. European
farming techniques are a failure in Australian deserts and Brazilian
rainforests).
trade, or similar claims (eg. international resistance to Iraq’s
occupation of Kuwait).
colossal planning failures (eg. failure of Soviet irrigation schemes
that dried up the Aral Sea).
diverse environments (eg. libraries of indigenous knowledge burning down
with the rainforests).
resources at an exorbitant rate (eg. the expansion of Americans across
depopulated American Indian lands bred a consumer society with a belief
in boundless natural resources).
state economically and fosters perceptions of illegitimacy (eg. Mobutu’s
Zaire).
These problems and others do not result from nationalism but from state
expansion. The geopolitical antagonism between states and nations is a
by-product of this. States claim by occupation and seek out treaties
with other states to recognize the annexations. Older nations persist
with claims to their cultural homeland. When the breaking point comes,
many states fracture along the boundaries of these old enduring nations.
This is not because nations prove to be more militarily powerful than
states but because expansion involves a variety of synchronous problems
that lead to break-up (synchronous geopolitical factors).
The collapse of the Soviet Union provides a case in point. Nationalism
converged with economic, environmental, and social forces. From a core
in Moscovy (Moscow) a series of monarchs engaged in territorial
expansion for state maintenance. The Soviet Union from 1917 continued
this pattern of expansion. Ultimately the annexation of the Baltic
States in 1940 completed the basic outlines of a state that claimed
one-sixth of the earth’s land area, and embraced more than one-hundred
nations. Resistance to occupation persisted throughout all seventy-five
years of Soviet rule necessitating expensive internal policing,
crackdowns, and army occupations. Coupled with the costs of the cold war
(another form of expansion), environmental breakdown (eg. Chernobyl cost
14% of the GNP in 1988), economic breakdown owing to failed five year
plans, and social breakdown in the form of a failure of legitimacy,
small, poorly armed, nations were able to assert a powerful geopolitical
force. By 1991, the Soviet Union withdrew from a ring of fifteen nations
around the original Russian core, that it could no longer afford to
occupy. Nationalism, then, was not the downfall of the Soviet Union but
rather a host of structural problems related to occupying nations. This
includes occupying recalcitrant nations.
If the process of expansion and consolidation are faulty, the solution
is unlikely to be more of the same. Given the large numbers of Fourth
World nations (6,000 to 9,000) and the frequency of state collapse,
“nation- building” by nation destroying seems to be a failure.
Nonetheless, it is the tactic most modern states continue to follow. It
dates from the Jacobin effort in 1789 to unite more than a score of
nations into a single state culture with one revolutionary ideology and
one language for sharing it. After some two-hundred years of
Frenchifying “France” most of these old nations like Alsace, Lorraine,
Brittany, Burgundy, Provence and others endure in one form or another.
In fact, from 1982 France began an ongoing process of devolving power to
some 22 official regions corresponding to old nations.
There is evidence that break-up can be deferred with an approach that
awards substantial territorial autonomy to Fourth World nations. This
process differs from the ideology of nation-building by recognizing that
states and nations do not have to be mutually exclusive polities.
Identification with the state as a legal conception (citizenship) or an
emotional one (patriotism) does not have to interfere with the sense of
belonging to a nation. Peace can be a dividend from carefully
distinguishing national and state territories in such a way that
problems pertaining to the national level of sovereignty are handled
there (cultural issues, schooling, environment, etc.) while concerns
affecting more than one region (international trade, monetary policy,
defense) are taken care of at appropriate scales. Under this principal,
known as subsidiarity, there are middle tier commissions that facilitate
problems and plans that involve any group of regions.
The post-modern state with this structure of autonomy for nations and
regions; and subsidiarity as policy, is already evolving. Spain and
Belgium’s autonomous communities and even Italy’s South Tirol provide
models. The entire European Union is also studying the possibility of a
Europe of Regions including Fourth World nations, city-states, and
cultural regions that might cooperate on this basis. These state-nation
relationships represent a form of federation that preserves the
integrity of state boundaries, reduces cultural conflicts, and by a
process of devolution addresses some of the problems created in the
process of expansion. The endurance of nations, the ephemeral nature of
states, and the general historic failure of assimilationist policies
indicates that some form of confederation or federation is required to
address the instability of the state structure consequent to a history
of state-building by nation annexation.