Thank you Bill Easterly...
Monday, July 24, 2006 at 7:06AM This is the most important article I've read in a long time, citing a new study from the always brilliant William Easterly, along with Alberto Alesina and Janina Matuszeski, called "Artificial States."COLUMN: "Count Ethnic Divisions, Not Bombs, to Tell if a Nation Will Recover From War: "Long term, a squiggly border indicates less strife than a neatly drawn line," by Austan Goolsbee, New York Times, 20 July 2006, p. C3.
For months now, in my brief, I've been ad-libbing this bit about fake states, noting how America is all squiggly lined on the right and straight-lined on the left, and comparing that to how Europe is all squiggly, but it left behind a post-colonial Middle East and Africa full of straight lines.
This observation dovetails with my usual argument on the Balkans' break-up as real success and the assumption that Iraq must remain whole as naive, and it goes nicely with a long-term argument I've nursed in the brief that says that fake states will naturally trough-out in disintegration in response to globalization's disruptive integration and eventually the process of breaking up fake states will segue into the integration of newer, smaller, real ones (like that article on the Balkan states all wanting into the EU and NATO).
How long does such a process take? Well, it took the latter half of the 19th century for the United States (Civil War, settling of the West), and it took almost the entire 20th century for Europe (WWI, WWII, Cold War, now the EU), so yeah, it's gonna take a while in the Middle East and African portions of the Gap.
So I've been saying lately that our task in shrinking the Gap is mostly about managing the devolution of straight-line fake states into squiggly-line real ones. That devolution is likely to turn violent most of the time, so our task is managing that violence and pushing the situation as quickly as possible toward integration, reconstructuion, connectivity, and economic development (hence, Steve DeAngelis and I reach for Development-in-a-Box, quite naturally, as the next tool in the toolkit).
I've been thinking for a while that I just need some patina of academic research and I've got a new sequence of slides here, and voila! Easterly and Company come along with this great bit of work that says there are two key predictors for resiliency after civil strife: the more squiggly the lines the better, and the corollary (saying the same thing) that, the more ethnic groups are divided politically, the more security troubles you have and thus the less likely development will occur.
Great stuff.
Reader Comments (5)
So does this mean that the straight lined US west of the Mississippi will evolve into a squiggly lined area of new political entities as continued Latinazation takes hold?
my guess at something like Tom's answer: no, because by the time those lines were put in were put in place we were much further down the road as the world's first multi-state economic and political union. there's little enough comparative difference now between North and South Dakota that redrawing the lines just wouldn't be worth it.
Tom looks, instead, for interesting statehood develpments re: Latinization in Puerto Rico and south of Texas...
I like the ideas put forth here. I've wondered for some time now if Iraq wouldn't be better off with three strong states and a weak central government whose main job was national defense, foreign relations, and distributing the oil money.
The big stumbling block is, of course, the oil money. Most of the wells are in Shiite areas. If some genious can figure a way to assure the Kurds and Sunnis get their fair share of the oil money, I think it would help slow the sectarian violence.
Just as Yugoslavia disintegrated after strong-man Tito, Iraq without Saddam is imploding along ethnic and religious divisions; hemmed-in by the unrealistic straight-line political boundaries historically-drawn by the Colonial Powers.
From today's "Independent" http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article1193108.ece
"Iraq as a political project is finished," a senior government official was quoted as saying, adding: "The parties have moved to plan B." He said that the Shia, Sunni and Kurdish parties were now looking at ways to divide Iraq between them and to decide the future of Baghdad, where there is a mixed population. "There is serious talk of Baghdad being divided into [Shia] east and [Sunni] west," he said.
I am a random walker when it comes to the stock market..."tomorrow's price and can best be estimated by today's price".
Perhaps, the best indicator of war is children that only know violence. Kids that grow up with war today will become young adults inclined for war tomorrow. The younger population the more likely to continue war?...Meanwhile the aging populations of the Core ask "Don't they know better!"