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Comment by vonnik | Hacker News Reader

I don't think anyone considers Somalia a successful nation. It doesn't even cohere as a nation. Two northern regions -- Puntland and Somaliland -- have declared themselves to be separate, sovereign and autonomous states. A nation state's ability to cohere is the most basic criterion by which it should be judged. Those that fall apart, fail.

Also, from the law of the Somalis:

> If no satisfactory decision comes about, the parties will most likely take matters into their own hands in terms of redressing the wrong by force.

This sounds horrifying, and it indicates that Somalia is not a country that abides by the rule of law, whatever definition you want to give to it.

The article's author strikes me as terribly naive about the nature and function of law in human societies, particularly in the developed world.

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Successful by what standards or measures? I don't think the "cohere" argument is true, but do you have some examples I could think about? The Soviet Union didn't cohere, for one example I can think of. Neither did the British Empire, including America.

Is there any other basis for seeking peace ever? I think van Notten means here that this is the reason peace is usually sought, because violence is horrifying to those people as well. In North America we also hold violence as the reason to respect social order.

What are the main points about 'the nature and function of law in human societies, particularly in the developed world' you had in mind?

Coherence is the main measure I'm proposing. It's true that the Soviet Union and the British Empire did not cohere. They no longer exist, and in that sense, they failed. If the Union had not won the Civil War, the US would have been reduced to a rump of itself as a nation-state. Nations and empires that don't want to fail should cohere.

Empires and nation states are not the same thing (although they have similarities). All empires be definition attempt to unite disparate peoples and nationalities, usually under the dominance of one or two groups that initiate the expansion. (Russians in the case of the Soviets; English in the case of the British.)

Nation-states often encompass far fewer peoples. The etymology of the word nation is related to the Latin word for birth, and implies that a people share a lineage. This is especially evident among the smaller nations of Europe, where you often have something close to ethnic and linguistic unity. The breakdown of empires into many nation states often involves purges like we saw with the Armenian genocide (Ottoman), and, in a sense, the Balkan Wars (Hapsburg/Tito's Yugoslavia).

One of the twists, when you're considering African nations, is that most of them had their borders drawn by empires, and almost all of them (maybe all) encompass more than one and often many peoples as different from each other in culture and language as the Spanish are from the Finns. Congo, for example, is as large as western Europe, includes many ethnicities at odds with each other, and given it has been the site of Africa's world war since shortly after the Rwandan genocide in the 90s, you could say that it, too, has failed as a nation-state.

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