It also may appear to some, that those people lacking a 5000 year old written history seem to be increasingly intolerant towards dictators...
-How many shrinks does it take to change a lightbulb?
-One. But the lightbulb must want to be changed.
If the Western powers wanted to make a difference in many of these countries, they could try to broker deals to decentralize the governments and give ethnic regions large amounts of autonomy, much like the Americans have done for the Kurds in Iraq. Afghanistan should be at least two states, not one, and Americans might have to recognize that the Taliban is the popular representative of the national will of the Pashtun people in the south. The problem with SS Africa vs. the Middle East is that the African countries, having no history of large-scale states before the Europeans came, have so many national divisions that it becomes impractical. So I don't have answers to everything. Perhaps city-states?
I would note that the popular revolutions in North Africa don't appear to be doing so good by the welfare of the people. I enjoyed this article in the Telegraph - "The Arab Spring has failed because constitutional democracy needs nation-states"[1]
> "what should we be telling poor nations in Africa or the Middle East to be striving towards, if not economic growth, democracy and respect for human rights?"
Yes you are a good American that believes in the American ideals. So much destruction is done trying to impose them on others, though. At some point we need to make peace with the fact that not every country can become an America within a decade. And what happens when the people we are trying to bring to the American way of life don't want to be American?
[1] http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100232225/her...
Which is bullshit, looking at almost any country that is not currently embroiled in a civil war. Many of them combine tons of ethnicities... USA, Canada, Australia, India, even countries like Germany just aren't that "ethnically pure" as they are sometimes stylized...
Some can, some can't. I do think that Democracy is more sensitive to national separatism than other forms of government. The great multiethnic empires of history weren't democratic. The Chinese have held together a multiethnic society for 3,000 years without holding a vote.
The Northern coalition in the Afghanistan civil war was composed of many ethnic groups fighting together against the Pashtun south. There is enough common ground between the groups of the north that a two state solution may suffice.
Nationalism is a powerful force that has great appeal to human psychology. Every successful multi-ethnic, multi-religious, or multi-lingual empire has to address it. Even the Canadians have struck an uneasy balance between the French speaking Quebecois and the rest of the country. Separation was a close thing.
And nationalism doesn't skip Europe. Try to find Czechoslovakia or Yugoslavia on a map. And soon Spain might be joining them in the historical deadpool if the Catalan independence movement gets its way.
Nationalism is also an interesting phenomenon, in that over time it tends to transcend ethnic groups, but only once the thread of common identity has established itself. Take a look, for instance, at the post WWI Middle East, where the imposition of arbitrary zones of influence (the origins of many modern states) disrupted a budding pan-Arab nationalism in favor of keeping a balance of influence between the colonial powers.
The United States is a completely different case in that the nationalism that took root here was based on a shared identity among immigrants of (relatively speaking) diverse ethnic groups-- but even so, our early history had no shortage of atrocities committed agains native populations, as well as conflict among the constituent religious and ethnic groups that comprised the nation.
That being said, nation states seem to be a very stable and agreeable governance paradigm once they become established, but a shared identity amongst diverse groups (ethnic or otherwise) takes time to develop, and as history has demonstrated, it certainly can't be imposed from the outside.
The US went through some real nasty war to live together. Regarding India, check out Pakistan. Australia has some really dark history. For Germany, check out the holocaust.
Segregation makes problems worse, not better.
My point is simply the issue ethnicity is a complex one. There are societies where largely mono culture works quite well and it is not a deficiency. My country, Indonesia, is pretty diverse (300 ethnics plus) but it had to go to some fire as well to get some resemblance of harmony.
Regarding India, my understanding is that Indian states have a great deal of autonomy, but I'm certainly no expert.
So by and large Indian states have lesser autonomy than US states. Central govt. controls large chunk of Income Tax and redistributes it. Unlike US, State govts can't enact their own laws and all of India is ruled by one law.
Mmmm... what? States may have less powers in India than in the US but they do have their own legislature and do have their own legal system. Here's an example (state of Maharashtra):
http://bombayhighcourt.nic.in/libweb/acts/listofmahacts.html
And what also shines through, is that from an ivory tower of ignorance some people advocate forcing people to "live peacefully together" through their social engineering, enforced borders and when that doesn't work violence.
Because, those outsiders know what is proper for those "savages" that "can't live peacefully together" better than they do themselves, right?
>Which is bullshit, looking at almost any country that is not currently embroiled in a civil war. Many of them combine tons of ethnicities... USA, Canada, Australia, India, even countries like Germany just aren't that "ethnically pure" as they are sometimes stylized...
USA decimated and confined the natives into "reservations", then had the blacks as slaves or second rate citizens up until the sixties. Oh, and they had a big nasty civil war, because two groups had different views on such issues. Blacks still have a huge over-representation in prison sentenses and poverty and still live pretty much seggregated. As for the rest: Australia killed the natives and closed them in concentration camps and has had rampant racism against non-anglosaxon immigrants. In Canada there is the francophone and anglophone divide and tension, which is even worse for Belgium and it's two national cultures. The same goes for Catalonia and Basque country in Spain. USSR and Yugoslavia, examples of getting "different nations to live peacefully" all blew up in consisting nations after 1989, with civil wars and tension. Same for Chechoslovakia. Heck, even Italy has tension between the North and South parts.
As for Germany, it might not be ethnically pure, but it's not all fun and games either. Germans are still quite racist with immigrants, even those that live there for many decades (tons of hate crimes, neo-nazi groups, casual racism and such). Oh, and they have eliminated some million jews back in the 40s.
But it's putting up India as an example that really shows up the total lack of understanding of the issues and a bad command of history. India, if anything is the perfect counter-example: national, ethnic and religious tensions there broke the country into Bagladesh and Pakistan, and they still ran rampant in each of the new countries between sub-groups.
On the one hand, you say 'Americans have an anti-nationalist, universalist ideology, so their brains reject this reality to the detriment of the places their armies occupy' (an opinion) and on the other hand 'USA decimated and confined the natives into "reservations", then had the blacks as slaves or second rate citizens up until the sixties' (a fact). How do you reconcile these two?
Apart from that, you have the "buy American" movement, and you have this situation where US Americans identify themselves with (often fictitious) ethnic identities: Irish American, Italian American, African American, etc. Why call them "fictitious"? People say Barack Obama is African American!
> Germans are still quite racist with immigrants
Though I have come across cases where Arab immigrants were given nasty stares by old people when they moved to villages, I'd say that Germany is not at all racist with immigrants. I have many colleagues who have Slavic-sounding surnames, whose parents moved to Germany before my colleagues were born. Socially, they're treated as proper Germans. After WW2, Germans were largely disillusioned by nationalism, and now look upon it with disdain. Now, Spaniards and Greeks are moving into Germany by the thousands. Have you come across news reports of any ethnic clashes? It's all fun and games. The Neo-Nazis are a problem, but they are a small minority. When they break the law, they are dealt with properly.
> India, if anything is the perfect counter-example: national ... still ran rampant in each of the new countries between sub-groups.
India has a law and order problem. The constitution was written by a man who probably understood human rights, but this concept has not sunk into the heads of either the masses or the well-educated. There are separatist movements in Kashmir, and the Northeast, and there was one in Punjab. If you think the people in the rest of India have doubts about the integrity of the concept of India, you're dead wrong. Yes, I include SIMI sympathizers too.
At the same time, America did used to enslave people and confine the natives.
But those were two different time periods... Then and now, so they don't contradict.
As for USA, "buy american" movements come up every once in a while. Apple and Motorola's new ads display "Made in USA" as if it's a feature. "Freedom fries", happened recently, though it seems to be dead now. You have Fox News that's always clamouring about American this or American that. I don't believe that Fox News represents general American beliefs (though I don't rule it out), but the chunk of Americans that Fox News represents is too huge to sweep under the rug.
So I think it is easy to say that western nations have been able to work and experience peace, but in most cases there is either one ethnic group that is a clear majority and all other groups bend to its will, or there actually is a bunch of friction and conflict when those minorities become sizable enough. Obviously not to the point of civil war, but I don't think we can say that things are just "working" elsewhere.
>The problem with SS Africa vs. the Middle East is that the African countries, having no history of large-scale states before the Europeans came, have so many national divisions that it becomes impractical
Large scale political entities have existed in SS Africa. And in large scale states are quite recent in the Middle East.