This is surprising to me. Although I'm not sure why. Kosovo is now independent. When the bombing started, under President Clinton, it was viewed by many people, myself included as a half-assed gesture. Push button war-making at it's worst. But now history is proving the nay-sayers wrong. Milosevic was ousted, and now the Kosovar's are independent. I remember arguing that the only way to stop the ethnic cleansing was to put troops on the ground. But compare the outcomes of this push button war and the war in Iraq and you begin to feel it was not so spineless after all.
The question this situation now begs is the very reasonable one coming out of Moscow; what will this mean to other seperatist movements? Further, how will Muslim sepratists look on this? Will it enflame their already ferverent belief that the Christian world will never recognize their rights? This can, and most likely will, further undermine the stability of the basic unit of power for the past few centuries; the nation-state.
Is that in fact what we are seeing in this epoch? First the dissolution of Empires, then the eroision of the nation-state itself? That's perhaps a bit of a drastic assumption. The ethnically homogeneous nation states, like France and Germany are probably not in any great danger of collapse in the near future. It is in the post-imerpial states where the dissolution is occuring. And this is perhaps not an entirely bad thing, particularly in Europe. The benefit of being part of a major power, i.e. military and industrial organizing capacity, has become of little benefit on the continent. However, this does still bode ill for the post-imperial states outside of Europe. The precident it sets can and will only embolden those sepratist movements that are still threating to destablize an already unstable world.
No comments:
Post a Comment