by Parag Khanna
Still, the only way to overturn generations of hostility and hate is to reach deeply across a new generation and instill a different psychology. Seeds of Peace, an American nonprofit that runs camps in Maine for Israeli and Palestinian youth, now has its first generation of alumni entering positions of influence in their respective governments. They keep in touch during times of crisis, and many alumni have become teachers in local peace centers that attempt to change perceptions of those on the other side of the fences and walls. Jimmy Carter has become a major backer of the Geneva process led by Israeli and Palestinian civil society groups—insisting that government officials attend only as observers. A nonviolent Palestinian group in the town of Budrus has gained back territorial concessions from Israel and built goodwill with Israelis in the process. Like celebrity diplomats, this new vanguard of civic mediators and reconciliation movements shouldn’t be dismissed simply because they haven’t yet been able to undo the mess colonizers and corrupt governments have made. A peace made without the people is a piece of paper.
Making Borders Irrelevant
In the mid-twentieth century, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein engaged in a long exchange of letters on the question “Why War?” They debated whether war originates in the human mind or if it is inherent in social existence, but agreed that war has been a permanent feature of human activity because communities naturally struggle to assert their identities and control territory. Intergenerational, cross-border political disputes fuel the world’s exploding military-industrial complex—even in countries that can’t afford their militaries and have little industry. Today, any enemy, near or far, real or imagined, justifies stockpiling more nuclear weapons, warplanes, ballistic missiles, tanks, and surface-to-air rockets. More often than not, conflicts are over borders—either within or between countries. As the late Columbia University sociologist Charles Tilly wrote, “War made the state and the state made war.” These existential questions—who gets to have a country and who gets to be a country—are still as alive as ever. Our disorderly matrix of borders is still the biggest threat to peace.
Worldwide, so much energy is dissipated in perpetual cartographic stress. When tensions flared between Indonesia and Malaysia over the disputed islands of Sipadan and Ligitan in 2005, masses were mobilized and cyberspace was ablaze with hateful rhetoric from both sides. India and China have two outstanding disputes in mountainous areas that are of strategic value only if one side is shooting down at the other. Even peaceful diplomatic haggling—the two sides have exchanged maps for decades while waiting for the upper hand—demonstrates latent animosities unbecoming of powers that wish to be seen as great and benevolent. The World Court at The Hague has border dispute cases piling up, and overlapping maritime claims are now being registered according to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. But who will arbitrate these hundreds of potential flashpoints?
There is no better time to remap the world and move beyond the arbitrary postcolonial borders that have become the hand-me-down suits of international relations that never quite fit. This was President Woodrow Wilson’s vision after World War I: to promote ethnic self-determination but also to embed nations as equals into economic and other institutional bonds such as the League of Nations. It may seem paradoxical that the antidote to the problem of weak states is to create more states. But if we don’t proactively remap certain territories now, they will just continue to tear themselves apart. Only by more clearly defining the political lines on the map can we move beyond them. Why insist on imposing modernity when we should strive for postmodernity? Sometimes the former is the surest path to the latter. Only when states are comfortable within their borders can they confidently transcend them. Speedy and fair breakups can lead to better friendships.
When the ancient Greeks quarreled with one another and their neighboring Persians, they would often engage in the practice of dike, making truces on the spot and demarcating borders anew for the sake of avoiding fruitless battles. Ironically, this is what empires were good for. During several centuries of peaceful reign, the Ottoman Empire offered nominal autonomy to hundreds of ethno-religious enclaves but also protected them from one another. So, too, does the European Union, which requires the settlement of disputes by diplomacy rather than force. EU and NATO pressure compels Greece and Turkey (which almost went to war twice, in 1987 and 1995, over uninhabited islands in the Aegean Sea) to resolve Cyprus peacefully. Even Great Britain and Spain still sometimes deploy warships to intimidate each other over the British Mediterranean exclave of Gibraltar, but war within the EU commonwealth is effectively unthinkable.
The major reason Europe is finally at peace, though, is that almost all nations have their own states. They merged economically after they separated politically. Just look at the Czech Republic and Slovakia, which emerged from a partitioned Czechoslovakia in 1993 and are both now members of the European Union. Extending this logic to the Balkans is still necessary today. The savagery of the Balkans in the 1990s might have been even worse without the breakup of Yugoslavia. While Slovenia is already an EU member today, Bosnia is still governed by a fragile, forced coalition among Bosnians, Serbs, and Croats with untold resources wasted in the suspended animation of bickering and corruption. In Mostar, the restoration of the famous sixteenth-century bridge cannot hide the fact that the ethnic Croatian section of the city prefers the Croatian kuna to Bosnia’s national currency. Meanwhile, the borders of the Republika Srpska still snake around Bosnia like a noose, with Serb-backed nationalist leaders insisting on autonomy from power-sharing structures with Muslim Bosnians in Sarajevo. Maybe both Serb territory and its disruptive proxies should be ejected from Bosnia instead. This isn’t tantamount to giving in to the Serbs. Instead, it turns suspicion into settlement. Most important, it removes a major obstacle to both Bosnia and Serbia’s eventual EU membership—without which neither state has a meaningful future.
States’ borders are like amoebas: lacking a fixed shape, pulling in new directions, engulfing neighbors, and splitting randomly. In the Middle Ages, princely rulers forged alliances and crushed former vassals and mercenaries to centralize power. Governments today constantly struggle to build, maintain, and renew national unity, both physically and psychologically. Colombia, fractured for decades through a narcotics-fueled civil war, even ceded territory to the FARC guerrilla army in the 1990s before the government of Álvaro Uribe used the army and police—as well as construction engineers and road builders—to make the mountainous Andean nation whole again.
Then there are the largely abandoned zones where identity is being redefined at the ground level. Slowly and almost imperceptibly, even the world’s most imposing cartographic presence, Russia, might be fragmenting. No empire has suffered greater losses in the past two decades—both territorially and demographically. Today, many of its cities remain unconnected to one another, with some roads literally ending where provincial boundaries do. Russia today has less usable highway mileage than it did in 2000. Without a sense of belonging to Moscow, Turkic identities are being resurrected as nomadic peoples and increasingly identify with their lineage tracing to Genghis Khan. Meanwhile, in the North Caucasus, Islam has deepened its roots in and around Chechnya despite the brutal war of a decade ago. Rather than broaden and deepen their governance, the Kremlin and Duma have granted two giant utility companies, Gazprom and Transneft, the right to raise private armed security forces to protect their gas pipelines across Siberia, while largely abandoning much of the massive Far East to the whims of resource-hungry Chinese firms and shuttle traders. On a map, Russia is still the world’s largest country, but on the ground it is an archipelago of diffuse ethno-political experiments. Russia isn’t “too big to fail.”
Our present cartography does not have to be destiny. The map of the world is in perpetual flux—its many lines, either straight or curved, rarely represent orderly calmness. Often the opposite is true. Some countries such as Lebanon and Afghanistan are too ethnically entangled to be separable, so they exist in a state of
perpetual negotiation with warlords or ethnic minority groups to maintain tenuous, always costly, and ultimately dubious stability. Yet still we look at Kurds, Pashtuns, and Baluchis—peoples who live across multiple national borders—as if they are bizarre historical anomalies, as if the borders they straddle are somehow morally superior to their far deeper cultural and geographic identities. This arrogance stems from a loyalty to sovereign territorial integrity over self-determination. But today no amount of counterinsurgency or promises of equality will cheat people away from their national aspirations.
Mediation can save time and lives, but partition can as well. Indeed, sometimes divorce is the most sensible option. Not every society can remain a multiethnic, democratic state. Nigeria, Sudan, and Iraq are just some of the former British colonial states fused out of ethnically, culturally, and religiously incommensurate communities that have found no peace with one another. Not all partitions necessarily end up in the genocidal violence that attended the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947. This is not to say that all examples of ethnic tension should result in splintering states into ethnically pure nations. In fact, it is the state failure resulting from predatory corruption that most often unleashes interethnic feuds. But once on this path, patching up grievances is an arduous and uncertain task and often not the most efficient option. Power-sharing agreements and more inclusive constitutions work in some places and not in others.
Realpolitik, of course, plays a crucial role in determining the fate of peoples. The United States, Europe, and even India have long abandoned the Tibetan cause in the face of China’s growing clout, and if North Korea collapses, China might dominate its future, too, given that it provides 90 percent of the country’s oil, 80 percent of its consumer goods, and 45 percent of its food—even if there is peaceful reunification with South Korea. Similarly, the West won’t bother Russia about Chechnya so long as oil continues to flow undisturbed through the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline (which, indeed, Russia scrupulously avoided damaging during its 2008 invasion of Georgia). Now Russia has reappropriated for itself the Georgian enclave of South Ossetia, dispatching Federal Security Service agents cloaked as border guards and distributing Russian passports with little opposition from NATO. Such bargains are an inevitable part of great power relations, but they rarely help us find deep, long-term solutions to resolving the mismatch of territory and demographics that plagues so many parts of the world. There are at least thirty countries in the world in the midst or on the brink of civil war. Each dispute has its own solution.
Inertia is not a legitimate reason to prolong cartographically imposed suffering. Both interstate and intrastate rivalries require us to remain perpetually open to the option of remapping territory. This means first and foremost sorting out—and supporting—stable and self-governing entities wherever they may be. Many nations are not yet lucky enough to achieve statehood, but from the Eskimos of Canada to the Jews of eastern Russia, varieties of self-governing communities are becoming more and more the norm of world politics. Granting them some autonomy can grease the path to peaceful coexistence, while reflex nationalism is almost always a recipe for war. The Northern Ireland and Basque Country conflicts were tamed only after promises of more devolution from London and Madrid, and the restive Muslim-majority Pattani province of southern Thailand will only settle if Bangkok makes the same decision.
Talking about “making borders irrelevant” won’t make it happen, but accelerating clear border demarcation and building cross-border infrastructure can. European governments and companies have built a dense network of roads and railways spanning almost thirty countries, promoting a single borderless economic space. In much of the rest of the world, these are the lines on the map that still need to be drawn—and each one can make borders increasingly irrelevant. For example, the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway in the Caucasus, supported by commercial banks around the region, will bring badly needed economic interaction to the fractious area. Similarly, the Trans-Asian Railway Network Agreement is perhaps the most important breakthrough in diplomacy across the former Soviet Union, a part of the world not known for warm cross-border relations. If this “Iron Silk Road” of publicly and privately financed pipelines and rail lines across landlocked central Asia is completed in the coming decade, it will triple the region’s GDP while assuring that the region isn’t bypassed in favor of the maritime Silk Road linking the Persian Gulf to the Far East. The places that most need to start emulating the European model today are Europe’s former colonial spheres of Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia.
Facts on the Ground: Africa
We know to always be suspicious of straight lines on a map—and Africa is the continent left with more of them than any other. Many African states take their boundaries from the 1884 Congress of Berlin, which divided Africa among European powers along lines of latitude and longitude rather than by rivers or ethnic territories. Decades of interstate and civil wars have not undone these disfiguring colonial scars. According to the Fund for Peace, fifteen of the world’s twenty worst failed states are in Africa.
Now is the time to ask what an Africa for Africans would look like. There may be little that Africans can do about droughts and climate change, but many do agree they would like to redraw the continent’s borders—except when it comes to their own. This must change. We can start with the biggest, most volatile, and most meaningless cartographic fictions of Sudan and Congo. Both Sudan and Congo need to be broken into more sensible and governable pieces if Africa is to collectively make sense—even to itself.
A colonial construction almost twice the size of Alaska, Sudan is the continent’s largest country, a forced biracial crucible of Arabs and black Africans. It has known more war than peace. With Arabs and blacks, Muslims and Christians, nominally inside one set of borders, the country actually suffers from three civil wars at once. In Darfur, Arab janjaweed militias backed by the Khartoum government have been engaged in what some call “slow-motion genocide.” But like the genocide in Rwanda, there is nothing slow about three hundred thousand people being massacred between 2003 and 2005 alone. In the south, the Khartoum government is far more interested in controlling lucrative oil fields than fairly governing the Christian and animist population, which is more loyal to the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA). Neither judgments from The Hague nor a referendum in 2011 will bring stability so long as Khartoum can still send proxy militias to destabilize the SPLA regime in Juba and siphon off oil profits. In the east, rebel groups are equally suspicious of inequitable central control over the region’s resources, making the region a perennial powder keg as well. By what logic do we cling to the arbitrarily defined Sudan when it seems impossible that any government in Khartoum will ever have the authority or legitimacy to rule over the whole country again?
Then there is the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Africa’s next largest country and an equally obsolete colonial legacy. Plundered by Belgium’s King Leopold II for its rubber, and by the leopard-skin-clad Mobutu Sese Seko for cobalt (essential for American fighter jets), Congo has more speaking for its nonexistence than its existence today. Its sixty-seven million people include more than two hundred ethnic groups who share little in the way of a national language or a sense of unity. The government has little reach beyond the capital, Kinshasa, controls only an undisciplined army and police force, and depends on patronage payments from mining operations to stay afloat. The country’s 1998–2003 civil war, in which four million people were killed, has been called “Africa’s first world war”—and one largely ignored in the West. With its child soldiers, empty schools, and exploding AIDS rates (a result of the use of rape as a weapon), the war has devastated the nation’s human potential. Two scholars of Africa point to a simple, brutal fact: “The Democratic Republic of Congo does not exist. All of the peacekeeping missions, special envoys, interagency processes, and diplomatic initiatives predicated on the Congo myth—the notion that one sovereign power is present in this vast country—are doomed to fail.
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Many Africans genuinely want stronger regional bodies to help them deal with border conflicts, rebels, weapons, and refugees—and the African Union has the political respectability to oversee the gradual remapping of Sudan, Congo, and other parts of Africa as well. It can convene the relevant governments and provincial leaders to settle the future of Congo’s California-sized Kivu province, which Rwandan forces regularly infiltrate to chase Hutu rebels, as well as that of the mine-rich “copper belt” province of Katanga, which is tied more to Zambia than to Congo. The AU can also openly shepherd the independence of Darfur and southern Sudan without waiting for referenda that are already being preemptively undermined by the Khartoum government. China has certainly wasted no time in beginning construction of an oil pipeline from southern Sudan across Kenya to the Indian Ocean, which may prove to be the key factor in liberating southern Sudan from Khartoum.
The AU won’t look anything like the EU until fundamental territorial questions are resolved. There are many other frail corners of Africa needing such an approach. Somalia, held from total socioeconomic collapse only by the bandage of humanitarian efforts, has separatist regions such as Somaliland and Puntland, both more functional than the country itself, while the Muslim Somalis of the Ogaden region of Ethiopia suffer brutal military crackdowns at the hands of the Ethiopian military. With states so weak and illegitimate, the only pragmatic approach is to abandon efforts to shore up the current states dwarfed by their own geography and work with de facto powers on the ground toward a more pluralistic but coherent set of quasi-states.
Whatever the number of African states, increasing physical connectivity across the continent’s hundreds of internal borders is its greatest hope. There are two kinds of countries in Africa—landlocked and not landlocked—the former always having to negotiate with the latter. Medieval European merchants took advantage of the Danube and other major rivers reaching deep into the continent’s interior, providing economic lifelines even to landlocked communities. But Africa has fewer and less navigable rivers, so needs other forms of lifelines even more.
